Generations of McInernys and Farleys had signed up for this club. Surely there was a reason why they stayed, even when it became clear the barrier to entry wasn’t high enough. Was the driving force simply the fact that it’s what generations of McInernys and Farleys had always done? If religion did mean something to my parents—really meant something—I never heard about it.
And then Aaron happened. We were together for a year before his brain tumor showed up. We were young and stupid and in the phase of love where everything you read reminds you of the other person, especially a quote from a long-dead writer about the ill-fated love of his life.
I love her, and that’s the beginning and the end of everything. You’re still a Catholic, but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
My pretend Catholicism was over. I didn’t have an hour to spend zoning out in some uncomfortable pews. I didn’t have time to do anything except Aaron. Shut up, you know what I mean. Aaron was the only God I had left, but suddenly, everyone was pushing God like it was a hot new drug that could get me high enough to pretend my perfect boyfriend hadn’t just been diagnosed with an aggressive and incurable brain cancer. In the absence of those creature comforts of predictability and a firm and stable plot line to our lives, it’s our reflex to want to invoke the name of God. God may not make sense, but at least God is predictable in her unpredictability. It’s God who gives you what you can handle, and only what you can handle. It’s God who planned this, so it’s pointless for you to worry about it. It’s God who will see you through, even though it’s also God who planned this? The religious platitudes were heaped upon me like so many Midwestern Hot Dishes, and I would have none of them. God had not done this. “What does God have to do with this?” I wanted to shout at every person who tweeted their #thoughtsandprayers to me while Aaron’s body wasted next to me. What does a prayer do? What kind of a God is listening, but not doing anything? I envied people who could believe like this, and I resented them for assuming that my own discomfort could be eased with the same balm that soothed them when our pain was so different. Not to their faces, of course. I smiled and thanked them, told them to keep on praying, told them how much I appreciated it.
Narrator: she did not appreciate it.
God would not stop this. But I could. I could save Aaron. Maybe not medically—he had stage-four brain cancer and I had tragically chosen to major in English instead of something useful—but in every way that I possibly could, I would make his life better. I would make him organic, fresh-pressed juice every day even when he just wanted a Mountain Dew. I would marry him. Have his baby. Scratch his back while he fell asleep at night, noticing each night how more vertebrae pushed toward his skin. Our family didn’t need God. We had each other. And we had a community of people who showed up when God had failed to. People showed up to mow our lawn. To shovel our walk. To paint our basement. To drive us to chemo and radiation, or to watch our child so we could do these things without him. They fundraised for Aaron’s medical bills. They brought us hot dishes. They packed a huge art gallery for his funeral.
MY FRIEND KYLEE IS A CHRISTIAN. Like a Christian Christian. The kind who goes to church and reads the Bible. I knew that when we met—about a year after Aaron died—but I decided to let it slide. We had followed each other on Instagram for some time, and while a few of her posts were about Jesus stuff, most of them were about her photography and video work, her kid, and the creative circle of women she runs with here in Minneapolis. Kylee never told me that Aaron’s death was a part of God’s plan, or told me I needed to pray more. She never told me I needed to pray at all.
God was a part of Kylee’s life in a way I hadn’t really witnessed before. Not as an all-knowing, all-seeing Father who had a blueprint for your life, who you had to beg for forgiveness or for help, but as a calm center inside of her. Once, over lunch at the kind of place where everything is organic and grown within ten miles of the table you’re sitting at, I asked her how she prays. She laughed and shrugged. “I don’t know, I just . . . talk?”
You just . . . talk? Don’t you have something to memorize?
Sometimes, she explained, she pictured God as an ocean. Standing on the edge, she could throw in her worries, and watch them be swept out to sea. I liked that.
After lunch, having scraped our leftovers into the compost bin and placed our dirty dishes in the bus bin, we hugged good-bye.
“You’re being held in God’s hands,” she said to me as we pulled apart. It was very early in our friendship. Too early in our friendship, frankly, but for some reason I didn’t want to sock her in the throat or block her number. I felt relieved. The months since Aaron died had been a never-ending treadmill of busyness and accomplishment. I’d quit my job, and racked up freelance clients. I’d written my first book and started a nonprofit. I shuttled Ralph from daycare to gymnastics to whatever else it felt like a good mother would take him to. It was all on me, I knew. Or I thought.
After our lunch, I sat in my car and cried. The car is actually one of my favorite places to cry, because it’s like a little semiprivate pod where you feel invisible enough to really let loose, even though anybody with vision can see exactly what you’re up to.
Since that day with Kylee, I have relived the years I had spent with Aaron, and I have started to see them differently, the way Kylee saw them that day outside the restaurant. I saw how unfair it was that Aaron was sick, and how lucky we were to be caught in the middle of our freefall and held up. That is not the blessing that everyone gets when their lives fall apart. There are plenty of people who suffer alone, or whose social circles don’t have the means to build them a safety net to fall into. But we were never alone, and we never hit the ground. We were made safer and seen through the hardest parts of our lives. I had been so angry about what God hadn’t done that I’d missed everything that people had done for us. People fed us and cared for us. They paid our bills. Some of these were our friends and family, but most of the people who reached out to help us were strangers. People who had never met us, and likely never will. They didn’t do it for a thank-you note or for a few extra karma points. They did it because we needed their help, and they had help to give.
They showed up, and they brought God with them. Because God, to me, is just people. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard. God is people. God is the best of them, and the worst of them. And the path to God does not start in a Church. It doesn’t even need to wind through one. You have a direct line to God, and you don’t need to make a Sunday appointment to see Her. God is here, whether you like her or not. Whether you need her or not. Whether or not you believe in her. That there is no magic spell to invoke, no special code to learn, no door that must be opened to you.
You are the code and the secret and the door. You are God. Don’t get a big head about it, though.
Chapter Fifteen
Flip the Nuggets
There were places I couldn’t go with Matthew, places that still belonged to Aaron, and maybe always will. Northeast Minneapolis—where Aaron and I lived—was off-limits. Live music—a regular night out for me and Aaron—was a no-go. And he couldn’t—wouldn’t—meet Ralph. Ralph wasn’t just mine; he was ours. Mine and Aaron’s. Ralph wouldn’t meet a man until we’d been together for years. No, he’d never meet a man! I’d live my life completely separately from any man I met. I’d be a dedicated mom with a sidepiece who understood that my life revolved around one small person. It would be terribly modern. Matthew agreed. He had kids, too, after all. They’d already endured a dramatic divorce. They didn’t need to get all attached to a woman who only wanted their father around as a male concubine. The rules were set in my living room, with the fireplace roaring and Ralph asleep upstairs. Across town, Matthew’s children were asleep at their other home. It was like a business deal, only made cross-legged on my floor, drinking wine from old jelly jars.
“Not for at least six months,” Matthew said, and raised his glass for a toast. I clinked my glass with hi
s. This would be over in less than six months, of course. It was best if we always kept those parts of our lives separate.
I knew lots of widows who pulled this off: whose boyfriends or girlfriends came over after bedtime and left before dawn. We did this for weeks. Six weeks, to be exact. I saw Matthew only those nights when his kids were at their other home. I was careful not to text him during his parent time, so as not to raise suspicion between Ian and Sophie. Ralph had become the kind of toddler who reliably slept through the night, in his own bed, and Matthew would wake up hours before Ralph, and head home to get ready for work. I slept deeply and peacefully with him beside me. On my bedside table, he’d leave a note and a cup of coffee with the perfect amount of cream. If it had snowed, he’d shovel the walkway and steps before he left.
I resisted all of these kindnesses.
“You don’t have to do that,” I’d say, halfway between annoyed and grateful, when he took the groceries from the back of my car.
“I know,” he said, “but I want to do it.”
Matthew and Ralph met accidentally, a slip of our spy-like, stealthy dating. Matthew arrived a few minutes early to pick me up, and Ralph was procrastinating his bedtime routine for a babysitter. It was . . . anticlimactic. Ralph could not have been less interested in meeting Matthew. Ralph knew a lot of adults—he had a whole stable of babysitters to pick him up from daycare, take him to fancy toy stores—so one more grown-up was nothing to him, especially if they were just hanging out in the living room playing LEGO. What I assumed would be a monumental event was nothing to this child. Maybe (definitely) I was making more out of this than I needed to. Not to say that Ralph needed to be flipping through Tinder looking for his next Father Figure, but maybe I could just let life happen?
Here’s how life happened: Ralph got to know Matthew slowly, ten or fifteen minutes at a time. He asked questions like “Do you have boys?,” which really meant “Do you have kids?” and Matthew nodded. “I have a boy, and a girl. Ian and Sophie.” All Ralph heard was boy, and every time he saw Matthew, he asked where “The Boys” were.
We’d talked a lot about Matthew’s kids. I knew how their extracurricular activities were going, and what their report cards said. But I’d never met them. I didn’t know if I was qualified to meet them. I had been eighteen when Ian was born, didn’t that make me basically his peer? Sophie was my niece’s friend—wouldn’t that be weird for them? And both Ian and Sophie were old enough to understand what a girlfriend was. Would they feel uncomfortable knowing their dad was kissing someone on the mouth? Would they feel their little team of three was being infringed upon? Would they meet me, immediately scream “You’re not my mother!” and storm away?
I didn’t want to get involved in their lives if we weren’t sure about one another, but I couldn’t be sure about this man without knowing him as a dad. Being a dad is a huge part of Matthew’s identity. Not just because he has kids, but because he acts like he has them. We all know a guy who is “technically” a parent. Sure, he loves his kids, but it also seems like he kinda got tricked into the whole situation. A guy who refers to spending time with his kids as “babysitting” or who idealizes his glory days of being young and single. Matthew is the opposite of that guy. Knowing nothing about him, you could spot Matthew on the street and know he’s a dad. He doesn’t wear cargo pants or Teva sandals (thank God), but he exudes a paternal air, like he is constantly ready to cut someone’s meat into non-chokable pieces or secure a car seat correctly. I kid you not, he keeps a nail clipper on him at all times. His default mode of speaking is a Dad Voice that urges you, in its tone and timbre, to listen carefully. After his divorce, Matthew spent any evening without his children sitting at work until it was time to go to bed. That way, he explained to me, he didn’t have time to miss them. On the flip side, I would often lock the bathroom door just so I could read in peace, and scream in terror when Ralph slid his fingers under the door, groping around for my toes.
We decided to not make a big deal of the whole meet-the-kids thing. It was nearly Christmas, so the plan became that we would all meet up on a weekend afternoon to make Christmas cookies and watch a Christmas movie. We would not touch or kiss in front of the kids; we’d just act like old friends that our kids had never happened to meet before this day.
Ralph watched out the window for hours until Matthew pulled into the driveway with The Boys. Ian, fourteen, looked tiny and frightened in the front seat. Sophie, nine, bounded out of the backseat wearing a puffy, purple winter coat and a floor-length tulle skirt over her winter boots. She stepped in the front door, beaming, and asked where the kitchen was. Ralph ran to Ian, hugging his knees, and Ian broke into a huge smile. He took Ralph’s little hand, and got tugged along into the living room to look at a Star Wars book. So far, so good. I shook Matthew’s hand.
The afternoon stretched into evening. We made puppy chow and peanut butter kisses and decorated sugar cookies. Ralph asked to show Ian and Sophie his Motorcycle Room, the empty basement where I let him ride his bike in circles. The Boys showed Ralph how to kick a soccer ball, and took turns helping him on his balance bike. Sophie unrolled the gymnastics mat and challenged me to a headstand contest, which I promptly lost. Matthew’s children were sweet and kind to Ralph, and Ralph was effervescent with joy at the presence of other kids in his house.
Dinner was a culinary masterpiece of chicken nuggets and tater tots, which Matthew took charge of. My preparation of this meal includes the following steps:
Rip open each bag however you can. I prefer to dig a fingernail right into the center of the bag, and open from there.
Dump the contents onto a baking sheet, and kinda spread them around.
Put the baking sheets into the oven and forget until you smell something subtly burning.
Matthew had a different approach. I walked into the kitchen to find each of the nuggets equally spaced on a baking sheet, and the tater tots laid out the same way . . . on their own sheet? I watched skeptically. After ten minutes, an alarm sounded on Matthew’s phone, and he reached for the oven. “They aren’t done yet!” I shouted, like he was an imbecile. He looked at me and said, “It’s time to flip the nuggets.”
Flip. The. Nuggets? That is not on the instructions! “This way,” he said, concentrating on keeping the perfect spacing between each artificially formed hunk of chicken by-product, “they’re crispy on both sides.”
Did these kids realize what kind of a father they had? A nugget-flipping angel who wanted them to enjoy perfectly crispy pieces of breaded chicken parts reconstituted into tasty, asymmetrical blobs? They did. Matthew doted on his children that evening in a way that made it clear this was not a onetime performance. He watched their glasses and filled them with water before they were empty. He handed them napkins before they even asked. And his kids looked at him like the perfect nugget-and-tot-making saint he was.
After dinner, The Boys asked if they could help Ralph get ready for bed. Matthew and I loaded the dishwasher and listened to them coaxing Ralph into brushing his teeth quickly, so he could watch part of Home Alone before he went to bed. They carried him downstairs with cozy PJs on and fresh breath, and he snuggled between them and pretended to follow the plot of a movie that wasn’t a cartoon. When it was time for Ralph to go to bed, The Boys paused the movie and came upstairs to read Ralph his bedtime books and help tuck him in, and when I came back downstairs to finish the movie with them, I found Ian, Sophie, and Matthew snuggled up in a chair. A one-person armchair. Of all the seats in our cozy living room, a fourth grader and an eighth grader wanted to be jammed into a single chair with their dad, who gently played with the hair on each of their heads while they ate popcorn and laughed at the misfortune of the Wet Bandits. I was getting a sneak peek into who Matthew was as a dad, and as a person. That was it.
I was officially in love with this nugget-flipping, kid-cuddling, dad and a half. I wanted him in my life, and Ralph’s life. I wanted to be in Ian and Sophie’s life. I was in. Not for the modern,
no-strings-attached kind of relationship I had imagined, but for the gorgeously mundane one we were having today. I was in for movies on the couch and off-brand chicken nuggets and playing soccer in the basement. It had only been a month, and I was in. All in. I was in love. And for some reason, I said it. I said it when we were both in the kitchen, dishing up bowls of popcorn. I didn’t say the whole chicken nugget part, but I said the three most important words, the ones I was sure I’d never say again. I didn’t realize I was going to say them until they were already out. Was I crazy? I was crazy. But Matthew smiled at me right away.
“Thank you,” he said, and left the room. “Okaaaaaay,” I thought, “that is a fair response and I will not take it personally. It is unfair of me to assume that he should reciprocate my feelings on my schedule.”
That’s what my brain said. But as soon as the kids clamored upstairs to check on Ralphie, I leaned into him on the couch and let my heart take over.
“Did you hear me back there?” I whispered. “I said I love you.”
He turned to look me in the eye.
“I heard you,” he said. “I was just surprised. I love you, too.”
I kissed him, quickly, in case the kids had developed X-ray vision that could penetrate the floor above us.
“Good,” I said.
Chapter Sixteen
Meet the Parents (All of Them)
My father always told my boyfriends “you marry a person, you marry their family.” It was his way of making sure these guys knew that the McInernys are a package deal, and that should they choose to marry me, they’d be committing to a family that still practices the ancient art of Tickle Torture. It is one of many traditions within the McInerny family that may be considered child abuse, but one person is attacked by the rest of the family and tickled mercilessly right up to the brink of peeing their pants. It’s great fun unless you’re the person trying not to pee your pants, but even then, it does feel nice to be the center of attention.
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