The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page B

gonna handle that?”
    “If she has it, she’ll probably become riddled with guilt at some point and hand it over.”
    “Hope so. Hey, guess how much their rings cost.”
    He shrugged.
    “Fourteen thousand apiece.”
    The look on his face made her more terrified than she had previously let herself be.
    “Holy shit. We gotta find that thing.”
    “I know.”
    Suddenly every napkin and shoelace and jar of Play-Doh seemed like its only purpose might be to obscure the ring. Kate opened the junk drawer, and pulled out old screwdrivers and stamps, a box of paper clips, a few alphabet magnets that had traveled from the fridge.
    “You think it’s in there?” Dan said skeptically.
    “I don’t know.”
    He poured a cup of coffee. “Here, drink this,” he said, kissing her neck as he handed it to her.
    “You seem downright chipper compared to the guy I woke up with this morning,” she said.
    “Well, I’m happy for them,” Dan said. “I was just thinking that marriage equality may well be the one bright spot in what’s otherwise been a terrible millennium so far.”
    “Yeah, I suppose when the last decadebottle of winealgron’s been marked by terrorism, genocide, a depression, a tsunami, hurricanes, earthquakes, war, and torture, marriage does look good in comparison.”
    “You forgot to mention the demise of the record store.”
    “Oh yeah, that too.”
    “Not like the nineties were so great, though,” he said. “Rodney King, Columbine, Waco. The Oklahoma City bombing. O. J. Simpson.”
    “Yes. And all of those seem practically quaint compared to this last decade.”
    “True. Hey, never let it be said that we’re not one cheery couple.”
    She grinned. “Two rays of sunshine.”
    The day’s mail sat on the table. She sifted through it—a cell phone bill, a birthday party invitation from one of Ava’s playground friends, and a few junk flyers addressed to Mrs. Daniel Westley. The fact that they weren’t married never stopped anyone from calling her by Dan’s lastname, or referring to him as her husband. For the most part, she didn’t really mind.
    The first time Ava got sick as a baby, Kate rushed her to the emergency room in Brooklyn. After she filled out the requisite forms, the woman behind the desk said coldly, “Can I ask what relation you are to the child?”
    “I’m her mother.”
    “She has two last names,” the woman said. “Our system can’t process that, you’re going to have to pick one.” As if it were 1952. As if scores of married women didn’t keep their maiden names all the time, and hyphenate their children’s.
    It pissed her off most of all because things like that weren’t supposed to happen in Brooklyn. She might have expected it in the town where May lived, a place where everyone prided themselves on the sheer throwback of it all; where a little girl whose parents had never married would probably get mocked, and all the women took their husbands’ names, like the feminist movement had never happened.
It was just easier that way
, friends told her. They wanted to be family units, and in a family unit everyone was called the same thing.
    She could admit that words were tricky, but that didn’t mean you should dismantle your whole belief system to keep things simple. It was awkward when people struggled to figure out how they ought to refer to Dan. If forced, she’d call him her partner, but to most strangers the word conveyed that she was either a lesbian or a lawyer. She tried not to call him anything—just “Dan.”
    She wandered into the living room. May sat on the couch between Ava and Olivia. The girls were watching an episode of
Barney
on TV. May had her laptop turned on, but she was gazing out the window, possibly asleep with her eyes open. She liked to say that she hadn’t slept through the night for the past decade, ever since Leo was born colicky and screaming.
    Olivia and Ava each wore a pink plastic tiara with a medallion in the center that featured a