Chapter 8: Robert
Robert called me himself, two days later.
I almost didn't pick up.
I saw his name on the screen and felt a sudden, irrational fear that he was calling to tell me I had caused all of this — that if I had just stayed quiet, if my mother had stayed quiet, everything would have been fine.
I picked up anyway.
"I hope I'm not disturbing you," he said.
His voice was the same as always — warm, slightly formal, the voice of a man who had grown up in a time when you didn't call people without a reason.
"Not at all, Robert.
How are you?"
"Honest answer or polite answer?"
"Honest."
"I've been better." A short pause.
"I've also been worse.
I'm somewhere in the middle, I think." He cleared his throat.
"I called because I wanted to say something to you directly, not through Lucas."
"Of course."
"What she said at your shower was wrong.
It was cruel.
And it was not the first time she's been unkind to you, I suspect, though you've been too gracious to say so." He stopped.
"I want you to know that I see it.
I've seen more than I've let on, for a long time.
And I'm sorry I didn't say something sooner."
My throat tightened.
"Robert, you don't have to —"
"I do.
You're carrying my grandchild.
You've been part of this family for four years.
You deserved better from us.
From her, yes.
But also from me, for not drawing a line when I should have." A pause.
"I'm drawing it now.
Late.
But I'm drawing it."
I didn't trust my voice for a moment.
"Thank you," I managed.
"The baby," he said, and his voice changed — something in it opening up.
"Do you know yet?
Boy or girl?"
"We're keeping it a surprise."
He laughed.
A real laugh, brief and warm.
"Good.
I like a surprise." Then, quieter: "I'm going to be a better grandfather than I was a father-in-law.
I want you to know that."
"I already know that," I said.
And I meant it.
We talked for another twenty minutes.
About nothing important.
About the nursery color we'd chosen and the name we were still arguing about and the way Lucas had started reading parenting books at eleven o'clock at night with a highlighter.
Robert laughed at that.
I laughed too.
When we hung up, I sat for a moment with the phone in my lap.
The call I had been dreading had turned out to be the one that helped.
Brenda, meanwhile, had gone quiet.
No more messages.
No calls to Lucas that I knew of.
My mom told me, through Carol, that Brenda and Robert were in counseling — that Robert had insisted on it as a condition of staying.
I didn't ask for more details.
It wasn't my story to follow.
What was mine was the nursery, half-painted in a soft warm yellow.
The name list on the refrigerator with seven options and question marks beside all of them.
The small kicks and rolls that had become so familiar I talked back to them now, narrating my day to the baby like a running commentary.
And Lucas, who came home every evening, who asked how I was feeling and meant it, who had spent the weeks since the shower becoming — somehow — even more present, even more deliberate, as if everything that had happened had clarified something for him that had been slightly blurred before.
One evening he came home and found me sitting on the nursery floor, surrounded by flat-pack furniture instructions and pieces of wood that did not obviously belong together.
He stood in the doorway and looked at the chaos.
"Do you want help?"
"I want you to tell me which piece is Part D," I said.
"I've been looking for Part D for forty minutes."
He sat down on the floor beside me, took the instructions, and studied them with great seriousness.
"This is Part D," he said, holding up a small wooden dowel.
"That's Part D?"
"That's Part D."
"I've been looking at that for forty minutes thinking it was a spare."
He started to laugh.
May you like
I started to laugh.
We sat on the floor of the half-painted nursery and laughed until my eyes watered, and the baby kicked indignantly at the noise, and it was the best I had felt in weeks.
