Everything After(10)

Emily laughed. She’d had enough friends who’d been pregnant recently that she knew the rules by heart. “No alcohol, no unpasteurized cheese, no raw fish—no raw animal protein at all, really—limited caffeine, make sure you wash all your vegetables thoroughly.”

Ezra looked at her, puzzled. “Wash all your vegetables thoroughly?” he echoed.

“Toxoplasmosis,” Emily answered. “From the dirt they’re grown in.”

Now it was Ezra’s turn to laugh. “Good point,” he said. “We’ll wash all our vegetables thoroughly. And I’ll eat what you eat. No fair that you have to give up alcohol and sushi and deli meat if I don’t. No more alcohol for us.”

Emily kissed Ezra’s cheek. “You really don’t have to do that,” she said.

He turned and kissed her on the lips. “But I want to,” he answered.



* * *



—

    In the grocery store, Ezra and Emily decided to buy the ingredients for homemade spaghetti and meatballs. One of the things they’d registered for when they got married was a pasta machine, which Ari and Jack got them, along with a series of classes on how to actually make pasta. “It didn’t make sense,” Ari said, “to get you something you wouldn’t know how to use.”

They’d made pasta maybe ten times in the last two and a half years. Emily had to admit that without those classes, they probably wouldn’t have made it at all. They used the bread maker and the waffle iron even less.



* * *



—

Emily loved watching Ezra doing things around the house. He was remarkably domestic but did everything with a doctor’s concentration, with medical precision. He sewed torn seams in their clothing as carefully as if he were suturing a child, using the same zigzag stitch he’d learned in medical school. He excised rotten spots in apples as if he were cutting out a tumor, making sure it had clean margins on all sides. And he followed recipes only if they made sense, questioning any step that seemed like it might cause a culinary problem down the line. They even adjusted recipes that had been passed down from his great-grandmother. A glass of flour, one read.

“Well, that’s ridiculous,” Ezra had said, the first time he tried to make his nana’s chocolate squares. “Does she mean a tall glass or a short glass? A mug? A tumbler?”

“Maybe she means about a cup?” Emily offered. “It’s probably an old recipe. One that wasn’t written in the U.S.”

Ezra looked at her, then at the recipe, then at the oven. “Huh. Well, we’re going to find out how much we should really use,” he said.

That day, they made three trays of chocolate squares. One with a cup of flour, another with ten ounces, and another with twelve—the amounts that their two glasses held. They’d decided that the juice glasses, which held only about four ounces, probably would be much too small. All three options tasted good—but the consistency of the ones with ten ounces of flour seemed the best. So Ezra fixed the recipe.



* * *



—

Emily was making those same chocolate squares for dessert, while Ezra made the meatballs for dinner, because the smell of the raw meat made her gag.

“It’s like someone turned up the volume on my nose,” Emily said. “Do you have cinnamon gum in your pocket?”

Ezra reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out a pack of cinnamon Trident. “I had no idea pregnancy would give you a superpower. Maybe we should test it out. How far away do you have to be from this cinnamon gum not to smell it?”

“You’re bananas,” Emily told him. “For now, though, would you mind sticking it back in your pocket? It’s accosting me.”

Ezra did as she asked, and lined the meatballs up in a frying pan while she slid the brownies into the oven. Then they worked together to make pasta. Fettuccini was the easiest, so that was what they made.

“Are you okay telling our families before the twelve-week mark?” Ezra asked.

She nodded. “We’d tell them if something went wrong anyway, so . . .” She shrugged, hoping, praying that nothing would. “Might as well tell them now.”

Emily thought of her dad, living with his second wife in New Mexico. A woman who was nice enough but who Emily could never think of as a stepmom or any other version of a mom. He’d be happy. Send a gift. Fly east to meet the baby. He came about once a year to see Ari’s kids, Hunter and Tyler, and Ari flew their family to Santa Fe once a year to see him. The sisters often talked about the fact that their mother would never have been a twice-a-year grandmother, but he seemed fine being a twice-a-year grandfather. She’d call him later. She’d tell Ari first.

After dinner, as Ezra was dialing his parents, who Emily was pretty sure would drive in from New Jersey tomorrow just to take them out for dinner to celebrate, she pulled out her own phone and sent a text to her sister. She used the exact same words she’d sent last time: Can you talk? I’m pregnant.





vii



Your dad and I were so careful.

   We were always so careful.

   Until one day we weren’t.





10



The next week, Emily was walking down Broadway to get a sandwich for lunch from Crust, which called itself a Brooklyn deli, even though it was located in Manhattan. Ari had been so exhausted the first few months of both of her pregnancies that she’d fall asleep no more than twenty-five minutes into any movie that Emily brought up to Connecticut to watch with her, but Emily didn’t feel that way—not now, and not the other time either. She felt, somehow, powerful. Though also more likely to cry at a credit card commercial or TV movie or a story Ezra told her about one of his patients. It was all she could do these last few days to make sure she didn’t cry at her own patients’ stories—the happy ones and the sad ones.