“I don’t think so, hmm, Birchie?” Wattie said. “We need a cool drink and a bite of something and to have a little lie-down. We will do much better on our own.”
“We’re never going to be on our own,” Birchie said darkly, staring into the dining room. She shook an angry finger at her own seat near the head of the table. “Get out of there.”
She wasn’t talking to us, though. She was talking to bad rabbits or whatever animal she saw defiling her table by Lavender’s dirty breakfast dishes.
Rachel shot me a speaking glance, but she took Lavender’s shoulders and steered her out the front door.
“Sorry,” Lav whispered again as she went, and I said, “S’okay, kid.”
Wattie was back in profile, whispering to Birchie, coaxing her to come and sit down and rest, promising a cool drink of lemonade.
Birchie looked on the verge of angry tears. “It should be champagne. Floyd teetotaled, you know. His whole life. I didn’t. Daddy didn’t either, but that’s not what’s going to put us both in hell.”
Even with the front door closed, I heard Lav calling to her dad as she clattered like a pony down the porch stairs, which meant that in another thirty seconds we would have had Jake here, on top of everything. So that was a small mercy.
Wattie’s whispers were so soft now that they were for Birchie alone, and she eased her along toward the table.
“We are having lemonade. You are not,” Birchie told all the nothings that were not in the empty chairs, still angry, but also cold and flat, as if she were reciting facts. The sun’s a yellow star, gravity works, and silly rabbits, lemonade is only for old ladies.
Wattie made a shooing hand at me behind her back.
“Come on,” I whispered to Sel Martin.
I led him silently down the hall, back to the sewing room. I opened the door for him, and he went in. All the way in, walking to the far side to stand in front of the rainbow of quilt squares stacked in the shelves, his gym bag held awkwardly in front of him. I closed the door behind me, and I stayed right there, by the door.
I wished I had a bag to hold. I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands. Everything possible felt fake and posed and full of silent messages. Clasped in front was judgey, behind my back turned me into a naughty child, and crossing my arms felt defensive or, worse, angry. I hung them by my sides, where they felt obvious and unwieldy.
This is what I’d wanted, but now, with the door closed, I was remembering that the last time I’d been alone in a room with him, we’d made Digby. I knew that this near stranger had a hairline scar on his abdomen. Appendix, he’d told me as I ran my tongue along it. This was the same man who had kissed the tiny birthmark I kept hidden high up on the inside of my left thigh, now fully clothed and on the opposite end of the room.
“So we should talk,” I said, and instantly blushed. World’s worst opening for a conversation with a man who’d just told me he stuttered. I corrected, “I mean, I want to apologize. I shouldn’t have called you at the butt crack of dawn and sprung Digby on you.”
“Dih . . . Dih . . . D . . .” he said, trying to repeat the name, and I had done it again—given him vital information in a casual side spill, like when I’d told him I was having a boy via a pronoun slip.
“I’m sorry. Digby is what I’ve been calling the baby.”
“Oh,” he said, and very carefully made no facial expression.
“You don’t like it?” I asked, because whether Digby’s father would like the name was not something that had crossed my mind. Not until I was facing Digby’s father.
“I luh-luh-love it,” he lied. He wasn’t very good at it.
Strangely, this obvious lie to please me made me feel a little better. Maybe he was like that cliché about snakes—as scared of me as I was of him. I stayed on my side of the room, trying to read his silence, his dark eyes, his carefully neutral body language, as awkward as my own. Did he have his own worst-case scenarios running in his head?
The first thing he’d said to me was, I wanted to show up. I wanted you to know I will show up. That was the thing he’d said that mattered anyway. He’d dropped everything to appear bare hours after I told him I was pregnant.
Meanwhile I had his kid tucked inside my body. That made Digby wholly mine for now. I hadn’t contacted Sel for months, and when I finally did, I hadn’t mentioned the baby. I could have kept Digby to myself forever, and he knew it.
Maybe that was his worst-case scenario. Was he scared of being locked out of his own kid’s life? I wanted his words, for him to tell me, but they were trapped inside his mouth. So I took it as my best, most hopeful guess, and I rolled with it.
“Digby can be what we call him while I’m pregnant, like Rachel called Lavender ‘Beanie’ before she was born. We can figure his real name later. Something we both love. If you want.”
His smile appeared, relieved and beautiful, and I knew I’d guessed right even before he said, “Gug-guh-gggg . . .” trying to get out some affirmative. Good, or maybe Great. He snapped his mouth shut, nostrils flaring, frustrated.
I said, “Don’t be nervous. We’re on the same side here, I think. Aren’t we? I think about Digby—Digby-for-now, or whatever we end up naming Digby—and I’m on his side. Are you?” He nodded in sincere, vehement silence. “Okay, then. So we have to find a way to talk. I’d offer you a beer, but there isn’t any in the house. We have bourbon, but between your evolution T-shirt and drinking before noon, Wattie might go find the old shotgun and run you off.” His gaze had turned speculative. I was flat-out babbling, my own nerves causing the words to run out of me, trying to make up for all his stuck ones. “What if we got our phones? We could sit in the same room and text. It’s very modern. Lavender and her friends do it all the time.”
He put his hand briefly over his eyes again. When he took it away, his expression was rueful. He held one finger in a wait-a-sec gesture, and now he was the one blushing. Furiously. So furiously that I could see the red wash rising in the undertones of his skin, especially in the tips of his ears.
He turned away and set his gym bag down by my laptop on the Singer table, opened it, and set his book aside. It was a hardback of Saga, as battered around the edges as my own beloved copy back in Norfolk. He really did have damn good taste in comics. He pulled out a wad of black cloth and unfurled it, his back still to me, and then he pulled it on over his head.
It was the cowl, the same one I remembered from FanCon, with the bat ears poking up. The long cloak fell behind him to midcalf. He pulled at the neck, simultaneously twitching his shoulders, getting it all to lie correctly in one practiced motion, and then he turned back around to face me.
“Hello,” said Batman. And it was him. Sel Martin was gone. This was the hot Batman with the lush mouth, flashing the cocky smile that had caught me at the hotel bar. His eyes glinted through the slits in the mask.