A nondenominational minister named Jane had officiated their wedding, one of those atheist northeastern ministers. Brian had never known they existed before he met Becks. I don’t believe in God, but I want to run a church. Like, I hate food, but I’m gonna be a chef. Say what? But they were a real thing.
Anyway, Jane gave a little speech just before their vows. Marriage can be a seesaw, one side rising as the other falls, she said. An endless tug-of-war, both of you fighting for control. Or it can be a partnership, a place where your happiness is his and his yours. A sacred space, a shaded grove. Live in the grove of happiness.
Jane wasn’t married, though. And, no surprise, Brian realized pretty quick she didn’t have a clue. Their marriage wasn’t a grove or a seesaw or a tug-of-war. It was… a bus ride, maybe? With Rebecca driving and Bri eight rows back. They didn’t fight, but from the first they built their lives around her and her job. She made the money. She had the health insurance.
Brian didn’t mind. Not at first, anyway. Rebecca took to being an agent. And Brian felt he got to live the job without having to put on a suit. She told him all about it, not just the cool parts but the bureaucracy too, the forms they filled out in triplicate, their old-school computer systems. Long after everyone else switched to email, the FBI still used faxes as a regular means of communication.
He liked Birmingham too. Practically no traffic, low cost of living, and cute UAB coeds for scenery. Even after Kira started going to preschool, he had Tony. Goofball Tony. The kid walked into walls and insisted on taking two baths a day for exactly seven minutes each. He wasn’t autistic. He made eye contact, he loved to be hugged. He was just weird. So be it. Brian was glad to hang out with him.
But sometime during their second year in Alabama, he realized he was turning into a housewife. And in Birmingham, men weren’t supposed to be housewives. At the park where Brian took Tony to play, the moms gave him a wide berth. They never asked him to join their playdates. He found out why after a few weeks, when the cutest of them all—small and luscious, the opposite of his wife—sat down next to him on the bench that had somehow become his and his only.
Okay, he was turned on, he’d admit it. Their sex life had come back some now that the kids were a little older, sleeping through the night. But he could tell it would never be the same as it had been in those first few months. Becks was tired all the time. Besides, the old joke was true, just ’cause he liked Mexican food didn’t mean he wanted tacos every meal for the rest of his life. This little piece of honey-dipped cornbread next to him…
“Nice to meet you.” He put out a hand and she hesitated but then her Alabama manners took over. She had a boy who was maybe three, but she couldn’t have been more than twenty-four. She wore a little gold cross between her perfect D cups. “I’m Brian.”
“I’m Kaylee?” Women down here turned everything they said into a question. Even their names.
“Hi Kaylee.”
“That your boy? Tony?” She nodded at Tony, who was sitting backward on a fire engine, cupping his hands around an invisible steering wheel instead of the real one in the front. Why? Who knew? Tony gotta Tony.
The question surprised Brian. Kaylee must have seen him bring Tony to the park dozens of times. “Of course.”
“Like, yours?”
Finally the penny dropped. “You’d have to ask his mother, but I think so, yeah.”
“You’re not, you know”—she hesitated, finally came out with the word—“queer?”
Brian tried not to feel humiliated. So what if she thought he was gay? “Do I look queer, Kaylee?”
“Lil bit, not too much. But you can’t always tell.”
“Could you give me a percentage?”
She shook her head in a way that suggested the concept of percentages was foreign. “But are you?”
“Straight as a jaybird.”
“Oh.”
He didn’t quite understand the disappointment in her voice.
“Was gonna ask if you wanted to bring your boy over to play with Karlin? They play good together.”
Indeed, Karlin was giggling with psychopathic glee as he swung a pail at Tony’s head.
“You still can.”
“My husband said only if you’re a queer. Otherwise no guys in the