When I mentioned this to Michael on the phone the following week, mostly as a joke, there was a long pause. Then he said, “I have a toolbox. And I have absolutely no idea how to build a crib. But I’ve always wanted to try.”
That Sunday, Michael and Helen showed up at my door with a toolbox, a casserole, and a plate of lemon bars. Helen, it turned out, took baking very seriously. Her lemon bars had won second place at the county fair three years running, and she was still mad about the woman who kept winning first.
“She uses a store-bought crust,” Helen whispered to me darkly. “Everyone knows.”
Michael spread the crib parts across my living room floor and studied the instruction sheet the way some people study ancient maps. Forty-five minutes later, he had built something that was definitely a piece of furniture. It was just hard to say which one.
“Is it supposed to lean like that?” I asked.
“It has character,” Michael said, which made me laugh so hard I had to sit down, because that’s exactly what my mother used to say about her lumpy blanket.
When I told them why I was laughing, Helen asked to see the blanket. She turned it over in her hands, looked at the hole in the corner and the lump in the middle, and smiled.
“I knit,” she said. “Not well, but more than she did, from the sound of it. Would you let me finish it? I won’t fix the lump. The lump should stay.”
I said yes before she’d even finished the sentence.
Helen held Grace while Michael took the crib apart and rebuilt it, properly this time, with a lot of muttering and one very loud word he apologized for to the baby. When it was finally standing straight, all three of us cheered like we’d built a house.
11. The Hard Conversation
Daniel and I did have our talk. It was about three weeks later, at a coffee shop, with Grace asleep in her car seat between us like a tiny referee.
I’d thought a lot about what I wanted to say. In the end, I didn’t need most of it. He talked about being confused and unhappy and how things “just happened.” He said he wasn’t sure he was ready to be a full-time dad. He said maybe we could “figure out something flexible.”
I listened. Then I told him the truth. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want revenge. I wanted Grace to grow up with people who showed up. If he wanted to be one of those people, the door was open, and we’d work out a fair plan. But I wasn’t going to keep waiting for him to decide whether we were worth his time.
“So, you want a divorce,” he said.
“I want peace,” I said. “I think that’s what that looks like.”
It took months, and lawyers, and a few tense phone calls. In the end, we agreed on a schedule. He sees Grace every other weekend, mostly. He isn’t a bad person, I’ve decided. He’s just a person who chose the easy road when the hard one mattered. I hope someday he’ll choose differently. For her sake, not mine.
12. Sunday Dinners
Somewhere along the way, without anybody planning it, Sunday dinner became a thing.
It started with Helen dropping off soup “because she made too much.” Then Michael started coming along “to carry the soup.” Then they stayed to eat it. Then it was every Sunday, and if I tried to cook, Helen would gently take the spoon out of my hand and tell me to sit down and feed my baby.
Michael read Grace the sports section in a dramatic voice because he said she deserved to know what was going on in the world. Helen taught me how to swaddle properly, which I had been doing wrong for weeks, and how to make a pie crust from scratch, “so you never become one of those store-bought people.”
Some Sundays were quiet. Some were loud. One Sunday, Michael got the hiccups for forty minutes and Grace laughed for the very first time at the sound. He claims he did it on purpose. Helen says he absolutely did not.
One evening, after Grace fell asleep on Helen’s shoulder, Helen sat in my mother’s old rocking chair and said quietly, “I used to think there was a Helen who got to be a mom, and a Helen who didn’t. And I was the one who didn’t.”
She looked down at the baby in her arms.
“Now I’m not so sure it’s that simple,” she said.
Neither was I.
13. The Green Door Opens Again
The flower shop had been closed since April. I couldn’t bring myself to sell it, and I couldn’t bring myself to go inside. The lease was paid through the end of the year, and every time I walked past that green door, my chest got tight.
Helen was the one who finally asked about it.
“What are you going to do with your mother’s shop?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know anything about running a business. I only know what flowers mean.”
“That’s the hard part,” Helen said. “The business part, you learn. I did the books for a dentist’s office for twenty years. I could do numbers in my sleep. I’d love to help, if you’d want me.”
Michael, from the couch, added, “And I know every driver in the city. Free advertising. Every cab ride ends with, ‘By the way, have you seen the flower shop on Elm and Fourth?'”
So that’s what we did. It took two months of cleaning, painting, and figuring out suppliers. The green door still sticks in the summer. The bell still rings half a second late. On the first morning, Helen and I stood behind the counter with Grace in a carrier, arranging white roses and sunflowers, and waited to see if anyone would come.
Mrs. Patel came in first. It was a Monday. She bought yellow tulips and cried a little, and then she held Grace and told her all about her grandmother.
Leon came in that Friday and bought a carnation. “For my lady friend,” he said, winking. Helen leaned over and whispered, “It’s a cat, isn’t it?” and Leon said, “Her name is Duchess, and she deserves the best.”
Mom would have loved it.
14. One Year and One Cake
Grace turned one on a sunny Saturday in the backyard of Michael and Helen’s little house. They insisted on hosting. Michael strung paper garlands from the trees. Helen baked the cake herself, from scratch, obviously, and it was so beautiful that I almost didn’t want Grace to touch it.
Grace did not share my feelings. She took one look at that cake and plunged both hands in up to the wrists. Then she squealed, smeared frosting across her own face, and offered a fistful to Michael, who ate it without hesitating.
“Delicious,” he declared. “Ten out of ten. Better than the county fair.”
Helen pretended to be offended and then laughed so hard she had to hold onto the table.
