“Sunday,” I say.
He looks up. “The Ferretti?—”
“Ferretti waits until Monday. Take Sunday.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. Something moves across his face that he doesn’t fully manage. “Roman?—”
“I said don’t,” I say.
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You were about to.”
He is quiet. He looks at the two cribs, one finished against the wall, one taking shape in my hands on the floor, and the rockingchair by the window, still wrapped in transit, one of its legs I haven’t gotten to yet. He looks at all of it for a long moment.
Then, quietly, so quietly it almost doesn’t make it across the room: “I am glad.”
I look at the crib in my hands.
“Get back to work,” I say.
He stands. He picks up his folder. At the door, he stops for exactly one second, the way he always stops, and then his footsteps move toward the elevator, and the penthouse goes quiet again.
I finish the second crib.
I unwrap the rocking chair.
I position both cribs against the far wall and the changing table beside the window and the rocking chair in the corner where the afternoon light comes through at the angle Elena will need when she is up at three in the morning. I stand in the middle of the room and I look at what I have built and I think about a key in my hand in a lobby on 48th Street and the weight of everything it meant and the weight of everything this means and the fact that one of those weights is heavier than the other and it is not the one I spent thirty years carrying.
Elena’s birthday is in four days.
I know this because her birthday has been in my calendar since her first week of employment. For two years, I had flowers sent to the office on that date, a standing instruction handled by the billing department, something I set up once and didn’t think about again.
This year, I have been thinking about it for three weeks.
On Wednesday afternoon, I go to the jeweler on 57th Street, a place I have used before for corporate gifts. I walk in and tell the man behind the counter what I am looking for. He shows me several trays, and I go through them with the attention I bring to things that matter, which is different from the attention I bring to things that are merely important.
On the third tray, I find it.
A bracelet. White gold, simple, two small stones set side by side. Deep red. Ruby, the jeweler says, is the birthstone for July.
The boys are due in July.
I buy it without discussing the price, which is not something I typically do. I have it wrapped, carry it home in my jacket pocket, put it on my nightstand, and look at it for a moment before I put it back in my pocket and go to find my wife.
She’s in the kitchen in her robe, her hands wrapped around a mug, her hair loose, her bump visible even through the fabric. She turns from the counter when she hears me, and she looks at me with the expression she has been wearing in the mornings lately. Open. Unhurried. The expression of a woman who has stopped bracing for what a room might contain.
“The nursery people finished the second coat this morning,” she says. “It smells incredible.”
“It will air out by the weekend.”
She sips her tea. I cross to the counter and stand beside her, and we look at the city through the kitchen window. After a moment, she leans against my arm, a small automatic thing she has started doing somewhere in the last few months, and I lether lean, and I don’t comment on it because commenting on it would make it a thing, and it’s better as what it is.
“Your birthday is in four days,” I say.
She looks up at me. “You don’t have to?—”
I take the box from my pocket and set it on the counter in front of her.
