A gun.
This is not a duel—I don’t have a gun—and Melanda was right—A GIRL IS A GUN—and if anyone should have a weapon it’s me. She stole my child.
“Ah,” she says, as she makes eye contact with me in the mirror. “So you don’t miss me.”
“Love, put down the gun.”
“Just say it. I know you. I feel you not wanting me. You don’t love me. You’re not excited to see me.”
“You have a fucking gun on me.”
“Oh please. That doesn’t scare you. Don’t forget, Joe. I know you.”
She doesn’t know me. She knows things about my past and I am not that man anymore and I slowly turn around and face the woman who made me a father. “Love, it’s a two-way street. Don’t forget that I know you too.”
She grunts. “Like hell you do.”
“Love, you don’t want me back. You can’t do what you did to me and then tell me that you ‘love’ me with a bed of fucking rose petals.”
She grunts. “You’re such a snob. You really are, Joe.”
“See that. There it is. All of this… I don’t know what it is, but it sure as hell isn’t a grand gesture and you can’t point a fucking gun at me and tell me that you want me back.”
“I’m just responding to you,” she says. “You started it. You don’t want me.”
“You paid me to go away. You…” I look around. I want him to be here—he’s my son—but I don’t want him to be here—she has a gun. “He’s not even here, is he?”
“Who?”
“My son.”
“Right,” she says. “Your son. See, it’s usually the girl who uses the guy to get the baby. It’s usually the woman who loves her kid more than her husband. But then, you’re not usual, are you?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“You fell out of love with me the day I told you I was pregnant.”
“That’s ridiculous. The baby was just as much a surprise for me as it was for you. Just because I was excited about becoming a father… Love, put down the gun.”
“No.”
“Well which is it? Rose petals or bullets?”
“Say it.”
“I was in prison.”
“And I was pregnant. What’s your point?”
“I told you, Love. The only reason I survived in there—the only reason I didn’t lose my fucking mind—was the fact that we were gonna have a family.”
“Right,” she says. “You should put that on a card, Joe, ‘I only fell in love with my girlfriend when she was pregnant with my baby and I knew I spread my seed.’？”
“How can you say that?”
“Because it’s true. Because the minute I told you about the baby, even before you got arrested… you didn’t look at me the same way. You didn’t want me. You wanted your baby.”
“Love, put down the gun.”
“You notice that every time I tell you the truth, you tell me to put down the gun?”
It’s true, but she ended all possibility of an honest negotiation when she pulled out that fucking gun and that’s the only fucking “truth” that matters right now. She could shoot me, so I have to stay calm. Gently, Joseph. “Come on, Love. You know that’s not true.”
“You’re incapable of love, Joe. You couldn’t see your face every time I risked exposure to disease and criminals… spiritually… physically… but every time I went to see you, you didn’t look at me. You looked at my body like I was a fucking piece of Tupperware carrying your lunch.”
“Put down the…”
She smiles. Evil. Spoiled. Wrong. “What did you say, Joe?”
“You’re not remembering things clearly. I was worried about you, all the stress…”
“Aw,” she says. “You didn’t think I was durable enough for the job, did you?”
“Yes I fucking did.”
“Ah,” she says. “So you did think of it as my ‘job’ to carry your offspring into this world. The second you knew about your seed planted inside of me, I stopped being a person to you.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Oh, so what? You go to ‘jail’ and you think you’re so experienced and you just fall out of love with me because I’m out shopping for the baby and meeting with doulas and not obsessing over you twenty-four hours a day?”
“Bullshit,” I snap. “Do you know what I was obsessing over in that fucking hellhole? You, Love. I could feel you turning on me a little bit more every time you visited. I hated the fact that I couldn’t shop for cribs with you or meet the goddamn doulas, but I blamed the system. You, on the other hand, you blame me.”
I too speak the truth but she holds the gun, so she’s ranting again, raving about how I didn’t love her. This, coming from the woman whose family paid mercenaries to get rid of me as if I am the one in this family with all the problems. She’s the sick one. She’s the one who told me that I didn’t kill RIP Beck or RIP Peach because they were both just using you for their murder-suicide story that began before they even knew you. And the worst part is that I did fall out of love with her. I too was a little less excited every time she visited.
I wanted to love her. I did. But I couldn’t. It’s the big things—she used our baby as a chess piece—and it’s the little things—she prefers the fake snow at the Grove outdoor shopping mall to real snow—and she’s still ranting and she feeds my son guac and cilantro and I obeyed her wishes. I moved away. I went against the rules of fucking nature to appease her and what does she do to me? She hits me when I’m up—I don’t want to love you, Mary Kay, I just fucking do—and Love points at the sofa.
“Right there,” she says. “And don’t try to fight me. I am prepared to shoot you. This thing has a really good silencer…” As if I don’t know that she can afford all the best things, as if that isn’t the reason that she’s so demented, because money doesn’t make anyone happy unless they do something good with it. “I practiced,” she says. “I’ve been spending time at a gun range and if you try to fight back…” This, from a woman who stole my son. “I mean it, Joe. I will kill you.”
“I don’t want to fight you, Love. I came here to make peace.”
People who have kids like to tell people who don’t have kids that there are things you can’t understand until you become a parent, that parenthood changes you and that you don’t know what love is until you become a mother, a father. It’s an insulting position that makes you realize how loveless so many people actually are. But they are right about one thing. Motherhood does change women. This isn’t Love Quinn. This is LoveSick, armed and dangerous.
My phone is off and you’re awake by now—I’m sorry, Mary Kay—and Love is pacing, chewing on her fingernails, what’s left of them, and is she on meth?
“I’m not happy, Joe.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”