“Brett, do you see the red bucket?” I said gently. I was sitting on the edge of the tub in the dark bathroom, whispering so I would not wake the babies. Behind him I could hear waves, music and a bartender shouting for another round. “Look inside it.” At midnight, I had opened his big black suitcase and taken out his swim trunks, his linen shirts and his sunscreen. I had put in a plastic beach bucket, and in the bucket, everything that I did every day, laid out in a row like the contents of a small museum.
Brett lifted out a small shovel, three newborn onesies, a bottle warmer and a pacifier clip shaped like a seashell. Under them was the leash of our dog, Biscuit, and a roll of bags. My note said, Biscuit has not been walked in a month. Please walk him at six in the morning and at six in the evening. Triplets are fed at one, three and five. Build something that lasts, Brett. The sand will not wait forever. I heard him laugh once, a short helpless sound. “Dani, I am at a swim up bar holding a dog leash.” “Then you know where you belong,” I said.
His college roommates stopped laughing. I could hear it, a silence spreading through the cabana like a stain. One of them, a man named Greg, said quietly, “Brett, is that your wife? Is she by herself with three babies?” Brett said yes. Greg said, “Then why are you here?” I held the phone to my ear and said nothing, because I had nothing to add. Greg had said it all. After a long moment, Brett said, “Dani, I will be on the first plane. Please do not give up on me yet.” “Brett,” I said, “I have not. That is why I packed the bucket.”
A red bucket found in a suitcase gave one husband the weekend to bring his family back to the nursery in Wichita.
Brett landed in Wichita at four the next morning. He took a taxi from the airport and arrived at the house with a straw hat still on his head and a bag of Cancun trinkets in his hand, ashamed. He saw the dog first. Biscuit, whom he had not seen in a month, leaped at him with a joyful bark, and Brett sank to the floor and held the old golden retriever around the neck. The dog licked his face. And my husband, who had not cried once since the babies came, cried into that dog, with his hat crooked and his shoulders shaking, while I stood in the hallway and let him.
I gave him my terms at the kitchen table, over coffee and cold toast. He would take the night feedings, two of the three each night, with a bottle in one hand and a burp cloth over the shoulder. He would walk the dog before work and after. The twelve thousand dollars would be repaid to the joint savings, and he would cancel any trips for two years. And on Friday nights, as it had always been, we would have date night, but at home, with the three babies in their bassinets beside us. He agreed, and then he went upstairs, took down the cot from the bonus room and carried it to the curb.
His mother, Pamela, flew in from Phoenix on Sunday. At the baby shower, she had told me that she did not do diapers. I was braced for a fight. She stood in the doorway with a suitcase in each hand, looked at her son holding a baby against his chest, and said, “I came to eat my words.” She rolled up her sleeves. For nine days, she changed diapers, washed bottles and swept floors, humming old hymns. On the last evening, she told me over supper, “I raised him to believe the work was done by women. I was wrong, and I am sorry. Now teach me how to burp a baby.”
The men at the bank where Brett works took up a collection for diapers, and the manager, a gray haired man named Mr. Alvarez, came to the door with a case of formula and a long, serious look. “Brett,” he said, “I hear you almost missed the most important job you will ever have. Do not miss it.” Brett nodded. Then Mr. Alvarez handed me a hundred dollar bill in an envelope and said it was for a massage, and he would hear no argument. The women from our church brought a casserole schedule that ran through the end of November.
The money consequences were firm. Brett sold his golf cart and the boat he had bought on a whim, and he took a second position, two evenings a week, teaching finance classes at the community college. He came home by nine and took the late feeding. Each month he put an envelope on the table, labeled with the date and the amount, until the twelve thousand dollars was whole again. On the day of the last envelope, he took me to dinner at the diner on Douglas Avenue, and we split a slice of pie, and neither of us said a word about money.
My grandfather Joe, who passed ten years ago, drove a milk truck in Sedgwick County for thirty four years and left a pint of cream on the porch of every mother who had a new baby. In his name, I started the Papa Joe Fund. It pays for a home cleaning, a week of meals and a night helper for mothers of multiples across Wichita. In the first season, we reached seventeen families. A mother of twins cried when the crew vacuumed her living room, and said it was the first time in two months that the floor had been visible.
The following summer, on a Saturday morning, I watched from the porch as my husband loaded the triple stroller. He strapped in the triplets, one, two, three, then clipped the leash to the collar of Biscuit and headed down the sidewalk at a slow, proud pace. At the park, he spread a blanket in the shade and set out three small plastic buckets, one for each child. They dug in the sandbox for an hour, and Brett dug beside them, up to his elbows. When I came to find him, he looked up at me with sand on his face. “I built something,” he said, and pointed to three lopsided castles.
