Page 105 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“But that wasn’t good enough for the rejected suitor,” Jacob continued,

settling down into the Tube seat beside hers. “He’d been wanting to marry this
woman for ages, long before the adult realization that marriage isn’t all that
necessary . . . so he proposed again the following evening. The babies don’t have
to happen, he said, and then he sang the cheesiest Korean song he could
find . . .”
Was Jacob about to sing “What’s Wrong with My Age” right there on the
Tube with all these boys and girls and men and women looking? They were

already looking, since he hadn’t bothered to keep his voice down.
Still, she stuck up for “What’s Wrong with My Age.” “It’s not a cheesy song!
It’s your singing that makes it cheesy. I love that song.”
“Me too. But I’m afraid it is inherently cheddar, J.”
Jacob turned to Jill, opened his arms and sang, in Korean, of staring into the

mirror and bidding time to stand aside. The lyrics sprang to her own lips as she
listened, and by the time he was challenging her to deny that his age was the
perfect age for love, she was smiling the words right back at him.
As he sang, she realized something. He hadn’t been thinking about leaving
her. Whatever he’d been working up to asking her, it was about something else
entirely. She placed a finger over his lips: “And when they wed their parents and
all their friends stood up in the church pews and sang ‘At last’ . . .” but Jacob

made a halfhearted attempt to bite her, then said: “Hey! Hey Jill. Are you
thinking about leaving me?”
She didn’t answer that. One of the things she’d learned about him early on
was that he had an inbuilt and near-infallible lie detector, and all of a sudden she
wasn’t sure whether what she’d really been doing for the past few weeks was
skillfully molding her own desire to be single again into an image of his. It could

be that all Jill’s leaving and being left had now made it impossible for her to stay
with anyone.
—

FOR MOST of their lives she and Jacob had both been afraid of the same thing: not
being deemed worthy to share a home with a family. They were both foster kids.
Nobody ever said you were unworthy, not to your face, but there was talk of

adults and children not being “the right fit” for each other. The adults were the
ones who decided that, so when “fit” was brought up they were really talking
about the child. This left Jacob, and Jill, and Lena (Jill’s onetime foster sister
during an idyllic but brief lull) ever-ready to have to leave a home, or to be left.