UNCLE ROGER'S BIGGEST SECRET

Zed's hand found mine under the table before the waiter even brought the menus, and I let myself enjoy it, the small warm weight of it, the way his thumb moved back and forth over my knuckles like he was checking I was still there. "You're doing the thing," he said. "What thing." "The thing where you're somewhere else." He tipped his head, studying me with that easy half smile he'd had since the day I met him, sophomore year, in a lecture hall that smelled like burnt coffee and ambition. "You've got a test?" "I always have a test." "Genie." "I'm here." I squeezed his hand to prove it. "I'm just tired. Long shift." That part was true, at least. I'd spent five hours at the café steaming milk for people who couldn't be bothered to look up from their phones to say thank you, and my feet still ached from it, a dull throb that climbed up through my calves every time I shifted in the booth. Zed had picked this place because it was my favorite, a little Italian spot two blocks from campus with red checkered tablecloths and candles stuck in old wine bottles, wax dripped down the glass in layers like something growing. He'd picked it because he was sweet like that, because six months in he still noticed the small things, still tried. I loved that about him. I told myself that a lot, actually, in the quiet moments when I caught myself wondering why loving him sometimes felt like homework I was diligent about rather than something I fell into. Zed Hastings was the kind of boyfriend other girls' mothers pointed to as an example. Steady. Kind. Ambitious in the unthreatening way that made you trust he'd have a good job and remember your birthday and never once make you cry from cruelty, only maybe from boredom, on the nights when his stories about his internship ran fifteen minutes longer than they needed to. "So my aunt's doing this whole thing on Sunday," he said, once the waiter had come and gone with our order. "Family dinner. Nora's making the lasagna that takes her, like, two days." "Sunday?" I did the math against my schedule, my paper due Monday, the closing shift I'd already agreed to cover for Mia. "I don't know if I can." "Come on. My mom keeps asking about you. She thinks I made you up." "I'm real," I said. "I have a receipt from Trader Joe's to prove it." "Genie." I laughed, and it came easier than I expected, some of the tiredness sliding off me at the sound of it, at the way he was looking at me like I was the punchline of a joke he liked. "Fine. I'll come. But if your aunt asks me one more time when we're getting married I might actually walk into traffic." "She means well." "She means well the way a golden retriever means well when it knocks you into the pool." He laughed at that, a real laugh, head back, and for a second I remembered exactly why I'd said yes to him in the first place. There was an ease to Zed, a lack of performance, that I hadn't found much of in the guys I'd dated before him. He didn't play games. He didn't make me guess. If he liked something, he said so. If he wanted to see me, he texted, plainly, "I want to see you", no bit-part cool-guy delay built into his phone habits. It should have been the easiest thing in the world to love him the way he deserved. "Who's going to be there?" I asked. "Besides your mom." "The usual. My sister, if she can drag herself out of her room. My grandma, probably, she loves an excuse to interrogate you about your major again." "Communications is a real major, Grandma Hastings." "Tell her that, not me." He stole a piece of bread off my plate without asking, the way he always did, and I let him, the way I always did. "Oh, and my uncle's coming. Roger. I don't think you've met him yet." "The one with the company?" "Hastings and Cole, yeah. He's my mom's little brother, technically, but don't ever call him little to his face." Zed smiled around a mouthful of bread. "He's kind of intense. Doesn't talk much unless he's got something to say. But he's cool. I've been interning under him this semester, actually, I don't think I told you that part." "You told me you got an internship. I didn't clock it was with your uncle's company." "Yeah, it's not nepotism, I swear, I applied like everyone else." He said it with a little defensive laugh, like he'd had to say it before, to other people, maybe to himself. "He didn't even want to hire me at first. Said he didn't want it to look like anything." "But he did hire you." "I'm good at my job," Zed said, mock offended, and I smiled and let it drop, because it wasn't important, not then, just a name in a story about a Sunday dinner I was already dreading a little, the kind of family gathering where I'd spend three hours smiling at people whose names I'd have to relearn every time, nodding along to stories about relatives I'd never meet, feeling the particular loneliness of being the girlfriend in a room full of blood. I didn't think about Roger Crawford again until Friday, when Zed sent me a photo of a construction site with the caption "this is basically my whole life now" and I zoomed in without meaning to, out of idle curiosity, at the man standing a little apart from the crew in the background, arms crossed, hard hat pushed back on his head, looking at something out of frame with an expression I couldn't read even at that distance and that resolution. Something about the way he held himself. Still, in a way that didn't look passive. Like stillness was a decision he was making on purpose. I sat there staring at a stranger's photo longer than made any sense, my thumb hovering over the screen, and told myself to close the app. I didn't close the app. I zoomed in further, until the image blurred, until there was nothing left to see except the shape of a man I hadn't met, and something in my chest pulled tight and low in a way I had absolutely no name for and no business feeling about a picture of my boyfriend's uncle at a job site. I put the phone face down on my nightstand like that would undo it. It didn't undo it. I texted Mia that night, lying on my bed with my laptop balanced on my stomach, a half-finished essay glowing accusingly at me from the screen. "meeting the fam sunday. pray for me" She wrote back almost instantly, because Mia was constitutionally incapable of leaving a phone unattended for longer than four minutes. "ur basically already engaged babe. what are they gonna do, say no" "i just don't want to say something wrong. u know how i get" "u get charming. thats ur problem. u charm everyone and then panic that they liked u" I rolled my eyes at my own phone, because she wasn't wrong, exactly, even if I'd never have admitted it to her directly. There was a specific anxiety that lived in me around meeting people who mattered to someone I cared about, a fear that had less to do with being disliked and more to do with being seen, really seen, the way family sees you, past the performance of a first date and into the accumulated small tells of who you actually were. Zed's family would be looking for reasons I was good enough for him. I wanted, badly, embarrassingly, to give them every reason and none of the ones that were true. "it'll be fine," I told myself as much as her. "it's just dinner." I finished the essay around one in the morning, badly, the last paragraph held together with academic duct tape and the vague hope that my professor wouldn't read too closely. I turned off my lamp and lay in the dark listening to Mia's music thump faintly through the wall, some pop song with a beat that lived in my chest more than my ears, and I thought about Zed's hand on mine at dinner, steady, warm, familiar as breathing. I thought, I'm happy. I believed it, lying there in the dark. I closed my eyes and the last thing that surfaced, uninvited, right before sleep took me, was not Zed's face. It was a stranger in a hard hat, standing a little apart from everyone else, looking at something out of frame. Sunday came the way Sundays do, slower than you want and faster than you're ready for. I stood in front of my closet for twenty minutes trying to find an outfit that said "I am a serious, wholesome young woman worthy of your son" without looking like I'd tried too hard to say it, and landed on a green sweater Zed had once told me made my eyes look like something out of a poem, which was a stupid, sentimental reason to pick an outfit and exactly the reason I did. "You look nice," he said when he picked me up, leaning across to kiss my cheek before I'd even gotten the seatbelt on. "Nervous?" "A little." "Don't be. They're going to love you. I love you, so." He said it easily, like it wasn't a big deal, though it still did something warm and complicated in my chest every time, six months in and the words hadn't gone flat yet. "Just be yourself." "That's what scares me." He laughed and pulled out of the parking lot, and I watched the campus slide by out the window, familiar buildings going soft and gold in the late afternoon light, and I told myself, again, that it would be fine. That it was just dinner. That I had no reason at all to feel the way I felt, a low nervous hum under my sternum that I told myself was ordinary. Meet-the-family nerves. Nothing more than that. Zed's phone buzzed against the console. He glanced at it at the next stoplight, and something crossed his face, quick, almost nothing. "Everything okay?" I asked. "Yeah. Just my mom." He set the phone down without showing me the screen. "Roger's coming after all. Wasn't sure he would." The hum under my sternum climbed a degree higher, and I didn't examine why.