Square Peg by Todd Rose

Author:Todd Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hyperion

“You Don’t Have to Marry Him”

* * *

Within a week after that pivotal talk with my parents, I found myself a job stocking shelves in a department store for $4.25 an hour, then the minimum wage in Utah. It was one of the few jobs listed in the classified ad section that didn’t require a high school diploma. I don’t remember feeling especially sad as I resigned myself to this daily monotony. At that point, I still had no real reason to think much about the future. My circle of friends was still my first priority, and I didn’t think leaving high school would mean I’d stop seeing them. On the other hand, from my first day on the job, I was bored out of my mind. This, I discovered, was much worse than sitting in class day after day. But there was no going back, it seemed—and especially not after Kaylin suddenly told me her own world-changing news. Eight months into our courtship, she was pregnant.

Kaylin’s father by then disliked me so much that he declared himself willing even to tolerate a child born out of wedlock if it meant avoiding linking our lives together. “You don’t have to marry him,” he told her repeatedly, often even when I was standing right there. But Kaylin was in love and also more than ready to leave home. To prepare for my new life as a responsible married man, I switched to a slightly higher-paying but even more boring job, as an aluminum factory assembly-line worker: punching a clock, wearing a cotton jumpsuit uniform, and filling shifts alongside a woman with a mustache. I lasted there just one week.

We got married just before Kaylin started to need to wear maternity clothes, in the small basketball court of our Mormon church, which community members could use for free. Kaylin’s father, as a wedding present, absolved me of the $1,200 debt from the charges on his credit card.

Kaylin’s mother sewed her dress for her, while one of her sisters baked our cake. Her brother served as amateur photographer—so amateur that every picture in our album has a curious pink ring around the outside. Only immediate family and a few friends attended, and my family discouraged any potential extravagances, such as bouquets or formal invitations, for fear of sending the wrong message to my younger siblings.

“Now you will obey your husband as you obeyed me,” Kaylin’s father intoned, as he stood at the altar. I caught my dad’s eye, and he shrugged, and we exchanged a smile. That whole obedient-wife concept was not exactly dogma in our own house.

For our honeymoon, Kaylin and I drove to Nevada with my grandparents, who generously subsidized the trip. We stayed for two nights in a $29-per-night motel in Wendover, about two hours from Salt Lake City, and a common destination for Mormons sneaking over the border to gamble. Mostly we played board games in our room, but a couple times I went with my grandmother to the casinos, even though, at nineteen, I was two years shy of the legal gambling age.

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