Free Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley

mean?”
    “I don’t know.” I whisper, “
Pregnant?
”
    Meredith nearly chokes on her drink. “I’m stuck here with
you
drinking this, which is like grain alcohol or something. I had better not be pregnant.”
    “Oh, relax,” I say, and Meredith kicks me under the table, hard, like we used to do when we were kids and ordered by our parents to be quiet. I scrunch my face at her, signaling that
she will get hers in return, and she laughs again. Aaron and Jeffrey ask something about her dress.
    “What about Franklin being Chinese?” I blurt.
    “What about it?”
    “I don’t know.” I’m trying to stay involved, pull my thoughts away from Lily, to be in the moment. “What about kids? Does it change anything about how you will
raise them?”
    “Of course not. It mostly just means I can never wear heels.” Meredith has always been self-conscious about her height.
    As we drink our second slings, we press Aaron about single gay life in San Francisco and remain tuned to his every word like he’s a telenovela—his stories are outlandish and
addicting and we understand most of what’s going on even if the concepts are a little foreign for the rest of us in longer-term relationships.
    “You mean people just do that in the streets?” Jeffrey interrupts when Aaron is in the middle of a story about the Folsom Street Fair.
    “What do you mean, naked?” I add. “Naked, naked?”
    “What are chaps?” Poor Meredith.
    By the third round of slings, we know what we’re doing. We dispense with the pineapple and the cherries and the umbrellas and get down to the business of gin. Two rainstorms have showered
the lagoon and we’re due for a third, and the band on the barge has paddled by us several times playing what they bill as Top 40 hits, but which are certainly not the current Top 40 hits
unless Kool & the Gang have made some recent cultural resurgence I’m not aware of. Some straight couples dance on the barge, but I’m not sure how they boarded or if they’re
even supposed to be there.
    The conversation turns to Lily, and Meredith and Aaron ask questions and I let Jeffrey answer as I lower my head to my glass and chew on my straw. After a few minutes, my straw mangled beyond
any ability to do its job, I finally speak.
    “When Lily was a year old she ate an entire bag of wasabi peas.” I laugh at the ridiculousness of that sentence, but no one else does. “She’d once eaten a bag of
chocolate-covered blueberries that someone had given me as a gift, so I had been down this road before. Since chocolate is toxic for dogs, I called the vet and they suggested giving her some
hydrogen peroxide as a way to induce vomiting—one teaspoon for every ten pounds of body weight, so one and a half teaspoons for Lily. Pretty effective stuff. To this day I don’t know if
wasabi peas are toxic to dogs, but to be on the safe side, I decided to pull out the old hydrogen peroxide. Only this time she was wise to the trick and wanted no part of it. So I grabbed her by
the snout and pried open her jaw. At the last second she zigged left and I zagged right and the peroxide ended up going down the wrong pipe. So not only did she not throw up, but now in addition to
wasabi peas burning her stomach she had hydrogen peroxide burning her windpipe, and she couldn’t breathe without a horrible wheezing sound. I rushed her to the animal clinic, and a few hours
later it was as if the whole thing hadn’t happened, but I remember thinking I was going to lose her.” I remember how much I hated myself that night, how I felt like a total failure if I
couldn’t keep her alive for more than a year.
    Somewhere in my speech the rain over the lagoon had started again, and the patter of rain on water sounds like a gentle snare drum. I pause and take the disfigured straw out of my glass and
replace it with another straw from an empty glass. I don’t even know whose empty it was, nor do I care. “I don’t know what made me think