Fractured Vows

The contract was three pages long, single-spaced, and smelled faintly of the printer that had spat it out ten minutes ago in the back office of my brother's auto shop. I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, because the first two times I'd been distracted by the way Selin kept tapping her thumbnail against her front tooth, a habit she'd had since we were kids and she was trying to decide whether to lie to our mother about where we'd been all afternoon.

"You want me," I said, "to pretend to be your boyfriend."

"Fiancé." She didn't look up from her phone. "There's a difference. Boyfriend is a text message. Fiancé is a ring and a story and a reason my mother stops setting me up with the son of every dentist in Istanbul."

We were sitting on overturned oil drums in the corner of the shop, because the chairs had all been commandeered by a transmission that was bleeding fluid onto the concrete. Outside, the Bosphorus was doing its evening trick of turning the color of weak tea, and the call to prayer from the mosque two streets over had just finished bleeding through the corrugated walls. My brother Emre was under a Fiat, swearing softly in a rhythm that suggested he'd stripped a bolt.

"You hate me," I said.

"I don't hate you. I tolerate you at a level that occasionally resembles affection." She finally looked up. Her eyes were the same dark brown they'd been when she was seven and pushed me into the shallow end of the pool at the summer house. "And you owe me."

"I don't owe you."

"You owe me for the thing with the boat."

"That was eight years ago."

"And I still have the receipt." She smiled, and it was the smile of someone who had never lost an argument in her life and didn't intend to start now. "Four months. Two family dinners a month. One wedding in June, my cousin's, in Bodrum. You show up, you hold my hand, you tell my aunt that I snore and you find it charming. Then in September, we have a very sad, very mutual breakup, and I go back to being the daughter who can't keep a man, which is apparently less shameful than the daughter who won't try."

I picked up the contract. The font was Times New Roman, which felt like an insult. "Why me?"

"Because you're the only man my mother has ever met who didn't try to sell her something." She pulled her knees up onto the drum, which couldn't have been comfortable, and wrapped her arms around them. "Because you know which fork to use at dinner and you can talk to my father about football for exactly eleven minutes before you run out of things to say, which is perfect, because that's exactly when he runs out too. Because you won't fall in love with me."

The last part landed differently than the rest. She said it fast, like she was skipping over a pothole.

"And if I say no?"

"Then I go to Bodrum alone and my aunt Fatma spends the entire wedding asking me why I'm not married, and I drink enough rakı to forget, and I wake up on a beach next to a German tourist named Hans, and I have to spend the next decade hearing about it." She shrugged. "Your choice."

I should have said no. I want to be clear about that, because everything that came after, all of it, started right here, on an oil drum, with a contract I could have refused. I should have said no and gone back to my apartment and my job and the quiet life I'd built out of the wreckage of the last one.

Instead I asked, "What's the payment?"

She blinked. "Payment?"

"You said it's a contract. Contracts have terms."

For a second she looked thrown, and I felt a small, mean satisfaction at having knocked her off her script. Then she recovered. "Fine. I'll pay off your mother's hospital bill."

The shop went quiet. Emre had stopped swearing under the Fiat.

"That's not funny," I said.

"I'm not being funny. I know about the bill. I know it's forty-two thousand and you've been paying it down for two years and you're not even close." She said it plainly, without pity, which was the only way she could have said it and not gotten thrown out of the shop. "I have the money. You know I have the money. My father's been trying to give me a job at the company for six years and I keep saying no because I'd rather die, but the money's there regardless. So. Four months of your time, and your mother stops getting those phone calls."

I thought about my mother, who still called me every Sunday and pretended the bill didn't exist, who had raised two sons on a nurse's salary and never once asked either of us for a lira. I thought about the phone calls she thought I didn't know about. I thought about how Selin knew all of this, had probably known for months, and had been sitting on it like a card up her sleeve, waiting for the right hand to play it.

"You're a piece of work," I said.

"I know." She hopped off the drum and held out her hand, palm up, like we were kids again and she was daring me to jump off the pier. "So. Do we have a deal?"

Emre slid out from under the Fiat, wiped his hands on a rag, and looked at me with an expression I couldn't read. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He'd been telling me for years that Selin was going to get me into trouble, and here she was, and here I was, reaching for her hand.

Her palm was warm and dry. Her grip was firm, the way it had always been, the way it was the day she'd pulled me out of the deep end of that pool when I was eleven and couldn't swim and she was nine and could.

"Four months," I said.

"Four months." She pulled the contract toward her, folded it in thirds, and tucked it into her back pocket. "And don't fall in love with me."

"I won't."

"Good." She turned toward the door, then stopped, one hand on the frame. "One more thing. My mother's going to ask how we met. The real story is boring. We're going to tell her we met at a wedding. Yours. A cousin's. You were miserable and I was drunk and we talked all night."

"That's a lie."

"All of it's a lie." She smiled again, softer this time, and something in my chest shifted a half inch to the left. "Might as well make it a good one."

The door swung shut behind her. The call to prayer had started up again somewhere, or maybe it had never stopped. Emre went back under the Fiat, and I stood there in the middle of the shop with my hand still half-open, like an idiot, like a man who'd just signed something he couldn't read.