"Thank you for coming with us."
Duke took the carrier from my hands. He stopped. He was right there, close enough that I could see the sunburn on the bridge of his nose, and his face did something I wasn't ready for.
"Don't," he said.
A beat.
"Don't thank me for being her father, Aud."
He said it without performance. Without asking me to receive it as anything more than what it was. A statement of fact.
I didn't answer him. I got in the truck. He put Nova in the back, checked the straps, and closed the door. We drove to my apartment in silence.
My mother arrived at my apartment on Sunday with two containers of food and the key I'd given her the week Nova was born. She let herself in, set the containers on the counter, and started unpacking without asking where anything went. She already knew where everything went. She'd been coming twice a week since I got home from the hospital.
She warmed the chicken in my oven, set the table for one because she'd already eaten, and put a glass of water beside the plate. She stood at the counter while I sat down.
We did the Sunday things, just in my kitchen instead of hers. TheYarn Roomcustomer who'd been working on a scarf for two years. Marcie's plan for an advanced crochet workshop. Theobservation that I was too thin. I ate the chicken because she'd decided I was eating it, and I laughed at a joke I'd heard before because the joke was hers and the kitchen was warm and this was the oldest thing we had between us.
Then the question, casually dropped between the chicken and the water glass, her back to me while she wiped down the counter.
"Is Duke legally named as Nova's father?"
I took a beat. "Not yet."
She nodded without turning around, telling me that was probably smart, that there was no rush on something like that, and then she moved on, asking about Nova's sleep, the pediatrician appointment, and whether I'd been getting outside at all. I answered everything she asked.
She finished wiping down the counter, picked up her coffee, and turned to face me.
"Sweetheart, do you want to marry Duke?"
"Mom."
"I'm asking because if he's not going to marry you, I'm not sure why you'd give him legal rights to your daughter."
The warmth in her voice was real, and so was the calculation underneath it, careful and practiced and dressed up as love.
"He's her father, Mom. That's not about whether we get married."
"I know he's her father. But fatherhood and legal rights are two different things, Audrey. One is a feeling. The other is a document, and a document gives a man standing in a courtroom." She took a sip of her coffee. "I'm not saying he's a bad person. I'm saying you should think about what you're giving him before you know what this is."
She moved on to ask whether I wanted her to plate the rice. She didn't push it. She never pushed it past the first pass. She just made the pass, let it sit, and went to the stove.
I sat at the table and felt the whole of it settle into me. She wasn't asking about Duke. She was asking about the architecture. Marriage, then legal fatherhood, then permanence, in that order, because that was the order that protected a woman. That was my mother's map. She drew it from the life she'd lived. In her version, you didn't give a man his name on a document until he'd given you his name on a different one. Anything else was risky.
And the marriage question was the one that was still sitting in my chest. Not because I wanted to marry Duke. Because she had asked me if I wanted to, and I'd not known the answer fast enough, and the not-knowing had scared me more than either answer would have.
I ate the chicken. I let her hold Nova on her shoulder and pat her back while we watched the baking show we always watched on Sundays. My mother's hand on my daughter's back, steady and sure. I watched her hold the baby and felt everything she'd said sitting between us on the couch, unresolved, doing its work.
She left at dusk. I walked her to the door. She kissed the side of my head, slightly too hard. I stood in the doorway and watched her walk to her car.
The apartment was still after she left. Nova was asleep in the bouncer. The containers were in the fridge. The kitchen was clean because my mother had cleaned it. The counter was wiped, the dish towel was folded in thirds on the oven handle—her fold, nobody else's.
I went to the window. The evening light was dropping over the street, going orange at the tree line. I stood there with my arms crossed and my forehead close to the glass.
My mother had spent the afternoon asking me to think about what I was building and who I was building it with. She loved me. She was afraid for me. Her fear was careful enough to pass for reason, and somewhere inside both was a woman who hadsigned a marriage certificate and watched it not hold and never stopped believing the certificate was the part that should have saved her.
Do you want to marry Duke?
