“I didn’t know that until he explained it to me. They’re just kind of like trolling everyone in the name of free speech.”
She laid back down beside me and my heart settled a little just to have her near. “It’s kind of genius,” she said through a yawn. “We don’t have to have all the answers tonight.”
“Thank God,” I said.
“Don’t you mean Sky Daddy?” she asked.
I pulled the blankets over us with the towels still beneath us.
“I love you,” she whispered again. “I think I knew it was true the moment you blurted it out back in LA, but I couldn’t say it then.”
I pressed a kiss to her forehead. “That’s okay. It was worth the wait.”
“Badum tss,” she said lazily, making a drum sound. “That purity culture pun gets ten out of ten.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Winnie
“How’d it go?” Kallum asked from the makeup chair. He was waiting for temporary white dye to set in his hair and beard, his long legs kicked out in front of him and crossed at the ankles, his phone in his lap and open to a YouTube video about plant-based meat.
The makeup and hair team were nowhere in sight, so I sat down in the chair next to him and answered honestly. “I think it went as well as telling your religious parents that you got pregnant can go.”
I set my phone on the makeup table and tucked my hand over my lower belly, feeling the small, firm curve there. “Which is to say that they didn’t answer, and so I left them a voicemail breaking the news instead.”
Kallum reached over and squeezed the hand closest to him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I didn’t apologize or make excuses though. I simply told them I was expecting and that I wanted them to know. And that if they wanted to know more, they could call me back and we would talk, but I wasn’t going to listen to any blame or judgment about it.”
“Your therapist would be so proud. I am too!”
I knewIshould be proud too, because communicating boundaries had been a parent-project of mine for two years, and I’d finally done it. But I didn’t feel proud or mature. I felt weirdly like I was playing all those things on TV rather than actually being them.
I squeezed Kallum’s hand back and smiled at him. “I’m glad your parents were nice, though.” Just remembering the squeals and shouts coming from the end of Kallum’s phone after he’d told his parents made me smile even bigger; listening to their happiness had made me feel like I’d just scooted up to a warm fire.
“They’re over the moon,” said Kallum, letting go of my hand to dab cautiously at his newly white beard with his fingertips. “My mom has known for a total of twelve hours, and she’s already bought you lanolin ointment, whatever that is.”
“She’s amazing.” It was how I wanted my own mother to react, but that was a fantasy I needed to let go of.
He cracked a grin. “She kept talking about all these creams and remedies and I’m just like, slap a Pampers on the kid and call it good. It can’t be that hard, right?”
“I think, very famously, it’s supposed to be really hard,” I said, the end of the sentence lilting up like a question. This wasn’t the first thing Kallum had said over the last couple of days that made me wonder if he thought of a baby like a Nintendo Switch—something to play with when you’re bored, something that you might take a nap with on the couch, but not something that would change the entire way you lived your life.
But I shook it off. Kallum and I were still learning each other. He was probably a lot more dependable and mature than he came off while he was making a sexy Santa movie. He owned a business! That meant taxes and payroll and finding out how to buy those giant rolls of toilet paper for public bathrooms! I was making something out of nothing.
“Hey, you okay?” Kallum asked. He leaned forward, his eyes a bright, concerned blue. “I know parent stuff can be weird.”
Despite the Pampers comment, he seemed so wise right now, with the white hair and beard, and it almost felt like I was telling therealSanta. If the real Santa were Viking-size and loved having me sit on his face, that was.
I opened my mouth to speak and then stopped, because I wasn’t even sure how to say what I wanted to say.
Kallum waited silently, his attention never leaving me, and I decided to just try, no matter how little sense my feelings made. “I got to be part of a perfect family on TV, this fictional family that peoplestilltalk about, twenty-odd years later. A fake family that was twenty-two minutes of adorable kids and loving parents, of pep talks and kitchen hugs, of people messingup and being forgiven, all in the predictable container of a single episode. It was my job to make sure everyone watching the show got to live vicariously through me growing up in this wholesome, loving family—butvicariousis the wrong word, even, because it wasn’t like I was living it either.”
“You should have been,” said Kallum. His voice was deep, warm. A little frustrated, which was so, so validating. “I don’t think any family is perfect, but every kid deserves pep talks and hugs in the kitchen, Winnie. I hope you know that.”
“I do, I do,” I assured him. “But I’m still mourning it a little. That no matter how much my parentslookedlike TV parents—shiny hair and big smiles full of veneered teeth—there weren’t any kitchen hugs for me. There never will be. I spent my childhood creating something that I myself never got to have. I guess it makes it lonelier, in a way, because I can imagine what it would have been like. Because it makes me wonder if everything is fake, in the end. If no one actually gets to live out the fantasy of the loyal, loving family. And I’m thirty-two, and it’s time I just accepted that.”
“No family is a sitcom family,” Kallum told me. “And mine is a mess sometimes, and totally chaotic, and constantly in each other’s business, and we definitely don’t fix problems in twenty-two minutes. But, loyal?” he added. “Loving? Yes. And I just want you to know that you’re officially a Lieberman now. It’s as good as notarized as far as my mom is concerned.”
