Infinite Cashback System

The parking lot at Giuliano’s smelled like rosemary and cooling asphalt. Jordan leaned against the brick exterior wall beside the valet stand, watching his mother and Chloe walk ahead toward the parking lot in animated conversation. Susan had Chloe’s arm looped through hers, their heads tilted together, and Chloe was laughing at something, real laughter, the kind that crinkled her nose and made her look seventeen instead of the forty-year-old financial strategist she sometimes impersonated.

Cassie had left ten minutes earlier, kissing Susan on both cheeks and shaking Chloe’s hand with the formality of someone closing a transaction. She’d paused at Jordan on her way out, studying his face one final time beneath the restaurant’s exterior sconce lights.

"You’re hiding something," she’d said.

"Everyone’s hiding something, Cass."

"Mine are documented." She’d tapped his sternum once, directly over Kumiko’s bite mark for the second time that day. "Yours are written on your body."

Then she’d walked to her rental car without looking back, heels clicking against the pavement in a rhythm that sounded like a countdown.

Now David McKnight stood six feet to Jordan’s right, hands in his jean pockets, watching his wife and his son’s girlfriend disappear around a row of parked cars. The February air carried the distant sound of the 405 freeway and the faint sweetness of the restaurant’s bread baking for tomorrow’s service.

"Walk with me," David said.

Jordan pushed off the wall and fell into step beside his father. David walked the way he’d always walked, shoulders forward, pace unhurried, the gait of a man who’d spent thirty years on his feet behind a register and had learned that rushing accomplished nothing that patience wouldn’t handle better.

They crossed the parking lot and stopped at a low concrete wall separating Giuliano’s from the strip mall next door. David sat on the wall and looked up at the sky, which was the orange-brown of a Southern California night, too bright for stars and too dark for anything useful.

"Sit."

Jordan sat. The concrete was cold through his jeans.

David pulled something from his back pocket. A pack of gum. He offered one to Jordan, who took it. They chewed in silence for maybe thirty seconds, which was approximately twenty-nine seconds longer than the old Jordan could have tolerated.

"Your mother’s going to plan an entire nursery by Tuesday," David said.

"She already sent Chloe a Pinterest board during dessert."

"Eighty-seven pins. I counted while she was showing it to me in the car last week. She started the board in October."

Jordan looked at his father. "October? We didn’t even know each other in October."

"Your mother started a nursery Pinterest board the week you moved into your apartment. She’s been waiting." David’s mouth moved around the gum. "That’s what mothers do."

A car pulled out of the lot, headlights sweeping across them before disappearing onto the main road.

"You going to marry her?"

Jordan didn’t flinch. He’d been expecting this question since the appetizer course, when David had watched Chloe decline wine and gone completely silent for four minutes.

"Eventually. Yes."

"Eventually meaning what."

"Meaning I’m not going to propose to a girl I’ve been dating for six weeks because she’s pregnant. That’s not a proposal. That’s panic."

David chewed his gum. "Your grandmother would disagree."

"Grandma disagrees with oxygen."

Something moved in David’s face that might have been a laugh, buried under decades of not laughing at things he found funny. "She’d say the baby needs parents who are committed. A ring proves commitment."

"A ring proves you went to a store. Commitment is showing up every day." Jordan looked at the concrete between his sneakers. "Chloe doesn’t want a ring right now. She wants stability. She wants to know I’m not going to disappear when it gets hard."

"And are you."

"Am I what."

"Going to disappear when it gets hard."

"No."

David let that sit. He pulled the gum wrapper from his pocket, folded it in half, folded it again, tucked it back.

"Prenup," David said.

"What about it."

"Are you getting one."

Jordan turned to face his father fully. David’s profile was lit by the amber security light mounted above the restaurant’s back door, his gray eyes fixed on the middle distance, the permanent furrow between his brows deepened by shadow. He looked tired in the way men in their late forties look tired when they’ve spent twenty-five years building something with their hands and aren’t sure if any of it will survive being inherited.

"I haven’t thought about a prenup," Jordan said.

"Then start thinking about it."

"Dad."

"I’m not being romantic with you, Jordan. I’m being your father." David shifted on the wall. "You told me at dinner that you’re starting a business. You own property. You have assets. Whether you earned them or inherited them or pulled them out of thin air, they exist and they belong to you. If things go south with Chloe, and I’m not saying they will, but if they do, you need something on paper that protects what you’ve built."

Jordan opened his mouth and then closed it. Because the old Jordan, the Jordan from December, would have said something stupid about love conquering all. Would have cited some movie where the guy tears up the prenup as a romantic gesture and the audience claps and nobody mentions the three-year divorce proceedings that follow.

The new Jordan just sat on a concrete wall chewing gum and recognized that his father was right.

"I don’t want to ask Chloe to sign a prenup."

"Nobody wants to ask. That’s the point. If it felt good, everyone would do it and lawyers would be out of business."

"She’ll take it personally."

"She’ll take it as you being smart. From what I’ve seen, that girl respects smart. She doesn’t respect romantic. She respects prepared." David’s Casio watch caught the security light as he gestured. "You think your mother and I didn’t have hard conversations before Cassie was born? We were twenty years old in a one-bedroom above a laundromat. The heat didn’t work half the time. We had exactly one savings account with six thousand dollars in it and your mother wanted to split it into two accounts, one for the baby and one for us, and I said that was a waste of bank fees."

"Who won?"

"Your mother always wins. The point is we had the conversation. We sat at a folding table with a calculator and we talked about money like adults, because a baby doesn’t care about your feelings. A baby cares about diapers and formula and a crib that doesn’t collapse, and none of those things accept love as payment."

Jordan stared at the parking lot. A family of four loaded into a silver minivan three rows away, the kids already fighting over the front seat.

"I’ll talk to her about it," Jordan said.

"Soon. Not after the baby comes. Before."

"Before."