“It’s Fox. I gotta go in.”
“Are you in front of a computer? Go check and see what the halfway point is between New York and Faulkner. I got a friend who’s a nurse who’ll run the lab tests. All I need’s a cheek swab. Come on. Let’s see if you’ve won the lottery and you’re not a Kisses.”
I end up renting a car and driving down. Our agreed-upon halfway point is just past Columbia, Maryland, off Interstate 68, at an all-night Love’s with an attached Denny’s. When I pull up, Shauna’s already there, leaning against a Chevy HHR, smoking a cigarette, looking slickly tan under the parking lot lights. She sees me pull in, runs over to the driver’s side, and knocks the window hard with her left hand. Her wedding ring has been replaced with a massive ruby and cubic-zirconia wrap, a weird triangle-swoop stone on a wide band. Her nails are purple.
I roll down the window. She leans in, grinning, and juts her hip out. I see a couple of truckers give her the once-over. “Hi, baby,” she says.
“What color of nail polish is that?” I ask her.
She grimaces. “I dunno. Purple something. Purple Rain, I think?”
I slap the steering wheel. “God damn. I knew it.”
“What.”
“It’s— Nothing. Probably too weird to explain.”
“Sometimes I think I don’t see enough of you,” she says. “And then other times I think it’s just enough.” She retrieves a plastic bag from her pocket, pulls out a swab, pinches my cheek. “Say ah,” she commands.
I open up. She takes a quick, triumphant swipe. “There. That’s all you had to do, angel baby.” She drops the swab into a plastic cup, puts the cup in a Ziploc bag. “Well,” she sighs. Leans against the car.
“Well,” I say.
“At least now we’ll know.”
“Certainty’s not a bad thing.”
“We’ll never get it from Mom,” Shauna says. “Between you and me, I think she’s goin senile.”
“If I turn out to be a bastard, will you buy me a Grand Slam breakfast?”
—
A week later, I get the text from her:
Lab says…you are officially a Kisses. Sorry?
—
When Teddy gets married, I send him a wedding gift—a watercolor skyline of Louisville, painted by an artist in New York. It is a softer Louisville than the one we drew for Irrefutable Love, that jagged lifeline struggling against the sky, the Ohio River gray and indifferent beside. This Louisville glows with the water, the view curving the bend of Interstate 64 as it stretches, out and out, into the west.
I am beginning to understand what I did to Teddy, what he was trying to tell me, when I look at Mel’s sketches. Finding yourself in a world someone else has made is a theft that is difficult to put into words—the magnitude of your life, smeared to their order, your voice impersonated or, worse, winked out altogether.
I know what Mel and I did with memory. We ran our endurance dry with our life stories, trying to reproduce them, translate them, make them manageable enough to coexist with. We made them smaller, disfiguring them with our surgeries. We were young. We did not know what we were doing.
I am protected by my forgetting: What I can recollect is subject to my own personal slash-and-burn, my inability to lay off. It is not in me to be able to leave well enough alone. Thank God I forget. Thank God.
I want to tell Teddy that I had no alternative. I had to make what I made to survive, to move forward with my life without the shadow of that goddamned trunk hanging over me. But now I’m aware enough of the cost for it to keep me from sleeping at night.
All I write on the card is this: Congratulations. I am so happy for you.
—
This is the year I meet Danny.
It happens at Animacon. He’s just moved to New York from Los Angeles to write and work PR for a media blog. ReAnimator has just launched its list of the top thirty adult animated films of all time. Nashville Combat is number 12, Irrefutable Love is number 7; he’s assigned to write a story about it, and me. When I meet him, he’s eating. He lifts his hand, a wad of bagel in his cheek, and he says, “Good morning, Sharon Kisses. Are you ready to be interviewed?”
I’m a good five minutes into the interview before I realize Danny is cute. Sort of medium height, substantial five-o’clock shadow, big brown eyes (even in distraction, I am still forever a sucker for the kind of moony, chocolaty eyes you can fall ass over cranium into). Nice hands. Sweet little teeth. And those five minutes ultimately work for me, because it means a window of coherence before my hormones descend and scramble my shit to pieces. A first impression in which I actually, unknowingly, have some game without getting in my own way. Snapping off some solid one-liners, some thoughtful ruminations about Brecky’s stupid Civil War show.
I ask Danny out to a bar afterward with me and Tatum and Ryan and some of the old crowd. On the way there, as we cut through the squirrels chattering in Washington Square Park, I elbow him and say, “You know what they call those where I’m from?”
“No.”