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Hannah wasn't lying to the new guy. There is something about those Midwestern boys that draws her in, even after six years in the city. Of course, now they aren't giving her much of a second look, but she knows that will change again in a few more months.
She finishes her third lunch shift of the week and grabs her bag before heading out the door. "Bye, guys!" Hannah calls cheerfully.
"Put those feet up!" Madison replies from the storage room. "I swear your midwife is negligent."
"You still don't look like a midwife!" Hannah retorts, swinging the strap over her shoulder and shaking her head. Her feet aren't swollen, she's not even twenty years old, and her midwife says she's perfectly fine to continue working.
The subway ride's a good chance to catch up on the latest assignments that have been posted, anyway, and she stops to get a smoothie before picking up some Thai for an afternoon snack. Put her feet up? Maybe. Eat plenty? Definitely.
Steve rapidly becomes one of her favorite servers to talk with, especially if they're both working a weekday lunch, which tends to run hot then cold the entire shift. On Wednesdays, Hannah doesn't go home, instead heading towards an evening seminar on the business of restaurants that usually threatens to put her to sleep.
She's halfway through her shift one Wednesday when she realizes she left her bag for school at home, and sighs, frustrated.
"What's wrong?" Steve asks.
"I brought the wrong bag with me. It's Wednesday, so I have a seminar after work." Hannah shakes her head. "I'll have to text and see if one of them can bring it to me."
"One of them?"
"My brothers," Hannah continues. "I've lived with them for several years, since I moved here, actually."
"Oh, okay." Steve nods.
"They finished raising me, really." Hannah grins ruefully. "I don't think it was easy. They'd only been married for a couple of years, first year of grad school, and then my mom dies and congratulations on your new teenager!" She laughs. "I didn't necessarily make it easy, either, at least not for awhile. That's partially why I offered to be a surrogate for them." Steve's eyes widen a little, and Hannah wonders briefly if no one explained to him that she wasn't having her own kid.
She does get a text back from Kurt that of course he'll bring her bag, and does she want him to grab her anything else? 'Anything else' is pretty much an invitation for any sort of food that she could possibly desire, which means Hannah ponders her answer carefully. She finally sends back that she'd love a couple of scones for during class, and a milkshake and hamburger when he arrives.
Shift's over and Hannah's in the break room chatting with Steve when Kurt arrives. "Bag, scones, hamburger, and milkshake," he announces each item, smiling at her, and then he glances over at Steve and does a double take. "Sam?" He stops and shakes his head. "No, sorry, of course you aren't. I'm sorry, you just look so much like an old friend of mine."
"No worries," Steve replies, smiling. "I get that a lot, being called Sam. My older brother's name is Sam."
Kurt tilts his head, and then gives Hannah a strange look. "Hannah, you didn't tell us who 'Steve' was."
"He's a new server?" Hannah replies, confused, and she exchanges a perplexed glance with Steve.
"Steve, your last name is Evans, perhaps?"
"Hey, how'd you know that?"
Kurt laughs. "Steve, did you and your family live in Ohio when you were younger?"
"Yeah, town called Lima."
Hannah gasps. "Oh my god, Stevie?"
"Wait." Steve— Stevie— blinks at them both. "Wait, Hannah? Hannah Puckerman?"
Hannah laughs. "This is like some bad television show plot! You guys moved to Canton in the middle of eighth grade!"
"And then to Indiana a year and a half later, yeah," Steve nods. "We were in Lima for a couple of weeks on our way over. I looked for you, actually, but."
"Like I said, Mom died. It was just a few months after you left, May of eighth grade," Hannah says. "I stayed with Burt and Carole for a couple of months, back in Lima, until Kurt and Noah moved to a bigger place. Went to high school here in the city." She shrugs. "Haven't really been back for very long since then."
"Damn," Steve breathes. "That's— just. And we work at the same place!"
Kurt's laughing, and Hannah shoots him a glare. "What's so funny?"
"I just can't wait to tell Noah!" he manages. "Here he thought…" He trails off, still laughing. "It's just amusing, is all." He looks vaguely conspiratorial, a look Hannah's come to recognize. "Stevie—sorry, Steve—would you be willing not to mention this small coincidence to your older brother?"
"Does it involve surprising him with it sometime later? I'm always up for a little good-natured humiliation of Mr. Abulous."
It takes a couple of weeks of snatched conversation for Hannah and Stevie to catch up on what they’ve done since they last saw each other in the middle of eighth grade. Hannah slides back into calling him Stevie without a second thought, and Stevie grins and doesn’t object.
Two more weeks pass, comparing their current living situations (Stevie’s in a shoebox-size NYU dorm), their career plans (nurse-practitioner for Stevie, which surprises Hannah for approximately ten seconds before she realizes that, no, it’s perfect for him), and the other things beyond ‘favorite television show’ that their previous conversations had more or less been limited to.
“We should go see that movie opening on Friday,” Stevie says one Wednesday. “The one supposedly set in Ohio.”
Hannah nods, not looking up from stirring. “Yeah, that’d be good. Do you work Friday?”
“Clinicals, but just until four. You?”
“I’ll be done here at three. I bet there’s a seven o’clock showing.”
“I’ll get us tickets, then.” Hannah looks up in time to see Stevie grin and then head back out of the kitchen. “It’s a date,” he says over his shoulder, and Hannah presses her lips together, trying not to laugh. That’s one way to make sure she’ll say yes, she supposes, waiting until she’s agreed before he labels it. She’s not going to argue, though.
Instead, she goes home after her shift ends at three on Friday, takes a nap, then takes a shower and changes clothes before taking the subway to meet Stevie at the movie theatre. The movie turns out to have been shot somewhere that is decidedly not Ohio, and as soon as it ends, they go for a late dinner and spend two hours dissecting just how badly the movie depicted Ohio.
It’s the first Friday night that they spend together, or the first one since 2016, and Hannah realizes a few weeks later that her weeks are developing a distinct pattern. They both have schoolwork and work, and Stevie has his clinical shifts, but Friday nights and a few hours on Sunday nights are times they have free, and without really thinking about it, Hannah starts to assume that’s how she’ll spend her Friday and Sunday nights.
“How’s your boyfriend?” Ana teases her one night, and Hannah rolls her eyes.
“We’re— okay, I guess we are dating. I don’t know. It’s more like we fell right back into our old friendship, just with added intimacy.”
“That sounds like dating.” Ana shrugs. “He doesn’t mind the whole pregnancy thing?”
“Actually, he’s probably one of the few guys I could find in the entire city who would get it. I mean, he knew Kurt and Noah, years ago. Stevie still lived in Lima when the two of them got married, and he knew Mom, too. I think he may secretly be looking up stuff like ‘psychological adjustment post-surrogacy’, sure, but otherwise, no.”
“Good,” Ana says firmly. “Mama wants to meet him, though. She said to bring him to dinner on Sunday. I don’t know what she’s making, but definitely tostones.”
Hannah grins. “I love tostones.”
As the end of the pregnancy comes within sight, Hannah starts making her way home earlier on Sunday nights, which is the only reason she’s at home when labor starts. The birth isn’t what she expects, in that she’s done, checked out, showered, and asleep by two am, Ana squeezed in a sleeping bag on the floor. She wakes up to pump, but doesn’t leave the bedroom until close to ten, and that’s how she actually meets Harvey.
Ana’s offer to spend a few days at their apartment still stands, and Ana and Nina have even offered to ferry the milk back to the Upper West Side. Hannah’s not sure what she wants to do, even after she meets Harvey. She doesn’t really have the sense that she’s anything other than his aunt, which is exactly what she wanted and exactly what she thought would happen. When she goes to get some food, though, and listens to Kurt, Noah, Finn, and Eliza with Harvey, that’s when she decides to go. Not for her, but for them.
They’re all clearly besotted, except for Eliza, who seems slightly dubious and a bit glad that she doesn’t have to sleep in the same apartment as the brand-new baby. And while she knows they wouldn’t mind her being around, she also thinks that it’s one more thing she can give them, a few uninterrupted days before people start flying in. Since the brit shalom will probably be on Memorial Day, she suspects they could have Ohio-based guests as early as Friday, which isn’t very long before Kurt and Noah have to play host.
Ana helps her pack everything, and they’re about to leave when Hannah realizes it’s time to pump again. She pumps, they hurriedly wash the pump and pack the parts, and then head to Ana’s. Hannah has to laugh; they’re barely there for any length of time before it’s time to pump again. Eventually her supply will even out, or so she’s read, and she won’t have to pump so often, but she can’t justify some slight inconvenience keeping her from pumping, not when the biological benefits to Harvey and herself as well are so clear.
Hannah’s right; Nana flies in Friday morning; Burt, Carole, and Audrey get in late Friday night; and Beth and Shelby arrive on Saturday morning. Finn has all of them in suites at the Hotel Beacon, and Hannah goes to stay with Nana while she’s there. The brit shalom is beautiful, Hannah feels smug about it, and Rachel is absolutely awful about it, which doesn’t actually surprise Hannah at all. By the time six weeks have passed since Harvey’s birth, Hannah feels good and doesn’t look like she’s had a baby, and is missing Stevie, since he’s spending part of the summer in Indiana with the rest of his family.
“It’s time to start looking,” Ana announces at the beginning of August. The two of them are sitting under a tree, eating ice cream and generally looking more like fifteen year olds than twenty year olds.
“For?” Hannah asks. “A job, a purpose in life, a boyfriend for you?”
“Ha!” Ana sticks her tongue out. “An apartment. Duh. And I thought you had a job.”
“I do.” Hannah sighs. “But it’s part-time, and I’ve worked there for three years, Ana. I feel like I’ve learned most of what it has to teach me. I really wish I could find two jobs. One lunch shift, one dinner shift, two different kinds of restaurants.”
“And maybe one of them, at least, should be near our new apartment.”
“Where we’re going to find you a boyfriend.”
“Fine.” Ana sighs. “But let’s talk about an apartment. I started looking and talking to people. We’re going to have to get out of Manhattan.”
“I don’t want to live in Brooklyn, though,” Hannah says quickly. “Or Queens. It takes forever to get to and from there, and my entire family’s in Manhattan.”
“No, no. No Brooklyn. The Bronx.”
“The Bronx. Huh.” Hannah shrugs a little. “I didn’t think about the Bronx.”
“No one seems to.” Ana grins. “That’s why we can get a good-sized apartment that we can actually afford.”
“Yeah?”
“And the 2 connects us to Manhattan. And there are some restaurants. Different restaurants, not just American or French.” Ana giggles. “But there’s always Italian.”
“Isn’t there?” Hannah snorts. “Always a pizza place, always an Italian restaurant.” That was one of the first things they’d had repeated ad nauseam in high school. By the end of their freshman year, they were expected to know how to prep and cook the most common entrees at Italian restaurants, plus make a good pizza dough. “Anything really different?”
“Bangladeshi, West Indian, Ethiopian,” Ana rattles off. “But I have dibs on the deli that makes its own pickles. You should have Jewish food mastered anyway.”
“Does that mean I get dibs on the Puerto Rican restaurants?” Hannah asks.
“Absolutely. So we’re going to look at one apartment tomorrow.”
Hannah laughs. “That was fast.”
“It looks perfect. Two bedrooms, in our budget, as good of a kitchen as we’re going to get, a big enough living room to have parties. If we get lucky, we can move in after your Stevie’s back, so we have an extra pair of hands.”
“Are you kidding?” Hannah shakes her head. “I’m pretty sure Finn would be offended if we implied we needed anyone else to help us move.”
The apartment Ana has them tour turns out to be as close to perfect as Hannah thinks they can find. They sign the lease, then pick up the keys one Thursday, with plans to move on Saturday and Sunday. On Friday morning, Noah tells her to tell Ana to meet them at Columbus Circle in an hour. When they get there, Noah, Kurt, and Finn announce that they’re supposed to go in Williams-Sonoma and get “whatever you need,” followed by a trip to Ikea with the same instructions.
The result is that Hannah’s pretty sure they have the best-stocked kitchen in the Bronx, especially when she adds in the Zabar’s shopping trip and a few other trips. Ikea delivers on Saturday, they get almost everything moved on Saturday and the rest Sunday morning, and on Sunday afternoon, Hannah goes out to LaGuardia to meet Stevie’s plane from Indianapolis.
“How’d the moving go?” Stevie asks.
“I have Noah and Finn hanging things, and Kurt directing them.”
Stevie laughs. “So moderately well, then.”
“Everything’s there. You want to see it tonight or do you need to settle in?”
“Oh, let’s go see it,” Stevie says, slipping his hand into hers. “You did say you got a new bed.”
“I am not breaking it in with everyone there!” Hannah protests. “Admittedly, I’m already more familiar with certain aspects of their lives than most people know about their older brothers.”
“See? Consider it payback.” Stevie grins and laughs as they hail a cab. “I guarantee that they’ll be more uncomfortable than you.”
“Stevie!” Hannah laughs along with him, shaking her head. “What if one of them decides to cheer us on instead?”
“Well, if Finn decides it’s theatre…” Stevie trails off. “I bet it could happen.”
“I don’t even know what to say,” Hannah manages.
When they get back to the apartment, most of the things Hannah and Ana want on the walls are actually on the walls. “Hey, Stevie,” Noah says, jumping out of the way of the door as Hannah opens it. “Hey, Hannah.”
“Hi,” Stevie says, nodding and looking around.
“Platypus-face, you still here?” Hannah calls.
“Puck, you’d better put a muzzle on that chihuahua before the neighbors complain!” Finn calls back.
“You better not have hung my pictures upside down!” Hannah threatens, even though she can see they aren’t.
“Hey, Kurt, Finn,” Stevie says. “Hi, Ana?” he calls questioningly.
“Bedroom! Hi!”
“How’s the family?” Finn asks, walking back into the room. “Sam and Mercedes made it official yet, or are they still ‘not really seeing each other’?”
“Oh, there’s nothing official, but I know someone who has a ticket to every single Dolphins game,” Stevie says, grinning at Finn.
“Ooh, is it me?” Finn asks. “’Cause, that’s awfully nice of you, if so.”
“You’d need to be about a foot shorter, sing higher, and really hit the spray tan place.”
Finn frowns theatrically. “So… not me, then.”
“You’ll survive, darling,” Kurt says, walking out of the kitchen holding a bottle. “Did you want to do this?” he asks Finn.
“Feed Harley Davidson the Motorbaby?” Finn holds his hand out for the bottle. “Twist my arm.”
Kurt shakes his head and hands the bottle to Finn, and Stevie looks at Hannah quizzically. “Motorbaby?” he mouths, and Hannah just grins and shakes her head, too. Finn sits down on the floor and picks up Harvey, proceeding to feed him.
“Oh, hey, he got a lot bigger!” Stevie says.
“I’ve accused K of slipping him growth hormone,” Noah says with a laugh. “But it could be Finn.”
“I’m feeding him pudding when they aren’t around,” Finn says.
“Of course you are,” Kurt agrees.
“Hannah’s going to show me her bedroom now,” Stevie announces.
“Stevie, I am going to kill you,” Hannah hisses, but she walks with him towards her bedroom anyway.
“That was definitely more than I need to know,” Noah says, wincing. “I’m going to the kitchen.”
“All of you, killing all of you,” Hannah mutters. “Just… see yourselves out, when you’re done.”
The Bronx turns out to be much nicer than most of Manhattan would have had Hannah believe, prior to living there, and she finds herself extolling its virtues to some of her coworkers at her Manhattan-based job. Stevie’s clinicals are all in Manhattan, of course, as are his classes, but they manage to work around their various schedules to see each other. The entire semester feels like it’s falling into a pattern, really, and it’s a pattern Hannah likes.
Even though she’s done with school, unless she decides to pick up and go to Le Cordon Bleu at some point, she still feels like she’s learning, which is why she wanted the two part-time jobs instead of one full-time job. It’s fun, too, and she’s satisfyingly tired at the end of the days that she works both, which is four out of seven days. Two more days with only a shift at one or the other, and Thursdays completely free. Stevie has clinicals on Thursday mornings, so Hannah sleeps in and then meets him for lunch when he’s done, and they spend the rest of Thursdays together, sometimes in his dorm, sometimes at her apartment, and sometimes out watching movies or doing other things.
The bit of distance from Manhattan gives her an interesting perspective, she likes to think: watching Finn with Eliza, avoiding Rachel but waiting for the new baby; Kurt and Noah talking to Harvey about ‘Dad’, but not, so far, in front of Finn; all three of them, all five-nearly-six of them, waiting. Almost, Hannah decides, like there’s some kind of signal or timer that they’re looking for, as if they know exactly what it is. She doesn’t herself, but as long as they do.
“Your family’s interesting,” Stevie says the night they’re at Finn’s, de-vegan-ifying Rachel’s kosher vegan kitchen and listening for Eliza on the off chance she wakes up while her mom’s having the baby. “Not bad, just interesting.”
Hannah grins and nods. “Noticed that, did you? I mean, I don’t remember ever being what people think of as normal. Zeke was never around, and I’m glad. But I guess we do bring new meaning to non-traditional.”
“How close are Kurt, Noah, and Finn?”
“Oh. Ohh.” Hannah starts to giggle. “I don’t know why I assumed that you had deciphered that. Well. You remember when Finn was playing at Wisconsin, and then in Chicago?”
“Yeah.” Stevie nods. “Everybody in Lima talked about it.”
“It wasn’t just Lima. Rachel was… an arrangement. A beard, if you will. I still don’t know exactly what happened, because it’s not my relationship, but that’s a really unhappy marriage. They want him home with them, he wants to be home with them and the kids, but everyone’s stuck for now how it is.” Hannah shrugs. “Rachel may or may not think Finn’s having an affair with Kurt, but she definitely doesn’t get the entire thing, and some people do know, but it’s like this weird open secret thing.”
“That’s confusing.”
“Tell me about it.” Hannah rolls her eyes. “The first time they told me about it, they hadn’t found the word ‘triad’, so Noah asks me if I’d ever heard of a threesome!”
“How old were you!”
“Not quite fourteen.” Hannah smiles sadly. “It was actually the best thing about that day. It’s funny how I remember so much, even before they came to school. I remember getting in an argument with two of the guys in our social studies class, and I remember wishing you hadn’t moved. And I was excited they were all three there, until I got to the office, and then I knew something was wrong. They didn’t feel like they had any choice but to tell me, though, not when I started asking who was sleeping where in the hotel room!”
Stevie starts laughing. “Okay, yeah, that might’ve been a little awkward.”
“Oooh, but Carole, if she knew.” Hannah shakes her head. “Now you’re all briefed for the next big get together.”
“I’ll understand all the dynamics better, at Thanksgiving next year,” Stevie agrees, and Hannah smiles, lying down with her head in Stevie’s lap. It’s not even the middle of December; Thanksgiving 2024 is almost an entire year away. So much can happen in a year, and the fact that Stevie plans to be there is definitely something to smile about.