Word Count: 2444

His mother’s house—one of those tall, narrow city townhouses sandwiched between two others on a street lined with more like them—never felt like home.

It was comfortable, warm, and roomy enough, as good a place as any to visit after a long morning of classes or an equally busy afternoon at work, where he could relax and rest his weary body and let himself be fed instead of doing the feeding, removed for a time from the turmoil of an ailing city. But it wasn’t like his father’s house, or the Gallos’ house, or either of the apartments he’d shared with Chris, and he thought—when he let himself think it, when he could bear the sadness and that lingering sense of regret—that it was because he’d never lived with his mother without his father there, too.

They had been divorced for eight years, his father had been dead and gone for almost six months, but to Paris they had always been, and likely always would be, the root of his family—however tarnished and broken that ideal had become.

“How about Dawn?” a man who wasn’t his father asked—a man who wouldn’t replace him and who wasn’t trying to, but Cal was different enough from his father to make Paris feel defensive even when he knew he shouldn’t, because Cal was there and his father wasn’t, and his mother was having Cal’s baby.

She was too big. Paris had never seen her so big and he couldn’t say he liked it. He liked it even less than the fact that she was having a baby in the first place, because all his life she had been young and beautiful and perfect in spite of her numerous imperfections, and now she was young still, but tired and overlarge and waddling around like some lumbering beast who’d had more than its fill, awkward and engorged and unsteady when she should be confident, spirited, and graceful. The baby he could ignore for now because he could not yet see it, or heart it or smell it or feel it, could only think of it as a parasite come to suck the life out of a mother who used to be lively, leaving her tired and unfamiliar to him in this unfamiliar place.

“I’m not sure I like it,” she said.

She sat on the couch, sipping at a glass of lemonade and fanning herself with a Sports Illustrated, because even though fall was on its way and the air conditioning was still on, she felt hot and uncomfortable. Paris felt uncomfortable, too, not because of the weather but because he couldn’t look at her without seeing her swollen stomach on display. Sometimes when he focused on it she didn’t feel like his mother anymore, and even though he’d spent so many years pushing her away he wasn’t sure if he was ready to give her up to someone else. She was all he had left of his childhood, of a family he didn’t want to lose.

“Anne?” Call tried again.

“I don’t want to give her my middle name.”

“I don’t see why she has to have a middle name at all,” Paris mumbled, sitting close to his mother on the other side of the loveseat, but not close enough to touch.

He had his legs curled beneath him and his laptop open on his thighs, clicking buttons and sliding his fingers over the track-pad as needed, focused half on the conversation and half on his research for a homework assignment. His mother was turned part-way to the side, half facing him with her back supported by the corner of the loveseat and a pillow she’d shoved behind her for a little extra comfort, her feet perched on the edge of the coffee table—careless and common and entirely normal in a house that looked too pristine. Once or twice her eyes flicked over to him, settling on his left hand when she could see it around the computer screen, and the ring that rested upon his finger.

“We’re not engaged,” he’d said the first time she’d seen it, when her brows had risen too high over eyes that glinted with too much curiosity that looked almost like pride and hope.

“Okay,” she’d agreed.

“We’re not,” Paris had felt the need to say again, as if the second time made it true twice over, when really he was saying it more for his own benefit than for hers.

“Okay,” she’d said.

“It’s just a promise ring.”

“Paris,” she’d said, the way she always did when she wanted his attention and couldn’t get it when she called him “Baby,” and then he knew she was serious. “It’s okay.”

He thought she should have said something else. She should have told him how stupid he was for rushing into things. She should have told him to slow down, to take his time, to enjoy his youth the way she hadn’t. He’d imagined more resistance from her, assumed she would grow glum and disappointed and frown when she saw it, warn him against it and use her own experiences to her advantage. Instead she’d smiled and took his hand to look at the ring, kissed his cheek and brushed her fingers through his hair as she said, “As long as you’re happy.”

And Paris didn’t know if he was really, truly happy, because he wasn’t sure if he ever had been before, but he knew this was the closest he’d ever been to finding it.

“You have a middle name,” his mother pointed out at present, bringing his attention back to the current conversation. “I have a middle name. Cal has a middle name.”

“Cal has a middle initial,” Paris replied.

“Looks better on the business card,” Cal said. “Better than Archibald.”

Paris made a face that expressed his agreement.

“Doesn’t mean she has to have one,” he said in response, preferring “she” over “Lilah” or “the baby” because it was a little less present, a little less personal. “Doesn’t mean it has to mean anything either.”

“Yours does,” his mother countered.

Paris snorted and tapped a few more keys. “Mine comes from the Marquis de Sade,” he said. “Probably dad’s idea of a sick joke.”

“He said it meant ‘gift.’”

A flash of memory—Paris and his mother at the coffee table in the living-room of his old house looking through boxes of pictures, countless memories captured on glossy film, and a photo buried with a ring in a grave, his father’s face smooth, and young, and relaxed as baby Paris slept on his lap at the beach so many years ago.

“Oh,” Paris said.

“Doesn’t it?” his mother asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “It does,” and then as if to recover his bearings, “Doesn’t explain why you picked ‘Paris,’ though.”

“Your father loved Paris,” she explained easily. “He spent the better part of five years there before we met. I loved it, too.”

“You’ve never even been to Paris,” he accused.

“Of course, I have,” his mother said. “Your father took me after we were married, that October before you were born. He used the last of his savings for the down payment on the house and a week-long honeymoon instead of an engagement ring.”

Paris’s eyes lifted from the computer screen to stare across at his mother, bewildered. “You never told me that before,” he said quietly, nearly breathless.

He saw the necklace she always wore, the thin silver chain that supported her wedding band and the sapphire ring his father had gotten her in the place of an engagement diamond five years after the fact, when Paris was walking and talking and stealing his cousin’s dresses and France probably seemed like a long-forgotten dream.

He couldn’t imagine his father being romantic enough to honeymoon in Paris of all places, whether he’d been there before or not. To Paris, Henri LeFay had always seemed decidedly unromantic, traditional enough to marry the girl he’d knocked up and practical enough to buy a house to raise his family in, but too stiff and emotionally distant to bother with things like romance. A trip to the beach at some generic hotel seemed more his style, maybe a few nights at some rustic mountain cabin if he felt like stretching his horizons a bit.

But Paris? Lights and music and La Vie en Rose? The Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, boat rides on the River Seine or dinners at fine restaurants?

He could barely imagine his mother there, much less his father.

“You never seem interested in hearing about it,” his mother said, encouraging him back into the moment.

“I never saw any pictures,” Paris accused, as if he hoped to catch her in a lie.

And he didn’t know what he wanted it to be a lie, except that a honeymoon in Paris and the subsequent naming of their child after the city made it seem as if his parents had actually been in love when they’d married, and Paris had gone through his whole life thinking they’d loved each other well enough at one point, but never had he allowed himself to think that the fondness between them had ever been deep enough to be in love.

Paris knew enough about love now to know that there was a difference between the two, between love and in love. He’d never thought of his parents in relation to the latter, imagined his mother had been some dumb eighteen-year-old girl with delusions of a family and a future she wasn’t ready for, and his father had been the infatuated twenty-eight-year-old too old for his years and blindly searching for a way to hold onto his slipping youth for just a little longer.

The truth was he had no idea how they’d met, or what had transpired between them from that moment until the day they were married. He only knew that his mother was pregnant by June of ’93, married by September of that same year, and a mother the following February. That was all it had ever been to him. That was all he’d ever been told, and he liked it that way, because it hurt less to assume there’d never been romance, to think there’d only been so much love on the line, than to think it had actually been more than that when he considered what had happened later.

And that scared him, because if his parents could have been in love yet grew to hurt one another to the point where his mother needed to break free and his father let himself waste away, what did that mean for Paris and Chris?

“The picture your father kept on his nightstand,” his mother said, “was taken in the Tuileries Garden.”

Paris remembered the picture, his father looking a little less haggard, his mother a little less pregnant than she was now.

“I have more in an album upstairs,” she continued, moving as if she meant to rise and get it, placing her drink and the magazine onto the coffee table as she swung her feet off of it. “I took them with me when I left. If you want to see—”

“No,” Paris said quickly. He shifted on the couch, readjusted his computer, locked his eyes on the screen so he wouldn’t have to look at his mother. “No, I don’t need to see them.”

He didn’t want to see how happy his father might have been, how in love they might have been together. He didn’t want to see it and recognize it and be forced to redefine his parents’ relationship with one another, or compare himself and Chris to it any more than he already had. He wanted what he and Chris had to be different, needed it to be different, because if it wasn’t…

If it wasn’t, what business did they have trying to make something out of it when it could so easily break apart at the seams?

“Why don’t I make some tea?” Cal offered, seeming to sense a need for his departure and wisely rising from his chair to make his way into the kitchen, leaving Paris alone with his mother.

He kept his eyes averted but felt the couch cushions shift as his mother inched closer. Her hand came on top of his to stop him from nervously twisting the promise ring around his finger before he even realized he was doing it.

“Baby,” she said, in that soft voice she used when she was trying to offer comfort. “Baby, you’re not me, and Chris isn’t your father. You know that.”

“Do I?” he wondered.

He never wanted to think about the similarities. Most days there weren’t any, and he could go on thinking that what he had with Chris was wholly different. He wasn’t as foolish as he liked to think his mother had been, and Chris was too… too focused, too sure of himself and his place in the world to be anything like Henri LeFay.

But there were some days when it wasn’t so easy to look passed his childhood, and he wondered if they were just fooling themselves the way he’d always thought his parents had. If they couldn’t predict the future, how were they supposed to know if any of it would actually last? Were they even supposed to?

“You shouldn’t live your life based on ‘what might be’s and ‘what could have been’s,” his mother said, and when Paris wondered when she’d gained the power to read minds he realized he must have been wearing his thoughts on his face. “The important thing is what you have now. You know that, don’t you?”

She touched his ring, adjusted it so it sat correctly on his finger, and Paris looked down at it when she twined their fingers together.

“We’re not engaged,” he said, just as he had earlier in the week when he first started wearing the ring.

Before, he’d been passionate in his refusal, his voice too clear and too strong to allow for any arguments—and Momma Gallo had most certainly wanted to argue. Now he sounded toneless and tired. It was an effort to keep denying it, to remind himself of all of the reasons why he would have answered “no” if Chris had asked, weighed down by his father’s sadness and the memories that had only grown since he’d died.

“Do you want to be?” his mother asked—quietly, cautiously.

Paris hesitated, swallowed deeply, could not see beyond his father’s face.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He was terrified that the real answer might be “yes.”