The Baby News Grandma Posted For Us

Grady nodded. He lay down next to me with his clothes still on and put his cold hand on my stomach, and we lay there in the dark a long time without talking.

The family chat went back to casseroles by Tuesday. Uncle Ron posted a picture of a pheasant. The baby news settled in, the way good news does in a big family.

But I noticed things. Aunt Joan posted a picture of a blanket she had started crocheting, yellow, since we did not know yet. Three different people asked when the shower was. Grady’s cousin in Waterloo offered us a crib.

And I noticed that nobody, not one person in the chat, asked Kirk about the wedding all that week. Not the color of the napkins, not the band, not the menu. He had been right about that much. A baby fills up a room.

I thought about that a lot. I thought about how he had been afraid of exactly what was happening, and how I had not cared, and how I still did not think I was wrong, and how all of those things were true at once.

On Saturday morning I got a text from a number I did not have saved.

It said: Tessa, it’s Mallory. Would you get coffee with me? Just us. No pressure. If you’d rather not, I understand.

I read it four times. Then I showed it to Grady, who was eating cereal over the sink in his socks.

“Go,” he said. “She wouldn’t have asked if she didn’t mean it.”

We met at a coffee shop on Seventh Avenue in Marion on Sunday afternoon, one week to the day after Kirk’s kitchen. It had been snowing again, and the windows were steamed over.

“I didn’t know what you drink now,” she said. “So I got you a decaf with milk. I can get something else.”

“That’s perfect,” I said. It was not what I drank before, but she was right about now.

We sat down. For a minute neither of us said anything. She turned her mug around and around on the table by the handle.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “About last Sunday. I should have said something. I was standing right there, and I didn’t say a word, and I knew exactly why he was doing it.”

“You don’t have to apologize for him,” I said.

“I’m not. I’m apologizing for me.” She looked up. Her eyes were already filling. “I was so happy for you, Tessa. That’s the awful part. I was standing at that sink so happy for you, and so jealous I couldn’t breathe, and I was afraid if I turned around you’d see both.”

I reached across the table and put my hand on hers. I did not plan it. My hand just went.

She told me about it then. All of it. The two lines on the test in the bathroom at the dealership because she could not wait until she got home. Kirk picking her up off the floor and spinning her around in the parking lot.

The heartbeat at eight weeks, Kirk crying in the car. The Easter plan. They had bought Grandma a little frame that said Great-Grandma and were going to give it to her after dinner.

Then the bleeding on a Tuesday. The emergency room in Cedar Rapids. The doctor who was kind but very fast. The drive home where Kirk did not say one word and held her hand so hard it left marks.