He Was There for Her Baby, Not Mine novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terms on the Porch

Dalton comes to her father's porch and refuses to say why he pays Colette. Noelle sets three terms, and then his mother pulls up with Colette on her arm.

My father did not ask a single question on the drive.

He carried my hospital bag up his porch steps with both hands.

Then he put the kettle on, because that was what he did with trouble.

I sat at the kitchen table I had done homework at, and I told him about the cake, the phone and the bank app.

He listened with his big lineman's hands flat on the oilcloth.

"Seven thousand two hundred," he said when I finished.

"And the storage unit," I said.

"Your brother's things." He looked at the window. "Dalton said he'd see to those."

"He's been seeing to them for fourteen months, Dad. I've never been inside."

My father's jaw moved, and he said nothing.

The truck came up the hill forty minutes later.

I knew the engine. I had ridden in that truck on every ordinary Tuesday of my marriage.

Dalton knocked once and stayed on the porch.

He was holding gas-station roses and my ring.

"Noe," he said through the screen. "Please."

My father opened the door a hand's width.

"Porch," my father said to him. "Floorboards are good. They held you up at the wedding."

"Sir, I'd like to talk to my wife."

"She's thirty-two weeks pregnant and she walked nine blocks. You can talk from there."

I got up and went to the door myself.

Dalton looked at my face and the whole speech he had planned went out of his eyes.

"I'm sorry about the shower," he said. "I was wrong to go. I know that."

"Is Colette your lover?"

"No." He said it before I had finished the word. "God, no. Never. Not once."

"Then why are you paying her rent?"

He swallowed.

"I can't tell you that yet."

I had expected a lie. A lie I could have fought.

I had not expected him to stand on my father's porch and refuse me to my face.

"Yet," I said.

"Soon. I swear I'll tell you. I need a little more time and I can't explain why."

"You swore on the baby this afternoon."

He flinched, and I was glad.

I opened the screen and took the roses and put them on the railing.

"Here are my terms," I said.

"Noe."

"One. When I ask you a question about her, you answer it truthfully or you tell me you won't answer. No stories, no softening, no 'it's complicated.'"

"Okay."

"Two. I don't meet her, and she doesn't come near me, until I decide I'm ready."

"Okay."

"Three. You stay at your mother's. You don't come into this house past the porch unless my father says so."

My father said from behind me, "I will not be saying so."

Dalton nearly smiled, and then he did not.

"I'll be at every appointment," he said. "I'll come to the scan on Monday. I'll sit in the parking lot till then if I have to."

"Come to the scan. Sit in the parking lot after."

"Noe, the crib is still in my truck bed. Your name's on the box. I'll bring it up and build it."

"Whose crib is in your truck?"

He stopped.

"Yours," he said. "It's yours. I mean, it's ours."

"You said it twice, which means you aren't sure."

My father made a sound that was nearly a laugh and turned it into a cough.

"The crib is ours," Dalton said carefully. "I'm telling you the truth. I bought it for our daughter."

"What's in the storage unit?" I asked.

His face went white.

"That's two questions I can't answer yet," he said quietly.

"Then we're done for tonight."

"Noe, don't say it like that. I'm not leaving you."

"You left me this afternoon," I said. "You just came back for the ring."

I closed the screen door.

I stood behind it and watched him look at the gas-station roses on the railing, then turn and sit down on the top step.

He did not go to his truck.

My father put a mug of tea in my hands and a blanket over my shoulders.

"Let him sit," he said. "It's good for him. I'll bring him a coffee at midnight and tell him he's a fool."

"Dad."

"That's love, kid. It's just very honest."

I laughed, and then the laugh turned into something else, and my father held on to me until it was done.

At nine, headlights swept the front window.

It was not Dalton's truck.

His mother's gray sedan pulled up to the curb, and the dome light came on.

Dalton's mother got out of the driver's side with a casserole dish in both hands.

Then the passenger door opened.

A young woman stepped out with a baby carrier on her arm, her blonde hair in a loose knot and her big eyes already wet.

Dalton stood up so fast he knocked the roses off the railing.

"Mom," he said. "What did you do?"

"I'm making peace," his mother said. "Noelle, honey, this is Colette."

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