Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

If my husband is the evangelical city boy who couldn’t have been less like my father if he tried, then Tony is everything I grew up never knowing I wanted, a butch from shitkicker Missouri who can strut into a room full of Boston academics wearing cowboy boots and a flannel and spin a story that leaves them all in her thrall. The rural redneck, roughneck boys and men of my youth never felt right, but everything about the way she moves settles something in me like fresh morning dew on a quiet field. Her natural charisma reminds me of my father’s, bright like the sun just before the eclipse shadow. She smells like every man in my family, all whiskey and tobacco, the kind a candle can never quite distill. On her, the masculinity I used to think I hated is suddenly resplendent, a gravitational pull I don’t want to resist. She fucks with gender on purpose, and when I tell her she is the best man I’ve ever met, she looks me straight in the eye and says thank you, the subtle twang in her voice reaching parts of me I thought I’d buried.