No Regrets This Time

The lasagna is late because I remade the béchamel twice. Obama doesn't know that. He thinks I just like cooking on Sundays, and I let him think it, because the alternative is explaining that a lumpy sauce felt, at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, like something I could not survive. I'd stood at the stove for twenty minutes with the whisk going in slow circles, watching for the moment it thickened, and when it broke the first time — separated into something greasy and wrong, little flecks of butter floating free of the flour — I didn't swear or slam anything. I just poured it down the drain and started again, calmly, like a woman who has learned that calm is a performance you can give yourself as an audience of one. "Smells like heaven in here," Nathan says, coming in through the side door with a bottle of red he holds by the neck like a chicken he's about to pluck. He always uses the side door. Eight years married to my sister, and he still won't come through the front like a guest. "It's just lasagna," I say. "It's never just lasagna with you." He sets the bottle on the counter, and for a second his hand is close enough to mine that I can feel the heat coming off it, the specific warmth of a body that has stood too long in the Florida sun. I step back to check the oven, which does not need to be checked. Some instinct in me has learned, over the years, to always have somewhere else to look. He's wearing a faded gray T-shirt with a hardware store logo half worn off, jeans with a streak of what I'm guessing is joint compound on one knee — he'd mentioned, weeks ago, that he was finally getting around to patching the drywall in Theo's room — and there's a particular ease to the way he stands in my kitchen, like a man who has spent so many years in this specific rectangle of tile that his body has stopped needing to think about where the cabinets are. Sofia is at the table drawing horses with too many legs, the way six-year-olds do, legs like a spider had opinions about anatomy. She doesn't look up. "Where's Auntie Melody?" "Getting the baby," Nathan says. "Which means we have maybe twenty minutes before this house sounds like a fire drill." Obama laughs from the living room, too loud, at something on the television that isn't that funny. I know the sound of his real laugh — it's lower, it catches at the end like he's surprised himself — and this isn't it. This is the laugh he does when Melody isn't in the room yet, and he's filling the space where she'll be. It's a habit I noticed maybe two years into our marriage and never mentioned the way he seems to warm up before she arrives, like an actor doing vocal exercises in the wings. I've stopped mentioning that I notice things like this. Noticing doesn't change anything. It just means I carry more. Melody comes in without knocking, obviously, because it's her sister's house, and she's never once in her life felt like a guest anywhere. Baby Theo on her hip, diaper bag sliding off her shoulder, lipstick a shade too red for a Sunday dinner, and she kisses my cheek and says, "You look tired, are you sleeping," in the same breath she uses to say, "Obama, get up and take this bag before I drop your godson." Obama gets up. Of course, he gets up. He crosses the room the way he used to cross rooms toward me, before we were married, before comfortable became the whole shape of us, and he takes the bag off her shoulder with both hands, careful, like it's breakable. I watch this. I have watched this for five years. I have gotten very good at watching it and saying nothing, the way you get good at not touching a bruise once you've learned exactly where it is. There's a specific angle to the way he tilts his head toward her, listening, like whatever she's saying matters more than anything being said anywhere else in the house. "Cass, you need help with anything?" Melody asks, already moving toward the kitchen, already reaching for a spoon to taste the sauce straight from the pot, which she has done since we were children and our mother used to swat her hand for it. "It's done," I say. "Sit down. All of you, sit down." At the table, Nathan ends up across from me. He always ends up across from me — I don't know if he arranges it or if I do, or if it's just gravity, two objects that used to sit closer finding the nearest legal distance. He asks Sofia about her horses, if they have names, and she tells him with total seriousness that the one with seven legs is called Broccoli, and he nods like this is the most reasonable thing he's heard all week. "You'd have made a good architect," he tells her. "Strong opinions about structure." "I'm gonna be a vet." "Even better. Structure that bites back." I laugh before. I mean to. It comes out short, surprised, and Obama looks over at me from the head of the table with an expression I can't read — not jealousy, not quite, something more like a man checking a door he thought was locked. Melody doesn't notice. Melody is feeding Theo mashed carrot and narrating his facial reactions like a sports commentator — "and he does not approve, ladies and gentlemen, that is a hard pass from young Theo" — and the table is loud with all of it, glasses and forks and a six-year-old explaining equine anatomy, and underneath the noise there's a current I've felt for years now, one I've never had a name for because naming it would require doing something about it. Sofia announces, apropos of nothing, that Broccoli the horse is going to marry another horse named Ham, and demands everyone at the table weigh in on whether this is a good match. Obama takes the question with total seriousness, asking pointed follow-up questions about Ham's temperament and financial prospects, until Sofia is laughing so hard she nearly falls off her chair, and I watch him do this — fully present, fully hers, a father unmistakably delighted by his daughter — and some part of me wants to hold onto that image so tightly it leaves marks, because even now, even knowing everything I know, I refuse to let anyone tell me that moment wasn't real. Halfway through dinner, Obama's phone buzzes face-down on the counter, and he glances at it — just a glance, quick, involuntary — before catching himself and turning back to the table. It's such a small thing. I clock it anyway. I clock most small things now; I've become an archivist of them, cataloging without knowing yet what the collection is going to add up to. "Everything okay?" I ask, mild, spooning more lasagna onto Sofia's plate. "Work," he says. "Always work." Melody laughs at something Nathan says about the bounce house they're renting for Theo's birthday, and I watch Obama watch her laugh, and I go back to my own plate, and none of it means anything yet. That's the thing I keep coming back to, all these years later. None of it meant anything, individually. It was only ever the sum. After dinner, Nathan and I end up alone in the kitchen for four minutes while Obama and Melody wrangle the kids toward the car. Four minutes, because I've timed it before, without meaning to, the way you learn the length of a red light on a route you drive every day. He dries. I wash. We don't talk about anything that matters. "Sofia's gotten so tall," he says. "She hates when people say that." "Noted." He sets a plate in the rack, careful, the way he does everything. "You okay, Cass?" "Why wouldn't I be." He doesn't answer that. He just looks at me a second too long, the way he's looked at me since we were twenty-two years old in a lecture hall that smelled like industrial carpet cleaner, and then Melody is calling his name from the driveway, and the moment closes like a door someone forgot they'd left open. "Coming," he calls back, but he doesn't move right away. He dries his hands slowly on the towel, folds it, and sets it on the counter with more care than a dish towel requires. "Thanks for dinner," he says, which is what he always says, and it's never quite what he means. I stand at the sink after they've all gone, water running over my hands longer than it needs to, and I think, not for the first time, that I built this life very carefully, board by board, and it is still somehow standing on ground I never actually checked. Obama comes up behind me and kisses the top of my head. "Good dinner," he says. "Thank you." "You always do too much." I turn off the water. "Someone has to." He doesn't ask what I mean by that. He never does. It's one of the things I chose him for, back when I thought that not asking was the same thing as safety. His hands rest on my shoulders for a moment, warm, familiar, and I lean back into him because that's what a wife does at the end of a long Sunday, and some part of me — the part I've spent nine years learning to ignore — notices that his eyes are on the window, on the taillights just now pulling out of the driveway, and not on me at all. I don't say anything. I never say anything. That's the whole architecture of who I decided to be, brick by careful brick, starting long before Obama Asta ever existed in my life. Later that night, after he's asleep, I go back downstairs for water I don't actually need and find myself standing in the dark living room, looking at the framed photographs on the mantel the way you'd look at evidence in a case you haven't decided to open yet. Our wedding photo. Sofia's christening. A family shot from two summers back, all six of us squeezed onto a bench at Theo's first birthday, everyone laughing at something I can no longer remember, Obama's arm slung easy around my shoulders and his eyes, if you look closely enough, already somewhere else. I've looked closely enough. I looked that night, standing there in a T-shirt and bare feet on cold tile, and I made myself put the photo back exactly where it belonged, facing the same direction, dust undisturbed, because that is what I do with things I've decided not to open. I think, some nights, about the woman I might have been if I'd let myself be Melody's kind of loud even once. If I'd stood in that kitchen and said the thing out loud instead of turning off the water. I don't know her. I've never met her. I only know the woman who went back to bed that night and lay very still next to a sleeping man, listening to the air conditioner cycle on and off, doing the math on eleven minutes of ice and coming up, every time, with an answer she refused to write down. In the morning, everything was ordinary again, the way it always was. Obama made coffee and burned the toast the way he always burned the toast, and Sofia came down in mismatched socks she insisted were a fashion choice, and I packed her lunch — turkey sandwich, apple slices she wouldn't eat, a note I wrote most mornings that said something small like have a good day, love you or you've got this — and watched my husband kiss the top of our daughter's head on his way out the door, unhurried, affectionate, a man who by every visible measure loved his family completely. That's what makes it hard to tell this part of the story, honestly. There isn't a villain who forgot to love us. There's just a man who loved us and also, somehow, wanted something else badly enough to risk all of it, and a version of me who noticed and said nothing because saying something felt like it would cost more than staying quiet ever did. I've had a long time to sit with the fact that both of those things can be true, and I still don't fully know what to do with it, except to keep telling the story honestly instead of choosing the version that makes me look wiser than I was. Melody called me that same week, unrelated to anything, just to complain about a client who wanted an entire quinceañera themed around a Pinterest board that didn't actually exist yet, and we laughed for twenty minutes about seating charts and difficult mothers, and there was nothing in her voice that sounded like a woman keeping a secret, nothing at all, and I've thought about that call more than almost any other, trying to find the crack in it I must have missed, and I never do. She was just my sister on the phone, funny and warm and entirely herself, and somewhere underneath that ordinary Tuesday call, whatever was happening with Obama was already happening too, running alongside the sister I knew like a second river nobody could see from the surface.