The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (28 page)

“But aren’t you busy with the museum? And tracking
down teacups? I wouldn’t ever even see you. And I’ve got so much to do here, teaching and taking care of Soapie.”

“I’m busy as hell, yes, but I’m a person, too,” he says. “Man does not live by teacup museum alone, believe me. I miss you like crazy.”

“You’ve managed to not call for weeks. How is that missing me?”

“Missing is cumulative,” he says. “I don’t understand how love works. It just does. I love you. And I want to be with you. Don’t you want this?”

“I’ve been mad at you.”

“But now?”

“Jonathan. Have you told your family about the baby?”

“Are you kidding me? Of course I haven’t.”

“Well, why not? See? This shows how—” She gets up out of bed and paces back and forth.

“Listen. It shows nothing, all right? It shows that I was trying to protect you from my mom’s meddling while we figured out what we were doing.” He sighs. “Listen, this is all the more reason to come. If we stay apart much longer, you’re just going to keep getting madder at me for things. When you get here, you can manage my horrible social skills the way you always did.”

“Soapie’s agreed to go to a home of some sort in January. I can’t come before then.”

“Okayyy. And when is the baby coming?”

“February twenty-second.”

“Well, that’s cutting it awfully close. Can’t Soapie go in earlier than January? What difference would it make to her if it’s now or months from now?”

“Listen, that is not going to happen.
You
need to come back
here
. Just leave the teacups with Andres Schultz and let
him run the museum for a while. And then you can be here when we have the baby, and we’ll get Soapie taken care of … and then … later, we’ll all go back. The three of us.”

“That’s four months from now! How can I leave the museum for that long? It’s just getting started, and I’m committed here.
You
come. Before you get any more pregnant.”

And then they go back and forth, and it’s rather aggravating actually—who should come to whom, when it should happen, what it all means—and then he puts an end to it by saying that he’ll work out things with Andres Schultz and come to her at Christmas. Just for a visit, though, just to behold her in person because he can’t stand not being around her. And then that’s when they’ll tell his family about the baby. In the meantime, she’ll find an assisted-living place for Soapie, where she can be cared for all the way up to the end. And she’ll put the house on the market.

And that, she says, is plenty. More than plenty for someone whose belly is now blocking her view of her knees most times.

“So,” he says, once the deal has all been hammered out. “How do you look, pregnant? How is that whole thing going—the bigness and all? Are you huge?”

She laughs. “Oh my God, I’m so huge now. You wouldn’t believe how I look, and how hungry I am. All the time. It’s so weird. It’s like being invaded by an alien species.”

“Really,” he says.

“I’d send you a photo, but I’m not sure you could really handle it.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I can.”

“I’m not sure. I look way different. I mean, I think it’s sexy in a way. My boobs are magnificent. But my stomach is now catching up to them, so it’s not so interesting anymore.”

“Please,” he says. “Do you have to use the word
boobs
? It’s so disrespectful.”

Oh, yes. She’d forgotten that, his sensibilities about sex slang.

“And it’s so weird—I have a brown line going down the center of me now—it’s some kind of pregnancy thing.”

“Jesus God in heaven,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says. “See what you’re missing? Are you sure you can handle all this?”

“Handle it?” he says. “Handle it! I’m all over this stuff. Ha ha. I love the brown lines.”

“I’ll send you some books,” she says. “So you can learn about the whole process, too. It’s a whole new world. Oh! And Jonathan—I feel the baby move now. She just leaps around. May be something of an acrobat.”

“Yeah?” he says.

“Yes! At first, she was like the tiniest little butterfly ever just hitting against my stomach. Or like a little tiny cricket thumping there. So weird.”

“Maybe you’re having a female insect. Did they test for that?”

She feels suddenly magnanimous. “I haven’t told anybody else about the movement,” she says. “Just you.”

Which is such a lie. But she wishes right then that it were true. She thinks of Tony’s hands on her belly. That can’t happen anymore.

After they say
I love you
four times each, back and forth, like singing a round the way they used to do, she hangs up, and she sits there, staring out the window for a while, running her hands across her stomach.

It’s dark down in the yard, but she can see the moonlight shining down on the metal tent poles, glinting there like some kind of little beacon.

She is practically singing the next morning as she and Tony make breakfast for everybody: apple cinnamon pancakes and cups of hot chocolate piled with whipped cream. Milo is telling her about all the noises he heard in the night, and his theory that when you sleep outside, you get different dreams than the ones you would have gotten in your bed.

“Your reg’lar dreams look for you in your room,” he explains with that vague making-it-up-as-he-goes-along way that children have, “but they just have to sit and wait for you to come back, because you’re outside getting the animals’ dreams instead.”

The animals’ dreams. Rosie likes that. Tony says he didn’t get the animals’ dreams; he claims he had dreams that he was in a medieval torture chamber being stuck with swords, and when he woke up, he realized his air mattress had deflated and there was a rock sticking in his back.

Rosie laughs. Everything seems so wonderful this morning. She doesn’t even get scared when Soapie seems confused yet again about why Milo isn’t staying permanently and says, “But I thought he was the reason you were painting the room. I can’t keep up with anything.”

“It’s fine,” says Rosie.

“But I
want
to stay,” Milo assures her, and then looks over at Tony with hope in his eyes.

“Not this time, buddy,” Tony says. “In fact, we have to get on the road. I told your mama I’d have you back by noon.”

Rosie can feel how nervous Tony is all the way back to Annie’s house. He’s made sure that Milo’s face and clothes are clean and that everything is packed into his little suitcase just the way it was. He doesn’t want her to have one tiny thing to object to.

As it turns out, it’s Dena who happens to be at home when they arrive. Rosie remembers her from that glimpse at the Starbucks so long ago, the woman who got up from the table abruptly and walked away. But this Dena, rosy and blond with a tangle of curly hair, looks relaxed and pleased, and she greets Tony and Milo with hugs and shakes Rosie’s hand.

“Oops, wait a minute,” she says. “I have to make sure this is the very same boy we gave you, and that you didn’t give us a different, inferior one.” She pretends to search in Milo’s ears and in the crooks of his elbows, while he laughs and tries to squirm out of her reach. “Okay,” she declares. “I’d know that wiggle anywhere. It’s the same boy. Did you have fun, sport?”

He tells her all about Kid City and sleeping outside, jumping up and down while he talks. Rosie expects that Dena will look irritated at all this boy energy, but she doesn’t. She smiles at him and then mouths to Tony, “Our time off was wonderful.”

“You see?” Rosie says to him when they’re back on the road. “A great precedent has been set. Everything is working out great. You can probably now get Milo anytime you want.”

“Soapie’s not going to put up with him being there a lot,” he says.

“Soapie? She thought he was living there permanently,” she says.

“You’re sure in a good mood.”

So she tells him then about Jonathan’s phone call and how he’s reconsidered his whole position on fatherhood and the baby.

“Is he coming back?” Tony wants to know.

“Well … no, he can’t come back,” she says. “He’s coming
for Christmas, but then, once Soapie goes into a nursing home, I’m going to move out there. Like I was before.”

Tony stays silent.

“It’s just that now I know the baby is going to have a father around. I have to tell you, I was so sad last night after you guys went in the tent. I was thinking my baby will never, ever get to have that kind of experience. With a dad.”

“And now all that’s changed?” he says.

She laughs, trying to picture Jonathan sleeping in a tent with their child. “Well, it’s better,” she says. “I won’t be by myself at least.”

“He’s a mensch, all right,” Tony says.

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“No, no. Lots of guys take seven weeks to decide if they’re going to stand by their girlfriend when she’s having their baby. I’m sure he’s even ahead of schedule from some guys.”

“Come on,” she says. “It’s progress.”

“I know.” He reaches over and pats her knee. “I shouldn’t be this way. It’s great. He’s going to end up being a really good father. I can tell.”

She looks at him.

“No, he is. Truly. You and Beanie will do your magic on him. This guy’s toast.” He doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride home.

“I have an interesting idea,” says Tony one morning about a week later. They are standing in the kitchen, fixing breakfast. She’s making a kale omelet with goat cheese and sundried tomatoes, and she is explaining to him how this omelet alone is going to provide, like, four hundred nutrients that her baby needs. And he is pouring a cup of coffee into which he proceeds to load three tablespoons of sugar and, oh, nearly a half cup of whipping cream.

“I don’t really like the taste of coffee,” he explains when he sees her looking at him with her eyes bulging out. “Try not to be jealous.”

“And you try not to be jealous of my kale omelet,” she says. “Unless you would like me to make you one, too.”

“Um, no thanks. I may have to eat a jelly doughnut later, just to confer for having been in the same room with this omelet.”

“Come on now. You’ve gone too far. You know
confer
doesn’t go in that sentence.”

He laughs. “I know. I’m trying to butter you up so you’ll go along with this idea. I want you to come with me to Fairfield.”

“No, no, no, Tony! You don’t need to go spy on Milo anymore. I told you that the two mommies have seen your truck.”

“No, it’s to a teacher conference. Totally on the up-and-up.”

“But why do you need me there?”

“Because—okay, I didn’t want to tell you this. But Annie called me up, and she said she’s going to file for divorce, and—”

“Oh, no!”

“No, it’s time. We’re not reconciliating, I know that,” he says. “But she’s worried that I might try to get custody or something, so she said Milo can’t come here anymore on a regular basis. She says Dena wants it to look like they have the house and the stability, as if I’m just some kind of unsettled guy. At least that’s what I think she said. My head was exploding while she was talking to me.”

“Oh my God. But she was so nice, when we took him back! And then she goes and does this? What do you think happened?”

“Nothing happened. That’s the way this goes. It’s Dena, just trying to stake out her claim. And so they went to the teacher conference already, and God knows what they said about me to that teacher, and I need to have my side represented. And if you come in with me, looking like a good English teacher and a stand-up member of the community with your nice pregnant belly—well, I think she won’t think I’m such a dumb guy. Also,” he says, “teacher conferences are gonna be something you might need to know about. Since you’re gonna have some in your future. This could give you a real leg up.”

“Ah.”

The conference is scheduled for right after school. Can she make it? Actually, she can’t, she tells him. She has an OB appointment at four thirty. But he’ll do fine, even without her there.

But this just makes him open his eyes wide and stand up straighter. “Perfect,” he says. “We’ll do the teacher thing
with Milo, and then zoom back to New Haven for the OB visit. I haven’t gotten to meet your OB yet. And George says he can be here all day with Soapie.”

“No,” she says. “You aren’t meeting Dr. Stinson. That is unnecessary.”

“Just kidding,” he says. “I’ll wait in the waiting room. Unless, if they were going to do an ultrasound for any reason, in which case, I would be happy to be invited in.”

“There won’t be an ultrasound this visit. And no just getting up and coming with me into the exam room like you did with the amnio.”

“Wasn’t that nice, though, that I was there? Didn’t you end up really needing me?”

“I did,” she says. “And it was nice.”

He makes a pleading face at her.

“Okay,” she says with a sigh. “I’ll go with you.”