“What if,” Andi says, thoughtfully, waving a single french fry through the air, “you just told them about the vasectomy?”
I fight the urge to look around and see if anyone around us heard, but they’re all either talking to each other or watching the basketball game on various screens around the bar.
“If I told who?” I ask, although my brain is helpfully supplying me with an endless stream of names about who she could possibly mean.
“The people who keep trying to give you six goats and a Chevy as their daughters’ dowry.”
“I’d never accept a Chevy as payment. At least not one being given away.”
Andi grins, leaning her head on one hand, hair spilling over her knuckles and down her forearm. It’s late, cold and raining outside, a Wednesday night, but I hadn’t seen her in a few days and I wanted to. She’d agreed to cover a Chamber of Commerce meeting for the paper, so I offered to meet her at the only place still open at nine-thirty.
“Gideon,” she says. “Don’t tell me you’re a Ford Motors loyalist or whatever. I’d have to rethink everything.”
“I drive a Toyota,” I tell her, the very picture of patience. “I don’t want another car, and I especially don’t want whatever rust heap one of my parents’ friends would give away.”
“That’s actually a good point,” she concedes.
“I also don’t want their daughters.”
“The goats, though,” she says, and I can’t help but smile because she’s not wrong. The goats are the only thing in that bargain I’d half-consider; the Chevy is an outright no and while I’m sure the daughters are lovely, nice young women, they don’t interest me.
Also, no one has actually offered me a dowry. My parents and their church friends might have archaic attitudes about a lot of things, but I don’t think they actually pay people in livestock to take their daughters off their hands.
“Goats can be useful,” I admit. Then I remember what we’re talking about. “Wait. Did I tell you about that?”
“Did someone literally offer you goats and a Chevy?” she asks, sitting up a little straighter.
“No,” I tell her. “Would you stop—they’re not that bad.”
Andi raises one eyebrow and eats another french fry.
“Just more dinner offers,” I mutter. “That sort of thing.”
Since I last saw Andi, it’s been two voicemails and one email. I responded promptly to the email but haven’t tackled the voicemails yet because talking on the telephone can go fuck itself.
“Would they stop if they knew you weren’t having kids? Could be an easy out,” she says, and she’s trying to sound casual but there’s something about the way she’s holding her shoulders, the set of her mouth, that makes me reach across the narrow table and tap the underside of her wrist with one fingertip.
“Hey,” I say, and she looks at me, and I was about to say there’s no number of goats I’d rather have than you, but the words shrivel up on my tongue. The look on her face is like ice over a river that might not hold; it seems sturdy but there’s a lot swirling underneath.
“I’m not interested, so they’ll get bored and move on to someone else soon, once I say no enough times,” I tell her. My fingertip is sliding across her wrist, warm and soft. A tendon flexes, and I run my finger down it. “Though if I tell anyone about the vasectomy, they’d tell my parents instantly.”
“They don’t know?”
God, the thought of it. I snort.
“Fuck no. They’d be furious.”
Andi’s quiet, watching my finger on her wrist.
“Why?” she finally asks, and I can tell from her tone of voice that she thinks it’s incredibly weird. I can’t blame her. I’m not even sure I can explain myself.
“Because they think there’s a right way to live and a wrong way,” I say. “And the right way is exactly like them and the wrong way is everything else. They think I’m still trying for the right way and just… haven’t made it yet.”
“And if you told them, they’d know you were wrong,” she says, and I sigh.
“Something like that,” I admit. “And I’d rather—it’s better for everyone if they don’t know. They’re happy, I’m happy, I can help when my brothers and sisters fuck up. Besides, they’re a little nicer when they pity me for not being able to achieve the life they think I want.”
I say that last part with a small, secret smile on my face. Andi doesn’t share it, two fingertips now drawing circles on the inside of her wrist. I watch them for a moment, and when I look back at her, Andi’s looking at me so intently I feel pinned to the booth behind me.
“What?”
She blinks and shakes her head.
“Nothing.”
“Andi.”
“Gideon.”
I tap her wrist again. “Tell me.”
She sighs, and makes a face, and scrunches her nose the way she does when she doesn’t want to say something but is going to anyway.
“I wish it weren’t like that,” she says. “I wish you could tell them about whatever life you want.”
“It’s this.”
There’s a beat of silence as Andi and I look at each other. I did mean to say it, but I didn’t realize the weight it would have until it was out of my mouth already, hurtling across the table. I didn’t realize that I’d feel like my heart went with it, out of my chest and into the air where anything at all can come along and damage it.
Andi watches me. She doesn’t say anything. I don’t, either, and finally she slides her hand into mine, raises them to her lips, and kisses my knuckles. I can’t help but smile and blush and feel brand-new in this world, because there are people and we’re in public but I don’t stop her. I’d never stop her.
“Thank you,” I say, and she shrugs, but strokes the knuckles she just kissed with the pad of one thumb.
I think about it for days, and finally settle on: I can tell them something. It doesn’t have to be everything. I can ask for mercy in some small way, and it will be granted, and everything can carry on almost as before, the delicate balance we’ve found not altered too greatly.
I’ve earned some kind of concession. This one small thing. Surely.
“We’ll pray on it,” my father says. Standing in front of the stove, my mother doesn’t say anything. I’ve still got my outdoor coat on, my hands in the pockets because they’re clenched into fists. Elliott would hire security guards.
“That’s not what I asked,” I say, and the steadiness of my voice surprises me. It gets my father to look up from whatever he’s reading on the table and give me a long, level look. “I asked you to stop. Not to pray about whether you should stop.”
“And I said we’d pray on it,” he repeats, and stands slowly, his hands still on the table in front of him. “I don’t appreciate my own son thinking he can walk into my home and tell me what to do.”
When I was four and he was three, I hit my brother Matt with a toy fire engine. He got a black eye and I got the first spanking I can remember when my father got home from work that afternoon.