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“What do you think about… what your dad said?” she asks and she’s hesitant. I scan her face. She’s so open, so trusting. She’ll do whatever I want to do. I know that.
I place my hand on her flat belly, my fingers splayed out.
“I’m not sure his home is where I want to have a baby,” I tell her, and my voice is husky. Her head snaps up, her eyes meeting mine.
“How did you know?”
“You’re already starting to waddle,” I grin. She smacks me.
“Seriously. How did you know?”
“I saw the pregnancy test in the trash, babe.”
I hug her tight, and she sighs into my arm. “Are you happy?”
“Hell, yeah,” I tell her honestly. “I love putting my babies in you.”
She giggles at that. “I love that process, too.”
“You feeling ok?” I ask her. She was radiant with Zuzu. She was barely sick a day… until the very end, when she had almost died from a detached placenta.
“I feel great,” she says brightly. “I wanted to tell you when I first found out, but then… well, I didn’t want you to remember it as a sad occasion.”
“I don’t,” I answer. “It’s the circle of life. One dies, another is born. My grandpa would be happy.”
Mila nods because she knows that’s true. “He was happy. He guessed it that night at dinner. Said it showed on my face. He really loved us, Pax.”
A knot forms in my throat. “I loved him, too.”
I move, and flinch. Mila narrows her eyes at me.
“Have you taken your pain meds?”
I shake my head. “I forgot.”
“You’d better do it. You’ve been limping all day.”
Shit. I’d hoped she hadn’t noticed.
“Yeah, I noticed.” She raises an eyebrow.
“Do you read minds now, too?”
She grins. “Only yours.”
I shake my head and limp away to the kitchen, to grab my pills. I swallow them down, and within minutes, the pain is dulled.
I’m a dumbass for forgetting.
It’s not until later in the evening that I realize that when I’m medicated, I don’t feel my grief as much. It’s less stark, less throbbing. I guess the pain meds dull my thoughts, maybe.
I reach for the pill bottle again before bedtime.
7
Chapter Six
“Go placidly against the noise and haste.” My wife traces the words on my side, a quote from the poem Desiderata, as she has a hundred times before. And as she has just as many times, she utters the following sentence of the poem, even though it’s not inked onto my body. “And remember what peace there is in silence.”
