“Do you understand that none of my shoes fit?”
“We’ll buy bigger shoes.”
“I don’t want bigger shoes.”
He looked up, smiling.
“Then I’ll carry you.”
I rolled my eyes.
Carol, who had stopped by with dinner, stood in the kitchen.
When I looked toward her, she quickly turned away.
A few days later, I found Daniel sitting alone in the car outside our building.
There were papers on his lap.
“What are you doing out here?”
He was startled, folded the papers, and pushed them into the glove compartment.
“Nothing.”
“What was that?”
“Work stuff.”
“Since when do you do work in the car?”
“Since my wife took over every flat surface in our apartment with baby things.”
I smacked his arm.
He smiled.
I believed him.
By the time Daniel stopped driving, I was so close to giving birth that we had settled into a strange routine.
Carol drove us to appointments.
Daniel insisted it was because I needed somebody available at all times.
“I can still drive,” I argued.
“Not with your stomach touching the steering wheel.”
“It does not touch the steering wheel.”
“Bianca, the babies could steer.”
I laughed.
That was Daniel.
Even when he looked pale, even when he had to sit down halfway through folding laundry, he found a way to make me laugh.
Then, three weeks before the twins were born, he died.
The world did not prepare me for how quickly an ordinary day could become the dividing line between one life and another.
There was the life in which Daniel stood beside two empty cribs, joking about diapers.
Then there was the life in which I came home without him.
His shoes were by the door.
His coffee mug was in the cabinet.
His jacket still hung over a chair.
I couldn’t move it.
Mia and Owen never met their father.
That fact settled inside me before they were even born.
Carol moved into our spare room 11 days after Daniel died.
When I finally held Mia and Owen, I loved them so completely that it frightened me.
Beneath that love was grief.
Daniel should have been there.
He should have counted their fingers.
He should have laughed when Owen screamed through his first bath.
He should have watched Mia fall asleep with one tiny hand curled against my chest.
Carol stayed.
She did the 2:00 A.M. bottle so I could sleep.
