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“She is not your abuser, she’s your grandmother.”
“She’s both,” Nicky said.
“Stay out of this, young man,” Dad said.
“I want to hear what Nicky has to say,” I said.
“He’s not your fiancé, so he doesn’t have a say in family arguments.” My father sounded so sure of himself. I was happy to tell him he was wrong.
“I told you that Nicky lives with me, with us, right?”
“You did, but that doesn’t make him family.”
“He is family to me, Dad.”
“He’s not going to be your husband, and he’s not your fiancé. How can he be family?”
“I’m poly, Dad, which means here in the United States I can’t legally marry everyone that I love. Hell, I still have to pick just one like it’s some romance novel and fucking soul mates.”
Judith said, “Language.”
I stared at her as I said, “Motherfucking son of a bitch, what’s wrong with my language, Judith?”
“Anita,” Dad said, “there’s no call for saying things like that.”
“The hell there isn’t. Do you guys even listen to yourselves, really listen to yourselves? It’s like as long as we’re polite to each other it’ll be okay. Nothing is wrong so long as we don’t cuss, and we say please and thank you, and don’t do anything that looks bad.”
They looked at each other, and then Judith reached over and laid her hand on his on the seat. “She may have a point, Fredrick.”
“There’s still no reason to curse,” he said.
“The hell there isn’t,” I said.
“Anita,” he said in that voice that had made me behave when I was a teenager.
“What the fuck, Dad?”
He glared at me. I smiled back because it was all so ridiculous that I couldn’t be angry about the language issue, not when there were other, better things to fight about.
Judith said, “Your father is having a little trouble understanding the whole poly situation. I did look it up online, but it seems so dependent on each couple that I’m not sure I really understand it either.”
“Polyis just a fancy word for cheating,” Dad said.
“No,” I said, “it’s the opposite of cheating.”
“What does that even mean, Anita?”
“It means that if I wanted to sleep with someone new, our poly group would have to all agree to it. Either everyone is happy with an addition, or you don’t add them to your group,” I said.
Nicky added, “Unless someone has a long-standing relationship from before the poly group formed, and then it’s more complicated.”
I nodded. “True, some people have one relationship outside the group that can be continued even if the majority don’t like the person, as long as it doesn’t negatively impact the rest of the group.”
“Do you have one of those in your…poly group?” Judith asked.
I nodded. “We do, but when you’re dating vampires they can have a lot of very old relationships that you have to take into account.”
My dad’s face tightened, and the anger was just back. I remembered him as more controlled than this, or less easily angered, but maybe I just hadn’t seen him clearly when I was younger? How do we ever see our parents as real people and not just parents? It was like the reverse of them seeing us as children forever.
