The Dinner She Was Told to Skip
“I think it’s best if you stay upstairs tonight.”
Chad said it from the bedroom doorway with my grandmother’s tablecloth folded over his arm like a waiter.
I was sitting on the edge of our bed with a nursing pillow strapped around my middle and a baby on each side of it. Lucy was eating. Ben had fallen asleep with his mouth open against me. It was a quarter past two on a Saturday afternoon in October and I had not yet brushed my teeth.
“Upstairs,” I said.
“Just for the dinner.” He looked at the tablecloth instead of at me. “It’s three hours. Maybe four. You’d be more comfortable up here anyway.”
“Chad, it’s the dinner for your promotion.”
“I know what it’s for.”
“I ironed that tablecloth.”
“And it looks great. I’m going to use it.” He shifted his weight. He had already showered and shaved. He smelled like the cologne I gave him two Christmases ago. “Beth, look. I’m not trying to be mean. You’re just not back in shape yet. You said yourself nothing fits. You said it Thursday. You cried about it.”
I had. I’d stood in our closet Thursday night holding a pair of pants from last fall against a body I did not recognize, and I’d cried for about ninety seconds, and then Ben had started up and I’d gone to get him.
I hadn’t known Chad was keeping notes.
“These are people I need to impress,” he said. “Mr. Lindgren’s wife is coming. Jeff and Kim are coming. I’ve got one shot at a first impression as a manager, and I don’t want you standing there feeling self-conscious in a bathrobe while everybody pretends not to notice.”
“I wasn’t planning on the bathrobe.”
“Then what? The maternity dress with the stain?”
He didn’t raise his voice. That’s what I want to be clear about. He said it the way you’d tell somebody the forecast.
Lucy let go and looked up at me with her milky, unfocused eyes. Three weeks and three days old. Five pounds, eleven ounces at her last weigh-in, which I knew because I had written it on the back of an envelope and stuck it on the refrigerator.
“I’ll tell them you’re resting,” Chad said. “Doctor’s orders. Nobody questions that. I’ll bring you a plate.”
I looked at him for a while. I looked at the tablecloth over his arm, the one my Grandma Ruth cross-stitched bluebells onto the corners of in 1971, the winter she was expecting my mother.
“Okay,” I said.
He let out a breath like a man who had expected a harder afternoon.
“Thank you,” he said. “Really. I’ll make this up to you.”
He went downstairs. I heard him snap the tablecloth open over the dining room table.
I should tell you how we got to that doorway.
Chad and I lived in a two-story house on a brick street in Adel, Iowa, about twenty-five minutes west of Des Moines if the combines aren’t on the highway. White siding, a porch swing, a maple out front that drops every leaf it owns in a single weekend. We bought it four years ago, the spring after we got married, when I was still teaching second grade and he was still driving a company pickup around three counties selling seed corn to farmers who had known his dad.
He was good at it. Chad could stand in a machine shed in February and talk to a man for an hour about his daughter’s volleyball team before either of them mentioned a bag of seed. People liked him. I liked him. That was the man I married, the one who remembered everybody’s daughter.