"Okay," she said.
Just that. Okay. No further negotiation, no follow-up conditions, which told me that she'd needed someone to just say it plainly and mean it, and that not many people had done that for her recently.
I filed that away.
“I’ll come with the truck two weeks from Saturday to move you out to Briar Hill,” I said. “Probably have my cousin in tow. He’ll want to meet you.”
She laughed despite herself, short and helpless. "This is insane."
"Yeah."
"I just want to be clear that I'm aware it's insane."
"I know."
"Okay." She slid off the tailgate and landed lightly and straightened up and looked at me with those dark eyes in the June sun and she was so pretty it was genuinely inconvenient. "Two weeks from Saturday."
She picked up her bag. Then stopped, the way she kept stopping, like she kept thinking of one more thing. She turned back with a slightly different expression—less certain than usual, working something out in real time.
"Hey," she said. "This is going to sound weird."
"Weirder than the rest of today?"
"Maybe." She shifted her bag on her shoulder. "My parents—my mom especially—she's going to ask questions when I tell her I'm moving to a ranch an hour away with a man I just met. A lot of questions. In Spanish, probably, which means she's serious." A beat. "I was thinking I'd just tell her we're dating. That it started fast, that you swept me off my feet, whatever. Just—something that makes sense to a Catholic mother."
I looked at her.
She looked back, chin slightly up, the way she had all day when she was saying something she'd decided on and wasn't going to apologize for.
"It would make things easier," she said. "For me. You don't have to do anything differently. I just…I'd rather she think we're a normal couple moving fast than know the actual situation."
"What's the actual situation?"
"That I propositioned a stranger in a fertility clinic and negotiated a baby contract on a tailgate." She paused. "She'd light every candle in San Antonio."
I thought about that.
"She going to want to meet me?" I asked.
"Probably within forty-eight hours of me telling her." She said it with the flat certainty of someone who knew their mother extremely well.
"And your dad?"
"Him too." She said that with the same certainty. "He'll pretend it's casual. It won't be."
I nodded slowly. This was not what I'd been expecting when I got out of bed this morning and drove south to a fertility clinic in a surgical mask. But then none of today had been what I'd expected.
"Okay," I said.
She blinked. "Okay?"
"We're dating." I held her gaze. "Started fast. I swept you off your feet." I said the last part without inflection.
Something moved across her face. "You don't have to say it like that."
"Like what?"
"Like it's a livestock report."
