Over tea originating in the Himalayas, which I convinced her to order instead of another spritzer, R looked at me with guilt and secret knowledge, as though she were about to end our liaison.

“Penfield, will you marry me?” she asked.

I waited for a clue. She didn’t slide a ring across the table, which had been cleared of crumbs by a man with a file. But she definitely didn’t laugh.

“Okay, so my grandmother Neena, the one whose bed we fucked in, is a dumb bitch.”

I was not attracted to this snarling side of her.

“She’s petty and calculating, and she uses her money—some of which comes from mining in the Congo—to control people. Blah. Blah. Blah. She’s getting really old and she hates my parents and last time I was in Los Angeles, she point-blank told me that I would inherit, along with my brother, as long as I got married. To a dude. My brother will take the money and use it to build AI robots that will fuck him. As much as I don’t want to get married to win her over, I can’t let him prosper from my queerness.”

“As happy as I am that you’ve actually used the word queer in my presence, no. I can’t believe you would dangle the possibility of a real relationship, one based on, IDK, oxytocin and trust, while you were cooking up this scheme. I mean, I can believe it, but it’s not okay.”

I got up to storm out, as I’d always wanted to do to someone.

Unlike in films, the volume of the restaurant remained uniform even as I pushed back my chair and walked past cis people, sprayed with various aromatic chemicals, who most likely would not propose to each other in such a manner.

“Excuse me,” I said, pushing through the waiting diners, and my voice came out as girly as ever.

My life was in disarray. I turned my phone on Do Not Disturb and walked all the way home, past the neighborhood where girl gangs rode skateboards while swinging Bluetooth speakers on long ropes to ward off catcallers, through the Lower East Side where my Jewish ancestors ran a vegetable stand, across the bridge, along the streets where wealthy bros felt exotic every time they entered Brooklyn into the city box at their online shopping checkouts, down the Plaza of the Rose, carefully avoiding the Scorpion Café, and then over to the street below the train tracks, where Linden and Palmetto met.

Aiden and I sat out on the back steps drinking iced coffee. He’d already taken his daily selfie beneath my cherry blossom tree. I remembered how my insides used to curdle from looking at him all those dead mornings ago.

The blossoms on the ground were the color of the potty seat my parents had when I was learning to pee on the toilet.

“How’s it going with the Gram?” I asked. I didn’t go on it much anymore and found myself craving a distraction.