A/N: Here it is now, finally. The next chapter. Thank you, dear readers, for your patience.
Ch 56 – New Normal: Tony
After feeling Angela quake beneath his hands, Tony would have loved nothing more than to free himself of the confines of his pants, pull her onto his lap – legs trembling, cheeks and chest flushed crimson –, and make her melt around him once more.
She was so ready.
But she was also still healing, and pregnant, and about to fall asleep in his arms for the first time in two weeks.
He could wait. They would have many nights like this before the baby came. And even more after.
Her hand was on his leg, but he turned away from her, almost painfully hard. After a deep breath, he reached for the blanket and pulled it up to cover them.
"Not tonight."
A kiss on her lips, her hand closing around his fingers instead.
"We've got all the time in the world."
This was only the beginning.
ooooooooo
The following week, Angela went back to work, which Tony was equal parts glad and worried to see.
"Good morning," she said brightly on the first Monday, coming into the kitchen where Tony and the kids were already having breakfast.
"Morning," Jonathan mumbled into his oatmeal.
"Hey, Angela. You look nice," Sam said.
"Yeah, you do," Tony confirmed, and they kissed each other on the cheek before Angela sat down in front of her standard plate of dry toast.
Angela did look nice in a purple blouse and a pair of silver-gray slacks with a matching blazer, her open hair held back by a simple black band. But there was also an air of fragility about her that no manner of professional dress could disguise.
Tony felt a strong urge to protect her from something. From life itself.
Perhaps it was only natural. He tried to remember what it had been like when Marie was expecting Sam. But he had been on the road a lot of the time back then, trying to be seen, to impress the right people, to make his way into the Majors.
Every time he returned home after a few days, or sometimes a few weeks, Marie's belly had grown. He did remember that. The marvel, and also sometimes the bewilderment at all that what was going on with her. But somehow, he had never worried. And why should he have.
Aside from some pretty heavy morning sickness early on, Marie's pregnancy had been uneventful. As were most pregnancies in the neighborhood, at least as far as he knew. People had babies left and right, year after year. It was the way of life along Pitkin Avenue, and Tony and Marie were 19 years old, just starting out, with everything still ahead of them.
Now he was 36, and Marie was long gone, and he didn't want to appear overbearing, but couldn't always control himself.
"You take breaks whenever you need to, okay? You've got nothing to prove," he had asked Angela the night before.
"I know," she smiled at him in the dim light of her – of their – bedroom, her voice in a that deep, relaxed register that he loved. "But it is my business, and I do need to show my face."
"I get that. I just don't want you to overdo it. Promise?"
"I promise."
"Okay," he relented and leaned in for a kiss. "Your beautiful face."
"Tony," she admonished him, but didn't refuse his kiss, either.
"What? It's true. You have a beautiful face. And a beautiful … everything else."
Under the covers, his hand lifted the hem of her nightgown.
"We need to sleep," she protested, albeit not very convincingly. While her mouth was saying one thing, her body spoke a very different language.
"And we will," he whispered, his lips drawn back to hers as his hand began to explore down below. "In a minute."
With both of them slowly but surely on the mend from their injuries, they were once again increasingly powerless against the animal magnetism that had always existed between them.
Animal magnetism … Hearing himself think in such corny terms made Tony cringe, and it would have driven Professor Darnell up the wall.
But there was really no other way to describe it.
Over the past few days, Tony had gratefully begun to reacquaint himself with Angela's body. Her scent, how her skin felt under his fingertips, the softness of her curves, the sweet taste of her mouth and of the many other delicious parts of her – all of it made for a heady cocktail he just couldn't resist.
It would be a while still until they would be able to make love with the same carefree abandon as during the earliest days of their new relationship.
But they were well on their way.
ooooooooo
As the days went by and January turned into February, a welcome sense of normality set in.
He and Angela were still doing their best to show the kids that after their big fight, everything was now okay, and Sam and Jonathan seemed to have understood even without words of explanation. In all honesty, Tony wouldn't have known what to say.
At least Sam seemed to continue to adjust well. She was an absolute sweetheart, helping out wherever she could. Tony was proud of her for handling the impending changes with such maturity.
Sometimes, he did ask himself whether this might be the calm before the storm, if Eric had been a mere warning and there were further, more severe boy troubles in their future. Because who was he kidding! But for now, he chose to hope for the best, and to believe Sam when she told him or Angela that she was going out to meet her girlfriends at the mall.
Jonathan was a different story.
He spent a lot of time playing with his Nintendo or doing homework up in his room. None of his friends ever came over to the house, and Jonathan didn't seem to get invited anywhere. He wasn't especially chatty, and it seemed to Tony that he was actively avoiding situations that might lend themselves to conversation. It didn't sit well with him that they still hadn't had a good talk about everything.
If his knee continued to improve at the current rate, Tony hoped that he would be able to start working on the basement and on his old room in a few weeks' time. Trips to the hardware store and weekends spent together, tearing down wallpaper and building furniture, would hopefully give him and Jonathan the opportunity to talk man to man.
In the meantime, he tried to focus on the things he could do right now, especially for Angela.
He was proud of himself for having come up with the idea to put the ultrasound picture up on the door of the refrigerator, and it had felt good to place his very first college transcript right next to it a few days later.
Mona had walked in on him putting it there, and together, they had taken a step back to consider the ensemble. Eventually, she gently elbowed Tony in the side.
"And here you were, telling me all about how you can't handle change. Huh? I'd say you're doing alright.
ooooooooo
Tony did begin to feel that he was, indeed, doing alright.
At Ridgemont, he had finally settled on a set of required courses that interested him, and in which he felt he might perform at least as well as during his first semester. Kathleen was in none of them. Good, he caught himself thinking with some relief, and immediately felt bad.
The college campus was becoming a second home to him, just like he had hoped it would. If he couldn't be 18 years old again, a freshman living in the dorms, he at least wanted to feel like he belonged during the day.
It almost felt like being out and about back in the old neighborhood. College came with an everyday sense of community that, as Tony realized now, had been missing from his life for quite some time.
By now, many of the other freshmen knew him, and he knew them. "Hey, Tony!" they would shout from across the quad when they saw him coming, or "Yo! Micelli!", and he would shout back and go over to talk to them for a little while. Even though there was a considerable age difference, being in the same classes or having the same advisor gave them some common ground.
He even got invited to parties, but he never went. One disastrous frat party was more than enough for him, thank you very much. It felt right to return home to 3344 Oak Hills Drive late in the afternoon, to the woman he loved, and to their children.
Instead of the drunk tank, he and Angela spent their nights curled up on the couch together, as much as their injuries permitted, anyway. She always nodded off long before the ten o'clock news, her head on his shoulder or her feet in his lap.
Tony usually let her sleep for a while, lacking the heart to wake her up right away, and silently cursing the fact that he couldn't simply carry her up the stairs and into bed.
The only disappointment during these halcyon days of late January and early February 1989 was Tony's appointment with Career Services.
The counselor, who was the same age as him, seemed a little out of his depth, confronted with an older student of Tony's colorful background and – admittedly – diffuse ambitions for his professional future. The guy couldn't give him any concrete advice, but ended up recommending an aptitude test that a colleague of his was qualified to administer. Unfortunately, the colleague was on leave for all of spring semester and would not return until the fall.
Much to his surprise, Tony was mostly okay with waiting until then.
The simple, yet momentous act of quitting his job as Angela's housekeeper had put him more at ease than he had anticipated. Maybe it was because by quitting, he had somehow asserted himself, drawn a line where previously only blurry scribbles had existed. He owed Philly big time.
Granted, he was unemployed now. Or, to put it more charitably, a full-time student and a stay-at-home dad. Either way, he didn't earn any money.
But if he looked at it long and hard and was honest to himself, he had to admit: By investing his energy into his studies, into their family, and into the household, he was making the most valuable contribution he could. It didn't matter whether or not he liked it, whether it fed his pride or his ego – these were the facts.
Somewhere deep inside of him, a stubborn sense of satisfaction took hold, much like when he had decided to leave his life in Brooklyn behind so Samantha could grow up in a safer environment.
ooooooooo
It didn't take long, however, for Tony's inner peace to be disturbed again.
One Thursday evening, he and Mona went to the market for groceries. Mona was walking a few paces behind him, listlessly pushing a shopping cart, while he stalked up and down the aisles, pointing out which items they needed to buy.
Sure, she could have gone on her own, as she had before, in the early days after the accident. But it gave Tony a better feeling to come along. Just like her daughter, Mona couldn't be trusted to pick out the freshest produce, or even cans with acceptable expiration dates.
"Tony Micelli! Is that you? Wait up!" a woman's voice called after him in the frozen foods section, stopping Tony in his tracks.
"Oh, no!" Mona groaned, but there was no escape. Frozen pizza to their right, frozen meat to their left.
"Tony!" the voice huffed, louder now as its owner got closer. "And Ms. Robinson."
Tony and Mona turned around, resigned to their fate.
"Frances," Tony forced out from between gritted teeth.
"Ms. Martin," Mona acknowledged the other woman's presence.
"How are ya?" Frances asked, blunt and blustery as always, as she looked back and forth between them.
It wasn't that Tony didn't like her. But he also … didn't exactly like her.
"I heard you and your boss got in an accident!" Frances blurted right out, her tongue pushing against the inside of her cheek in jolly provocation.
Of course, she already knew everything. And predictably, she had a million additional questions as to how exactly the accident had come about, what Tony and Angela had been doing out in Brooklyn on a Friday night – together. And if it was true that kids, dressed as the Three Wise Men, had run into traffic and caused the massive pile-up? Also, how come police hadn't been able to apprehend a single one of the little devils? What about Tony's van? Oh, and did he think the scar on his forehead was permanent?
Tony did his best to answer truthfully, yet evasively – the best tactic when dealing with Frances, as he had learned over the course of their acquaintance.
"And that's it, really," he concluded, "wrong place, wrong time. You know how it can be." He smiled at Frances, hoping it looked disarming.
"Hmm," she made. "That's nice of her. Your friend in Brooklyn, I mean. Inviting you and Ms. Bower over for dinner. A bit unusual, I'll say that. But to each their own."
"What can I say. It's a tradition." By now, Tony' smile felt as frozen as the lamb chops in the freezer just behind Frances.
"Uh-huh," she said gravely. "Oh, speaking of traditions! You seem to have forgotten about ours, so here's your reminder: It's your turn to host, Micelli."
"To host-" At first, Tony didn't know what she meant.
"The kaffee klatsch*?" Frances blinked expectantly.
"Oh, right. Right, right. The kaffee klatsch …"
It came back to him. Tony hadn't attended the monthly get-togethers among the neighborhood housekeepers since the previous summer, having been too busy with school, and then also overwhelmed by everything that had evolved between him and Angela.
But now it looked like he would have to face the music. Or rather, the gossipers.
So far, nobody else knew that he wasn't Angela's housekeeper anymore. Not even the kids, or Mona. But he couldn't have the other housekeepers over and not tell them. That would be disingenuous.
Also, Frances had good instincts. He had to give the woman that. To this day, he could feel his pulse quicken when he thought of what she had asked him and Angela last spring, on the day the housekeepers' strike had ended.
'Just tell me one thing, flat-out – are you two sleeping together?'
There was no way Frances would come over to the house now and not be able to tell.
"So, are we on for two weeks from now?" Frances asked, snapping her fingers in front of Tony's face.
"Oh, yes, yes." Tony nodded. "I just remembered. Mona – we need to get some more, uh, brussels sprouts. It was nice running into you, Frances. Real nice!"
Then he patted Frances' shoulder and made to hobble away from her, in the direction of the produce section.
"No rest for the wicked!" Mona chirped and began to push the shopping cart past Frances.
"But brussels sprouts aren't even in season!" she called after them.
Mona did Tony the favor and waited until they were far away from Frances before sidling up to him, forearms resting on the handlebar of the shopping cart and an amused expression on her face.
"So. Looks to me like you and Angela are about to come clean to half the town in one afternoon."
"Yeah," he said, dazed.
ooooooooo
On the drive back home, Tony stared out the window, lost in thought.
It wasn't that he hadn't worried about how and when best to disclose the news of their relationship, of the upcoming wedding, and the new baby to all the people who knew them.
He had been unexpectedly bold on Christmas Day, taking Angela's hand when they were out on their afternoon walk. Anybody could have seen them.
But then they had had the accident, and their terrible fight, he had quit, … and then they had decided to let the dust settle. Which it had now been doing for more than three weeks.
Maybe it was time.
Angela was almost twelve weeks along, and sooner rather than later, even casual observers – or nosy neighbors – would be able to tell that there was a baby on the way at 3344 Oak Hills Drive. Not to mention the fact that she was wearing his engagement ring. That was bound to raise questions, too.
The kids had to know first, of course. Then Mona. The next PTA meeting was coming up, too. He could make an announcement there. And the housekeepers would take care of the rest of their neighborhood once he told them when they came over the week after Valentine's Day.
Or should they tell the neighbors ahead of time, to prevent the gossip mill from spreading the news? Maybe they could send a card, announcing their engagement. But then people might expect to be invited to the wedding. They didn't want that. Or did they?
The order probably didn't really matter, Tony rationalized with himself. People would talk one way or the other. But before they did, he wanted them to have their facts straight.
Theirs was a story about love and family, not about sex and scandal. It couldn't be that hard to make people see that, could it?
kaffee klatsch is a loan word inspired by the German 'Kaffeeklatsch', which can be literally translated as 'coffee gossip'. 'Klatsch' by itself means 'gossip', the implication behind 'Kaffeeklatsch' being that people (usually women) will sit around, drink coffee, eat cake and, well, gossip. ;) The housekeepers' get-together was referenced in the season 4 episode 'Housekeepers Unite', and Frances really did call it a 'kaffee klatsch'. I didn't make this up. ;)