Oh.
I will not claim the crib went together with ease after that. I will say it went together. She read, I built, and we did not discuss the two hours that came before her, which is, I am learning, a load-bearing wall in the architecture of a marriage.
I had cleared the nursery on the first day out of pure habit, checked the lines of sight, noted with approval that the one window faced the inner wall and not the road. Then I had stayed up until two in the morning reading about car seats, until I could have argued crash ratings with the engineer who designed them. Ruby found the search history. She has never once let it lie quiet since.
"The most dangerous man on the eastern seaboard," she told Maks at dinner, delighted, "bookmarks strollers now."
I did not deny it. I had bookmarked three, and one of them folded shut with a single hand, which struck me as tactically superior.
"You are enjoying this," Maks said from across the table, watching me with the look of a man who has caught a glacier learning to dance. "The one who interrogated Lebedev's lieutenants now reads stroller reviews like target dossiers. Should I be concerned?"
"You should be grateful. The same instinct that keeps our child safe is the one that keeps you employed."
"That instinct used to keep me awake at night."
"And now?"
"Now it builds cribs." He raised his glass to me. "Poorly. But it builds them."
By then the entire house had reorganized itself around the arrival of a person who currently weighed less than my sidearm. Petya had appointed himself doula. No one had requested this.Petya is a man who once held a stretch of Brighton Beach through a sheer refusal to be reasoned with, and he had redirected the whole of that gift toward the unborn.
"You are folding them wrong," he informed me, in the room we had stopped calling the second armory. He had a shelf of socks the size of espresso cups and was sorting them by a logic known to him alone. "There is a method."
"They are socks, Petya."
"They are her socks." He never said the baby. He said her, with total certainty, having settled the question of sex by a process he described only as listening. "And you will not fold them like a man garroting a sentry. You will fold them with love."
"And what does a doula do, exactly, that a midwife does not?"
"A doula believes. Can a midwife believe? No. She has a license. Belief does not come from a school." He held up a sock the length of my thumb. "You think this is small? Her foot will be smaller than this. And one day it will kick you, here, while you carry her, and you will weep like an infant yourself. I have watched it break harder men than you."
"You have watched no such thing. I am the hardest man you know."
"I saw your face the night she said yes," Petya said, and went back to his sorting, and let the matter rest, because he had already won it.
I have cleared safehouses faster than Petya cleared one shelf of tiny socks, and with far fewer tears. His, not mine. Allegedly.
Downstairs the war was louder, and it smelled considerably better.
Galina has run the compound kitchen since before I was a man anyone bothered to feed. Marisol, Ruby's grandmother, had flown in to inspect the man who had gotten her granddaughter pregnant, had found the man acceptable and the kitchen anatrocity, and had simply never left. In the weeks since they had reached the particular closeness of two generals who respect each other far too much to call a ceasefire.
"The child will have a Russian stomach," Galina said, not lifting her eyes from the pelmeni.
"The child will have taste," Marisol said, not lifting hers from the masa.
"Borscht builds blood."
"Pozole builds a soul."
"You put chili in everything. The baby will come out already annoyed."
"Your food is the gray of a long winter. No wonder this whole family broods."
I stood in the doorway and did the thing I have begun doing without ever choosing to, which is simply standing in the noise and the heat of it, two old women insulting each other across a stove on behalf of a palate that did not yet exist, and feeling a thing in my chest for which the life I came up in never gave me a word.
"They've been going since six," Ruby said, appearing at my shoulder with a stolen empanada and the contentment of a woman fed lavishly by both sides of a conflict. "Galina cried this morning. The happy kind. Then she denied it and threatened Petya with a spoon."
"Your grandmother called my home an atrocity."
