Then a man's voice. Low. Patient. The voice of a man who has decided, in this moment, that the rest of his Saturday is going to be a conversation about elephants.
"What do elephants eat?”
"Grass. And flowers. And sometimes bananas."
"Then we'll get him a banana."
I lie under the sheets, and I listen. The fear that woke me has emptied from my chest, and something else has filled the space. I do not have a word for that something else yet, but I know what it is.
It is the sound of my daughter explaining elephant biology to the father she doesn’t yet know is her father, and the father, who knows perfectly well that she’s his, is doing what fathers do: taking the assignment seriously.
I get out of bed.
My T-shirt is somewhere on the bedroom floor. I do not remember where. I find Lex's T-shirt instead, dark blue, soft from many washings, smelling like the cedar of the closet and the bergamot of him. I pull it on. It hits me mid-thigh. I don’t bother with anything else.
I walk down the hallway and stop in the kitchen doorway.
Lex is at the stove.
He’s in sweatpants and nothing else. The scars I mapped at midnight are visible in the gray morning light, the long one down his ribs, the bullet on his shoulder, the small one I traced with my mouth at four in the morning. He’s holding a spatula.
He is, I realize after a long second of looking at him, doing what he does at the dining-room table when he’s reviewing a document. He’s bringing the same precise attention to the small thing in front of him that he brings to the large things in front of him. He’s decided, this morning, that the small thing in front of him is pancakes.
Nora is on a kitchen chair pulled up to the counter.
She’s in her dinosaur pajamas. Her hair is sticking up on one side from sleep. She has Brontos under one arm, and she’s holding the other hand out, palm up, in the gesture of a small magistrate explaining a ruling. There is a banana on a plate next to her. There are pancakes on a second plate. The pancakes are small. They are slightly burnt at the edges, like a man who has not made pancakes recently and is concentrating very hard.
Nora sees me.
She says, in her morning voice. Conversational. The voice of a child who has been there for hours and is filling in on the late arrival on what she’s missed.
"Mama. The friend is making pancakes."
"I see that."
Lex turns.
He sees me in his t-shirt in his kitchen at the lake house with our daughter on a chair beside him and his half-burnt pancakes between them, and he gives me the look of a man who memorized me last night and is checking, this morning, that I am still real.
The check takes him three full seconds. He doesn’t blink. The spatula is suspended over the pan. The pancake is browning.
"Lex. The pancake."
“Got it.”
He turns back to the stove. Flips the pancake. The flip is professional. Of course, the flip is professional. He’s a man who doesn’t do anything at less than full attention. The pancake lands centered in the pan, and he stands there with the spatula and covers his face.
Then, without turning, in the voice he uses for me alone, he says: "There's coffee."
"Thank you."
I cross the kitchen.
The floor is cold under my bare feet. The coffee maker is on the counter to his left. I have to walk past him to get to it, and as I pass him, my hip brushes the side of his thigh, and his free hand comes out. The one not holding the spatula. His fingers graze the back of my wrist. It is not a grab. It is not a hold. It is the briefest possible contact, and then it is gone, and he’s back to the pancake, and I am at the coffee maker. We do not look at each other. But we both register it. Neither of us says anything because Nora is six feet away, narrating something to Brontos.
I pour the coffee.
Lex has put a clean mug next to the pot. Cream is in a small pitcher, sugar is in a bowl with a small spoon. He’s set up the coffee station for me the way you set up a thing for a person you have been quietly preparing to share a kitchen with.
