Harvey never really understood what it was like not to be a father until he himself was not a father at the age of 32. As the only child of a single mother he’d seen various men come into and out of he and his mother’s life and not be a father to him, and sometimes it was his mother who told them they were not his father and sometimes it was Harvey who told them they were not his father so that it was always well and clear whom Harvey’s father was: not them.

The curious thing about these men who were not his father was that they were only not his father when they tried to be his father. Otherwise and at all other times they were just men, referred to either as Steve, Charlie, Harold, Doug, et cetera, or if his mother was feeling particularly ironic and they were new, Uncle Steve, Uncle Charlie, et cetera—though always with the understanding that they were no more related to him than the boy who delivered the paper every morning.

Uncle Steve taught him how to ride a bike and built him a bicycle out of scraps he’d found at the junkyard. It had a banana seat and a bell on the handlebars his godmother had brought back from China. Harvey stole his first joint from Uncle Harold and smoked it with another boy from junior high who never would have given him the time of day before and never really did after.

These merits of unfatherhood endeared them to Harvey, but eventually the bike fell apart, the cogs rusted, Harvey smoked the joint and got cotton mouth, heard voices and got the spins, and when his mother broke up with them they wished him well, promised to stay in touch, vowed that Harvey had been just as important to this relationship as anything else, but inevitably they faded away. They were in mourning and the sight of him pained them, reminded them of what they’d lost, et cetera, and they just weren’t strong enough yet. They were never strong enough.

When his mother next met Uncle John or Uncle Richard or Uncle Stephen (“en,” with an “eph”), Harvey would nod and say hello, but he never really expected anything from them, because the sooner you thought they were anything other than what they were—“Uncle,” like mercy, like what you cry out when you can’t take it anymore—the sooner they were gone.

Before Harvey became not a father but after he became a man, he also dated women. Their names were Sarah and Caroline and Amy and Jan and they were pretty and smart, and they reminded Harvey of his mother inasmuch as they were pretty and smart, but were also different from his mother inasmuch as they didn’t have any children, so that not being not a father was never any problem.

He was happy for some of the time and for some of the time he was sad, and when he was sad he went to see his therapist who told him, “Do what makes you happy.” Swimming made Harvey happy. To stay fit he would go to the local gym every day and swim thirty laps. He was very good at holding his breath; he could go two laps without coming up for air, which is why one afternoon he noticed the thrashing in the water before he heard the shouts from up above. He broke the surface halfway through his second lap and looked around just in time to see a little boy’s hand sink down beneath the water at the deep end of the pool. He didn’t even stop to catch his breath before he went under again. The boy was limp in his arms, all his measurable weight dripping from his sodden clothes.

The woman, the mother, the source of the scream, took the boy from his arms like Harvey himself had held the boy’s head underwater. She didn’t say anything. She wept, and when the boy came to he wept with her, and no one noticed when Harvey got out of the pool and dried his face off with a towel and walked into the locker room and changed into his other clothes.

That was all, thought Harvey: an interesting story he told his coworkers back at work, and later when his mother called him, he told her too. She inhaled sharply and reminded him about the time he’d gotten lost at the circus. She’d frantically sought out the people in charge who’d instructed her to wait by the gate and look at the shoes of everyone who left. Why the shoes? Because, they’d told her, if someone had kidnapped him they might change him into different clothes so no one would recognize him but they’d leave him with the same shoes; they wouldn’t bother to bring a different pair of shoes. So she’d done that; she’d stared at all the shoes leaving, big shoes and little shoes and medium-sized shoes, leather boots and sneakers and flip-flops and heels, and then Harvey had walked up to her, crying, still dressed in the same clothes he’d worn that morning. The same shoes. “You’d stopped to look at the miniature horse and hadn’t noticed when I wasn’t there anymore,” she said.

“I don’t remember that,” said Harvey. “Anyway, I really don’t think that has anything to do with this.”

“Oh, but it does,” said his mother. “It’s exactly the same.”

Harvey expected never to see the mother and her son again, but two days later, there they were. The mother was running on the treadmill and her son was struggling under the weight of a ten-pound dumbbell. When she saw Harvey, she stopped running and came over to talk to him. “I didn’t get a chance to thank you for what you did the other day,” she said. “I wanted to. Thank you.”

“It was nothing,” said Harvey. “I hope your boy’s all right.”

“Elvis. His name is Elvis,” she said, looking over at him, his arms like scissors beneath the weight. “I’m sorry,” she shook her head, “but this isn’t good enough. I wonder if you’d like to have dinner with us tonight. Tonight is macaroni and cheese night. Macaroni and cheese night is Elvis’ favorite.”

Her name was Yael and she was a single mother. She lived with Elvis in a one-bedroom apartment in the part of town no one ever went to unless they were on their way to somewhere else; just her and Elvis and the cat. Harvey got lost three times and was twenty minutes late. Dinner was out of a box, the wine was out of a jug, and when she put Elvis to bed she sang him “Hush Little Baby” with a tin ear. She was tone deaf, but Harvey thought it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard.

This was the way it happened: he mistook her gratitude for attraction; she mistook his affection for love. Eventually the one turned into the other, but the gratitude was disarming, the affection blinding. The nuclear family can be a powerful call to the grown child of a single mother, to a single mother. Was it because she was a single mother just like his mother? Did he seek to redeem those unfathers from his own childhood? This is what his friends would tell him, what he would tell his friends after more than several drinks, but it was both far more complicated and unimaginably more simple than all that.

They decided he should move in after much long and careful deliberation, because of course there was more to take into account than just their own personal feelings on the subject; there was Elvis. Harvey soon found it was different from dating Sarah or Caroline or Amy or Jan without children. One night Elvis wet the bed that they all still shared sometimes and woke up crying. Yael cleaned him up and put him in fresh pajamas and tucked him into his own bed, and then she and Harvey changed the sheets. Suddenly she began crying. “What is it?” asked Harvey. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve always done this alone,” she said. “It’s always been just me and Elvis. And that’s fine. We did fine. It’s just, I’ve never had anyone else help me make the bed.” Harvey hugged her and she buried her face in her shoulder, and then when they finished tucking the last sheet in its corner she buried her face in the pillow, and after she had fallen asleep there was a giant wet spot where her face had been, but that was okay, they didn’t have to change the sheets again; tears were much better to sleep in than pee.

A couple of days later Harvey caught Elvis feeding bugs to the cat, and he reprimanded him. “Don’t feed bugs to the cat,” he said.

“Don’t tell Elvis what to do,” said Yael. “You’re not his father.”

Harvey was at a loss for how to respond. He knew very well that he was not Elvis’ father, but he didn’t see how that had anything to do with feeding bugs to the cat. That night he talked to his mother and he told her about the argument, expecting her to take his side on the subject. She didn’t. “She’s right, you know,” she said. “You’re not his father.”

“Of course I’m not his father,” said Harvey. “That’s not the issue here.”

“Oh, but it is,” said his mother. “It’s precisely the issue.”

Harvey stopped seeing his therapist for fear of what his therapist might say about his seeing a single mother. Harvey hadn’t read Freud but he knew enough to know he wanted nothing to do with it. When he began to get a belly he thought it was just because of the food they were eating; macaroni and cheese was not just Elvis’ favorite meal, it was very nearly the only meal they ate. He returned to the gym to swim his laps but it didn’t matter how long he could hold his breath anymore; he was too buoyant.

After five months and with his belly now the size of a cantaloupe, Harvey decided to go to the hospital. “Doctor, I don’t understand it,” he said. “I try to eat well, I exercise. Why have I become so fat?”

The doctor took his blood pressure, checked his heart and took some X-rays, and then he met Yael and Harvey in his office, where he leaned back in his chair, palms splayed across the armrests. His face bore the color tones of a medical man; white hair, white teeth, pink skin, blue eyes; he looked like the kind of man who ate every meal to the very calorie of the food pyramid, like he’d never been sick a day in his life.

“It’s not often I get to say a thing like this,” said the doctor. “But Mister, you’re pregnant.”

“But—but,” stammered Yael, “but he’s a man! Harvey, you’re a man!” she cried. “Besides, we used protection!”

Harvey didn’t say anything. He stared at his belly. He put his hand over his belly button and thought he felt a kick. So I’m a father after all, Harvey thought to himself. He imagined the phone call to his mother: “Hello, Mom—I mean Grandma,” and her wanton squeal.

“Ha!” cried the doctor. “Ha!” he slapped himself on the knee. “That never fails to tickle me pink!” Harvey and Yael stared at the doctor like he’d gone off the deep end. “You’ve just got a little bit of a belly there, Harvey. A little blocked up is all. Are you stressed? Because some people, when they’re stressed, they store it all in one place. For some people it’s their back, their neck, their joints. Some people, it’s their belly. Nothing critical. Try exercising a little bit more and, uh, maybe cut back on the carbohydrates.”

Of course there wasn’t a baby—or there was, but just one. Inside Harvey’s belly there was a liver and a pancreas and a gallbladder and a spleen—one of each. There was a stomach and the intestines—one large, one small—and an appendix. There were one of all these organs but there were not two, and there were not two not because they hadn’t developed yet or because they were still too small to be distinguished from nothing but because he was a man, not a mother.

Neither said a word to the other as they drove from the hospital to pick Elvis up from preschool. Neither had been amused by the doctor’s mirth. It seemed cruel, black humor; gallows humor, even. When Elvis got in the car he said he was hungry, Harvey and Yael said they were hungry too, and they decided on Mexican food because Elvis said he wanted the fish tacos.

“Remember when we had the fish tacos in Mexico?” he asked Harvey.

“Nope,” said Harvey.

“That was before we met Uncle Harvey,” said Yael.

“Oh,” blinked Elvis, who seemed somehow embarrassed to admit that there had been a life before Harvey—places they’d been to and meals he could still remember; as if it was they who had been Harvey’s parents, and this—that there had been a them before Harvey, before his conception—was startling and somehow shameful. At the last minute Elvis decided he wanted a bean and cheese burrito instead, and then when the order came he wouldn’t touch it. “I wanted the tacos,” he cried. “Like from Mexico!”

“Honey, you changed your mind,” she said. “Honey, that’s what you said you wanted.”

Harvey turned away and took a swig of his beer. Yael leaned into him with a smirk. “Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” she asked. “I mean, for the baby?”

Elvis blinked. “What baby?”

“Oh, it’s just a joke, honey. The doctor told Uncle Harvey he was going to have a baby.”

When Harvey was finished with his own burrito he started in on Elvis’, still untouched, still wrapped in thin, crinkly paper the color of saffron, because he just couldn’t let all that food go to waste, and when Yael mentioned how big his appetite seemed today, Harvey just nodded. He nodded because his mouth was full, and this seemed somehow appropriate—that his mouth should be full—because he didn’t have anything to say anyway that a full mouth couldn’t answer, and because if wishing made it true, he was eating for two.