She exhales. “I don’t know if I have a word to describe you. I’ve been thinking about it really hard because I want to give you a word—but I just can’t find one that encompasses everything you are. I can’t relate you to anybody or anything else.”
“Wow. This is a promising conversation.”
“I’ve thrown some around. A balloon, a compass…”
“Is this some joke about my sense of direction?” I ask.
“What? No. Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know? Because a balloon just floats in the air, taking it wherever the breeze goes, and a compass would be a sarcastic joke.”
She laughs. “No. Jeez. I just meant—” She stops, knowing we’re going off on a tangent. “All I can say is, Romy—you’re a hopeless romantic. You’ve always been that way. You’d make me read all the fairytales twice every night. For Halloween, you were a princess every year until you were ten years old. All those fake weddings you’d put on when you were little. I swear you could find anything to use as a veil.” She laughs. “The first novel you ever read was a romance you stole from Aunt Bette.”
I shift in my seat, trying to get more comfortable in this pregnant body. “Nothing wrong with any of that.”
“You’re right. Nothing is. But you truly believe that everything is fate or kismet. And I don’t know… for a while, I worried about you because of that. I thought that you were only going to be disappointed when you got older.”
“Well, I am disappointed. Guess you’re psychic.”
She places her hand on my thigh and squeezes. “No, I mean that… I thought you wouldn’t be able to settle. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, you were always looking for a specific connection that something meant something. Or a sign. And I thought, maybe she’s just gonna meet someone as she’s dropping off the mail at a post office. Like, it doesn’t have to be this big, grand thing. And I wondered… if it was just an ordinary way of meeting someone, would you give it a chance and believe in them? But then… it kind of happened to you.”
“Yeah, Mom. I got picked out of a crowd because a country singer wanted to fuck me.”
She taps her hand on my thigh. “My god, Romy, stop talking like that.”
“It’s the truth, Mom. Zander didn’t pick me out of the crowd because he had a feeling I was the one.”
“How do you know that he didn’t point at you and ask security to get you because he felt something different?”
I laugh, a fake hysterical one. “Because he pushed me away. After the third time I went to see him. On the fourth time, he had DeSoto tell me I wasn’t on the list.” All that pain is present again, but so much worse now. Because we’ve gotten close, and we’re having a baby, and I was naïve to think he’d changed.
She sighs. “You know, the thing is… sometimes men just don’t know what they want.”
“I don’t want to hear that, Mom. I don’t want to hear that he’s out there somewhere yearning and pining away for me when I’m in as much pain as this. He’s not. It became difficult, I didn’t want to play by his rules, so he pushed me away. That’s the way he works.” I cross my arms and stare at the words on my grandparents’ graves. Wife and husband. Maybe mine will just read mother, sister, daughter. I need to be okay with that.
“I don’t think that’s true. And I know that you’re probably going to tell me I’m wrong, but… you know, Zander didn’t grow up with this.” She puts her hands out and circles her head around, indicating our surroundings. “He didn’t grow up with love. Definitely not unconditional love. I mean, he grew up with people taking him in who didn’t always have the kindest hearts. Sure, there are great foster families out there—people who want to help the kids and give them a chance at life—but they’re not all that way. And it sounds like Zander wasn’t lucky enough to be placed in those families.”
“I get it, Mom, I know it wasn’t easy for him. He had a rough childhood.”
She frowns. “It forms the person you are, Romy.”
“I know.” My voice comes out rough.
“You clearly don’t.” Her angry tone makes me turn to face her.
“What don’t I get?”
“You protect what you love. It’s a reflex. Like breathing. He and Beau probably know what love is before anyone else does because they know how it doesn’t look. They spent their childhoods with strangers constantly turning them away. So, when Zander finally found something real, something he loved”—she nods at me, then my stomach—“he gripped it so tightly, with everything he’s got, and God help the world if it takes it away.”
“He just let me leave,” I say, but she continues as if I didn’t say anything.
“Now, he has an instant family. A woman he loves and a baby he wants to give every opportunity that he didn’t get?—”
I groan, and tears fall down my cheeks. “Stop saying he loves me. He can’t love me. Not when he deliberately hurt me.”
“Oh, stop it. You know what that man feels for you. And if you don’t, then you need to go back and look at some of those pictures of you two. There’re plenty of them on the internet. Go search them up. That man loves you.”
“Then why would he push me away, Mom?” I wipe the tears on my face.
