“Yes, Mom.”
We talked a little while longer and then, I have no idea where it came from, but I asked her a question that fell out of my mouth.
“How did you know Dad was the right one for you?”
“I stopped using the word I when I looked into the future.”
“What do you mean?”
“Before I met your father, all of my plans were just that—my plans. But after I met him, even after only a few weeks, I stopped seeing the future as mine and started seeing it as ours. I didn’t even notice it for a while, but when I talked about things t
hat were coming up—Saturday nights, holidays, whatever—I eventually realized I’d started saying we, not I.”
I stopped at the grocery store on the way back to the office and picked up some things to make dinner. Drew was going to be living in a hotel in Atlanta and working long hours when he was here, so I figured he’d appreciate a home-cooked meal. He came in as I was taking the lasagna out of the oven.
“Smells good in here.”
“Hope you like lasagna.”
“It’s my second-favorite meal.”
“What’s your first?”
He came up behind me, brushed my hair to one side, and kissed my neck. His word vibrated against my skin. “You.”
“Control yourself. You need to enjoy a homemade meal when you can. Your next few weeks are going to be busy.”
I opened the drawer to the right of the stove to get a spatula and found two matchbox cars and an old flip phone in with the cooking implements.
“I wondered where you kept the toy cars.”
Drew chuckled. “When I tell Beck to clean up, he just shoves shit in drawers. Last year I found crayons in the spoon section of the utensil drawer. He’d taken the spoons and thrown them all in the garbage. When I asked him why, he shrugged and said we didn’t need them because we could scoop things better with our hands but nothing else made color on paper.”
I smiled. “He has a point.”
Drew reached into the drawer and took out the flip phone. “Remember when we first met, and I looked through the pictures on your phone?”
“Yes. You told me the best way to get to know someone is to look at their cell phone pictures when they least expect it. Then after I let you look through mine, I found out yours was empty.” I exaggerated a sigh. “Jackass.”
Drew opened the flip phone, pressed some buttons, and offered it to me. “I’m gonna go wash up and change before dinner. This is Beck’s cell. It doesn’t have service, but he likes to use it to take pictures. Every time I start to doubt whether I’m doing the right thing by staying in his life, if I’m confusing things by not backing off and letting his biological father step in, I scroll through those pics. Take a look.”
Drew went to the bedroom, and I poured myself a glass of wine and sat down at the dining room table to look through the pictures.
The first photo was of Drew shaving. He stood in the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. There was shaving cream on the left side of his face, and he held the razor near his chin after shaving one line down. The other cheek was already cleanly shaven. Off to the side, in the reflection of the mirror, I could see Beck holding the camera with one hand, and the other held a spatula covered in shaving cream up to his face, which was also half cleared of white foam.
The next photo was of Beck standing in a stream. It looked like it could be upstate somewhere. It was probably taken a year ago, given how much Beck’s face had matured. He wore waders and smiled huge for the camera as he held up a small fish he must have just plucked from the stream.
I kept scrolling—photos of Beck and his dad ice skating, a shot of them sitting together on the subway, one of Drew reading Harold and the Purple Crayon in Beck’s bed, them riding bikes with Roman in Central Park, one that I had to turn the phone upside down to realize I was looking at the picture right side up—it was Beck taking the photo of the two of them while on Drew’s shoulders. He’d leaned over to snap the shot of their faces.
Photo after photo revealed their life together and showed just how much Drew was Beck’s father, no matter what a lab test said.
The very last photo surprised me. I hadn’t even known Beck had a phone at the time it was taken, much less that he had snapped a picture. It was the afternoon we’d gone ice skating—prior to my falling and injuring my ankle. Beck must have been standing on one side of the rink, while Drew and I were on the other, and I attempted to skate. My legs were spread wide—something I couldn’t seem to stop that day—and I was laughing on my way to falling into an ungracious split. Drew had one arm wrapped around my waist, trying to hoist me back up, and was looking down at me while he too was laughing. We looked so happy—almost…like we were falling in love.
My heart swelled in my chest. Drew was right. The best way to get to know someone was to steal glances at their pictures. He looked through the pictures and saw the love of a father and son—a reminder of why he needed to fight. I saw a good man, one fiercely passionate about the things he loved and who would do anything to protect them. Rubbing my finger across the screen as I stared at the picture of us, of me falling, I realized I’d fallen in more ways than one that day.
I had to blink back tears to keep my emotions from getting the best of me, and decided I should get up and cut the lasagna to busy myself.
Still preoccupied, I wasn’t thinking and grabbed the side of the hot lasagna pan to turn it so I could cut.