Chapter 13: The Birthing Class
The doorbell rang at seven, and Astrid heard it from the kitchen, where she was standing with one hand braced on the counter and the other pressed flat to the small of her back. Three days of unpacking and arranging had put a low, grinding ache there, the kind that no amount of pillows or propping could reach. She had spent the afternoon telling herself it was nothing, that she was only tired, that a woman who had argued appellate briefs at eight months pregnant could certainly manage a few boxes.
Then the bell rang again, twice, impatient, and Shane called from the hall, "I'll get it."
Astrid heard the door open. She heard a voice like gravel in a bucket, flat and unhurried.
"You Tanaka? You look smaller in person. Doesn't matter. Where do you want me."
By the time Astrid made it through the wide archway into the living room, Rosa had already crossed the threshold, dropped a canvas duffel on the floor with a thud that shook dust from the baseboards, and was surveying the room with her chin lifted, iron-gray hair cropped close to her skull, forearms bare and thick in the sleeves of a faded hoodie that read HAVE A HAPPY BIRTH DAY across the chest in cracked white letters.
"You're Rosa," Astrid said.
"I am. You're the lawyer." Rosa looked her over, top to bottom, without apology. "Forty minutes ago you were standing at a stretch you won't hold by Thursday. I can see it in the way you're standing right now. Walk toward me."
Astrid did not move. "I'm sorry?"
"Walk. Toward me. You're guarding your right hip. I want to see how much." Rosa set her hands on her hips, and there was nothing unkind in her face, only a vast, practical patience, the patience of someone who had done this a thousand times and would not be impressed by any of it. "Mrs. Tanaka, I've got six weeks of you and your friend here, off and on, and I don't waste the first hour on pleasantries. Walk."
Astrid walked. Six steps, and by the fourth Rosa was already shaking her head.
"There. You do it every step. Like you're carrying a bowl of soup you're afraid to spill." She turned as Dina came in from the hallway, Leo behind her, and Dina's face had the particular brightness of a woman who had been looking forward to something all day. "And you're the deli."
"Dina. Deli's the family business, but I make pickles, mostly," Dina said, and offered her hand, which Rosa shook once, firmly, as if testing a knot. "This is my husband, Leo."
"Marchetti. The one who built the archway." Rosa glanced at the swept curve of the new opening, at the farm table beyond it, at the nursery door standing open at the end of the hall. "Nice work. Now, is the floor in there flat and warm? That's where we'll work. Nobody's doing a damn thing on this rug."
She had the duffel unzipped before anyone answered. Out came two enormous inflatable balls, gray and faintly pearlescent, one after the other, and Rosa dropped them both at once and had them filled and capped in under a minute, pumping with quick, economical strokes of her arm while she talked.
"You two are three days past a party that went on longer than it should have, I can see it, and I can see that neither of you stretched properly after it. So we're starting with the ball, we're going to get you off your feet and over it, and then your husbands are going to learn something useful." She looked up at Shane, then at Leo. "Both of you. Take off the watches and push up your sleeves. You're about to find out that your hands are the only tools that matter from here on."
Shane caught Astrid's eye and raised his eyebrows, a small, amused question, and she answered with the corner of her mouth, a look that said go along with it, and something warmer underneath that said I'm glad he's here and not me.
Rosa bent the first ball into place in the middle of the floor, on the rug after all, and pointed at Astrid.
"You. Kneel right here, then come forward over it, belly on the ball, knees on the floor, spread them wide. Arms hanging. Don't hold yourself up, that's the whole point."
Astrid knelt. Getting down was its own negotiation now, the slow lowering of a body that had stopped being entirely hers, and she felt Shane's hand briefly at her elbow, which she shook off, because the last thing she wanted tonight was to be helped into position like an invalid. She came forward over the ball, and her belly settled onto it with a soft, yielding give, and the pressure went out of her lower back all at once, a relief so sudden her eyes stung.
"Oh," she said, quietly.
"There it is," Rosa said. "Didn't hurt, did it. Breathe. In through the nose, all the way into your ass, and out slow. You're going to do that on the count and you are not going to think about anything else."
She got Dina down over the second ball two feet away, and Astrid turned her head, cheek against the gray vinyl, and watched Dina come forward with a grunt and settle, dark hair sliding loose from behind her ear, her belly round and low over the ball, and Dina looked back at her and grinned, wide and girlish, and mouthed something that might have been this is ridiculous.
"Marchetti," Rosa said. "Hands on your wife's back. Heels of your palms, right here, on either side of the spine, at the top of the rise. That's where she's tight. Press when she breathes in. Let up when she breathes out. If you press while she's breathing out I will know and I will make you switch."
Leo put his hands on Dina's back and pressed, and Dina made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a moan, and Astrid heard herself inhale sharply in sympathy.
"Tanaka. Same. But she carries hers lower, so you go lower, and you go wider, and you keep your thumbs off the bone." Rosa crouched between the two balls, one hand on each woman's sacrum, feeling, adjusting. Her palms were hot as bricks. "Both of you, count along with me. In for four. Out for six. In for four. Out for six."
They counted. Four in, six out. Four in, six out. Shane's palms pressed into the aching band across Astrid's back, and on the third round he found the exact place, the spot she'd been trying to reach with the edge of a doorframe for a week, and worked it with the heel of his hand, slow and steady, and Astrid's breath came out in a long shudder.
"Good," Rosa said. "Again."
Four in, six out. Dina's voice, low and warm to Astrid's left, counting along. Then Leo leaned into a press a half-beat late and Dina's breath buckled into a snort, and she said, "Leo. Four, not two."
"I did four."
"You did one and a half and then panicked."
Astrid started laughing, which broke her count, which made Dina laugh, which set the two balls wobbling underneath them, and Rosa sat back on her heels with a flat, unimpressed sigh while both husbands stood over their wives with their hands raised in surrender, waiting.
"All right," Rosa said. "Laughing's fine. Laughing's better than crying. But you breathe after. Now, trade."
"Trade," Shane repeated.
"Trade. You take Marchetti's wife, he takes yours. Half the work of a birth partner is knowing a body that isn't yours, and half the work of you two," a thick finger swung between Astrid and Dina, "is letting him. So. Trade."
There was a pause, brief and charged and entirely pleasant, and Astrid looked across at Dina's flushed face, at the way the small hairs at Dina's temple were already curling with sweat, and Dina looked back at her, and neither of them said a word.
Shane crossed behind the balls and crouched at Dina's back. Leo settled behind Astrid, and his hands, when they landed, were wider and heavier than Shane's, slower to find the spot, more careful.
"Four in," Rosa said. "Six out."
"Four in, six out," they all said, and Leo's thumbs found the tender rise beside Astrid's spine and pressed, and Dina, across the two feet of floor between them, let out a laugh that turned halfway into a groan, and Astrid heard herself laughing again too, helplessly, her belly riding the ball, the ache in her back loosening in slow increments with every counted breath, and in the warm light of the newly opened room, with candles still unlit on the shelf and the nursery door standing open down the hall, nobody wanted it to stop.
Rosa let them laugh for exactly as long as it took her to stand up and cross to the shelf by the window, where she pulled the first candle down and set it on the farm table without lighting it.
"Laughing's the release valve," she said, mostly to the husbands. "You'll want it later. Right now you two are pressing like you're defusing something. You're not. You're holding her. Press with the breath, not against it."
Leo's palms eased, adjusted. Astrid felt the difference at once, the way his weight came down through the heels of his hands in time with her inhale instead of lagging behind it, and the tight band above her sacrum seemed to unknot by a degree, inch by inch, and she let her forehead rest against the gray vinyl of the ball and gave up on holding anything.
"That's it," Rosa said. "Better. Tanaka, you've gone too high on the deli. She carries hers wide and low, down by the hips, not up under the ribs. Slide down. Both thumbs, one on each side, and walk them outward when she breathes out."
"I had it," Shane said.
"You had it in the wrong place. You're not being graded, you're being corrected. There's a difference." Rosa dipped her chin toward Dina. "Tell him where it hurts."
Dina's voice came muffled and warm from the ball. "Left side. Down by the top of my hip, right where the band of my pants sits. It's been there for two weeks."
Shane moved his hands lower, found the spot, and pressed, and Dina made a low, grateful sound into the vinyl that Astrid felt in her own belly.
"Good," Rosa said. "Now count."
They counted. Four in, six out. Four in, six out, all four voices threading together in the warm quiet, and the room had gone soft around the edges, the unpacked boxes stacked along the far wall, the new archway holding the last of the daylight in its curve, the nursery door open down the hall with its half-finished mural still taped off. Astrid breathed Shane's count in Dina's voice and Leo's count in her own back and stopped, for the first time in days, thinking about what had to be done tomorrow.
Then Leo's thumb slipped a half inch too high and hit the rib, and Astrid yelped, and Dina laughed so hard the ball rolled an inch sideways under her.
"Trade again," Rosa said, before the laughter had even finished.
"Again," Leo said.
"Again. Nobody learns a body in four minutes." Rosa crouched and repositioned both balls, nudging Astrid's a hand's width to the left so her hips hung deeper. "First round's for your hands. Second round's for your ears. You're going to listen to her breathe and you're going to find the spot that changes the sound. That's the whole job. Go."
So they traded back, and Astrid felt Shane's hands land, familiar and knowing, and heard Dina across from her go quiet with Leo's palms on her back, and the counting started again, four in, six out, but softer now, almost under their breath, and the room filled up with the small wet sound of two women breathing hard against inflatable vinyl.
Four in. Six out. Four in.
Dina's hand was hanging down off the far side of the ball, fingertips an inch from the rug, and Astrid's hand was hanging off her own, and the two feet of floor between them was nothing, was less than nothing, and Astrid had just decided to reach when Dina reached first.
Her fingers found Astrid's, warm and damp at the palm, and closed, and Astrid closed back, and neither of them said a word. Dina's thumb dragged once across Astrid's knuckles, slow and deliberate, and Astrid felt it all the way up her arm and down between her legs, a hot pull that had no business being there and was there anyway, and she turned her face on the vinyl and found Dina already looking at her, cheek flat against the gray, eyes bright, mouth tipped open around a breath she was supposed to be counting.
"Six," Rosa said.
Neither of them said six.
"Six," Rosa said again, and this time she was looking right at their joined hands and did not seem surprised in the least. She stood up, brushed her palms on her thighs, and took a long, unhurried look at the two men still kneeling behind their wives with their sleeves rolled and their faces flushed and their hands frozen on the wrong women.
"All right," she said. "I've seen enough. Everybody up."
Nobody moved.
"Up," Rosa repeated, and she was already collecting her duffel, zipping it with a hard rasp of teeth. "You've got your homework. Ball twice a day, ten minutes, one of you on the ball and one of you pressing, and I don't care which one of you is pressing so long as somebody is. Bath, not too hot. Sleep on your left sides. And if either of you goes into labor in the next six weeks, you call me before you call anybody else, including each other." She looked at Shane. "You've got the number."
"I've got the number," Shane said.
"Then I'm going to go home and eat something that isn't your leftovers." Rosa hauled the duffel onto her shoulder and paused in the archway, one hand on the swept plaster, and looked back at the four of them still down on the rug, the women over the balls, the men behind them, Astrid's fingers still locked in Dina's, and something in her blunt gray face softened by one degree, no more.
"Good room," she said. "Good people. Don't waste it."
The door closed behind her. The three days of unpacking sat in their boxes along the wall. The candles stayed unlit on the table.
Dina's fingers tightened around Astrid's, and Astrid felt the ball shift under her belly as Dina turned her hips toward her, dragging the whole round weight of herself closer across the rug, and Shane's hands were still warm and still on Astrid's back, and Leo had gone very still behind Dina with his palms flat on her, and the counted breathing had dissolved entirely into something else, something low and waiting, that nobody in the warm light of that room wanted to name out loud.
Dina's breath hitched, small and sharp, the kind of catch a person makes when they have been holding something in and it slips loose without permission, and Astrid felt it travel down the length of their joined fingers and settle somewhere low in her own belly.
Across the two feet of rug, Dina's eyes went wide and then soft, and her mouth closed around the sound, and for a moment neither of them moved at all. Behind Astrid, Shane's palms had stopped mid-press, warm and still on the small of her back, and behind Dina, Leo had not moved either, and the room had gone so quiet that Astrid could hear the refrigerator hum in the kitchen through the archway and the tick of the hallway clock.
"You heard that," Dina whispered.
"I heard it."
"I didn't mean to."
Astrid pulled her hand free of Dina's fingers and pushed herself up off the ball instead, slowly, hips first, and the gray vinyl rolled away under her with a hollow plastic clatter and bumped the leg of the farm table. Getting up was the usual negotiation, one knee at a time, both hands braced on the floor, and Shane's hand came to her elbow again and this time she let it stay there. Dina came up across from her the same way, Leo's hands hovering an inch off her back as if he did not know whether he was still allowed to touch her, and the two women ended up facing each other in the middle of the rug on their knees, both of them breathing hard, both of them flushed to the roots of their hair.
Dina's belly was low and round between them. Her hair had come loose entirely and hung in damp strings at her jaw. There was a red crease pressed across one cheek from the ball, and she was looking at Astrid's mouth, and Astrid watched her swallow.
"Say it," Astrid said.
"I want you."
The words landed on the floor between them like something dropped, and Astrid felt Shane shift behind her, heard the small sound of breath go out of Leo, and neither man said a word. That was the thing that undid her, the not-saying. Three days of boxes and hospital forms and nursery paint and this was the first moment since the party that nobody in the room had wanted to be practical.
Astrid leaned forward and kissed her.
Dina met her halfway, and the kiss was not the gentle thing it had been on the phone or the first time in the deli with the blinds down. It was open from the first second, wet and searching, Dina's hands coming up into Astrid's hair and Astrid's hands finding the round hard warmth of Dina's belly and sliding up under the hem of her shirt to feel the bare skin stretched over it. Dina made a low sound into her mouth, and her tongue slid past Astrid's teeth, and Astrid answered it with a graze of her teeth on Dina's lower lip that made Dina's hips jerk forward against her thigh.
"Astrid," Shane said, quietly, from somewhere behind her, and there was nothing in his voice but permission.
Leo's voice came a half-beat later, rougher. "Dina. Do you want me to stay."
"Yes," Dina said, against Astrid's mouth. "Stay. Both of you stay."
Astrid's shirt came off first, over her head, and the ruined bra strap she had been meaning to fix for a week, and then she was bare from the waist up in the warm light with her belly hanging heavy and her breasts swollen and dark at the tips, and Dina looked at her the way she had looked at her in the deli that first afternoon, with a hunger that had nothing to do with politeness. Dina's mouth found the side of her breast and closed warm and wet around the nipple, and Astrid's head fell back and her knees gave a little, and Shane's hands were there on her hips, steadying her from behind.
Dina's shirt went next, peeled up over the belly by Leo's careful hands, and then her pants, worked down over her hips with both men helping, and Astrid got her own pants off over her heels with a grunt and a wobble and nearly went over sideways laughing, and Dina caught her arm and they both ended up sitting back on their heels on the rug, naked, thighs touching, laughing helplessly at the absurdity of two women in their third trimester trying to undress elegantly.
Then Dina's hand slid up the inside of Astrid's thigh, and the laughing stopped.
Her fingers were warm and sure and they found Astrid wet already, slick and open, and Astrid hissed through her teeth and dropped her forehead to Dina's shoulder and spread her knees wider on the rug. Dina stroked her, slow and flat, thumb dragging up over her clit and back down, and behind Astrid, Shane settled onto his knees and pressed his mouth to the nape of her neck and stayed there, breathing against her skin, one hand on the swell of her belly.
"Tell me how," Dina said, low, into Astrid's ear. "How do you like it."
"Two fingers inside. Thumb on top. Slow."
Dina did it exactly as she was told. Two fingers slid into her, deep and unhurried, and her thumb came to rest over Astrid's clit and pressed in small circles, and Astrid's breath went out of her in a long broken sound that she did not bother to hold back. Leo had moved behind Dina, Astrid could see him over Dina's shoulder, his broad hands on Dina's hips, and Dina's own breath was coming in short catches now, hitching each time she pushed her fingers deeper into Astrid.
"You too," Astrid managed. "Let him touch you. Let him."
Leo's hand slid down between Dina's thighs from behind, and Dina's hips rolled back against him, and her fingers curled inside Astrid, and Astrid came on her hand with her mouth pressed to Dina's throat and her whole body bowing over her belly, and Shane held her through it with one arm across her hips, murmuring something into her hair that she could not hear over her own blood.
When she could see again, Dina was still there, flushed and gasping, Leo's hand working between her legs from behind and Dina's hips rolling slow against it, and Dina's fingers still inside Astrid, gentle now, waiting.
"Come here," Astrid said, and pulled her forward by the hips, and got her hand between Dina's thighs alongside Leo's, and found her slick and swollen and hot, and slid two fingers into her while Dina cried out and grabbed Astrid's shoulders, and the two of them rocked against each other's hands on the rug in the warm room, foreheads touching, both men behind them with their hands on their wives, and the counting was long gone, and nobody was thinking about tomorrow.
They finished together, or nearly, Astrid's fingers curling inside Dina at the same moment Dina's thumb dragged up over her clit one last time, and the two of them broke apart with a wet sound and a shared gasp and sat back on their heels on the rug, thighs slick, both of them breathing like they had run the stairs. Leo's hand came out from between Dina's legs and rested on her hip, glistening. Shane's arm was still across Astrid's belly, holding the weight of it, and she leaned back into his chest and let him hold her while she caught her breath.
"God," Dina said. She wiped her fingers on her own thigh, laughed at herself, then looked down at the red creases the rug had pressed into her knees. "I'm going to have marks."
"So will I."
"Good." Dina's smile was crooked and tired and entirely unrepentant. She reached over and tucked a damp strand of hair behind Astrid's ear, the gesture so gentle it was almost funny after what her hand had just been doing. "You look wrecked."
"I am wrecked." Astrid turned her head and kissed the inside of Dina's wrist, then looked past her, over her shoulder, to where Leo sat with his sleeves still rolled and his palms resting on his own thighs. He was watching his wife with an expression Astrid could not quite name. Not guilt. Something closer to hunger, held carefully in check. And behind her, Shane had gone still, quiet, one hand flat on the small of her back, and she knew that stillness. She had learned it over six years of marriage. It meant he was thinking about something and had not decided yet whether to say it.
She turned her head, cheek against his forearm. "Say it."
"I was thinking about what she said," Shane said. "The doula. Trade."
Leo's head came up.
"She made us switch three times and it was the most useful thing anyone has done to my back in a month," Shane went on, slow, calm, watching Leo and not Astrid, which Astrid understood. He was asking Leo. "I know her body. You know yours. But we've been in this house three days and I've had my hands on your wife all night and I don't know a single thing about where she hurts." He paused. "And I want to."
The room went quiet again, the refrigerator humming through the archway. Dina's eyes had gone wide, and she was looking at Astrid now, not at the men, asking without a word. Astrid held her gaze and thought about the way Leo's thumbs had found the tender rise beside her spine, wider and heavier than Shane's, slower to learn, and the way it had felt to be handled by hands that did not already know her. She wanted it. She had wanted it since the first press, honestly, and had only been too practical to say so.
"Trade," Astrid said.
Dina laughed, a small breathless sound. "You don't have to sound like you're approving a motion."
"I'm approving a motion."
"Then seconded." Dina pushed herself up onto her knees and turned, deliberate, unhurried, and did not crawl. She walked on her knees the two feet of rug to Shane, put her hands on his shoulders, and settled herself against him, belly to belly, and Shane's hands came up to her back, finding the place lower and wider where she carried, and Dina let her head fall forward against his collarbone with a sound like something finally set down.
Leo had not moved. Astrid rose up on her knees and turned to face him, and for a moment they simply looked at each other across the rug, this broad quiet man with his rolled sleeves and his tired eyes, and Astrid remembered the first dinner, the way he had barely spoken, the wall of him. He was not walled now. He was terrified, she realized, and doing it anyway.
"You don't have to be careful with me," she said.
"I do, though." His voice was low and rough. "That's the thing. I've spent nine months being careful and I don't know how to stop."
"Then be careful." She reached for his hand and drew it to the underside of her belly, let him feel the taut weight of it, the small hard push of a heel somewhere against his palm. "Careful doesn't mean distant. I've had distant. This house is full of people who learned that lesson the hard way." She stepped in closer, knee to knee. "Touch me like I'm a person, Leo. Not a situation."
He kissed her. Not the way Shane did, quick and sure; he kissed her like a man taking a first step onto ice, testing. Astrid leaned into it and made it easy for him, one hand sliding up into his hair, and after a moment that hesitation went out of him all at once and his mouth opened on hers and his hand slid up her back, broad and hot, spanning the whole ache of it.
Across the rug, Shane had Dina's shirt off over her head and was bent over the swollen curve of her breast, mouth moving slowly, and Dina had her head tipped back and one hand braced flat on the floor behind her, and she was making small, helpless sounds that went straight through Astrid's belly, low and hot. Astrid watched her over Leo's shoulder and felt her own nipples tighten, felt the slick wetness of the last few minutes still cooling on her inner thigh.
"Don't look at her," Leo said, against her mouth. "Look at me."
Astrid laughed, low. "That's a lot to ask in this house."
"I know." Leo's hands went to her hips and turned her, one palm flat on her lower back, guiding her forward onto her hands and knees on the rug, and it was not rough, but it was not tentative either, and the shift from being held upright to being bent low made her whole spine sing. He knelt behind her, close, and his thighs came against the backs of hers, and his palm pressed down on the small of her back where the ache lived, patient and heavy.
"Like that?" he said.
"God. Yes." She dropped her forehead to her forearms. The rug was warm and rough under her knees. Across the room, Dina had gone onto her back on the floor with Shane between her knees, and Astrid could hear her, unmistakable, the wet sound of Shane's mouth moving down her belly, Dina's breath breaking into short high notes.
Leo's hand slid from her back down over her hip, fingertips skimming the soft inside of her thigh, and Astrid's hips pushed back involuntarily. He took his time. He touched her the way he had pressed her back: slower, wider, learning. Two fingers stroked down through her and back up, gathering the wetness, and Astrid heard herself make a sound she had not planned to make, a long, open, needy thing.
"There," she said. "Right there. Don't stop to ask."
He didn't ask. He pushed two fingers into her from behind, deep and slow, and his other hand stayed planted on the small of her back, holding her steady, and Astrid's mouth fell open against her arm. Across the rug Dina cried out, once, sharply, and then again, quieter, and Astrid raised her head enough to see her with her thighs spread and Shane's dark head low between them, both of Dina's hands fisted in his hair, and Dina's eyes found hers across the room at the same moment and stayed there, glassy and bright and locked on, while Leo's fingers worked inside her and Dina's hips rolled under Shane's mouth.
"Both of you," Dina said, wrecked, half laughing, and neither woman looked away.
The pressure built low and deep, a slow swell that had nothing to do with Leo's fingers alone and everything to do with the way he held her down and would not let her hurry. He worked her from behind with two fingers and his palm pressed flat to the small of her back, and every inward push of his hand rocked her forward onto her forearms and dragged her clit against nothing, over and over, until Astrid's breath had gone thin and high and her thighs were shaking on either side of his knees.
"Don't rush her," Leo said, and it took Astrid a full second to understand he was talking to himself.
Across the rug Dina's heel had come up to rest on Shane's shoulder, her knee bent wide, and she was watching Astrid the way you watch a storm come in over water, bright-eyed, unblinking, her mouth open around a breath she was not bothering to count. Shane's hand moved between her thighs, slow, matching exactly the rhythm Leo was using, and Dina's hips rolled up into it and her eyes never left Astrid's.
It climbed. It kept climbing. Leo crooked his fingers inside her, dragging over the spot that made her knee jerk sideways on the rug, and he found it again and stayed there, patient, insistent, pushing her higher the way water rises in a pot, with no single moment that could be pointed to, and the sound that had been building in Astrid's throat broke loose all at once.
She cried out. Loud, open, her forehead grinding into her forearms, and the pressure inside her crested and rolled and broke in a long wrenching wave that started behind her pubic bone and ran up through her belly and down into her thighs, and she came on Leo's hand with her back bowed and her fingers clawed into the rug, and he did not stop, did not slow, held his palm flat and his fingers deep through the whole of it while she shook.
"There it is," Rosa had said, an hour ago, about the ball. It came back to Astrid absurdly, through the haze, and she laughed and it turned into a sob halfway and she pressed her face into her arm.
Leo drew his hand out slowly and laid it flat on her hip. "Was that too much."
"No." She could barely get the word out. "No. Give me a second."
Behind her he shifted, and she felt him lean down, and his mouth pressed once to the base of her spine, above the swell, careful, almost courtly, the kind of kiss a man gives a door he has just walked through.
Across the room Dina cried out too, higher and shorter, twice, and Astrid turned her head on the rug in time to see her come with both hands fisted in Shane's hair and her whole body bowing up off the floor, thighs clamped to the sides of his head, and then go limp all at once and lie there gasping with one arm thrown over her eyes.
Shane sat back on his heels and wiped his mouth on his forearm and did not look at Astrid. He looked, for a long moment, at his own hands, and then at Leo, and Astrid watched the two of them exchange something across the width of the rug that she could not read and did not intend to ask about.
"I need to lie down," Dina said, from the floor, muffled under her arm.
"You are lying down."
"Flat," Dina said. "Actually flat. Not on a ball, not on my knees, not bent in half with a hockey player in my face."
Shane laughed, low and easy, and got an arm under her shoulders and helped her sit up. Astrid rolled over and sat up too, slow, both hands under her belly, and the room came back into focus around her: the candles still unlit on the farm table, the boxes along the far wall, the open nursery door down the hall with its taped-off mural, the refrigerator humming. Her knees were crosshatched with red creases. There was a smear of her own wetness cooling on her thigh, and she was, she noted with a distant sort of clarity, spectacularly tired.
And underneath the tired, humming still, quiet, there was something else. A low residual ache that had nothing to do with her back.
She reached over and took Dina's ankle where it lay on the rug and pulled, gently, and Dina slid down onto her back with a grunt and let her, and Astrid got down beside her and rolled onto her side, and they lay face to face on the rug in the warm light, both of them flat on their backs a minute later, shoulders touching, staring at the ceiling.
Dina's hand found Astrid's between them and laced their fingers together.
"I have rug burn on my knees," Dina said.
"I have rug burn on my everything."
Dina turned her head and looked at her, and there was a softness in her face that Astrid had seen before, at the deli with the jars, at the party on the tile lip of the tub, and she understood that whatever they had just done, Dina was not going to let it be only that.
"You okay," Dina said. Not a question, quite.
"I'm okay." Astrid squeezed her hand. "You."
"Round two of that and I'll be walking funny at the deli tomorrow."
"Leo's got the deli tomorrow."
"Leo's got the deli tomorrow," Dina agreed, and laughed, and her laugh turned into a yawn.
Above them Shane appeared, holding Astrid's shirt, and Leo came with Dina's, and the two men stood over their wives in the warm room looking down at them the way men look at a house they have finally finished building and are afraid to touch in case it is not real. Shane crouched and worked Astrid's shirt back over her head with gentle hands, and Leo got Dina's over her shoulders and left it there, and the four of them, on the rug, in the new room with the whole opened floor plan around them, did not move to get up.
The candles on the table stayed unlit. It did not matter.
Astrid turned her head on the floor and looked down the hall, through the archway, at the open nursery door, and thought that in a few weeks there would be two small people in there and none of this would be quiet ever again, and she found she was looking forward to it.