The Greenhouse

Fifty-six

It’s been three days since the girls fell unexpectedly into my life, so to speak, and this is the first time we’re going out together with the child in the carriage. We have a specific mission: I’m going to show the mother of my child where the library is. Anna has changed the carriage into a stroller and we alternate pushing it. Our daughter is in her flowery yellow dress and has a ribbon in her hair. People are staring at us so I feel like announcing to everyone that we’re not a couple and that just because we’re taking our child for a stroll doesn’t mean that we sleep together, that this is just a temporary setup.

The library is beside the café, but before Anna dives back into her science, we sit down at one of the three tables on the sidewalk, facing each other with the stroller between us. I put on the brake while Anna adjusts our daughter, ties the laces that have come loose around her hat, and hands the child a strawberry, which she immediately shoves into her mouth. An older couple is sitting at the next table, and I hear the man say he’ll have the same thing his wife is having. Is that the sign of a successful relationship? Ordering the same thing? Should I also say I’ll have the same thing that Anna, the mother of my child, is having? I practice several potential answers in the local dialect in my mind; the onus is on me to speak for both of us, since I’m the one who’s been living in the village for two months.

— One coffee, says Anna, smiling at the owner.

— Same for me, I say.

My daughter claps her hands in excitement and parrots my last syllable.

If the owner of the café asks me straight out if she’s my girlfriend, I’ll deny it.

— Is that your girlfriend?

But he doesn’t.

Before the owner goes in for the coffees, he stoops over the child, doting over her, and then gently pinches her cheek and pats her on the head. People seem to be very child-friendly here; practically no one leaves the child alone. And the men have been eyeing up Anna, too, I can’t help noticing. I also realize that the child attracts less attention when her mother is with her. I have mixed feelings about this, even though, just a few minutes ago, I was worried that people might think we were a couple.

The man who is squatting on the steps of the library is staring at Anna so intensively that it’s almost rude, I feel like telling him to stop it. Instead I lift my daughter out of the stroller and sit her on my knee by the table. She’s all fidgety, but doesn’t touch the coffee cups. I stick the pacifier in her but she spits it right out. She tries to stand on my knees, and I lift her up so that she can see all around her. She waves at the man on the steps and he waves back. Then I try putting her on the empty chair beside me, let her sit on her own chair between us parents, with her head just about reaching over the edge of the table. We both look at her proudly, the parents; inside my head I’m turning into the father of a little child. Her mother smiles at me. I hope the guy on the library steps also noticed the smile. This is how my new life comes into being, this is how the reality of it is created.