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went on, “Pacifica takes over this booth. She’s seven months pregnant, and that’s the bomb with some of the customers. I’m thinking about doing a piece on it.”
    “You’re kidding me?”
    “Well, why not?”
    “You mean she—?”
    “Don’t make that face. Lotsa people find pregnant women hot. Lotsa guys, in fact. That’s good news in any woman’s book.”
    There’s justice, I know, in the fact of an aging gay libertine being made to squirm about sex. Shawna is my karma, I suppose, my just desserts for banking too blindly on the power of my own liberation. There’s plenty I don’t know about, or care to know about, in my comfortable, vagina-free existence, and Pacifica the Pregnant Lady and her devotees are just the tip of the iceberg. I’m not proud of this; it’s just so.
    My friend George felt stifled by his own limitations and made up his mind upon turning forty to eat pussy at the next available opportunity. It was not a success, he said, and the woman who had volunteered for this noble experiment had freshened up with a cinnamon douche, so George was left only with a lasting distaste for breakfast rolls. He worked as a ticket agent for Southwest, so the smell of warm Cinnebons wafting through an airport could undo him completely. Some things are better left alone, he said.
     
    Shawna, as it turned out, had decided to move to Manhattan when her book was published and wanted my take on how Brian would react to the news. She’s always been this way, anticipating her father’s feelings like a devoted but anxious wife, desperately afraid of hurting him—of betraying him, really, as strong as that word may seem. The considerate children of single parents often seem to carry that additional burden.
    “I think he’s got plans of his own,” I told her.
    “You mean the RV?”
    “Yeah.”
    “He’s not serious about that.”
    “Yeah. You’re probably right.”
    “He’s Mr. Inertia,” she said. “And he’s happy that way as long as nothing else changes.”
    I remembered Shawna’s mother saying something similar when she left Brian and her little girl to launch her career in New York. She had found Brian’s mellow passivity intolerable, a serious obstacle to her own ambition. Shawna loves her father as is—down to the last tie-dyed T-shirt and Neil Young album—but she’s leaving town just the same; she must worry a little about reconstituting that earlier trauma.
    “He’ll be all right,” I told her. “He always is.”
    “I guess so,” she said, fiddling with a tassel on the pillow. “Will you and Ben come visit me once I’m settled?” She seemed almost waifish at that moment.
    “Of course, sweetie. Ben’s crazy about New York.”
    “I know you aren’t,” she said, “but I’ll make things fun for you.”
    “You always have.”
    I felt tearful all of a sudden, sitting there in that fuckless brothel while the apple of my eye laid out her dreams for my approval. She looked a little wistful herself.
    “Don’t let him grow a ponytail,” she said. “He always does that when he gets depressed.”
    I laughed. “Don’t worry.”
    “I hate ponytails on old dudes.”
    “I hear you.”
    “A guy was in here yesterday who had the greasiest ponytail and every time he—”
    “Can we talk about something else?” I said.
    “All right, Auntie,” she said with an impertinent grin.

5
    The Family Circle
    I t occurred to me recently that this is probably the last house I’ll ever own. (It was the first as well, come to think of it.) The endless possibilities of my youth have been whittled down to this little plot on a hillside, this view of the valley, this perfect lamp, this favorite chair, this flock of wild parrots breakfasting in the hawthorn tree. I’m still enough of a Southerner to love the notion of my own land, my own teacup Tara.
    It’s not unimaginable that Ben and I could one day pick up and move to a condo in Palm Springs or Hawaii, but I wouldn’t bank on it.