Chapter 2 - His Silence Was Louder
The frosting was starting to dry on my skin. It tightened across my forehead and cheeks every time I blinked, pink and white caked thick in my hair and down the front of my light pink dress. I could feel it on my chest, cold and sweet. I didn't wipe it off.
My mother-in-law stood less than two feet from me, her pink lace dress spotless, her pearl necklace catching the daylight. She had said what she said. My son deserved a boy. She wasn't taking it back. She was waiting for me to do what she told me to do and leave.
I looked past her to my husband.
He was still there between us, a little out of focus the way he'd been the whole time. Navy blazer, white shirt open at the collar, his hands at his sides. His mouth was open like he was about to say something and then closed again. He looked at her, then at me, then at the frosting on my face.
"Are you going to say anything?" I said to him.
My voice didn't shake. That surprised me.
He swallowed. I watched his throat move. He took a half step toward his mother, not toward me.
"Mom, come on," he said quietly. "Let's just... let's calm down. It's a party."
It wasn't an answer to me. It was for her. An appeasement, short and soft, like he was trying to smooth the air without actually touching what she'd done.
His mother didn't even look at him when he said it. She kept her eyes on me.
"The shower's over," she said. Her voice was flat and certain, like she was announcing a schedule. "You made your point. You can leave now."
Behind us I could hear the rest of the garden. No one was talking. The balloons overhead shifted a little in the wind, pink and peach bumping against each other. The folding table with the cake was right next to me, the sheet cake half destroyed, the pink frosting smeared where my face had been pushed or where it had been smeared — I still wasn't sure which. A paper plate with a plastic fork sat untouched.
I realized everyone was waiting to see if I would obey her.
I didn't move toward the gate. I moved sideways, one step to my left, and put my hand down on the edge of the cake table. My palm landed right next to the ruined cake. The table wobbled slightly on the grass.
"I'm not leaving," I said.
My husband looked at my hand on the table like he didn't understand what I was doing.
"Honey," he said to me, finally, but his voice was still that same low, placating tone. "Maybe we should get you cleaned up. Let's go inside for a minute. Just us."
Inside. Away from everyone. Away from where she had done it.
"No," I said. "I'm not going inside to wipe this off so everyone can pretend it didn't happen."
The frosting was still thick on my right hand where I'd pressed it to my chest earlier. I left it there. I wanted it visible.
His mother let out a short breath through her nose, almost a laugh.
"This is my house," she said. "This is my son's shower that I paid for, that I planned. You don't get to stand here covered in cake and tell me what will happen in my yard."
She said my house. She said my son's. Not ours. Not his wife's.
My husband flinched at the words but didn't correct her.
"Mom," he tried again, a little weaker this time. "Don't—"
"Don't what?" she cut him off. "Tell the truth? She knows what I mean. If she belongs here, she can act like it."
The guests were still frozen. I saw one of my cousins near the lemonade pitcher staring down at her shoes. No one stepped forward.
I tightened my grip on the cake table. The metal edge pressed into my palm. My dress was sticking to my legs where frosting had soaked through. My daughter moved inside me, a hard roll low in my belly that made me breathe out slow.
I looked at my husband again. Straight at him this time, frosting in my eyelashes, so he had to see it.
"Do you think I belong here?" I asked him.
It was a direct question. One sentence. There was nowhere for him to hide in it.
He opened his mouth. For a second I thought he would answer. His eyes moved quickly from my face to his mother's profile. Then back to the grass.
"Let's not do this right now," he said. "In front of everyone."
It was the second time he'd chosen not to choose.
His mother heard it the way I heard it. She nodded once, as if he'd agreed with her.
May you like
"Exactly," she said to me. "Not right now. So you should go. The shower's over, leave. We'll talk when you're calm."
I didn't take my hand off the table. I didn't wipe my face. The balloons cast a pale pink shadow over us, and the daylight stayed bright and even, and I stayed exactly where I was, frosting drying on my skin, between the cake and the woman who said I didn't belong and the man who wouldn't say that I did.
