Page 88 of Babies for the Boss
“I’m very good at knowing when to let him have his freak-outs and when to skip them. This one gets the time because we’re leaving the babies, and the freak-out will actually make him feel better.” I pause. “The trick with Pavel is figuring out which things are about control and which things are about love. They look the same from the outside.”
She looks at me with the green-eyed attention that has been assessing me since the third grade. “You really love him.”
“Yes, and it’s extremely inconvenient.”
She snorts at that. “Is it?”
I think about this honestly, the way I’ve been thinking about things since the girls arrived and rearranged my interior landscape along with everything else. “No. Actually, it’s the least inconvenient thing in my life. Everything else is inconvenient. He’s the part that makes sense.”
Carrie Ann absorbs this, and we drink our coffee in pleasant shared quiet. Pavel continues his explanation, having shifted to something about monetary policy now, I think, which the babies are receiving with whatever the six-month equivalent of profound interest is. Which is to say, total silence. They’re probably asleep by now.
Eventually, Pavel comes to the kitchen with both of them still in the Bjorn, because he doesn’t take them out of the Bjorn unless there’s a specific reason to take them out of the Bjorn, and helooks at me with those pale blue eyes that I have fallen in love with every day. “You truly want to go out tonight?”
“We are going out tonight. Dinner and dancing. I made a reservation.”
“Dancing.”
“I want to dance with my husband in a room with other adults. While wearing a dress that doesn’t have any biological material on it.” I look at him steadily. “I have earned this.”
He looks at me for a moment, and I see the thing in his expression that is always there when the subject of leaving them comes up. The reluctance of a man who has discovered that the babies are the most interesting thing in any room they occupy, and thus has difficulty with the concept of voluntarily being in a different room.
Then he looks at Carrie Ann, who is standing beside the counter. “You know the protocols.
“I know the protocols,” she confirms.
“Dmitri is on the east entrance, and Sasha is on the north?—”
“Pavel,” I say.
“Sasha rotates at three-hour intervals?—”
“Pavel.”
He looks at me. Something in his expression adjusts—Pavel the pakhan making room for Pavel the man. “Fine.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m calling Dmitri.”
“You can call Dmitri as many times as you want from the restaurant,” I say. “That is within the agreed parameters.”
He looks at me with the look that means he knows he’s being managed and has made peace with it. “You are very organized about this.”
“How do you think I managed the office for all those years?”
He smiles a little at that. “I’m glad you decided to remain home. For now.”
That’s what I keep telling myself. It’s temporary. But the longer I stay home with our girls, the more I want to keep doing it.
Not tonight, though. We leave at seven.
The car comes around, and Pavel hands the girls to Carrie Ann, and they don’t fuss over it. My girls love Carrie Ann. He looks at them for a moment after the transfer, their faces, the duck-printed onesies, and I put my hand on his arm, and he looks at me and does the adjustment.
“Dmitri knows to?—”
“He does,” she patiently says.
“And if either of them?—”
