Dad’s eyes were wild and round as he looked between the two of us and then to Tyler. “You’re pregnant, Becca?”
“Everyone needs to calm down,” Mom said from the corner. “This is wonderful news.”
“The hell it is,” Nick said, lunging at Tyler again. Suddenly, Dad was standing, too, and two of his friends were holding him back. He was shouting and the words mixed with Nick and Tyler and all the people trying to calm them that I couldn’t make them out. Instead, I pulled on Tyler, trying to get him to the door.
“Come on, Tyler, please,” I said.
“Fine,” Tyler said, grabbing his jacket and turning to the door. I followed him, looking back one last time at the tableau of my family and Dad’s friends in the dining room, paused as they watched us leave. My father and Nick were seething, breathing heavily. I slammed the door behind me, and tears streamed down my cheeks as I ran to Tyler’s car.
33
Tyler
The ride home was silent, but I held her hand the entire time. I wanted her to know that while I was angry, it wasn’t at her. I reached out to her over the center console, and she placed her fingers in mine. I squeezed them but kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t want to talk yet. The words that were bubbling up in my chest were ones I might not be able to take back. And definitely ones I didn’t want her hearing me say about her family. Especially when I might not really mean them.
The most important thing to me was that she knew who I was mad at. It all began and ended with Nick. Even her father got a pass from me since his initial reaction would be to protect his children, and if Nick was angry, he would jump to his defense. I got that. Becca stayed silent, either her head in her free hand or looking out the window as a light drizzling rain began to fall. When we made it back to the house, I lifted her hand to kiss it and then let her go so I could get out.
I opened the door and let her in first, and she rushed to the restroom, turning on the sink and grabbing washcloths out of the linen closet. It dawned on me that I never kept washcloths in the linen closet before she came to live with me. I might have had two, and they rotated being either in the shower or in the washing machine at all times. Now there were several of them, and they lived in a neat little stack in the closet that until her was barren, except for some toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Now it housed various sizes of towels I still didn’t know the difference between, candles, a basket full of various bathroom things, and then a matching basket with hers.
I didn’t remember buying any of it. It just appeared one day.
Not for the first time I thought about how much my life had changed, and how much it was going to continue to in the future. The very soon future. I was going to be a father, and that meant I needed to, in many ways, get my shit together. Simple things like keeping a cadre of washcloths in a closet was something I was supposed to do now. I had to be able to take care of a tiny human who couldn’t take care of themselves, and that meant I had to actually act like an adult.
That thought pushed me to thinking of school again. It was more imperative than ever for me to get my classes going and get to a point where I thought I could handle working at Tom’s company. I needed to be able to not only provide the safe foundation for my little family that a job in the tech sector could provide, but it filtered down to little things like the times I’d be at work there versus the working hours at the bar. As much as I loved my brothers, working until two or three in the morning would be difficult with a newborn.
As Becca washed the makeup off her face and spent a few minutes decompressing alone in the bathroom, I made my way to the kitchen and poured myself a large glass of water. Mom had always touted the calming effect of a big gulp of water when we were young and fought. She was right. Just forcing yourself to take a moment to polish off an entire glass of water tended to remove the zip right out of a person. Many a scuffle between me and my brothers as children ended rather quickly when we were put in time-out and given a large glass of water to drink.