Back With Baby, Ex Regrets Deeply novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: The Night Before

Teddy waited.

When nothing came, he patted my father's knee twice, the way he patted the bus when it had done something good.

Then he took the bus back.

He'd only lent it.

My father laughed, a wet, broken laugh, and wiped his face with the heel of his hand.

I came in from the doorway and sat down on the floor beside them.

I didn't touch my father.

But I sat there, on the same floorboards, with my son between us, for a whole hour while the two of them made tug noises at each other.

When he left, my father stopped on the top step.

"The back row," he said. "That's all. I won't make a sound."

"The back row," I said.

Gran arrived three days later with four suitcases, a hatbox and a piano.

I heard the van before I saw it.

I came out on the stoop with yellow paint still under my nails, and there was Gran climbing out of a black car in a lilac coat, and behind her a moving van backing up to the curb with its hazards blinking.

"Gran. What did you bring?"

"Your mother's piano, hen. Don't look at me like that." She pointed up the steps with her cane. "A piano should be at a wedding. It can go home after. I'm eighty-four, I've earned a little drama."

"You flew a piano across the Atlantic."

"Alistair flew a piano across the Atlantic. I merely sat beside it and told it to behave."

The same red-faced mover from my birthday morning came around the back of the van.

He saw me.

He saw the steps.

"Oh, come on," he said.

They carried it up.

They put it back on its four pale dents against the yellow wall.

Gran walked into the parlor and looked around at the color.

"Well," she said. "That's better. Gray is for battleships."

That night we had dinner in my mother's dining room with every window open.

Gran at one end. Me at the other.

Alistair beside me with Teddy on his knee.

The old woman from next door, who'd come over to complain about the van and been made to stay.

And the great-aunt from the luncheon, in her lavender suit, who I'd invited on an impulse and who'd turned up with two bottles of wine and a lobster.

She and Gran took one look at each other across the table and recognized something.

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