1979
1979 would have been a good year.
January: Fabian would have gone home to Dorcas in the first few hours of the year, would have shaken the biting cold from the Newcastle streets out of his cloak, would have climbed in their warm bed and watched her sleep awhile, would have been grateful (he's grateful and relieved every time he comes home to her, it seems precious and lamentably fragile).
February: He would have cried in the shower, terrified tears overwhelming the dumb, blind joy he'd felt when Dorie had formed her mouth around the word 'father', her own voice lost somewhere.
March: There would be one day, one single day in a solid three weeks of rain that the sun would shine. It would have shone on his face and he would have reveled in life.
April: He would have brought Dorie lilacs on a rainy afternoon; she would have been weary of the April showers so he would have given her May flowers a few weeks early
May: He would have struggled through a wretched wedding rehearsal, interrupted halfway through with news of Benjy Fenwick's sad demise. They would've spent the night holding each other, wands in hand, waiting and fearing.
June: Dorie would have walked down the aisle, and Fabian would have thought she was heart-shatteringly beautiful, even despite her keening cries of the night previous over her empire-waist wedding dress and her swelling stomach and how fat her arms looked.
July: He would've seen Dorie turn twenty-six and teased her about being old until her moods swung and she cried like the sky was falling down in chunks of heavy blue. Then he would've let her eat the whole lemon meringue pie Molly had baked for her birthday and not peeped a single syllable of complaint.
August: Death would have hung around his doorstep, but it would never quite knock on the door. After a close brush, he would have rushed home to Dorie and tossed all night with the implications of what if…
September: He would have curled up on the settee with Dorcas one evening and scratched her back. She would have sighed out a casual, meaningful 'I love you' and smile at him with such a lazy contentment and he would've been seized with a rush of mad, powerful, enveloping love for his wife and the baby performing aerobics in her stomach.
October: He would have loved his firstborn son with an immediate and heart-straining intensity. Would have named him Nathaniel Adam Prewett and marveled at the way he could see Dorie so clearly in their son.
November: Fabian would have turned thirty and instead of going out, they would have stayed in with their new son and passed out on the settee five minutes after they put him to bed.
December: Six-months-pregnant Molly would have had a Christmas dinner with her youngest brother and their families, cooed over Nate, and threatened to beat a seven-year-old Charlie with her broom for 'careless misuse' of his toy broomstick around the baby.
It would have been a good year. Fabian would have been happy, would have loved, would have been loved.
Would have been grateful for every day.
But the world cares nothing for gratitude or possibilities, and Fabian Prewett dies in back-alley Newcastle a few minutes shy of the new year.