He blinked at me.
“Or not.” I hefted the laundry basket up, propping it against my hip so I could carry it outside and upend its contents into the dumpster. Conner trailed unhelpfully behind me, empty-handed and oblivious to my struggle to open the door while carrying the basket.
“I thought of doing something at the hospital,” he said. “During one of her shifts. Like seeing if they would let me say it over the intercom or something. But I don’t know. That’s probably against some rules, right? And would you be mad if someone proposed to you at your job?”
“Yes,” I said. Then, seeing Conner’s dejected expression and feeling somewhat guilty about my terseness, I sighed. “But Shani is also very different from me! You know her best. In general, though, I would make sure you propose at a time that wouldn’t be massively inconvenient to her, or might make her uncomfortable. Like what if she just happens to be having a terrible day, and she’s under a lot of stress, and she’s still covered in the contents of a patient’s bedpan or something. A marriage proposal might feel like just one more annoyance to deal with, when it should be the happiest moment of her life.”
My gaze slid to Conner, who was looking at me with an uncharacteristic thoughtfulness on his face.
“Supposedly, anyway,” I muttered. “You know what I mean.”
“No, that’s good advice,” he said. “Thank you. I don’t want to make an ass of myself.”
“A creed to live by.”
The neighbor’s cat was back again, this time laid out on the driveway in a patch of sunlight shining through the oak trees overhead. She was exposing her belly to us, but I still didn’t feel confident enough to assume that was an invitation to pet. For all I knew, she just wanted an even tan.
Conner had no such compunction, though. He crouched down, giving her a light scratch on her stomach. She tolerated it for a minute, her eyes in contented slits, until she reached out a paw to bat his hand away. She flipped over to her feet and stalked away, finding a shady spot under the car.
“How would you want to be proposed to?” Conner asked abruptly.
“You planning to whip that ring out again, tiger?”
He straightened again, rolling his eyes. “I’m serious. I know you’re very different from Shani, and I know we live in a modern age and you could do the proposing, blah blah blah. But it might help me out, just to get your perspective on it.”
I tried to picture being with someone for years, the way Conner and Shani had. Making all these joint decisions together like whether to spring for the Investigation Discovery channel and what excuse to use to get out of a coworker’s baby shower. Tried to picture being so sure about that one person that I wanted to legally make a promise to love them forever. Tried to forget just how littleforeverreally meant, how little it had meant for people like our parents who maybe should’ve never married at all.
But Conner was looking at me, his face a complete open book. How was he the product of the same history as I was, and yet managed to hold on to that earnest optimism?
I didn’t know, but I wasn’t about to be the one to shatter it.
“I guess I wouldn’t care,” I said. “As long as I could tell the person really loved me.”
By the end of the day, Conner and I had cleared out the entire living room with the exception of my writing desk and a few boxes of stuff to keep we’d stacked in one corner. We’d only argued once—about whether to put the giant TV out on the side of the road or not. Conner said we should, because it was wasteful to throw it away when it still worked perfectly well. I said I had no intention of moving the damn thing twice, once to the curb and then a second time to the dumpster after it had sat out there overnight and gotten wet with dew. Conner promised me someone would take it. We went inside for five minutes to get some water and, to my intense irritation and relief, the TV was gone by the time we came back out.
“Don’t worry,” Conner said. “If Shani and I moved in now, we’d bring a TV.”
“Not going to happen,” I said.
Conner stopped to pick up the book on my desk, the memoir written by the daughter of the Sunrise Slayer. I’d been reading it instead ofIn Cold Blood, which was a travesty both because the latter was much better written but also because it was the one I needed to analyze in my next chapter. Even if I wanted to include the daughter’s memoir—and I wasn’t sure I did, in any more than a passing reference—no way would Dr.Nilsson let me. It was way too “sensationalistic” and “tabloid,” two adjectives that were the equivalent of steaming piles of dog shit left on the porch the way she said them. I could discuss the cultural significance of the pulp true crime genre as a whole, and give a few examples, butanything more and some hack author would be spending the first chapter of their mass-market paperback describing howmybody was found.
But for all that, there was something compelling about the daughter’s memoir that held my attention. Maybe it was how compartmentalized she still seemed to be about her father, the murderer, and her father, the man she’d grown up with and loved. The disconnect was understandable, given the unfathomable darkness of living with the knowledge of what he’d done. But it also felt like the question it raised was the exact one you wanted an answer for, and you kept reading, hoping to find one.
Conner flipped to the glossy pages in the middle, going straight for the photos. From his next words, I knew the exact picture he’d stopped on—one of the author and her father in front of a spring, looking like any other family with their dumb bucket hats and tired smiles.
“Do you remember that camping trip?”
He didn’t need to specify which one. We’d gone camping a few times as children, but the most memorable time had been the last one, the summer before the divorce. I’d been twelve; Conner, five.
“What set him off again?” I asked.
“Marshmallows,” Conner said. “We’d been snacking on them, and there weren’t enough to roast over the fire.”
I closed my eyes. There had been other spats and skirmishes throughout the weekend, of course—nobody was helping him put up the tent, nobody knew how to put the tent up right, he was convinced the campground was trying to cheat him out of five dollars with a hidden charge, there were twenty minutes where hecouldn’t find the car keys. But the marshmallows had been the big one.
“There were stillsomeleft,” Conner said now. “Mom said she was full from dinner, anyway, and I’d probably eaten my weight in sugar by that point. Dad could’ve just told me I didn’t get dessert and roasted a few for himself and you and been done with it.”
But then Conner would’ve been upset, and started crying, and Dad would’ve looked to Mom like it was her fault that her kid was so out of control, and it would’ve been the same problem with a different patina on it. As it was, he’d ended up angrily declaring he was going to the store to pick up more marshmallows, and then he just... hadn’t come back. I could still remember the way we’d tried to gather all the stuff up at the campsite, the way we’d had to push it to one side and stand there awkwardly while a new couple came to set up for the next day. The way the couple kept glancing over at us, likeWhy won’t they leave?, and my mom had held her phone to her ear and smiled as she tried to call my dad over and over.