The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,21
believe in open adoption, no matter what you say about it.”
“But the kid’s real parents could be at our Christmases?” Gabriella asked.
“Biological parents,” Davy corrected her. “We’ll be real parents. And, yes, they could be at our Christmases. And our Thanksgivings. And our birthday parties.”
“Eww! What if they’re freaky?”
I laughed out loud. So did Davy. “Freakier than our family already is?” he joked.
My daughter was so intelligent it often startled me, but she occasionally reminded me that she was only seventeen. She didn’t—as she sometimes seemed to believe—know everything. But please please please, Bobby, let her know she has two parents who love her.
Gabriella turned Davy’s silver band on his ring finger.
“Do you think he’ll come home?” she asked, without looking up.
“I don’t know, babe.”
“It’s too soon to tell, right?” Her tone dared us to disagree. When she was sufficiently certain that we wouldn’t, she changed the subject again in a bright, cheerful voice. “I remember your wedding,” she said to Davy. “I remember playing in the fountains at the park.”
Gabby had been nine at their commitment ceremony. Bobby and my mother had been miffed I’d let Gabriella get in the fountains in her tights.
Gabriella kept turning Davy’s wedding band. “I’m glad you wear rings even if . . .” she trailed off, not sure, I imagined, how to tactfully say even if they don’t count.
“Even if,” Davy said simply.
“If I ran the country . . .” Gabby started.
“Oh, brother, here we go again,” Davy said.
“ . . . I’d let you get married.”
“Well, thank you,” he said. “So under President Gabriella Binardi, let’s see, we’d outlaw all plastic grocery sacks—”
“That’s right.”
“We’d outlaw all drive-throughs, and now we’d have gay marriage. Nice.”
“Don’t forget the birth control in the drinking water,” I said.
“Whoa. Isn’t that a little fascist?” Davy asked.
“No, no, no,” Gabby said. “Anyone can have kids. They just have to choose. All they have to do is ask and I’d switch their water to normal.”
Davy nodded. “I like it. I’d vote for you.”
“And,” Gabby said, “I’ll pull that off in my first one hundred days. Just you wait. Law school first, though. Debate’s gonna get me into Harvard.”
She’d been saying that for four years now, ever since Holly, Helen and Hank’s daughter, got accepted there. I feared I’d have to make Gabriella apply to other schools, too.
Nick’s car appeared at the end of the block. The three of us fell into conspiratorial silence and my heart resumed its quickened pace. How had Bobby proposed to me?
Nick lifted his hand in a tentative wave when he spotted my truck. Gabby waved back.
Had there been a proposal? I remembered a conversation in my old apartment kitchen that would have to count. Bobby had made chicken korma, which had reminded me of Vijay and all the times he or his mother, Shivani, had cooked for me in high school.
Bobby’s korma had filled my entire apartment with eye-watering garlic scent. He fed me naan bread dipped in the korma, his fingers lingering on my lips. “Our kitchen will be bigger than this,” he’d said. “I’ll cook for you every night.”
“Our kitchen?” I asked.
“In our house,” he said.
I licked a bit of korma from his lower lip. “We’re getting a house?”
“Yep.” He took my hand.
“Are we getting married?”
“Yes.” He led me down the hall to my bedroom. This had often been our dessert.
A few halfhearted raindrops fell on my truck’s windshield. “I think I proposed to him.”
“What?” Davy and Gabriella turned their heads to me.
“I was trying to remember, since you asked me. I think I proposed to Bobby. I asked, ‘Are we getting married?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ ”
Gabby wrinkled her nose. “He didn’t give you a ring?”
“Later. Not that night.” His family had made him give me the heirloom ring I still wore. I self-consciously turned it with my thumb.
“He didn’t get down on one knee?” Gabriella sounded heartbroken.
I shook my head. I’d always defended our low-key engagement and wedding to my mother, to my brother, to friends, and especially to Bobby’s family. Bobby and I hadn’t needed all those trappings, all those “societal conventions,” as we called them.
“It should be romantic,” Gabby declared. “Mr. Henrici is doing it right.” No matter how many times Nick had told her she could call him by his first name outside of school, I’d never heard her do it yet. “That’s how I want Tyler to propose to me, something creative like this.”