But one Sunday she reappears. Without figuring out what he is going to say, he rushes up to her in the parking lot, and only then does he stop and ask himself, What are you doing? She appraises him, panting and speechless, and before he can utter so much as a syllable, she bursts into laughter and says, ‘Okay, lunch. But somewhere public in case you’re an ax murderer.’
Lunch lasts through dinner. Engrossed in conversation, they forget to eat, the food no longer steaming on untouched plates. She works at a day-care center. Her smile makes him dizzy. She touches his arm, once, when laughing at something. He tells her his story, unedited, in a single breathless burst, how he was six kinds of stupid when he went into the Hall but has since gotten it down to three or four. He tells her about the Couch Mother and the Saab Grandfather and the Superintendent Warden, how they all gave him consideration before he really deserved it, how that probably saved his life, and how he hopes eventually to do the same thing for other people. He tells her he wants to build houses someday. She says, ‘Dreams are a dime a dozen. But sounds like you actually have the backbone to get there,’ and he burns with pride and says, ‘Stamina.’
She lets him see her to her car, and they pause, nervous in the biting October night. Her door is open, the interior light shining, but she stands there, waiting. He hesitates, desperate not to blemish the perfect evening.
‘If you had any guts,’ she says, ‘you’d kiss me.’
There is a second dinner, and a fifth. When she invites him over for a meal, he changes outfits three times, and still, to his eye, his clothes look worn out and blue-collar. As she sautés mushrooms, he patrols her apartment, picking up a sugar bowl, eyeing the rows of matching candles, fingering vanity curtains that are there only to provide a dab of lavender. He pictures his bare mattress, his cabinet lined with cans of SpaghettiOs, the poster of Michael Jordan thumbtacked above his garage-sale desk and realizes that no one ever taught him how to live properly.
That night they make love. She weeps after, and he is convinced he did something wrong until she explains.
She is very different from the girls he met during his tenure at 1788 Shady Lane.
At the movies one night, she giggles at his whispered joke, and the muscle-bound guy in the row in front of them turns and says, ‘Shut up, bitch.’ With a quick jab, Mike shatters his nose. They rush out, leaving the guy mewling in the aisle, his friends looking on helplessly, clones in matching college football jackets. Outside, Annabel says, ‘I’d be lying to say I didn’t find that charming and exciting in a fucked-up sort of way, but promise me you won’t ever do something like that again unless you really have to.’
That’s her – reverent and irreverent at the same time.
Confused, he acquiesces.
Later that week, exhausted, he dozes off at the shirt press and burns a tux vest. The customer, a coked-out dickhead in a blue Audi, shows up on his way to his black-tie event. ‘Do you have any fucking idea how much that tux cost?’ Mike apologizes and offers to file a damage claim. ‘And what the hell am I supposed to wear tonight?’ The customer grows irate, leaning over the counter, jabbing a finger into Mike’s chest. ‘You stupid fucking clown, you couldn’t pay for that with what you make in a year.’ The guy shoves Mike, and Mike sees the angle open up, the downward cross to break the jaw, but instead he takes a step back. The guy’s rage blows itself out, and he departs, peeling out and flipping Mike the bird. Mike still has a job, his knuckles aren’t bruised, and there are no cops to contend with. For days he basks in this small triumph.
He is becoming socialized.
But still he fears Dinner with the Family. Her father is a bankruptcy lawyer. Her older sister is a domestic machine who produces baked goods and offspring at an alarming rate. Her brother has a Subaru and a weave belt. He gives to charity and complains about taxes, the kind of guy who probably played multigenerational baseball at the park around the time Mike and Shep were boosting Bomb Pops and urinating on Schwinns.
Mike minds his silverware, his elbows, his napkin in his lap. He thinks of those few domestic memories he has held on to – sage incense in a yellow-tiled kitchen, his mother’s tan skin, the dust-and-oil smell of the station wagon’s cloth seats. He feels uncomfortable, unworthy of sitting here at a nicely set table in a nice home. The parents, none too enamored, seem to agree. When her father passes the butter, he asks, ‘Where did you go to college?’ and Mike smiles nervously and says, ‘I didn’t.’ The rest of dinner is consumed by stories of successful friends and neighbors who never went to college and were successful anyway, the two other siblings swapping anecdotes while the parents chew and sip and shoot each other shrewd glances. Annabel has to contain her laughter at the absurdity of it all, and when they leave, she says, ‘I will never make you do that again.’
The next week, at dinner, she fiddles with her watercress. Her face is tight and flushed and quite unhappy. He braces himself for the speech he has been fearing. And sure enough she comes at him hard. ‘What are we doing here?’ She tosses down her fork with a clatter. ‘I mean, I don’t want to do this whole casual-dating thing-’
‘I don’t either.’
She bulldozes ahead, undeterred. ‘-where we agree we’re allowed to see other people-’
‘I don’t want to see anyone else.’
‘-and I pretend I’m okay with it.’
‘I’m not okay with it.’
‘I’m too old for that shit. I need security, Mike.’
‘Then marry me.’
This time, finally, she hears.
They don’t drink a drop of liquor at the ceremony but feel drunk with joy. The service is brief, some pictures after on the courthouse steps, Mom and Dad doing their best to muster smiles.
As he helps her mother gingerly into the car at the night’s end, she pauses in a rare unfiltered moment, dress hem in hand, and says, ‘The thing that doesn’t add up with you – you’re so gentle.’ He replies, ‘I spent enough years being not.’
He works hard, is promoted to foreman. In what is the single best day of his life, their daughter is born. She was to be Natalie, but when they meet her, she is Katherine, so forms must be reprocessed to ensure she has her proper name.
They settle into an apartment in Studio City. Prints of water lilies, matching linens, little seashell soaps for the bathroom. Through their back window, they can see the Wash, where the L.A. River drifts through concrete walls.
Out of the blue, Shep calls from a pay phone. It has been months – no, over a year. Both times he and Annabel met were excruciating, Shep’s hearing putting a damper on what little conversation could be summoned. Annabel is protective of Mike, all too aware of the costs of the sentence he served, and Shep doesn’t understand her; she is simply beyond his frame of reference. Mike remembers only long silences and sullen sips of beer, him in the middle, sweating worse than he did at that first dinner with her family.
Given Shep’s hearing, this phone conversation, like all others, is awkward, filled with starts and stops. Shep has heard that Mike has a daughter, and he wants to come by. Kat is five months old, and Mike is nervous, still adjusting, but cannot bring himself to say no.
Shep arrives two hours late, well after Kat is down. ‘Can I spend the night?’ he asks at the door, before saying hello. ‘I have a thing going on with my place.’
Mike and Annabel manage nods.
From his pocket Shep withdraws a gift – a wadded, unwrapped onesie sized for a three-year-old. Mike hates himself for wondering if it is stolen. He rubs his fingers over the butterfly pattern. It is the softest thing he has ever seen Shep hold.
Shep puts his feet on the coffee table and lights up, and Annabel says, apologetically, ‘Would you mind not smoking in here? The baby.’