Chapter 5: Sesame Oil and Shifting Tides
The lo mein was getting cold. Reggie nudged the container closer to her on the cluttered coffee table, the cardboard scraping against a stack of unopened mail and a dog-eared pregnancy book. “Eat,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “It’s the only thing you kept down yesterday.”
Alexis picked up a dumpling, the steam long gone. She took a small bite, watching him over the rim of the container. He was different. It wasn’t an act. The performative charm, the easy swagger he used like a second skin, was folded up and put away. In its place was a grim, quiet practicality that both unnerved and comforted her.
Their apartment felt like a waiting room. The tension hadn’t vanished after the ultrasound, but it had changed texture. It was less about the sharp, cutting words they’d traded before and more about the heavy, unspoken things between them now: the heartbeat, the future, the ghost of his father he’d confessed to Davon about. She knew about that conversation. Davon had told her, in a careful, roundabout way, trying to build a bridge. He’s scared of becoming a ghost, Davon had said. So be the thing that keeps him here.
“Need another job,” Reggie said again, not looking up from his own container of fried rice. He’d been saying it for a week. “Something dayshift. Better benefits.”
This time, she put her fork down. The metal clicked against the cardboard. “What kind of job?”
“Anything.” He finally looked at her. The fatigue from his night shifts was a permanent stain under his eyes, but his gaze was clear, focused. “Security’s dead-end. The health plan is a joke. I’ve been looking at warehouse supervisor posts. Courier companies. Stuff with regular hours and actual family coverage.”
Family coverage. The words hung in the air, mingling with the scent of soy sauce and stale carpet. He was building a spreadsheet in his head, she could see it. Weighing deductibles against mileage, paid time off against hourly wage. This was his new language. It was the most un-Reggie thing she’d ever witnessed.
“You’d hate a day job,” she said quietly. “You love the night. The quiet, having your days free.”
“What I love doesn’t matter anymore.” He said it without self-pity. It was a simple erasure of his own wants, a fact he’d accepted. “When the baby comes, someone needs to be on a sane schedule. You’ll be on leave. I need to be the one who can do the 2 a.m. feedings and still function at a 9 a.m. shift.”
He spoke about it like a mechanic describing a engine swap. Dismantle the old life, install the new parts. The romance of fatherhood, if it existed for him, was buried under this layer of stark logistics.
“You don’t have to martyr yourself,” she said, a flicker of her old fire returning.
“It’s not martyrdom. It’s math.” He pushed the container of ginger tea toward her. His knuckles, scraped and calloused from God-knows-what at the warehouse, brushed her wrist. The touch was accidental, brief, but it sent a static shock through the haze of her nausea. “Drink that. You’re looking pale.”
She obeyed, sipping the lukewarm, spicy liquid. He was observing her now with a clinical attention that was both creepy and deeply caring. He tracked her food aversions, her energy dips, the way certain smells sent her sprinting to the bathroom. He had become a student of her body’s rebellion.
“I got a call today,” she said, staring into her tea. “From my mom.”
Reggie went very still. Her family was a minefield he’d always expertly avoided. Polite distance at holidays, vague answers to direct questions.
“And?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral.
“She asked why I sounded tired. I told her.” Alexis took a shaky breath. “She cried. Then she asked if we were getting married.”
The air in the cramped room thickened. Reggie’s jaw worked. He set his food down, wiped his hands on his jeans. “What did you say?”
“I said no. I said we were figuring things out one step at a time.” She looked at him, challenging him with her eyes. “Was that the right answer?”
He didn’t flinch. “It’s the true one.”
“Is it?” She leaned forward, the pregnancy book tumbling to the floor. “What are we figuring out, Reggie? You’re talking about day jobs and health plans. You hold my hand at the doctor. You buy me pickles and ginger ale. But we sleep in the same bed like it’s a trench and we’re waiting for artillery fire. We haven’t talked about us. About what happened before. We’re just… building a life raft around this baby and pretending the ship underneath isn’t already sunk.”
Her words echoed in the sudden silence. The hum of the ancient refrigerator filled the space.
Reggie looked down at his hands, spread on his knees. They were good hands. Strong. Capable of gentle touch and careless betrayal. “I don’t know how to fix the ship, Alexis. I only know how to build the raft. That’s all I’ve got right now. One plank at a time. A job. A benefit card. Showing up.” He met her gaze, and the raw honesty there was terrifying. “The rest… the trust, the ‘us’… I think that comes later. Or it doesn’t. But the raft has to be built either way.”
It was the least romantic thing anyone had ever said to her. It was also the most real. He wasn’t promising her forever. He was promising her a structure, a utility. It felt like ashes in her mouth, but it also felt, for the first time, like a foundation you could actually stand on.
“I’m scared I’m going to wake up and this version of you will be gone,” she whispered, the admission pulled from a deep, vulnerable place. “That this is just another performance. The ‘Responsible Reggie’ show. And after the baby comes, or when things get hard, the director will yell ‘cut’ and you’ll walk off the set.”
He didn’t rush to contradict her. He considered it, turning her fear over in his mind like a tool he needed to understand. “That’s the risk you’re taking,” he said finally, his voice low. “I can’t prove it to you ahead of time. All I can do is show up tomorrow. And the day after that. The proof’s in the repetition.”
He stood up, gathering the empty containers. His movements were tired but purposeful. He walked to the kitchen, and she heard the trash can lid sigh open and shut. The faucet ran. He was doing the dishes. Another plank.
From the kitchen, his voice came, slightly muffled. “I’m going to see my mom on Sunday. Tell her.”
Alexis’s breath caught. This was a bigger plank than any job. “Are you ready for that?”
A pause. The sound of a plate being set in the drying rack. “No. But it’s time. She deserves to hear it from me. Before she hears it from someone else or… sees it.” He came back, leaning in the doorway, a dish towel slung over his shoulder. He looked young and impossibly old all at once. “She’s going to look at me and see my father. I have to be okay with that.”
The ghost was in the room again. But he was naming it now. Bringing it into the light of their messy apartment.
Alexis pulled her knees up to her chest, a protective mound over the tiny, fluttering heartbeat. “What will you say?”
“I’ll say I’m sorry,” he said, the words simple and heavy. “And then I’ll tell her about the heartbeat.”
He walked over, not to her, but to the window, looking out at the fire escape and the brick wall of the adjacent building. His silhouette was a cutout against the dirty glass. “I found a job listing. For a dispatcher at a medical supply company. M-F, 7 to 3. Full benefits that start after 90 days.” He glanced back at her. “The interview is Monday.”
The momentum was dizzying. He was building the raft at a furious pace, nailing planks while still out in the open water.
“Okay,” she said, because it was all she could say.
“Okay,” he echoed.
He stayed at the window. She stayed on the couch. A foot of space, a universe of unsaid things between them. But the raft was taking shape. Plank by painful plank.
Plank by painful plank.
Sunday arrived with a flat, gray sky that promised nothing. Reggie stood on the sidewalk outside his mother’s apartment building, a box of pastries from the Portuguese bakery sweating in his hands. He’d bought them as a shield, a tangible offering to place between them. The building, a tired brick rectangle, hadn’t changed. The same faded floral curtains hung in Mrs. Gable’s first-floor window.
He took the stairs, his footsteps echoing in the stairwell that always smelled of boiled cabbage and pine-scented cleaner. He stopped at door 3B. The peephole was a dark, unblinking eye. He could hear the faint murmur of a television gospel program inside. He knocked, the sound too loud in the quiet hall.
The locks clicked—one, two, three. She’d always been thorough about locks. The door opened a few inches, secured by a chain. His mother’s face, older and softer than he remembered, appeared in the gap. Her eyes, the same dark brown as his own, widened briefly before settling into a careful neutrality.
“Reginald.” She never called him Reggie. “This is a surprise.”
“Hey, Ma.” He held up the bakery box. “Brought you some pastéis de nata.”
She stared at him for a beat longer, then closed the door to slide the chain free. When she reopened it, she was already turning away, padding back into the apartment in her slippers. “Come in, then. I just made tea.”
The living room was a shrine to orderly solitude. Every surface was clean, every throw pillow perfectly angled. A single photo of him at high school graduation sat on the mantel, a fossil from a more manageable time. The air was warm and still.
He set the pastries on the coffee table. She returned from the kitchenette with two mugs, steam curling from the tops. She didn’t sit. She stood by her armchair, waiting, her hands wrapped around her ceramic warmth.
“You look tired,” she said. It wasn’t a criticism, just her first piece of data.
“Work,” he said, sitting on the edge of the sofa. The cushions didn’t give. “Night shifts.”
“You always liked the nights.” She finally sat, placing her mug precisely on a coaster. “Quieter.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed his palms on his knees. The speech he’d rehearsed in the car evaporated. The raft metaphor felt stupid here, in this room where silence had been the primary language. “I’m… seeing someone. Her name’s Alexis.”
His mother nodded slowly, taking a silent sip of tea. She was giving him room, which was somehow worse than interruption.
“It’s serious,” he continued. The words felt like blocks in his throat. “She’s… we’re going to have a baby. In about seven months.”
The silence that followed was absolute. The gospel preacher on the TV mouthed soundlessly. His mother didn’t move. Her gaze dropped to her tea, then to the clean, empty space on the carpet between them. He saw her throat work as she swallowed.
“I see,” she said. Her voice was a dry leaf. Then she looked directly at him, and the pain in her eyes was so fresh it stole his breath. “Do you love her?”
The question was an ambush. He’d prepared for anger, for disappointment, for practical questions. Not for this.
“It’s… complicated,” he stammered.
“It always is.” She set her mug down again, the click definitive. “Your father said the same thing. ‘It’s complicated, Lynne.’ Right before he decided it wasn’t complicated enough to stay for.”
There it was. The ghost, named and placed between them on the floral rug. Reggie felt a hot flush climb his neck. “I’m not him.”
“Aren’t you?” Her calm was fracturing, a fine crack in her composure. “A baby on the way with a woman it’s ‘complicated’ with? You have his smile, Reginald. You have his way of filling up a room. I always prayed you didn’t get his exit strategy.”
“I’m not leaving.” The force in his own voice surprised him. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped tight. “That’s why I’m here. I’m getting a dayshift job. With benefits. I’m… I’m building something different.”
She studied him, her eyes cataloging the new lines on his face, the grim set of his mouth. “You’re scared.”
“Terrified.” The admission was a relief.
A long, slow sigh escaped her. Some of the rigidity left her shoulders. She looked, for a moment, just tired. “Good. You should be. It’s the most terrifying thing there is.” She paused, her gaze drifting to the graduation photo. “I wanted to give you everything. But after he left, all I had to give was the warning. Don’t be like him. It’s a heavy thing to put on a boy.”
“It kept me straight,” Reggie said, but it sounded hollow even to him.
“Did it?” Her smile was thin, sad. “Or did it just teach you how to hide the parts of you that might be like him? The parts that get restless? The parts that fear being trapped?”
He had no answer. The quiet hum of the refrigerator filled the room. She stood, slowly, and walked to a small oak bureau. She pulled open a drawer he’d never seen open, rummaging beneath folded linens. She returned with a small, creased photograph and handed it to him.
It was his father, young—maybe Reggie’s age. He was leaning against a car, smiling a smile Reggie saw every day in the mirror. He looked happy. He looked present.
“He wasn’t a monster,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “He was a boy who became a man who couldn’t bear the weight. He loved you, in his way. He’d hold you and his hands would shake. He’d look at you like you were a miracle, and then like you were a sentence.” She took the photo back, her fingers tracing the faded image. “The ghost you’re so afraid of becoming… he was real. And scared. And he ran. Knowing that doesn’t make it hurt less. But maybe it lets you aim your fear at something clearer.”
Reggie felt unmoored. His entire life, the man had been a silhouette, a cautionary shadow. Now he was a young man in a photograph, trembling as he held an infant. The villainy was gone, replaced by a pathetic, human weakness. It was somehow more frightening.
“What do I do, Ma?”
“You show up.” She echoed Davon’s words, but they landed differently here, seasoned with decades of absence. “And on the days you want to run, you call me. And I’ll tell you to go take a walk around the block. Then you go back inside. You keep doing that until the wanting passes.”
It was the most practical exorcism he’d ever heard. He nodded, a lump in his throat.
“Bring her by,” his mother said suddenly, decisively. “This Alexis. I’d like to meet her. Before the baby comes.”
“Okay,” he said, the word thick. “Okay, I will.”
He left an hour later, the pastries eaten, the tea gone cold. The sky had broken into a pale, watery blue. He sat in his car, the engine off, and stared at the steering wheel. The ghost had flesh now. It had shaking hands. The fear was no longer a formless dread; it was a specific, inherited tremble he felt in his own bones.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. A text from Alexis. How did it go?
He typed back, his fingers clumsy. She wants to meet you.
The three dots appeared, pulsed for a long time. Then her reply: Okay.
One word. Another plank. He started the car and drove, the image of his father’s trembling hands superimposed over his own on the wheel. The road home felt longer, the weight in the car heavier, but the destination was no longer a question. It was the only place left to go.