Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [88]
At first, it all seemed easy. I got pregnant on the first attempt, in August. There were plenty of things I didn’t know how to do: drive a stick shift, swim underwater, use the microwave for anything other than baking potatoes and popping popcorn. But I knew how to be pregnant. After two boys, I’d even say I was good at it.
I started showing right away, the same way I had with Spencer. Certain things bothered me—the smell of gasoline, the sound of the spoon squishing through the mayonnaise when I made tuna salad. In the afternoons I found myself napping, sometimes on the floor next to Spencer’s crib, conked out on the carpet like I’d been clubbed in the head. At five o’clock I’d sit both boys in front of the TV and scramble to make sure the table was set and the meatloaf or manicotti or chicken-rice bake or whatever I was making was in the oven, that the boys had their hands and faces washed, that their rooms were picked up and their lunchboxes packed by the time Frank came home, so he wouldn’t see how exhausted I was. When I was by myself, my hand resting lightly on my belly, I still felt that surge of excitement and accomplishment. I am doing something important, I would think. I was bringing a new life into the world, giving a family this incredible gift (never mind that it was a gift they were buying) . . . what could be better, more noble, than that?
“How’s Frank handling everything?” my sister asked me when we were at our parents’ house for dinner one night.
“Frank is fine,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t even close to being true. Frank, who was at that moment seated in front of the television set, watching the Eagles, was barely looking at me, not at my face and certainly not at my body as it started to change. That night, on the way home, with both boys sleeping in their car seats, I’d ventured a question. “Are you okay? With . . .” Frank hadn’t taken his eyes off the road.
“I guess I have to be, don’t I?”
“It’s just a few more months,” I said softly. He didn’t answer, but I felt the car speed up, as if by mashing his foot on the gas pedal he could hasten the baby’s arrival.
As the fall went on, he rarely asked how I was feeling, the way he had with both of the boys. Then, he’d been tender and considerate, opening bottles of seltzer so they’d go flat, the way I liked it, before pouring me a glass, sweeping and mopping the floors so that I wouldn’t have to bend. On nights when we were both home, I would prop my feet in his lap and he’d rub them with lotion, massaging them. Whenever we went out with the boys, he’d always double-check to make sure the diaper bag was packed. Now when he was home he’d sit in his recliner, eyes on the television, jaw set . . . and, more then once, running errands or at the library, I’d reached into the diaper bag and found that I was missing wipes or diapers or an extra pair of size 3T pants. Frank seemed to have decided that the bag, once his responsibility, was now my job, along with everything else around the house.
I tried to talk to him, but every time I asked if there was something wrong, he denied it. “What could be wrong?” he’d ask with a tight smile. That smile scared me, which meant that I never tried to ask follow-up questions, to point out the things I’d noticed, the way his eyes slid away from my belly, the way he hardly ever touched me anymore. The first time we’d tried to make love after the test had come back positive, everything had been fine at first—his mouth nuzzling the skin beneath my ear, my hands roaming over the deliciously taut muscles of his shoulders and his back. When he’d rolled on top of me I’d been wet and more