Dylan pulled his head back in surprise and then reached up and rubbed one eyebrow and then one eye, washing his face with his hands—it was both tension and tiredness that drove the movement.
Mike answered for him. “Nothing was deliberate. We were roommates in college and we got along really well and we realized that we got along so well, we like to spend most of our time together, but there wasn’t an attraction, it wasn’t ‘Oh, I’m g*y and this guy is who I want.’”
“No, I firmly want women,” Dylan said.
“Yeah, I get that. You’ve said it about nine thousand times.”
“I’ve said it twice.”
“Whatever.”
Mike interrupted Josie and Dylan’s sparring. “I think it was as much about being comfortable with each other in our friendship as it was about finding the right woman in Jill,” Mike said, his voice contemplative and calm, a tingle of nostalgia coming through.
“She was so mellow.” Dylan finished for him.
“Yeah,” Mike said, nodding. “And it was so…”
“Easy,” Dylan interjected.
Mike just nodded.
“How?” Laura asked, leaning back, running one hand through her hair to push it away from her face.
Just then, Madge arrived and delivered everyone’s food with perfunctory efficiency. Laura and Mike dug in immediately, while Dylan did the one-handed parent eating thing, nearly dropping part of his salad, a giant cherry tomato falling off his fork and narrowly missing the baby’s head.
No matter how hard he tried crumbs sprinkled down on her and Laura cocked one eyebrow, leaned down, and said, “Are you seasoning the baby again?”
“She’ll taste better that way. Haven’t you read Jonathan Swift?”
The whole table groaned. It was a really bad joke, but Josie had to hand it to them—anybody who could be this sleep deprived and still make jokes was doing all right.
“So, Dylan, you’re the one who can’t eat yet. You answer how, exactly, was it easy?”
“It was easy because Jill made it easy, just like Laura made it easy. We were these young pups. How old were we, Mike? I was nineteen, you were twenty?”
Mike nodded, his mouth full of food.
Dylan shifted the baby, just so, lifting her up onto his shoulder. She made a snurgly sound, and then nestled her little cheek deeper against the bare skin at the collar of Dylan’s shirt. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her little, perfect baby head. “We didn’t have words for what we were going through, and when we met Jill, and we all got a little tipsy one night; the sex part just made sense. It was something that we didn’t have a bunch of angst about…”
Mike swallowed and interrupted. “Actually, it was more that we had—we were worried”—he stumbled over his words—“we were worried about the fact that we weren’t more upset at our own actions.” Mike tapped his hand against the table as he said each word, as if thinking it through for the first time. He shoved an enormous coconut shrimp into his mouth, and gestured for Dylan to continue.
“There were all of these feelings that we were supposed to feel. I guess,” Dylan added, “I was supposed to be jealous that Mike and Jill got along, and Mike was supposed to be jealous that Jill and I got along, and Jill was supposed to feel like she was perverted, or an aberration, or that she should be ashamed for wanting us both at the same time. We talked a lot…a lot, in our dorm room that first year about all of the things that people would assume about us if we were open, so we stayed closed off; we didn’t tell anyone. People just thought that we were a group of three friends, and that Jill was just someone who liked to hang out with two guys.”
Josie finished her last piece of fried green tomato, took a sip of ice cold water, and asked, “You never told anyone?
Mike snorted. “That’s not quite true.” He looked hard at Dylan.
“My parents know,” Dylan said. His demeanor changed to one of discomfort, and Josie regretted the question.
“If I’m stepping over any boundaries here, just say so,” she said, palms up in a gesture of supplication.
“No, it’s not a problem,” Laura interjected. “Dylan’s mom and dad know, and they’re mostly okay.”
Mike snorted again.
Josie looked at him. “You don’t think so.”
He sighed, grabbed his glass of water, chugged it down, and then looked around for Madge, who, as if reading his mind, zipped by with a completely full extra pitcher, and then grabbed the coffee carafe, shook it a bit, and ran off, muttering to herself. Josie gave her two minutes to return with a full coffee pot.
“My parents are Catholic,” Dylan said.
“Oh, boy,” Josie answered, shaking her head.
“This…yeah, it was not well received, but back in college I felt like it needed to…be open. That it was the world that was screwed up, that I was fine and I had my own standards, and that judgment be damned, I was going to be open about it—at least after that first year.”
“How did your parents handle it?” she asked.
“About as well as you can imagine two cradle to—well, they’re not dead yet, but when they die—grave, Catholics could be expected to hear that their son was in a relationship that was so odd, there wasn’t even a coalition of people against it.”
“Your parents did a good job of trying to create one at first,” Mike muttered.
Dylan closed his eyes and shifted the baby to his other shoulder, stretching his sore arm out, and then yawning deeply. “Yeah, at first they did. It only took three years to wear them down, and the fact that they wouldn’t let Mike come to any family events once they knew.”
“Ouch,” Josie commiserated.
Laura looked at her and nodded. “That’s one reason why we didn’t have a baby shower…” Her voice tapered off with a choked sound at the end, and Dylan took his free arm and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Josie did a facepalm. “You’re right, we never did a baby shower. Was that my job? Was I supposed to do that and I just totally flaked on you?”
“No, no, no, no, no,” Laura reassured her. “No, it wasn’t something that was on our ‘wanted’ radar screen anyhow. It would have been very complicated.”
“We should do something, though,” Josie pointed out. “Maybe just a small party that celebrates her life. What you’ve done is just so amazing, and little Jill…little Jill,” Josie repeated. She looked at Dylan and then at Mike. “In the rush of the birth and everything that happened, I never thought to ask, how do you feel about the name?”