Okay, I needed to check my planner and see when my period came last, because I thought I just got done with it, but I felt like I was going to start sobbing again.

Instead of doing that, I declared, “I’m not having this conversation.”

“It’ll get it off your hands and you won’t have to worry about it,” he pointed out.

“Yes, and not only will Mick have issues if I do that, and from what I can tell, they’d be very serious issues, I might have issues since this guy knows I have it and then I won’t have it and he’ll suspect I did what you’re thinking of doing with it.”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” he muttered.

Of course he hadn’t.

“’Bye, Dad,” I snapped.

“Evie! Wait!” he called.

I wanted to hang up.

I wanted to hang up.

I wanted to hang up.

“What?” I asked.

“Let this be done, girl. Let this be the last shit Mick unloads on you. Listen to your old man for once, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I muttered.

“Look after yourself. I’m in a new band, we got a gig, come see me play. I’ll shoot you the info in a text.”

Another band.

I hoped it lasted, for his sake. Even if it was just local gigs.

But I knew it had no hope of lasting, because nothing my father had a hand in lasted.

“Right. Great. Looking forward to it,” I said by rote.

“It’ll be all right, Evie. You always land on top, doncha?”

At another time, in perhaps thirty years, when I had the time, I would have to ponder this.

Ponder how anyone could think that their daughter working two jobs, one of them stripping, to pay for her tuition, her rent, her food, to get various family members out of jams, who it was taking years to get her systems engineering degree because she was out of school more than she was in it because, if she had the money to pay for it, she didn’t have the time to go to class, was landing on top.

I had a good car, because I worked hard to buy it.

I had a nice apartment, because I worked hard to have it.

This work, by the way, was mostly taking off my clothes and dancing on a stage with my body slicked with oil and strange men shoving money into the only remaining garment I wore.

I wanted a degree in something that fascinated me, a job making good pay, a husband (someday), a family (someday a little later), love, laughter, vacations, birthday parties, graduations, weddings and a decent retirement in a condo by a beach.

Oh, and to take off my clothes only in privacy for the rest of my life.

That’s what I wanted.

I had thought that wasn’t asking too much.

But maybe I thought wrong.

Maybe I should start taking selfies.

Of course, I’d have to have an Instagram account, something I did not have (and wasn’t actually on social media at all, mostly because I didn’t have the time for it).

But I could take apart and put together a radio by the age of six, I was changing the oil in my father’s car by the age of eight, and I’d figured out how to do that myself.

I could start an Instagram account.

“Evie?” Dad called.

“Yeah, Dad. I always land on top,” I said.

“That’s my girl. See you soon, my darlin’. Later.”

I put the phone down realizing he did not tell me to call the cops.

He also did not say, no matter when, day or night, he’d be at my side if I went to the cops or something else cropped up with this situation.

So, two votes for cops from two men in my life who weren’t blood.

One vote for no cops from my mother.

And one essential abstention from my father.

Last, the person I really needed to talk to about all of this, my brother, I couldn’t talk to because whatever he said could incriminate him.

I didn’t know what to do with all of that.

I didn’t know what to do at all.

What I knew was, I had to finish my salad, hit my call, and go get Gert.

It was grocery day.

“Evan, what’s up? You aren’t right.”

I looked down to Gert, who was in one of those motorized, grocery-store chair-carts.

This was because she couldn’t walk very far.

Into a restaurant when I took her to Chili’s or Applebee’s, yes.

Around a King Soopers, no.

“I had a bad date last night,” I evaded, telling the truth, but not all of it.

She shook her head and scooted along the aisle toward the fruit juices.

Gert was all about fruit juices.

Being “regular” was a big thing for her.

“Boys these days, they don’t know which end is up,” she decreed.

Mag knew precisely where the ceiling was.

This thought made my heart feel heavy.

“Was he one of them metrosexuals?” she asked, reaching for the prune juice.

I took it from her and put it in her basket, thinking that Mag kind of was, being fit and well turned out.

Though, my guess, all that messy, sexy hair flew in the face of metrosexuality.

“There’s a new one, you know,” she said, not waiting for me to answer her question, as was her way.

Gert was alone a lot.

As in, almost all the time.

So, when she had company, she talked.

“Spornosexual,” she continued. “Not so much about the grooming, all about the body. I wanna see me one of them. Was he one of them?”

Okay.

That sounded more like Mag.

“I’m afraid I’m not keeping track of all the terms for dudes these days, Gert,” I admitted in an effort not to label Mag with the ridiculous word of “spornosexual.”

“Well, I got lots of time on my hands and I know it all,” she replied. “You have questions, ask me. I got answers. These days, everything is confusing. You gotta do your research. I know what heteronormative is, and you don’t wanna be that. I know cisnormative, and you don’t wanna be that either. And binary and nonbinary, and not that stuff you do when you’re in class with your bits and bytes.”

She then laughed and took the endcap probably a little faster than the King Soopers management wished their scooters to go.

But the next aisle was cookies, so she had reason.

“How’d the date go bad?” she asked.

Not because my brother is a jerk, surprisingly, but because I was a bitch, I did not answer.

“He just wasn’t my type,” I said.

To that, she stopped on a scooter squeal and looked up to me.

Gert had curly gray hair, two missing teeth, three sons and a daughter who lived in different states and did their best from far away to take care of their mother, who flatly refused to move closer to her children.

And she fell in love with computers the minute she saw her first one in 1981 (she knew the exact year, and by the by, it was August).

In other words, we were kindred spirits two generations apart.

She budgeted everything from groceries to gas to electricity.

But she paid Charlie for tech support, because now, she lived on her computer with her email friends and her Facebook groups and her online forums, and if her system was down, her entire life was interrupted, and she was even more alone than her normal alone.

This being how we met.

And when I went to fix her computer and saw the state of her, and her house, bimonthly grocery shops and more than occasional trips to the likes of Cracker Barrel and Olive Garden, not to mention, me talking her into letting me clean her pad every once in a while, became part of my schedule.