For weeks, Matt had sent emails and left messages, asking Molly to meet with him to negotiate the specifics of their custody arrangement. “As friends, no lawyers.”
She finally said yes.
He hopped the four-hour flight just so they could work it out. They met at a chain coffee shop near Molly’s home and sat at a table in a quiet corner. Outside, summer stubbornly refused to give way to autumn. Inside the over-bright, over-lit, hipster-inspired space, Matthew chugged iced espresso while she sipped her juice. Molly folded her hands, squirmed in discomfort, and waited for him to talk.
“I’ll pay to have the baby on your health insurance,” Matt told her. “That makes more sense. With me travelling and working long hours at the studio, he’ll be spending most of the time here with you.” He pulled a slightly wrinkled check out of his jacket pocket and slid it, facedown, across the table to her.
Molly looked at it. Blinked.
“That’s to help with prenatal care—deductible and co-pays, you know—and with the crib, the pregnancy clothes, and all.” Matt looked at the table, his hands, his papers, the ceiling—anywhere but in her eyes.
Molly nodded and put the check in her jacket pocket, feeling much too awkward about the whole thing even to glance at the amount.
Matt wrote a number on his napkin and pushed it toward her hand. Again, he refused to meet her eyes. “I can also afford to give this much monthly for support after the baby is born. We can re-evaluate the amount periodically as the child’s needs or my income changes.”
She fiddled with the napkin and nodded again. The amount was more than fair. Here in Michigan, Molly could take good care of their child with what he offered.
“For the time being, I would like to have visitation for one week every other month. I know you won’t stay at my place. At first the baby will be too young to travel alone. I thought I’d fly out here and find a place he and I can stay together.” Matt clicked his pen over and over.
Molly shook her head, even though she knew he wasn’t looking at her. “Matt, if the baby goes two months between your visits, he’ll forget you. That’s how babies are. Then he’ll spend most of your visitation time freaking out. It won’t be good for either of you.”
“Well, Mol, it’s not like I can fly out here every weekend to babysit.”
“You can’t ‘babysit’ your own child.”
“Right. Anyway, I do that, and I won’t be able to afford my mortgage.”
She frowned. “I know, but…” Molly’s eyes burned, and her argument disappeared.
Matt drew triangles on his palm. Molly had seen smears and faded leftovers of penned words and shapes on his skin on more than a few occasions before. This was the first time he made them while she was around. He still hadn’t met her eyes. She stared at the top of his head, his hair flying in all directions like always. This man couldn’t figure out how to use a comb, and he was about to be raising a child?
Hey, now. Molly bit into her bottom lip. Don’t be petty.
After a minute or two of silence, he said, “How about I get a webcam for that old laptop of yours? We can set aside Skype time every day, so the baby can see me and hear my voice. It’s not ideal, but maybe it will help.”
Molly thought for a second and nodded slowly. It might work.
“Is that okay?”
Of course. Matt hadn’t seen Molly’s nod, because he wouldn’t look at her.
She dashed away a few tears and cleared her throat. “It might help if we’re consistent about it.”
“You don’t think I can do consistent, even for my own child? Shoot, I kept in pretty ‘consistent’ touch with you this past couple of years.”
Molly pursed her lips, choked on a sigh. “That’s not what I meant. At all.”
“What did you mean, then?” Matt was printing dark insults onto his skin now, probably against himself.
“I don’t know a lot about child psychology. Maybe she won’t even recognize it’s a person on the screen, let alone her daddy. Little babies, their eyes don’t even focus like ours do. I’m not sure how much the baby will understand.”
“We’ll do it anyway. Eventually she will learn. I’ve heard babies recognize their moms’ voices before they’re even born, so hearing me at least will have to help.”
Molly nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“Oi? It’s true then. There really is a first time for everything.”
She had never liked it when Matt knocked himself down like that, even just to joke. However, that wasn’t the hill Molly wanted to die on at this tense moment. She gave him a shaky smile. “Matthew, thank you for being so generous with me, with us. I know this isn’t what you wanted.”
His deep blue eyes—not like the sky, more like lapis lazuli—came up to Molly’s for half a second, and darkness flickered through them. Matt shrugged and scribbled black over the design on his hand. “Yeah, well, it isn’t what you wanted either. We all have to deal.”
Awkward silence. So awkward.
He dipped a napkin in the condensation dripping off her juice bottle and used it to swipe at the mess of ink on his palm. The muddle of dye was tacked on so thickly his efforts only made things worse. Soon Matt’s palm was coated in a sheen of black. Thin rivulets of grayish fluid slid out of the lines in his hand and dripped back onto the shiny white plastic table. Molly dabbed at the drops with her napkin, self-conscious of the motherly aspect of the action but unable to stop herself from trying to help.
When she looked up again, Matt was staring at her. His expression took her breath away. Molly felt right then she could ask him to buy her a house or crash his rental car into a brick wall or shoot everyone in this ridiculous little hipster café, and he would’ve done it without question. What did I do to you, Matt? God, I’m so sorry. Molly set the napkin down and burrowed her mouth and chin into her palm.
Matt blinked, and that odd intensity flickered to love, flashed to desire, and melted into despair. Then his usual cheerful mask, the one he put on for the audiences and Hollywood folk, but never for her—not until the morning after—ratcheted up again and covered it all. He closed the ink-stained hand, crumpled the matching napkin inside of it. “You said your first visit to your new OB is tomorrow?”
She nodded slowly, still half-numb, struggling to process the complexity of his expressions. Molly had a weird feeling whatever had just passed between them was something somehow even more intimate than what happened that night.
“What time?”
Did Matt not feel it, too, or was he just ignoring it? Molly wasn’t sure it was a good something anyway, didn’t think she wanted it back. She leaned back a bit. “Oh. Um… It’s at one.”
“I’d like to come along, if it’s cool with you.”
She nodded again, her hand back over her mouth to hold in all the words she didn’t know how to say.
“I’ll come by for you at 12:30 then? No, they’ll want you to fill in all the intake forms, so let’s say 12:15.”
Another distracted nod.
“Right. G’day then.” Matt stood, pitched his half-empty coffee cup into the trash can behind their table, then stalked back to the café’s restroom.