…”…the day you said yes. Turn around.” I turned around. My husband was standing in the doorway in his pajamas, holding the pregnancy test I’d thrown in the bin, with tears running down his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said, laughing and crying at the same time. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you this much.” I stared at him. “It was you? All of it?” He nodded. “Every package.”
He sat down on the kitchen floor and told me. When we started trying, and month after month nothing happened, I’d stopped smiling. I’d stopped wanting anything. So he made a second Amazon account and started buying me the things he heard me wish for. The vinyl, from overhearing me on the phone with my sister. The tea, because I’d left it open in a browser tab on our shared tablet. He disguised his handwriting on the notes so I’d think I had a secret admirer, someone in the world who noticed me.
“You’d smile for a whole day after every package,” he said. “So I kept going.”
“And this morning?” I asked. He held up the test. “I took the trash out last night. I saw it. I didn’t say anything because I wanted you to tell me when you were ready.” He wiped his face. “But I couldn’t help it. I drove to the twenty-four-hour store at midnight. I wanted the first gift our baby ever got to come from its dad.”
I should have been angry about the fear. Some of me still is. We made a rule that night: no more anonymous anything. Every gift has a name on it from now on. He agreed immediately.
Our daughter was born in June. The onesie fits her perfectly now. The tag is still tied to the sleeve, in his disguised handwriting. I never cut it off. Underneath, he added a new line in his real handwriting: “Love, Dad.”
