“There’s a hypothetical situation that I have to do a thorough report on, and I need a male perspective. I thought, ‘hey, Vince is a male.’”
“Thank you for noticing,” he deadpans.
“So, is this a good time to ask you a few questions? I might think of more later, I just want to ask some preliminary questions to start.”
“I guess so.” He nods his head at me, putting the tongs down and asking, “Where’s your little notebook?”
Damn. I always carry my little brown notebook with hearts on it to jot notes in, but I don’t have it with me. That slightly delegitimizes my already-poor story—I would need to take accurate notes—but Vince isn’t Carly, so I might slide by. “I’ll take notes later. Right now I’m asking very general idea stuff. The scenario is about reproduction.”
“Wonderful.”
“Okay, so assume hypothetically you got a girl pregnant. Not a girl you’re in a relationship with or anything, but someone who… lives far away. It was only a few days together, but you got her pregnant.”
His brown-eyed gaze darkens and his face turns to granite. It makes my stomach sink. Does he see through my bullshit? Does he know what I’m talking about? He doesn’t speak, so I’m not sure.
I continue on, but tentatively. “And there’s no realistic possibility of you and this far-away woman being together. You’re essentially worlds away from each other. It’s not like there’s any feasible scenario in which you would be raising a baby together. Even if she kept it, she would have to raise it without you.”
He passes a hand over his mouth and turns to look back at the house. After a second, he looks back at me. “Who have you been talking to? Carly tell you?”
“What? No, I told you, this is a hypothetical.”
“This is fucking specific for a generalized hypothetical, Laurel. Don’t bullshit me. Did Rafe say something to you?”
The mention of Rafe drains the color right out of my face. I’m tempted to tell him never mind, to run back into the house, but I’ve already made it this far into this uncomfortable conversation; I may as well push on until I get some answers.
“I told you, this is just a hypothetical for a class assignment. It has nothing to do with anyone we know. Now, pay attention to the scenario.”
He scowls, not appearing to trust me, but I plod on anyway.
“If you got this woman pregnant, would you want to know?”
“Yes,” he says, without hesitation.
I pause. “Well, wait. I mean, what if she wasn’t even—I mean… Okay, what if she didn’t plan to keep the pregnancy? Do you still think it would be unethical for her not to tell you?”
Now he sighs like I’m killing him. “Laurel, I don’t want to get into shit like this with you and your sister. Do you understand the kind of family I was brought up in? Traditional doesn’t begin to cover it.”
I nod my understanding. “Carly has explained they’re sexist assholes. I understand. Hypothetical Pregnant Chick is not asking permission or advice on what to do from you, the accidental donor of sperm. I’m trying to find out, from your perspective, just yours, Morelli brain and all… would you expect her to tell you? Would you be pissed off if she didn’t, and you somehow found out after the fact?”
“How does this have anything to do with genetics?”
“I told you there was a sociological component. Just answer my question.”
“If I got a woman pregnant, I would want to know. Regardless of the circumstances, I would be at least mildly annoyed to find out later that she was pregnant, went through it all without me, and didn’t even tell me. That would anger, sadden, and annoy the living fuck out of me. Hypothetically.” He adds that last part with more sarcasm than I thought a single word could hold, but I’m too busy processing his response to overthink it.
Since he is a Morelli male, he’s the closest to Rafe’s perspective as I can get. Probably his other cousin, the evil one, would have a closer opinion, but there’s no way I’d reach out to him. I try to envision sitting down at my laptop with some lemon tea and typing out an email to Mateo Morelli, asking him about his perspective for my bullshit assignment. The mere description of my assignment would be enough for him to realize I’m full of shit. I’d probably have Morellis crawling up and down Vince and Carly’s residential street the following morning when I woke up. Maybe Rafe on their doorstep with all his goons from the funeral spread out on the manicured lawn.
That would be bad.
Mostly bad.
Part of me wouldn’t hate seeing Rafe again, but probably not under those circumstances.
Consequently, even though it probably shouldn’t, Vince’s Morelli perspective gives birth to a spark of hope. “So, you would expect her to contact you? Even if you never planned to see each other again?”
“Yes.”
“And you would never be weirded out and think, why didn’t she take care of this without bothering me?”