He spoke. "I'd booked it before any of this. There was no getting out of it—"
"No getting out of it?"
I laughed. "She's been with you since she was eighteen. Eight years. And you couldn't get out of one birthday?"
The living room went quiet, just the baby babbling in the rocker.
In the kitchen my mother had been chopping pork ribs. The knife stopped.
Brian looked me in the eye. "Fee, I've ended it with her."
I said nothing.
"I gave her a house. Call it a settlement."
He took a step closer. "I promise, from now on—"
"You promise."
I gave a small laugh. "Last time you promised you wouldn't move her in. Then you turned around and rented her an apartment. The time before that you promised you'd be done with her before the babies came. Three days after I gave birth, she sent me a photo of the two of you."
Brian froze.
"You want to guess what she sent?"
I set the older one down and turned to face him. "She sent the one of you tying a scarf around her neck. That scarf was mine. The Van Cleef one I bought."
The color drained out of his face completely.
"Brian." I leaned against the side of the crib. "When you were chasing me, you said you were single. When you proposed, you said there was no one in your heart but me. When I was pregnant with twins, throwing up until it was bile, you put your hand on my belly and said the four of us would have a good life together."
The younger one fussed in the rocker. I went over and picked him up.
His little mouth crumpled, ready to cry again, so I turned aside, lifted my shirt, and fed him.
All that was left in the living room was the older one sucking on his fingers.
Brian still stood where he was. There was garbage stuck to his leather shoes. He didn't even glance down at it.
"That scarf." He spoke. "I didn't know she took that picture on the sly."
"Of course you didn't."
I pressed my hand to the back of the younger one's head. "You didn't know she sent me the photo. You didn't know she used your phone at two in the morning to send me voice messages. You didn't know she photographed my prenatal reports and showed them to her mother."
Brian took a step forward.
The younger one was still nursing when he suddenly hiccupped, white froth spilling at the corner of his mouth.
I took a cloth and wiped him, then set the cloth down on the coffee table, next to the divorce papers weighted there.
My mother had drawn them up for me yesterday. An old friend of hers is a divorce lawyer.
Brian saw them.
He slid them out and flipped through a couple of pages.
"You want to divorce me?"
"It's all written out in the agreement."
"The children go to you?"
"They go to me."
He pinched the edge of the paper, pressing his thumb over the crease again.
"Fee, the babies are still so small. You, on your own—"
"On my own?"
I laughed. "The day I hemorrhaged, the nurse held the babies up for me to see. She said, look, Mommy, they're both fine. I was lying on the operating table, the anesthesia worn off, shaking all over from the pain. The doctor asked where the family was. The nurse said she couldn't reach anyone."
The younger one had finished. I sat him up to burp him.
His little head slumped soft against my shoulder, drool soaking into my collar.
"That day, my mother signed."
I said, "Her hand shook so hard she couldn't write. The doctor said without a signature both the mother and the babies were in danger. She gripped her right wrist with her left hand and traced each stroke for half a minute."
Brian stayed silent.
And into that silence my mother came out of the kitchen.
She'd taken off her apron. She still had the kitchen knife in her hand, bits of meat clinging to the blade.
"Brian," my mother said. "Are you leaving or not?"
He glanced at her.
My mother is five foot two, barely up to his shoulder, and she had that knife raised, grease spattered on her cuff.
"Mom!"
"Who's your mother."
She slapped the knife down on the shoe cabinet. "Three years. You've set foot in this house fewer than five times. When Fee was so dehydrated from morning sickness with her first pregnancy and called you to come get her, you said you were with a client. When she started cramping and bleeding in the middle of the night, she called 911 herself, and when the ambulance got downstairs she couldn't climb onto the stretcher—the security guard had to carry her up."
