Happy Birthday: A Novel

Chapter 20

April was at the restaurant every day, meeting contractors, and watching the people Larry had hired clean up debris, and remove everything that been damaged by water or fire. The basement was dry now, and the little they had been able to salvage was being stored there. The reconstruction of the restaurant still seemed like a mammoth project. Larry had hired all the people he needed, and he came by himself several times every day to oversee it, between the other jobs he was doing. April was there from sunup to nightfall, doing whatever she could, and constantly making decisions. It worried Mike that she was working too hard and doing too much, but there was no way to stop her, as usual.

He showed up one day at noon with lunch for her, and was horrified to find her pulling boards away from the wall with a crowbar. She was still wearing the rubber boots she had bought, and a hard hat she had borrowed from one of the work crews. She was a sight with her huge belly hanging out of her jeans, dirt all over her face, and work gloves, as she wrestled with the boards she then dropped at her feet.

“What in hell are you doing?” he shouted at her as she put the crowbar away. She could hardly hear him through the workers jack-hammering the floor in the kitchen. “You’re going to have the baby right here, if you don’t stop it!”

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, but she didn’t look sorry at all. She couldn’t wait for him to leave so she could go on working and do more.

“You know, this may come as a shock to you, but they can do this without you. Women in their ninth month of pregnancy are not usually considered part of the workforce on this kind of project. Maybe you should join the union.” She took the hard hat off and wiped her face as she grinned at him. The truth was she was enjoying helping with the work, and he knew it. Nothing would have slowed her down or kept her away. April was only happy when she was working. She sat down on a stack of bricks as he sat down next to her, and handed her the sandwich he had brought her.

“Thanks, I was starving,” she said, as a truck arrived and the driver walked toward her. They were expecting more electrical fixtures, and she hoped this delivery was them.

“I have baby furniture for April Wyatt,” the driver said, pointing at the truck. “From Valerie Wyatt.” April had forgotten all about it. Her mother had mentioned it before she left.

“I don’t live here anymore,” she said, indicating the shambles around her. “Could you deliver it somewhere else?”

“In the city?” The driver didn’t look pleased.

“Yeah. Uptown.” He nodded. He could see that there was no way she could accept it here.

“Someone should have called us,” he grumbled, but wrote down Mike’s address. “Is there anyone there to accept it?” And of course there wasn’t. Mike was going back to work and she was busy here.

“How about four o’clock?” she asked him, and he grudgingly agreed, and walked back to his truck and drove away. April knew she could be back at Mike’s by then, and she would be exhausted before that anyway, so ready to go home. She had been at the restaurant since eight o’clock that morning.

“How much is there?” Mike asked her as she finished her sandwich. He had a small living room and bedroom, a tiny office, and a kitchen the size of a closet. There was no room for a lot of additional furniture there, in fact none at all. But she didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings. And the baby needed a place to sleep. She knew her mother had bought a crib and “a few other things” before she left for Europe. April had borrowed almost everything she needed from friends, and her mother had bought the rest, even a fancy layette from Saks that was due to be delivered any minute too. She was all set now. And in her own empty, nearly unfurnished quarters above the restaurant, it wouldn’t have been a problem to house the furniture her mother had bought. At Mike’s, it could be.

“I’m not sure, but we’ll move it back over here, as soon as we can move back in.” He had decided to give up his apartment, since he’d never see her otherwise. She was always at the restaurant, and she wanted the baby there with her. There didn’t seem to be much point to his keeping his old place. As soon as the apartment upstairs was cleaned up, and the remodel was down to a dull roar, they were planning to move in. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll make room for it,” she promised him. “How much room can stuff for a baby take?”

But she was in no way prepared for the full set of nursery furniture her mother had ordered. When the driver showed up at Mike’s at four o’clock, he brought up a crib, a chest of drawers, some kind of table with a place to change diapers on top, a toy chest, a rocking chair for her, and half a dozen framed watercolors of Winnie the Pooh to decorate the walls. Valerie had thought of everything, and knew April wouldn’t buy it. She was afraid she’d get it at Goodwill.

“Holy shit,” April whispered, as he brought the last of it in, and the crib had to be assembled. She asked the driver if he could do it for her, and he wouldn’t. He was sweating profusely from dragging it all up the stairs, and it took up every inch of Mike’s apartment. He had had to put the rocking chair and the toy box in the kitchen. Mike was going to kill her. She had no idea what to do with it, or how to make it fit, and she hadn’t wanted to hurt her mother’s feelings by sending it back. In her own apartment, it would be fine. In his, it was a disaster.

She managed to wrestle the parts of the crib into the bedroom after the driver left, and then dragged the rocking chair in. If she squeezed the crib in next to the bed, there was a possibility it might fit. The rest was a problem.

She shoved the white chest of drawers with scalloped edges into a corner of the living room, and the changing table next to it. He didn’t have a coffee table, so she put the toy box in front of the couch, and she stashed the Winnie the Pooh drawings behind it, for lack of anywhere else to put them. She didn’t think Mike was ready to have her put Winnie the Pooh on the walls instead of his collection of photographs by Ansel Adams. She looked around the room after that, and had to admit that the living room looked terrible. The white baby furniture was cute, or would have been in a nursery, but it stuck out like a sore thumb, and they’d have to climb across the rocking chair to get into the bed. It was an obstacle course of babydom, but there was nothing else she could do.

Mike wasn’t prepared for it when he got home that night, and he looked like he was going to have a stroke when he walked in. He had imagined a little basket in a corner somewhere, or maybe a miniature crib. Instead there were boxes all over his bedroom, waiting for him to assemble the crib, and baby furniture everywhere. He looked like he was going to hyperventilate and nearly did.

“How can a baby need so much stuff?” She didn’t tell him that friends were going to drop off the rest of what they needed in the next few weeks, a sterilizer, pajamas, diapers, a stroller Ellen was lending her, a high chair from one of the waitresses, a car seat one of the busboys didn’t need, and things she didn’t even know about yet and had no idea how to use. And Ellen had told her she’d need a plastic tub with a sponge insert to bathe the baby. April hadn’t thought of that. Mike sat down on the couch staring at the toy box, and feeling sick.

“I’m sorry.” April looked at him apologetically. “I know it’s a mess. We’ll be back at my place soon.” In a single afternoon, the baby had moved in. For the first time, he felt the way he had after the sonogram, and he looked it, which worried April more than a little.

“We can’t live like this. For chrissake, April, the baby will weigh five or six pounds. Why does it need all this furniture?” Her mother had bought what she would have for a magazine layout, and it was lovely stuff, but it had taken over Mike’s postage-stamp-sized apartment, and was a warning to him that this seemingly tiny being was about to take over his life, in ways he hadn’t understood till now, even in his panic.

“Why don’t we put the crib together? And then the bedroom won’t look so crowded,” April suggested. As it was now, they couldn’t even go to bed that night until they assembled the crib, because the bumpers and mattress and a white eyelet canopy were lying on their bed. “I’ll help you.”

“Do you realize that I have no mechanical skills?” he said miserably. “I don’t know a screwdriver from a hammer and I can never read instructions. Whenever I get something that has to be assembled, I wind up throwing it out. I can never figure out what to do with the nuts and bolts. You need an engineering degree to put this shit together.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she said soothingly. “We’ll do it together.”

“I need a drink,” he announced, and went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of wine. “What’s that thing?” he asked, pointing at the changing table as he came back into the room. He looked extremely crabby and completely panicked.

“It’s to change the baby on,” she said, embarrassed.

“Why can’t you change the baby on your lap, or on the floor or something? Do you realize the Olympic equestrian team doesn’t use this much equipment?” April herself was living out of one small bag, and had three dresses in his closet. All she wore now were jeans, T-shirts, and rubber boots.

April went into the bedroom then to get started on the crib. She tore the cardboard away, looked at the instructions, and realized that Mike was right. Putting it together was more complicated than it appeared, and Mike came in a few minutes later and set down his glass of wine. He didn’t mention the rocking chair or the mess in the room. He just walked over to her and put his arms around her as she wrestled with the boxes.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t prepared for this. And neither were you. You’ve got enough on your mind with the restaurant. You don’t need me making it worse.” He knew she had met with insurance adjusters the day before, and they had been a pain in the neck. “Give me the instructions,” he said, looking at them, and then went to get his tools.

It took them two hours of hit and miss, and several false starts, but they finally got it together. The mattress was in, the bumpers were attached, with little lambs on them, and the canopy was even on the crib. They both looked as though they’d run a marathon as they collapsed next to each other on the bed.

“Childbirth must be a snap compared to this,” he remarked, and then was sorry the minute he said it. He looked at her mournfully, missing the restaurant for exactly the reason he had written about in his review. “I need comfort food,” he said unhappily. April smiled at him and got off the bed.

“That’s the easy part,” she said, as she kissed him and left. Mike lay in bed watching TV, and fifteen minutes later she appeared in the doorway. “We may not have the restaurant. But you have me. Monsieur est servi,” she said, bowing as low as she could given the beachball at her middle.

He followed her into the living room where she had set the small round table they ate on, and a stack of her delicious pancakes were on a plate with warm maple syrup beside it. She had even made a plate of them for herself — the menu sounded good to her too.

“Ohmigod,” he said, like a man dying of thirst in the desert. “That’s just what I needed.” He sat down without another word and devoured them, and then sat back in his chair with a profoundly satisfied look. “Thank you,” he said, looking peaceful finally. “Maybe everything will be okay.” And then he shook his head as he looked around. “I had no idea babies needed all this stuff.”

“Neither did I,” she said honestly. Neither of them had thought about it, they were too busy dealing with everything else.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Mike said sensibly. “We’re moving out anyway, and thank God your place is bigger than this.” She was relieved by that fact too. Living as tightly as this long-term would have been miserable for them. She hoped to be back in her apartment by July, after the worst of the reconstruction was done and they wouldn’t be breathing plaster dust day and night, which wouldn’t be good for the baby either. Too much furniture in a cramped apartment had never hurt a child, even if it unnerved Mike.

He helped her do the dishes after dinner, and they went back to their bedroom. They brushed their teeth and got into bed, and lay looking at the rocking chair at the foot of the bed, and the elaborate crib beside it. Valerie had bought them beautiful things, just too many of them.

“It’ll be weird when there’s someone sleeping in that crib,” he said softly, and looked at her in the moonlight streaming into the room. They could no longer get to the window to pull down the shades, unless they stood in the crib to do it.

“Yes, it will,” she agreed, nodding, but their baby was a very real presence to her now. It was bouncing all over the place at the moment, probably from the pancakes and the sugar from the syrup. She had noticed that whenever she ate sweets, the baby hopped around for hours.

And then without another word, he reached for her, still shocked that he could want her so much even though she was so extremely pregnant. There was something so tender about her now, and so womanly, he couldn’t keep his hands off her. He wasn’t sure if that was normal or not, and he worried that it was uncomfortable for her, but she was touched by it, and always responded to him. They made love in the moonlight and forgot about the baby for a little while, and clung to each other, swept away by their passion.