Homecoming

Two months. It had been two months since I’d been in his presence, and I was more than anxious. I’d flushed the Tylenol 3′s the night before, knowing I had a tendency for abusing them, especially in his company, and I was sure he hadn’t been sober. He’d been smoking synthetic to pass a drug test if I wanted him to, but I wouldn’t make him.

“He looks just like his father,” Rita smiled the words. “Have you looked at baby pictures? Does he look like Autumn? Does he look like you when you were a baby?”

“I haven’t,” I said. I tried to keep all my sentences short with his mother. Who knew what she would turn around on me?

Mark and Jim were hauling in Jim’s garbage bags of stuff he’d had, and a few of our boxes we’d left at their house. Things I had worked to get on my own in the past two months: a few pots and pans, dishes, towels. Little household things you forget about until you don’t have them. I’d been substitute teaching and making just two hundred bucks a month, but I made it work and had an apartment for me and Autumn and baby Jordan in public housing. It wasn’t posh but it was mine. And I felt free.

For weeks, I had prayed that he would come back to me a changed man. I prayed that he would be honest. I’d hoped he’d get a job and a home for us, and we would come to live with him. Of course, that wasn’t what he wanted.

“I have some stipulations, though, when you come,” I’d said on the phone. A call I had made. He never called.

“I understand, and, like I said--”

“No, I’m serious. You can stay here for two weeks to see Jordan but then you have to go to the shelter and get your own place and whenever I see that you are being an adult we will come be with you.”

“Yea..." Pause. Feign listening. Change the subject. "I talked to Bobby today. Him and Malory are doing well.”

I fought the urge to tell him again my requirements.

A few days before I went to the hospital I told Jim to wait to come down. “Why don’t you work until the end of the week and make more money. We’ll need it. And then you come down and be with us.”

“I want to be there,” he’d said, but there was no fight. He accepted the terms, and four days after Jordan’s birth, here I sat in my little living room, wishing with all my being he was not coming back.

What had I been pining for all that time? When I wasn’t focused on how lonely I thought I was, I felt so free. Why had I been so intent on having him at home? I’d realized how little I needed him in that delivery room, but it seemed too late to tell him to stay with his mom and dad. They wouldn’t have him anyway. He’s good at wearing people out, burning bridges, using people up.

The tension thickened as they brought up the last of the boxes and I was forced into conversation about how my life had been going and what I had been up to these two months. I snipped through it and spent as much time talking about Autumn and the pregnancy as possible, but I wasn’t my usual conversational self. Jim’s elephant filled up the room for me. Had he been sober? Had he really spent all the money my grandparents and sent to bail him out of his legal mess on “food and taking care of himself?” Had he really not been able to find a job? Day labor was all he could get and that money, too, went to food? Not that he had paid anything to our debt or any of his fines.

When Mark and Rita finally left, Jim hugged me, and the warmth I had hoped for was sand paper.

I guess that’s what “they” mean then, when they say, “be careful what you wish for.” I had cried in hospital waiting rooms watching children entertained by their fathers while their expectant mothers were in the office. I had wept in my bed clutching his pillow, but in the moment when you would expect one to wish they were clinging to their husband, as I squatted, pushing his son’s life into fruition, I was grateful he wasn’t there.

I chose to try to think of his return was the beginning of our new life together. Really, it was the beginning of the end, but that was two years in the making.