Lauren wanted to tel Mary about the macaroni and cheese, and how when Mark had met her one-year-old niece, Lily, he had taken her hand without smiling and said, “Hel o. Hel o, Lily.” She wanted to ask Mary if it was bizarre to like a guy who’d brought you a fish. She wanted Mary to help her decide if Mark was a sociopath or just a little strange.
Mary looked at her expectantly, rubbing her stomach and groaning at fake contractions. Her little boy, Henry, bopped around the room, and Lauren knew she couldn’t do it. It was too odd to sit there and tel Mary these things, too strange to talk about Mark bringing her a fish, while Mary toddled after her toddler. So Lauren just said, “Yeah, I do. I do like him.” It was the truth, she thought. Just not al of it.
The day that Rudy died, Lauren went to feed her before school and found her bel y-up and completely white. She let out a little scream and her parents came running. Her dad looked shocked, and her mom looked as though she had opened a Tupperware ful of mold.
“We’l have to flush him,” her dad said.
“Rudy’s a she,” Lauren said.
“Of course she is.” Her dad put a hand on her shoulder.
Her mom had left them to it, let them carry the bowl to the upstairs bathroom and dump Rudy in the toilet. Her dad had started to carry the bowl to the downstairs bathroom, but her mom yel ed at him, “That’s the guest bathroom.” She said it like he was crazy, like everyone knew you weren’t supposed to flush fish in guest bathrooms. She shook her head and said, “Take him upstairs.”
“Do you want to do it?” her dad asked, and Lauren shook her head. He looked relieved and pressed the flusher. They stood next to each other and watched little Rudy go round and round.
Lauren didn’t cry during the flushing, and she was embarrassed when her dad hugged her good-bye. But that day in school, during a spel ing test, tears began to fal out of her eyes. She was mortified. You didn’t cry in sixth grade. Lauren especial y didn’t cry in sixth grade. She was tough. But as the teacher read the words “Submarine, crystal ized, immigrant,” Lauren’s tears dropped onto the page and made a mess of her test. She felt awful that Rudy had died. She couldn’t even remember if she had checked on her the night before or not. What if Rudy had been dying al night?
The tears came faster, sliding in one motion down her cheeks and fal ing with a plop on her paper. Final y she raised her hand and didn’t wait for her teacher to say anything before getting up and going to the bathroom, where she locked herself in a stal and cried until her friend Lizbeth was sent to check on her.
She told the whole class that she’d had an al ergic reaction to the kind of cereal she’d eaten for breakfast that morning. It was a reaction, she said, that gave her a sudden pain so bad that she cried. When Tina Bloom suggested that Lauren’s story was a lie, because her dad was an al ergist and she’d never heard of such a thing, Lauren told her she was stupid and, above al , mean for not having more sympathy, and none of the girls in the class talked to Tina for a week.
On their tenth date, Mark told Lauren he never wanted to live with someone else.
“Never?” Lauren asked.
“Never,” he said. He didn’t sound sorry about it. Lauren wasn’t sure that she ever wanted to live with anyone else either, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you said aloud. It was something that you kept to yourself, knowing that if you ever found yourself seriously dating someone or getting married, that you would just do it. Because that’s what people did.
“So, what’s your plan?” Lauren asked.
“My plan for what?”
“I mean, let’s say you meet someone one day and get married. Separate residences?”
“Maybe,” Mark said. “One uptown and one downtown? Or maybe just two separate apartments that join together somehow?” He was lost in thought and Lauren was horrified for him. It was like on their fifth date, when he’d tied a windbreaker around his waist and had no idea that he should be embarrassed as they walked around the Central Park Zoo.
“Maybe you’l change your mind someday,” Lauren said final y. She wanted him to stop thinking about it.
“Maybe,” Mark said. “But I doubt it. I don’t like other people touching my stuff.”
Lauren met the Kansas City couple on their closing day. The wife was wearing a plaid dress and a headband. “Congratulations!” Lauren said.
“You’re going to love New York.”
The couple walked around the empty apartment and Lauren recommended a cleaning service they could use if they wanted to get it scrubbed down before they moved their furniture in. She found the wife standing in front of the new wal that had been put up to make the second bedroom.
“Is everything okay?” Lauren asked.
The wife smiled at her. “I just never pictured myself here, you know?”
“Yes,” Lauren said. “I know how that goes.”
On their fourteenth date, Lauren brought Mark over to Mary’s apartment for dinner. Mary and Isabel a had been hounding her. “It’s real y weird that we haven’t met him yet,” they’d kept tel ing her. “Fine,” she’d said. “Fine, we’l come to dinner.”
Henry took an immediate liking to Mark. Henry always chose the person who paid him the least attention and then spent the night trying to win him over. This worried Mary. She was sure he was going to end up in some sort of abusive relationship. “It’s just so odd,” she always said. “It’s like he can sense who doesn’t like children and then he won’t leave them alone.”
This night was no different. Henry sat on the floor at Mark’s shoes and played with his shoelaces. Every once in a while, he patted Mark’s leg affectionately. Mary gave Lauren a look like she was sorry, and Isabel a laughed and tried to distract Henry. “No!” Henry yel ed at Isabel a. “Go away.” He grabbed tight fistfuls of Mark’s pants and held on to them for dear life.
