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Having sex without condoms was something Paul and Jenna talked about a lot. He thought it might be okay if he just put it in for a minute — he wouldn't even need to move around — but she'd heard from a friend that sperm cells were always leaking from the tip of the penis, like signals from an antenna, so they didn't risk it. They talked about anal sex, but it was only talk. Lying in Jenna's bed, under her Muppets poster, an hour before her older sister Mish got home from working after school at Kinney Shoes, they talked about being the only two people left on earth, lost and naked and helping each other in the jungle heat and under cold desert skies. "Would we feed each other?" he asked, and her hand reached for her pink wristwatch strewn in the sheets.



Paul's daughter Beatrice was the same age now, fourteen, as he and Jenna were when they'd made the tape. Beatrice had brought her schoolbooks to the hospital when Paul had his emergency appendectomy. Didn't seem particularly worried — maybe she just didn't get it.

Kat did enough worrying for all of them; at one point he told her to go away. "You're making it worse," he'd said, and Kat dropped her cell phone on the tooth-enamel tile floor.


The fear was that Kat or Beatrice would find the tape after he died. He'd reached the age where he could go at any time. Guys had heart attacks at thirty-nine. Some famous ball player had had a stroke when he was younger than Paul, a minor one, and wound up missing a season. A person might die in his sleep or away on a business trip. Paul didn't want to leave anything behind that might complicate what his wife and child already knew about him.


For condoms he and Jenna took a bus to the Meijer Thrifty Acres the next town over, where they knew no one would recognize them. Sometimes they lost sight of their task and spent an hour looking at porch furniture. Each condom represented time and money, a shared effort between them. When they were done they wrapped it in a napkin and tossed it outside. They made love once or twice a week for about six months until Jenna got scared, and they decided to stop. In those days they didn't realize how hard it really was, how unlikely the union of sperm

and egg.


Beatrice's school was learning human reproduction that semester, and both Kat and Paul approved. Just talking about it didn't mean you condoned it. He even thought — in a few years — he could handle the idea of his daughter being in a sexual relationship with a boy she liked. Not now, not at fourteen, but in the foreseeable future. He didn't want to hear about it, because that wasn't healthy for anyone, but he understood that Beatrice would want to have sex someday, and he wouldn't judge her for that. He hoped that Jenna didn't regret what they'd done, that she didn't now feel he'd bullied her into it. He didn't remember any bullying. He remembered the leather smell of her penny loafers at the foot of the bed, and how he and Jenna pretended to sleep like an actual married couple after sex. Sometimes she'd look down at where their bodies were joined and whisper, "We're one person." Their hands always found each other during sex. They'd tighten and pull, grip violently. Coming with her felt like forgetting to grab onto something in a rush.


Paul did a lot of thinking after his operation. With her debate club, clarinet lessons, riding lessons, Saturdays out with friends, he hardly ever saw his daughter anymore. In four years she'd be in college, making a good impression on teachers, learning to discern between boys. Some weren't worth spending time on. Beatrice seemed too bookish for a serious boyfriend, but then Jenna probably had seemed bookish to her friends and parents. Only Paul heard her whisper, "I think I need a good fucking," in the hallway between classes. Only he knew what her pussy and asshole tasted like, and how her voice went hoarse when she came. She and Paul were both in the library club, and she once yelled at a senior on the track squad for tearing the cover off a Frank Herbert paperback. Took a lot of guts.