Not a picture of Courtney Cox

"You have to behave yourself," my mother warns. "Amber, too."

It did not occur to me, in meeting Bryan's possible girlfriend, I would have to behave. My wife and I are invited not for our stellar company but as buffers against someone who might be interested in Bryan. I do not know what form my supposed misbehavior might take. I am easygoing unless I find it too funny not to be.

Monica is from Wisconsin. Bryan has no wife, child, pet, or house--at least two of those sound like terrible ideas for him--so nothing that might stop him from flying to one convention or another throughout the continental United States. My family does not ask for details about these — going so far as not to fact-check whether they exist when and where Bryan says — though my mother perpetually posts his flight information to our group chat in case we want to track his progress. I have rarely clicked on these, as I don't see it as much of my business where he goes.

He has occasionally mentioned women. If pressed, I could give names, but the contexts would be foggy. I do not consider them romantic and surely not sexual prospects, as he is asexual, and so their relevance is uncertain. Most of these women appear to be married or in complicated relational situations, and about half have gone out of their way to take advantage of Bryan, even to the extent of having him fly to them only to leave him alone in their houses while they went on dates with other people.

To my knowledge, his last relationship was with Colleen, with whom he was affianced after being together for years. Not joyfully united in mutual love and respect with a desire to grow as a couple, but together. They did seem to have the fundamental friction that, though Colleen is many things, none of them are asexual (quite the opposite). When they were engaged, I asked Bryan if he would periodically give Colleen hall passes to sleep with other people to get it out of her system. He saw this as a horrific question, as he demanded fidelity from the women with whom he was not sleeping. In no sense does Bryan want other people impinging on this territory, even if the fields want plowing.

My mother was unclear whether Monica was Bryan's girlfriend and not merely a woman who took a week out of her life to visit him here rather than having him fly to her so she could roll her eyes and leave him at the airport.

When he was maybe twenty, a girl invited Bryan to take a train to Canada. When he arrived, he was met by this girl's mother, who said there was absolutely no way Bryan was meeting her. It is even money between Bryan having been unwittingly chatting with an actual girl lying about her age and the girl being a fiction summoned by the "mother" for the psychosexual pleasure of catfishing. Bryan, who was supposed to crash at this girl's house, instead spent the night in a hostel and came home in the morning.

Another time, he went to visit an internet friend who, if I recall correctly, lived in a rundown trailer in the woods of Kentucky. Her family would not allow Bryan to leave, even a week after he was supposed to have done so. Their excuse was that they couldn't find the motivation to get him to the airport, and Bryan was too awkward to insist. They were only stirred to action when my mother informed them that she would be calling the police to report a kidnapping, which was likely not a joke.

That Bryan would permit Monica to visit perplexed me. I have rarely encountered someone pricklier about people intruding on his privacy. My mother clarified that Monica was staying at an Airbnb, and Bryan and she would only cuddle while watching movies before he sent her away each night so he could work in the morning.

What could a romantic prospect look like for Bryan? I imagined ungenerous characteristics but discounted them as quickly. As Amber and I would get a free dinner out of it, I could be open-minded.

My mother contacts me soon after the invitation, saying I no longer have to be on my best behavior, as Bryan no longer seems to like Monica. The dinner is still on, though, which seems unnecessary. Perhaps my parents just like a good meal out.

I am still hazy about the bad behavior my family expects from me. What reputation of caddishness have I cultivated?

"Did you ever watch Friends?" I ask Amber on the drive down.

They had not, and do not see why this is relevant.

"They used to shove the character Monica--Courtney Cox--into a fat suit for flashbacks. It is a show that excelled in being problematic. Whenever I try to imagine Bryan's Monica, this overrides it. The cultural energy is too strong."

When we arrive, Monica is not a fat-suit version of Courtney Cox. She has curly, dark hair and a warm smile. She may be dating my brother and thus could be a dangerous lunatic, but I find her instantly pleasant. Some of the women Bryan encounters at these conventions sound like randomly chosen pages of the DSM loosely wrapped in fast food bags.

I halfway consider Monica the condemned, so entitled to the sacrament of a last meal. I am seated next to her, across from Bryan. Monica and my father are opposite ends of two tables pushed together, making Amber and me an almost literal buffer. The restaurant, Double O Grill, is not loud. Still, this positioning is not conducive to my parents getting to know her, subtly emphasizing they do not care to.

My mother asks if Monica would like her own appetizer or would be okay sharing with the family. Monica says if she has an appetizer, she won't be hungry enough to eat her meal and will have to bring it back to her Airbnb.

"That is exactly our plan," I assure her. "I may eat a quarter of what I order, and I select dinners specifically considering how easy they will be to reheat."

Seeing I will have to pick up the conversational slack--and feeling no dearth of pity as I dwell in the dramatic irony that I know she is likely dumped and she does not--I ask what she likes to read. This question is always self-serving, as my implicit coda is, "Yes, but you should read me."

Monica primarily reads self-help books, which is not a genre into which I have tapped, so I have nothing much to say there. I have read some, but not with any vigor.

Hearing again that she lives in Wisconsin, I mention I read and loved John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye, a startlingly affecting book about the moon literally turning to cheese. Monica is impressed that I know enough to equate Wisconsin with cheese, but I know little else. Aren't their license plates made of cheddar?

I cannot figure out what Bryan might have told Monica about Amber and me, though we are civil and charming people. I assume it was more warnings than compliments, though he does say he showed her my books. I could cajole the answer out of her, but what would be the point?

Whether from the canceled prohibition on being mannerly because we have decided we will not see Monica again or our inevitable reprobate nature, we end up discussing a pornographic VHS that my mother found on a walk when we were children, Malibu Spice, which haunted our home for a decade and vaguely contributed to my older brother's breakup from his long term girlfriend. (Dan was annoyed she slandered his friends and family because we had all seen clips of this tawdry flick--I do not think we ever watched more than 45 seconds of it at a time, and I cannot promise it was anything more than poorly lit softcore. We may be degenerates, but that movie isn't why.)

"I used to wake the boys whenever there was a good horror movie on, even if it was at 4 am," my mother confides.

I cannot remember this exactly, though I do recall watching the head-crushing scene in The Toxic Avenger while eating dinner. My mother rented but maybe did not choose mondo movies like Faces of Death when I was young. We also once rented and watched Blood Sucking Freaks, which, as a connoisseur of schlock and bad movies, I still rank as one of the worst. (We stopped it around the scene where Ralphus, the little person assistant of the evil Sardu, guillotines a ballerina and then enjoys her dummy head. We came back and finished the movie after about an hour's breather.) As a result, I developed a sardonic sense of humor and an unflappable demeanor when it comes to horror plots. These are nothing I would want to show Amber, of course, but I suspect they did me no lasting harm.

Monica seems unbothered by all this, so I could see how she would wish to spend time with my brother.

I mention that, in front of residents, one of the clinicians at my job complimented an article I wrote about "a janitor." I have written a great many things, some of which I have not thought about since, so I study her face for clues as to what she could be talking about. Sanitation services are not typically a topic on which I expound. It dawned on me that she meant the local serial killer Kendall Francois, and tried to shoo the students out of the room before she praised me more about detailing the crimes of a man who suffocated several sex workers, ignored by the police.

Monica, it turns out, loves serial killers. Her interest in Bryan comes better into focus. When he visited her in Wisconsin, she was sure to show him Jeffrey Dahmer's killing grounds. As I spent two nights at Lizzie Borden's Bed & Breakfast, which is featured in Holidays with Bigfoot, I cannot cast aspersions. I would not flinch at dark tourism, though I might hesitate to have too many pieces of murderabilia in my collection.

"I put my foot on the stairs," Bryan said. "I assume it was Dahmer's apartment building."

Given what Dahmer did with chemicals (to say nothing of what he did to unfortunate gay men with them), I cannot imagine it is physically or spiritually healthy to live there. Still, it isn't the building's fault. We do not often knock down structures simply because they have hosted horrors.

Monica is free to travel as she wishes. She holds a doctorate in psychology and teaches at an online university. As long as she keeps to hours that imply she is in the United States, no one is the wiser when she is actually in England.

Bryan occasionally notices Monica and includes her in the conversation, but it is conspicuously not often. He does not look at her when he can help it.

Days earlier — just after I was told to be on my best behavior — Bryan and Monica had a conversation that boiled down to her wanting him to move to Wisconsin to help her pay her bills, while Bryan wanted very much not to do so. After all, his job is here, even if he hates his job (he would hate any job, but especially this one). I will later find out they have been dating a month after having been friends for at least a year, so her request seems at least premature. She is also going through a divorce from a man who paid most of her bills. This was her second marriage, the first being a man who paid most of her bills.

There has never been a time in this life--nor do I think there will ever be a time--where Bryan will wish to pay most of someone else's bills. I suspect he is none too keen to pay his own, though he is a doctor of nursing — with the salary and loans to prove it.

Even if the point of this dinner was to give Bryan reasons not to proceed with breaking up with Monica, I wouldn't. He reacts to such advice with seething rage, no matter the topic, and it would do me no good even to make a joke.

My mother brings up Ayannah and her secret theory that her granddaughter has married her Lebanese boyfriend. Her visa was for six months, and it has now been nine. On the other hand, Lebanon might be happy to look the other way for a polite American woman, even without a ring on Yannah's finger. She now occupies herself making complicated, authentic meals with her boyfriend's family, looking bright and fulfilled.

"She bragged to me once that she made Kraft Mac and Cheese out of a box without ruining it," my mother says. "This was only a few years ago."

As I married Amber two days before her twenty-sixth birthday, I cannot say much against marrying. Still, I would have liked an invitation to this wedding, even if I had little intention of attending. At the very least, grant me the courtesy of a livestream link.

The dinner ends. I hug Monica, knowing this will be the last time I see her.

I have stayed too long in relationships, regretting the hurt I will do and thus compounding it or eroding my sense of self in hopes my degradation would counterintuitively make me worthy in their eyes. And I have been the one my lover didn't wish to leave, even to the point of contemplating eternal misery or suicide as alternatives if these meant I wasn't hurt.

I know well the self-destructive desperation to have someone--specifically the object of one's interest, but also just a person you imagine could hold you through the night--and the fear you won't. In my former disordered thinking, I still figured someone would love me if Amber decided they couldn't. I have never worried much about that, though, even less so now that I do not need it (obviously, because I have my person and expect to always be, but also because I have finally healed the wound in me that made me so rife with anxious attachment).

I find out later that Monica gave my mother a scented candle that reeked so strongly that my mother refuses to keep it, and asked for my mother's phone number, which she does not get. Attempting ingratiation is unlikely to win my mother over. It would have been met with suspicion even if Bryan saw a future with Monica. I am unsure Amber has my mother's number now, and they would know better than to give my mother a candle.

last watched: Preacher
reading: Author of the Impossible