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rottinglilys · 9 days ago

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2020

beneath the boardwalk, part 18 (series masterlist)

perfect sense

warnings: i ain't spoiling this shit

word count: 14k

Winter was an open-stretched yawn, mouth hanging open, jaw locked in place. No bite to the bark. Alex and I had been at my father’s since Christmas Eve Eve, and it was now Alex’s 34th birthday, which he was spending running errands at the behest of my father. Every time he returned, my father seemed to have a new task for him. “Oh, Alex, did you not get (fill in the blank)?”

Then, he had been charged with setting up a handle for the shower, which I suggested should be done by a professional, but my father said, “But I want to take a shower tonight, Janie.” Sickness is the reversion of an adult back into a whining child.

Alex, who had never held a drill before, and I, who had the impatience and temper that made me scream at IKEA furniture, set up the shower handle. “The guy isn’t bedridden and has a stool in here. Can’t Pat just shower with him or something?” I complained to Alex as we struggled to figure out how to use a stud finder.

His laughter echoed off the shower walls. “I think he just wants to feel he can still do things on his own.”

I sighed, “I know. What if you miss the spot and this whole house comes tumbling to the ground?”

“I’m not gonna miss the spot,” he insisted as he lined the drill up.

“Mhmm, sure.”

He stared up at me. “Do I usually miss the spot?”

“Didn’t you hammer your thumb once?”

“Says the girl that once had to get stitches from stabbing scissors through a sheet of paper.”

“I was 8.” I was trying to cut a hole in the center. It ended unsuccessfully, clearly.

“I’m the one holding the drill.” He held it up in the air, pressing down on the trigger, allowing it to emit a loud noise through the air. He was a complete dork. “I’ll be doing the drilling.”

I crossed my arms. “Alright. I’ll be in the other room doing some drilling of my own.”

He playfully furrowed his brows. “With your dad?”

“Shut up.”

Harper made Alex a cake because she’s the homemaker type who can make a house a home. She and her family, as well as Greg and his family, were staying at a nearby hotel, while Alex, Stacey, Paul, and I were staying in the extra rooms here. There were some privileges to not having kids; however, my father had become a child of his own.

My father was in hospice, although he could still care for himself relatively well, and had Pat, the new girlfriend, to assist. It was clear in the coming weeks that more assistance would be required. We were trying to get ahead of the needed tools, hence the shower handle.

Harper’s cake, a vanilla cake with chocolate frosting, and Alex’s birthday put a little excitement into an otherwise depressing winter. Alex deserved all the love in the world for putting up with my family for the entirety of this time and electing to celebrate his birthday here, in this depressing little world, rather than London or Sheffield. He said it’s because he needed a taste of Harper’s cake, but I knew it was all for me, for me.

My father used to eat the biggest slice of cake, but he now struggled to swallow more than a few bites of the sugar-ridden thing. A picture was taken that would be the only photo of the whole family together, partners and children included.

Everyone was talking about how nice the day had been. Greg said something about the sun being positioned perfectly, an odd statement from a generally unpoetic guy.

As Alex moved to go to the bathroom, my father took his arm, whispering words to him that were unheard by the rest of the table. They shook hands like two civil, loving men. Alex left for the bathroom, and my father waved me off for staring and said, “Don’t be rude, Jane.”

I held my hands up before moving to take the dirty dishes into the kitchen. Later, I was joined by Alex carrying in empty glasses as I waited for the faucet water to run warm. “What did he tell you?”

“Mhmm?” He hummed a curious sound, not looking at me, making headway for the dishwasher.

“My dad, when he pulled you aside, what was he saying?”

He took a deep inhale, loading the dishwasher before formulating a thought, only able to do one at a time. He then came over to me, leaning his back against the counter before me, like we were casually talking while washing up dinner. But I couldn’t move because Alex was being intentional with his words, which meant whatever my father had said had affected him in a deep sort of way.

“He thanked me. For everything.” He was emotional. I didn’t have the right to know what they said. It had been an unusually deep conversation for my father, for which I did not have the right to be privy to. “You know, the shower. Very nice. Very nice.”

He averted his eyes, and I smiled over at him, simply pleased by the sight of him. “He doesn’t do that often.” I sighed and turned the water off, giving up on the work. “I hate this. I want to go home. I feel like I’m suffocating in here.”

He came closer to me and soothed my tension with a hand on my back. “We can leave right now if you want to. Drive right back and be home before midnight.”

I shook my head. “We can’t do that. I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you want to do?”

Want, what a relief to hear that word. “Nothing. I want…I want to be someone else. I want it to be a fun birthday for you and this is all just depressing.”

“Hey, I don’t give a fuck about my birthday. I loved this.”

“Don’t humour me. I want you to be mean to me. Say something rude. I want to fight. Something to get my mind off this nonsense. Tell me I’m ugly or something.”

He laughed because how could he not, I was basically forcing a gun to his head. “I’m not telling you you’re ugly, Janie.”

“Then, finger me in the bathroom. Let’s do something wild.”

His mouth dived into the curve of my neck and he rumbled a laugh while flicking his tongue over the sliver of skin. “Nice try.” He squeezed my side and I felt so aroused so quickly I could’ve spontaneously combusted. “You get all the head on my birthday.”

I tugged on his belt. “I’ll give you head. I’ll give it right here if you want.” I might have entered a psychotic state. I hadn’t been sleeping much.

He snorted, tipping his head back. When he returned, levelled to me, he was warm in his eyes, holding a sticky sweetness in them. I could’ve dipped a finger in his iris for a taste of honey. His touch slipped down to the tips of my hands, lancing our fingers. “You want to get married?”

“What?” I doubled. “Now?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I guess we can’t get a license and all that, but we could act it out. Like a playground wedding.” I shrugged. “Everyone’s already here.”

I bumped my chest into his. “But it’ll be so embarrassing.” I was coloured a beet red down to the soles of my feet.

His laughter would indicate this was all a big joke, which it was to us, but we would still do it. Alex and I have still never gotten a marriage license, so technically we aren’t married, but we are. Whatever that means to you, but it means this to us.

“Yeah, but your discountenance for it makes me want to do it even more.” He gathered me in his arms, practically scooping me up. “I know I can be a pain, but come on, bite the bullet.”

“You know it’s not the You part of it that makes me not want to do it,” I told him. “You’re already my husband in every sense except the ceremonial sense.”

“Do it for me then. In the backyard with those stupid lights Harper made me put up. Or here in the kitchen. I like the lightning here.”

He was an entire mountain and I was the snow that lay upon him, melting and hardening into him. He was a firefly I had caught in the backyard of Will’s mother’s garden. Or the moon, simply the moon.

His face was the incandescent whole of my past, present, and future. He was the center of me, the only thing holding this mess together. I didn’t want to cry because that would be cheesy, and how could I, effectively getting married in the middle of my father’s kitchen, cry?

Alex held his palm to one of my cheeks and kissed the other. “Yeah,” he said, clearly aware that I couldn’t speak. I was frozen, hoping the moment would freeze alongside me. “I’m good with here if you’re good with it.”

I hugged him, wanting to hold him, and wanting him to hold me. We swayed back and forth for a minute. I detached myself from him. “Say something real cheesy now.”

“Like what? Do you want me to do the chicken dance?” We cracked in a lachrymose laughter. “I do, Janie. And all that.”

“Okay.” I pursed my lips to hold my sobs inward.

He nudged me. “And you?”

I nearly gave way to turning away from the tenderness of the situation, bubbling enough to erupt, and destroy the whole of the United Kingdom, the debris spreading to take out the whole of Europe. Ireland wouldn’t make it either. I was close to shouting something like ‘I don’t!’ or ‘That’s terrible!’ but I thought if this was my wedding, if we were getting married right now in the eyes of God or Buddha or just ourselves, then what a terrible way to declare my love for a man, a boy, a person, Alex by shouting these things at him, especially when he looked softer than I’d ever seen him.

But what could I say to measure up to him, looking like that, saying, I do to me, to Janie. And all that, encompassing a world we had shared together. I didn’t have words to give him. I wanted him to feel weak in the knees like I did at just the quiver of his lip. “Does he know what that does to me?” I thought.

I thought the same thing when I was 17, begging him to kiss me. Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me. I don’t think I was even a person before him. I couldn’t imagine myself full-formed without him. It was an unimaginable fever dream. I began and ended with him.

At the moment, I couldn’t think of anything, at a loss for words completely, other than “Love you.”

At that, he split in two. I saw it. His shoulders dropped, and I realized how nervous he had been that I was going to turn him down, spout some hate about how ridiculous this was. I knew I had been hard to handle, always, but especially during the last few months. He cupped my face on both sides. He didn’t want me to move away from him. I gave myself over in an act that any other situation, I would say was a transformation into a Stepford wife, except this. I could never make fun of this.

His lips touched mine. A second, a minute, or could’ve been an hour, unsure, unlikely, but possible. He broke away a millimeter, whispering into me, “Love you too.” It was mouth-to-mouth. He was breathing for both of us.

He moved further, not away from me, but enough to see the look in my eyes, deducing, and finally accepting with a smile. “So…is that it?”

I huffed laughter. “Don’t act so disappointed.”

He gave a quick stroke to my cheek, a wipe to a stray tear. “Never,” he promised. It was the seal on the back of an envelope. “Should I go around calling you my wife now, or would that make you vomit?”

I wrapped my arms around his neck. A holding hug was more affectionate to me than any longing makeout session. “Depends. Like when you get hit on by someone and you say, ‘I’m not sure my wife would take very kindly to this.’ That’s hot. But talking to me like ‘Get dinner ready, wife.” That’s reason enough for divorce.”

He pulled back to bump his nose against mine, a full grin covering his face. “I’d never trust you with dinner.”

Footsteps neared the kitchen, making us pull away from one another like we would be caught having an affair with one another, two sparks flying away. I returned to the sink, making friends with the dishes. “What a way to say ‘Just married.’” Alex noted.

I violently shushed him. He just chuckled and leaned on the counter beside me, stuffing his hands into his pockets. He was the cutest husband ever. Greg walked in, and he’s about as unperceptive a person can get.

The news of our kitchen wedding slowly spilled out. To most people, we said we had a quick courthouse wedding, something that was only becoming trendy and less alarming, although Greg did ask if I was pregnant.

To my father, I told him that evening. Every night, I was increasingly terrified he wouldn’t make it through the night. I slipped into his bedroom before he turned the lights out, asking if he needed anything before we went to bed.

He grunted a no and sank into bed, shutting his eyes.

I knelt at his bedside and grabbed his hand. “Dad, Alex and I are married.”

He lifted one eyelid. “Since when?”

“After dinner, in the kitchen.”

“Is this some reference I’m supposed to know?”

“No,” I laughed, “just something we’re doing.”

“Pft, a new way. I don’t get it.”

“That’s fine.”

“Better way to do it. I should’ve never gotten married.” I was prepared to let the comment slip. I felt no need to tell a man on his deathbed, ‘No regrets!’ But he corrected himself, “No, that’s not true. I liked being married. It’s the second-best thing a man can do. No, third. Children are second. First is…”

“What?”

“Know how to use a drill.”

We chuckled together. He beamed with pride at this joke. “Did the shower handle fall off?”

“No, no,” he said. “He did an alright job. It’s uneven, but I’ll give the guy a few practice swings.”

Before we left my father’s home, I placed a sealed envelope in Alex’s bag, containing the following handwritten letter:

It is late, and you’re not awake, so I’ll write all I’m thinking here. It’ll come out better than what I say aloud. I found I’ve been reduced to my unfortunate speaking habits when I talk to you. It’s too hard to formulate everything I want to say when you look at me the way you do. I want you to experience all the joys I get from looking at you and it breaks my heart that you’ll never get to experience feeling you the way I feel you, but I feel I might be the luckiest soul alive that I’m the only one who gets to feel this way. I have likely reused “feel” an overwhelming amount, but this, after all, is a letter about how I feel.

During this period of my life, I’m stuck thinking about death more than I ever want to. I’m thinking of waking up one morning without my father, and I know it’ll come soon. Tonight I lie awake thinking of waking up one morning without you. I don’t mean to bog you down with thoughts of your own death, but I know you know I can’t help but see things this way lately. Sometimes, I have survived aimlessly in this world in the sole thought that you are out there breathing. I don’t think I will survive the day that ends.

I don’t wish to discuss this topic anymore, so I will be awkwardly switching it here, as is my fashion.

Do you ever wish I wrote about you the way you have written about me? I tried once, back in the early years, I’m not sure which one, but I hoped to write something that would make people shout for it the way they did for “Mardy Bum.” It’s the adult experience that I have only now found appreciation for those songs. I spent years wishing to feel for them the way other people did. My proximity to them was too close at the time. Every time I heard it, I thought about that fight. Now, I still think of that fight, but with a longing to be fighting again. I went to relive all we have done again.

I’ll spend a lifetime living in the past, but I’d like to have you join me there, too. I hope this note can be somewhat of a building block to reach your tower of love notes, songs, and words. I have tried to think of declarations of love that could measure up to yours. During those times, I found myself simply comparing my words to yours, and until now, I didn’t realize it’s not about measuring up against you. I suffer from the competitive comparison game, but there’s nothing to compare. We share this feeling so I don’t have to tell you about every way I feel inside and out because I know you feel exactly the same.

But in case you ever need reminding because I can be awful sometimes, the worst maybe, I want you to have this, just as I have your songs, heart, e-mails, notes, and a load of other nonsense that I kept for years, despite the ephemera having no value to anyone, except me, and maybe you too.

I’ve never been good at poetry. I feel I suffer through most things and simply say how that makes me feel rather than waxing poetically about the moon. (Not meant to be a dig, obviously, the moon is for you and Earth is for me. You know, Mars for men, Venus for women, but moon for Al and Earth for me.)

If I’m speaking of space, and the little I know of it, I’ll speak of the gravitational force we share, keeping you locked to me. I have never felt you to be far, even when you are. Only a room away from one another, I miss you terribly, but I can feel you through the walls. Do you feel that buzzing when I’m near? I have a radar, a chemical reaction, that alerts me that you are near too. An internal compass, pointing you to my true north, Polaris. (I think that’s right).

I talk to you all the time in my head, so it’s unimaginable that you’d ever stray too far because you’re simply always on my mind. Even writing here, I am convinced you are the paper and I’m etching my words into you.

The first thing you left with me was your ear. I can hear myself talking to you now, at 17, asking you to kiss me, I thought that in the kitchen. I didn’t think until years later that I could marry you because I felt unworthy of you for so long. I hope you no longer feel the need to assure me otherwise because I believe it now. I’ve seen the notes and the things you tried so hard to stuff in the drawers out of my reach, but I’m thankful they never faded, and I have the proof that it wasn’t all in my head. Sometimes I think I made you up, that’s how good you are.

Do you know how good you are? I see you shrink sometimes, doubting it. I understand it to be the human condition to feel we are never good enough, but I do believe you are good to, for, and with me. Just as I feel with you. Whenever I think about how awful I am, I think of how good you are, and know I can’t be that bad if I have earned your love.

Allow me to be a bit sentimental here, as if I haven’t suffered through that this whole letter, and my whole life. I often think of that tomato I had in the garden during one of our first conversations and how it was this perfect, juicy, red tomato. The first time we spoke, when you called me “Jeanie” and spoke in repetition to me “Jane, Jane, Jane,” I wore a red skirt. I flushed red every time I saw you after that night in my room when I embarrassed myself so deeply, it still haunts me to this day, and if you ever have anything to make up for, it is making me suffer through that because why couldn’t you just kiss me? Did you already know how good it would be and couldn’t control yourself? (You don’t really have to make up for it, I’ve already forgiven you a thousand times over ((but I won’t forget))).

Maybe I’m reading into the colour red too much, so I’ll pass over that and skip to you and those stupid jeans that had the writing on them, and when you passed your notebook over the hood of my car. Did you know how much of a badass you looked in that moment? You were the ultimate dork and I loved you. Love you. I love every version of you, but maybe that little boy most of all. Forgive me for this, but I think he needs that love most of all. I still see him when you’re hunched over a notebook at our dining room table.

You were a dickhead for fooling me that you were writing instead of drawing little stick figure versions of me, but you changed my life by doing that. I can’t help but feel like you knew how the future would go and you were some agent sent to guide me on my path. You knew me down to my core and I could tell just by the way you looked at me.

I thought what a terrible thing it was to be known by you and I felt sorry for every girl who had ever crossed your path. Now, I think otherwise in long tangents about how unlucky they were to pass you up.

I hope you see the little details of my love in this and in the acts I commit. If you feel I ever stray from this, simply throw this letter at me and say I wrote it here. I quite like it when you try to act all chauvinistic. It’s either internalized misogyny or knowing how laughable it is for you to be all macho. The only pride you seem to have is for me. I don’t know how I got it. Some past life karma, I suppose. But thank whoever it was for me, but thank yourself first and most of all.

Love,

Janie

p.s. There are many other things I didn’t write here that I’ll wish to add later. I reserve the right to do so, but I will not amend any of these words. There’s no need. There will never be. Any love I don’t know how to write, I shall show you. Unless you want a dirty letter, I can bring out my best James Joyce for you, my dirty little fuckbird.

We got His and Hers towels as a gag gift from Opal. It was waiting for us when we returned to London. A week later, my father was admitted to the hospital. We drove to him with only silence between us, but music on the radio. The only adjustment came when “Honey” by Roger Miller came on. Alex reached over, turned up the song’s volume, and placed his hand on my thigh.

My father was released back home into his quasi-hospice care. There were no nurses, only children, an amusing occurrence that a man who had servants who took care of him his whole life, only in near-death would he decide against a caregiver, instead placing the weight onto his children.

I was not the caregiver. The other children took care of that, primarily Stacey. Harper cooked, and Greg talked about mundane things with him, mainly sports. Alex would occasionally join in these conversations as if only to prove his presence was there sometimes. My siblings’ spouses were far more vocal than Alex was. I will claim and declare love for these in-laws, but I find them to be garrulous in their conversational skills, and this is in comparison to me.

Alex and I mainly took up the front of errand runners. Other than Stacey, I was the only one who didn’t have children to also care for during this time, and since Stacey seemed suctioned to my father’s side, Alex and I navigated the outside world for the family.

My father sat in a recliner in the living room for the majority of the day, only transferring to and from the toilet and his bed. We ate our meals scattered about the living room. I had never visioned the immensity of my family with four children, each with the spouse, a total of six grandchildren, Oswald, my mother joining later toward the end, Pat, and the fifth child, who I had never felt to be near before, but now in that room it’s like we were reanimating Tom with the noise of words we made.

The older folks claimed sitting on the floor would be too rough on their bones, but Stacey refused to move from our father’s side, and Paul didn’t leave Stacey’s side. So, Alex and I sat on the floor with the children.

These were parting regards, and soon people started disappearing. The grandchildren went back, along with the in-laws, except Paul and Alex; one benefit of no children is getting your spouse all to yourself.

Stacey had gone out for the day at the demand of my father and the arm-pulling from Paul. Alex went into the kitchen, making lunch, and keeping his position as a worker. I know I have withheld much of the truth of my father’s last days here. It is an effort that, after his death, I may preserve his greater moments rather than the ones where he placed himself in poor lighting. My father didn’t want Alex there. I never found out why, but I suspect he was a little embarrassed. He said he wasn’t family and had no right to be there. So, Alex kept to the kitchen and was the errand boy. He didn’t care, perhaps relieved to avoid the sputtering man for the majority of our stay there.

“Jane,” my father said. He laid his hand on top of mine. He was cold and blue and had been all winter. His fingers were stuck in a constant half-curled position, too swollen to close into a fist or stretch open. I laid his hand upward and rested mine in his hand bowl. “I have something for you.”

“Yes?” My father’s gift-giving was rare, even on birthdays and Christmas, which had passed less than a month ago.

He cleared his throat. His voice had grown raspier in the last few months. He now struggled to speak for long stretches of time. It was thought he would lose the ability to talk, but he didn’t. He talked until the end. “I’m giving you Oswald.”

I glowered at him. “The dog?”

“No, the lucky rabbit, you fucking idiot, yes the dog.”

“Okay,” I hesitantly said. “Why?”

“Someone has to take care of him.”

I didn’t tell him how idiotic it was for him to get a dog with the knowledge he would be dead in a year, because someone might consider that to be rude to say to a man dying of cancer. “Why not Greg or something? He already has Tipper.” His Cocker Spaniel of six years and very annoying dog.

“And three kids. It’ll be good practice for your future children.”

“Don’t talk about that.” Introducing any children I had to their grandfather through pictures dejected me, even though introducing any children I had to their grandfather through meeting him dejected me as well, getting his whiskey and cigar breath all over them. “Stacey doesn’t have any children.”

“Stacey doesn’t want him. I already asked.”

“So, I’m the second choice. Or third. Did Harper turn you down, too?”

“No, Harper will barely go near him. You’ve already got that turtle anyway. You have a mothering instinct that I don’t know where you got from. God knows not your mother.” I rolled my eyes and he held up his hand to prevent me from saying anything against him. “I have a trade-off for you. If you take Oswald.”

“What? A big fat cheque?”

“This.”

“What?”

He motioned to his surroundings. I looked at him blankly, completely lost by his gestures. I leaned closer with bemusement. “The house, Jane.”

“This house?”

“My inheritance to you.”

The house sat in a wide, unmaintained field. The next closest house was a quarter mile down the road. A herbaceous border around the Cotswold house with moss climbing up the walls. There’s a little cottage in the back. An unowned pond just out of reach, but close enough to say it was yours. “Fine,” I said as if I were the one suffering. I shook his hand and said I would go get his lunch now.

I went into the kitchen, jumping. Alex stood puzzled. Perhaps, jumping for joy that my father’s death would leave you with a nice, beautiful house was poor behaviour, but it really is a nice house.

My father died the following week. I haven’t wrapped my head around it enough to write it here. I might have grieved him long ago, letting go of the idea of a relationship a father and child should have. Death is strange and a topic too personal for me to expand on. Tommy and my father are still constant figures to me, not solely in pictures and memory, but I don’t believe they’re dead. I don’t find myself to be eloquent enough to try and write about death here. I don’t think I ever will be. I feel I have misplaced them somewhere, and I will be looking for where they ended up for the rest of my life.

What to do with that damn dog? He had always been a well-behaved dog, but said dog had to travel in a small car to a new home with two people, who weren’t particularly enthused to have him. Alex tried to seem enthusiastic, but he was never good at faking emotion with me, especially one of EXCITEMENT! He was more excited. I couldn’t blame him because I was about as thrilled at the thought of picking up poop as anyone when told they have to start picking up shit.

But, you know, he was pretty cute. All black fur with a wet nose poking at my knees whenever he wanted to go for a walk. Alex mainly handled that because I was grieving, and all, a convenient excuse for anything. I didn’t do dishes for a whole month.

We began cleaning out my father’s house, which was relatively bare considering the man was about as sentimental as you’d expect. Most of it, like the furniture, was kept or taken by someone. On the first night with only Alex and me in the home (and Oswald and Louie, of course), we went through the music my father owned. CDs, records, and cassettes that added up to two shelves in the living room. They were mostly jazz and yacht rock. My father was very weirdly into Kenny Loggins. Nobody was sure why.

Wedged between Mose Allison and Louis Armstrong, sat Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. I held it up to Alex. “Do you think he ever actually listened to this?” I asked Alex, but then answered the question myself. “Maybe once. I gave this to him. Or rather, left it on the shelf for him to listen to, with no mention that I left it. I was very embarrassed about you for a long time.”

“Embarrassed by me?” Alex unseriously gaffed. His hand held to his chest in a doubtful expression of offense.

I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean. I never wanted the two words to collide. I didn’t want you knowing them and them knowing you. I was embarrassed by the whole ‘This is my boyfriend, Alex.’” My voice dropped hoarsely deep during the quotation.

“You were far more self-conscious than I ever perceived you to be.”

My eyebrows raised. “Really?” In my mind—the previously established self-conscious one—I figured everyone was laughing behind my back about how much of a show I put on for people. In retrospect, I still cringed at the way I made myself the center of attention, a constant need to overshadow people, even if the attention was detrimental.

“Yeah,” he said with no second thought. Even if no one noticed my insecurities, I figured it was an impossibility that Alex didn’t. He gave me far more than a once-over, in a constant exchange of a viva voce with one another, deeply involved, every utterance counted against you. “I found you to be unassailable.”

“What?”

He stopped what he was packing up, standing straight to stare me down with that same searing look. “Come on, you were very prepossessing, Janie. You were lionized by everyone at Barnsley, and you were a tad…” he looked down, nodding his head at the floor, pushing to word out, “Intimidating,” following it with a chuckle.

“I know all that.” Prompting him to chuckle further. “But I was pretty insecure, I know that for sure.”

“Yeah, well.” He moved a small stack of CDs back and forth in his hand like his brain tossing the thought around. “I felt it was one thing we had in common. When we first talked.” He placed the CDs in the cardboard box, finally ridding himself of them.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “I found you to be pretty puny.”

He tilted his head with a grin of acknowledgement. “You were fucking rigid. I thought you had a metal pole instead of a spine.”

I laughed, confused. “What? Like a scoliosis patient?”

“No,” he said with amusement, “like you had a giant stick up your ass. Or maybe lack of. You’re a little chicken. I wondered what kind of person could put up with Will.”

I rolled my eyes and went back to the shelf of CDs. “I was a tolerant individual.”

He hummed. I was unsure if he agreed, but I never asked further. We continued in silence, besides the droning of the Frank Sinatra record we put on for the clean-up. The room had slowly been getting colder as night swept in, so I went to get a sweater, the billowing, overgrown kind.

“Holy shit,” I uttered as I happened upon one of the last CDs. Placed completely out of order, shoved on the shelf, was one of Arctic Monkeys’ demo CDs, post hoc known as Beneath the Boardwalk. “How does he even have one of these?” I still hadn’t adjusted my language to the past tense. I still tend to refer to him in the present, and I don’t feel much of a need to adjust this language structure because he still feels like a constant in my life.

Alex took the CD in his hand, pressing his fingerprints all over the jewel case. “Fucking hell, I can’t even remember the last time I saw one of these. What a knobhead I look like.”

He handed me the CD back and I popped it open. “Oh my god, it’s Stacey’s. I can’t believe my dad kept this, but Stacey didn’t.”

“You lost the CD I personally gave you,” he reasoned. “Should we keep it? Or is that weird?”

We looked down at it as if it were a child we were deciding to give up for adoption. “It’s your decision.”

“It’s your sister’s CD.”

I slipped it back onto the shelf. “I’ll ask Stacey if she wants it.” I never did ask Stacey, and it stayed on the shelf, stuck after the alphabet like it was its own miscellaneous shelf, too personal to categorize.

Things never settled, they just kind of stopped, forced to halt. We never made it back to London, staying put in our billet. It was ideal to be in what felt like the middle of nowhere, preventing cabin fever, slightly, at least.

When things were fresh—the lockdown, the home, the “marriage”—Alex and I took up playing various games, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, Cluedo, chess, and gin rummy. It was easy to place on a record and play to last the whole day.

During a terrible game of Scrabble, in which Alex played “zein” for 81 points and we fought over whether it was a word for twenty minutes, with neither of us simply thinking that we could look it up if it was a qualified word. (In case you’re wondering, it is. Zein: [/ˈzēən/] n. the principal protein of corn. From modern Latin Zea (genus name of maize) + -in from the English suffix -ine, meaning forming names of organic compounds, pharmaceutical products, proteins, etc. Bastard). The days stretched long, if you couldn’t tell, or simply know.

Alex began to vomit about a week in. So…that was fun. He had caught the flu, of course. I was quarantined with the one person who got the flu during the worldwide pandemic. I subjected myself to the fate of getting the flu by taking care of him, but I also got my flu shot that year, so, yeah, it worked, and I never got sick. I ha-ha-ed in Alex’s face like Nelson Muntz for a good week after he was sick, of course, because I’m a professional caregiver.

I made a terrible chicken soup, but he didn’t seem to mind. He ate it as little as he ate the rest of his food, slurping down a few sips before saying it was too much. He confined himself to the bedroom for the majority of the sickness. I slept in the guest room because he was up every other hour.

Oswald and I grew very close during this time. We sat on the couch and watched TV. His head would sit in my lap the same way Alex’s did. Everyone slept a lot, a painful amount. We were all bored, even Louie, whose life hadn’t changed much other than the location of his terrarium. Life felt tiring that April.

On Alex’s last night of sickness, he declared he would feel better in the morning, kissed my cheek goodnight, then wiped it with his hand to “prevent the germs,” and then he went to bed. I was nursing a cup of tea with Oswald’s nose poking my stomach, and watching Chernobyl, the first of my pandemic shows.

About ten minutes into the first episode, I began to uncontrollably sob over the idea of the impending nuclear disaster, which had in fact already occurred 34 years ago. I was a month old when Chernobyl happened, and it had no effect on me because I was a month old, but weepy and curious, I called my mother, who stayed up later than anyone I knew.

“Mummy,” I whimpered, a word that hadn’t been uttered since a time period about as far back as Chernobyl.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Other than the sobbing, but that felt like a release. I hadn’t cried since the funeral. I had been in business mode since then. I figured this to be the levee breaking. “What was Chernobyl like?”

“Are you high?”

“No.”

“Okay. I’m a little high,” she giggled.

“Alright.” I was stoic for a moment before breaking into a giggle too. “I’m watching that mini-series and I was wondering what it was like.”

She bubbled around before managing to say, “A little like this. Not as severe, but a panic. Are you okay, sweetheart?”

“Yeah, you know, for the most part.”

“I understand. I feel that way too.”

“Enjoy your high.”

“Thank you.”

The following morning, Alex was still asleep when I woke up. I made a cup of tea, had mildly burnt toast, and caught the last half of The Thin Man. Alex arose after I finished my toast. He looked well-rested, his eyes slightly swollen from sleep, and like a little boy with his stuffed teddy bear. “Hey,” he greeted, “what time didja go to bed?”

I warmed my hands with the mug. It was drizzling outside. A perfect rainy day to stay inside all day, except for the fact that we had been doing that for a month now. “A little after midnight. You sleep through the night?”

“Yeah.” He stood in the archway of the living room, peering at the television screen. “I feel almost back to normal.”

“Good.” I placed my mug down. “Do you want some toast?”

“Sure,” he said as we switched places, him sitting down and me walking to the kitchen.

As I walked out, I said, “By the way, last night, I found out I was pregnant.” I wasn’t sure how else to deliver the news. I didn’t get any “special stork coming to my door” moment. In fact, I didn’t even get the peeing over the stick moment. I found out because I cried about Chernobyl and called my mother. I either had a mental breakdown or was pregnant. Plus, my boobs were sore and had grown out of an A cup.

I leaned against the archway and waited for his head to turn back to me. It did slowly. “How?” My mouth opened slightly. “Don’t play dumb with me, Janie.” His face cracked with a smile and remedied a slight fever inside me.

“It seems likely,” I said. “Them woman changes.”

I turned around and went toward the kitchen. I heard his feet hit the floor. “Wait a minute there, Road Runner.” He followed behind me. “So, you’re pregnant,” he said when we arrived.

“Established.”

“Okay. So, what’s up with that?”

“With the pregnancy or how that happens?”

He sighed exhaustively. He was like a dad already. “Shut up, come on, this is serious, I’m being serious.”

“Yeah. I went through that all last night about having to carry the thing, so I have no pity for you.”

“Empathize with me for a moment, Janie. What the fuck is the plan?”

“For the thing? 9 months, birth in hospital, presumably if the whole world hasn’t collapsed yet, if not, home birth in the pool. I’ll do a couple of laps and the thing will just pop out.”

He let out a worn-out chuckle and sat on one of the barstools. His head collapsed in his hands and he scruffed up his hair. He had calmed enough not to pace, so I took to toasting bread. “God, Janie,” he shook his head with a notch of laughter each time he turned his neck.

“Yeah,” I agreed as I pushed the toaster’s lever down. “I think Oswald knew first. He kept poking my stomach.”

He gave me a tender smile. “Do you have any clue on…when?”

“I don’t keep a sex journal.”

He huffed out a laugh. “No, Janie, when will the thing arrive?”

“Oh.” We broke into laughter and suddenly it was real in that terrifying, cloyed, perpetual moment kind of way. “Not quite. I’m not that all-knowing.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

By the time of my first OB/GYN appointment, I was 10 weeks pregnant. I was still emotional. It’s weird to see a photo of your insides, and allegedly, there is a growing thing in there that will become a baby, but Alex had to wait in the car so I was by myself and everything was even more sterile than a regular gyno visit. It was just strange.

They gave me a photo and some instructions for the following weeks. When I showed it to Alex in the car, he held it at the corner and said, “Wow.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, though he was far more amazed than I felt. I felt like I was Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo.

“That says your name.” He pointed to “Cavendish, Jane” printed on the bottom of the ultrasound.

I looked at him, befuddled. “Yeah, and what about the fetus in there?”

He held his hand up. “I’m getting there. I’m getting there.” He examined the image for a minute before saying, “Its head is big.”

I giggled and leaned on my side to face him completely. “Yeah. It only got legs a couple of weeks ago.”

“Weird.”

“Yep. Really weird.”

He handed it back to me. “I don’t want it to distract me while driving.”

I slipped it into my bag. “It won’t start crying yet. December 11th.”

“That’s the due date?” I nodded. “We’re gonna have a baby by the end of the year?!”

“Crazy, right?”

He shook his head to knock the insanity out of his head. “Holy shit.”

“I know. I’m not showing or having any morning sickness. At most, it looks like I got a boob job.”

He smugly nodded like he was the one who did the procedure. “That’s about right.”

I hit his shoulder. “Shut up and drive us home.”

“Baby on board,” he declared.

My face could have broken in half at the thought. I was truly glowing. I leaned over the console and kissed his cheek. He turned his head toward me, his eyes soft, and his face beaming, kissing me holily.

Everything was still being processed for both of us. Physically, I looked the same, but apparently, I was due to be a mother at the end of the year. It didn’t make any sense to me that in December, I was to push out a baby and have it handed to me, and they would say, “Here’s your baby. You can go home now.” I felt like a child wondering how babies were made, wondering when I was going to go to the store, and pick the child. Where was the stork?

I called my mother to tell her first. I felt bad about her being the last to know about the engagement (and I kind of never told her about the wedding because I was convinced she would ridicule the idea of it being a binding marriage).

Her first words were “Oh, lord, Jane.”

It was as if instead of telling her I was pregnant, I had said, “Mum, I have had sex! In seven months, there will be living proof that I’ve had sex a bunch! Enough to make something out of it.” I felt like vomiting.

I never got morning sickness, which was the only blessing of the pregnancy. Well, other than the baby, I supposedly popped out, of course. Alex joked that he never had the flu, but instead had morning sickness. It was a funny joke that I rudely and under the excuse of hormones (the other blessing of pregnancy: everything can be blamed on the fact that you are pregnant) told him, “Then you carry the thing!”

Later in the call, my mother asked how things were going, and I said well. Then, she said, “Enjoy it. Motherhood is a prison.”

“That’s everything a child wants to hear.”

She shushed me. “I’m not talking about that nonsense. I loved being your mother. I hope you know that. I was horrible at it, but you were the best part.”

“Thanks, mum.” I grew rather weepy, but didn’t want her to hear me cry again.

“I loved being pregnant,” she proclaimed. “Postpartum was awful. I was miserable with every single one of you. Of course, back then it was just the ‘baby blues’ but now I think they would’ve said I had depression. Harper had it too, you know?”

“Yeah. I remember. So, you think I’ll have it?”

“Certainly,” she definitively said like she was my psychologist. “I don’t say this to frighten you. I just want to make sure you’re informed. They’re better equipped to handle these things. Harper only had it for a few months.”

I thanked her, but the whole time I thought about how unhappy I would be. Despite my best efforts, darkness would be straight ahead on the itinerary, and nothing I did would prevent it. That itself made me despondent, and in my head, I completely decided that Alex would have to handle the first month of the baby’s life because I would likely be in a psych ward. Perhaps, I was a bit out of it, but I kept all this inside, which hindsight, was a terrible idea, but I was hormonal and pregnant.

A month later, after a gloomy week of rain, the air grew warmer, birds were singing, and, at least for one moment, the world felt idyllic. It was late June, 16 weeks pregnant. The first sign of visible pregnancy sprouted the week before, although to the untrained eye, it simply looked like bloating. The baby size tracking app I used told me it was the size of a can of Coke, so Alex and I took two cans of Coke outside, some towels, and Oswald.

The sun felt bright, but never blinded us, or at least me, because Alex, of course, wore sunglasses. I wanted it to be a day at the beach. We were forced to take to roleplaying to live out these fantasies. I dressed in a bikini and Alex in swim trunks. It was much better than the beach anyway, no sand in our crotches.

I sat cross-legged on one end of the towel with Alex on the other end, with his legs out, lying back on his hands. We were listening to the fauna around us, silently sipping our cokes. Alex would throw a stick out for Oswald to catch, and he’d return with it panting, dropping it back in his lap.

He tossed it back out and adjusted the baseball cap on his head. I sighed in the sun, burped, and laughed with him, instead of excusing myself. “We’ll be able to find out the gender at the next appointment.” It was two weeks away, and I would be by myself as I would for all my appointments. Alex had fun waiting in the car. “If you want to.”

He shrugged. “Up to you.”

“No, it’s not. Come on, nature’s last surprise.” When California nearly burned down from a pyrotechnic gender reveal party later that year, we knew we had made the proper choice.

He chuckled. Oswald had given up running and laid his head in Alex’s lap. “Then, it’ll be a surprise. Then, we’ll have to worry about naming Godzilla.”

I gasped. “You mean we’re not going to name the baby Godzilla?”

He tilted his head thoughtfully. “Maybe the middle name, but then we’d have to nickname the baby God, and that’s a lot to live up to. God and all.”

“What if it’s a boy? Would we name him Alex?” I teased.

“Shut up,” he quickly said, lying on his side, propping his head up to keep eye contact with me. “Would you want to name him after your dad or…?”

“While the thought is lovely, I’m not really up for naming my kid Dick.”

“Richard is a dignified name,” he tried to reason.

His hand ran over Oswald’s head. I wish I could’ve felt the pleasure Oswald seemed to receive from this. Though Godzilla was only the size of an avocado, I was already experiencing back pain. It was from “womb expansion,” as my doctor called it. I joked with Alex, “It’s doing renovations.” Alex said it was appropriate that we nicknamed it Godzilla because it was destroying Tokyo, also known as my body.

“I don’t want to name the baby after anyone,” I told him. Then I thought for a moment and said, “Maybe the middle name. Besides, I think Stacey has dibs on Richard. She’s more sophisticated than us. Her child could handle that name. Can you bring me two of those coconut popsicles?”

I had claimed that I had no cravings, but in retrospect, I was addicted to coconut popsicles and sour cream & onion crisps, but only the crinkled kind. It was one of the few things I loved about pregnancy. I had an internal list of pros and cons of pregnancy. At this point, just the start of my second trimester, it was:

Pros: Excuse to eat anything. Excuse for irrational behaviour. Excuse to make Alex wait on me hand & foot. Growing human life???

Cons: Constipation. Irrational behaviour. Nosebleeds. Might be a secret life-sucking parasite. Bleeding gums. Expanding womb. Vertigo. Back pain. Headaches. Sore boobs. Impending doom.

“What about naming the baby after me?” I jokingly asked him.

He shrugged. “Two Janes? Might get confusing.”

“We’d be like Thing One and Thing Two. Do you want a boy or a girl?”

“I’d be fine with either,” he annoyingly said.

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be that person. ‘As long as it’s healthy.’”

“Would you rather I be the dad who is mad it’s a girl?”

“I wouldn’t have a kid with someone who would be pissed over something so inconsequential. I want a girl.” Girls seemed easier to me, possibly because I’m a girl who was annoyed by boys for the first decade of her life. Or girls simply have better names than boys.

“I’m fine with that.”

I scoffed, “Don’t sound so blasé.”

He sat up, throwing the stick for Oswald to run off again. “I don’t have a preference. What’s wrong with that?”

“Fine. What do you think it’ll be? And be definitive, don’t be like ‘Whatever’ or ‘Probably a girl, I don’t know.’” My poor imitation of him prompted a laugh from him. Oswald laid his head in my lap this time.

“Alright, alright. I think it’s a boy.”

“Contrarian.”

He shook his head with amusement. “Can’t do nothing right for you, Janie.”

In truth, I would’ve succumbed to myself during the pregnancy without him. I don’t know how millions of women have done a pregnancy solo. I barely know how a single human being is supposed to have a baby. In my almost daily nighttime panic, I shouted around the house to Alex, sometimes Oswald, rarely Louie (never a good listener), about the unnatural physics of a watermelon through a belt hole, the leather was bound to tear.

One night, when Alex had gone to bed before me, I read every Reddit thread in existence about vaginal tearing, which occurred in degrees as if it was murder. A fourth degree essentially tearing your whole asshole open with a recovery time of months. I cried as any naturally extra-hormonal person would hear the likelihood that in six months their body would be torn to pieces.

During this slightly embarrassing breakdown I told Alex, “Enjoy having sex with me now because I won’t have a vagina after this.”

He kindly didn’t laugh at this, though I knew he wanted to. He rubbed my back and comforted me by reading the positive messages on the Reddit threads of people saying they made a full recovery, and to think of it as an athletic injury.

“I’ll be running a marathon for fuck’s sake,” I blubbered.

He rubbed my back in the one spot that already hurt from the thought of an epidural. “You’ll be doing more than that. Like going to war or something.”

“At least it’s not Rosemary’s baby.” We laughed, and he pressed his forehead against mine, counting small blessings.

At week 20, the fetus was the size of a banana or a pint of root beer. I now looked like how I felt: pregnant, pregnant. I was halfway through now, and that was worthy of celebration, which meant Alex made horrible-looking cupcakes and I devoured them before the hour was up. I considered entering myself in eating competitions if the thought of hot dogs didn’t actively make my blood boil.

Other than not sleeping well, sore boobs, bleeding body parts, muscle pains, headaches, heartburn, and swollen feet, I was in the golden period of pregnancy. This was an alleged claim my doctor made at the start of my second trimester, to which I repeatedly called her and asked, “When does this golden period start?”

Godzilla started to roam Tokyo some more as it began to flutter around my stomach. We decided not to learn the sex because the reveal would consist of the doctor telling me, and then me going out into the car and telling Alex. I figured it would make the birth more interesting and might distract from the doom of tearing, shitting on the table, nerve damage, and the certainty of postpartum depression. It was fun enough to see the baby sucking their thumb at the last ultrasound.

I was pretty clinical about the fact that the baby started kicking. It scared the shit out of me rather than making jump for joy. It’s like if your intestines started kicking your uterus one day. Alex kept comparing it to the Chestbuster from Alien, which weirdly comforted me.

Alex, rather than place his hand on my belly to feel the baby kick, would knock on my stomach, reasoning that it was payback for the baby. I told him it just made the kicking occur on the inside and outside of my stomach now. He said he had to make things even for me. That made me smile.

Alex elected to use more unconventional ways of connecting with the fetus. I found sentimental speeches to my stomach to be disgusting because it made me feel like I was holding our child hostage in my stomach, and Alex was the father, desperate for me to let his baby out, willing to pay the ransom fee. So, Alex played rock, paper, scissors with it, acting out winning and losing in various scenarios. It made me laugh too much to ever make fun of him for it. I realized after that the act was more to entertain me than the walled-in baby.

I suppose if there was ever a period to be titled “The Golden Period,” it would be the third week of July, after a week of rain had levelled out to simply an overcast sky, I began a ravenous period of writing. I had begun a pregnancy journal, which Alex decorated with Godzilla stickers he bought off Redbubble. The Godzilla Journal quickly became a regular journal where I occasionally wrote symptoms and questions to ask at my next appointment.

I continued my loose investigation on Robert out of curiosity. It morphed into an autofiction journalism piece that pleased my agent enough for her to tell me to continue doing this path, something I had already started doing. I never found out where Robert ended up, meaning he has probably dropped off the face of the earth, but I made up my own ending for where he could be. It would be more interesting than actually finding him.

Alex was hit with a greater rush of creativity after dancing around possible paths all year; he had finally landed on a direction. We always worked in a synced fashion that even pregnancy hormones couldn’t throw off. The knowledge that one person was working would make the other person feel that they had to be driving toward something too.

How the pregnancy was announced to everyone whom we didn’t know enough to inform was through a personal history piece titled “Hostage Case” published in the New Yorker. I received several congratulatory messages from people I had met once in the New York City writers’ circles. It was nice, but I was thankful that I would never have to run into a human being and have them put their hands all over my stomach without my permission.

When a heatwave hit in August, I became a miserable bitch. Well, more than usual. 24 weeks, fetus the size of a package of Oreos or corn on the cob. They seemed wildly different in size to me, but that’s what the NHS website said. Either way, I ate both, and then some.

I felt I was the perfect size pregnant, telling Alex, “I don’t plan to grow the baby anymore, this is good enough for me.”

He laughed, placing his hand atop my naked stomach. “I think you might want to incubate it for a little more.”

“It can survive outside now. I don’t think I’ll survive any longer with it inside. Don’t touch me. I’m too hot.”

He took his hand off me. “Yeah, you are.”

“Ugh. Stop. I’m too hot to have sex, and I feel like I might break a rib if I laugh too hard. Tell it to quit the kicking.”

The biggest development had been that the fetus could supposedly hear outside the womb now. I didn’t believe this to be truthful and just something doctors told parents so they would have an excuse to be in so much pain. The latest development for me had been the forming of piles, or haemorrhoids, which I don’t want to even get into because I can still feel the sensation of them now, bleh!

Alex laid his head on my thighs, avoiding my crotch, which, of course, had swelled from the increased blood flow and pressure of the uterus enough that we had invested in perineal ice packs and witch hazel, which had become my saving grace for both the pregnancy and the heat.

“Knock it off.” He barely managed to get the phrase out before cracking a laugh. “I’m gonna suck at this discipline stuff.” He came back up to my head, lying on the pillow beside me.

I sighed. “It’s fine. I’m used to being the bad cop anyway. I like yelling at people.” I groaned and shifted my body from the heat.

“Do you want to run through the sprinklers?”

“Like the dog?!”

I ran through the sprinklers like the dog. The relief: 10/10, highly recommend. Alex and I both liked the fact that for the rest of the summer, I chose to relax in a drenched bikini. Oswald also enjoyed a partner for sprinkler running.

One day, a week or so later, where we lounged on blanket-covered grass, I asked Alex, “Did you think three years ago that we’d end up with a baby?”

Alex chuckled, stuffing a handful of popcorn into his mouth (week 25, size of a popped bag of microwave popcorn or a courgette). “I didn’t even think we’d have a baby at the end of this year.”

I giggled. “Fair enough. Nothing feels normal right now. I don’t feel like myself anymore.”

He grabbed my feet and placed them on his lap, beginning to rub the left one. He was comforting me with the distraction, something I never picked up on during the pregnancy. “You still are. If anything, I feel like I’ve seen more of you than I ever had before.”

“You’ve had to put haemorrhoid cream on me, of course you have.”

He softened. His movements stopped, and he looked up at me slowly, meeting my eyes fervently. “I never knew if we’d get back together, you know, it felt like something I had missed out on, fucked up, and all that, but I always knew we’d be in each other’s lives. The fact that I am here, putting cream on your bits.” We were both cracking too hard for him to finish the sentence in one try. “That’s love, baby. I’d do that for you even if the kid wasn’t mine, although that might be a bit more awkward for this other husband of yours.”

I covered my face for him not to witness my simultaneous crying and laughing, though he already knew what was occurring behind the curtain, rubbing up and down my legs in a soothing motion. I peeked out from behind them with wet lashes and a protruding smile. “I think putting cream on my bits is how we got in this situation.”

“Ew,” he yelped. “I hate that word. Don’t call it that.”

“What? Cream? You once told me I was a Twinkie you creamed in.”

He gasped. “No, I did not.”

“Yes, you did, I swear.”

He shook his head and returned to rubbing my feet. We listened to Oswald pant for several minutes before I returned to questioning Alex. “Remember when you thought I was pregnant back in 2010?”

He cringed like I was twisting his insides. “Yeah. Why didn’t you sock me for that?”

“You were so freaked out over it that I had begun to think I really was pregnant.”

“Well, if this pregnancy has shown anything, I don’t know shit about the female body.”

“It’s a learning process,” I reassured him. “By the end of this, you could probably start delivering babies yourself.”

He snorted a laugh. “I’ll pass, but thanks for your faith in me.”

When the third trimester arrived (28 weeks, the size of an original Nintendo—something Alex got a major kick of nostalgia out of—or an aubergine), the apocalypse had slowly become regular life. I couldn’t recall a time before I was locked away with Alex and some leech locked inside me. It felt like I had been pregnant for about a decade.

However, the overwhelming reality that this would be over in a month, at least the leech part, terrified me more than another decade with something living in me. Logically, the best thing to do when facing this terror is to ignore it and build a crib.

I felt the baby’s room was more of a passion project than the baby itself. First, there was ordering furniture that I didn’t have to put together. Then, there was ordering several unnecessary, wasteful knick-knacks. Lastly, there was watching Alex do all the work.

I had yet to acknowledge the final destination of pregnancy: motherhood. I had not yet developed the idea that I would be someone’s mother. On the couch, finishing a yoghurt while reading The Scarlet Letter as part of my homemade series of books with mothers, I thought of myself as Hester Prynne, not in the adultery way, but in regard to the paternity of her daughter, Pearl. Arthur Dimmesdale, the Puritan minister, her true father, denies his parentage.

It was awfully abstract to compare it to a child produced from a plain old relationship, but it made me think for the first time about Alex having someone call him their father. I had been self-centered the majority of the pregnancy, which I have few regrets over, other than this particular circumstance of wild, unalterable change.

He dropped down on the couch to take a break from sweating in the nursery. His eyes were closed and his head flopped back. I reached over, petting his fluffed-up hair back. He opened his eyes, smiling slowly. “How are you doing?”

“Fine.” I wiped the sweat from his brow, stroking the temple. “How are you? With everything?”

“What’d you mean?” He sat up a little straighter.

“Just there’s a big change coming and if you’re freaking out a little that would be understandable. In fact, I would be a little weirded out if you weren’t panicking completely.”

He interlocked his fingers and rested them on his stomach. “Oh, you know,” he humorously said.

I cracked a grin at him, sitting on my knees, I moved closer to him. “Sure. But you could tell me too.”

He was shielded by his smile. I could tell we were both moved by the same thing, but neither of us discussed it, merely passing facial notes to one another; the tossing of the head, the raising of an eyebrow, the overfamiliar grin. He offered me a few words after our visual debate. “I’m convinced I’ll wake up tomorrow in Brazil.”

I giggled skyward. My laugh had become gruffer due to the fetus compressing my lungs. “Is that a premonition or just something on your bucket list?”

He restlessly chuckled, sinking back into the cushions. “Everything feels rather paracosmic.”

“Uh-huh.” I slowly nodded at him, a little lost by his thoughts, so I played along. Poorly, of course. He knew I wasn’t picking up what he was putting down.

He rested, then made a short confession. “I’m terrified, but I think I’ll live.”

“Good.” I effectively nodded. It was a good enough answer for me when all I could think about were leaky breasts and torn assholes.

“And you?”

I hummed in thought. “I think birth might kill me, but I can already feel the Demerol coursing through my veins.”

He affectionately pinched my arm. “I’ll make you the best margarita of your life when this is over.”

“Perfect push present, other than the fact that I then have to breastfeed this monster after all this sobriety.”

He clicked his tongue, shaking his head. “If only I were a seahorse.”

He’s my favourite human being. Those wheels in his mind clicked a certain way, lining up with the gears in my mind. It felt like I was fiddling while Rome burned, but I like the way his elbow digs into the side of me, and how he laughs when I yelp because every pain becomes some cause for celebration. I suppose when that happened, I felt a little less scared.

My anxiety didn’t evaporate, but as it had been bubbling before, it was now reduced to a simmer for the time being. I figure everyone during pregnancy has some form of anxiety, and everyone during 2020 had complete mental breakdowns, so this seemed fairly regulated.

When the weather turned cold, I tended to slip below the sheets and never come out, but pregnancy made the cold weather heaven-sent when I finally made it through a day without having to change my shirt from sweating so much.

Several to-do lists had been formed with every night concluding with the top item on the list: what the fuck are we naming this thing? I had assigned us each to make a list of ten names for each sex, but gave up when Alex suggested the name “Cassius.”

“Are we giving birth to Muhammad Ali?” I questioned, propped up in bed (34 weeks, baseball glove or cantaloupe).

“It’s a cool name,” he reasoned. “It’s a Roman name, strong, powerful—”

“Help nail Jesus on the cross.”

“Oh, since when do you care about Jesus?!”

He redeemed himself on girl names by suggesting the name Winnie, which made me cry. “I don’t even like the name that much, but I could see a Winnie.” (35 weeks, a carton of eggs or honeydew melon). I sobered up, laughing about how funny it was that I cried over Winnie, wiping my eyes with toilet paper because we had run out of tissues.

“I consider Winnie to be a win,” he boasted proudly.

I rolled my eyes aggressively. “Oh, that is so cheesy. I hate it.”

“Come on! Cute little Winnie.”

“Hate it.”

There was also a determination to have a baby name that wouldn’t make the kid suffer through ten other people in his class having that name. Alex argued that we both had common first names but hadn’t suffered through that crisis, but I refused to name my child “Oliver” like every other person in England seemed to be doing.

“What about Claudius?”

“Quit it with those Roman names. I’m gonna burn that book I got you.”

“Oh, come on, Theodosius is a killer name.”

“But Otis isn’t?!”

He relaxed and turned toward me, resting his elbow on the bed. “What about Theodore?”

“Ted Turner.”

He sighed. “Right. Think again.”

“What’s wrong with Otis?” I argued.

“I only think of Otis the Aardvark.” Alex seemed to know every puppet in television history because it seemed all the names I suggested belonged to them. He reasoned against the name Sidney because Cookie Monster’s real name is Sid. I grew rather annoyed that night, and we ended baby naming time early and did not pick it back up for the rest of the pregnancy.

I vehemently denied anyone visiting for the birth. At first, my mother was perfectly happy with this. She said birth was brutal, and she didn’t even want to witness it, which was just about the comfort I figured my mother could provide.

When I told her I didn’t want anyone coming to meet the baby until things calmed down, she flipped. On the phone call, she said, “You’ll need help! You’re denying me the opportunity to meet my grandchild. That’s evil.”

I got so tired of her ranting with no interruption for about five minutes straight that I handed Alex the phone and told him to handle it. She was more shameful with him, instead taking a calm voice designed to make us feel guilty, but I left the room and decided not to engage with it anymore. I figured if she showed up outside our house, there was no stopping her, so we left the topic with an ambiguous “no.”

After getting home from my final antenatal appointment, a week before my due date, it felt as if I was watching a cut scene from Alien playing out in my stomach. Feet kicked up against my stomach, pushing the skin out. Alex enthusiastically watched this. I watched reruns of Project Runway.

Contractions started to become a pain about an hour later, though I insisted otherwise. An hour after that, my water broke. When we got to the hospital, the nurse popped her head out from my cervix and exclaimed, “You’re 9 cm dilated!”

To which, Alex and I both sat with our jaws dropped open. When she left to get the anaesthetist for the epidural, I turned to Alex, sharing a bug-eyed look with him. I shook my head, having no clue how things had moved that quickly.

“At least it will be over soon.” I tried to comfort myself, but I hyperventilated at the thought that a thing would pop out of me by the end of the day. It seemed like the preferable option compared to sitting around for 24 hours in the worst pain of your life, but I also wasn’t prepared to have a kid in an hour.

Alex rubbed me soothingly and said, “Hey. All our birthdays will be 4, 5, 6,” he said, pointing to my stomach, then me, then him in succession. “That’s pretty cool.”

I half-heartedly smiled. “Yeah.”

“You don’t have to do anything after you push this…thing out, I will do all the work,” he tried to assure me.

“So, I don’t even get to enjoy the rewards of my labour.”

His laughter eased me more than the epidural did. “All I want you to do is enjoy. You don’t have to deal with a single nappy, I’ll take all the shit.”

I giggled. “That’s a pretty good deal.”

Two hours later, Godzilla left Tokyo. I have always found it cliche when people say they don’t remember anything before their baby was laid on their chest, but I have truly forgotten the majority of labour, through the power of the brain’s response to the traumatic event and a whole lot of painkillers. I was high as fuck when I gave birth. You don’t need to hear about me pooping during birth anyway.

Godzilla, which had become a living, breathing human baby girl, lay on my chest in all her premortal goo. She had been doing that—living—for about four hours. She was still simply Baby Girl Turner. More and more, I thought Baby Girl Turner sounded like a pretty decent name.

“Hey,” Alex said softly from a chair directly beside me. I turned to him carefully. “Congrats on not tearing your arsehole.”

I chuckled as quietly as I could not to shake my chest too hard. “Thanks. I tried really hard.”

He gave me a congratulatory kiss and returned his eyes to the baby. “Now, what’s this thing’s name?”

I sighed. “I don’t know.” I pucker my lips at her. She wasn’t an ugly baby, but infants are rather gross to me. She was the least gross, though. I’m sure everyone was jealous of her in the nursery. “Cookie Monster Turner?”

He hummed. “Might be trademarked. Any other ideas?”

I smiled over at him. He was tired, I could see it in his eyes, but he never exaggerated a yawn, instead pushing my hair back, looking paternal. “What about Hester? Like Hester Prynne?”

His face held a resisted wince. “Might be a little taboo to name a child after a two-timer.”

“Okay. What about Esther? I like Esther.” I smiled down at her in all her pinkish glory. Baby girls must be pinker than boys, and that’s why pink is associated with girls.

He gritted his teeth. “It’s a little old-fashioned, don’t you think?”

I rolled my eyes and huffed, “Fine. What do you want to name her? Turner Turner?”

“Do you want the last name to be Cavendish?” He offered.

I scoffed, “Ew, no.”

Alex moved closer to the baby as if he were scanning her to detect what her first name should be. “What about Eden?”

“We can’t name the baby Eden because you’re reading East of Eden, otherwise I’m naming the baby Hester.”

He sighed. “We should’ve found out the gender. We could’ve had something picked out by now.”

“Well, I could always shove her back up there for nine months.”

He sent an acknowledging smile up at me before passing his gaze back to the baby. “What do you want to be named?” He asked her. “Eden or Hester?” She kept her eyes closed, so Alex leaned back in his chair. “I suppose that’s a no to both.

“I’m too tired for this,” I complained.

“Anne, Jill, Stephanie, Jean, Polly, Maureen,” he chanted out to the baby, erupting me into giggles.

“Let’s just give her a dumb name, and then she can name herself. Sparkle Telephone Turner. Go write it on the birth certificate. Now, take her before I pass out.”

Alex laughed and followed the command, taking her into his arms. He looked like he was cuddling a little bouquet of flowers to his chest. He looked so normal with her, but the image was out of place to me, like it was Photoshopped.

“I like Polly,” I said.

He raised his head slowly with a regretful frown on his face.

I groaned exhaustively. “Why did you say it if you hate it?”

“I was riffing.”

“Elaine?”

“No. Imogen?”

“Mhm…no.”

“Winnie?”

“No.”

“Come on! Winnie is so cute.”

“Too cute. She’s a sophisticated child.”

The next morning, I awoke looking sideways. Alex was sitting in a chair with his legs up on the edge of my bed. The bundle sat in his arms with his half-shut eyes on her, moving her with a slow bounce. “You look like a dad,” I told him.

He pulled his eyes open and looked toward me with a soft smile. “Did you sleep well?”

“As well as you can imagine. Was having panic dreams about naming her.” I can still recall them. It ranged from a game of Scrabble to punching letters to the sky. “Did you sleep?” I leaned down into my cold pillow.

He shrugged. “A little. Not the most comfortable bed.” He was left with a choice between a chair or a makeshift cot. They were low on sleeping supplies. Well, they were low on any supplies, to be honest. “Been thinking for a while. I think I thought of a name.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I’m for anything at this point. What about Spinner Turner?”

“Maybe for the next kid.”

“With whose vagina?”

He nudged my leg with his foot. “Shush. Let me tell you the name.” I kept my silence and remained all ears. “She’s been Baby Girl Turner for almost a day now, and I was thinking, you know, Baby, Bebe, B. You liked Beatrice, right?”

I nodded. “It’s nice.”

He looked down at her. It was like the human form of photosynthesis. I’d never seen love shine out of him, of anyone, like this. “What about Beatrice Esther Turner? I could do Esther Beatrice, too. I’m not that picky.”

I smiled, half hiding it in my pillow. He knew by my bashfulness, each holding a half-grin, making one full one between us. “Beatrice Esther Turner works. It’s better than Winnie.”

He rolled his eyes, but then said, “It’s way better than Winnie.”

B fit quicker than Beatrice. “B is crying.” “B is hungry.” “B is our baby, our bebe, or B.B.,” Alex called her B.B. like B.B. King. There was also Godzilla. That nickname stuck. The first month was the most unremarkable exceptional month of my life.

The first night home, I cried in the shower. I hadn’t done that since a bad hangover in 2015. My body felt like a half-empty vessel, and it had for months been shared with another human being, and now that the parasite was removed, I no longer felt like myself. Everything was the same as we had left it, except everything was different. It was a similar feeling to losing my dad. Something in my life had irrevocably changed, yet my whole world looked the same. I imagined things would glow differently when you had a child, but the world looked just as monotonous.

I stepped out of the bathroom, squeezing the ends of my damp hair, readying for bed, and there on the bed sat Alex with Beatrice. His eyes turned up at me, and a smile flicked across his cheeks. “She makes this little grunting noise in her sleep like you do.”

I eased onto the bed where I would spend the next month. My bedroom would become my whole world. All I did was provide my udders for my calf. She was precious against my breast. Alex made a few dirty jokes about it that he said would make him seem unbecoming if I wrote them here. “She looks like you,” I said, “at least that’s what I’m supposed to say. I think all newborns look the same.”

He twitched a grin. “She’s got your eyes, though.” They were big, light blue eyes. Most babies are born with blue eyes, but hers did look just like mine. Later, when the grandparents met her, they all shouted about how much she looked like Alex—which she did because daughters tend to look like their fathers—but then they’d get all choked up over her eyes. They couldn’t believe her blue eyes, and I sat proudly that they came from me, but they didn’t originate from me.

“They’re my dad’s eyes.” I could tell Alex was looking over at me, but I stared down at sleeping Beatrice. He leaned over and thoughtfully kissed my cheek. “Meanwhile, she has your hair from 2006.”

He snorted a laugh and ran his hand lightly over the little moptop she was born with. She felt like my science project. She provided a darling conclusion to the experiment. She felt like a prototype baby. She acted in the same way I had seen and heard every other baby act. She cried, slept, ate, pooped. She was a good sleeper, gaining Alex’s napping skills. Our house went into hibernation.

Most evenings that first month ended the same. We sat on the bed, one of us holding Beatrice, usually Alex, since I liked leaning my head on his shoulder and looking at her chubby cheeks. I had long feared all the pain she could cause me by tearing me in half or hormones spinning me into a postpartum depression, but now I feared any pain that could be inflicted on her. From that point on, I felt like a mum—her mum.

a/n: the baby was originally supposed to be a girl, but then i've written alex as a girl dad so much i wanted to make it a boy but then the only name i could think of was teddy, but ted turner, and then i switched it back to a girl. then, it also took me forever to think of a name. still not sure how i feel about it, but, oh well, you name the kid whatever you want. also, if you hate the picture. so do i. blame alex and the pandemic, not me. thanks.

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rottinglilys · 26 days ago

Text

2019

beneath the boardwalk, part 17 (series masterlist)

hello you

warnings: grief, sex, and guinness

word count: 16k

From an early age, my mother taught all her children what wine pairs best with a dish. If my mother had any leisurely hobbies, it was discovering the best wine for every single food imaginable. Though my mother rarely cooked any of the food we ate, she did consume every bottle of wine we ever owned. But I’m not one to talk. It might be the habit I picked up the most from her. Some may call it a problem, but unfortunately, I’ve come to the age my mother was when she told me, “It’s a skill to know how each wine tastes.” And I have to agree with her because I don’t want to have to kick any more of my addictions. I mean, hobbies.

Alex admires this skill from afar because there’s a thin line between supporting someone’s drinking and advocating for someone’s consumption of alcohol, especially when that person’s last name is Cavendish. But, one night in a drifty January, stuffed in a house that made Stephen King write The Shining, Alex and I were on a mission to decide which wine pairs best with pizza. Important distinction is that this was not your rich man’s pizza at a ridiculous price, this was the local pizzeria for a whole pie under £10 that sometimes came delivered, so greasy we had to soak it up with paper towels.

We came away from the whole operation deciding that it was probably better to just drink a Coke with your za. But we liked the sauvignon blanc, or maybe I generally just like it. I don’t know. We were too tipsy by the end of this to make an official judgment, and sex felt better at that point than arguing whether the pinot grigio was better than the sauvignon blanc.

I declared that night in bed, when we were faced down in our pillows with our arms awkwardly locked around each other’s backs, “I think this is the height of adulthood.”

Alex held his eyes closed whenever we were in bed and whenever he was drunk. I think he’s in a constant state of being half-asleep when either of these occurrences happen and I’m the annoying pest poking him awake. “I once stole a bottle of wine from my parents—I must’ve been 13 or something—and we had this big plan of getting drunk one night until we discovered that wine tasted like shite.”

I giggled, gazing at his cheerful little grin, half smashed into the pillow. We were certain to have lines across our faces in the morning. “You’re weak.”

He opened his eyes and instantly pushed my stray hairs out of my face like those ten pesky little strands were somehow blocking a clear view of me. “Not all of us were drinking beer out of paper bags on the playground when they were 5.”

I tucked my laugh away into the sheets. “I was never that bad. I did it at my local brewery. I was respectable.”

He hummed a tune of amusement to himself that I was lucky to overhear. “I don’t think anyone has ever called you respectable, love.” He stretched his body out with a sigh. We were both uncomfortably positioned but didn’t wish to move away from one another. It would be too much work.

“Maybe. I don’t mind.”

“I don’t either.”

One of the most enjoyable things about growing older, in that sweet period between your newfound independence coupled with instability and occupation with wrinkles, also known as your thirties (or my thirties), is a lack of care for what others thought, at least the others I didn’t really know. I still cared obsessively about what everyone I knew thought of me, and sometimes at night, I had a sneaking suspicion Alex had actually hated me all these years and was being paid by my parents to date me.

But I was no longer envious of Alex’s apparent ability to shrug every disparagement of him off, which, after years of being jealous of him for this, I learned wasn’t fully true. Simply, he had an insane condition not to ramble about every complaint lodged against him that day like I did. I still haven’t decided what condition is healthier, likely lying somewhere in the middle of our spectrum, but that doesn’t sound fun. I like complaining. It’s one of my many great skills. Alex likes to huddle his insecurities in storage until he is called out for being a hoarder. It’s one of his many great skills.

It’s a good balance otherwise, he would be complaining too much for me to ever talk about who I hate that day. His lack of complaining allows me to complain for him, which I might like best of all. Back in the early days, one thing that attracted me to Alex was his secure nature in letting women speak. This is partially due to his shyness, but he was never offended by a woman, typically me, standing up for him. I had many a boyfriend who never learned the skill of listening, and I suggested they should get their hearing tested. I might also talk too much. Two things can be true at once.

Our dining table slowly became converted into a working table. It sits in the kitchen where we sometimes ate breakfast if we weren’t eating it in front of the TV or not eating breakfast at all. In other words, on rare occasions, we ate breakfast at this table.

For Christmas, Penny and David gave me a puzzle of the New York City subway map, which I appreciated, but was pretty confident I’d never do. Until one night, I was convinced I was becoming my laptop and decided to cut the plastic off the box. Alex joined me, but after misplacing a piece, I refused his assistance.

I finished the puzzle by the end of the week and I was left with nothing to do. So, Alex and I went out to a consignment shop, and each of us purchased a puzzle; his was the Sgt. Pepper cover, mine was a bouquet of tulips. I let him assist with the former but not the latter. He didn’t quite enjoy it like I did, but he sat with me while I did them. He didn’t like helping until the edges of the puzzle had been figured out. He found it too infuriating.

The table quickly became covered with whatever puzzle I was working on and any of Alex’s work. We left our messes there. It was the only furiously unkempt place in our house and that’s the way I liked it. I found it made the house feel lived-in.

When Alex went back on tour in February, it allowed it to feel like he was coming back at any time. He left scraps of paper there that felt like when I was little and believed my father’s fax machine was the ghost in our house sending messages to me. I’d read over these sheets of paper constantly as if something new might appear on them.

A record would often be put on while I did my puzzles. The album would be selected by whoever was at the table first. So, some mornings Al would wake up to St. Vincent, and some evenings I would come home to Aphex Twin. Other than the noise emitted from the stereo, there would be little conversation. It’s odd how much I feel like Alex and I talk, yet the most intimate moments appear in those silent avocations. I guess it makes sense for two people who make a living off of words that the absence of them should appear to be revelatory.

I was the white girl who drank one too many margaritas in Mexico. My skin was tinted by a sunburn and as I strolled through the heated streets with a drink in my hand, fiddling the straw with the other, I was certain that if I looked in the mirror that night, my mother would have been in the reflection.

The band was playing in Mexico and I was glorifying myself with having absolutely no work to do, not even the act of planning a holiday. I hung off Alex’s arm that last night in Mexico City and whined, “I’m a step away from getting a lobotomy. I’m a Stepford wife.”

He stood me up straight and said, “You’re drunk is what you are.”

I could tell he was annoyed with me, even in my disoriented state. His fingers gripped the fat of my arm tightly, but I was numb to the pinch. We were back in the hotel lobby and the walk, which was definitely long and laborious for Alex, felt fantastically short for me.

“Do you hate me?” I was asking in what I always thought Alex perceived as the cutesy, daft drunk girl. The interpretation of this act of mine had been the same since college: the sloppy, tiring pissed girl. I tended to recognize that in the morning after, but never when I was blotto and it was just more embarrassing as I got older.

His body was wracked with an exhale like his whole body was about to give out and if he wasn’t in charge of keeping me up, he might have collapsed into me. “No, Jane,” he exasperatedly told me.

I giggled and picked at his chin where a few sharp hairs were hiding. “Ouch,” I yelped and laughed like it was something funny because I enjoyed reveling in pretending to be oblivious. “Are you telling the truth? I don’t believe you.”

We were walking as if I were a child standing on his feet. He swung one foot forward and I went with him. He was closed off to me, shutting his eyes, his blood had been drained from him. I only hung more of my weight on him. My arms linked around his neck and we awkwardly waited for the elevator.

The doors opened. He pushed me toward them. “Come on. I’m tired.” It was late and I was unsure of how early the hour was.

I leaned against the elevator walls and let the coolness melt into my skin. “Are you mad at me?”

“Nope.” His arms were behind his back and he was rocking back and forth on his feet.

I shook my head. My hair was mussed and the elevator handle dug into my back. “I don’t believe you.”

He didn’t talk the rest of the night. I fell asleep before I took my shoes off, but I woke up with them off so he must have done that for me. We had breakfast together, quiet for nearly the whole duration—I had a killer headache and he had a gut-wrenching irritation.

I flew to LA later that day. The band continued on to South America. I was meeting with Opal for business—both personal and Womb-related—and one of my book publishers. Alex and I kissed goodbye in a routine that we had mastered, but we both recognized that a misstep had been made the night before.

I texted him when I arrived and he called me that night from Lima, Peru, but there was no desire from either of us to address our issues over the phone. “We’ll talk more in person,” he said. I agreed because I needed to ask Opal what she thought I should say.

Her script went like this: “How did my actions affect you?” “I’m sorry that made you feel that way.” “Do you have a belief that you need to control me?” “Do I dictate how much you drink?” “If my drunkenness as a woman annoys you, then that’s sexism.”

I told much of the story from my biased perspective rather than the full scope of events. I realized afterward that my need to tell the story that way was the problem and not in the misogynistic lens I wished it to be.

As the hours went on, I became increasingly embarrassed by what had occurred, so much so that my urge became to go back home rather than join the tour for their final three shows. It was childish and I enjoyed how childish the thought was, regressing back into a teenager once again.

I blame LA. I felt lonely after seeing Opal and it’s disgusting how much I let the city overtake me. It’s the weather, it doesn’t match my natural disposition. Then again, that’s too easy of a cop-out. Wherever I went, there I was.

In our unfortunate custom, Alex and I didn’t talk about it once we were reunited. We didn’t talk about it in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo or Bogotá. I’ll claim it was for the best, even though it wasn’t the greatest feeling to have hanging over us for days.

We returned to London and didn’t talk about it there either until I came home one night to Alex sipping a beer on the couch. He softly smiled over to me as I neared him. He was watching something football-related (I lack the ability to retain any information about football due to a correlation of my father spending his time drunkenly screaming at the television). His bottle dripped water droplets onto the end table. I ran my fingers through the condensation that had formed.

I stood beside him long enough to raise an alarm, but he chose to focus on the television. This annoyed me at first until I realized Alex was annoyed by me standing beside him, saying nothing, so he wasn’t saying anything in retaliation. It’s a terrible thing to be understood.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

He looked up at me. His feet were on the coffee table and I could picture how offended my mother would be at the sight of it and it delighted me immensely. He was smiling again. “You mean with the match?”

I squinted at him. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

He swigged a chuckle into his bottle. “It’s never too late for a newfound interest.”

I put my bag down on the floor and climbed over his legs onto the couch. “Oh, dream on, bud.”

“What’s up?” He asked me, his eyes playing a game with me, sweeping all over my face, looking for the secret code.

I headbutted him, forehead to forehead. “I asked you first.”

His hand reached up and swept his hand through my hair. His eyes drifted back to the screen. “I fixed the showerhead if that’s what you’re asking.” Alex had messed with my perfected water pressure and angle since his return, and, yeah, you could say that I messed with whatever system he had when I moved in, but my system is better than his obsolete system.

“I’ll determine that.” I carded my hand through his hair. It had sprouted back to a short, goofy stance. I thought it looked like when a baby is born with hair, covered in bodily fluids, and it sticks up in an uncombable state. I never told him that because that would be rude. Putting it in permanent writing for his consumption is more my style. “What else did you do?”

Alex gave me a look in response to this odd insistence on talking about his day. I don’t usually care that much, especially when I had the knowledge that Alex didn’t do anything noteworthy that day. He shrugged—a request to no longer talk about him.

“Did you eat?”

He cocked his head, resting it on the cushioned backing. He tilted it slightly toward me, enough to see the indication in his eyes that I should shit or get off the pot. “Yeah. Did you?”

I nodded. “I grabbed takeaway for dinner. I suppose I should have called to ask if you wanted anything, but…”

He hummed.

“What?”

He shook his head.

I pulled away from him. “Do you want me to go and get you something?” I asked it as if he were a child incapable of obtaining dinner himself.

He shook his head again. “I ate.”

“Am I bothering you?”

He had gone completely non-verbal and shook his head once again like a toy with only one trick.

“You’re not very convincing. You know that, right?”

He muted the TV like it was the only problem. “What do you want to talk about, Jane?” He was chafed by me. I was as pestering as a woodpecker, only I kept hitting different spots rather than the same one.

“I don’t like it when you call me Jane like that. It’s like your parents saying your full name when they’re mad at you.”

He rolled his eyes and rubbed his hand over his face. “God, you’ve been pissed your whole life when someone calls you Janie.”

I put my hand on his shoulder in an attempt to ease our stand-off. “Not you.”

“Well, Janie, what is it that you’re dancing around? I don’t tend to like this avoidance game you play until I guess the winner, which I suspect, with how this is going, will be the topic of our next fight.”

I crossed my arms. “That or the way you’re talking right now.”

He stared at me like a ticking clock going off over and over again, and no matter how punny it is, I had chosen for too long to keep hitting the snooze on the situation.

“Is me…drinking—is that a problem for you?”

“No,” he quickly replied. He eyed me closer and one day I predict he’ll have developed the ability to X-ray scan me. I returned his stare. His body slowly eased. He waited, moving the words around in his head, changing the order, revising before presenting me with it. “You’re not the easiest to take care of.” He quickly added, “When drunk, I mean.”

“You don’t have to take care of me.”

He rolled his eyes. It was given to him. It was an ingrained trait, something he had to do. “When you’re hanging all over me, whining about how I hate you.”

“You weren’t being very convincing.”

His eyes narrowed. “Do you actually think I hate you? So, I was a little ticked off by you in Mexico, but that’s how I get when you’re like that.”

“I’m selfish, I know.”

Frustratedly, he sighed. “I don’t like your pity party, Janie. You’re not selfish and you know it.”

“I’m burdensome.”

He grabbed my shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “Eh. You’re fine. A bit annoying, but I enjoy how irritating you can be.”

I pushed away with my so-called irritation. “Oh, how nice you are. I hope you know how personally ugsome you can be.”

He leaned over to me. His mouth made contact with my clothed upper arm. “It ties into my inevitable charm.”

I placed my chin on my shoulder, eyes peering down at him. “Which in the full circle of things leads to ignorance.”

He chuckled and persuasively used his mouth as the offensive attack and his hands in a defensive stroke.

Stacey got married at the perfect time. In hindsight, it was an even more perfect time knowing what was to come in the following months, but even on the day, when we were all getting ready, it was declared that she had picked the perfect day to get married. It was a perfect April day where the sun would hit the foliage just right, which is a necessity for a wedding that is held at a converted farmhouse.

Stacey also had superb taste for a bride because I imagine the most dreadful thing that could happen as a bridesmaid is an ugly dress, but she chose fairly well between colour—the prescribed dusty blue—and cut—strapless flowy A-line dress with pockets (!!!)—though I was against the floor length of the skirt due to confident belief it would get dirty and an adamant fear of tripping.

Paul and Stacey got married and I didn’t trip.

Besides, a wedding is just an excuse to spend a bunch of money on a party, at least that’s what I believe. And to look your best. After all, enough money was spent on Stacey’s dress to put a down payment on a house, but I would pick that dress over any boring house, especially when you’re as gorgeous as Stacey and work a job that makes me feel stupid.

My habit of making other people’s big life moments about myself likely comes from my mother’s ability to make other people’s big life moments about me (and herself). The night prior, at the rehearsal dinner, my mother turned to me one bite into her pasta and said, “I’m so glad this isn’t your wedding.”

I was too taken aback to even know how to respond to that, stuttering out, “Huh?”

She distracted herself with her wine glass and her new boyfriend, who, yes, we had just met. He seemed fine at best, unmemorable and bland at worst, which is high marks for what I thought my mother’s future partners would be like.

“I’m so glad this isn’t your wedding either, mum,” I said to her. She either ignored me or tuned me out by this point, but I got Al to laugh bubbles into his champagne.

Later, at the wedding, I was confronted by an aunt, with whom I had not seen in about a decade, who greeted me by saying, “There’s nothing wrong with being a spinster, Jane. In fact, I think it’s quite honourable.”

I’ve never been irked by these remarks. I find there’s a hilarity in how much weight certain people put into whether I mark “Married” on a legal document. In this particular circumstance, I enjoyed it even more with the way Alex reacted to these comments by going completely bug-eyed and hiding behind me like a child behind their parent’s legs.

“I find it to be an appealing job,” I told her. “It beats divorce.”

She gave me a tight smile and told me not to talk about divorce at a wedding, but I think that had to do more with her past divorces than Stacey’s fresh, stable marriage. She excused herself to continue making the rounds like it was her wedding. I suppose there is something in my family’s bloodline that makes them feel like they deserve copious amounts of attention. I do in fact share blood with these people.

I turned around to look at Alex. “You’re plenty of help,” I told him.

“Well,” he cocked his head back, “I didn’t want to get involved in your family affairs.”

“You’re more family than she is,” I told him. “You’re not gonna defend my honour.”

“She said being a spinster was quite honourable and I have to agree.”

I slapped his chest. He grabbed the hand that bit and held it in between his palms like he was trying to start a fire. “What a dodger you are.”

He was passing my hand back and forth between his two hands like we were playing a hand-clapping game. He smiled with the corner of his mouth. “You want me to go knock her out?”

“Nah. I don’t want you to break your hand against her silicone.”

Paul’s family is apparently occupied by a bunch of dancers, consisting of a mix between professional ballroom dancers and people who shout at you to join the conga line. I don’t mind dancing, but I refused to do it in front of my family in a shared sensibility of being dreadfully embarrassed by anything your mother does, including grinding against her new boyfriend.

Alex and I stayed seated and indulged in the food bar for most of the wedding until I was abducted for the throwing of the bouquet for which I had zero interest in after enduring about ten comments per hour about how people couldn’t wait for a future wedding to the point where I felt I had entered a Clockwork Orange torture chamber where all I could do was smile and nod.

After I stood in the back with arms crossed until the bouquet had landed in Paul’s 17-year-old sister’s hands, I sat back down next to Alex where we were approached by my step-grandmother, who said, “How nice would it have been for you to catch the bouquet at your sister’s wedding?”

“Paul’s sister will have first dibs, I suppose.”

She laughed in the tone normal people make when they get a tooth pulled. “You better get on that soon.”

I then made the mistake of saying, “It’s up to Alex.” It was a deflection method that led to Alex looking like he had wet himself.

“Oh,” she exclaimed. “What are you waiting for? The good ones don’t stick around, you know.”

I was more shocked by being referred to as a “good one” than by Alex saying, “When she’s two weeks late.”

The blood drained from her face. I enjoyed a happy helping of laughing before tugging on Alex’s arm and exiting the venue. It was quite a childish thing to say, but it equalized out considering I hadn’t seen these people in half a lifetime and they had more interest in the occupation of my uterus than me, or better, no interest at all.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Alex repeated with a lack of anguish and with a levity the situation needed. He had always found these conversations of small talk to be ridiculous and that’s why I tended to be the mouthpiece. His taking up the mantle for me caused more than just a laugh. I also find everything Alex does to mean more than anyone else doing it.

No matter how immature we were acting, cackling outside the venue, I found it made me feel like an adult to be able to say these things to your family and no longer having to accept their judgment simply because it’s the proper thing to do.

“You’re gonna kill that woman,” I told him, scratching at his chest like a cat on all the nice furniture.

He kept muttering apologies with convulsed effort. He grabbed my hands off him and tugged me closer to him, knocking himself against me. “I’ve wanted to say that all night,” he explained. “I’ll rectify it if I have to.” He was an honourable soldier with integrity. How cheesy of him to be sworn to me and fall on his sword for me.

I kissed his cheek like he was my little puppy dog with sweet little cherubic cheeks. One of these days, I’ll swallow him whole, starting with those cheeks. “You’re good in my book.” His thumb dashed over my cheekbone, an archaeologist trying to uncover a fossil.

We produced cigarettes for ourselves. We swayed side-to-side in front of one another, saying small comments about the wedding, future plans, and the recent Notre Dame fire. The environment was stale and when we eventually drifted into our individual comfortable silences, I figured that would be it until we went back inside for another slice of cake.

But Alex spoke up, saying, “Do you want to get married?”

I shrugged. “One day, yeah.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding his head, “I know that. I mean, do you want to just get engaged?”

My eyes went wide and I was certain I was misreading the situation. “Like…to be married?

He pressed down a laugh. “Yeah. I would get down on one knee, but I think you’d slap me.”

“You’d be right and I’m thinking of slapping you now. You’re proposing?”

He slipped his hands into his pockets, stuck in clear nerves, shifting on his feet. “Well…yeeeeesssssss,” he dragged out. “Maybe.”

I was having processing issues. I stared at him for several long, stretched-out seconds. “This isn’t feeling too romantic.”

“When have you ever wanted that?” He was smirking.

I shook my head and pressed my hand into my forehead, suffering from a terrible case of second-hand embarrassment. “Yeah. No. This is feeling more obligatory than actually wanting to.”

He shrugged and looked at his feet. “I’d want it.” He peered up like a scared little boy, afraid I had changed my mind on everything, and now I would deeply hate him. We’re one and the same.

I had a hard time looking at him and chose to scan the surrounding area instead. I needed to be occupied by something other than him. I was overwhelmed, about to overdose. “Do you have a ring?”

“You don’t want a ring,” he reasoned.

I was still struggling to track the whole situation. “I still don’t think you’re seriously asking.”

“Okay, but if you want, whenever you want.”

“Standing offer?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.” As if it were a business transaction between us. As if this was a simple thing and these were simple affairs, and it was normal to ask your girlfriend to marry you over two cigarettes and after a joke about how you wouldn’t marry her unless she was two weeks late. I found it humorous, but not worthy of a “Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!”

I don’t know what I would’ve expected after years of denying any romanticism or possibility of marriage. I just didn’t want it to be something that seemed loveless. Something that would appease my family more than me. It wasn’t the story I would want to tell my children.

I worried about him, though, all twisted about, tangling himself up from the inside. I’m fearful that one day it’ll be discovered that his organs had wrapped around themselves and shut off blood flow, forcing his heart to explode. I would no doubt be the primary cause of torsion organs.

He looked down at the ground. His shoes skimmed the grass like a magnet was holding his attention. His hands were out of his pockets and now at his hips. He looked simultaneously fully formed and adolescent. I don’t know if saying yes would have changed this at all. To me, he didn’t act as if it was something he wanted, but he might have, if my eyes weren’t so shaming toward him for asking me under these circumstances.

The environment had just turned awkward. I would have to bend down to get him to look me in the eye, and I know that would feel belittling, acting toward him like he was a child who misbehaved and had to be placed in time-out. “I’m sorry if I upset you,” I told him.

He shook his head and his lips moved in the motion of saying, “No,” but he never spoke it out loud.

“You know how picky I can be about these things. Probably to an enraging degree.”

His eyes met mine and they didn’t look like how I imagined: dreary, dark, downy. Instead, he was sunny, jocular, and rapt. I’m still not sure what rabbit’s foot I carried around in life to earn him, but I’d do it over and over again, even if I had to cause that poor rabbit pain. “No, perfectly normal. Or, at least, the way I like it.”

“I just feel like I shat all over you.”

He huffed a laugh and closed his lips together to silence himself. I swung my arms down by my side. We were two black holes merging together, but for now, we both resisted, instead dueling each other in Street Fighter: The Courting Version.

“I look clean. Don’t I?” He widened his arms and looked down at his suit. His jacket was undone, so his white button-up was showing. I imagined everyone else thinking vile things about him. It made me want to jump around like the girls who caught bouquets, screaming, “I won! I won! I won!” And maybe I should lose that competitive spirit that I must be the ultimate winner in all outcomes, but at least in this circumstance, I will deem myself the winner.

I eyed him up and down, the way I had seen him do to me a thousand times (again: “I won! I won! I won!”). I tossed my head to the side with a thoughtful pull of my cheek. “Maybe. I don’t know. You look pretty dirty to me.”

“Shut up, you.” He threw his arm around my shoulder and scruffed up my hair like we were once again teenagers “wrestling” on his bed, back when we felt the need to act out play fighting as a prelude for sex. It made me miss the days when every action was a nervous domino in the sequence concluding in sex. All our conversations were just reasons for me to eventually get him under the covers (and, in the really really long term, get him here with me).

I pushed against him, shouting all through laughter, “Stop it! Stop it!”

He surrendered, but kept his hold against me, keeping me with him. I tilted my head back to look him in the eye as he spoke, “I’ve just gotta think of something more grandiose.”

I gave him the pleasure of needing to hide my face from him, still terrified of this boy seeing my rosy cheeks and aching smile. “A mix between this and flash mob. Plus, Stacey would kill us if we got engaged at her wedding.”

He whistled in pure relief.

My father adopted a dog. My father’s parenting of his children was on an absentee basis. I believed for a long time he never wanted children, but he did it because my mother wanted children. Then, he got a dog. A black lab that he named Oswald.

This is when we all believed my father had gone nuts. He began sending blurry pictures of this dog to us. Whenever he was prompted about why he got a dog, he replied only saying that Oswald was too cute to pass up. My father had been oozing with unusual affection as of late and I don’t believe the word “cute” had ever been in his vocabulary. It would be a word he would chide me, “Quit talking so babyish, Janie.”

It was enough to prompt me to call him, asking after him, the unnamed girlfriend, and Oswald. He replied, saying that he would be in London soon and hoped to get the family together. The request seemed ridiculous, considering we had only just been together a mere month ago. I’ve gone full years without seeing family.

“I’m worried about him,” I told Alex while we were eating dinner. We met at the restaurant after I spent the day in boring meetings over the phone and he had been out doing things that weren’t making his brain melt.

I liked meeting at places. It gave me a unique sensation. It was a reenact of the days of distance when we had crushes or heartbreak or a deep, perpetual longing for each other.

We were chewing on rolls, waiting for our meals to come out. “He’s always been a mystery,” Alex said. “He’s probably engaged or summat.”

“Lord only knows,” I sighed. “But the dog? That’s weird.”

“Maybe she’s into dogs. If I told people I had a turtle, they would probably question that.”

“You’re not a man who once gave me batteries for my birthday.”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t know. The guy’s gone through a lot of changes as of late: retirement, divorce, moving, new girlfriend.”

“Maybe.” But I didn’t think so. It was more likely for the guy to have a brain transplant than to have that big of a lifestyle change. “Maybe the new girlfriend is a miracle worker.”

My father came to town a few weeks later. It was just him, Stacey, and me. My father insisted that it would be only blood relations, so Alex and Paul didn’t attend the dinner. We ate at the restaurant in the hotel where my father was staying, which was luxurious at every corner, down to the teaspoon. He said he would pay, causing Stacey and me to take advantage.

“So,” I opened, “when do we get to meet this girlfriend of yours?”

He twitched a smile, something that, for a long time, was an unimaginable sight to see on his face. “Oh, soon. She’s a great woman. Patricia, so goes by Pat, and she’s…” He stopped like he couldn’t fathom another word. I felt sad that I never witnessed my parents experience this kind of affection for one another. There was a claim that it had once been there, but I had never lived to see the sight.

When I got home that night, Alex was in bed with a book. He had drifted off with it in his hands. It had now collapsed on his chest. I shut the bedroom door, jolting him awake. He rubbed his eyes, slowly sitting up. “Hey. Hey. How’d it go?” Ripples washed through me, an overwhelming tide was sweeping me away, so I sat on the end of the bed. “That bad?” Alex questioned. “You were out for a while.” I left at 6, it was now past midnight.

I exhaled the best I could and kicked off my shoes. “Yeah. I’ve been walking around for a little.”

“What happened?” His approach over to me was slow as he began to understand the situation. Each move stretched with calmness and hesitancy until he sat beside me. He didn’t try to touch me, instead showing me his presence first. The trace of him has been a far greater antidote than anything else I’ve seen out there.

I scrubbed my face and improved my posture. I knew I had to process, but was aware I would likely never process the truth. “He’s got metastatic non-small cell lung cancer and there’s—he’s dying. So, that’s all.”

When I learned Tommy died, I was trying to comfort my crying mother, and since that early age, I was well-aware that there’s nothing you can say to aid that debilitating pain. The hard part with my dad is that I had spent years of my life avoiding him, and for reasons I still deemed as rightful, and yet, all I could do was rethink what could have been.

Alex wrapped his arms around me and held my head to his chest. He didn’t say anything. He held me and what an untouchable feeling it is to be held. I heard his beating heart under my ear and I could only think about my dad holding me as a baby. He had told me that rocking us to sleep was his favourite thing because it was the only time he felt he was doing something right.

I was crying, I’m sure of it, though when I recall the memory, I don’t think I was. I definitely wasn’t at dinner, I know that for sure. Stacey sobbed. I was too embarrassed to cry in front of my dad. I was too embarrassed to cry in front of my dad when he told us he was dying. Alex told me I cried when he held me, so I think that’s what happened.

He kissed my head and placed his mouth up against my ear. “What do you need me to do?” I pulled away from him. He told me to take a deep breath, so I was definitely crying, even if I didn’t feel it. We lay down under the covers and I told him to turn the light off. I don’t think I wanted him to see me cry either.

“All those nice things we said about him,” I said. “It was because of this.”

“That’s not true,” Alex insisted. “It’s him. It’s all him there.”

I didn’t believe him then, but I believe him now. “And what about Oswald? He’s just gonna leave that damn dog behind. What the fuck?”

His hand rubbed circles on my back. “He’s probably a comfort for him—”

“What about me? Huh? He’s had it for a bit. He didn’t want to tell us because of Stacey’s wedding. The whole dinner, I kept thinking, ‘What about me? You know, don’t I deserve to be blissfully unaware of all of this?’ Then, I kept thinking how selfish I was and how I’ve always been—”

“It’s your dad.” He squeezed me to insist upon this point. “That’s not selfish, J. He gave you life—”

“Yeah, and now he’s dying, and I’m thinking me me me. Imagine how he feels.”

Alex’s breath brushed my neck, and it felt like he was breathing for both of us. He was my life support. “Seems like he’s trying to fix things. He might be acting out of the ordinary lately because he’s evaluating the life he’s lived.” I do remember crying here. It felt like a sneeze that couldn’t be held in. “Janie.” All I could think was how much I hated that nickname because my father called me it.

In the wake of the news, I smoked vigorously for two weeks before deciding to quit. It’s a tribute to my father, who wasn't actually dead yet. I tried to write something, an obituary, already planning a funeral for someone who might die in a week or five years.

I talked extensively with Stacey for two weeks. We indulged ourselves in our most unforgiving vices, but primarily alcohol. She had always been closer to our parents than I had. She was the baby and remained with them longer than any of us had. She cried over it for a number of hours on the first few days before sobering up and slowly turning to laughter.

I kept thinking how the man wasn’t actually dead yet, but we are all acting like he was. For parts of my life, he has been dead for months at a time. I didn’t tell Stacey that out of fear she would reprimand me for thinking of our father as a disposable thing, but I whispered it to Alex at night because I’m confident in the belief he will only ever judge me for my favourite Strokes song and my deep hatred of bourbon.

That’s the primary reason to have a partner. The amount of secrets locked up with him could sink a ship, and not just a small one, a big one, not quite a yacht, maybe a schooner. I would be at the bottom of the ocean without him during this time. Each day, I squeeze out the amount of tears left in me. We talked in the dark. I could be more honest, like a makeshift confession box in our bedroom. It felt like speaking to the void and the void was speaking back to me.

“Do we throw a party for him?” I asked Alex, semi-serious. “Do you even throw a funeral? Let alone if the guy is still alive.” It had been over a decade since someone close to me had died. I barely knew what a person wore to a funeral other than black.

It was early in the day, though neither of us knew the time, we could tell through the position of the sun sneaking through the window. We had spent innumerable mornings into the early afternoon like this since the beginning of time, but the amount had increased exponentially since the pending death of my father. I could never reach the end of a topic with Alex, but with this one in particular, I don’t think anyone has reached the end of the topic of death until their own death.

“Seems like something he would like,” Alex said. I had my legs crossed, leaning my back against the headboard while he was lying out on his side, half-tucked around the blankets. “It’s in his humour.”

Alex had been trying to make sense of this whole mess to the best of his ability. He had to guess the moves of a man who had barely spoken to him, and when he had, the tone was in jest. He was untangling a dynamic that the people in it didn’t discuss among themselves. He was trying to break into a window that had been painted shut decades ago with deadly lead paint, and it was dark, raining, and he only had the moon to guide him inside.

“Sit around having a bunch of cigars, playing a game of poker.” I was choked up by the thought. It would be the first and last time I ever joined in on my father’s favourite game. When I was a baby, my father would occasionally take me off the hands of my mother or the nanny by sitting me in his lap while he played poker with his friends. I am not sure what the surgeon general would think of having your baby sit in on a booze-filled, smoke-infested poker game, but I was my father’s good luck charm. And he could use some good luck.

Alex placed a hand on my thigh. His thumb moved back and forth. “It sounds like a fun evening.” It’s the “fun” that can only come when a plague has been placed on you. I was only waiting for the locusts to descend.

The feeling of heaviness wore off about a month later. I had accommodated to the constant weight of getting The Phone Call™ on my mind. I knew it wouldn’t be coming too soon. My father sent a record number of updates in that annoying way when someone sends text after text, rather than finishing a sentence and then sending it, but in this situation, I didn’t mind. I just wanted to know. I hated not knowing things.

Dad: Breathing good today

Dad: Had troble last night

Dad: Getting scan

Dad: Tomorrow

Dad: walking oswald

Dad: Fresh air good for lungs.

Dad: even if air is prob poluted

Me: Okay.

I didn’t work for a while, even though I had writing deadlines to meet that I didn’t ask for extensions for. I joked with Alex that they probably thought I died, but he didn’t laugh at that. Death didn’t seem so funny anymore.

We talked about going away somewhere to take our minds off of it, but it didn’t matter where I went, the thought would still be on my mind. So, we stayed huddled up in London. It was becoming warmer and I was in constant need to feel like it was summer. I needed it to be enduring, like summer would never end, and this is a time loop that would play out in some twisted form of Groundhog Day, where the date would never change, and therefore nothing would ever change.

But the more I thought that the more I felt unhealthy for not facing the truth of the situation. Alex said there’s nothing wrong with that. He thinks I feel a need to shoulder the burden of things. We were never punished growing up in the typical way kids receive punishment, therefore, I felt a need to mentally bring it on myself. I told him he was trying too hard to be my Dr. Melfi. We had been rewatching The Sopranos, which, other than Alex, was my only salvation during this time.

There was a birthday party one evening that Alex had questioned me all day about whether I really wanted to go, constantly saying, “You don’t have to, no one would judge you.” I appreciated his tenderness toward me through these trials, but he talked to me like a child, or maybe worse than a child, a person completely incapable of making their own decisions. He talked to me like I was a baby or his pet fish. He had more nuanced conversations with Lou than he had with me about this party.

He was extending my grief out as a constant reminder that if I ever forgot it, he would give me a little tap on the shoulder. It made me couple everything with guilt now. I was angry at him for caring. I had no right to fault him for caring after I had spent decades of my life begging for someone to care. The only person judging me was myself.

The sun had disappeared by the time we left home, which is the way I prefer leaving for any evening occasion. Alex was dressed like he was about to change the oil on someone’s car, but would shout, “Ew! Ew! Ew!” if any dirt got on his hands. I wore a blue T-shirt and jeans.

We were eating dinner made by the birthday girl’s husband. Alex and I ate food off each other’s plates, even though we had the same meal. The food tasted better when shared between us. He would be chewing and sounding a moan of pleasure, rubbing his lips together to taste every drop. He would tell me, “Here. Have a bite of this.” He held his fork up to me and I bent down to bite it off like I was a dog earning scraps of dinner.

I scantily talked, an unusual convention for this group of friends, causing them to ask, “How are you doing, Jane?” They were so downtrodden, I thought they already knew, like talking to a child after their dog had “gone to live on a farm.”

Alex spoke for me because he had an idea that if he said it would somehow lift the pain from my lips. “Her dad isn’t doing too well, uh, health-wise.” When they expressed concern, asking further, Alex continued to explain it vaguely. I wonder if he talked about death with anyone like they were a child. I thought if someone asked him how babies were made, he’d tell them a stork brought them. I wonder how long he believed in Santa Claus.

“He’s dying,” I said because easing the band-aid off hurt like a bitch. Why weren’t we just ripping the fucking thing? Everyone there was already guessing it, so why do we feel this need to tiptoe around it? It was as if not saying it wouldn’t make it real. It was real. I didn’t want to act like it wasn’t real. I was tired of everything feeling like some performance we had to act out.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told them. I was already tired of the idea. That night, I told Alex my most shameful thought. I wanted my father to hurry up and die already. It was an anvil hanging over my head. I didn’t want the anvil to exist, but I just wanted the process to be over already, rather than thinking the anvil would drop at any time.

We walked home from the party that night. I scuffed my shoes on the concrete, so there was some noise for our ears to acknowledge because we weren’t talking. Silence between Alex and me could be one of the most deadly sounds.

“I don’t like it when you talk for me,” I told him when we were a block away from home.

His hands were in his pockets. He hadn’t held mine in a long time. “You do it all the time.”

“You like it when I talk for you,” I countered.

He shrugged. “Not all the time.”

“Oh, okay. ‘Some’ of the time.” I performed air quotes, an eye roll, and a promise to not look at him for the rest of the evening.

“Yeah,” he anathematized, “some of the time.” I could tell he was getting annoyed with me. He only repeated things I said when he was annoyed with me or trying to be cute. His tone was too short for flirtation.

“Fine. You can talk all the time.” We were doing that thing where you don’t yell, but your voice gets just close enough to it. We were still quiet enough to insist that “We’re not fighting!” even if everyone knew you were. I call it Cold War-ring.

“That’s not the point, Jane.” He was calling me by my given name. That meant he was really mad at me.

“Sureeeeeee.” When I talked like this, I was really mad.

He scoffed and swatted his hand at me—his way of seeming like he is over fighting, but actually wants to continue fighting. “Fine. You can do all the talking.”

“I don’t want to do all the talking!”

“Pft,” he spat. “That’s all you do. Hours upon hours. We can’t talk about anything other than what you want to talk about.”

He was saying that to hurt me, which I knew, so I didn’t take it personally. “You could interrupt me at any time or—here’s an idea—just go to sleep!”

“I can’t go to sleep if you’re talking.” He was unlocking the door. I was happy we would be home so I could yell. I liked yelling. It’s the same release as crying or an orgasm. “You’re so fucking loud. Surprised someone hasn’t come complaining.”

“Well, maybe they like listening to me. I’m very insightful.” He was chuckling, and I knew in a matter of minutes we would be having sex. It makes a fight a lot more fun when you know it will end in sex. It’s an additional game. “Besides, it’s not like you could fall asleep anyway.”

“You’re making fun of my insomnia.” He was laughing loud enough to make the house shake. “That’s a new one.”

“I’m creative like that.”

He agreed. “One of your best qualities is telling a person everything you hate about that.”

“Oh, not just everything I hate, but anything anyone could possibly hate. Like your shirt.”

He pulled at the fabric. “What’s wrong with my shirt?”

I pressed my eyebrows together. “It’s got holes in it.”

“I like it!”

We were in our bedroom now. I was taking off my jeans and he was peeling off said shirt. “Don’t you want to look nice? My mother would call you homeless if she saw you wearing that.”

“You’re listening to your mother’s opinions now! You used to love me because you knew your mother would hate me.” I was taking off my bra now and he was waiting with his hands on his hips to take off his underwear so we could each do our own at the same time.

“Oh, what do you know? You don’t even speak to my mother.”

He twisted his face offensively. I think I like him best when his face is all scrunched up. It accentuates his cuteness. “You used to hit me if I tried to speak to your mother for too long.”

We were taking off our underwear now at an equally matched pace, one might mistake us for mirrors of one another. “Because I wanted to go upstairs and have sex.” I slingshot my underwear at him and the piece of fabric brushed his crinkle-ridden nose.

“Are you going to hit me now?” He asked. He had a smirk now. I used to long for this predictability. It felt like we had already had sex before we even committed the act. It’s like our bodies were already three moves ahead, but our brain hadn’t yet captured the movements.

“Do you see my mother anywhere?”

He neared me, moving like a snake. I both deeply hated and was intensely turned on when he moved like that. I found him to be too smug, but his body moved too sultrily for me to ever complain. “Is that what it takes to get you going? The threat of someone walking in.”

“Please. My mother likely spent a total of 10 minutes in my room the entire time we lived in that house and half of them took place when we were moving in.” I moved over to the bed and sat down.

He sat beside me. “We’re getting off topic,” he reminded me. He tapped my back. “Scoot.”

I moved up the bed, lying on my back. “That’s what happens when you do the talking.” He was laughing too much to continue the act. “You’re distracted too easily. You need cue cards or something. I am your teleprompter.”

He twirled his fingers, motioning me to flip over to my stomach. He liked fucking that way because I told him once that it felt more punishing because we weren’t allowed to look at one another. I think I picked that up from porn. Alex got turned on if he thought I was turned on. It didn’t take much for his mind to wander to sex. He found it to be more precious if he thought I was thinking about it. Thus, having sex this way felt hot to him and to me in some Newton’s cradle where we were turned on as long as the other was turned on.

“You’re too fast to be my teleprompter. You malfunction at every other word.” (One thing I have mostly excluded from my personal writing is the amount of filler words I use. I’m afraid “uh,” “um,” and “like” would take up the majority of this book if I included them in every piece of dialogue I say as I do in real life. I don’t think I can begin a sentence without it. It’s like my start-up sound.)

He was in me by this point. “You’re just slow,” I said. “I’ll see you next year by the time you get to the end of your sentence.”

“I’m choosing my words carefully. You could probably try that more.”

I made a noise at this point. It was a mix between a moan, an interjection, and a giggle. “I would lose all my charm if I did that.”

“You’d probably get along better with people if you did.”

“Why would I want that? Then you wouldn’t have me all to yourself.” I looked back and smiled at him. It was intended to tease, but I found it came off more sensitively than a sexual gesture.

He rolled his eyes, knowing that I was looking at them. “I’d finally have some time on my hands. Probably learn a new language.”

I turned my head back straight forward. “And not be able to speak it to anyone.”

He did a quick thrust then, which meant he needed time to think of a rebuttal, so he had to distract me. Unfortunately, successful. “Maybe I’ll learn sign language.” His head was closer to me now. He was talking straight into my ear, brushing his chosen air on my neck.

Once I knew he had moved back, I spoke again. “You’re quite good at gesturing. You move around so much I sometimes think you’re in pain from that stick up your ass.”

“You can’t say that when you’ve got me in you.” He moved quicker to prove his point.

I tilted my head. “Fair enough. Then again, you’re the one moving, and I’m just sitting here. Thus, proving me right.”

“Oh, you’ve always got to be right.” He said it as if this were a new development in my behavior. I was likely born with the gene that makes you unflappably stubborn. “That’s another thing that’s wrong with you.”

“But don’t you find my precocious tenaciousness attractive?”

“I find everything you do attractive.”

“That isn’t saying much. Men would fuck a fire hydrant if it had a wig on.”

He snorted through his nose. It was wildly unattractive and I never wanted to come more. “Are you a fire hydrant?”

“In another life.”

“Certainly are wet.”

I laughed and decided nobody had ever loved another human being more than me at that moment. Most people probably feel that way before they come. “Does that make you the hose?”

“Aren’t I long enough to be?”

My face ducked down into the mattress. I was shaking from laughter and pleasure too much to hold myself up. “Shut up.”

“We’re saving lives, honey.”

He could cut into me and I wouldn’t care. It used to scare me how much I was willing to take any pain he could cause me. I used to lie awake at night, right in that early phase when I knew I loved him but hadn’t told another soul yet, and think about how he could do the most awful things to me and I’d still find him to be the most exquisite thing to walk the earth. I had never used the word exquisite before. I find it to be filled with a propensity that only my mother could pull off, but I found him to be perfect for my first usage of it.

The real love came when I realized he would never do such a thing. He wouldn’t even think about it. Even when I did some of the most wicked things that would cause even the most level-headed of people to squeeze their hand into a fist, he would lean back like he was Buddha. I then lay awake at night, convincing myself of all the awful things I would do to him that would run him off. One day, and this was only a few years before this, I realized that I had never thought about doing those things. I only ever thought about having those thoughts. He was too beautiful to think of placing a scar on him.

“I think we’re causing a fire, not putting one out,” I told him.

“Are we?” He questioned seriously. I thought he might pull out of me and go sit at the desk and write a research paper about whether or not sex is a fire or the water coming to aid it. “Or are we already on fire? Isn’t fire associated with these things? Fighting? Making love?”

I giggled at how cute he was. “Making love? Who are you? A teenage girl? Am I taking your flower?”

“Oh, I was plucked long before you.”

I tossed my head back again. “No, you weren’t. It was only about a year before me. Unless I’ve been lied to.”

“Me?” He pointed to himself. He acted out these gestures even if I couldn’t see him. He didn’t need to perform for anyone but himself. “Lying? No.” He was being serious when he said this, not rhetorical. “I wasn’t lucky enough to save myself for the Jane Cavendish.”

I turned forward again. “Ew,” I implored, “don’t use my full name.”

“Should I call you something else? What’s your stripper name? It’s your first pet’s name and the street you grew up on, right?”

“How do you know that?”

“You don’t know what I get up to.”

I playfully pushed his left hand off me. “Don’t want to know what diseases you’re carrying.”

“Compared to you? Nothing I’m sure you don’t already have.”

I looked back at him with my mouth wide open. “I’m not one of the whores you picked up off the street. Though I should charge with how good I am.”

“Oh, yeah,” he agreed. “Should teach classes or something.”

He was mocking me, so I once again turned away and told him, “Shut up.”

I wasn’t sure we were even having sex anymore. It was easy to forget about when talking to him or arguing or whatever foreplay this was. “When did you lose your V-card? 12?”

I chuffed. “Are you 12? V-card? Has your prepubescent lifeform taken over your body?”

“You should be in jail if that were true.”

“Don’t talk about rape when you’re fucking me.”

He paused. “Sorry.” Then, he picked it up again.

“I was 13.” We had never talked about it before for some reason. I guess it never came up before.

“Really?”

I nodded. “At his parents’ coastal house. After we did it, he never spoke to me again.”

“Wow. How? It’s impossible not to talk to you. We’re talking right now.” I like it whenever he feels the need to commentate a situation. Sometimes we’ll be grocery shopping or waiting for an airplane and he’ll just state out loud what we are doing, for no one in particular. I’m not sure who is talking to when he decides to exclaim, “We are now waiting for the airplane.” It might just be a way for him to make sense of situations, to confirm some trick isn’t being played on him. He lives in constant fear of that happening.

“It’s fine. Not like it was that good anyway. I didn’t even know what good was yet, but I knew it wasn’t that.”

“When did you know it was good?” He asked. “I’m not saying that to flatter myself. I’d prefer it if you said someone other than me. I know I wasn’t too good in the beginning.”

“How did you know?”

He lightly chuckled, followed by a groan. We were still in the midst, believe it or not. “I was 18. I wasn’t exactly Casanova.”

“I always liked you. You were better than the 13-year-old.”

He squeezed my side. I knew that meant he wanted to kiss me, but the position was too awkward to perform the act. “I hope so. I just meant, when did you know sex was good? I know it isn’t always…you know, pleasing for girls.”

His tenderness was easy to laugh at, but was a far greater display of his maturity and endearing qualities that men were unlikely to possess, especially when he came to asking women about things like sex or periods. “Well,” I thought out loud. “I had done some stuff before I liked. Masturbating and reading the dirty romance novels my mother read, so I knew it could be good. Or thought it could be with how romance novelists describe it. Then, I had a boyfriend, maybe a year or two before you. He was pretty good. A little bit older, more experienced. It doesn’t matter. No one really counted before you.”

We finished around this point, so the conversation paused for a moment for a while until we were settled beside one another. We lay down on our backs and his hand drifted up to play with the stray hairs that poked out their way around my head. “When did you know sex could be good?” I asked him.

“Oh, probably the first hard-on I got.”

I spat laughter into the air, covering my mouth as my muscles tensed up. “You really are a 12-year-old boy.”

“Oh, come on,” he insisted, “you wouldn’t get it.”

“Why? ‘Cause I don’t have a penis.” I flipped onto him and reached my hand down in between us to touch him like a medical examiner. Like I had to make sure it was still attached to him. “Sexist.”

He held his hands on my upper arms to make sure I wouldn’t move them away from what I was touching. “But it’s true. It’s the first sign that you’re a man.”

“Is that why men are so attached to this thing?” I squeezed it like it was my chew toy. He squealed like a pig. “Don’t men think about sex every 30 seconds?”

“It’s impossible not to think about sex when you’re involved.” He was trying to play cute. He knew how to get under my skin.

“Stop. I’m being serious. Do you really think about it all the time?”

“No,” he said. “But it’s a nice thought. You know, when you want to pass the time and think of something.”

“You think about sex? Doesn’t that give you an erection?” I was moving my hand over him.

He chuckled. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“How am I supposed to know? After all, I’m not a man.” I fluttered my eyelashes to play our cute little game. “Tell me.”

“I don’t know.” He was blushing and I liked him best when he was blushing. It fell in a different category of sex, making love, fucking. “I don’t know. What do you feel?”

“Probably the same thing as you.” I presume. It was hard sometimes to feel like we didn’t share a mind. Half the time, I thought we were just communicating inside someone’s brain, not actually two individuals, just two brain cells wrestling with one another. “Try,” I urged, tugging on him.

He was turning redder. “I don’t know,” he said, frustratingly. His head drifted off to the side, unable to look me in the eye. I kissed his Adam’s apple. It had been playing tricks on me all night. “Warm, I guess.”

I hummed. “Yeah. I feel that too. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“If you wait long enough,” he said. “Waiting is a pain for anyone.” His eyes flicked back to me. “Especially you.”

I giggled, my chin chattering against his chest. “What about coming? It comes out of the same hole you pee out of. Isn’t that weird?”

He laughed with his eyes coasting down to me. “It’s weird you have so many holes down there.”

“You get confused which one to put it in?” He quickly pinched my arms in a tight grip to make me yelp as payback. “Why are men such babies when it comes to getting kicked in the balls?”

“Why are women such babies when it comes to giving birth?” He joked. I took my hands off of him to punish him for such an awful joke. “No, no, wait, I’m sorry,” he said through laughter. I didn’t believe him, but I returned them to their juncture. “It’s a sensitive area. It’s like getting poked in the eyes by Moe’s two fingers.”

“That’s good. I can imagine that. You’re very good at that. You should write sometime.”

He sighed like remembering. “You’re good at that.” He was drifting off. He was looking heavenward, and I let him go to the sky for a moment. I knew he’d return to me at some point. It was nice to see the appearance of peaceful demise in those trying times—a friendly reminder that letting go could feel gratifying.

We returned again to our backs. I waited for him to speak to indicate he could breathe again and then I would breathe again. He began to hum a tune so faintly that you couldn’t even echolocate it. He delicately touched a finger to mine and then pulled it up my arm; more soothing than a massage. “I didn’t know it was good until you,” he said.

I squinted, disbelieving. “Just now? It took you 33 years?”

He huffed a laugh. “Be sweet to me.”

“I’m very sweet to you,” I said. I rolled onto his chest because I liked to hang out there for a little while. “Didn’t you just feel how sweet I could be?”

“Don’t play, Janie.” His eyes were escaping my view, and I could tell he was growing tired. It was later than we would allow ourselves to believe. He had to get up early, but he wouldn’t reject speaking to me in favour of sleep. “Don’t play when I’m sincere.”

“Mhmm.” I suddenly felt sleepy, like it was an osmosis transfer. “I believe you. Sometimes it’s hard to handle the weight of what you say. You know, like ‘nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.’ I need a funnel for all the things you say, age it like wine, or something.”

His eyes were closed now. “That’s nice. You should write.”

“Don’t play, Al.” I quipped, defeating the purpose of my statement.

“Go on,” he said.

I wasn’t aware I had to say anything more. So, I talked for him. I knew he was growing tired. “I have a ‘if I loved you less I might be able to talk about it more’ mentality.”

“Are you going to talk through quotes for the rest of the night?” He asked.

“Are you going to talk again at all?” He didn’t say anything so I continued. “You’re too big for me to handle sometimes. I have to take you slowly, in pieces.”

“Like a chocolate bar.”

I giggled and tried to pull him closer to me. Unfortunately, conjoining our two skins wasn’t a possibility. “Sure. In that case, I have diabetes, a mad case of it.”

“Maybe you should eat less chocolate then.” We might have been talking about two different things at this point. He was half-asleep. I didn’t mind. It felt like I was in one of his dreams.

I kissed his cheek. “But it’s so addicting,” I whispered in his ear.

He was smiling then in a sleepy way and I thought it would be best to not keep him up any longer. I moved away a little to put my head on my own pillow. He pulled, not wanting to give too much of me away.

He flipped to his stomach so the hold would be less awkward and his hand shifted down to my waist. I thought he was about to squeeze my ass but he kept his hand on the line. He shuffled a little closer. I thought he must be somnambulant by this point, but then he whispered, “I love you.”

We never said it much. It was a phrase implied in everything we said or did. I found the phrase too much sometimes. It still made me flush red the same way it did when he first said it. I would tell him it was such a disgusting thing to say, like it was covered in some sticky substance and smelled like garbage. For a long time, it was, but he had cleared it off like he had much of the other dusty things in my life. I didn’t know it was good until you. I whispered it back and was under the suspicion he had fallen asleep by the time I uttered it, but he kissed the back of my neck. When I asked him about it the next day, he said he couldn’t fall asleep until he heard it like your mum tucking you to sleep or the night before Christmas. I’m not sure what I had to do with his mum or Santa Claus, but I knew at certain points, they were the dearest, closest things to him and had kept him warm in the bitter cold of life. I thought nothing could be more apt for him. He was both my blanket, mum, heater, Santa Claus, and Alex—my Alex—all at once.

July was sluggish in the way much of summer is after the heat no longer feels pleasurable, but instead that gross, sticky, unbearable feeling that has you longing for the cooler months that you had spent praying for the warmth of summer. There’s the rub, always wanting what you don’t have.

Alex and I went up to my father’s house, where the summer was cooler and there were fewer other miserable people around, which was saying something about how London had felt, considering the preferred location was with a man dying from cancer.

It was all about time anyway. The location didn’t matter much to me anyway. You only focus on time when you’re losing it. The hourglass isn’t as daunting when it’s still full of sand. Perhaps, the situation made me too philosophical. I tend to get introspective in the face of death, most people probably do, but I’ve never been another person, so I can’t say for sure. I tend to get long-winded in moments like this. Alex has said I talk until I run out of breath because it forces me to stop and control myself, and from that, few moments in my life will put things in perspective then watching as my father died like a car slowly going downhill at just the right speed that you’ll never catch up to it. It’s death and taxes, right?

My father stayed inside most days. He didn’t have anyone to go out with other than Oswald and most days he let him out into his wide backyard that stretched on for acres and acres. I told him many times that I wished we had a backyard like this when I was younger. He said we did. I said that I knew but it wasn’t like this backyard, so wide the human eye could not perceive all of it at once—a place where you couldn’t see where it ended. He told me I was the only kid who saw the beauty in a place like that, my siblings had become too industrial for the country, the true country, “not those blasty old suburbs,” he said.

Alex and I drove to the River Severn to sit by the shore. I had never seen it despite its English status and I liked being near the water with Alex. It made the world feel like it was turning on the right axis for just a moment. We rested in the blades of grass and waited for the rising sea levels to sweep us away in the next Great Flood.

It was warm and had begun to rain in that sweet, dewy summer kind of rain that God had designed for the sole purpose of driving thirst from Earth’s plants, so we went and sat in the car to watch the rain on the windscreen with no use for the wipers. The sky was grey, and I was slowly convincing myself it might be my last day on Earth. It felt like a meteor or War of the Worlds was hours until it was upon us, or, at least, me.

For once, I was the one too inside their head. Alex sat in the passenger seat, drumming his fingers in a rhythmic pattern against the centre console, signifying his boredom, but not vocally speaking because that would be deemed rude by me. However, his drumming meant the same thing as him telling me to hurry up and get out of there. I demanded, “Could you quit doing that?”

He lifted his arm, muttering an apology, and straying away to the other side of the car seat. The minutes passed slowly. I stared at the car’s clock, always a minute behind. His voice broke through. “Is there something you’re waiting for?”

I sighed and decided to be done with it. “No.” I took the car out of park and pulled away from the river.

“Sorry it wasn’t a nicer day,” he said.

I shrugged with a frown bubbling to the surface. “What can you do? It is what it is.”

His hand reached over and squeezed my shoulder, a thumb strumming my collarbone. “I’d stop the rain for you.”

I chuckled to feel something. “Okay, Al Roker.”

His hand crawled to my neck and rubbed right where my hair ended, pulling at the itty-bitty baby hairs. “Do you want to go somewhere else? Somewhere special?”

I shook my head. That had been my something special. It was a chance to feel normal and at home again. It was a worn-out tape, and I suddenly felt old by the river as if I had turned into the old hag version of the Evil Queen. I was terrified of sleeping—of missing out on something, something I’m not sure of—yet, it was all I wanted to do. My weight felt like a burden pressing down on Alex and I could only hate myself in these moments for both being that burden and thinking of myself that way.

“Is there something—”

I interrupted aggressively, too much for my liking, “Just be quiet.” I was casting some spell, a curse, or cough medicine with that pink colouring and artificial bubblegum taste my mother forced down my throat when I was sick.

Alex’s hand fled the scene and went back to his body. I couldn’t help but feel the urge to scream out for it like my own limb was being taken from me. I was stuck remembering the days when all we did was talk in this car with an amplitude that single-handedly caused the radio to become obsolete.

He was bored and had begun fiddling around. I hated how twitchy he could be, but he went for the glove compartment instead of the radio so I didn’t say anything. He was searching for gold in there, only coming up with some ragged paper. “Gin rummy scores,” he hummed in recognition. “We could play a game of that.”

I gripped the steering wheel until I turned a whiter shade of pale. I nearly cried, but melted away instead. “Found your letter in there. The one with all the quotes from Letters to Véra. And that letter you wrote me.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?” I glanced over to little avail at getting a read on him. “‘Oh’ like ‘Oh, that old thing’ or ‘Oh’ like I shouldn’t have found it. Don’t tell me it was for some other girl.”

He let out a short laugh. “No, no. You were the only girl. Well, for the most part, you know the rest.”

“Why didn’t you give it to me back then?”

“Don’t know. I wrote it half a lifetime ago at this point. Nerves, something like that.”

“I was unworthy of it anyway.”

“No,” he was reading over the gin rummy sheets in the midst of this, “you weren’t. Wouldn’t have written it then.”

“I know. I just meant I wouldn’t have appreciated it. I brushed all those things off too much. You sent me into a panic back then.”

He shut the paper away like its rightful place would always be in that glove compartment behind the car’s registration papers. “You were slow to open. It’s what I liked about you, attracted me to you at first. So mysterious.”

He was being playful. I realized my mind was no longer drifting away with me, so I went with Alex instead of whatever terror lay on the other end. I did that with my whole life. Instead of counting sheep at night, I tried to figure out what my life would’ve been like if I had never met Alex. The imagination would often scare me to sleep to escape the what-if spiral.

“Thank god we met when we did. You know, like what if I went to uni without meeting you?”

“You’d be fine. Maybe have a drug dependency, but chilling. Like the stoned mum or something.”

I snorted and thought about pulling over so I could look at him straight on, but we were only a few minutes away from my father’s home by this point. “Who would I have kids with?”

He thought for a minute, which meant he was thinking the best way to tell a joke without me getting (mock) offended. “One with Robert, but you wouldn’t be together. He’d be your sperm donor without paying for it and he’d see the kid on its birthday and one week in the summer.”

“You’ve really worked this out in your head,” I noted. He tossed his head side-to-side, not to indicate one way or the other. “In this scenario, I’m a single mother suffering with Robert for the rest of my life.”

“You’re an independent woman,” he cheered, trying to put a positive spin so brightly on his face I couldn’t reject it.

“Sure. And where are you? With some model?”

“An orgy of them.”

My jaw hung open at his boldness. “Oh, how nice for you.”

He brushed my arm. “Relax. I’d be some drunk, unable to get it up, too frustrated to enjoy it.”

“Okay.” I just laughed on and on.

“I wouldn’t have anything special in my life without you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t get all cloying on me.”

He was laughing but sitting up and squeezing my arm, insisting, “I’m being serious. You know everything you’ve done for me.”

“I’m having a hard time believing you when you’re laughing in my face.”

“It’s because I’m so happy my body can’t keep it in anymore.”

I leaned away from his lips that were coming in to plunge on my cheek. “I’m gonna flip the car if you don’t stop.”

“Fine. Fine.” He leaned back into his seat, but I felt his eyes because he liked to see all the hair stick up on the back of my neck.

Something was stuck in between my teeth after dinner. The three of us were crowded around the small kitchen table. Oswald was below it, by my father’s feet, wagging his tail. Everyone was breathing heavily, an indication of a good meal. I excused myself to floss the thing out from its lodged location.

I returned to the two men, having moved to the living room with cracked-open beers, chatting. I went to the fridge to grab one for myself. When I returned, they quieted down. “Am I interrupting you two?” I fluttered my lashes with wariness.

“No,” they both said with their lips curled out.

I looked down at my shirt for a stain. They were staring. “Okay,” I said when I found nothing. I sat on the sofa beside Alex. “Why are you being weird?”

“Sweetie,” my father said, “you’re being weird.”

I rolled my eyes and pulled from my bottle. “Right.”

“We were talking about Stacey’s wedding,” my father said. “It was a cracking old event.”

I narrowed my eyebrows together. “Has the cancer spread to your brain? You’re talking funny.” The ultimate sign of adjusting to a tragic circumstance is the ability to joke about it. I read that online somewhere, so I was trying to be more willing to joke about all of life’s ailments.

He waved me off. “Piss off, you, whining about everything.”

I sank back and let him carry on. I just wanted to listen to him talk for a while about all those uninteresting things he rambled on about. It was my inheritance.

Later, when I was turning down the sheets, I asked Alex what they had been talking about. He was digging through the suitcase for a pair of boxers. “He was going on about Stacey’s wedding.”

“What about it?” I asked. He didn’t reply, focusing on changing his clothes. I asked again, “What about it?”

He scrunched up his face, shook his head, and got into bed. “Nothing.”

I squinted and got into bed beside him. “Why aren’t you telling me? You’re keeping secrets with my father, of all people. Don’t count on him keeping it. He spoiled every surprise party ever. I think my mother listed it as a reason she was filing for divorce.”

“He was talking about being the father of the bride and walking her down the aisle. Just things that would upset you.”

His synopsis had done that enough for me without knowing the additional details. I couldn’t fault Alex for telling me after I pried it out of him. He just had to get better about lying. “Trying to urge you into proposing?” I jested in an attempt to lighten the tone.

“Something like that.” He was closing his eyes with a smile on his face. It scared me.

“Well, are you?”

Alex chuckled and opened his eyes. “Are you allowed to ask me that?”

“You’re talking about it with my father and not with me?”

He barked a laugh. “Of course not. If I have any plans, Janie, you’ll be the first to know.”

“So, nothing on the table?”

His lip jerked. “Or in the sock drawer. Don’t sound so terrified, jeez.”

“I’m not,” I assured, tucking my arms under my pillow. “Only if you’re talking about it with my father, of all people.”

He nudged my side with his elbow to bust a laugh out of me. “Don’t worry, he brought it up.”

“Okay,” I exhaled. We were going through the motions of going to bed, but I knew we’d talk for a distance more. It was dark, except for the light bleeding through the crack between the door and the wall. “He’s not going to walk me down the aisle. Or he’ll be really feeble and he’ll have to be pushed in a wheelchair by Michael Scott, and it'll be funny but painful to watch, and nobody wants that. My whole life, I shuddered at the thought of my father walking me down the aisle and ‘giving me away’ and now the thought of not having that scares me, even though I wouldn’t want it. Or thought I wouldn’t want it.”

He smiled to ease me. “You’re allowed to want that, Janie. Doesn’t mean you’re bending to anti-feminist or societal pressure.”

“Yeah, I know. Still, the thought of not having those things. Like he never was going to be an involved grandfather, but him not being here for the hypothetical children is sad.” I laughed at myself as I said it. Anything that he wouldn’t be here for would be sad, even for the mundanity, stupid small talk I had shunned. Perhaps it was better this way, not having to worry about him dropping dead of a heart attack or dying in his sleep. It was impending and I knew when it would occur and I would save up every conversation I would’ve or could’ve had in the time beforehand. “He seems content with it, so why should I interrupt that?”

Alex pointed out, “He’s had more time to deal with it than you.”

I agreed. “Change the subject.”

“Samuel Beckett drove André the Giant to school,” he spouted out. “He was too big to ride the school bus and Beckett was his neighbor.”

I wonder where he read these things. If he was simply more well-read than I, or if he had a book of fun facts that he carried around. I didn’t ask him because it’s nice for there to still be some mystery, some untouched part of his being. He imagined he had a little magician’s hat and pulled these facts out of it.

“I have an idea,” I told him. He perked up his eyebrows to indicate he was all ears. “What if we got married?”

“Yeah?” He suggested that I move further.

“No, like really.”

“Yeah, and?”

I giggled at him and tumbled over his body, forcing eye contact with him. “Alex, I’m asking you to…” I motioned my hand in a circle instead of saying the words out loud.

“Marry you?” He chuckled. “Hard for you to spit it out.” He hissed between his teeth. “Doesn’t seem like a good sign.”

I turned off him, smacking down on the mattress. “I’m about to revoke my offer.”

“No, wait, wait, wait.” His voice was tinged with hilarity as he pulled himself over me. “I just never prepared to be on the receiving end of this.” His arms lay on either side of me. His body was compressing my chest, but I didn’t want to breathe quite yet.

“This is how I’ve chosen to be non-traditional.”

“Okay. Say it. You know, ask me.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m not gonna.” His words were tickling me as he kept insisting I ask him. “You say it. I’m not gonna say it. I already asked.”

“But you didn’t say it.”

“Say what?” I attempted to trick him.

“Nice try.”

I closed my eyes. “So, that means no?”

“No.”

I sighed. “I’ll take my answer off the air.”

“Alright, Janie. I say yes to whatever your question is. I’m your yes-man.”

I smiled because, you know…

The next morning, my father said, “That’s mighty nice,” and continued making his bacon.

I complained for decades about those annoying people who say fiancé like it’s the only word they know, like they are teaching the baby to say a word—“Can you say fiancé? Fiancé. Fiancé. Fee ahn say!”—and I still hate those people, but I told everyone I knew. I wasn’t trying to boast, I mean, I definitely was, but I wasn’t like “Ha ha ha! I’m engaged and you’re not!” but I did tell everyone I knew like it was a passing thought.

I told Stacey and Paul when they came over for dinner a couple of nights after we returned to London. We sat down, and I said, “Oh, hey, by the way, we got engaged.”

She screamed one loud scream. Her hands were shaking by her face like she was auditioning to play Laurie Strode in the Halloween remake. Then, she shouted, “Copycat!” while pointing her finger like we were in a court of law and she was pointing to the offender.

In the grand scheme, I felt I was low-key about it, but maybe I wasn’t. Alex and I went grocery shopping and I felt the urge to tell the cashier we were engaged. Then, I ranted at him the whole way home about how embarrassed I was that I had told her we were engaged, because what a disgusting idea to be happily with someone and getting married.

Alex shared a similar disposition to mine, telling people in passing, not calling them up to make an announcement, except for his parents. His mum kept calling him honey, like when she tucked him to bed every night. His dad said, “Alright, that’s nice.” So, they were very happy and I knew it.

My mother called me a week later. “Hello there, Mrs. Turner. Do I have the pleasure?”

I grimaced. I had elected to defer the announcement to her, simply forgetting about it, at least that’s what I told her. “Not quite. Who told you dad or Stacey?”

She gasped. “You told your father before me? Christ, Jane!”

“He was in the periphery.”

She lightened up when I told her we could go wedding dress shopping. I questioned the whole ordeal, but dressing up always sounds nice.

A few weeks after the new title of fiancée had been ordained on me, Alex and I were finishing up lunch together, walking around, when he suddenly suggested, “We should get you a ring. Let’s get you a ring.”

I told him I didn’t need one, but he had his mind set, and he insisted. He shrugged, but it obviously meant a lot to him. “I like the idea of you with a ring.” He ducked his head down to hide his grin. He was staring at our joined hands.

“Okay.” I was overcome by his sudden insistence. It was more personable than the ring. “But nothing too big. No diamonds.”

“Not too big to you is a toy ring,” Alex pointed out.

I squeezed his hand. “Exactly. Like Hello Kitty or something.”

He tipped his head back with a boyish grin. “I’m not getting you a Hello Kitty ring, Janie.”

“But I want you to. Shouldn’t I get what I want?”

“I’ll give you that for Christmas. Stuff it in your stocking.” (And he did).

The ring ended up being nice, but not too nice. Alex allowed me to pick the ring I wanted as long as it was nicer than “that plastic crap.” We ended up at Portobello Market, searching around. I felt settled on this sapphire ring deemed worthy enough by Alex.

We went to pay for it when I told the vendor it would be my engagement ring. He clicked his tongue and shook his head. In his thick Cockney accent, mouth wrenching of Guinness, “You’ve got to get a Claddagh ring.”

Convinced he was trying to sell us more, and told him, “Just this.”

He was searching through the stacks of boxes he had behind his table. He shoved a box into my head. “Here. Here. There you go. Vintage. Gold.” I opened it and I couldn’t help but think how beautiful it looked. “Richard Joyce made it in captivity for his future wife.”

I was overwhelmed by the power of it. Hands held a crowned heart, the slight wear on it adding to its character, charm, and lure. “This one?” I held it back to him.

He shoved my hand away. “No, love. I wouldn’t be here if that was the original one. Back in 1600s. This is ‘70s or so, but very nice. Gold. Gold.” He took it out of the box. “Depending on what hand it’s on and the way it’s turned, it tells you whether a woman is taken or not.” He spun the tip of the heart outwards. “In your case, engaged, outward on the left hand.”

He motioned for me to hold my hand out. “Suppose I should give your man the honours.” He handed the ring to Alex. He slid it on slowly. I let out a mix of giggles and stuffed-up tears. “I’ll give you this pretty sapphire thing for free. Engagement gift.” That meant it was mighty cheap. “Claddagh ring £10,000.”

We looked at him, utterly dumbstruck and wide-eyed. After all, we were on a side street in London and this ring had been protected by nothing but this half-drunk man.

He howled out boisterous laughter. “Kidding, mate. Gimme a few hundred, a wedding invite, and a Guinness and it’s yours.”

a/n: so like ten other things were supposed to happen in this part but it grew so long that we'll just push them to 2020, which i'm scared about. that'll be weird to right. but with five minutes left of my birthday, here's my gift to you. also, i like it so you better like it. thanks.

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