His plea squeezed my heart. “I can’t, Nick. I just don’t know.”
His hand loosened slightly, played in my hair. “What if…you know.” His eyes swept to my stomach. “Should we take a test?”
“I appreciate the whole we thing, Nick, but I don’t want you to feel like this traps us into anything, even if it’s positive.”
“I don’t feel that at all.” His eyes were steady on mine in the dark. “Not at all.”
My mouth fell open as I realized something. “You hope it’s positive, don’t you?”
“Not necessarily.” He dropped his hand from my hair to my shoulder. “But I wouldn’t think my life was over if it was. Would you?”
“Hell yes, I would.” I put my hand over my chest. “I’m not ready for it. We’re not ready for it. We have a history of rushing into things, and now we’re all fucked up, and no child deserves to be born to two people who’ve been divorced for seven years, made a sloppy mistake, and don’t even know what they want.”
“I know what I want.” His thumb brushed my cheek.
“Well, I don’t.” I looked away from his crestfallen expression. “And until I figure it out, we have to cool off.”
He took his hand off me. “OK. I understand.”
“Thank you.” I opened the car door and got out. Nick followed suit, putting a hand at the small of my back as we walked up the porch steps. I turned to him halfway up. “Nick, you have to stop touching me. Seriously. I can’t think when you do.”
He held up both hands. “OK, OK. Sorry.” We continued up the stairs. “I guess that means we can’t sleep together tonight, huh?”
“That’s exactly what that means.” It came out sharper than I intended and Nick stopped me before the screen door with a hand on my elbow.
“Are you still angry with me?” His face was solemn.
“About what?”
“Any of it. All of it.”
I closed my eyes briefly, let the question ruminate. To my surprise, I wasn’t. “No. You know what? I’m not angry anymore. And I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m just sad and confused.”
He sighed heavily as he opened the door. “I think I liked it better when you were angry with me.”
#
Creak.
My eyes flew open as the unmistakable sound of the old springs beneath me groaned under added weight.
“Shhhh.” Nick’s scent filled my head as his warm body slid into the full-size bed behind me.
“Nick, what are you doing?” I whispered as he curled his body around mine.
“I love you,” he whispered back. “And I’m not giving up this time. Now go back to sleep.” He kissed the back of my head and tucked an arm around my stomach. “Night.”
I swallowed hard.
See? He lies, said common sense. He promised not to touch you. He said he’d let things cool off. He doesn’t know how to play by the rules. He’d be a terrible husband and father.
But his body was warm and cozy, his breathing deep and steady, lulling me back to sleep already.
I’d kick him out in the morning.
#
As it turned out, I didn’t get the chance to boot Nick out of my bed, because he was up before me again. I sat up and stretched, breathing in the smell of fresh coffee and---oh God, that scent! Was it…I sniffed the air like a bloodhound…Noni’s cinnamon buns?
I jumped out of bed and dressed in a navy blue romper, brushed my hair with a few frantic strokes and headed downstairs, recalling the breakfast Nick and Noni always made when we were here in the past. Huge, doughy rolls, sticky sweet with cinnamon and sugar and dripping with icing. I might have to go on another run today, but I was having one of those buns.
The aroma grew stronger at the bottom of the steps and I nearly floated into the kitchen, where Nick sat at the counter with a cup of coffee and Noni putzed around, cleaning up.
“Good morning,” she sang. “Did the noise wake you? I dropped a metal pan, and the whole house shook. My hands are a little unsteady these days.”
“Nope. It was the smell.” I inhaled, my knees twitching in excitement. “I have dreamed of this smell many times.”
“Rolls are in the oven,” Nick said. “Come sit. I went up to the attic this morning. Look what I found.” He gestured to the counter in front of him, where an old black photo album rested. Photographs, it said on the front cover in curly script. The leather edges were soft and frayed, and the entire thing was coming apart at the binding, time doing its best to overpower the graying white ribbon holding the pages together.
I sat next to him and pulled it between us. “Is this the album you mentioned yesterday, Noni?”
“It is.” She set a cup of coffee in front of me.
Nick opened the cover. Black and white photographs were fixed to black paper pages with tiny picture corners. Wedding photos, pictures of families, religious portraits of children. We turned the pages slowly, and sometimes we laughed at a particularly dour or mischievous expression on a child, but mostly we were reverently silent, going through more than a century of his family’s history.
The first photos looked like maybe they’d been taken in the early twentieth century, but as time went on, the pages revealed less formal poses and more smiling faces. All the Lupo men had the same full mouth and strong brow, the dark hair and eyes. Nick resembled them, although he must have gotten his leanness and height from his mother’s side. Finally we came to the wedding picture of his great-grandparents, which we studied in silence for a moment.
“They’re in love, you can just tell,” I said.
“They must have been. They had eight kids.”
“You don’t have to be in love to have eight kids,” I reminded him. “Or even one kid.” Without thinking about it, my hand went to my stomach, and I glanced down at it.
Nick cleared his throat. “We found something interesting in the back. Look at this.” From the back of the album he pulled a piece of material and spread it out in front of me. It was once white cotton but had yellowed with age. “It’s a handkerchief,” Nick said. “And look.”
On the handkerchief, scrawled in what appeared to be red lipstick, were three words.
I love you.
At the bottom, in black ink, was printed, Tiny and Joey, 29 July, 1923.
I stared at it for a moment, gooseflesh rippling down my arms. “What’s today’s date?”
“July twenty-ninth,” Nick answered. Then he leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Fucking weird, right?”
Weird?
No. Cheez Whiz was weird. Olive loaf. Haggis- and-cracked-pepper potato chips.
This was alarming as fuck.
What did it mean???
“Oh yes, that was a pretty famous family story.” Noni picked up a coffee cup with a picture of a cat on it and took a sip. “Apparently, Tiny had turned Papa Joe down, and so he’d decided to go back to Chicago. Well, wouldn’t you know, she realized she was in love with him as soon as he announced he was leaving. She shows up at his house to tell him, but he was right in the middle of cooking Sunday dinner for his family.”
I smiled, although my heart was beating in a peculiar and uneven fashion. “Really?”
“Yes,” she went on. “He was in the kitchen surrounded by his sisters. And she tried to get him to speak privately with her but he refused.”
“As he should have,” Nick put in, lifting his cup to his mouth. “Fickle women.”
“So then what?” I asked. “She wrote him a note?”
Noni laughed. “Yes, in the bathroom, with her
lipstick, on her handkerchief. Then she marched into the kitchen and handed it to him. And according to his sisters, they disappeared into the pantry downstairs for quite an inappropriate length of time.
I clapped my hands over my cheeks. “I love it! Nick, you should put the note in your restaurant too. Frame it or something. With the picture.”
“Not a bad idea.” He set his cup down. “Noni, do you think I could have it?”
“It’s a good thing Nick found it then. Otherwise it might have been lost to time forever.” I couldn’t get over the matching date. What did it mean?
Noni nodded, eyeing me thoughtfully. “Yes. Although, nothing is really lost forever. When a thing is meant to be found, the right person will find it. So I bet there’s a reason why that note was discovered again after all this time.”
“You mean…you think it was a sign?” I asked carefully.
Nick laughed. “You’re getting to her, Noni. Coco believes in signs. Keep going with it, please.”
I was too flustered to even hit him.
“Not a sign, necessarily. I just meant that I think it’s right Nick came across the note. That he was meant to have it.” She took another sip of coffee and winked at me over the rim of her cup.
Later that morning, Nick painted the Adirondack chairs while I typed up some of Noni’s stories on her desktop, which reminded me of the kind we used to have in our elementary school classrooms. In addition to the Lupo stories she knew, she talked about growing up on the farm, what it was like to be a teenager during the Depression, and meeting her husband Joe at a USO dance in 1944. I printed a copy of the file for Noni and emailed a copy to Nick and myself—maybe it wasn’t my family, but I felt emotionally invested in the stories somehow.
After lunch, we said goodbye to Noni, and got on the road. It looked like rain, so we didn’t put the top down on the convertible, and sure enough, after about ten minutes on I-75, it began to sprinkle, and then pour. Visibility was so bad, I wouldn’t have blamed Nick for pulling over and waiting out the storm, but he just slowed down and stayed focused.
“Sorry. This ride home might take us awhile,” he said without taking his eyes off the road.
“That’s OK. I’m not in a rush to get back.” Crossing my arms over my chest, I thought ahead to the task I was dreading—a pregnancy test. After we got back to Detroit, I’d leave right from the parking garage and stop at a drugstore on my way home. The thought of taking a test at my parents’ house was pretty cringe-worthy, but I didn’t want to do it at Nick’s apartment either. I wanted to be alone. Maybe I could do it at the Devine Events office.
“Want to talk?” Nick glanced at me briefly.
“Not really…” I rubbed my hands up and down my arms. “I don’t have anything new to say yet. I’m still…working through some things.”
“OK. Do you want to stop at a store on the way home?”
I shook my head. “No. I’ll take care of it.”
He pressed his lips together, and I could tell he wasn’t saying something he was thinking.
“What?” I pressed.
“It doesn’t seem like you should be alone when you take it.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“No, I know, it’s not that. I mean it doesn’t seem fair. For you to be alone.”
I studied his profile carefully. His jaw was set at a stubborn angle. “Fair to whom, Nick?”
“To me.”
“You!” My arms flew open. “How is it unfair to you that I want to take this pregnancy test alone? You’re not my boyfriend.”
“Maybe not, but I’m still the potential father. I want the answer just as badly as you do.” He risked a sideways glance at me. “And I want the truth.”
“What!” I exploded. “You think I’d lie to you about this? You’re the liar in this car, Nick. I think we’ve established that this weekend. Thanks for the reminder.” I turned away from him in a huff, crossing my legs toward the passenger door and staring out my window. Unfuckingbelievable. Just when he starts to get under my skin again, he has to be an asshole.
“Don’t get mad, Coco. I’m trying to be honest here. You know what? Women say they want men to talk about their feelings and be honest, but they don’t really mean it.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t need to hear your feelings when you’re insinuating that I’d lie about something like a baby.”
“Wouldn’t you? Even though you don’t want it?”
“No, I wouldn’t! But you’re damn right I don’t want it.”
Nick exhaled like he was struggling to keep his temper. “You’re trying to hurt me. I get it.”
“Good.” I felt a small victory in getting to him.
A covert glance over my shoulder revealed white knuckles on the steering wheel.
“How many times am I going to have to apologize for the past, Coco?” His tone was aggrieved, as if he were the victim of injustice here. “I’m sorry. I never should have done any of the wrong things I did. But it was seven fucking years ago. Can’t we move on?”
“I’m not looking for another apology because you hurt me in the past, Nick. I’m looking for one for what you said to me just now.”
He was quiet after that, and I kept my eyes on the raindrops splattering down the window. All the way down I-75 we sat in icy silence, both of us hurt and angry, neither of us willing to apologize again.
This is why, I told myself. This is why it will never work. You’re always going to throw the past in his face, and he’s always going to play the martyr, make you feel like a bitch for holding a grudge.
I didn’t see any way out. And the only thing that could make this worse was a plus sign on that test.
#
By the time we pulled into the parking garage next to Nick’s apartment building, my ire had mellowed. His must have too, because when he asked what floor I’d parked on, his voice was much softer than it had been the last time he’d spoken.
“Fourth floor.” I directed him to where my Volkswagon was parked, and after pulling up behind it, he turned off the engine and put his hand on my leg.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that…about the test. You can take it alone if you want. Just let me know what it says.” He opened the driver’s side door, but I stopped him.
“Wait. I’m sorry too. I know this affects you almost as much as it affects me, and I know you have strong feelings about family.”
“And about you.” He met my eyes. “I love you. And I want you. But I don’t want to live this way— being called a liar and an asshole for the rest of my life because of something stupid I did when I was twenty- two. I don’t want every argument we ever have to circle back to it. I’m not that guy anymore, Coco. I’m not perfect, but given the chance, I know I could make you happy. Tell me what to do to get that chance.”
“I wish I could, Nick. The truth is, I just don’t know.” I felt like crying again but managed to gulp it back. He nodded sadly and got out of the car.
After unloading my things from his trunk, I placed them in my back seat and turned to say goodbye. Nick stood a few feet from me. It felt like a few miles.
“I have to go to L.A. tomorrow. Back Wednesday. Just call me when…you know anything,” he said.
“I will.”
“And take care of yourself.”
“I will.” The tone of sad finality in his voice squeezed my heart.
Taking two steps forward, he kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks for staying the weekend with me. Let me know the details for the party next Saturday. I’ll be there.” Then he walked around the front of the Mercury, looking more morose than I’d ever seen him.
No—there was one other time I’d seen him that miserable, the night I’d broken things off because I thought he’d slept with another girl. The night he’d lied. The night he thought he lost me.
I’d believed that was goodbye forever.
Maybe it should have been.
“What’s it doing?” I sat on the edge of the tub in Mia and Lucas’s bathroom, my hands twisting together in my lap.
Please be positive.
“Nothing yet.” Mia and Erin stood at the vanity, both of them staring intently at the st
ick, like those people who can make objects move just by looking at them.
Please be negative.
“OK. Tell me when you see anything.”
Please be positive.
“It’s only been like thirty seconds—wait Something happening!” Erin grabbed Mia’s arms, and Mia grabbed Erin’s back. They looked like a 6th grade couple at a middle school dance.
Please be negative.
“Oh, God, you guys. I’m a wreck. What is it?” Getting to my feet, I paced back and forth in front of the tub, terrified of either result.
“Hold on…” Mia’s voice—was it hopeful or wary? I knew she wanted it to be negative.
And what if it was? Would I be relieved or disappointed? Why did I feel like I’d cry either way?
“OK, it’s done.” Erin and Mia looked at each other and turned to me.
“Holy shit.” I felt woozy. I breathed in and out, touched my fingers to my temples. “OK, tell me. Am I pregnant?”
“No,” Mia said. “You’re not.”
“Not according to this test,” Erin added. “But you should probably take the second one in the box tomorrow to be even surer.”
Exhaling, I closed my eyes and let my hands drop to my stomach. Not pregnant. Erin was right, and I would take the test tomorrow, but somehow I knew what Mia said was true. “I’m not pregnant.” The word pregnant caught in my throat, and I struggled to choke back tears. They spilled over anyway. “I’m not pregnant,” I sobbed.
“Oh, honey.” Mia took me in her arms, and Erin wrapped us both in hers. “Are you sad or just relieved?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted as they released me. “Both, I guess.”
“Come on in here. Erin, grab the tissues.” Mia led me into her bedroom, spacious but cozy with its chocolate brown walls and king-sized bed mounded with colorful pillows. Photographs of Paris hung over the bed, and on her nightstand, Mia had a framed picture of Lucas and herself on the top of Notre Dame Cathedral. She sat on the foot of the bed, pulling me down beside her. “Speak.”
“She’s not a dog, Mia.” Erin handed me the box of tissues and sat on my other side. “And let her catch her breath first.”
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