“Me,” she sighed. “I told you you never listen.”
He smirked and took a bite of his egg. She didn’t have to look at his face to know that it was perfectly cooked. Her dad had been the one to teach her to fry one correctly. The way to ruin an egg was to not be patient, and to heat the pan too fast, which would make it stick to the pan. You had to be slow, methodical, deliberate. Wren had lost track of how many times her father had come into the kitchen when she was making breakfast and would automatically turn the flame down. But, as much as it pained her to admit it, he knew his shit. The eggs she cooked were works of art.
She folded her arms and rested her chin on her them. “So I’ve been saving this one for today,” she said, and immediately he perked up. For as long as she could remember, they traded facts, mostly about astronomy—which her father had introduced her to so long ago she couldn’t remember not being able to pick out constellations like Andromeda and Cassiopeia and Perseus and Pegasus. “Astronomers have found a massive star that exploded in 2014 … and again in 1954.”
Her father’s eyebrows shot up. “Twice?”
She nodded. “It’s a supernova that refuses to die. It’s five hundred million light-years away, near Big Bear. Usually supernovas fade over a hundred days, right? This one is still going strong after a thousand.”
Her dad had taught her that stars needed fuel, like anything else that burned. When they started to run out of hydrogen, they cooled, changing color to become red giants, like Betelgeuse. But this star had defied the odds.
“That is an excellent birthday fact.” He grinned. “What’s on the agenda today?”
She shrugged. “I’m going to check on my meth lab, wire a million to my offshore account, and have lunch with Beyoncé.”
“Give her my best,” her father said. He ate his last bite of the egg. “Do you know how few people can cook a perfect egg?”
“Yes, because you tell me at least twice a week. I have to go or I’ll miss the bus.” She circled the table and kissed his cheek, breathing in the familiar smell of starch from his uniform shirt and bay rum from his aftershave. Wren thought that if she ever wound up in a coma, all the doctors would have to do was wave that combination of scents under her nose, and surely she would wake. She stood up and reached for her knapsack on the counter, but before she could get it, her father grabbed her arm.
“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
She forced herself to meet his eyes. “What?”
“Come on. I’m a detective.”
Wren danced away from him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
Her father shook his head, smiling. “Never let it be said I spoiled a birthday surprise.”
Wren walked halfway to the bus stop at the end of the street before she let out the breath she was holding. How had he known?
She wasn’t hiding a birthday surprise. She was going to get birth control today, at the Center. She was cutting health class to do it, which felt somehow karmic. Wren thought of how she and Ryan had talked about this: whether it made sense to use condoms, if their safety rate was good enough, how if Wren got contraception, she would do it without having to tell her father. That much she and Ryan agreed upon. Ryan didn’t relish the thought of her detective father, with his standard-issue Glock, finding out that his daughter was sleeping with him.
Wren knew there were girls who were so unromantic they had sex because they wanted to get it over with. There were others who were so starry-eyed they truly believed that the guy they had sex with the first time would be their one and only. Wren was caught somewhere on the spectrum between the two. She wanted to have sex for the first time with someone she could laugh with, if things got weird or didn’t work. But she also knew there was more to it than that. She knew your first time could only happen once. There were so many memories that you didn’t get to pick—like being the only kid in her class who wrote a Mother’s Day card to her aunt, or turning seventy shades of red when she had to explain to her father that the reason she’d called him from the nurse’s office wasn’t that she had the flu, but that she had gotten her period. Given that, shouldn’t you get to choose this memory, and make it perfect?
The bus pulled up to the curb, exhaling heavily as its doors swung open. She picked her way through the rows, past the jocks and the brains and the theater nerds, and slid into a blessedly empty row. She pressed her cheek to the cool glass. The next time she rode this bus, she would be taking the Pill. She wondered how many other girls on the bus were. She wondered who was having sex, if they all felt as swollen with that secret as she did.
One day she would tell her father that she wasn’t a virgin. Like, when she was married and thirty and having a baby.
As the bus chugged toward the school, Wren thought maybe this was a birthday gift to her father, after all. He got to think she belonged only to him, for a little while longer.
—
HUGH WAS FORTY, AND HE felt every fucking minute of it. He flattened his hands on the table, bracketing the plate of breakfast Wren had made him, which he had scraped clean. You’d think that things would be different, that there would be an invisible line between yesterday and today to mark the fact that he was this old, but no. He was still headed to the same precinct he’d been at since he became a cop. He was still a single parent. The table still had one wobbly leg that he hadn’t managed to fix. The only new thing was silver in his beard stubble, which frankly he could have lived without.
He supposed that this was the age that men began to wonder if they were doing anything that would leave a mark on the world. If he died today, what would be said at his funeral? Sure, he had made a difference in the lives of individuals given his career. And he would not have traded a moment of his time with Wren. But he wasn’t a genius. He wouldn’t invent something that eliminated fossil fuels or allowed for time travel. He’d never negotiate world peace. He supposed if every individual man did his best, then the greater balance tipped toward good rather than evil, but that didn’t keep the individual daily chain of one’s life from feeling, well, mundane.
Plus, dammit, his back hurt after he’d been on his feet all day in a way it never used to.
He feared—although he would never admit this to anyone—that this was the crest, the pinnacle. That the rest of his life would be a slow march down the hill; that he had already experienced the best of what was coming to him. What was getting old, anyway, except dragging your feet toward the inevitable?
He was saved from skating further down this morbid path of thought by the buzzing of his cellphone. Bex’s face popped onto the screen, and he smiled, shaking his head. “Happy birthday to you,” she sang, as soon as he answered. “Happy birthday to you!”
He let her finish her off-key rendition. “I think I know who Wren gets her dubious singing ability from,” he said.
“Because it’s your birthday,” his sister said, “I’m going to let that slide.”
Hugh had three siblings, but he was the accident, born ten years after his youngest brother. He was closest to Bex, even though she was the oldest. “How come you’re the only one of my brothers and sisters that remembers my birthday without fail?”
“Because I’m the best one,” Bex said.
“And the most humble,” he added. He scratched his neck. “Tell me, does it go away?”
“What?”
“This feeling that it’s the beginning of the end.”
She laughed. “Hugh, I’d give anything to be forty again. You must think I have one foot in the grave.”
She was fourteen years his senior, but he never thought of her that way. “You’re not old.”
“Then neither are you,” she said. “What are you doing to mark this festive occasion?”
“Protecting and serving.”