Epilogue
* * *
“Wait, look at this one!” I pull on Graham’s hand, making him stop in his tracks on the sidewalk again. But I can’t help it. Almost every store on this street has the cutest children’s clothes I’ve ever seen and Max would be adorable in the outfit displayed in the window.
Graham tries to keep moving forward, but I pull on his hand until he relents and follows me into the store. “We were almost to the car,” he says. “So close.”
I shove the bags of kids clothes I’ve already bought into Graham’s hands and then find the rack with the toddler sizes. “Should I get the green pants or the yellow ones?”
I hold them up to Graham and he says, “Definitely yellow.”
The green pants are cuter, but I go with Graham’s choice simply because he volunteered an answer. He hates shopping for clothes, and this is only the ninth store I’ve forced him to follow me into. “I swear this is the last one. Then we can go home.” I give Graham a quick peck on the lips before walking to the register.
Graham follows me and pulls his wallet out of his pocket. “You know I don’t care, Quinn. Shop all day if you want. He only turns two once.”
I hand the clothes to the cashier. In a thick Italian accent, she says, “This outfit is my absolute favorite.” She looks up at us and says, “How old is your little boy?”
“He’s our nephew. Tomorrow is his second birthday.”
“Ah, perfect,” she says. “Would you like this in a gift box?”
“No, a bag is fine.”
She tells Graham the total, and as he’s paying, the cashier looks at me again. “What about the two of you? Any children of your own?”
I smile at her and open my mouth, but Graham beats me to the punch. “We have six children,” he lies. “But they’re all grown now and out of the house.”
I try not to laugh, but once we decided to start lying to strangers about our infertility, it’s become a competition with who can be the most ridiculous. Graham usually wins. Last week he told a lady we had quadruplets. Now he’s trying to convince someone that a couple our age could have six children already grown and out of our home.
“All girls,” I add. “We kept trying for a boy, but it just wasn’t in the cards.”
The cashier’s mouth falls open. “You have six daughters?”
Graham takes the bag and the receipt from her. “Yes. And two granddaughters.”
He always takes it a little too far. I grab Graham’s hand and mutter a thank-you to the cashier, pulling him outside as fast as I pulled him inside. When we’re on the sidewalk again, I slap him on the arm. “You are so ridiculous,” I say, laughing.
He threads our fingers together as we begin to walk. “We should make up names for our imaginary daughters,” he says. “In case someone probes for details.”
We’re passing a kitchen store when he says this, and my eyes automatically fall on a spice rack in the window. “Coriander,” I tell him. “She’s the oldest.”
Graham pauses and looks at the spice rack with me. “Parsley is the youngest. And Paprika and Cinnamon are the oldest set of twins.”
I laugh. “We have two sets of twins?”
“Juniper and Saffron.”
As we’re walking toward our car, I say, “Okay, let me make sure I have this right. In order of birth: Coriander, Paprika, Cinnamon, Juniper, Saffron and Parsley.”
Graham smiles. “Almost. Saffron was born two minutes before Juniper.”
I roll my eyes, and he squeezes my hand as we cross the street together.
It still amazes me how much has changed since we opened the box two years ago. We came so close to losing everything we had built together because of something that was out of our control. Something that should have brought us closer together but instead pulled us further apart.
Avoidance sounds like such a harmless word, but that one word can cause some severe damage to a relationship. We avoided so much in our marriage, simply out of fear. We avoided communicating. We avoided talking about the challenges we faced. We avoided all the things that made us the saddest. And after time, I began to avoid the other half of my life altogether. I avoided him physically, which led to emotional avoidance, which led to a lot of feelings that were left unsaid.
Opening that box made me realize that our marriage wasn’t in need of a minor repair. It needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, with an entirely different foundation. I started out our life together with certain expectations, and when those expectations weren’t met, I had no idea how to move forward.