He peeked over his magazine at the other two men in the waiting room of the Gladstone Clinic, wondering if, like him, they’d come to see how well their “boys could swim,” as Dr. Victorino had put it the day before in what Parrish guessed had been an attempt at levity and camaraderie. Neither appeared to be even half as tense as he was, though neither seemed to particularly want to make eye contact, either. The guy reading Sports Illustrated had an expression on his face that reminded him of the happily lost look that came over Julie whenever she was in the middle of rereading one of her Jane Austen novels from college. The guy in the ostrich cowboy boots, on the other hand, looked sleepy, as if he might doze off if his name didn’t get called soon.
The door next to the receptionist’s frosted window opened, and a nurse with a tattoo on her forearm of something Parrish couldn’t make out — an alligator? a shark? — stepped into view. Behind her, he couldn’t see anything of the office’s interior except a vivid cross-section of a penis and scrotum hanging framed on the far wall.
“Mr. Hortter?”
The guy reading Sports Illustrated didn’t look up as Parrish walked past him. The cowboy’s eyes closed.
* * *
Since he and Julie were both relatively young — thirty-two and thirty-three — and healthy, they’d assumed it wouldn’t take them too long to get pregnant once Julie stopped taking the pill. Beyond agreeing that, yes, they were ready, they did nothing special. They’d accomplished nearly everything they’d wanted to accomplish before moving on to this stage of life. House? A nondescript but nice ranch home not too far from the freeway that Julie and everyone else in Ivy took to get to work in Dallas. Money in savings? More would be nice, sure, but what they had was pretty good. And though Parrish had never gotten around to pursuing some sort of graduate degree as they’d sometimes talked about, Julie had — and, for the most part, it was her MBA that they could thank for their house and financial cushion. Since Julie made significantly more than he did, they’d agreed that once her maternity leave ran out he’d quit his job at the Ivy Daily News in order to stay home with the baby instead of shuffling him or her off to daycare. Then when the baby turned two, or maybe three, he’d go back to work. Somewhere other than the Ivy Daily, he hoped, though he didn’t know where his eleven-year-old degree in Psychology would ever get him a better job. After all, it hadn’t even gotten him his current job. The man he had to thank for that was his old circulation manager, Mr. Royal, who seemed always to be out fishing at Lake Ray Hubbard whenever he called his office over in Grand Prairie, where he was supposed to be busy being the Director of Circulation for all of the suburban newspapers owned by Metro Star News.
“Say goodbye to staying out until two on the weekends,” Julie said as she ceremoniously threw her remaining birth control pills into the trash next to the toilet.
“Goodbye,” said Parrish, who had tired of staying out late seeing local bands at various downtown clubs long ago, though he’d never confessed this to Julie.
* * *
Truth be told, Parrish rarely noticed children except when they called negative attention to themselves — throwing food in restaurants, running roughshod down the aisles of grocery stores. In these instances, he found himself mentally criticizing their parents for not being able to control them. Nevertheless, he was confident that once he had his own it would be a completely different story. As soon as his own child, still slick from the birthing, was placed in his arms there in the delivery room, he would transform. When he looked upon his child’s face for the first time and saw how its features were cast from his and Julie’s own, he would become a different man. And it would feel utterly natural, holding his child, rocking him or her ever so gently, even though, as far as he could remember, he’d never even once held an infant before. Over the years when friends of theirs had become new parents and asked if he’d like to hold Chase or Henry or Maya, he’d always declined as they pressed their children onto him, claiming to feel a cold coming on.
“I’d be afraid I might pass on whatever I’ve got,” he liked to say, when really what he was afraid of was seeing the terror in their eyes as they watched him fumble their swaddled bundle, sending it tumbling to the floor.
* * *
Not really knowing a better way to respond, each time that Julie told him that she’d started her period, he’d say something along the lines of Oh, well, next month will be the month. He was disappointed each time, sure, but not horribly, no. After all, what was a month? Just thirty days. Four weeks and change.
The sixth time she got her period, she said, “Well, it’s been half a year now.”
They were both in the kitchen when she said this, apropos of nothing. He was loading the dishwasher after dinner, thinking about whether to ask her if she wanted to take a walk around the block before it got too dark. She was sitting on a stool at the counter, flipping through an issue of Business Week.
“Since what?”
“Since we started trying.”
He couldn’t tell whether she was just noting this fact or if she was concerned but trying to sound nonchalant, as if she’d only just happened suddenly to realize this. “Already?”
“Tell me about it. But they don’t even want to see you until you’ve been trying a year, so I’m sure it’s fairly normal . . . but still. Six months is six months, you know?”
Parrish wondered who they were and how she happened to know this information if she hadn’t worriedly sought it out. Dropping a handful of forks and knives into the dishwasher’s utensil basket, he thought about asking her if, in fact, she was worried, but already several seconds of silence had passed; to ask now might cause her to think that his delay was rooted in an anxiety of his own regarding their inability to conceive, so he let it go, not wanting to give that impression.
Soon after this discussion, Julie gradually became more sexually aggressive. Parrish didn’t know why she chose the odd moments that she did at times, but he assumed it had something to do with the vagaries of her menstruation cycle. No matter — he liked how she’d playfully call from down the hall for her stud to come service her, though such explicit talk embarrassed him a bit, especially when the sunlight was pouring whitely through the open windows. So despite knowing how ridiculous it was even to pretend that someone with such an adolescent body could make a living in the sex industry, he played along. He’d knock on the bedroom door and, in his best attempt at a suave voice, say, “Did someone here request a gigolo?”
Five more identical months passed. Julie didn’t say anything more than to note the timely arrival of her period every fourth week or so, but Parrish sensed the heightened anxiety underlying each successive announcement. After the twelfth unsuccessful month, he knew what would be coming soon.
“I’m going to get checked out next week,” she said.
Even though this comment broke ten minutes of silence between them one night as they sat together watching the news and eating a late snack of tortilla chips and guacamole, he didn’t need to ask what she was talking about.
“Do you want some company?”
She shook her head, her mouth full. “It’s only with Dr. Hammond-Greene. She said she’s just going to be a little more thorough than before, when she gave me the okay to start trying in the first place. Then we’ll go from there.”
Parrish didn’t say anything as he removed a dot of guacamole from her chin with his finger. He wondered if they were on the verge of one of those moments that, once whatever it was that was going to happen had happened, they would look back upon and think, Remember when we thought . . . ? Remember when we didn’t know . . . ?
When she returned from her appointment the following Wednesday, she sat on the couch next to him with a shrug. “I’m fit as a fiddle. Her words, not mine. At least from what she can tell.”
All this time Parrish had just assumed that if a problem existed that it would be a problem with her. After all, a woman’s body — what with all its tubes and folds and cavities, all its whirling hormones — was so much more complicated, and therefore so much more prone to malfunction. Now he felt stupid, like the last one in the Ivy Daily’s break room to get the joke. Of course it could be him to blame just as easily. “So now it’s my turn, I guess, right?”
“She said we should have started with you, anyway. Men are simpler.”
* * *
Parrish wondered if the tattooed nurse, whose wake smelled of disinfectant laced with flowery perfume, was snickering to herself at the thought of what he was about to do. Or was escorting men from the waiting room to the collection room just another dull part of her humdrum routine?
She stopped at a door marked Private. “Have you abstained for the last seventy-two hours?”
Slightly unnerved by her direct gaze, he nodded, afraid that his voice might come out sounding nervous.
She handed him a lidded cup sealed in loose plastic. “Magazines are available inside if you need them,” she said in a voice that now sounded like a tour guide’s. “Lubricant is intentionally not made available because it might contaminate the sample. When you’ve finished, take your sealed cup to the lab technician’s window at the end of the hall.” She paused a beat. “And don’t forget to turn the lock. You don’t want anyone walking in on you.”
Parrish waited until she had disappeared into a nearby room before opening the door. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find (a water bed? soft music?), but it certainly wasn’t just an ordinary bathroom that the staff probably used whenever patients weren’t busy masturbating in it. An uncomfortably chilly one, at that. After undoing his pants and pushing down his boxers (which he’d recently switched to from his lifelong briefs after Julie had said that his “tighty whities might be keeping things too warm down there”), he waddled over to the magazine stand next to the sink.
Despite the legitimately medical nature of the circumstances, a slight feeling of shame came over him as he pulled a Playboy from the rack. His body tensed, as if, despite his double-checking of the lock, his mother might burst through the door at any moment to catch him in flagrante delicto. He thumbed through the slick pages of glowing, taut skin. Beachcombing blondes kicking through knee-deep ocean foam. A squad of cheerleaders exercising beneath a goalpost in a variety of incomplete uniforms, pompons in hand. And then the centerfold: a blue-eyed brunette luxuriating on a hay bale, wearing only a red bandanna (tied around her neck). A chaff of wheat dangled precariously from her moist, parted lips. From her navel, a diamond piercing winked at him. Choosing her, he got started.
* * *
Officially (with Julie, in other words), he claimed not to care whether they had a boy or a girl. In truth, however, he wanted to be a father to a son. He liked to imagine attending his son’s baseball and basketball games — heck, maybe even football games! — though he hadn’t been that boy himself, a fact that had never seemed to concern his own father in the slightest. As a boy, he’d tried to teach himself how to throw and hit a baseball, how to shoot baskets, but he could only do so much on his own; stepping onto the baseball diamond or the basketball court with the other boys during gym class, he’d always felt like an imposter, a spy, hoping that his true identity wouldn’t be found out. But it always was, every time. When the captains selected their teams, he was always thankful for Mickey Jameson (morbidly obese) and Gary McGeoch (gimp-legged), otherwise he never would have been picked any earlier than last. As a father he’d do better, he knew. He’d be sure to learn as well as he could all the rules and the mechanics, all the ins and outs, of his son’s chosen sports so that at least the boy wouldn’t be at a disadvantage from the very start, as he himself had so unfairly been.
“Sports are for brutes, by and large,” his father liked to say whenever the subject of organized athletics happened to come up. “Team sports, especially. Tennis is fine, I suppose. And possibly golf, though that game has always seemed rather pointless to me. I’d have to agree with Mark Twain on that one.”
More recently, in a rare moment of intimacy between them, Parrish had made the mistake of confessing that he and Julie had been trying to get pregnant for nearly a year now, to which his father said, “You’re thinking too much about it. If you relax, things will take care of themselves.”
Sensing his father’s rather recent embracing of Buddhism behind these words, Parrish wanted to say something cheeky like, “Would sitting cross-legged and chanting mantras help?” But he didn’t. And though he supposed that it could be relevant somehow, neither did he ask how long it had taken for them, his father and mother, to get pregnant with him, their only child. As soon as they decided to start trying? A few months? Or had he been a surprise, an accident? He realized that they’d never talked about it. Or if they had, he didn’t remember. Hell, if it weren’t for the fact that he had so obviously inherited his father’s petite frame, not to mention his delicate features — his tiny mouth and ears, his pale skin, his spider-like fingers — he could have been adopted, for all he knew.
“Maybe you’re right,” Parrish said, wondering if other people would find it weird how uninterested he was about how and why he’d come into the world. “Maybe we are just trying too hard.” Then he got off the phone, claiming that Julie needed help bringing in the groceries.
* * *
Sitting in his office at the Ivy Daily News, Parrish was supposed to be calculating the print run for the next edition, but he hadn’t even glanced at the figures yet. Instead he was staring blankly into the crack in the wall next to the thermostat. When had it widened so much? In the morning, his results from the Gladstone Clinic would be in. It was just like being back in school again, sitting there watching the teacher as she made her leisurely way down the aisles of desks, dropping tests from her fingers: would he pass or fail? Had he been shooting blanks, as the stupid saying went, all this time?
He looked through the open door at his district managers waiting around for the papers to be trucked in from the plant in Dallas. They were laughing at Randall, the oldest of the lot, who was hurling his fists dramatically at an invisible foe while regaling the others with what was, most likely, an account of yet another one of his weekend escapades. Had any of them — fathers all, by his vague recollection — had any difficulty getting their wives pregnant? None, most likely. In fact, he was fairly certain that at least a couple of them had children by a number of different women. It didn’t seem right. Didn’t he have more to offer as a father than any of them? He knew he was being a snob, which he hated ever feeling himself being, particularly since he hated his father’s elitism so much, but at least he didn’t think that getting thrown in jail for breaking a guy’s jaw in a fight at a bowling alley was a badge of honor, unlike some of these guys. At least he had a college degree. At least he occasionally read the newspaper, insubstantial as it was, that they were in the business of delivering.
Having seen Parrish watching him, Randall’s arms froze in mid-swing. “Papers should be here any minute. Dugger just got the call.”
Parrish sat forward and picked up a pencil, his head still cloudy. For a moment he relished his authority, knowing that he could call Randall into his office and chew him out — even fire him —over anything he wanted, even something imagined, and Randall would have to take it without complaint, but all he said was, “No inserts today, I heard.”
“Good deal.”
As soon as Randall returned to his story, punching the air all the while, Parrish called Julie to make sure she’d be able to go with him to get his results. He needed her there to help him make sense of things.
* * *
The results—
Vol.: 1.4
Liq.: NL
Count: 21
Morph.: 55%
pH: NL
WBC: None
Fruc.: NL
After briefly looking over the printout with Julie, Parrish returned it to Dr. Victorino. He didn’t particularly appreciate being given his results like this since the abbreviations and numbers obviously couldn’t mean anything to them without a doctor’s translation, but he was too nervous to let his annoyance last more than just a second.
“So, what’s the verdict?” Parrish asked, hoping to sound relaxed.
“Well,” Dr. Victorino said, drawing the word out unhurriedly as he adjusted a large photograph on his credenza of himself posed smiling beside a bloody shark hanging dead from a cable, “strictly speaking, everything falls within, or only just below, what’s typically considered the limits of adequacy, as we say. Which is good, but several of these figures are definitely pushing the low end of normal. And a couple have pushed on through, if you know what I mean. By themselves, none of these numbers begs for radical concern, I don’t think, but all together? I’m not sure. Maybe.”
Parrish looked over at Julie, who raised her eyebrows and shrugged, as if to say, “Okay, so . . . ?”
Dr. Victorino unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled his sleeves halfway up his coarse-haired forearms. “What we’d like to see is at least three times the volume and at least five times the count, with a higher percentage of well-structured, forward-moving specimens. A good portion of your sperm, however, is either misshapen — two-headed, tiny-headed, two-tailed, short-tailed — or bad swimmers.”
As Parrish struggled to think of an appropriate question to ask, a vision of cartoon sperm — little tadpole creatures with stern eyes and determined mouths — came to him. At first a steady armada cruising happily along, abruptly they start thrashing about, gasping for air, drowning, their deformed heads weighing them down. This wasn’t even slightly fair. Wasn’t it cruel enough that he’d recently verified with a paint-stained ruler from the kitchen junk drawer that his penis, which he’d always assumed was on the small side, was officially three-fourths of an inch shorter than the reported world average? Wasn’t it cruel enough that something like three billion men around the globe, most of them probably wandering around cluelessly in third-world countries, were better equipped? Wasn’t it cruel enough to know that Julie, every time he reached his shallow depth, must bemoan her own cruel fate, as well? Now he had to add this to his shortcomings?
“Regardless,” Dr. Victorino continued, stepping around his desk toward them, “it’s time to make an appointment with an RE, certainly. I’d be happy to suggest one, of course.”
“An RE?” Parrish asked, only half-listening.
“A reproductive endocrinologist,” Julie said, a breath ahead of Dr. Victorino.
“Oh.” Despite Julie’s hand now in his as they left Dr. Victorino’s office, he felt as if he were alone, as if he’d accidentally stepped into a closet instead of into the cheerful hallway that led them back to the waiting room.
* * *
A significant portion of Parrish and Julie’s life together now fell under the direction of Dr. Brzybylinski, the RE recommended by Dr. Victorino. Despite encouraging them to call him Dr. B, he was all unsmiling business.
After poring over their records for several silent minutes at the beginning of their first appointment, Dr. B finally looked up and said, “The first thing we need to do is to get you” — he stabbed his pen in Parrish’s direction while his face remained disconcertingly blank —“tested again, Mr. Hortter. Then, depending on the results — I am not expecting significant differentiation, mind you, but single samples do not always provide us with an accurate picture — we will proceed cautiously. No reason to do anything drastic immediately. I am confident that I will have you expecting soon enough.”
So Parrish returned to the Gladstone Clinic. The tattooed nurse repeated the same speech from his first visit after escorting him to the same bathroom, her eyes giving him no indication that she remembered him. He also returned to the brunette still reclining on the hay bale. Her name was Holly, he read in her profile, and she was from rural Georgia. She wanted to go to law school. And have a big family. And just as he had the first time, with his eyes locked on her sun-warmed breasts so unabashedly thrust forward next to what might be her very own father’s tractor, he labored and strained. After several fruitless minutes, he began to worry, and sweat. He paused for a moment, allowing his forearm to relax. What if he couldn’t do it? It was worse than the way he froze up in public restrooms whenever all the stalls were occupied and someone stepped up to the urinal beside him. Would the nurses in the hall start making quizzical faces at each other, wordlessly asking, What the hell’s going on in there? He started up again, trying to imagine Holly calling for him to come service her.
Just as he felt as though he might faint from exhaustion, it finally happened. Shakily he screwed on the lid, washed his hands, and belted up his pants. Relieved, he stepped out into the hall, aware of nothing except that his semen was pooled at the bottom of the clear cup, visible for anyone who cared to look as they passed by.
“The numbers are consistent,” said Dr. B over the phone a few days later. “Plenty of men with worse numbers get their wives pregnant, but that does not mean that your sperm is not the primary problem here. With no reproductive assistance, you might very well get your wife pregnant, but it also might take years. It also might never happen.”
Parrish’s hope that his first sample had merely been an unfortunate fluke died.
Think of your sperm as students doing poorly in school,” Dr. B went on. “Some are simply not cut out for it. Others are doing poorly because they are underachievers. They need a little extra assistance. A little tutoring, so to speak.”
Parrish could tell that Dr. B was proud of this analogy, but he didn’t especially like having his sperm called stupid and lazy, even if he knew it was silly to take offense. After all, it wasn’t as if Dr. B were calling him stupid and lazy. But still. He hung up and called Julie at work. While he waited for her to pick up, he kicked his office door shut just as he caught sight of Randall wiping his newsprint-stained hands across the belly of his t-shirt.
“I almost wish the news were worse,” Julie said. “At least then we’d know what we’re dealing with a little more.”
“I know,” said Parrish, though he didn’t agree, taking some consolation from the fact that he might still be able to get his wife pregnant without Dr. B there to take care of it for him.
* * *
Dr. B started their treatment by putting Julie on Clomid, a mild fertility drug, which required her to test her basal temperature and Lh levels regularly in order to pinpoint her time of ovulation. All Parrish knew was, except for the three days of the month that they screwed like rabbits, as Julie liked to say when grabbing him by the belt and pulling him down on top of her (with two pillows under her butt to optimize the possibility of fertilization), the rest of their time together primarily seemed to consist of Julie squinting at a thermometer, Julie peeing on OvuQuick sticks (with Parrish waiting on the other side of the door), Julie scribbling inscrutable notations in a variety of colored inks on a calendar magneted to the refrigerator, or Julie telling him the most recent awful thing she’d read about that could happen once she finally did get pregnant, things with names that sounded like wizard spells to call down hexes — hyperemesis gravidarum, preeclampsia, hydramnios. To top it off, the Clomid made her grouchy, but since she didn’t seem to notice the change, he didn’t mention it since he knew it would only make her grouchier.
“No problem,” Dr. B said after four unproductive months. “Clomid is not a cure-all, not by itself. Frankly, I would have been surprised if we met with success so quickly, but stranger things have happened.” He cleared his throat. “May I make a suggestion?”
Parrish felt Julie’s fingernails dig into his palm as she took his hand; he sensed that the aggressive optimism she’d maintained since their first appointment with Dr. B was beginning to fade.
“Maybe you would benefit from an infertility support group as we move forward,” Dr. B said, his mouth barely moving. “There’s a very good one that meets weekly at Presbyterian. Many of my clients have found it helpful.”
Parrish watched Julie nod her head, her eyes now closed.
Dr. B recommended that their next step be IUI — intrauterine insemination. “A very simple process. And only three-hundred dollars or so an attempt. It’s the last method so inexpensive, though, I’m afraid. But we don’t have to cross that bridge just yet, eh?”
“Maybe we never will,” Julie said, straining to smile.
“Exactly,” Parrish said, not wanting to seem uninvolved in the discussion.
Dr. B proceeded as if he hadn’t heard them. “It merely involves threading a very thin catheter through the cervix and injecting washed sperm directly into the uterus,” he said, mimicking the procedure with his pincer-like fingers. “Virtually painless, and it takes all of about two minutes.”
On their way out to the parking garage, Julie grabbed him around the waist and said, “Well, I guess we’ve reached that point now where you might get me pregnant without ever having to touch me.”
Or not, Parrish thought, unlocking the car. And it was at this moment, just as he was imagining the true possibility of failure for the first time, his desire to become a father flared within him more brightly than he’d ever felt it. His heart stuttered.
“Or not,” she said, as if she’d heard his thoughts.
* * *
“How many of you newbies here tonight have found that most people don’t really understand what you’re going through?” This question was asked by Carrie, the smiling coordinator of the support group they’d joined in North Dallas, a part of the city that, despite being closest to Ivy, they both typically found too snooty. She’d immediately let everyone know that, thanks to IVF — “in vitro fertilization, for those of you not far enough along to be hip to the lingo” — she had two beautiful daughters, Hailey and Hannah.
“You’ve got that right,” grumbled a woman on the other side of the room, which brought laughs from several people.
Spreading her arms, Carrie said, “We here at Stork Watch hope to foster positive feelings and inspire hope in each other on our journeys toward babyhood.”
The man next to Parrish leaned over and whispered, “I don’t know about you, but this is the point where I could use a drink.”
Parrish chuckled, pretending to concur, but not loud enough to draw the attention of Julie, who was listening attentively.
After half an hour of more affirmative talk, they broke for ten minutes, but not before Carrie announced to the first-timers that the men and women typically congregated separately out in the hall at this point. “After all,” she said, “as much as we’d like to think that our spouse understands every little thing we’re going through, there’s still something to be said for what women know about being women and men men, don’t you think?”
Next to the snack machines, the man who’d been sitting next to him rested a hand on his arm and said, “I know what you’re thinking. My wife and I are going on three years of this crap.” He held up three fingers, then twisted his hand around slowly in front of his face, as if only just now grasping the amount of time that had passed. “My name’s Clark, by the way.”
“Parry,” Parrish replied, even though he’d already introduced himself as Parrish to the group, mainly because Julie still refused to call him anything else.
“Some of us” — Clark gestured to a few guys leaning against the wall, most of whom were talking into cell phones — “like to tip a few back on Thursdays over at Beers ‘n’ Steers right off of Northwest Highway, if you’re interested. Some of the regulars aren’t here tonight, but they never miss Thursdays.”
“Time’s up!” Carrie shouted, windmilling her arms in the direction of their room, where they talked about embryo freezing until ten.
* * *
Everywhere he went now, Parrish saw babies. Babies in the parking lots, babies at the mall, babies in Dr. B’s building. It didn’t particularly bother him—he still assumed that eventually they’d have a baby—but he could sense what it did to Julie, though she never said anything as they passed them sleeping in strollers or strapped to the chest of a parent, staring forward like a ship’s tiny, proud figurehead. He saw how her head turned, how her eyes lingered.
And then there were the pregnant women. He’d never really paid much attention to them before, but now when he saw them — dozens a day now, it seemed — their swollen bellies like watermelons begging to be thumped, he often found himself staring. Was it weird to find them sexy? Even when they seemed to be in all sorts of discomfort as they wobbled past, stiff-legged and splay-footed, their faces glistened in a way that was almost supernatural. Even the ugly ones — the ones that made him wonder about the guys who’d put them in such a condition in the first place — he found almost beautiful as he watched them shuffling along, massaging themselves absentmindedly.
What would Julie look like when it finally happened? He was contemplating this while they ate fried rice at The Galleria’s food court. Would her tiny breasts get as enormous as those of the woman who had just walked by with two full bags from Gymboree?
“If the IUI doesn’t work,” Julie said, continuing where’d she’d left off right before they’d placed their order at the Golden Wok, “I’m thinking we should seriously look into adoption.”
Before he could respond, she continued, saying again what he’d heard her say several times before. “I mean, IVF is somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand a pop. And even that’s still a crap shoot. According to his stats, Dr. B’s success rate with it is around fifty percent or so. And that’s good. Lots of doctors’ rates are below that.” She put down her fork and massaged her temples. “Plus there are all those goddamned injections I’d have to give myself. I just don’t know.”
Long before they’d even started trying to get pregnant they’d discussed adoption, how it really was the best thing to do considering how many unwanted children there were in the world. At the time he’d liked the idea of it, how it would make him feel good about himself by doing the unselfish thing, making the planet a little bit of a better place. But now that the topic was less theoretical and more possible, he knew he didn’t want to adopt. He liked the thought of all that was in him, both good and bad, flowing out and reconstituting itself anew. With a clean slate, as it were. Besides, he wasn’t sure whether he could even love a child not his by blood, no matter how awful he knew that sounded. He imagined gazing upon a son or daughter from Guatemala or China or Russia, and never being able to extinguish the voice in his head that would whisper, again and again, no matter how much time passed, You’re not really mine . . .
“Adoption’s expensive, too, you know,” he said, repeating his same line from their previous conversations. “But like Dr. B said” — he dropped his voice to a low, robotic monotone — “we don’t have to cross that bridge just yet, eh?”
Julie laughed. Only then did Parrish realize how long it had been since he’d last heard her do that.
“You know that’s why I haven’t divorced you yet, right? You still make me laugh, even when I’m feeling like shit.”
Though he sensed a subtext of criticism in the compliment, he tried to ignore it, and, still in character, said, “Are you now ready to assist Mr. Hortter in purchasing some new jeans?”
Her smile faded, but only slightly. “Okay, funny man, don’t overdo it.”
* * *
Watching Dr. B flexing his latex fingers as he stepped between Julie’s stirruped legs, Parrish felt out of place, but then Julie took his hand and pulled him closer to her side. Dr. B’s impassive face sunk from view below the tent of blue sheeting that had been slung over her raised knees.
“This should feel no worse than getting a pap smear,” said Dr. B, his voice slightly muffled.
Parrish bent down and whispered, “Do those hurt?”
Julie held a finger to her lips. “Shhhh.”
He listened for a sound, maybe a soft squelch, but he heard nothing. A man whose first name I don’t even know, he thought, is squirting my semen into my wife, and I’m standing here in khakis and loafers, watching.
Half a minute later, Dr. B’s head rose into view again. “That’s it. Now we wait. Just to be safe, I want you to lie here with your hips elevated for twenty minutes.”
While Parrish read articles to her from Newsweek, he wondered whether his little tadpoles were making their way diligently toward her expectant egg, or were they already floundering, already done for?
* * *
Julie suggested that they invite Parrish’s parents over for dinner, to let them know what was going on now that they were pursuing IUI. She had told her parents about Dr. B immediately following their first appointment with him, but Parrish hadn’t followed suit with his own.
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” Parrish had said. But he agreed now. He was tired of keeping the truth from them, even though he wasn’t necessarily looking forward to hearing their input.
Having agreed with Parrish that she might have an easier time explaining things, Julie, after serving the lasagna, said, “Since we’ve been trying to get pregnant for awhile, as you know, we wanted to tell you that we’ve been pursuing artificial insemination for the last few months now.” She sipped her water. “We’ve found a very good specialist, and though we haven’t had any success yet, we’re confident — he’s confident — that it’ll happen.”
Parrish watched his parents as they listened to this. His mother’s eyebrows rose dramatically. His father seemed genuinely surprised, too, but also possibly a little annoyed that they hadn’t been informed sooner.
“I’m sure you believe that I’m just an old fuddy-duddy who still thinks that VCRs are high tech,” his father said, “but I happen to know a few things about AI, believe it or not.” He paused here, which Parrish knew meant that they were supposed to look impressed at his casual usage of the appropriate acronym, so he obliged. “A younger colleague of mine at the university — a lesbian, as it happens — underwent a variety of fertility procedures, and for some reason she chose me as a confidante, so I’m more familiar with the field than I have any legitimate reason to be.” He speared a cucumber slice from his salad and popped it into his mouth. “I just hope that you’ve done your research, that’s all.”
“We have,” Parrish said.
“All I want is a healthy grandchild,” his mother said. “Science is an amazing thing.”
“Did your colleague get pregnant?” Julie asked.
“She did eventually,” Parrish’s father replied. “Twins. They’re in preschool now, I think.”
“Multiples are a risk,” Julie said. “But we’ve reconciled ourselves to that possibility.”
Parrish couldn’t remember ever having that conversation, but he trusted Julie to be telling the truth. He nodded his head in agreement.
“Catholics believe that infertility is God’s way of directing a couple toward adoption,” Parrish’s father said after taking a bite of lasagna. “But that’s neither here nor there, I suppose.”
“I suppose not, considering we’re not Catholic,” Parrish said, drawing an uneasy look from Julie. He ignored her, though he was a little surprised at how brusque his voice had just sounded. “Besides, I thought you were a Buddhist now.”
His father laughed. “You know that I’m no more of a Buddhist than I am a Catholic. Just because you happened to find a copy of “The Way of Bodhisattva” on our coffee table that one time doesn’t mean that I adhere to the Noble Eightfold Path, you know.”
The discussion faded. Not until Julie mentioned that there was tiramisu for dessert did easy conversation comfortably return. In bed later that night, though, Julie asked him what that Catholic business had been about.
“Who knows,” Parrish said, staring into the darkness, his anger with his father returning. “Maybe it had to do with me going to Mass once with a friend in high school. Dad seemed to think it meant more than it did. Being the arrogant atheist that he’s always been, he liked to give me a hard time.”
“Seems like you both like to give each other a hard time, if you ask me.”
Ignoring her, Parrish said “Good night” and rolled over, but he didn’t shut his eyes. If his father was as unconcerned about his bloodline dying out as he seemed to be, then why had he even bothered passing his stupid name, Parrish Clayton Hortter, on to his son? The sight of an Asian or Hispanic grandchild would bring his father up short, he bet; maybe then he’d regret how flip he’d been over the lasagna. Regardless, Parrish thought, now closing his eyes as he heard Julie’s breathing deepen and slow beside him, no son of theirs would ever get stuck with that awful name, that was for sure.
* * *
“I think you should go,” Julie said.
It was a Thursday, which meant that Clark and the other Stork Watch guys would be meeting up at Beers ‘n’ Steers. As far as Parrish knew, he was the only one who hadn’t shown up at least once so far. He’d avoided it because he’d never felt comfortable in bars — their atmosphere was too much like a locker room’s, where a good time typically involved someone getting a swirlie or being lashed with a wet towel rolled into a rattail. Besides, no matter how screwed up he knew most guys would think it was — no matter how odd even Julie might think it was — given the choice, he preferred to spend his spare time at home with his wife. Plus, he didn’t particularly like to drink. And he certainly didn’t like being around people who drank as much as those who liked bars typically did. Most of all, though, he didn’t want to go because he didn’t like how Clark and his pals, so dapper in their expensive suits and monochrome ties, all looked like former frat boys who were now attorneys and real estate developers. What could he ever have in common with them, anyway? Hell, he still had newsprint on his hands from helping the district managers load their trucks a few hours earlier.
“I have a pretty good time at Sweet Tooth with the girls,” Julie said, now looking up from her book, which for once, he noticed, didn’t concern either infertility or motherhood. “It might do you some good.” The tone of her voice changed with this last statement. She seemed to want him to hear something beyond her words.
“Am I in need of some good being done for me?” he asked, hearing an edge to his voice that he didn’t quite intend.
“You’ve been great through all of this, but I just think that, well, like Carrie says, men and women have different issues when it comes to this stuff.” She closed her book and set it in her lap, folding her hands over it. “I don’t mean for this to sound critical, but sometimes I don’t really get a sense of where you’re at in regard to all this, so I’m thinking maybe you could use some time with guys going through the same thing, that’s all.”
“I’m in the same place you’re at, Julie.”
She reached out and hung her fingers from the front pocket of his pants. “I know you are, hon. I know you are. But, see, for example, I don’t even know what it’s like for you at the Gladstone Clinic. Now with the couple of IUIs we’ve done, you’ve had to do it there something like four or five times now, but you’ve never said even one word to me about it. Is it awful for you? Do you use porn? I don’t even know.”
Parrish pictured Holly’s pubic hair, which had been reduced to a strip no wider than his index finger. Sometimes when he closed his eyes at night he saw her shaving herself with a foamy-headed razor. And then he remembered after his first time, how humiliated he’d been to see that the lab technician extending a hand to receive his warm-bottomed cup was a woman — and not an ugly one, either, which would have made it a little easier. No, she’d been cruelly attractive, a green-eyed redhead with her hair braided in girlish pigtails. “It’s fine. It’s no big deal.”
“And, believe me, I know how this has knocked things all out of whack.” Her hand slid from his pocket to his crotch.
“Stop it, Jules.” The subject made him uncomfortable. Since starting the IUIs, they’d only had sex a couple of times. No longer regularly driven to bed by duty, he hardly knew how to approach her anymore. Now that they were depending entirely on a skillfully manipulated catheter to get Julie pregnant, when he thought of sex he could only think of his pathetic sperm — of failure, not pleasure. It was simply easier not to complicate things; if nothing ever happened, if fertilization never occurred, he’d rather have only Dr. B to blame.
She let go of his pocket. “Humor me just this once.”
“But it’s called Beers ‘n’ Steers, for crying out loud. They’ll probably string me up for not wearing boots and chaps. Besides, I humor you all the time, don’t I?” It was starting to get dark outside now, so he turned on the lamp next to her. When he saw the disappointed look in her eyes, it was too similar to the look he’d seen in them only a few days earlier, when she’d begun spotting and thus knew that their first attempt at IUI had failed. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go. For you.”
On the way, he couldn’t help but wonder about the things she shared at Sweet Tooth with those women she barely knew, the things she obviously didn’t feel comfortable sharing with him.
* * *
When Parrish finally stepped into Beers ‘n’ Steers ninety minutes late, having gotten lost after taking the wrong exit off of Central Expressway and ending up in a part of Dallas entirely unknown to him, he tried his best to look as though he instinctively understood how to conduct himself in a bar like this one, but no one even bothered to glance up. Except for three Randall look-alikes bent over the bar, a woman yellowed in the halo of the jukebox, and a stone-faced couple slouched at a dark table by the wall, the place looked empty.
“Look who’s here!” shouted Clark, stepping forward from the shadows hanging in the back of the room, a longneck raised high. “Lord Parry has finally deemed us worthy of his esteemed presence.”
Though he was relieved to see Clark in jeans and a t-shirt, he was embarrassed to hear that they believed he was avoiding them, so he tried to come up with something that would make it clear that they had him wrong, but all he could think to say was “Better late than never.”
“Oh, I’m just fucking with you,” Clark said, hanging his arm across Parrish’s shoulders and leading him across the sawdusted floor and toward a table beneath a bank of viciously horned skulls.
Everyone at the table rose to shake his hand, their faces tomato red from the neon beer signs blazing on the opposite wall. It was strange to see all of them dressed just like Clark rather than in their usual attire; they looked almost like a completely different group of guys. He, however, looked as he always did. Julie called it (affectionately, he thought) his Sears-catalogue-boy-on-the-first-day-of-school look: khakis, madras short-sleeved shirt, and loafers. As he gripped each of their hands, he wondered which ones were to blame for their infertility woes. Any of them?
“Fresh Shiners all around,” Clark called to the waitress over the Johnny Cash playing from the jukebox. He pulled Parrish down into the chair next to him.
“Usually we play pool in the back,” said Charlie who, with his sweat-damp hair and flushed face, looked as if he’d been drinking twice as fast as the rest of the table. “But it seems the tables have been commandeered for the evening by some drugstore cowboys, so tonight we’re just chilling.” He raised his bottle. “Just chilling and swilling.”
“Don’t mind him,” Clark said. “He’s just pissed off that they still haven’t put Bob Wills on the jukebox like he keeps asking them to do.”
“What self-respecting Texas bar,” Charlie shouted, to the amusement of everyone else at the table, who were all now laughing in that way that indicated that this outburst was a regular occurrence, “doesn’t at least — at the very fucking least — have ‘Faded Love’ on their goddamn jukebox is what I want to know.”
“On top of being pissed off,” Clark said, “he’s loaded, too.”
“For bear I am.” Charlie raised an imaginary rifle and fired it at Clark.
The waitress set a frost-whitened longneck in front of Parrish, which he immediately raised to his mouth so as to appear happy and comfortable to be there. The intensity of the cold liquid shocked his teeth. After only a few swallows, he was certain that he could already feel the alcohol swimming its way straight and deadly into his unaccustomed veins. And it wasn’t a bad feeling at all.
Being the new guy at the table, he got asked questions, not surprisingly, so he had to tell a bit about himself — where he’d grown up, where he lived, what he did for a living. At first he was self-conscious, fearing how they must perceive him, the dull, unsuccessful guy living out in the same dull suburb where he’d lived all his life, but the beer helped. By the time he reached the bottom of the bottle, he nearly felt relaxed. The alcohol had worked through the muscles of his neck and shoulders, loosening them so much that he hadn’t realized how tight they’d been. And already his lips and tongue felt slightly tingly and rubbery, almost as if he were having the same sort of allergic reaction that he got when he ate strawberries.
“Sounds like you should run for mayor,” said Trent. “I didn’t know it was even possible to live in Ivy that long. And I should know because I grew up there, too.”
Parrish would have taken offense at this except that he remembered that Trent’s wife had revealed at their last meeting that she’d miscarried three times in four years.
“Cut taxes, Mr. Mayor!” Charlie cried.
Says the husband of a tax attorney,” laughed Clark. “Somehow that doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Makes no nevermind,” Charlie mumbled, mopping his face with his sleeve. “I’ve still got to pay them.”
“I used to have a paper route when I was kid,” said Mitch, seeming just now to have registered where Parrish had said he worked. A fog of cigar smoke seeped from his mouth.
“I did, too,” Parrish said. “I just never thought I’d make it my career.”
He could tell by their faces that they didn’t know how they were supposed to take this — was this guy confessing some uncomfortable secret? But when he grasped the handlebars of an imaginary bike and started throwing imaginary papers, they laughed and nodded.
With the arrival of the next round, everyone started comparing stories about their REs. Clark and Trent went to a Dr. Malla, who apparently had a problem with body odor. Mitch and Graham went to a Dr. Seib, who they agreed was almost too hot to take seriously.
“When she starts spouting all those medical terms,” Graham said, “I just want to say, ‘Look, I know for a fact that I could get you pregnant, so get your ass on over here.’ You know what I’m saying?”
Only Charlie went to Dr. B. He and his wife had just found out that day that their first round of IVF had failed.
“All that dough,” Charlie said, pushing down an imaginary handle. “Down the crapper. Which is where I might as well have jerked off into, by the way.”
Parrish expressed his sympathy, but then in an effort to lighten the darkening mood, he stuck his arms out stiffly in front of him and droned, “But I am king of all babymakers. Do not worry. I will make you pregnant. No big deal.”
Charlie slapped the table, nearly spilling his beer. “Oh, man, that’s so dead on!” He looked around at the rest of the guys, his eyes shining. “That’s exactly how that guy fucking talks, I swear!”
Parrish struggled not to smile too broadly, delighted at the reaction, but he also felt a brief nudge of anguish, wishing that he’d given Beers ‘n’ Steers a chance long before.
When the third round appeared, Parrish guzzled what remained of his second bottle so that the waitress could take his empty along with the others. After he downed half of the fresh bottle, luxuriating in the numbness spreading its web a little further and deeper through his limbs, he decided he’d just take a cab home. And if Julie complained about it in the morning, he’d just remind her that he hadn’t wanted to come in the first place.
“Who here has to give the injections?” Clark asked.
Several of the guys rolled their eyes and grunted.
“Lupron with Gonal-F?”
“Lupron with Gonal-F, baby!” Mitch raised his hand for a high five.
“Please, no drug talk,” Charlie shouted, waving his hands. “Please. At least no brand names. I don’t want to hear them.” He leaned closer to Parrish and in a quieter voice said, “I’m a drug rep for Pfizer. And I guess you could say I’m not exactly in love with my job.”
“You and me both,” Parrish said, thoroughly enjoying how the camaraderie pulsing in waves around the table had come to include him so quickly.
“My wife fainted when she tried to do it herself,” Graham said. “Fell out of the chair and busted her head wide open.”
“My wife’s gut swelled up like nobody’s business,” Mitch said.
Despite knowing that IVF was probably going to be his and Julie’s inevitable future, his attention fogged over as the discussion moved on to follicle stimulation and egg retrieval. He thought about how nice it was just sitting there, boozy, temporarily disconnected from life’s responsibilities, soaking up the smoke and noise. Except he now realized that he was in fairly desperate need of emptying his bladder. Looking about, he tried to determine where the restrooms might be, but there was nothing to see nearby other than reproductions of Wanted posters for Old West outlaws and rusted antique signs for Pearl and Lone Star beer.
When he asked where it was, Charlie said, “I’ve got to piss, too. Follow me.”
Taking his newly acquired fourth bottle of Shiner with him, Parrish unsteadily followed Charlie past the pool tables and down a hallway hung heavy with lariats, rifles, and spurs. This, he said to himself, enjoying the muddiness of his senses as he concentrated on not grazing the wall or weaving too conspicuously, this is what it’s all about: drinking beer in a honky-tonk with nothing but Johnny Cash playing on the juke box. He did wish, though, that he was wearing a pair of boots like Charlie’s, which looked so lived-in and used, instead of his stupid cordovan Weejuns.
Up ahead of Charlie, who was whistling enthusiastically along to “Ring of Fire,” Parrish saw the doors to the restrooms: one was marked Steers, the other Heifers.
Charlie stopped and turned toward him. “I have to say, I still don’t like having to take a piss in a place where they refer to us as steers.”
“Why’s that?” Parrish asked, expecting a joke.
“Steers are bulls that’ve been castrated. It should be Bulls, not Steers.” He shook his head with a disgusted look on his face. “I understand how the dumb Yankees who probably own this place want to keep their cute little motif going, but at least they could do us the courtesy of getting this right.” He started to push through the door, but then he stopped. “Needless to say, if it was up to me we’d meet up somewhere else, but Clark’s the boss. At least until he finally gets himself a kid.”
Now he pushed through the door, and Parrish followed him, stepping from smoky darkness into bright fluorescent light. There were two stalls to the left — one out of order, the other occupied by someone wearing silver-tipped black boots — and on the right, instead of urinals there was an enormous tub, a thigh-high trough running the length of the wall. Immediately he wanted to turn and leave, to push back through the door with an exaggerated look on his face that would make it clear to anyone looking at him that he hadn’t been looking for the restroom at all, that he’d walked through the wrong door entirely, but he couldn’t, not with Charlie, who was still cheerfully whistling, already stepping between the two guys standing at it—one a shrunken old man in a brown Western-cut suit, and the other a hulking cowboy in stiff, blue-black Wranglers, a dizzyingly bright red- and turquoise-striped shirt, and a pristine, cream-colored Stetson that seemed to absorb all of the room’s light.
With his pulse thrashing fitfully, Parrish stepped to the other side of the cowboy. After setting his beer between his feet, his eyes wobbling slightly at the sudden dropping and rising of his head, he unzipped his khakis. It was as he was guiding his tentative penis out into the chilly air that, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the cowboy’s, which hung heavy and thick over his fist like nothing Parrish had never seen before, like nothing he’d ever even imagined before. It looked artificial, manufactured, like the insanely over-muscled arm of a bodybuilder, except that it was a penis. To keep himself from staring enviously at life’s injustice standing right beside him in the guise of an enormous, pissing cowboy, he closed his eyes and ordered himself to relax. Willing himself to forget about how if the cowboy happened to look over that he’d find a man beside him who was boy-sized from his collar all the way down to his size-six shoes, he prayed that the appropriate muscles would cooperate, allowing his bladder to empty itself, and him to leave as quickly as possible. Despite the rank smell, he filled his lungs to their capacity, and then exhaled slowly through his nose, which felt oddly numb as the air rushed from it, as if it were no longer quite a part of his face. Swaying slightly, he tried to imagine he was safe in the privacy of his own bathroom, so nicely scented by Julie’s bowls of seashell-shaped soaps and potpourri. The only sounds to be heard were the splash of piss, the occasional grunts and boot scuffing of the guy in the stall, and Charlie’s whistling, which continued unabated despite the muffling effect of the restroom door on Johnny Cash’s sonorous voice.
To Parrish’s surprise, within just a few seconds, his queasy insides calmed, his taut muscles sagged, and he felt himself let loose with a stream so steady and strong that he nearly smiled when he opened his eyes to watch what remained of his Shiners flowing out in a clear arc and splashing against the rusted bottom of the tub.
“Enough already, you fucking canary.”
Even though Parrish immediately knew that he wasn’t the one the cowboy was talking to, that it was Charlie, his stream vanished without even a dribble, shut off like a light switch by the alarm that sparked through him.
Charlie stopped whistling long enough to say, “Hey, it’s a free country, pal,” and then resumed whistling just as loudly as before.
Parrish zipped up and turned away from the trough, wishing that Charlie had just done the easy thing and stopped. He wanted to leave, but he couldn’t, at least not until it was clear that nothing more was going to happen. One after another, the old man, Charlie, and then the cowboy finished up right after him. The old man, adjusting himself as he walked, pushed through the door without looking in anyone else’s direction. For a moment, Johnny Cash’s voice swelled, but then the door shut again. Moving past Parrish without a glance, Charlie walked to the sink and began washing his hands, still whistling. Parrish didn’t like the look on his face; it was flat-eyed, waxen, shiny. In the bathroom’s harsh light, he looked even more drunk than he had in the bar’s red neon.
The cowboy stepped up behind Charlie. “You don’t seem to have heard me. I said, ‘Enough already.’”
“Listen, my friend,” Charlie said into the mirror, “since I was in no mood tonight to hear any of that Brooks and Dunn horseshit that you probably like, I punched ten dollars’ worth of the Man in Black into that shitty-ass jukebox, and by God, I’ll whistle along if I damn well please.”
Just then “Ring of Fire” faded away. The only sound now was the water splashing in the sink. Parrish desperately hoped that that had been the last of Charlie’s songs, but then there was Johnny Cash’s deep voice again, singing, “Well, my daddy left home when I was three,” and with this, instead of whistling, Charlie began to sing along: “and he didn’t leave much for ma and me—”
In one motion, the cowboy grabbed Charlie by the back of the collar and swung him around. “I told you to shut the fuck up already!”
Charlie, his face twisting fiercely, pushed back hard against the cowboy, who now had hold of his shirt. “Get off me, you fucking cowboy wannabe!”
In shock at Charlie’s fearlessness, Parrish moved closer, unsure what to do. In what seemed like time slowed down by his drunkenness, he watched the cowboy cocking his fist to throw a punch. Later, he would wonder if he would have done anything had it not been for the beer, but now, just as he heard Johnny Cash’s voice bloom once again (someone was coming in), he reached for the threatening arm, felt its strength straining against his fingers, saw the man’s Stetsoned head turn toward him, a look of confusion blurring the rage on his face . . . and then, without seeing anything else but light followed by streaking colors, Parrish felt his left eye explode, followed by the back of his head cracking against . . .
When he opened his eyes, he saw Charlie and the cowboy above him, wrestling . . . dancing . . . then suddenly there were several more people around, yanking and tugging, yelling . . . cussing . . .
When he opened his eyes again, he sat up despite the throbbing pain, and he watched two men leading the cowboy out, their arms laced across his back. His hat hung from one of his hands. Above his clenched, red face, the bald dome of his head glowed as whitely in the light as his hat had. He was bleeding slightly from his mouth, and there were thin, dark smears on the turquoise stripes of his shirt.
Charlie was beside him now, laughing uneasily, helping him to his feet. “Holy shit, Parry. What the fuck was that about?”
Parrish delicately touched the back of his head. A raw lump was rising under the skin. “I don’t know, man.”
In the mirror, Parrish pressed his fingers against the places where his face throbbed; a purpling bulge was already distending from his left eyelid to the middle of his cheek. His eye seemed to be disappearing as he watched. Tomorrow he knew it would look awful and hurt like hell, but right now he kind of liked the look of it, he had to admit. He’d never had a black eye before, and though he’d lived for years and years in constant fear of being challenged to one, he had never been in any kind of a fight.
“Here you go,” Charlie said, handing him his Shiner, which Parrish now remembered he’d set down between his feet upon stepping up to the trough. “Where do those clowns get fucking shirts like that, anyway? He needed to get his ass kicked for that alone.”
“Were you the one who bloodied him?”
“Not as much as I would have liked, but yeah. It wasn’t like I could stand around doing nothing after he laid you out like that, right?”
A sense of gratitude came over Parrish like he’d almost never known before. It threatened to overwhelm him. He splashed cold water on his face.
When they got back to the table, everyone rose up in shock at the sight of him.
“What the hell?” Clark shouted.
Once they were seated, Charlie recounted what had happened. Even though only a few minutes had passed, Parrish felt that this was going to become one of those stories passed on by everyone at the table, possibly for years to come.
“You should have seen this guy,” Charlie said, pulling Parrish toward him. “He flew at that crazy motherfucker like nobody’s business.” Sweating and smiling, he bent his head over the fresh Shiner handed to him. “Saved my stupid ass from a haymaker.”
Clark raised his bottle, shaking his head in awe. “Here’s to Parry, then.”
“Here’s to Parry,” everyone echoed.
Parrish extended his beer to allow everyone to click their bottles against his. Then everyone drank, including Parrish, who felt . . . expansive, as if he could hug every last one of the men at the table. When a new bottle was brought to him, he stood, which made the lump on his head throb worse. To keep from wobbling, he pressed his thighs against the table. Charlie, Clark, Trent, Graham, and Mitch all looked up at him. He had their full attention. Johnny Cash was still singing — he was telling someone not to take his guns to town. A warmness like love flooded through his body, even through his face, where he could feel his cheek tightening, ballooning toward his eyebrow to seal off his sight.
“Here’s to success for all of us,” he said solemnly.
Everyone raised their bottles toward his. “Here’s to success.”
“And here’s to our wives,” Parrish said.
“Here’s to our wives,” the men echoed quietly, their upturned faces attentive and serious.
“And here’s to our future children,” Parrish said quietly, in almost a whisper. The joyful warmness in him intensified, so much so that he could feel sweat trickling down his spine, wetting his shirt. Big, slow waves throbbed out from him with every heartbeat, flowing out over everyone. He downed as much of his bottle as he could manage in one long, voracious gulp. Beer dribbled down his chin, down his neck, but he didn’t bother to wipe it away. When he lowered the bottle to the table, he looked down at his friends looking up at him, quiet. They knew he was ready. They knew what he was going to do. They knew he was going to take a cab home and wake Julie up and get her pregnant with the biggest, roly-poly baby anyone had ever seen on the face of this earth.
The doctors could go fuck themselves. He was loaded for bear, by God.
