Opal took the stone gladly. It was not the response she had expected, but one of the reasons why she liked Antony was because she could never anticipate what he was going to say. She had seen it in his desk, in a small bag with what looked like, maybe, fingernails, dirt with flecks of gold, and another gold rock. What had she been looking for? An answer for why he seemed so much older than her or a reason for why he was so different from everyone else she had ever met, or to know him without all the effort.

“Where did he find it?”

Antony shrugged. “On vacation somewhere weird.”

It was a tone he used only when he was lying, but Opal didn’t know him well enough to know that yet. His eyes were soft, and she thought he might be thinking of their life together. They would be the ones filling drawers with rocks and knickknacks. A house filled with proof that they had traveled and loved. A year after Mateo had gone through the door, he had tried again. One of the fingernails in the sack was his.

2

When you meet at twenty in a crowded living room lit only with Christmas lights, twinkling purple-yellow-blue-white in a pulsating rhythm, when the music is so loud you have to lean in so that your lips are almost always brushing an ear to be heard, when you walk home together, and because you’ve had an unquantifiable amount of alcohol between the jungle juice and the shots and beers, and still you’re talking and talking, and even though you haven’t really, truly, purposefully touched yet, most of your brain power is spent on the heat of the other person walking home next to you on the sidewalk, how close your fingers are coming to brushing their hands or their thighs, and have you ever wanted anyone, truly, before in your entire life, and of course, when you kiss—finally—there is no room in either of your brains to think of consequences. And that’s why, slightly before the time you’re twenty-one, one of you is pregnant and both of you are casually saying things like maybe you were just not cut out for four-year college—you can make good money in HVAC—to prepare everyone for what’s to come.

And when you get married at twenty-one and two weeks and at twenty-one and three-quarters, well, of course you haven’t had the important conversations. You’ve been so busy listening to people talk at you about how long life is, how there are things you don’t have to do right now, and what about adoption, what about you-know-the-medical-procedure-that-we-dare-not-speak-its-name because Opal is already the kind of nice lady who loses her mind every time the word is uttered, what about your degree, what about money, so the two of you make home a quiet place. The babies don’t need stress.