The Vow

I stuff the last few bites of glazed doughnut in my mouth and toss my napkin in the trash. The plates, along with the utensils and miscellaneous kitchen crap, have already been packed up to be taken over to my new apartment at Wisper Pines. And everything worth shipping has been packaged and is awaiting pickup in the living room in a mountain of FRAGILE-tattooed crates. The house looks naked and gutted, like a fish with its insides scraped out.

“You leave on Friday, right?” I ask.

No answer. I assume this means I’m right.

“So will this guy be able to squeeze us in before then?”

“I don’t know.” He drains the last of the juice from his plastic cup and wipes the corners of his mouth.

“So I’m going by myself ?”

I regret saying it immediately, even before exasperation and disgust take over his face. “You’re about to be alone in this country. If you can’t manage going to see some law student for immigration advice by yourself, we have a pretty big problem.”

I stare into my own juice cup and feel myself shrink.

“Too much hand-holding,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. “You probably don’t even know how to write a check.”

“I can write a check.”

“Just be sure to pay the rent on time.”

“I’ll pay the rent on time.”

“And the electric bill. And water. You forget and they tack on late fees, and then they turn off your power completely. And if you’re late paying the rent, it’s only a six-month lease, so they can kick you out if they want to. Where’ll you go then?”

To Annie’s, obviously. But that hypothetical nightmare is not worth discussing since I’m not going to forget to pay rent at Wisper Pines. The apartments are upscale, furnished, and best of all, on the northern edge of Elizabethtown—so, not in Jordan. Their inability to spell whisper correctly seems like an unnecessary adulteration of a perfectly good word, but that’s my only real complaint. “I’m not going to screw this up.”

No response. Apparently he’s alternating between the silent treatment and You can’t handle this pep talks

“Annie won’t let me,” I add.

He sniffs, and something inside me twists. After everything she’s done for me, he still can’t stand the thought of her.

“Anything else I should know about the law student thing?” I ask.

“What are you asking?”

“Well, we aren’t going to tell him that it’s not real, right? He doesn’t actually need to know.”

He frowns. “Know what? There’s nothing to know. You married your friend, Mo. People do it all the time.”

“Right, but he doesn’t need to know that we aren’t, you know, like . . . having, you know . . .”

He turns the next page of his magazine even though he’s obviously not reading it. Now it’s open to a picture of a cartoon brain, a fork and a steak knife sawing into it like the brain is Sunday dinner.

“Don’t be crass,” he says. “It’s nobody’s business what happens within a marriage except the two participants. And in some cases, their parents.”

In some cases, some of their parents. I picture Mr. Bernier’s shiny bald head and rippling biceps. That man would rip my limbs out one at a time and eat them if he found out Annie and I got married. For immigration status, for love, for duty, for a joke, for sex—it wouldn’t matter. I’d be a chew toy.

“You didn’t pay Annie to marry you,” Dad continues. “You didn’t meet her last week on Craigslist or through some seedy human trafficker. She’s your friend, correct? You married your friend.”

“Yeah.” My stomach hurts. Too much fast food, too many breakfasts of stale doughnuts and rubbery egg McWhatevers. I miss Mom’s cooking already, and the kitchen’s only been packed up for three days.

Three days.

Crap. Crap, crap, crap. I don’t know how to cook. Why have I never learned how to cook? Why hasn’t anyone bothered to teach me how to cook? Stupid question. I know why. I never needed to know how to cook, never anticipated needing to know, and never had the slightest interest in learning. Sarina can make almost anything, which I’ve always used as evidence that it can’t be that hard.

But what if it is?

This tied-up rot in my gut from three days of straight junk—what if it’s permanent? I like Taco Bell as much as the next guy, but I’m not fooling myself. I’m pretty sure my body can’t handle three fast-food meals a day.

But Mom learned. After that first year of being here in the States without a cook, she forced herself, one burnt, tear-salted meal at a time. I close my eyes and think about her naan, its perfect chewiness, the smell of the dough as it fries and puffs up. Or her tagine, the earthy richness of the lamb stew I ate just the other night. I’m glad I hadn’t realized each meal was the last of its kind. For a while, anyway. It would have made it harder.

“Another doughnut?” Dad asks.

“No. Thank you.”

He’s still turning pages of The Economist, and I’m distracted by the blur of images, the armies of words that he’s not even trying to read. He subscribes, so it’s not like he saw this issue on the stand and had to have it, but he usually scours and absorbs every inch from cover to cover. But what he’s doing right now, turning every page without taking in any of it, is just another task to be checked off his list.

“We need to go over some things,” he says.

“What things?” I ask.

“Let’s start with school. I’ve filed the necessary emancipation forms and sent them to your principal and superintendent, giving you permission to act as your own guardian.”

“You don’t want to make Annie my legal guardian? Maybe I should have asked her to adopt me instead of marry me.”

He doesn’t even smirk. It’s like I’m not talking. “Moving on,” he says. “Basketball camp.”

A sudden lump in my throat can’t be swallowed. “What about it?”

“You’re not going.”

“What?”

“You’re getting a job.”

“But—”

“Save it. You decided you were an adult. You got married. Now you’re getting a job so you can contribute financially. Summer camp is for children.”

I stare at my hands and nod. Why can’t I argue? Is it because he’s right? Everything’s sinking, though. My stomach, my heart, my brain. I drag a chair out from the table and sit down.

“As for your banking . . .” He pauses to pull several thick folders from the portable file box at his feet and careens headfirst into a fiscal responsibility lecture, hitting all the essentials: checking, savings, debit, credit, interest, record keeping, various PINs, and on and on. He doesn’t just go through it once, though. Several times he cycles through the same material, and unless this is his first and only Alzheimer’s symptom, he thinks he’s doing this for my benefit. Not only does he believe he can purchase me some financial savvy by repeating himself again and again, apparently he’s reverted to twenty years ago, back to a time before all my banking could be taken care of by him via the internet, all the way from, say, the Middle East. “—and are you even listening?”

“Yes.”

He shakes his head, shoves the folders back into the file box, but one doesn’t want to fit.

“I’m listening. I am.”

He wrestles the one offending file into submission, snaps the lid shut.

“But I can call you, right?” I ask. “Or email you. I mean, if I forget my debit card PIN or my Blue Cross Blue Shield number, or if I have some kind of emergency. It’s not like I can’t ever talk to you again.”

The moment I’ve said it, I realize I should have just shut up and kept on nodding. His face is raw with unguarded disappointment, and I see what he’s really saying through this never-ending, outward-spiraling lecture after lecture. If I can’t handle this, I’ve failed him. No, I’m evidence of his own failure, which is worse. I’m