22. Graham
GRAHAM
I meet Keeley in the lobby of Julie’s office. It’s not her first sonogram, but it’s the first I’ll be present for, and I’m strangely nervous, though I’m not sure why.
“What do you want, anyway?” she asks as we wait. “A boy or a girl?”
“I don’t care as long as it’s healthy,” I tell her, though that’s not totally true. The real answer is that I want whatever won’t set my mom off, and there’s no way to know what that will be. The stuff that happened when Colin was a baby is always with us, somehow. “What about you?”
“I’d prefer a girl, but given my family curse, I guess I shouldn’t. Good news for you, or bad news depending on how much involvement you hoped to have with this kid: the O’Keefe women die really young.”
I swallow. She told me this before, though she doesn’t remember it. “If you hate me,” she’d said, “at least you won’t be stuck with me for long.”
I thought it was a joke at the time, and she’s still saying it like it’s a joke, but I’m starting to wonder—it’s a weird joke to make repeatedly.
“Just because your mom died young doesn’t mean you will.”
She laughs. “What if it’s my mom, my aunt, my grandmother, her sister, and my great-grandmother? Does that change your thoughts on the odds?”
She’s scrolling through something on her phone as if what she’s just said doesn’t matter. I reach for her arm to get her attention. “Did they all die of the same thing?”
She glances at me and away. “Everyone but my great-grandmother has died of cancer. Everyone . It’s the bit your internal medicine doc will gloss over: that you might just be genetically fucked and then all your efforts to stay healthy will be for naught.”
Her name is called and we rise to follow the nurse back to a room. “No offense, Keeley,” I say, “but I’m not sure you can claim you’re making a lot of effort.”
“Exactly. Because I watched my mother making green juice every morning and only eating salad, and look where it got her.”
I wonder how much of Keeley’s attitude toward life—her live-for-the-moment, who-cares-about-a-savings-account brand of joie de vivre —is related to this curse she seems to believe she’s under. And if that’s true, has having a kid changed it?
We are taken to a different room than usual, and this time there’s no undressing. Keeley simply reclines on a table and tugs her shirt up when Julie enters the room. Even the sight of her bare stomach is a wonder to me, with that unmistakable swell just beneath her skin.
Julie squirts a gel on Keeley’s stomach and starts moving a wand back and forth. An image appears on the screen—at first, it’s nothing discernible, just a mass of white and black, and then: a child. A child with long thin arms and legs, a nose—a single hand, fully formed.
Our child. It’s absolutely amazing. I never wanted a kid. I never wanted the responsibility of a kid. But I have it. And inside me, already, something has shifted. Something matters a million times more than my fears, my plans, and I’m looking at it right now.
“I’m assuming you don’t want to know the gender,” Julie says, which is when I realize Keeley is very intentionally not looking at the screen.
“You don’t want to know?” I ask. She’s desperate for a girl, and I’d have thought she’d want to know ASAP so she could blow every penny she makes on baby designer dresses.
“I’m not sure,” she says.
I do want to know. I want to plan. There’s a part of me that thinks the answer will help get it through Keeley’s head that this is happening, but there’s clearly more going on here than meets the eye. If Keeley isn’t ready for this, I’m not going to force the issue.
“Maybe they can write it down for us?” I suggest, looking at her. “And put it in an envelope?”
Keeley smiles up at me as if I’ve just done something heroic. It makes me wish I really had.
We walk to Whole Foods after the appointment because the overlap between healthy foods and foods Keeley is willing to eat is painfully small, and I’m running out of options.
She takes a seat on the patio while I go in to get our sandwiches. When I return, she’s holding the envelope up to the sun.
“Cut it out.” I snatch it away from her. “If you want to look, we’ll look, but you’re not going to do that and claim you discovered it by accident later on.”
Keeley barely seems to have heard me. She’s too busy tearing into her sandwich.
“Oh my God,” she groans. “It’s so good.”
I flinch and adjust myself. My life would be infinitely easier if she wouldn’t make everything sound so goddamn sexual. But maybe it’s just that every moan and groan and inhalation triggers a specific, filthy memory of her making those sounds beneath me.
“What do you think of the name Maddox for a boy, by the way?” she asks.
“He sounds like a runaway who’s turned to sex work to survive life on the streets.”
“So that’s a maybe, then,” she says cheerfully. “I like Kalamity for a girl. Spelled with a ‘k’, though.”
“At least we won’t have to worry about paying for college.”
She laughs, but then deflates only seconds later.
I follow her gaze to the girls walking past us in skimpy shorts and half-shirts. “Jesus Christ,” I say quietly after they’re gone. “I don’t want a daughter.”
Keeley sets the second half of her sandwich down on the brown paper wrapper.
“What’s the matter?”
She glances back at them and her face grows longer. “Nothing.”
“You’ll lose the weight,” I offer helplessly. “I know it’s—”
Her mouth falls open. “Oh my God, are you saying I’m bigger than those girls?”
And that’s when I know I’ve fucked up and there’s really no way to salvage this. “Well, obviously. You’re supposed to put on wei—”
“I’m not bigger than those girls!” she cries, though obviously she is. I mean, she must realize… but that’s not relevant right now.
I set my own sandwich down. “Keeley…you’re pregnant. It would be worrisome if you hadn’t gained…gotten...I have no idea what to say here.”
Her face is a storm cloud, eyes narrowed, mouth in a child’s pout. “It’s not about the weight, which is mostly in my rack and fucking spectacular at the moment.”
She isn’t wrong, but I’m not even going to touch that one. I scrub a hand over my face. “Then why are you upset?”
She stares at the uneaten second half of her sandwich, unable to meet my eyes. “I’m never going to go to Coachella again,” she whispers. “I just realized I’m never going to Coachella again. And also, that I have to learn to cook, and I don’t want to.”
“You can still go to Coachella. I mean, God only knows why you’d want to, but—”
“It’s not about Coachella, Graham! It’s that I’m never going to be one of those girls again, and I feel like I barely got started being one of those girls.”
It still sounds like it’s about the weight to me because what else has changed? But I know not to say it aloud.
Now . I know it now .
“I don’t understand. You will look exactly like those girls in a year. You’ll be able to go to Coachella. What’s the difference?”
She finally meets my eye. “When I meet Harry Styles and Machine Gun Kelly backstage and they’re like, ‘hey , let’s go to Amsterdam’ , you know what I’ll have to say? ‘Sorry, Harry Styles. Sorry, Machine Gun Kelly. I have to go feed my baby.’”
I am at a loss for words. Mostly because I can’t imagine that she’s serious, and I’m a little worried she is.
“Sorry, Harry Styles and Machine Gun Kelly, but I’ve got to get home and sew a Pilgrim costume ,” she continues. “ Sorry, Harry Styles and Machine Gun Kelly, but I have to chaperone a school field trip in the morning .”
“Just out of curiosity, how long would you call them by their full names? At what point do you just call them Harry and, uh, Machine Gun ?”
Her mouth twitches, a reluctant smile at last. “I’m pretty sure his birth name is not Machine Gun . And shut up. You see my point. I’m never going to be fun again.”
There’s a part of me that wants to say, “this is what I’ve been trying to tell you, dammit. Parenthood is serious. It’s time to stop fucking around . ” But there’s this weird, unexpectedly soft thing in my chest that keeps me from doing it.
Keeley has spent her whole life rebelling against the status quo, refusing to let anyone tell her how an adult has to behave, and she still wants to refuse. It’s for the baby’s sake that she’s giving in. Maybe it feels like she’s losing her whole identity in the process.
“You’re still going to be fun,” I say, pushing her chips toward her. “You’ll be too fun. You’ll be the mom who suggests our kid teepee someone’s house and gets arrested for providing minors with alcohol. And I’ll be the boring dad who has to come bail both of you out of jail.”
“You’d only have to bail out me,” she whispers with a guilty shrug. “They don’t take you to jail for minor in possession. They just write you a ticket.”
I laugh, that soft thing in my chest growing a little bit more, though I wish it wouldn’t.
Because she has no idea how or why she married me—and she’d never have done it sober—but I’ve known, all along, exactly why I married her.