I told my mother that one-year-olds won’t remember their birthday and to save extravagant parties for when they know the difference between a backyard carnival and a ten-dollar bag of streamers from Party City.
“I went simple like you said,” she tells me, and I watch her silently count the chairs at the long table.
“Everyone is coming,” I assure her. Jane tugs on my dress, and I lift her back into my arms. She rests her cheek on my shoulder.
My mother lets out a soft breath. “You know, there was a minute where I thought you might not let me throw Jane a birthday party.”
“Can you blame me?” I wonder. She no longer sat on my side during one of the most harrowing moments of my life. I needed her to support Connor and my love for him, even if she didn’t fully understand it.
“No, I don’t blame you.” She touches her necklace, not her usual strand of pearls. This time, it’s a silver locket. “I rushed to judgment…me and your father did.” Before she can say anything more, the sunroom door opens and Connor and my father slip inside.
They both seem at ease, and Connor wears his usual complacent expression, not divulging much. He nears, tickling Jane’s arm, and she giggles and squirms against my hip.
“Your father apologized,” he explains, eyes flitting back to my dad.
My father nods repeatedly and clears his throat. “It’s easy for me to go on the offense when I feel like my daughters and my company are being threatened at the same time. It wasn’t right, but…I was just seeing red. I’m sorry.”
It’s nice to be back on these terms, and I sincerely hope it’ll last. “I appreciate the apology,” I say.
“Did you hear that Scott wasn’t granted bond?” he asks both of us.
Before we can say yes, my mother chimes in, “He should get a maximum sentencing after what he’s done.” I spot the rage in her stiff posture. She can be a protective mother hen, I suppose. It just takes the right kind of bullet to head towards us before she grows horns and breathes fire like me.
“Connor doesn’t think he’ll go to trial,” I tell them.
Scott is stuck in jail since the judge denied him bond, so he has to sit there and wait for what could potentially be months. He’s being tried in federal court, so it’s likely he’ll try to worm his way out by a plea deal.
My mother looks horrified at the notion. “A jury needs to convict him.”
“If he pleads guilty,” Connor says, “and takes the deal, it probably won’t be much better than a trial.” Scott Van Wright is looking at five to ten years in prison.
And his name will not cloud the jubilant atmosphere of Jane’s first birthday, so I decide to change the subject. “Mother says you’re dieting,” I tell my father, a clear digression but I’ve never been subtle.
He laughs once into a smile. “My cholesterol is high.”
“Where’s the birthday bunny?! We come with presents!” Daisy exclaims before the door even opens. My parents turn to greet the large group of people, all squeezing into the sunroom, and I go near the other end of the table with Connor, settling in the head wicker chair with Jane on my lap. He sits adjacent to me.
I won the right to sit here after a thirty-minute game of Scrabble this morning. I only beat him by two points.
“Winners sit at the head of the table, Jane,” I tell her.
She waves around her stuffed lion and looks up at me with big blue eyes. “Mommy…” I can’t really understand anything else. Sometimes I think I can, but then I realize I just want to hear actual sentences, and it’s my mind pretending her noises are intelligible words.
“You’re glowing,” Connor says. He has his finger to his jaw, his grin widening as I meet his eyes.
“I’m not pregnant, if that’s what your oversized brain is thinking.” The mention of pregnancy downturns my lips. Jane is supposed to be an only child, Rose. Whatever other babies I birth will belong to Daisy.
“I wasn’t, but clearly you were,” he says easily, as though the topic hardly plagues him. I don’t see how it doesn’t.
I think about our lost dream almost daily, and never once do I begin to smile.
Happy thoughts, Rose. It’s Jane’s first birthday, a momentous, joyful occasion on June 10th. Being sad about not having more of my own children on my actual baby’s birthday is downright mean and almost sacrilegious.
I try to be better. Maybe this is what life is always like.
Connor scoots his chair closer to me.
“Are you cheating, Richard?” He’s trying to sit at the head of the table with me.
“Would you love me if I was a cheater?” he asks. In my peripheral, I notice our friends and family beginning to take their seats.
“Why do you ask me questions that you know the answer to?”
He steps over my comment. “You love me so I couldn’t possibly be a cheater.”
Mind games. Riddles. Paradoxes. My head beats with them all. And I’m transported to us at sixteen and seventeen, when we were locked in a janitorial closet at Model UN together. I never knew he had the means to let us out, not until he admitted it at the press conference.
“You told everyone a memory of ours,” I say, jumping to a new page of our book, and he follows me.
“I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I don’t,” I say softly. “But you forgot to tell them the part where you leaned in to kiss me, and I face-palmed you.”
He gives me a look and shakes his head. “That’s not how it went.”
I glare. “Yes it is. I have a perfect memory, Richard.”
He scoots even closer. Until his shoulder bumps into mine. “Moi aussi.” So do I. He lifts my chin with two fingers. “That day, you stared at me like you’re staring at me now.”
“And how’s that?”
“With passion,” he says it with his own bout of passion. “You looked at my lips and I looked at yours.”
He’s already roped me in, and I draw nearer, our knees knocking.
“We never touched, but I made love to your mind. When you had enough, that’s when you face-palmed me.”
I made love to your mind. He’s never uttered those words before, but I think I’m in love with them. “Hmmm,” I say.
His brows rise. “Hmm?”
“Your memory isn’t terrible.”
He laughs into another grin. “You do love me.”
“And you love stating the obvious,” I point out. I don’t stare at him to see his full-blown grin that overtakes his face. I rarely agree that I love him to the extent that he claims, even if it’s always true. Someone clinks a wine glass, and I redirect my attention to the filled table, every family member and friend seated.
We’re all here, including Willow, Sam, Poppy…and Jonathan. He’s positioned between my father and Sam, and his hair looks thinned on the sides, as though he’s been battling stress.
I’m surprised that he stays quiet, and maybe he’s a little guilt-ridden like Connor has claimed.
Loren rises with chilled water in his left hand, his right hand in a black cast. As the table hushes, I take in the moment, the smiling faces of my three sisters, my parents with their hands clasped together beside a coffee cup, the quiet morning in my childhood home, Connor so close that his arm fits across my chair, and my daughter here, on my lap, hugging her lion.