Page 166 of Boardroom Ties
The walk back down the hill is slower. I’m not in a hurry; nobody is rushing me. Halfway down, near a little stone bench under a maple, I stop walking.
It isn’t gas I’m feeling. It isn’t the weird flippy thing my stomach has been doing when I think about Mat’s mouth, either. It’s small and distinct, somewhere below my navel and just a little to the left, and it goesbump-bump,like a tiny knuckle rapping politely on a door.
I press my hand flat to my belly. I wait.
It happens again.
“Oh,” I breathe. “Oh, hi. Hi, you.Hi.”
Not many people smile like this in cemeteries, but who cares, who could stop me? No one. I’m grinning and I don’t even register the confident footsteps coming up the path until a strong arm slips around my shoulders and I am all of a sudden completely gathered up.
He turns me toward his chest and wraps both arms around me and rests his chin on top of my head.
“She moved,” I whisper into his coat. “Mat, I swear to you, she just moved.”
I sense his smile overhead, even with my face pressed against his chest. One hand drifts down between us, splayed wide, and he rests his palm to my belly over mine.
We stand there on the path under the maples, the three of us—or is it four?—waiting for a future that’s never looked so bright.
One Year Later
The fairy lights came from the hardware store, not some fancy pants wedding accessories shop. Several of them blink. One whole strand has gone dark over the bar. But nobody, including the bride, gives a damn.
This, I have decided, is the correct way to get married.
I’m standing at the edge of what used to be a loading dock in Red Hook, balancing a paper plate of cornbread on my forearm, watching my cousin sway in a tea-length ivory dress that she absolutely refused to call agown.
Fireman Chad—yes, that is his proper title—has both his enormous hands at the small of her back, and Dani has one of hers fisted in the collar of his shirt like she’s worried, even now, that he might evaporate into thin air.
She’d never let him get that far. I mean, look at her face. Whatever ghost of an ex-fiancé used to live in Dani’s eyes, that’s gone now. It’s been smoked out and replaced by a square-jawed, six-foot-two redhead who calls herBunnywithout irony and cooks a mean rack of ribs.
I take a bite of cornbread and have to bite back a quasi-orgasmic moan. Chad’s grandma made it, apparently, though I refuse to believe that the whip-sharp, refuses-to-use-a-cane woman I met on the dance floor is anywhere near the ninety-seven years old she claims to be.
Beer cans are cooling in galvanized tubs of melting ice along the wall. Unlike the DeMaris wedding, there is no Etta James here. There is a guy named Sal with a Bluetooth speaker and a wacko playlist that just transitioned from Stevie Wonder into something I’m half-sure is by Lizzo?
Whatever the case, the party is absolutely rockin’.
What a wedding. I can’t stop smiling.
It doesn’t hurt that there are precious little joys everywhere I look. For example, as soon as I tear my eyes off Dani Banany and Fireman Chad bumpin’ and grindin’ on the dance floor, I see Afon settled back comfortably in a lawn chair, holding my daughter against his chest.
Galina Satyrin is three months old and has made the leap from fruit-shaped size comparisons to those of the breadloaf variety. Her name means “calm serenity” in Russian, which is hilarious to me as someone who grew up with the loudest-laughing sister on the planet.
But Galina honors her namesake well, because she giggles nonstop, especially when her daddy blows raspberries on her tummy when he’s changing her diaper.
Right this second, she’s not laughing, but that’s only because she’s dead asleep. She’s slumped in Afon’s arms in a manner that suggests she was knocked out by a tranquilizer dart rather than a lullaby.
Her great uncle has one massive hand cupped around the back of her head and the other curled under her swaddled bottom. His face is scrunched up almost painfully, like he’s trying so hard not to be cracked in two by the force of love that it actually, physically hurts him.
He scooped her out of my arms the second we got here and has not put her down since.
Afon, it turns out, is asoftie. Just don’t say it to his face.
“Never thought I’d see the day,” Matvei remarks as he joins me at my side and smirks over at his uncle. He nuzzles the side of my neck until I giggle and squirm away.
“He’s a real cupcake, isn’t he?”
“The biggest I’ve ever met.”
