Chapter 1 - The Ring on the Kitchen Table
I came home three hours early on New Year’s Eve and heard my newborn son crying before I reached the second-floor landing.
Not fussing. Crying hard enough to lose his breath.
Our apartment occupied the top two floors of a narrow brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. From the stairwell, I could see the warm lights of neighboring windows and fireworks beginning over Prospect Park.
Inside our kitchen, the air felt cold.
My mother stood over Maya with one hand pressed against her shoulder. Maya was nine days out from an emergency C-section, folded into a dining chair in beige pajamas, her palm clamped over the incision beneath her stomach.
A bowl of instant ramen trembled under her chin.
“Eat it,” Eleanor said. “Your pain means nothing.”
I dropped my work bag.
“Get your hands off her.”
My mother spun around. Broth sloshed across the table and onto Maya’s lap.
In the bassinet near the radiator, Liam kicked beneath a thin hospital blanket. His lips were not blue, but his face looked mottled from cold.
Maya tried to stand and gasped.
I reached her before she fell.
“What happened?”
She looked at me as if I were the last person she expected to protect her.
“You said she was in charge.”
“I said she was staying until I got home.”
“You told me not to call you. You told me to stop ordering food because I’d already spent too much.”
“I never said that.”
Eleanor lifted her chin. “She’s exhausted, Daniel. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
I crossed to the bassinet and touched Liam’s chest. His sleeper was damp around the collar. The thermostat on the wall read fifty-eight degrees.
The refrigerator was nearly empty.
That morning it had held soup, yogurt, sliced turkey, frozen meals from our neighbors, and enough prepared food for a week.
“Where are the groceries?”
Eleanor folded her arms. “Your wife was wasting everything. I cleared out what had spoiled.”
Maya’s eyes filled.
“Nothing was spoiled.”
I pulled out my phone to call our pediatrician’s after-hours line.
Eleanor reached for my wrist.
“Don’t make this into some public spectacle.”
I stepped away from her.
Maya watched the movement, then looked down at her left hand.
Slowly, she pulled off her wedding ring.
May you like
She placed it beside the spilled ramen.
“If you really didn’t know,” she said, “prove it.”
