Making It Last - A Novella (Camelot Series) (12 page)

I love you
, she’d told him, so many times.
I love you, I love you
.

And he said it back, though not as often as she did.
I love you, too, bunny
.

It wasn’t until she got pregnant that she’d started to wonder
why
she loved him.

It wasn’t until he’d proposed that she’d started to wonder why he loved her back, and if it was enough. If she was ready. If they could do this.

When she’d found out she was going to have a baby, she’d become conscious, suddenly, of how little she knew. What if they turned out to be awful parents? What if this thing that felt like love wasn’t? What if he and Patrick were permanently at odds, and he was always prone to feel guilty about his niece’s death, his father’s death—a possibility that scared her, because she’d been able to pull him away from that darkness so far, but what if someday she couldn’t? What if he got in one of his black moods and she didn’t know how to help?

It was just after 9/11. Her mom never turned the TV news off. Tony read every newspaper and magazine article about al-Qaeda that he could get his hands on, and Amber was afraid. All the time.

She could still remember the taste of her fear, like prenatal vitamins and orange juice. The restless need she’d had to pace the rooms of Tony’s house and take long walks—so long that even Tony started to worry. She wasn’t putting on enough weight with the baby. She couldn’t stand still, because whenever she stilled, she became afraid, and the fear kept getting bigger.

Tony didn’t know, either. What to say or how to fix it. He said he loved her, he loved their baby, but the words sounded so thin. Inadequate against the enormity of the situation. She kept waiting for him to tell her the perfect right thing that would banish all her fear, and when he didn’t, she moved out. Two months before Clark’s due date, she’d packed up her stuff and taken herself back into the apartment she still had in Camelot, turned off her phone, locked the door, and refused to answer when her mother knocked.

She’d huddled in her bed beneath a blanket, curled around her baby. This baby who was the shape of a future that she already felt pressing into her, molding her identity into
wife, mother
, when she wasn’t ready for any of it.

Tony took the door apart.

Later, he said he was freaking out, but he hadn’t seemed to be when she’d padded from the bedroom to find him standing in her living room with all the daylight she’d been shutting out
of the apartment lighting him up.

He’d propped the door in its place, put his arm around her, and led her back to bed. His work boots had made a mess of her comforter, because he’d come from the job site when her mother called him. He’d come right away, and when Amber didn’t answer, he’d taken apart the door.

He held her until she finally started to cry, and then she told him what she was afraid of.

Such a long list of things.

Tony had promised her he would do anything he could to help. Anything for her. Anything. And she’d put her nose to his neck, her lips against his chin, on his mouth, and known he meant it.

She’d thought,
This is love, then
.

Not the drama of the door and the hinges. Not all the sex they’d had, the excitement of finding intimacy with a man for the first time at the ripe old age of twenty-four.

Just Tony’s arms around her, and his promise. His choice.

I’ll help you. I’ll be here. Whatever I can do, I’ll do it
.

She’d made a choice, then, too. To be with Tony, whatever that cost her. To accept the future they’d created, the life they’d made, and not look back.

He’d helped, just as he’d promised to. In the hospital, when labor turned out to be so much more formless and confusing than the books had led her to believe, Tony had rubbed her back. He’d put a pillow beneath her forehead where she had to press it into the bed, and he’d found another one to go behind her knees. She moved, and he made sure the pillow was there when she needed it again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

He’d promised to be there, and he’d been there. Always.

She’d been there for him, too. All through the up-and-down drama of his relationship with Patrick, the endless working out of his guilt about his niece. She’d encouraged him to get his GED, take some college classes, learn what was necessary to know to start building the homes he felt so much more interest in. She’d helped him sleep. She’d taught herself to cook because someone had to feed them. Learned how to be a mother, quit her job at the community
center because Tony needed to work more than she did, and he was making better money.

He’d taught her to accept what she couldn’t change. For a decade, she’d been a mother above all else, and none of it had frightened her—not the way she’d been frightened so much of the time since Jacob started first grade a few months ago.

And now … now she had to remember how to do that again. Accept what her choice had brought her. Put the yoke on, pull together with Tony. Bear up against her fear.

If it felt too heavy—if she felt too tired—she could lean on him. Because there were things that scared Tony, but they were different than the things that scared her. He had more strength than she did to keep going. He could do it forever if he had to—do it and appreciate whatever small crumbs of happiness they found to share between themselves. He could live on those crumbs for years and never forget he had them or how much they meant.

He
would
do that. Take the door off the hinges. Fly to Jamaica and rescue her from her own fear.

Amber had to find the strength to do it, too.

To go home, and to keep going.

* * *

As soon as he heard Jake sobbing in the background, Tony knew.

Never mind that his mother-in-law was saying “It’s nothing to worry about,” and “I just wanted to check in” and “a very
slight
fever.”

Jake sounded awful, and he was begging for Mommy.

“What’s his temperature?”

“One hundred even. But I think his pajamas were too hot, and aren’t you supposed to subtract a degree?”

“With the digital?”

“Yes.”

“No, you add one.”

One-oh-one was high enough that there was no decision to make. Tony would tell Amber, and she’d want to fly home as soon as possible.

“He’s just overwrought, I think,” Janet said.

“Is he sleeping?”

“A little bit, today.”

He heard what she didn’t say.
Last night, not at all
.

Poor Jake.

Poor sensitive, anxious, terrified kid.

“Put him on,” Tony said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

After a moment there was a clunk, and then Jake’s voice. “Daddy?”

“Hey, buddy. How you doing?”

“I want Mommy.”

“I know. She’s here with me. I’ll bring her home.”

“When?”

“Soon. Tell me what’s going on, huh?”

While Tony listened to his son’s reply—
I have a fever, Daddy, and Grandma says I need to lay in bed and rest, but I want to watch TV, so I told her
—he opened up Amber’s purse and found her phone and the page torn off the hotel notepad where she’d jotted down her flight times and confirmation number for the trip home.

Tearfully, Jake explained that he hadn’t been able to sleep because his heart was too anxious, and that Ant had said Mom and Dad weren’t coming home, and Clark had said they
were
, stupid, but that they’d probably get divorced and then the boys would each have to choose which parent they wanted to live with.

His voice kept rising, and then it broke and he started to sob again, saying, “I d-don’t wuh-
want
t-to
choose
, Daddy. I want to live with b-both of you—”

And Tony interrupted, because it was too awful. “Shh, buddy, shh, that’s not going to happen.” He couldn’t take hearing his son’s worst fear and knowing it was the same as his. That they were the same, and he still wasn’t sure he could stop his marriage from sliding off the edge of the cliff.

Even after last night, he wasn’t sure.

He soothed his son and pulled up flight times on Amber’s phone.

When Jacob was calm again, he said, “Put Grandma back on, okay? I’m going to have
her help me get the plane tickets changed, and we’ll see if we can get Mommy home to you tonight before you go to bed.”

“You, too, Daddy?”

“Me, too, bud.”

He spoke to Janet for a minute, asked her to take a look online for availability, and then got the customer service number from her. After they hung up, he booked the first flight home with open seats. It left early in the afternoon and would get them home right around Jake’s bedtime.

They’d have to leave for the airport in a few hours. Too soon.

Last night, he’d felt close to her. So sure of her, in a way that he hadn’t been since Jake was born.

Because it was Jake who had started the shift between them. Amber had been afraid to have a third baby—afraid, she’d said, that she would be consumed by another kid, that she would run out of energy, they would run out of love. And he’d been positive she was wrong. He was one of half a dozen Mazzara kids, used to thinking children ran in packs, that love would stretch as far as it had to.

More than that, Tony had thought seven years ago that between him and Amber, they could do anything. Business was good. They had plenty of money—enough for him to build her a house as big as she deserved, as nice as she ought to have—and they’d had these two awesome kids who were amazing, smart, making fatherhood so much more
fun
than he’d thought it was going to be.

He’d wanted to keep doing it. Turn great into better into fantastic.

And he’d been daring himself, too.
Go all in. Dig yourself in deeper, because you’re
not
going to fuck this up. You’re not hopeless, you’re not nothing, you’re not doomed to fail
.

Amber had given him faith that all those lessons of his early life were bullshit. He’d seen her with their sons and known that their boys weren’t going to grow up feeling like he had. He wasn’t going to be the kind of father his own dad had been. Even if he slipped, Amber would never let it happen.

So he’d pushed her. He’d campaigned, buying frilly baby girl dresses and talking up how cute newborn babies were, how hot she looked when she was pregnant, how the boys would be happier with another sibling and they’d all entertain themselves. How much fun they could have
trying for a baby.

Amber had caved. Then Jake had come along and steamrolled over her at exactly the same time the economy was steamrolling over Tony.

And he didn’t regret it. He couldn’t. He loved Jake so goddamn much it hurt. They’d made the best of it. But it had been a hell of a grind, these last six years. Three kids wasn’t fifty percent more than two. It was this whole other stratosphere of parenthood. Outnumbered. Outgunned.

In those early months after Jake was born, when he was puking up everything he ate, not holding on to enough weight, never sleeping more than ninety minutes—usually more like forty-five—Amber had developed dark purple circles under her eyes and a steely sort of optimism that she wore like armor.

Everything will be fine, hon. Don’t worry about us today. I’ll try to grab a nap when Jake goes down—I can put a cartoon on for Ant and Clark. I’ll see you later, okay? Have a good day
.

She would hand him his lunch when he walked out to the garage, and she would kiss him goodbye, but her mind would be elsewhere, on the battle that was her day. Holding her shit together. Keeping the house clean, the kids alive and fed and bathed and rested.

He’d been so grateful for her—so grateful, because he’d had so much worry of his own. Enough to give him bad dreams, wake him up in a cold sweat thinking about what college and braces were going to cost and how many more times Patrick could drop the ball at work before Tony had to say something. What he would say.

The housing economy had gone from bad to worse to nightmarishly awful. His mother had died, and he’d hired somebody to do the accounts at the office, and in six months she’d created a ruinous mess—or revealed a ruinous mess that had already been there, Tony wasn’t sure. Depended on who you believed.

In the middle of all that, it was a relief to know he could count on Amber to cope. He’d thought they would both do this for a while, as long as they
had
to, and then he’d get her back again.

But he hadn’t gotten her back. Until last night, she’d been drifting farther away.

Now he felt like he could reach her, if he did the right things. Said the right things.

Only they had so little time.

The bedside clock said 7:15. She’d been in the shower for half an hour.

Tony opened the bathroom door and took a towel off the rack.

He stuck his head inside the tiled enclosure and put his arm under the spray. Still hot. Her skin was pink all over, her eyes closed.

He turned off the tap and took her hand.

“Come on out, bun.”

She came meekly, like a child.

Well, not the kind of children they had. Their kids either refused to come out or vaulted from the tub like demons, running naked through the house and getting water everywhere.

Amber stood still and watched, bemused, while he toweled off her hair. Then he dropped to his knees and dried her thighs, her calves, the tops of her feet. Behind her knees, and on to her hamstrings and thighs and butt.

“Turn around.”

She did, and he dried her back.

He thought of how happy Jacob would be when she walked in the door. How he would put his face right up against her stomach and breathe in the smell of his mother.

How Ant used to wind his fist around and around her hair when he nursed.

How for Clark, it had been her pinky fingers, and then her hands and her wrists.

They needed her in a way they had never needed him. Her body. Her
being
.

He needed her, too. Her breasts and her pussy and her smell and her mouth and her arms. Her eyes. Her hips. Pregnant or not, thirty pounds heavier or skinny as a rail, short hair or long.