“It’s love on a plate. That’s what it is.” She popped up onto her tiptoes, giving her just enough clearance to peer over the top of the canvas at me.
Since I’d been laser-focused on her legs and feet, I was able to stifle my smile before I earned my five-hundredth-and-one warning. Her head tilted a bit, her eyes narrowing in a concentrated kind of way, before disappearing again. I’d gotten used to getting flashes of Rowen, pieces of her, bits at a time, every Friday night for the past couple of months. Well, this was Thursday night, but Friday was our typical night for me to cook her dinner before she held me prisoner in the overstuffed chair until an hour or two after midnight. Tomorrow night, though, we’d be rolling into Willow Springs to kick off our trial summer, so Rowen had pretty much demanded that we move up our date night by twenty-four hours. She’d been working on whatever the painting was—she wouldn’t let me see yet—since we’d found out she was pregnant, and she said she was getting close to finishing.
“Will you make this for me next Friday night too?” she asked, her voice muffled, which meant she had the handle of a paintbrush in her teeth. “Pancakes just taste better at Willow Springs.”
“Yeah, but those aren’t just pancakes. Those are chocolate chips pancakes with peanut butter layered in between.”
I hadn’t been hungry, but Rowen had refused to dig into her stack until I did. She’d started noticing I wasn’t eating, drinking, or sleeping during the first couple of weeks after we’d learned of her pregnancy. At first, she hadn’t said too much, probably assuming it was a phase that would pass. When she observed it only seemed to get worse with time, she started to intervene in the way only Rowen was capable. So I’d shoveled down a plateful of pancakes I hadn’t been hungry for so she would eat her own, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover chocolate chip pancakes smeared in peanut butter didn’t taste just barely palatable but actually pretty damn good.
“Peanut butter, yum.” Rowen sighed like she sighed my name when I slipped a sheet of her hair over her shoulder and kissed the base of her neck. “It’s manna from the gods. Manna in creamy, roasted goodness conveniently packaged in a jar.”
“I asked Mom to stock up on peanut butter, and she said she’d swiped every last jar of Skippy, Jiff, and generic brand peanut butter on the shelves at Murray’s, so we should be good to go until next weekend at least.”
“If your son grows any faster, it won’t make it that long.” The paintbrush wasn’t in her mouth any longer. From the sounds of it, the brush had moved from her mouth to slashing frantic strokes across the canvas again.
Rowen thought we were having a boy. No, she was convinced we were having a boy. At the last appointment, we could have found out the gender of the baby if we wanted to, but we’d made the decision to wait to find out until the baby was born. Rowen liked a little mystery in her life and mentioned that the surprise would make the whole messy part of the Cesarean delivery a bit less so. Instead of just getting to see his or her face and count his or her toes, we’d be able to look forward to finding out if it was a his or a her. She said that would make the actual delivery less daunting and more fun . . . although I couldn’t quite comprehend how anything could make getting one’s stomach cut into “easier.” I didn’t have to comprehend it though because for her, it worked. It only endeared her that much more to me.
Which would only make it that much more difficult to lose her.
That was the main reason why I’d agreed to not find out the gender of the baby. Giving it a boy or girl designation usually led to a name, which led to outfitting a nursery, which led to a whole new world of expectations and anticipations I was all too okay with keeping the door closed on at that point. It felt too much like tempting bad luck to come hunt us down if we found out what the baby was, or gave it a name, or put together a nursery and prepared a diaper bag. We had enough bad luck stacked against us at it was—I didn’t want to garner the attention of any more.
Rowen stuck her head out around the side of the canvas again, inspecting my face in only the way a person looking to know every scar, wrinkle, and imperfection so they could capture the bad with the good would. When she disappeared behind the painting again, I snuck in a yawn. Realizing the deaths of one’s wife and unborn child were only about fifty times more likely had a way of keeping a man up at night.
“I’m used to hearing a subtle sigh or notice a tightening in your jaw or witness that the-end-is-near expression roll across your face whenever I mention my confidence on the gender.” Rowen’s voice trickled around the canvas and filled the small space of our condo. Her voice had always had a way of doing that—filling a room from one corner to the next. It wasn’t like her voice was loud or harsh, like it sometimes got when we were in the heat of plenty of kinds of moments, but her voice, kind of like the rest of her, just had a way of filling the room. Not to mention my world. “Did you fall asleep over there?”
I gave my head a small shake to clear it before answering. “Not asleep. Not yet at least. Just trying to obey your every command and heed your every threat to not move a muscle. Last I checked, sighing, jaw tightening, and the-end-is-near looks required moving a fair share of muscles.”
She popped her head out around the side of the canvas with a smile, but I had to keep mine to myself or else. Her face was streaked with a few swipes of paint, the most prominent being the intensely bright green dotted on the tip of her nose.