“Damn,” Caleb said. Ellen’s eyes shot to the door. “It’s okay. I locked it,” he reassured her.
“This is going to happen a lot, you know,” Ellen warned him, running her hand over his chest. “Parenthood isn’t as sexy as you might think.”
“I know. But I’m up for it.” His eyes told her he meant it, and her heart told her not to worry. Caleb could handle fatherhood. He could handle anything she threw at him. “Besides,” he added, “Hank has to go to bed sometime, right? And I’m a patient man.”
He rolled off the mattress, tossed her clothes into her lap, and disappeared into the bathroom with his pants. When he came out, she was standing in the middle of the floor pulling her shirt over her head, and he took advantage, planting warm, wet kisses on her stomach while her arms were all tangled up. Ellen giggled. “Stop it.”
“You’re not really going to make me wait five years, are you?” Caleb dragged her into his arms and pressed his forehead against hers. “Because I’m not sure I’m that patient.”
“Maybe three or four.” She managed to keep a straight face when she said it, but the truth was that she’d already made up her mind. Improbable as it seemed, she knew who she wanted to wake up next to every morning for the rest of her life. She didn’t really care how long it took them to get the paperwork signed.
He did, though, and she liked winding him up.
Wrapping her arms around him, she said, “Don’t look so glum. Think about it this way. We both want to get married someday. Now we get to do the fun part.”
“What’s that?”
Parroting his own words back at him, she smiled and said, “What we’re going to do now, honey, is negotiate.”
Epilogue
Three months later
Ellen sat on her front porch with her feet up, sipping a glass of iced tea and watching Caleb rake up leaves while Henry followed him around with his own tiny rake. It was windy—typical for October—and their voices drifted to her on unpredictable currents, so that she caught only snippets of Henry’s questions and Caleb’s patient responses.
Jump now, Cabe?
Not quite yet, buddy. Give me another second to make the pile bigger.
Then, later, I’m raking! Cabe, look! I’m raking!
I see you, Hank. That’s awesome. You might want to rethink your technique a little …
Caleb had spent weeks gently correcting Henry every time he mixed up “I” and “you,” and then one morning a switch flipped, and Henry woke up fluent in pronouns. Naturally, Caleb took credit for teaching him, and Ellen smiled and praised them both.
Language development didn’t actually work that way, but she couldn’t help wondering if maybe it did, for Caleb. He had his own fluency in these kinds of things, a talent for coaxing other people into giving him their best. After all, he’d helped Ellen dismantle her own barriers between “you” and “me,” coaxing her slowly out from behind her castle walls until one day she realized that her whole perspective on self-sufficiency had changed.
Her eyes traveled down the slope of the yard to stop at the fence skirting the property line. As fences went, it was handsome enough. Eight feet tall, cedar, stained and weatherproofed, with a deep new flower bed stretching along its length.
She’d negotiated hard for that flower bed. Caleb spread the mulch for her, and she’d selected the plants from the nursery and put them in the earth on her hands and knees. New hostas, bleeding hearts, lungworts. He’d moved her tulip tree and bought her a second one to stand nearby at the corner of the property. None of it looked like much now, but it would grow. It would thrive.
She didn’t love the fence, but she loved him, and that turned out to be a lot more important.
After three months with Caleb, Ellen could see that she’d taken the wrong lesson from her mascot hosta. She’d thought the plant’s survival proved that she, too, could endure anything. But it was a perennial, for Christ’s sake. Surely the point was that it kept coming back.
Renewal. That was what her life had been missing. That was the pulse that beat at her wrists, the sap rising in her blood, the beautiful pinch of emotion in her throat when she watched Caleb with her son or woke up in the dark to hear her lover groan, caught in a nightmare, and she was able to hold him, soothe him, talk him through it.
She’d spent the past few years hibernating. Now her life had these green shoots, this promise of fullness, and there were moments when gratitude overwhelmed her.
Caleb finished raking a pile of leaves onto a bright blue tarp, plopped Henry down in the middle of it, and hauled him down the driveway, threatening to dump him out front and leave him there for the leaf trucks. She watched her dark-haired lover with her light-haired son, and she let the late afternoon sun warm her bare feet where they stuck out from under the porch roof. It was a perfect day of the sort that came only three or four times a year in Ohio. Bright blue sky, crisp air, a breeze.
They were a perfect family, suspended in a perfect moment.
Of course, tomorrow it was supposed to rain, and it would turn colder soon. Last week, Caleb had questioned her parenting one too many times in a twenty-four-hour period, and she’d snapped at him and sent him home to sleep alone.
He worked himself ragged, especially now that his business was taking off, and he didn’t like it when she got on his case about that. Sometimes she still got scared and hid behind a self-protective wall, and he didn’t like that, either.
But he always coaxed her back out.