Rosie winced at several loud, heavy thumps coming from somewhere upstairs. “We have lots of hands, but it’s an open question if that makes unpacking harder or easier.”
“I thought you were going to say harder or much harder.” Marginny’s smile, mom to mom, was genuine all of a sudden. Rosie wondered, for the first time, if she might actually like the woman. “Listen, I wanted to … not apologize for Frank this morning, but, you know, I hope he didn’t offend you. Talking about the drag show and everything. He was just … taken aback. We both were.”
“Sorry it was so awkward,” said Rosie. “I think I might need practice. You’re the first people we’ve known who haven’t … known.”
“Yeah. So about that,” and Rosie braced herself in case she might have to stop liking Marginny as soon as she’d started, “I just wanted you to know that we decided not to tell our kids.”
“Tell them what?” said Penn.
“About Poppy.” Rosie answered without looking at him. She felt his arm go around her waist.
“It just seems like it would be unnecessarily confusing for them.” Marginny was twisting her fingers together like braids. “Why tell them just to ask them to forget? We’d have to explain and explain just to get them to understand and then we’d have to explain and explain about how they can never mention it again. So we thought isn’t it best to just let nature take its course?”
“Nature?” Rosie and Penn said together.
“As long as we don’t say anything, our girls will look at yours and just naturally think of her as one of them. That’s what everyone wants, right?”
“I guess so.” Rosie wasn’t sure what her objection was, but it felt like there must be one.
“Anyway, I just thought I should let you know.” Marginny smiled that genuine smile again. “May these be the most awkward conversations we ever have.”
And how could Rosie object to that?
*
“You told them?” Penn unwound his arm from her waist as soon as the door was closed.
“Yeah? Was I not supposed to?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought this through I guess.”
“Me neither.”
“Why’d you tell them?”
“It’s the truth?” said Rosie. It came out as a question.
“It’s not really.”
“It’s not?”
“That she’s really a boy?” said Penn. “She’s not really a boy.”
“I didn’t say she was really a boy. I said she used to be a boy.”
“That’s not entirely true either.”
“What would you have said?” Rosie asked.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. I would have just said, ‘This is my daughter, Poppy.’”
Rosie thought about Jane Doe bleeding to death in her hands. Rosie thought about Chad Perry’s fingers jerking back from what they found under her skirt like he’d pricked them on a witch’s spindle. If you didn’t tell people to begin with, you never knew when they might find out. “They’d realize. Eventually.”
“How?”
“That’s what worries me.”
“It’s been a long time since we had neighbors,” Penn allowed, “but I don’t think one generally sees them naked.”
“So we just don’t tell anybody?”
“I don’t know. How was the conversation?”
“Terrible,” she admitted. “Weird. Awkward. Embarrassing for everyone.”
“Want to have it forty or fifty more times this week? With everyone we meet at the barbecue, on the playground at school, all the kids’ new friends and their parents?”
“I do not.”
“Besides,” said Penn, “on sight, how do you tell the difference between the Cindy Calcuttis and the Nick Calcuttis?”
“What do you mean?”
“How do you know before you tell them who’s going to say, ‘Okay, cool,’ and who’s going to be hateful and violent? Or who’s going to say, ‘Okay, cool’ and be secretly hateful and violent?” Penn pictured his imaginary gunshot wound. Penn pictured his fist slamming again and again into Nick Calcutti’s face.
“You don’t know,” Rosie conceded.
“I know this isn’t why we moved,” Penn said, “but it’s a nice bonus. Not everyone has to know. She can be just Poppy for a while. We can always tell people later.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.” Penn shrugged. “Later. Once we’ve gotten to know them. When we know it’s safe. When the moment is right.”
Maybe there was a moment when the moment was right, but over the years, Rosie and Penn realized the impossibility of finding it. For the first few thousand of them after they met someone, it was too soon, Poppy’s story too awkward and complicated, too intimate, too risky to share with new acquaintances. But by the time those acquaintances became close friends, it was too late. Perhaps there was a perfect moment in between, when you were close enough to tell but not so close it was problematic that you hadn’t done so already, but it was infinitesimal, too fleet and fleeting to pin down, visible not even in hindsight.
“You can tell anytime,” Penn said, “but once people know, they can never unknow.”
For such a short statement, it was astonishing how much of it proved untrue.