We Could Get By

xxiii.

Nellie seated herself unceremoniously on the sofa and laid back, letting her head fall onto Sweeney's leg without so much as asking him first or thinking to announce her arrival. It was not as if she needed to- between her wild hair and her extravagant clothes, she was a difficult woman to miss, even in a dense crowd. He did not even flinch at her sudden presence or the squeak of the sofa. Her boots and striped stockings stuck out like toothpicks from beneath the layers and layers of her skirts. She reached for his hand and clasped it between hers, holding it to her chest.

“I feel like it's gonna be a girl,” she said. “I dunno why, but it's what I feel.”

“Hm.”

Nellie wondered if it would hurt him more, should the baby turn out to be a girl. Or perhaps it might be better that way, therapeutic, maybe to feel he had a fresh start. She would not look like Johanna, at least- or so Nellie could only assume. Neither of them had particularly delicate features, nor were they light-haired. Those things had all come from Lucy. He seemed to have stopped mourning his marriage to Lucy, though she could not say with any amount of certainty how he felt about Johanna. How he felt about this baby. Nellie would not ask him. She changed the subject, squeezing his hand.

“Toby's birthday’s comin’ up soon, love. He said he don't want a party, so I was thinkin’ I'd just make him a cake and we could get him some nice little things.” Of course, neither Sweeney nor Nellie had any clue as to the boy's actual proper birthday, so they celebrated it instead on a day that Toby himself had chosen.

Nellie expected Sweeney to make some snide remark about how well her last cake had turned out, but instead he nodded. “That sounds nice, Nellie.”

She beamed up at him. Toby's cake would be leagues ahead of her last one anyway. From where she rested her head against his leg, he looked like some sort of abstract painting, all cast in greys and blacks, tilted at an angle where nobody who happened upon it could tell easily what the original subject of the piece had been. She released his hand to smooth the fabric of her dress over the swell of her stomach, to squint her eyes and scrutinize it as if somehow she might glean some information from it, but he left the weight of his hand where she had dropped it. This pleased Nellie immensely; he knew that it did, and she knew that he knew it.

“Dunno why in the world he wouldn't want a party- when I was jus’ a silly lil thing, I'd go down to me Aunt Nettie's house for the summer- I haven't told ya, have I? I must've!”

Even if she had repeated the story a hundred times over, Sweeney still would have shaken his head and said, “I don't think you have."

“Well, then,” Nellie began, settling herself further against him, the warmth of his leg through the fabric of his trousers homey and reassuring. “Aunt Nettie had this big ol’ monster of an ‘ouse on the seaside. I always thought she was somebody what was important- an actress, like, or a queen, but really I think she was just plain rich. And she'd have these parties every single night and people from all over would come and dance and she'd have champagne and wine and- she had a fella that’d sit up all night jus’ to play the piano. An’ she'd sweep right through all them strangers an’ say to me, ‘Nellie, darling, isn't it grand!’ Only it wasn't what like a question. She knew it was jus’ the most wonderful thing- all of us knew it, even lil’ ol’ me, too young to even have a sip of wine yet.”

Nellie paused and tilted her head back to look at him. To her surprise, Sweeney was looking back. There was no discernible trace of any particular emotion coloring his features, but he did not seem uninterested, either.

“An’ I'd get upstairs, to this room she kept jus’ for me, an’ I'd lie there and listen an’ the party would still be happenin’ on downstairs and outside an’ all ‘round me. I could look right out the window there, ‘n see all the people standin’ about on the sand outside with their drinks ‘n their gowns. When I woke up in the mornin’, it'd all be gone. Jus’ like a dream. That was always jus’ the saddest thing. Maybe that's why he don't want a party.”