Stephanie was the only child of a widowed mother who had died years ago. She’d loved her childhood and her doting, accessible, smart, and funny mom. The only regret she had about not having a baby sooner was that her mother was gone and her mother would have been an amazing grandmother. But Stephanie had been lonely sometimes as a girl, too, so she hoped the Plumbs would embrace her and Leo’s baby and so far, they had.
If Stephanie was perfectly honest with herself, she knew that the particular family configuration hers was about to take was her preferred configuration because it was what she knew. If she was being scrupulously honest, one of the reasons she’d never had a kid was because having a father in the picture was something she didn’t know what to do with. It wasn’t really something she’d missed. Her mother and her cousins and summers in Vermont with her beloved uncle satisfied her craving for family. In the middle of the night, in the dark, where nobody could see the satisfied smile on her face, her hand on her rising belly, she recognized that although this baby hadn’t been premeditated (it hadn’t, Leo had shown up at her door), the night of the snowstorm she didn’t insist on a condom, something she had, quite literally, never done before—not during the most inebriated hookup, not during the most spontaneous erotic moment.
She hadn’t planned the pregnancy (hadn’t), but she hadn’t prevented it and if she was being brutally honest, deep in the night in the privacy of her room, her room, hand on her belly gently rising and falling with the undulating motion of her rolling, kicking, hiccuping baby, listening to the quiet of her creaky house under the duvet arranged exactly as she liked, she could admit the truth about the night of the snowstorm: that she’d let a tiny aperture of possibility open to something that was of Leo but wasn’t Leo. And that she liked it that way.
“You’re more like a guy than a girl,” Will Peck had said to her once when they were together and she suggested he might want to sleep at his place a little more often. He didn’t appreciate her love of solitude. She supposed that was true in a way. Although she didn’t buy the stereotype of women being the needy ones. It seemed wrong. Sure there were women hell-bent on getting married, but men were just as bad once they decided they were ready to pair off. Wasn’t it the divorced or widowed men who always remarried right away, who had to be taken care of? Wasn’t it the elderly women who reinvented their lives alone? Of all her friends whose marriages had split up—and by now there were quite a few—it was usually the woman who had the courage to step away from something broken. The men held on for dear life.
You’ll be beating the divorced Brooklyn dads off with a stick, Pilar warned her. That was the last thing she needed! A guy with his own kids. She’d dated and dismissed a number of divorced men she suspected were mainly on the prowl to have someone around every other weekend to help with their kids. They didn’t particularly charm her, the men she thought of, collectively, as “the dads.” She had to admit, though, that there was something captivating and even a little sexy about a man fumbling to pin back his daughter’s curls with a barrette or braid a ponytail.
As she turned onto her block, she could see Tommy O’Toole sitting out on their stoop. Oh, good. He’d insist on carrying her bags up the stairs and into the kitchen and she’d be happy to let him. She waved; she wouldn’t mind some help carrying the bags the rest of the way. But he wasn’t facing her; he was looking at a couple walking from the other direction. The woman was on crutches and—shit—it had to be Matilda. And the person walking next to her must be Vinnie. They were early. Oh, well, she’d put them to work chopping vegetables. Maybe Vinnie could carry some bags, too.
CHAPTER FORTY–ONE
Even though it was a little chilly to be outside, Tommy and Frank Sinatra were sitting on the stoop, which they both loved to do. Sinatra took up his usual position, on the third step from the bottom, snout high, bulging eyes alert, tail happily thumping the cement riser behind him.