Page 90 of Fox
“What’s going on?” Dina clocks it immediately at the diner.
“Nothing is going on.”
“Lucy.”
I wave a hand at her. “Not talking about it”—I growl at her when she rolls her eyes—“yet. I need time.”
By day two, I’m feeling guilty. It feels like I’m pretending to have amnesia again. I sit in our garden close to the fig tree that he still waters even though I don’t ask him to.
“Hey.” I put my hand on my stomach. “I don’t know how to do this. Any of it. But I’m going to figure it out.” I breathe. “So just?—“
Stay.
I don’t say it out loud. I think it, completely, with everything I have.
This time stay.
On the third day, when I’m bursting at the seams to tell him, we eat a quiet dinner and then sit on the porch to enjoy the spring evening. I sit in one armchair, he in the other.
“Lucy,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Spit it out, sweetheart.”
I swallow.
His eyes drop to my hand, which is at my stomach, where it apparently went without my permission again, and when they come back to my face, I know he knows.
“I’m…I’m…” I’m scared to say it in case what happened last time happens again.
“Tell me,” he insists.
Tears fill my eyes. He takes my hand in his.
“How do you know?” I ask him.
“You keep touching your stomach, and you’re eating toast in the mornings. And you have the same look you had the first time. Like you’re holding something wonderful in both hands.”
I lick my lips and pick up my courage. “I’m pregnant.”
He breathes like it’s become real now for him, too, because I said it.
“Okay,” he says.
This is our newokay. The one that means what it says all the way through.
“Are you—” I start.
“Yes,” he says, before I finish.
“I haven’t said what I was going to ask.”
“The answer is yes,” he asserts. “I’m incandescently happy.”
“Me, too. But I’m also terrified,” I confess. “I need you to know that. I’m happy—I’m, I’m so—” My voice trembles. “I’m so happy, Fox. But I’m also terrified.”
“I know.” He comes to me, lifts me gently, and settles into the armchair with me in his lap. “Me, too.”
