Which was an asshole thing for me to do. I know that. I’m not sure, sitting here at my kitchen table, that I’m in the cleanest possible position to be demanding honesty from everyone else.
I make a note of that. I intend to sit with it properly. Later.
Because Bossy wakes up then, announcing herself with her usual conviction, and I get up and go to her and lift her out of her crib and hold her against my chest, and she grabs a fistful of my hair and holds on with the absolute certainty of someone who knows exactly what she needs and intends to have it.
“You’re lucky,” I tell her. “You’re too young for any of this.”
She pulls harder on my hair. I decide to take that as solidarity.
I give it a day. I can’t stop thinking about Leigh’s face when she saidI was always your person.People are complicated enough to hold two truths at once. They always have been. She can be my person and be someone else’s person, I suppose.
I call her that evening. She picks up on the first ring, which tells me she has been sitting with her phone waiting, which is very Leigh. I tell her, “I need you to be honest with me. About all of it, going forward. Everything. No more managing what I know. If something involves me, I get to know about it. That’s the only rule.”
“Yes,” she says. Immediately and without qualification.
“And I need space to be weird about it for a while. Because this is weird, Leigh. You and Connor is—it’s a lot to get used to.”
“I know. Take whatever time you need.”
“And I’ll do the same for you, when we’re back to what we were before. I know I wasn’t the most honest person either. Things got hard, and then they got weird, and right now, they’re getting weirder, so I think we’ll need to lean on each other soon. But for now, I just need some time.”
She exhales. “Okay. Thank you.”
I hang up and sit with it for another minute, and then Baldy starts up and I go and get her, and she blinks up at me with her bare, perfect head and her enormous dark eyes.
Nothing else matters when I look in their eyes. I think that everything works out or it doesn’t, and the things that matter find their way back, and I have more important things to do right now than be angry at the people who love me imperfectly. I have, for instance, three babies to raise and a man to text back.
24
RONAN
I have,in my life, made a number of decisions that could be charitably described as impulsive and less charitably described as reckless. Sleeping with a woman I’d just met in an airport was one of them. Taking Connor to dinner last year when I wasn’t sure he’d come was another. Submitting my paternity leave paperwork, after delivering three children I had not yet known were mine, was a third.
I have also made a number of decisions that others considered reckless, but that turned out to be simply correct. The distinction between impulsive and correct is not always legible in advance, and I have learned to trust the instances when something feels not like a lack of caution but like the absence of the need for it. When the path is simply obvious and the only thing standing between me and it is the habit of deliberating.
Showing up at Sage’s cottage with no invitation and no plan is shaping up to be one of those decisions.
I stand on the pavement outside and consider, briefly, whether I should call first. It is seven forty-five in the morning. She has three newborns. The responsible, considered approach is clearlyto call first, to ensure she’s awake, to give her the option of telling me she’d prefer I come another time.
This is the height of rudeness. I am aware. I am also unable to walk away.
She is, obviously, awake. She has been awake since approximately four in the morning, as she is every morning. I know this because she texts me at odd hours with the dry, observational humor of someone processing her life in real time and finding it useful to have an audience.
Last night at ten forty-seven:Baldy just sneezed on me and then looked offended.
At four-ten this morning:Boy is awake for no reason. Extremely rude. Currently judging me.
I knock.
She opens the door in leggings and a sweater with a burp cloth over her shoulder and Bossy on her hip, and she looks at me for a moment with an expression that cycles through surprise and something warmer before it settles into the dry, considering look I am beginning to recognize as her baseline.
“You don’t have work,” she says. Not a greeting exactly.
“Paternity leave, which entitles me to be here rather than there.”
“Entitles is a strong word.”
“It is. May I come in?”
