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Knocking down interior walls was the fun part. Donovan was sexier than ever while wielding a sledgehammer, muscles bulging with every swing. He was only five minutes into the first wall knock-down before I jumped his bones and rode him there on the floor.
“Pregnancy hormones are a hell of a thing,” I said afterward. “I keep bouncing between horny, worried, and hungry.”
“I don’t mind!” Donovan said while resting the sledgehammer against his shoulder. “When I’m done with this I’ll pick up lunch from the cafe.”
I swear, I could have made love to him again right then.
After all the internal walls were knocked down, we installed the kitchen. Donovan nervously instructed the delivery guys while they carried the industrial appliances through the building. When everything was installed, he rested his arms and head on the flat-top stove and smiled like he had never been happier. He spent the end of every day wiping down construction dust and dirt from the stainless-steel appliances with a micro-fiber cloth.
If he was half as caring for our child as he was for that kitchen, then he would be an amazing father.
We did most of the renovations ourselves, which took extra time but saved us money. We redid the floors and installed a fire-suppression system that was up to code. We painted the walls, and put up Italian landscape paintings. We bought tables and chairs from another restaurant that had gone out of business during the pandemic.
We made love on the floor, on the tables, and on every surface of the kitchen. Donovan made a joke about how we had to get it out of our system now, because we wouldn’t want to get a health code violation once we opened.
For the Fourth of July, we took a road trip back to Boston to get Donovan’s belongings and car. Sure enough, the diner he used to work at had permanently closed. Then we packed up his stuff into both cars.
“Thanks for not tossing all my stuff out on the curb,” Donovan told his landlord. “Give me a few months and I’ll pay back all the rent I missed.”
“You don’t owe me nothin’,” the old man said. He was wearing a Red Sox mask. “Always paid your rent on time, and never complained when somethin’ broke. Take care of yourselves. Send me a postcard.”
The lockdown ended in July. Restaurants were allowed to open at half-capacity, and certain stores and bars could re-open.
But Donovan wasn’t ready to open our restaurant. He spent all of August and September working on the menu. While I finished all the little details in the restaurant, he cooked food around the clock, tweaking recipes and throwing entire dishes out. He was like a composer working on his magnum opus.
I didn’t mind because I got to be his taste tester. And now that I was nearing the end of my second trimester, I had a newfound appetite. Flatbread pizza, ground-lamb lasagna, veal osso bucco… I wolfed everything down and gave him my opinion.
I was also starting to show by this point. Every time I woke up and looked in the mirror it seemed like my belly was just a little more swollen than the night before.
“I still don’t understand why you don’t want to know,” I told him one afternoon in the kitchen. He was coating two chicken breasts in breading while I sat and watched.
“It’s more fun to wait,” he said. “I want to find out when we’re in the delivery room, and the doctor announces that it’s a boy or girl.”
“All right,” I said. “But it just means that when he or she is born, you’re going to have to re-paint the nursery.”
“Green is a good neutral color.” He gestured with the chicken breast. “There’s going to be plenty of blue-or-pink clothes and toys in the baby’s life. He or she won’t need to have the walls of the nursery gendered too.”
“It makes names difficult too,” I pointed out.
“We’ll come up with gender-neutral names.” Donovan placed the chicken breast in a pan of oil, which immediately began sizzling. “Alex. Blake. Taylor. Jordan.”
“I went to school with a guy named Jordan, and he was a huge asshole. Veto. And I don’t like Blake because one of my exes had ahugecrush on Blake Lively.”
He glanced sideways at me. “Hmm. You wouldn’t be saying that if the baby was a boy.”
“Do you want to know the sex or not?”
“I don’t! I just like analyzing your clues.” He scratched his chin with the spatula. “It’s totally a boy, isn’t it?”
“If you keep pestering me I’m going to blurt it out,” I warned.
By the end of September, Donovan had decided on a menu for opening night. My business degree helped me handle the logistics of supply delivery, and by the first week of October we were ready for our grand opening.
The two of us stood outside the restaurant. The name was written in cursive above the entranceway:Solo Tu. We took a selfie in front of it and then went inside.
“All the tables are prepped,” I said, running down my checklist. “We have eight beers on tap, and sixteen different wines. You have all the food ingredients you need for tonight?”
“My sous-chefs are prepping them now,” Donovan replied.
