Page 62 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

We hang up. The office settles back into its two-in-the-morning quiet. The whiskey is where I left it, and I’m sitting with thefeeling of a man who’s just done something he can’t take back and is not sure he would if he could.

But still, deep down, concern rattles me.

I’ve never played a game with this much at stake. There’s the very real possibility that I’ll get everything right, and she’ll still look at the full shape of my life and decide it’s too much.

25

LUNA

Marty makesthe risotto when something important is happening. Vegetable, not chicken. He gave up meat in 1987, and it stuck. He considers it one of his five best decisions. The risotto takes forty minutes of standing at the stove and stirring, which is the ritual.

“I want to meet him. Sooner rather than later, if he can pencil me in.”

“I’ll figure it out. You were saying about Mom?”

Marty has spent the last twenty minutes telling me things about my mother I’ve never heard before. “She was pregnant with you the same year she turned thirty-one,” he says, without turning from the stove. “She didn’t tell anyone but your father for five months. Not even me, and I was sleeping on their couch at the time. She just held it in. The whole thing, for five months.”

I cannot imagine doing something that way. I mean, I can be pretty private at times, but hiding a pregnancy for five months? I barely kept it to myself for five minutes. “Why would she do that?”

“Waiting to see if it was real, I think. Waiting until she knew what to do with it.”

“What about Star?”

He makes a face at the risotto. “Your mom knew it’d be a problem for her firstborn, so she worked extra hard to keep it from her.”

I have my mother’s photograph in a frame on my dresser, the one from her twenties, before I existed. Dark hair, the strong chin that Marty says I have too. Same set to our shoulders. We have a lot in common, but I can’t imagine letting my child treat their sibling the way that Mom tolerated Star.

Mom died when I was nineteen of a heart condition I didn’t know was hereditary until I was in the ob-gyn’s office three months ago, reading the new patient form. The form had a row for maternal cardiac history, and I stared at it for a minute. That’s when I realized I wasn’t sure about what had happened to her.

So, I asked a nurse about it, and sure enough, it’s something I have to watch out for.

Another to add to the pile, I guess. Now Mom’s medical history is in my chart, and the cardiologist was added to my care team by a doctor who said it calmly and watched me take it in.

I don’t like being watched when I’m processing things, but there isn’t much alternative in the room. “She was secretive about medical stuff. I’m trying not to be. It’s harder than I thought it would be, but I want to stay alive, so there’s reasons to share that stuff, you know?”

“Definitely. She had her issues,” he says firmly. “I’m glad you lean more toward the open-and-honest end of things. The world would be a better place if more people were that way.”

I don’t know what to do with this. “Well, I don’t want to end up dead because I kept a stupid secret.”

“That’s life, though, isn’t it? How we navigate the world in our own ways?” He pauses. “I’m sure she had her reasons. But she kept the heart thing a secret, and I’ll never stop believing that if she had just told someone, we could have stayed on top of her. Made her take care of herself. Something…” His voice almost cracks at the end.

“I guess so.” I pat his back, trying to reassure him. I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of that. “What did she do when she finally told people about her pregnancy with me?”

“Picked them carefully,” he says. “In the right order. Called her friend Ellen in the middle of the night. Ellen drove over. They sat in the kitchen and made tea, and your mother cried a little and then put on a record, and they danced.” He smiles at the risotto. “Your grandmother didn’t know for two more months.

“She must’ve been pissed.”

He takes the risotto off the heat. “She was, but it didn’t amount to much. And you do that too, you know. Keep things to yourself until you can’t anymore. You always have. Your whole life, Luna. You hold things until you know them, and then you hand them to the people you trust, and you never once got the order wrong. So, it doesn’t really matter who gets mad about it, because it all works out in the end.”

The lunch is served on his good plates, with bread that Gerty made, and a salad Fred insists on despite having no detectableopinion about salad on any other occasion. We eat at the round kitchen table, all four chairs occupied. I look at Marty across the table and think about the women in my family and what they held, when they let go, and what order they chose.

“And Dad? How did he deal with a surprise baby at his age?”

Another shrug. “With as much grace as you might expect.”

None.

I expected nothing from that man. That way, I was never disappointed. “Was anyone happy that I was in the world?”