Fruitful said, “Oh. You mean if you’re getting married.”
I cast a glance at Daisy. She lifted a very nicely shaped dark eyebrow at me. She looked just bloody fine without makeup. Honey-colored skin, dark brows and lashes, a broad forehead, and dark eyes with twice a normal person’s amount of life in them. A straight, pretty nose, heaps of cheekbone and square jawline, and a small mouth with a perfect bow in the top lip, and the kind of fullness in the bottom one that didn’t need any lipstick at all to get your imagination going. It all worked just fine for me.
It took me a second to realize that she wasn’t going to answer, and then to think of what the question had been. “Well, no,” I told Fruitful, bringing my soup over to the table. “I didn’t mean marriage. I meant if you’re dating a woman.” I was not explaining hookup culture. Daisy could do that. Call it the Advanced level. “Which may or may not lead to marriage. Usually ‘not,’ to be fair.”
“If it doesn’t lead to marriage, though,” Fruitful said, “why would you do it?”
Obedience whispered, “Fruitful,” in a horrified sort of way, so I said, “No, it’s a good question. And asking me is the right thing, too. How are you going to find out if you don’t ask?” Then, of course, I actually had to answer. I decided on, “Well, as a man … because in those ways women aren’t like men, they’re pretty awesome. Softer. Sweeter. Well, except for you,” I told Daisy, who was doodling on her paper now, drawing three-dimensional boxes, and boxes inside of boxes, like a woman with too many things to figure out. She laughed, and I grinned. “Because they are made differently in some ways, and it’s fun to talk to a woman, and be with a woman, and, uh …”
“And kiss a woman?” Daisy asked, yes, sweetly. “And so forth?”
“Well, yeh,” I said. “That too.”
“But don’t you want to get married?” Fruitful asked. “How can you not? Who cooks for you, at your other house? Who does your washing and cleaning? And what about babies, and needs?”
“I do all that for myself,” I said. “Even here. My mum taught me to hang out the washing when I was just a kid, and how to clean a bathroom and do the washing-up and the rest of it, too. Single mum, eh, with enough on her plate.”
They gaped at me. I’d swear that shocked them more than the sexual part. “Well,” I amended, “I do it all except the babies.” I wasn’t going to ask about “needs.” I suspected I knew what “needs” were, and as far as I was concerned? That was another Daisy topic. “And as to why I’m not married,” I went on, “I, uh, had a job where I traveled a fair amount, overseas as often as not, and I wasn’t very available otherwise, and since then? Dunno. Just never found the right woman, I guess.”
The girls looked at each other again, and Obedience asked, her voice tiny, “Why do you have to find her?” And then blushed dark over having said anything.
“Uh …” I said, “because so far, she hasn’t found me?”
Daisy explained, “In Mount Zion, your husband is chosen for you by the Prophet once you turn sixteen. Boys, too, though they tend to be older. I’d say something about how that makes it easier for them to command their wives, since a wife’s job is to obey and a husband’s job is to make her, but that would be bitter.”
“Which you’re not,” I said.
She laughed, at least. “Nah, I’m bitter. I’m owning it.”
Here we were, then. I did need to ask this. It was hanging over this table like a cloud. Wasn’t it? It felt like it, an edging of fear around every conversation, around all Daisy’s actions last night, brave as she’d been. “That man,” I said. “One of the two who were chasing us. He said he was the girls’ father.”
Everybody got extremely still. No more smiles, and only Daisy was still looking at me. She said, “I thought it was his voice.” She wasn’t drawing anymore, and I wasn’t sure her hand was steady. She saw me noticing and put the other hand over it, clamping both of them down on the tabletop.
Delayed reaction, almost certainly. She’d had to hold it together so long, and now, with her sisters, she was having to hold it together even