Page 96

“I figure they’ll be vets. Just to shake it up a little. Although I really want them to become, like, mob vets.”

Maeve’s lips turn up. “What?”

“You know, the ones who treat all the illegal lions in California.”

“Val, that’s not a mob vet. That’s just a vet who can go to jail for treating animals for idiots.”

I point to Maeve. “A good profession.”

She shakes her head. “God, I love you so much.”

I relish the flush as it climbs up my neck. “A thousand times back at you.”

We stop by a particularly full bushel of light pink roses. We’re now pretty far off the path. Maeve takes my hand. “Hey, so, can we add an extra dinner with my parents this weekend?”

I met Maeve’s parents last summer, about a couple of months into us getting back together. I still don’t know if asking me to go to Ohio for Fourth of July weekend was meant to be trial by fire, but it’d set her parents and me up pretty well. They had strong East Coast accents, talked fast, used lots of Yiddishisms I had to stealth google in real time, and went right from “good to meet you” to telling me about Socrates and string theory. I had their blessing by the end of the first night when I was the last one on the back porch with them, talking.

In fact, it was only the second day of knowing them that I learned that they had no idea why I was famous. That they haven’t watched a new movie since 1995. That Maeve had sent them a photo of us and the interview where I answered K through 12 homework questions on BuzzFeed.

“Is this a trick question?”

Maeve chuckles. “No. Do you have time?”

I motion to the roses sprawled around us, Downtown LA beyond that. Besides our anniversary tonight, I’m free. We could have every dinner with her parents for all I care. I pull her into my arms. “Your time is my time.”

She traces a line on my forearm. “They want to meet your parents too.”

My heart picks up, as if sensing something before I can. “Why would they want to meet my parents?”

Maeve tries to bite back a smile. “Well, they want to meet family.”

I open my mouth to voice my question, but Maeve’s too quick.

She answers by getting down on one knee.

Maeve pulls a velvet box out of her jacket pocket and opens up the case to reveal a diamond ring.

My maternal grandma’s ring.

This can’t be real.

“Val, will you marry me?” Maeve asks, tears brimming in her eyes.

I’m thrust back to a conversation I had with Luna. We were driving to an advanced movie screening I’d gotten us tickets to sometime after filming Oakley in Flames. She’d asked me when I first fully understood I was gay and whether I associated that moment with a positive or negative feeling. The first thing I’d come up with was when I was eighteen, a few months from graduating and heading off to Oxford. I’d brushed every romantic and sexual feeling for my Huntington coworker to the side, yet there I was, sitting in AP Government as my teacher explained something painfully obvious about the judicial branch, and Riley Cooper leaned over to me and asked for a piece of paper. She smelled like strawberry shampoo, and I remember sitting there with my chest tight thinking it would be so nice to fall asleep being able to smell that shampoo every night.

It’d been a bad feeling back then, that soul-squeezing fear of being fundamentally different. I remember telling Luna that and watching her expression fall. She grew red when I asked her what her answer would be, only to remember another memory.

One of the first sleepovers I went to was one of those invite-all-your-classmates in first grade. I was six or seven, the friend in question, Jane, had a new little brother that she’d write about in the projects we had to do. She’d draw family portraits with two parents, one with short hair and pants and one with long hair and a dress. I’d been trying to find a bathroom to remove a Fanta stain from my white shirt and had accidentally witnessed Jane’s mom breastfeeding her infant brother. Her other mom.

I’d brought up the encounter to my mom on the way home, and she’d fumbled through an explanation. She said some women married and had kids with men and some did the same with other women. I remember smiling and thinking to myself that if everyone in the world got to choose, I wanted to marry Jane. I corrected my answer for Luna, said that my first queer memory actually had been happy.

All these years later, tears brim in my eyes thinking about what I would tell that little girl in the back of Mom’s car who wanted to marry Jane.

“Yes,” I say. Maeve slips the ring on my finger.

I pull her up to her feet, hold her in an embrace as I kiss her. We kiss long and hard, pressed so close to each other that I can feel her heartbeat slam in her chest. There’s noise around us, a swell of it. I’m vaguely aware that the sound is positive. But I can’t move from this woman, from the feeling of her leather jacket against me, her weight pulling me down as she clutches the sides of my blazer. I’ve memorized the feeling of her lips on mine, yet nothing gets my heart to flutter faster than the thought of being able to taste them over and over again for the rest of our lives.

Then I hear the click. I hear the click and my heart sinks and I turn around and—