Stephen

July 2024

I’m setting down the following account of Stephen and Mary’s origin story with the hopes that it will give me some inspiration for my speech as the best man at their wedding. This all happened a couple years ago now. Here it goes.

Mary and Stephen met at a DKE fraternity party during the first semester of their sophomore year. For a week after their first encounter, they went on a few dates. It seemed to me they spent most of their waking, and sleeping, hours together during that short fling, as I’d often see Mary walking down the hall of the frat early in the morning to head to class. Eventually, Stephen’s boundless enthusiasm for Mary dwindled after the next weekend of partying presented him with another swath of beautiful, intriguing, energetic women. This was a familiar cycle with my buddy, he was a head-over-heels romantic, claiming emphatically that each new girl was “the one” for about a week, which would then give way to indifferent, almost ennui-laden, shrugs of the shoulders when asked about the last girl after a couple weeks of meeting.

Mary realized she was just one brief stop in Stephen’s journey, and tried her best to also indifferently shrug off all the compassion and attention she felt from him that was now gone. But, Stephen’s cyclic journey, pushing this boulder up and down the same hill over and over, was about to give way to a new one. It all started with several texts from Mary. Stephen was surprised to see the contact “Mary from DKE party” show up on his phone, as he had sent a fairly boiler plate text several days before ending their romantic relations. The last text he had from her was an equally nonchalant and good natured acknowledgment of the termination.

But now Mary insisted they must talk on the phone. Stephen tried to ignore the texts, but they kept coming. Eventually, he relented after she said “we HAVE to talk on the phone!!!” for the fifth time. Her voice was meek and shaky, riddled with uncertainty. As soon as he heard her voice, Stephen’s heart began to race, his head felt burning hot, he could not collect his thoughts or remain calm. He suspected the thing that lurked just under the surface of all these engagements, the thing that he and his peers tried vehemently to ignore, pretend was not real, even to the point of believing it was something so distant, so alien, as to be relegated to a near obsolete or archaic status. But wishing it away or forgetting its possibility does not actually prevent this potential. And Mary’s words confirmed the worst, “Stephen, I’m sorry. I’m pregnant…” 
Her voice trailed off, Stephen could hear soft, teary inhales. Mary’s soft crying beating rhythmically into his ear through the phone like a drum. They each sat like this on the line for some time before Stephen asked “but you said you were on birth control…”

“I was…I am, but I guess it happens sometimes, I’ve been looking into it more. The IUD’s aren’t perfect, even this new kind I have. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

They sat in silence for another several seconds before Stephen blurted out, as if unconsciously, “Well, you’re not going to keep it, are you?”

All that echoed back to him was the soft drumbeat of Mary’s gentle, heart-wrenching heaving. After a minute or so, all Mary could get out was “I’ll call you back.”

I was the first person he told, as soon as I returned to the frat from class. He was already sitting in my room when I came in, and immediately blurted out “Dude, I’m fucked. Remember that chick Mary?”

“Yea, you see her with another guy last night or something? That shouldn’t bother you dude, hah,” I checked the date on my watch and did some math, “you’re like two chicks past her at this point!”

“She’s pregnant,” He stated flatly.

“Oh, shit.” We sat in silence. Eventually I asked, “Well, what are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know man, she said she’d call me back. She was just crying on the phone. When I asked her if she was going to keep it, she just cried more. That sounded like an answer to me, and not the one I wanted to hear. This is fucked.”

“Well, what are you gonna do?” I repeated.

“I don’t know man. I mean there was a reason I stopped talking to her. I’m not like, into her or anything. I can’t be with her. Let alone raise a god damn kid with her! That’s not happening!”

“Ok, assuming she keeps the baby, could you at least try?”

“No man, I never fell in love with this chick. I couldn’t love, her. Not my type.”

“Well what if you could love her? Like eventually? How the hell do you even know what love is? I don’t even fucking know what love is and I’ve actually dated chicks for longer than two weeks!” I rattled back to him. In the hazy, half-sober, high-speed confusion that was college, none of us had a clue what love was. This is, I guess, what I was trying to get at with him that night. But it is one thing to view the situation, to know the right questions to ask, the right things to consider and think about. But it is another to be in the situation. To have to answer all those questions, and to have to act on those things to consider and think about.

Stephen sat for a while staring at the dingy gray carpet of my bedroom floor. “I don’t know man, I just don’t want her to keep it.”

After a couple days of silence, Mary finally reached out to Stephen again. He, of course, did not reach out first. She wanted to meet in person to talk more.

They met on a big grassy glade in the middle of campus. It was a relentlessly hot and sunny day, typical of the late summer in Chico. Stephen saw her sitting on a beach towel in the middle of the glade, wearing a simple, flowing white dress, almost to her ankles. She looked beautiful in that dress. As he drew closer, she stood up to greet him. The sun reflected off her long blonde hair. The stray hairs that always mischievously shoot off from even the most well kept heads caught the sun’s light in a peculiar way as to produce almost a little halo of light around her head. She gently caressed her flat-as-could-be belly. It was almost a ridiculous thing to do, the baby at that moment was no more than a few cells, but her soft little hands delicately, naively, instinctively rubbed her stomach.

Stephen was at once terrified to see this woman—who not but a week ago had effectively disappeared from his life, never to be seen again, as quickly as all the others had—but at the same time he was oddly calmed by her presence. It was a feeling almost totally foreign, alien to him. I say almost, because there was probably a time that he felt it before, a time before his explicit memory even reaches back, when his mother caressed him, not just physically, but with her divine feminine energy that is unique to the mother. And so once again—though seemingly to him for the first time—he felt this primordial force in his presence. “Hi Stephen.”

“Hi, Mary how are you feeling?”

“A lot of ways, I guess. But I wanted to meet in person to talk. Because it’s a really big deal, you know. And I think I want to keep him.” She looked down nervously, her muscles tensing in expectation.

Stephen let out a deep sigh. The silence lasted so long that they had time to both sit down and make themselves comfortable. Finally, Stephen looked at Mary and said, “Or her.”

She smiled and started crying.

“So does that mean…does that mean, you’re gonna stick around?”

“Yea, I mean, I’m going to support you. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But you’ve made your decision, and I’m not just going to disappear. I don’t even know what the hell love is so maybe this is it. Or maybe it will be it. Or maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about…so, yea, I’m gonna stick around.”

Stephen told me all this just hours after they met on the glade. He was a wreck. “There’s so much I want to do! Some much I haven’t done! I haven’t done anything yet! Nothing!” He went on like this for literally an hour. We made short work of the six pack I picked up for our conversation. “I don’t want to look at my kid and resent him every time I see him!…I’m losing my freedom! My freedom…my identity!!!”

Stephen collapsed on my bed and began to sob like a child. I hadn’t seen anyone cry like that in my whole life. It is an unmooring experience to see a grown man cry like this. It made a sadness sink deep into my very bones. That night’s conversation was just the first of many late nights we spent talking about the future, about the kid, about Mary, about Stephen, his freedom, his life, the whole dang thing. For a couple weeks he didn’t really go to any of his classes. He drank some. He went on long runs. He only saw Mary a couple times. He opened up a lot to me during this time, but never let on about his plans, about what the hell he was actually going to do. Then one day, with a big backpacking bag slung over his shoulder, he knocked on my door. “Yo. I’m withdrawing for the semester. My grades have gone to shit anyways. I got some work. Gonna help my dad in the shop. Got all that debt to pay. From all our damn trips and parties and bars, not to mention tuition. And then I can straighten my shit out and come back ready for all this.”

Stephen had called his dad a few days earlier. “Dad, you still looking for a mechanic to backfill John?”

“Yes, son, one of your friends offering to work?” He replied gruffly.

“No, Dad. I won’t be the best mechanic, in fact, I’ll probably be the worst. But I’ll make damned sure that I’ll be the hardest working one in the shop.”

His Dad grinned on the other end of the call. “Be happy to have you son. Never liked you going off to college in the first place.”

“It’s just for the next three months, Dad.”

“All the same to me. See you Monday at 7 am…oh, and, there’s a bed for you at home still if you want it. I’m guessing you’re not gonna want to go and pay rent somewhere.”

Stephen certainly was the worst mechanic at the shop. On his very first day he was assigned to the easiest thing a mechanic could be: changing oil and filters. Without wasting time, he cross threaded his first oil filter. Not able to really see the filter, which was buried deep down in the engine bay and could only be felt, he mistook the snugness from destroying the threads for the snugness of a properly installed filter.

He turned the car on to double check for leaks and fresh oil gushed mercilessly all over the engine bay. In a panic, Stephen shut the car off. A few of the mechanics nearby laughed and sneered at him. After having their fun, they helped him get sorted out. 
Not more than a few days later, Stephen was in another panic. After changing spark plugs on a car, another rookie task for the green new mechanic to warm up with, Stephen started the car to check his work. The car felt like shit and sounded even worse. Maybe it just needs to warm up he thought. So he tried to take it for a spin around the block. The car stalled and died on him a hundred feet from the shop’s driveway.

His Dad came out in a huff. Stephen nervously tried to explain exactly what he did, insisting it was all as he was instructed to. Shouldering Stephen aside without a word, his father popped the hood, right in the middle of the road, leaned over the engine, and firmly slid a spark plug boot back into place that Stephen had forgotten to reinstall. “Spark plug boot. Pay attention next time. And don’t panic. What you get into, you can sort your way out of. I don’t think there’s a car I haven’t been able to fix here in the last twenty years. Clients may not have been able to pay for the damn fix, but there always was a fix.”

After his initial misfires, Stephen started picking up the trade extremely quickly. He worked tirelessly at the shop every week, putting in five ten hour days, sometimes six. During his limited free time, he’d drive a couple hours to Chico to spend time with Mary. She remained in school, trying to focus on her studies, plan out what the next year or two would look like, and become more diligent about her health: her sleep, diet, exercise, stress. For Mary, Stephen went from being something as ephemeral as a fall leaf listlessly blowing in the wind to a stone well set in the firm earth. She began to rely on him more. And trust him.

He’d stop by to see me here and there. We’d catch up and shoot the shit about my life and all the brothers in the house and what they were up to. I’d fill him in and he’d laugh about the drunk antics and drama from the last party. He’d only ever talk a little bit about himself. But he seemed confident to me. Tired, and still freaked out out of his mind, but somehow at the same time almost calm, even with a faint hint of happiness. As he was leaving on night around midnight (he had to be at the shop, a two hour drive away, the next morning by seven) he said to me “You know what, I had been so worried about losing my freedom. Burdened by all these insane constraints, things I couldn’t even imagine. Like, a kid? Working as a mechanic for my dad? A girl I didn’t even want to be with? Are you serious! That’s not freedom! But I’m kind of seeing these constraints as the opposite. I’m actively choosing to take them on. For the first time in my life it feels like…like I’m exercising free will. ’Til now I’ve just bumbled into the next thing: high school to college, this girl to that one, this class or this prospective major to that. Like on autopilot. Now I feel like I’m the actual pilot. I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s still fucked, but I’m feeling better…Alright, I gotta get out of here. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” I said back, still processing the profundity he just laid on me. That kind of talk from Stephen? Not just about the total babe he just laid the night before? But about free will? Obligation? Maybe his dad was getting to him, I thought.

Three months passed in a snap for Stephen. He’d be heading back to Chico and moving in with Mary in just a day’s time. It took him a couple months to tell his dad about Mary and the kid. But his dad took it in stride, crazier things had happened to his old man.

All the other mechanics were gone, and the two were left to close up alone. “Want a beer?” His dad asked. Before Stephen could answer, a cold beer was launched into the air towards Stephen.

“Thanks.” Stephen said, catching the cool cylinder with both hands. The two men sat down next to each other on a backless wooden bench just outside the west wing of the shop, looking out on the sun setting over the central valley.

“Well, we’re gonna miss you here. I’m gonna miss you here. You sure you want to go back to school? I never got why you went in the first place. But I wasn’t paying, so I though ‘knock yourself out, kid.’”

“Yea, I’m going back, dad. I didn’t really know either, ha. But I want to go back, it’ll be good for Mary and I for me to have the degree. You know, for my career and stuff. And now I’m a badass mechanic, so if that doesn’t work, I have this!”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Now, you are mechanic. Better than you were three months ago, that’s for sure.” The two laughed together, his dad slapping him affectionately on the shoulders.

“Well, son. I’m proud of you. You’re taking the reins it looks like. I’ve been waiting for you to do this for a long time. I can’t force you to do it, hardest lesson I learned as a father. I can raise ya right, but I can’t make a man out of you alone. You gotta do it yourself. And you are.”

“Thanks, Dad. And thanks for letting me come work at the shop. I’m sure there were a million other people more qualified.”

“Yea, but none who would have worked as hard as you.”

“Ha, yea. I’m beat after all that. Hopefully my cush college-degree job will not be sixty hours a week of hard manual labor.”

“Probably better for you if it was, ha!”

They finished their beers as the sun set behind the huge cottonwoods trees in the park across the street. The air cooled, relieved from the sun’s relentless rays. They shut up the shop doors, and the next morning Stephen was off for Chico.

I was stoked to have Stephen back at school. Although he wasn’t living-in at the frat anymore—he had an apartment with Mary—he’d come by for afternoon barbecues, the occasional party, brotherhood meetings, and just to hang out and shoot the shit with me in my room. He finally declared a major, and picked his grades up after a pretty piss poor academic performance freshman year. But all the guys needed freshman year to calibrate I guess. Hell, I didn’t do so hot freshman year, and still hadn’t picked a major, and still wasn’t doing so hot academically.

Eventually, the baby was born. They named him Matthew, which Mary told me means “gift from God.” Matthew was adorable, and a ton of work. Stephen was always exhausted when I saw him. Mary was beyond exhausted. A lot of the guys helped to cook them meals, got them answers to homework problem sets when they needed them, and generally did small tasks here and there to ease the burden where we could. Despite both of them being perpetually in a half-conscious state of waking, they each seemed to emanate a kind of quiet satisfaction that I never really understood. I still don’t now. Probably because I don’t have a girlfriend or a kid. But I was crowned beer die champion last week at the frat. So I do have a fair share of quiet satisfaction for the time being.