Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [89]
“Sorry,” he’d muttered, rolling onto his side so that I couldn’t see him. “Guess I had too much to drink.” Except he hadn’t had anything more than a single beer before dinner, and dinner had been five hours ago. I touched his shoulder, then the tattoo on his arm. “Is anything bothering you?”
“I’m fine.” His voice was loud.
I pulled up my panties and pajama bottoms. “It happens,” I said to the ceiling. At least I’d heard that it happened. It had never happened to Frank before, and I knew what was wrong, even if he didn’t want to say anything: it was the baby. He was worried about this baby in a way he’d never worried about his own. We’d made love right up until the ninth month with the boys, only stopping because I’d gotten too tired to do anything in bed except sleep, but now that I was carrying someone else’s baby, Frank couldn’t . . . or wouldn’t. I was never sure, because I couldn’t get him to talk about it, and there was no one I could ask.
The real trouble started when I was thirteen weeks along. I was in the living room with the boys, the three of us putting together a giant puzzle of the White House on the floor—I’d bought it for a quarter at a tag sale—when I heard a crash from the kitchen, and Frank cursing. I ran in to find him throwing a loaf of bread at the wall. “Goddamn stupid crap!”
“What’s wrong?” I looked at the plate on the table and saw the ragged remnants of half of a sandwich. He’d tried to fold the bread in half, only instead of folding, it had crumbled.
I crouched down to pick up the mess. “It’s organic.” It was true, the bread India wanted me eating, made without additives or preservatives, was considerably harder to fold than the Wonder bread I normally brought.
“It’s crap,” he said again, and kicked the wall on his way out. I winced, hoping the boys hadn’t heard.
It took me a while to realize that it hadn’t been a coincidence, Frank losing his temper the day after we’d done our bills. We paid them the same way we always did, in the living room after the boys were asleep, Frank in a chair with the stack of mail, me on the couch with the checkbook, only for once things had gone smoothly, thanks to the money from the clinic I’d deposited in our account, the first installment of the fifty thousand dollars I’d eventually get. We paid off the balance on one of our credit cards, and another two thousand dollars on a second card, instead of just the minimums the way we normally did, and we hadn’t had to decide whether to be a few days’ late with one of the utilities. For once, there was enough to go around, with money left over at the end, and I’d been stupid enough to smile about it, to say, “Wow, this is great,” without realizing how my comment would hurt him.
“Couples fight when the woman gets pregnant,” India said via Skype the day after our fight. It was funny, listening to her talk like she was some kind of expert on marriage after less than two years as a wife. Since the insemination, I’d gone to New York twice, arranging for my mother to pick up the boys after school. India and I also chatted by Skype every few days on the brand-new laptop she had insisted on buying me.
At first I’d been worried that it would feel like India was checking up on me, but gradually we’d started to feel . . . not exactly like friends, but more like coworkers who were friendly, who could share a meal and gossip about their lives.
“Men have mood swings and cravings,” she told me. “I saw a thing about it on the Today show.”
“How about you?” I asked. I’d told her about the argument, leaving out the particulars—the broken plate, the cursing—and now I was eager to steer the talk toward safer ground. “Are you having any cravings?” That was, of course, a joke: even on the computer screen that only showed her from the neck up, I could see she was skinny as ever, her skin smooth, her eyebrows and makeup all perfect.
“Nope,” she’d said. “I’m very horny, though.” My mouth must have fallen open because she’d laughed. “Don’t look so shocked,