Ryder's Boys

by Cody Ryder

  “Is he going to be here?” she asked eagerly.

  I smiled. It had come to the point where I had to put in my contract that an appearance by Will was not part of my services. “No, I’m afraid not. He’s in school.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I just bought his new album, it’s really good. Really different from his old music, I usually don’t listen to stuff with guitars and stuff, but I liked it a lot.”

  “I’ll let him know.” She seemed happy to hear this.

  “You guys really inspired me a lot. So tell him thank you. And thank you too.”

  “Of course. I’ll tell him.”

  She beamed and walked back to the group of bridesmaids who were standing around waiting for her to return.

  Much like my wedding photography, Will’s career didn’t decline, it boomed. He released his final album shortly after we made the announcement, and his first independent album just a month ago, and it was met with rave reviews. Music critics who had ragged on him saying he was just a performer with a good voice now came out to say that they were surprised to be proven wrong. Some called it the “best album of the year, filled with true heart.”

  When I got home, Will was sitting at his drafting table intently working on a project, earbuds plugged into his ears. I came up behind him and kissed him on the top of the head, and jumped in surprise. “Hey, Luke,” he said, turning his head up to kiss me. “Have you been home long?”

  “Just got in.” I set my camera equipment down by the kitchen table and plonked myself onto the couch. “What a shoot. You got more commendations on your album.”

  He laughed. “I’m sorry. It must be annoying to have to deal with people asking about me every time you go out.” He came over to me and knelt in front of the couch, resting his hand on my chest. I took it and rubbed his palm.

  “Part of the job,” I grinned. “One of these days, maybe you should show up.”

  “Make up a William Masterson package,” he said, “Includes a special appearance by. The guests can all line up to take turns sitting on my lap.”

  “Don’t say that, people would actually buy it,” I laughed, and drew my hand around his neck to bring him down and kiss me.

  “My mom came by today.”

  I sat up on one elbow. “Really?” Linda had apologized to the both of us about a month after she had come to the apartment, but she still had been having a difficult time accepting the situation, and she still was distant with me. “What happened?”

  “Just wanted to make sure I was okay. Also she had a little gift basket from Michael, my old manager. He wants to get me back under his label and apparently is willing to give me ‘unprecedented freedom’ in my contract.”

  “Okay,” I said doubtfully.

  “He can send all the wine and cheese he wants but I’m not going back.”

  “Okay.”

  “Also, my mom said she had something for you.”

  “For me?” I couldn’t imagine what she would want to give me.

  “Yes, but she wouldn’t say what it is. Only that you’ll get a call about it soon.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “She’s trying her best,” Will said. “She’s a stubborn woman, you know that.”

  “Yeah.”

  Later that evening while I was working on editing photos from the day’s wedding, my cell phone rang. I looked at the number and saw that it was unlisted, and I considered letting it go to voice mail if not for a little hunch inside that told me to pick up the phone.

  “Luke Golden,” I answered.

  “Luke, hi,” a woman’s voice said from the other line. “My name’s Robin Morris from Homeowners Mag. How are you this evening?”

  Robin Morris. I immediately bolted up in my chair. Robin Morris was the CEO of the company.

  “Uh, great, how are you doing Mrs. Morris?”

  “Please, just Robin. I’m doing great. The reason why I’m calling is in regards to an open position we have for a staff photographer.”

  My heart was thundering now.

  “Okay…”

  “I’m calling you directly because I’ve gotten a personally recommendation from a good friend of mind that you are the one for that job. Now typically I don’t do this. We’re very selective about who we hire, but when I saw your portfolio I was convinced. So, I’d like to ask if you are interested in a position.”

  My head spun. Linda. This was what she had meant. I felt an explosive mix of emotions – a stubborn anger at what she had done to Will, what she had said to us that day – and I considered saying no out of spite. But then I remembered what Will had said to me earlier – “She’s trying her best.” Linda wasn’t a bad person. I had accepted and believed her tearful apology. She was just set in her ways, stubborn, the kind of person who had trouble admitting she was wrong. She was trying her best.

  “I am,” I said. “I would love to accept the position.”

  Will, who was working on his project, looked over at me when he heard this.

  “Great. Come by and see me tomorrow at two o’clock. We’ll get everything sorted.”

  “Thank you, Robin. Goodbye.” I slowly set the phone down on the table, trying to keep a hold of myself.

  “What was that about?” Will asked.

  “That,” I said, turning slowly to him, “was Robin Morris. The CEO of Homeowners Mag.”

  His mouth dropped open. “What?!”

  “I just got offered a job!”

  “Holy shit!”

  We both leapt out of our chairs and ran to each other, and Will threw his arms around me and lifted me up in the air. “Oh my God!” he beamed. “You did it!”

  I laughed and he spun me around in circles several times before setting me back down. “You’ll never believe who got me the job though, Will.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mom. She’s friends with Robin Morris and put in a personal recommendation.”

  “Oh my God…” he whispered, his eyes wide with shock.

  It was then that I knew that everything would be okay. From that gesture, I knew that Linda would open up to us being together – no, she already had. It might take her a while to be completely comfortable, but I would accept her olive branch. And what an olive branch it was.

  “Okay, well,” Will said, “I’ve got something else to propose to you, and this seems to be about as good a time as any to do it.” He squeezed my hands. “Luke, being with you has been the most fulfilling thing in my life, more than architecture, more than design, more than music.”

  That’s when he dropped down to one knee in front of me. I gasped.

  “You’re the love of my life, and that’s why I want to ask you to marry me.”

  I didn’t think heart could take this much good news. If I felt lightheaded before, I was practically on the verge of passing out. “Of course,” I said. “Yes, of course I will.” I didn’t need to think twice about it. I pulled him in and kissed him, the fireworks exploding in my head just like it was the first time.

  Epilogue

  We were married in August, just a little over a year after we first met. The wedding was small and private, held secretly so that we didn’t have any unwanted guests. The team of photographers flitted around snapping shots of the two of us, and I felt a weird urge to double check that they had all their bases covered. I restrained, laughing to myself as I remembered Carol, the mother of the bride at the wedding where Will and I had first met.

  Frankie and April were our best persons, and at the dinner April gave a hilarious speech about how she was pretty much the reason why Will and I were together.

  My parents, who were conservative in their views, had to my surprise changed their opinions on the matter when they found out that I was gay. They came to the wedding, beaming at me from the front row. Linda was there too of course, and she still carried an icy look on her face – but when Will and I kissed, I saw her smiling, a stream of tears running down her cheeks.

  The crowd of our friends and
family stood and cheered, and as I stood there with my husband I could see the rest of our future together – our beautiful home in the countryside, built to his exact specification, the walls hung with my photography and my photo books plugged away on the bookshelves inside. He and I, our hair streaked with grey, sitting out in the front as he strummed a song on his guitar while I listened with my chin in my palm just like always.

  And as that vision faded from my mind, I knew that things would be perfect.

  Bounty of the Heart

  One

  Powlton, California.

  Settled in 1885 as a small farming community, Powlton stayed an unincorporated community within San Diego County until the late 1970’s. Even when it became its own city, Powlton was still tiny, with just one main road going through the entire thing. And today? It definitely lives up to its nickname: “the city in the country.” Although, considering it’s located just forty minutes north of downtown San Diego—a real city with actual tall buildings and city things—it probably would be more apt to just call it “the town in armpit of San Diego”.

  Powlton was where I grew up. I went to high school at Powlton High, middle school at Powlton Middle, elementary at Powlton elementary—you get the idea. As a kid, it was probably the best place to be. Plenty of places to ride your bike off-road, a nice public swimming pool, the bowling alley to hang out with your friends, it was safe, friendly, and close enough to things like Sea World and the San Diego Zoo. As I got older, though, this sleepy one road town only made me restless. I had big dreams—dreams of the city, San Francisco, of working on the cutting edge of my field, getting to ride up to my top floor office in a skyscraper every day and knowing that I was making something with my life. Powlton, with its public pool, its one bowling alley, and its sleepy air of drowsy placidity only stifled me.

  And so, as soon as I graduated high school, I left. I was off to college at UC Berkley to study business, and I was living my dreams. Life then went exactly how I had hoped—in fact, better than how I had hoped. During school, I’d met Alicia, the girl who would become my fiancée. Her father was the vice president of a major technology, and after I graduated, he’d used his connections to help me get a job that most new graduates could only dream of. I worked in my skyscraper office, shared a nice apartment with Alicia, and was well on my way to living the perfect normal city life that I had always seen for myself. We’d have a couple of kids, maybe a dog, move out of our apartment into a condo and eventually get ourselves a house, maybe in San Carlos or something.

  Things were perfect for eight years. Eight years, can you believe that? I proposed to Alicia in our seventh year together, and she said yes. We had everything planned out, and everything was going to be perfect. I thought that what I wanted was what she wanted, but I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I was too wrapped up in making sure everything fell neatly into place in my perfect little idyllic fantasy life, but I sure as hell can tell you that I did not see it coming in the slightest. Hindsight is twenty-twenty as they say, and I looking back at things now I can just make out the signs in my memories, I can see the hesitation, Alicia’s little hints that she wasn’t happy and that things had changed for her.

  She ended it nine months ago. We’d just been in the middle of making our wedding plans.

  “I care about you, Roy,” she told me that day. I was on the ground in front of her, squeezing her hand in mine, tears streaming down my face as I begged her not to go. “But I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. A really long time. And it’s hard for me too, but I need to do this for myself. We’ve been together since college, and I just feel like…I never got to live my life. I never got to explore, or discover me. It wasn’t an easy decision for me, but I’m not ready to be Mrs. Winterfield. Mrs. Anyone.”

  I couldn’t say anything to that. All I felt was hurt that she couldn’t feel free to discover herself with me. And no, she didn’t cheat on me or anything like that, though from the recent Facebook posts I’ve seen of her on some South American beach with her arms wrapped around the waist of some ripped-as-fuck, swimsuit model diving instructor, it really didn’t matter. It hurt all the same, and I understood exactly what she meant by “explore”.

  So there I was, my fiancée walking out the door of the apartment we had shared for eight years, an entire saga—a whole decade—of my life crashing down around me, and I was let go from my job a month later. Downsizing, they said. When it rains, it pours. It really fucking pours.

  In the months that followed, I did what I could to get back on my feet again, though my world was completely torn apart. It felt like I had gone crazy, like everything I had known just didn’t make any sense. I was seeing things differently then, you see, and I suppose it’s bound to happen when the reality you’ve lived in for so long suddenly gets obliterated. I was alone in that apartment, where every corner shared some memory of our time together, and where every morning, I’d wake up in our bed and wonder what the hell was happening, what I had done to deserve this, where had it all gone wrong. I felt like my entire existence was completely shattered.

  I was hitting up all my contacts from school, trying to find a new job that could support my life in San Francisco, but I was coming up empty. Eventually, with all the elements beating at me and my savings account dwindling to its bones, I decided to join the masses of my peers who also couldn’t afford to live independently in this modern world, and swallow my pride. It was back home for me.

  Back home to Powlton. Back with the folks.

  Back to square one.

  Two

  The worst mornings were the ones after I had those vivid dreams.

  In them, I’d be back in my old apartment in San Francisco, waking up to the smell of breakfast cooking and the sound of Alicia singing from the kitchen. I’d get up and out of bed to the kitchen where she was, her back facing me as she cooked at the stove, brown hair flowing down as she worked her magic. I’d walk up to her and wrap my arms around her waist, and she’d look up to me and tell me good morning. I’d kiss her on the forehead, the smell of her hair so vividly filling my senses. Then I’d wake up. For the first few moments after coming back to consciousness, I’d be confused about where I was. Same bed, different room. This was one of those mornings.

  The smell of Alicia’s hair still seemed to linger around me as I looked over to my right where the doorway to the kitchen should be, and caught an eyeful of blank wall. What the hell? I looked up and saw the faint residue of the glow in the dark star stickers I used to have up all across the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, and I remembered where I was. The sound of CNN on the television and the call of birds outside my bedroom window. Alicia and I never had cable TV, and we hardly heard the sound of birds from our city loft apartment.

  I let out a breath of air. “Right,” I muttered, rubbing my eyes as I remembered where I was.

  My chest felt tight. It’d been six months since I’d moved home, nine months since she’d left. I hated that feeling of want, of missing her, of memory—because when I was awake I definitely wasn’t feeling that way about her. Of course I still thought about her from time to time (okay, maybe a little more than that), but I’d at least come to grips with the fact that wallowing in the pain of missing her was meaningless. I didn’t think I was still in love with her, but did the dreams represent what I felt deep down inside?

  If she came waltzing back into my life, would I crumble and beg her to take me back?

  I didn’t know.

  I threw back the covers and without even thinking about it, quickly glanced over at the side of the bed that Alicia used to sleep on. Dugh. Damnit. I’d brought the bed back from San Francisco with me because it was nice, I’d spent a lot of money on it, and I wasn’t about to go back to sleeping in my childhood twin bed. Now I was starting to wish I’d just sold the thing.

  Sitting on the edge of the mattress, I took a few deep breaths and tried to clear my mind. The tightness in my chest was slowly letting
up, but her presence was still choking my mind. I looked over at the small electronic clock sitting on my bedside table. Eleven. Another late morning, as usual. I’d always been the kind of person who liked to wake up early so I could sneak in a workout before going to the office, but ever since moving back home I’d found myself waking up later and later. It wasn’t just because I was out of the job. I just was having difficulty finding the motivation.