She steps back, which I take as a yes.
The cottage again smells of vanilla and warm milk and the particular lived-in warmth of a space that has, in three weeks,become entirely organized around three small people. There are muslins on every available surface, and in fact, no surface is unadorned.
Baldy and Boy are in their bouncy chairs in the sitting room. Baldy is regarding the ceiling fan with the serene philosophical interest she brings to everything. Boy is watching the door, and when I come in he looks at me with a recognition that is almost certainly my imagination and absolutely does something to me regardless.
“Hello, sir,” I tell him.
He blinks.
“Eloquent as always.”
“He’s been doing that,” Sage says from behind me. “Looking at the door. Leigh thinks he’s waiting for someone. I told her he’s three weeks old and doesn’t know what a door is yet.” A pause in which I can hear her deciding something. “Maybe she’s right, though.”
I look at him for another moment. Then I do what I came here to do, which is make myself useful, and I go to the kitchen and assess her fridge.
“You have butter,” I report, “eggs, two heels of bread, half a block of cheese, and something I’m going to charitably describe as yogurt.”
“I’ve been meaning to go shopping.”
“Give me a list. I’ll go after breakfast. Which I plan to make, because I assume you’ve not eaten.”
“Are you applying for sainthood? Because I think you could get it.”
I laugh, then set the kettle on. “Chamomile, right?”
“Yeah.” She appears in the kitchen doorway with Bossy still on her hip, and looks at me with an expression I am learning to read—the one she gets when something has landed differently than she expected and she’s not yet sure what to do with it. Slightly open. Slightly off guard. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I know.” I take the eggs out. “How do you feel about eggs in top hats again?”
“I’d love that.” She sits, which I note because she does not strike me as a woman who sits easily when there are things to be done. Bossy settles against her shoulder and grabs a fistful of her dark waves and holds on with the proprietary confidence of someone who has decided this is simply her territory now.
I make breakfast. The cottage is small enough that we can talk easily from the kitchen to the sitting room, and we do, about nothing in particular at first—the texture of the morning, whether Boy’s habit of watching the door is personality or coincidence, whether Baldy is the most serene baby in recorded history or simply conserving energy for something spectacular later. It is easy in the way that things are easy when two people have, without quite deciding to, already begun to know each other.
Two of the eggs come out overcooked, so those are mine. She takes hers “dippy,” as she likes to put it, so I’ll not burden her with hard yolks. We eat. I do the washing up over her objections. When I return from the grocery, bags in hand, she swears she’ll stow the supplies, but I’m too fast for her to object to the help.
Then we spend the morning with the babies in the way I am discovering mornings with newborns go—not structured, not particularly plannable, but full in a way that I have not felt in my domestic life in a long time. And it is a discovery. Aoifa handled the girls at this age far more than I ever did. I can still change a diaper with the best of them, but the moment-to-moment stuff was her.
Now, it’s me. At least, while I’m on leave. As long as Sage allows me.
Sitting in her cottage with Baldy on my knee and Boy watching me from his chair and Bossy finally asleep against her mother’s shoulder and the sound of Sage talking about her website analytics with the focused energy of someone who does not believe in not working just because she has recently produced three human beings, I am aware, with a clarity that is both illuminating and slightly alarming, that I have been very wrong about what I prefer.
My home is neat. Orderly. Clean. Cold, some might say.
I prefer this. The warmth and the noise and the small, persistent demands of three people who have not yet learned that the world doesn’t organize itself around their needs. The company of a woman who fills a room without trying to, who makes me laugh precisely when I’m not expecting it, who hands me a baby and turns away to do something else without ceremony, like my being here is simply part of the furniture of her day.
I want to be part of the furniture of her day. I want that with a directness I am no longer interested in denying.
In the evening, while all three sleep at once in the miracle formation that Sage treats with the hushed reverence of areligious event, we sit on the sofa and watch something on television that neither of us is paying attention to. She tucks her feet under her and leans sideways into the cushions and tells me about her sister Rosemary in North Carolina. It is, evidently, notable that she cried on the phone twice.
“Rosemary doesn’t cry,” Sage says, with the tone of someone reporting a fact of natural law. “The last time I saw Rosemary cry was when our grandmother died, and before that, I genuinely don’t know. She cried twice about these three and then apologized for it both times, while also apologizing for not coming to see them, which is very Rosemary.”
“She sounds dramatic.”
“She’s the best person I know. She can bake chocolate chip cookies that’ll break your heart and rewire a car alarm by hand. There’s nothing she doesn’t know how to do perfectly, so she hates asking for help and gives it constantly.” Sage is quiet for a moment. “She wants to come. I keep telling her to wait.”
“You should let her come and see what a good job you’re doing. You have more feet under you than you think.”
She looks at me sideways. “You’re very sure of things about me for someone who’s known me three weeks.”
