Myparents?
This wasn’t like her. Normally she was sharp, sunny, not prone to outbursts of emotion. He knew she was likely still reeling from the aftereffects of IVF, both hormonal and emotional, the second of which had only been confirmed a failure two weeks previous. But something told him this went deeper than that.
He licked his lips and stalled for time. “It… it sounds like you’re speaking from experience.”
What had she done? He tried to think back to when she was a teenager. That was when children rebelled, wasn’t it? He would’ve been what? Eight? Twelve at most during that stage of her life. Had she ever been in trouble? Had she come home late? He didn’t remember.
She laughed, but it was a brittle, humorless thing. “Yeah, you could say that.” She set the beer bottle down, empty. It thunked on the table with resounding finality.
Ari decided to tread carefully. “Do you… want to talk about it?”
“I have been, sort of.” She took a deep breath and blotted her face with one of the clean sushi napkins. “Though I guess you didn’t know it at the time.”
Ari had no idea what she was talking about. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she echoed. “I’m going to have to do better than that, I know.” She tapped her nails on the arm of the couch, biting both lips. “I had a boyfriend in high school.”
Ari wanted to make a smart comment—what a rebel she’d been, dating a boy at the age girls generally dated boys, when their parents had had no strict rules against it—but it didn’t seem like something he should tease about right then. “I don’t remember that.”
“Yeah, well. Maman and Baba didn’t know. He wasn’t exactly someone they’d approve of. He didn’t take enough academic courses, and he wasn’t going to go to university. You know what they would have said.”
“That he wasn’t a good long-term investment, emotionally,” Ari surmised. “He had no ambition. He would not be able to support a family.”
She flashed him a quick, mirthless smile. “Wow, it’s almost like we grew up in the same house. But yeah, that’s exactly what they would have said. And I know, because they said it anyway, even though they had no idea I was seeing him.”
Ari winced.
“And you know what the funny thing is? He got a great job after graduation, working with Hydro One. Now he’s got a wife and two kids and, like, seven dogs. Guess he showed them.”
Ari still didn’t know where this was going. “So he was your boyfriend…?”
“Yeah, he was. And I… I was dating him in part because I knew it’d piss Maman and Baba off, because their expectations made me so angry I could scream. I thought, you know, we moved to Canada so we could have more freedom, not so we could recreate the expectations of Iran in another country. Which is way harsher than they deserved, but I was a teenager. But also… he made me laugh. He was kind, in a goofy way. He didn’t care that I was smarter than he was, which let me tell you, that is rare. A lot of the guys I dated after werereallysensitive about that.”
That, at least, was one dating pitfall Ari had managed to avoid by being male. “I apologize on behalf of my gender.”
“Thank you, I accept.” This smile had a little more emotion behind it. “Anyway. We broke up right before I left for university, and I was… heartbroken. But I couldn’t come to Maman and Baba about it, because they didn’t know I’d even been seeing anyone.”
Ari relaxed a little. “That must have been difficult,” he tried. Surely there had to be more to the story to support her reaction to telling it?
“Yeah. I went off to school in September stupid and hurt and angry at Maman and Baba, like it was their fault it didn’t work out, and of course frosh week was just one long party and I went a little off the rails….”
So therewasmore to the story. Only now Ari didn’t know if he liked where it was going. “Understandable.”
Finally Afra laughed. “Ari, just… bless you for not being willing to jump to conclusions.”
He felt himself flush. “Not enough to go on.”
“Not for you,” Afra agreed, not unkindly. But she seemed to have gathered strength somehow, because she finally cut to the chase. “When I didn’t come home right away the next summer, I said it was because I was busy moving into student housing and getting ready to start my new job. Which was true—I did move, and I did have a part-time job there for the summer. But thewholetruth is that I needed to stay there. I couldn’t come home right away. Because a week after exams, I….”
He waited.
“I had a baby.”
His mouth dropped open. “You….”
“I got pregnant frosh week like a stupid after-school special,” she confirmed. He expected her to sound bitter or tearful, but she actually seemed calm. Maybe a little rueful. “I wasn’t showing yet by winter break, but by reading week I knew I needed to figure out what I was doing instead of coming home, because my obstetrician wasn’t about to approve a nonessential C-section for a nineteen-year-old, and I could not come home nine months pregnant. Maman and Baba would never let me leave the house again, and there was no way they’d give me any option about keeping the baby. Actions have consequences, family first, blah blah blah.”
“So you gave it up,” Ari filled in.
