Francesca told him that Benjamin had gone with Charles to sort out the furniture situation. The light dimmed in Ronald’s eyes. “I need to speak with him,” he muttered, his eyes to the ground.
Francesca swallowed the questions she wanted to ask: Why aren’t you at work? What has happened to you? Are you healthy? Is someone after you? She looped her arm through Ronald’s and led him into the back office, where she pulled the shades and ordered him to lie back on the sofa. She disappeared to fetch him water and a plate of the pasta she’d made herself earlier for lunch (but hadn’t managed to eat all of it due to her never-ending tasks at the front desk). She heated the sauce and poured it over, pleased that she could tend to Ronald’s needs right now. She hoped that this was the sort of thing she’d be good at as a new mother.
All afternoon, Ronald rested in the shadows of the back office, drinking water and waiting for Benjamin to get back. Francesca checked on him frequently and caught herself thinking often of her own brother, Angelo, of how worried she was about him and his future, and whether he’d wind up in jail one day. Her worries for Ronald were different. She didn’t dareask about his girlfriend, Bee, for fear that he was upset about her, about something she’d done to him. Maybe it was over.
It wasn’t till Benjamin returned that Ronald came clean about anything. Thirty minutes after Benjamin went into the office to speak with his brother, he helped Francesca close down the desk and led his wife and his brother to the corner of the veranda, where he set out mugs of tea and focused his eyes on his brother. Francesca tried not to stare at Ronald, but he looked so stricken, so pale, that she caught herself glancing over at him, worried he was going to faint.
“Do you know what you want to do, Ron?” Benjamin asked now. He hadn’t yet filled Francesca in on what Ronald had told him.
Ronald put his face in his hands. Slowly, mumbling, he explained what had happened. “Bee got pregnant, too. I was overjoyed. We weren’t ready to tell people yet. It was too early, although I wanted to tell Mom and Dad so badly. I felt like we could really be a family, Bee and me and Kevin.” Kevin was Bee’s toddler. “But yesterday she miscarried. It was devastating. I broke down and couldn’t support Bee at all. We both said some things we shouldn’t have. She told me to get out of the house. I went out last night to blow off some steam, and when I got to work this morning, they could see how hungover I was and…” He coughed into his hands.
Francesca guessed he’d been fired on the spot.
As Ronald continued to talk about the pregnancy, the excitement he’d felt, his hopes for a brighter future, Francesca’s heart shattered. This was a man who’d never understood life, who’d never managed to build any happiness for himself, who’d fought to be “good enough” in his parents’ eyes and had never been, not compared to Benjamin. Now that he’d lost his girlfriend and a baby, he looked even more broken than before. Francesca didn’t know what to say.
“You’ll move back here,” Benjamin said, his voice tender. “You can get back on the payroll. Mom and Dad don’t have to know anything.”
But Francesca guessed it was even more complicated than that. She imagined that Ronald partially wanted his parents to know that he’d lost a baby. He wanted them to understand that a woman had loved him enough to bring a baby into the world with him. But even that was too difficult to talk about.
Suddenly, Charles appeared on the veranda with a cigar between his lips. “Benjamin, can I speak with you for a moment, please?”
Benjamin hurried off to help his father with yet another Lodge-related emergency, leaving Ronald and Francesca alone on the veranda beneath an enormous moon. Francesca watched as Ronald sipped his tea, his eyes gloomy. When she couldn’t think of anything to say, Ronald breathed, “How do you do it?”
Francesca parted her lips with surprise. But she knew what he meant: how do you live?
“I don’t know what I’m doing half the time,” Francesca said, putting both of her hands on her pregnant stomach. “The year that Benjamin stopped writing me letters, I watched myself fall apart. I got fired from a couple of jobs. My friends fell in love, and I was so alone.”
Ronald tilted his head but looked as though he didn’t believe her. “But you do everything perfectly,” he said. “You love my brother perfectly. My parents think you’re perfect.”
Francesca remembered how many times Elaine had had to remind her to do various tasks at the Lodge correctly and snorted. “They don’t think that.”
“Okay, but they don’t think anyone is perfect,” Ronald said, offering his first miraculous smile of the day. “But they love that you’re here. They love that you’re going to give birth to the first Whitmore of the next generation.”
“They want a boy,” Francesca said. “I don’t know if I can give them that.”
“You’ll have a boy,” Ronald said, although it was impossible that he could ever know.
Francesca laughed, but then her smile dimmed. Her heart still ached for Ronald, for all he’d wanted to build with Bee, for the fact that he’d escaped the Lodge and now had to return. How could she ever help him? With him, she felt so completely like herself, as though Ronald was one of the truest friends she’d ever had. But before she could say something perfect, something that would heal his broken heart, Benjamin returned to the veranda and told Ronald he could start back at the Lodge tomorrow morning if he wanted to. “It will be good to do something,” he said. “It isn’t good to sit around, thinking about it.”
Ronald bowed his head and agreed.
That night, as Francesca lay in the dark beside her husband, she felt a powerful lurch in her abdomen and shot upright, terrified. Her due date was a week away. But she woke Benjamin, describing what was happening and what she thought was happening, and in a flash, they were downstairs and headed for the hospital. Benjamin didn’t bother to wake anyone else up in his family. He left a note on the kitchen table that said, "The baby is coming."
In the car on the way to the hospital, Francesca started crying. These were not sweet, happy tears. These were tears that told of homesickness, of heartache, of fear. She was worried about her baby, about raising her baby so far from Italy and her mother and father. She was concerned about hospitals and scary procedures and the drugs they were going to give her. She was worried that, like Bee and Ronald, she and Benjamin would lose their baby. Benjamin held her hand, said all the right things, and drove them as quickly as he could to the hospital, where theywere taken to a private room and told the doctor would be there soon.
Benjamin tugged his fingers through his hair, looking stressed. If Francesca had to guess, he was just as worried about what he was going to miss at the Lodge today as he was about her labor and delivery. Ever since his father had given him more responsibilities, Benjamin’s anxiety had shot through the roof. Francesca often felt lonely in America, waiting for her husband to return from wherever he was, tending to the Lodge. A part of her wondered if the baby would keep her company. Maybe now that Ronald was back, he could swing by the nursery and say hello.
Francesca’s labor lasted fourteen hours. Through it all, she held Benjamin’s hand and tried her hardest to focus on positive thoughts, on how beautiful their future would be, on how thrilled she would be, whether it was a girl or a boy. She imagined her child’s future at the Lodge—or elsewhere, as a filmmaker or an architect or, heck, an airline pilot, if that’s what they wanted. Panic set in as she imagined the next twenty years of her life, years during which she’d worry obsessively about this child. She hoped she could teach them enough to live well in the world. She wished she wouldn’t be a terrible mother.
When Alexander came into the world the following afternoon, Francesca and Benjamin were blown over by how gorgeous he was. Ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes wiggled as he squawked hello. Francesca burst into tears as the nurses cleaned him up and passed him over to her. “Ciao!” she said, switching to Italian with her son, because she wanted him to know what her culture was and where she’d come from. But when she felt Benjamin’s eyes upon her, she switched back to English, laughing at herself, saying, “Your daddy is giving me a funny smile, Alexander. Do you see him?” Soon, Benjamin held his son for the first time and gazed down at him with all the love in theworld. He said sweet things that couldn’t quite reach Francesca’s ears.
Before the night was through, the rest of the Whitmores came to the hospital to say hello. Ronald held Alexander an extra-long time, his face difficult to read, although Francesca guessed that he was thinking about the baby he’d lost with Bee. She wondered what, exactly, he and Bee had said to one another, how monstrous they’d gotten in their heartbreak.
As he held Alexander, Ronald whispered, “I’m going to take care of you, little guy. I’ll be there for everything. Just come and find me if you need anything at all.”
Francesca squeezed her eyes shut to keep her tears from falling. When she opened them, Elaine was there with the family camera, eager to take a few shots that Francesca could then send to her parents and brother in Italy—her true family, who didn’t even know there was a brand-new member to welcome. Years after they were taken, Francesca adored those photos, adored how young she looked and how tiny Alexander was in her arms, but in the moment that Elaine took them, Francesca felt she looked wild, untamed, and petrified. It was the first day of her life as a mother. She knew everything would be different from here on out, and it was written all over her face.
Chapter Ten
