“You don’t look fine.”
“I’m fine, Andrea.”
He was not fine. He was standing in the corner of an exam room with red eyes trying not to cry about a heartbeat on a monitor and I had to look away because something in my chest cracked at the sight of it.
In the car afterward I handed him the ultrasound printout without looking at him. “Here.”
He took it. Stared at it for so long I checked to make sure he was still breathing. His thumb rested on the edge of the image, careful, like he was afraid of smudging it.
“That’s our baby,” he said quietly.
“That’s our baby.”
He drove us home one-handed because he wouldn’t put the photo down.
The next morning he showed up with peonies and a question.
“Date?”
“No.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow.”
He left. I stood at the counter holding the peonies and Grandma poured herself more coffee without looking at me.
“He’s persistent,” she said.
“He’s annoying.”
“Those are sometimes the same thing.”
A few days later I came downstairs and he was already at the table with Grandma, both of them with coffee, mid-conversation about the fence.
“It’s been crooked since 1987,” Grandma was telling him. “My husband Harold tried to fix it. Harold was a wonderful man but he was not a fence person.”
“I could take a look at it.”
“That’s what Harold said.” She sipped her coffee. “Harold was wrong.”
“I think I can handle a fence.”
Grandma raised an eyebrow at me from across the table. I raised one back. He went out and fixed the fence that afternoon, and when he was done it was straight. Actually straight. Grandma inspected it three times, running her hand along the top rail, before she said “it’ll do” which was the highest praise she gave anyone who wasn’t dead.
Another morning I came down and heard his voice from outside. I looked through the kitchen window and he was in the garden pulling weeds while Grandma sat in her lawn chair with her tea, pointing at spots he’d missed.
“That one. No, the one next to it. The tall one. Finneas, that’s a flower.”
“They look the same.”
“They do not look the same. One has rounded leaves and one has pointed leaves. Your generation can’t tell a weed from a petunia.”
I watched him crouch in the dirt in clothes that probably cost more than Grandma’s monthly grocery bill, pulling weeds under the supervision of a seventy-three-year-old woman in a lawn chair, and I had to turn away from the window because my face was doing something I didn’t authorize.
He asked me on a date every morning. I said no every morning. He said okay every morning. He never sulked about it, never guilt-tripped, never brought it up again after I answered. But he kept asking, and that was the most infuriating part because I wanted him to stop so I could stop thinking about what I’d say if I ever changed my mind.
One afternoon I came home from my walk and heard Grandma cackling from the living room.
I walked in and found Finneas on the couch beside her with a photo album open across both their laps.
