The Dinner She Was Told to Skip

Chad came down for a glass of water around one and saw me there with flour on my robe.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

“I wanted to.”

He stood there a second longer, looking at me on that stool, in that robe, with my hair in the same knot it had been in for three days. Then he drank his water and went back to bed.

After he went down with the tablecloth on Saturday, I sat on the bed a long time.

I wasn’t angry yet. Anger takes energy, and I had been sleeping in ninety-minute pieces for twenty-four days. I felt like something that had been put away for the season, like the porch cushions.

I’d said okay because some tired part of me thought he might be right. I had looked in the mirror.

But I had grown two people. Both at once. I had done that with the body he didn’t want at his table.

Around four the caterer’s van pulled up. I listened to him set out my wedding china, each plate clicking down on the cloth.

I counted the clicks. Five.

Chad. Mr. Lindgren. Mrs. Lindgren. Jeff from his office, and Jeff’s wife, Kim.

Our table seats six.

A minute later I heard the door to the garage open and close, and when I looked down from the top of the stairs, the sixth chair was gone. He had carried it out. So nobody would see an empty place and wonder who it was for.

At a quarter past five I went downstairs for the last time.

I needed my water jug, the big hospital one with the straw, and I needed the monitor. We had the plain kind. No camera, nothing that talks to a phone. A white unit in the nursery that listened, and a white receiver with a stubby antenna that you carried around the house. It had a row of little lights that climbed when a baby cried.

The receiver lived on the kitchen counter by the coffee maker, because that was where I was when I wasn’t upstairs.

Chad was in the dining room lighting candles. I’ll give him this: the table was beautiful. Grandma Ruth’s bluebells at the corners. The china with the gold rim. Cloth napkins I didn’t know we still owned. In the middle he had set a low bowl of bronze mums from the floral counter at the Hy-Vee.

“Looks nice,” I said.

He jumped a little. Then his eyes went down me, the robe, the slippers, the hair, and came back up.

“They’ll be here at six,” he said.

“I know. I’m just getting my water.”

“I’ll bring you a plate around seven. Brisket okay?”

“Brisket’s fine.”

He went to the kitchen to check on the foil pans.

I stood there with the receiver in my hand.

Here is what I was thinking, as near as I can put it back together. I would be upstairs alone with two newborns for four hours. I wasn’t cleared to carry both of them on the stairs. If they both went off together, which they did most evenings around seven, I had two hands and a healing incision and nobody to pass one to. On a normal night the receiver was how Chad knew to come up.

If he didn’t have it near him, he would not know.