His Brother’s Wife
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 11
It started with Becky.
They were in the grocery store on a Thursday evening, their second week of cooking dinner together, and she had gone ahead to the produce section while he stopped for olive oil, and when he came around the corner and saw her standing there frowning at two bunches of parsley as though they had personally offended her he said, without thinking, “Becky, just pick one, they’re both parsley.”
She turned and looked at him.
“Becky,” she said.
“Is that okay?”
She considered it with the seriousness she brought to most things, turning it over, and then something settled in her face that was not quite a smile and not quite something else but was warm either way. “Yes,” she said. “I think I like that.”
She put both bunches of parsley in the cart.
From Becky it was a short distance to Beckster, which arrived one Sunday morning when she beat him to the coffee and had both cups poured before he made it to the kitchen, and he said “Beckster, you are a miracle” in the voice of a man who had not had coffee yet and meant it with his whole heart. She laughed and handed him his cup and he saw, for just a moment, the version of her that had been in there all along — light and quick and a little mischievous — finally finding room to show itself.
Baby Girl came later.
They were at a diner in Park Slope for Sunday brunch, a place with red vinyl booths and a menu the size of a small novel, and the waitress — a woman in her fifties with the manner of someone who had seen everything twice — came to take their order and looked at Joshua and said, “What’ll it be for you and your little girl, hon?”
Rebekah went perfectly still.
Joshua looked at the waitress and then at Rebekah and said, completely straight-faced, “She’ll have the eggs Benedict. My wife will have whatever she likes.”
The waitress had the grace to look mortified. Rebekah ordered the French toast with the composure of a queen and did not laugh until the woman was back behind the counter, and then she laughed until her eyes watered, her hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking.
“Baby Girl,” Joshua said, watching her. “That’s what you are. That’s the name.”
“I am not a baby girl,” she said, still laughing.
“You are absolutely a baby girl. Look at you. The waitress thought I brought my daughter to brunch.”
“I am eighteen years old and I am your wife.”
“You are eighteen years old and you are my wife and you are a baby girl and I am not taking it back.”
She shook her head but she was still smiling, and when the French toast came she ate every bite of it.
After that it was her name, the one that was only his — Baby Girl for the mornings when she was still half asleep and shuffled into the kitchen in her socks, Baby Girl when she did something that delighted him, Baby Girl said quietly across a restaurant table just to watch the color come into her face. She pretended to find it undignified. He was not fooled.
He found out by accident that she had started testing it.
They were in a department store on a Saturday, looking for a jacket she had decided she wanted, and he was holding her coat while she tried things on and he heard him say across the rack — not to anyone, just into the air — “Baby Girl, what do you think of this one?”
Two women turned around.
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