For the Love of April French

by Penny Aimes

  “Ugh, I hate it when you call me that.”

  “You just called me Bubba, you think I love that nickname?”

  “That’s what I call you, ’cause you’re my big brother. I’ve called you that since I could talk.”

  “And you’re my little sister and I call you Peanut.”

  “No, you call all of us Peanut and it sucks. At least give me a personal nickname.”

  “I’m gonna be real with you and tell you you’re all in my phone as Peanut. I don’t really know which one of you this is.” This wasn’t true—well, they were all in his phone as Peanut, but he had recognized Georgia’s voice immediately. But part of being a big brother was driving a bit into the ground.

  “Asshole. This is Georgia.”

  “Ohhh, the tall Peanut. ’Kay. What’s up?”

  He could hear his oldest little sister shaking her head down the line.

  “Just calling to catch up,” she said. “I haven’t heard from you in a while and you went and deleted Facebook, so I was just curious.” Oh. Right. He’d nuked most of his social media earlier in the summer, in order to resist the temptation to peek at Sonia’s life without him.

  “Yeah, sorry.” He closed out his browser and prepared to focus on an old-fashioned family catch-up. It had been too long. “I’ve been talking to Mom often enough and I guess I just assumed it all got circulated.” Not that he told her everything.

  “Well, I’m not saying she hasn’t told me plenty.” Their mother always had plenty to say. “But it’s different hearing it from you.”

  “Maybe you just miss me,” he said.

  “Nah, can’t be that,” she said. “I’ve got enough family here, with Mom and Dad and Kat and the cousins and all that. Who cares about Bubba off in Austin?”

  “Well shit, I thought you guys might want to come down for Austin City Limits, but I guess I see how it is now.” The weeklong music festival was coming up in October, and Dennis and Jason already had wristbands; but he had indeed considered bringing his family down for at least one weekend. Or at least Georgia and Kat. He’d like them to meet April; even if he wasn’t exactly sure how that introduction would go. Maybe, once they met her, he could talk to them about the trap he’d caught himself in.

  “Now I didn’t say all that...”

  He laughed. “Nah, it’s okay. I’ll keep all this good food to myself, too. I was going to teach you about barbecue.”

  She snorted. “You can keep that Texas shit. I’m a vinegar-based girl.”

  “Wait a second, you know about different types of barbecue? I thought I’d been missing out all this time because of being from the Midwest.”

  “I don’t know about Seattle, but there is perfectly good barbecue of all different kinds here in Illinois, Dennis. You just gotta find it.”

  “How did I not know about this? The only barbecue I knew about was Grandma’s.”

  “See, that’s your problem, though. If you don’t like something you just don’t ever try it again instead of learning something.”

  “I do not,” he protested, although inwardly he was registering a direct hit to his ego. Nobody could rival their mother when it came to seeing right through people, but all of the Martin girls had inherited a little bit of her X-ray vision.

  “Mm-hm.”

  He rolled his eyes. “So how are you doing, though? How’s work? How’s Ray?” He liked Georgia’s husband, a big, quiet and self-possessed guy she’d met in college at Urbana-Champaign. They’d been married several years by now.

  “Ray’s good,” she said. “We’ve been talking about kids again, but I just don’t think it’s time yet. I’ve got one more exam for my CPA and then hopefully I can move up next year. I can think about getting pregnant after that.”

  Kat and Georgia both had good careers, although neither had hit the jackpot like Dennis; he had been in the right place at the right time, and there just weren’t that many right places to go around.

  “Yeah, you got time. How is Kat?”

  “Katrina’s good...you oughta call her, too, you know.”

  “She still living at home?”

  “You think Mom would miss a chance to tell you if she moved out?”

  “I genuinely don’t understand why she doesn’t want her own place,” he said, shaking his head. Living in the attic of their old family home had made sense while she was getting her graphic design business off the ground, but she was doing fine now. And she worked from home, which meant she was with their parents all the time. Dennis loved his family, but...

  “She says she likes it there. She takes care of the dogs.”

  “It couldn’t be me,” he said, shaking his head again.

  “You know it won’t be long until we might be glad to have somebody living with Mom and Dad,” Georgia said gently, and he winced.

  “I don’t want to think about that.”

  “Bubba, we both know when Mom and Dad can’t live on their own anymore, it’s going to be you paying and Kat on the spot.”

  “What are you and Keisha going to do in this equation?”

  “I’m management,” she sniffed, and he chuckled at that. “And I don’t expect anything from Keisha.” Unlike the previous comment, that wasn’t a joke. It was real bitterness.

  “You hear from Keisha at all these days?” His third sister, and the one most distant from the family. Dennis had moved away, but he tried to stay in touch and came back for Thanksgiving at least every year; Keisha was a permanent maybe.

  As the baby, Keisha was the only one who hadn’t grown up in a house where debt collectors were calling night and day. Maybe that was why her ambitions were less practical, or maybe there wasn’t a pat explanation for it. Whatever the reason, Keisha had dropped out of college and gone west to be a movie star. It hadn’t gone great, but she was hanging in there.

  “Nah, she’s still dating that guy and she doesn’t want to hear from me right now,” said Georgia wryly. Reluctantly: “I heard from Kat she needs money.”

  What Keisha did have in common with her siblings was the intense personality they had inherited from their mother. Only Katrina had their father’s gentle peacemaker gene. The rest of them were slightly too prone to making sure their opinion was known. It didn’t always promote family harmony.

  He exhaled. “I’ll call Kat soon. I don’t know why Keisha doesn’t just call me when she needs money.”

  “Yes, you do,” Georgia laughed. “She’s too proud. She tells Kat because she knows Kat can’t help. Just putting it out there and letting word filter around to you is just about all she can stand.”

  It was true. After a beat, Georgia pointed out: “You know you didn’t answer, right? About how you’re doing?”

  “I’m good,” he said, dragging his mind away from the puzzle of his baby sister. “Everything’s good. I just don’t have a lot to talk about, I guess. I’m in Austin, I’m eating well, having Jason down the street is like being back in high school, in a good way. House still isn’t finished.”

  “Dennis, the fuck. How is your house not finished?”

  “That’s what I keep saying,” he said. “How is this not finished? Mostly we’re dealing with city code stuff. Maybe in the next month or so.”

  “You need to talk to your guy.”

  “Reggie’s doing his best. He’s a good contractor, this house just has a lot of surprises in it. We had some leaks and they had to rip up the floor and start over once they fixed the roof.”

  “Mm-hm,” she said again. The two syllables were an impenetrable wall of knowing better, and it frustrated him. Now he was feeling like it was a good thing she didn’t know about April. There was nothing like family for putting you in two minds about everything.

  “He’s nice,” Dennis argued. “He invited me to a cookout for Juneteenth.”

  “Oh, well if he can grill, t
hen that’s okay,” she said, dripping sarcasm. “Y’have a good time at least?”

  “Yeah, it was great. I’ve been wondering where Austin was hiding all the Black folks. I met some cool guys.” There’d been a lot of people at the cookout, a pretty wide spectrum of Reggie’s friends and clients and younger people invited by his kids. He’d found a pocket of tech guys and settled in. “I’m supposed to do some trivia thing with one of them actually.”

  “Good job, Bubba, you found the Blerds.”

  “You’re an accountant, you can’t say shit about Black nerds.”

  “I’m not an accountant yet.” Georgia had not started out to be an accountant, but a job as an office assistant had carried her sideways into an unexpected career, and she felt that set her apart from people born with a pocket calculator in their hand. “Nah, I’m glad you made some friends. You said you met some cool guys...what about the ladies?”

  “Subtle.”

  She snorted. “It’s not supposed to be subtle, it’s a straight question.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, and she continued. “We all liked Sonia, Dennis, but you broke up and that’s it. I worry about you down there in your leaky-ass house all alone.”

  “I’m not all alone,” he said. All right; here it was. His chance, if he wanted it.

  The problem was, he didn’t know how to explain about April; anything about April. Their relationship was officially nothing official; he didn’t know if he was allowed to tell people she was trans, and he absolutely didn’t want to discuss kink with his sister. He certainly hadn’t explained anything about his relationship with Sonia or what ended it, and so the breakup had come out of left field for his family. He didn’t want to go down that road again with something that, despite his best efforts, might never solidify into a real relationship. “I keep plenty busy. I’m barely in this house between work and everything else.”

  “How is work? Mom says you’re dealing with some clown who wants your job.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” he said, sighing. Work was definitely a headache right now. “Things have been going all right, but I knew sooner or later I’d hit something me and the COO couldn’t settle on. We need to do this server migration, but he’s being a tool about it. He thinks it’s going to fuck everything up and no one’s going to be able to find their files.”

  “Okay, translate that for some with a slightly lower Blerd quotient, Bubba.”

  “All right, so this company keeps all their data on servers, right? And all the different teams have found their own solutions to this so there’s a bunch of different ones, run by different companies. Different services. We can save a lot of time and money by putting it all in one place, but Graham is a stubborn son of a bitch. We were giving a presentation to the shareholders about our plans for the quarter and he deleted my slides from the deck we had put together. I had to just freestyle on the spot.”

  God, he’d been angry. “I can’t help feeling like a couple years ago I would’ve pushed this guy out already,” he said. “Or at least shut him up. But I don’t know, it’s a new company, I don’t have the social capital I did before...he’s been there a long time and all the other East Coast big shots know him and they don’t know me.”

  “Mm-hm.” There it was again, and the most frustrating thing was her skepticism was warranted; it sounded like excuses to him, too.

  “But that’s not even it, really. I mean. I guess if I really wanted to, I could finesse him. But I just...don’t want to. I wanted this to be easier.”

  “Well, that makes sense,” she said. “If I had your money, I wouldn’t be working at all.”

  “I like working,” he said. “I just don’t want to have to be a dick to do it. But I don’t like getting pushed around, either.”

  “Look, Bubba, I know you don’t want to talk about whatever happened with Sonia. But anybody who knows you can tell that you’re different than you were.”

  “Thanks,” he muttered in a dry tone of voice.

  “I’m just saying...that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You remember when we were kids and you read my diary? And you found out I was dating a guy in your grade and you beat seven kinds of shit out of him and got suspended? Is that still what you’d do today?”

  “I stand by that beatdown. Any high school senior dating a middle schooler is trash, Georgia.”

  “I know that now, Dennis, thank you. But is that still how you’d handle it? Or, since we’re all adults now, looking back, was that the right way to handle it?”

  He closed his eyes. “I mean, I still feel pretty good about hitting him, but it shouldn’t have come to that. In a perfect world I wouldn’t have read your damn diary, Peanut.” Life as a Black man in a white business had taught him to keep his temper under control, and Sonia had put the seal on that lesson. Sure, he got angry. Everybody got angry. But you could care about solving problems or you could care about taking your mad out on someone’s face. They were—mostly—mutually exclusive.

  “Exactly,” Georgia said, as if she had scored some tremendous point.

  “Exactly what?”

  “You grew up, Dennis. People grow up. If I could have that talk with Keisha again, I’d sure as hell handle it different.”

  “Yeah, but I’m...”

  “But what?”

  “I might not get what I want this way.”

  There was a long pause, in which he could sense Georgia restraining a record-breaking fourth “Mm-hm.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yes, I heard how that sounded. Love you, Peanut.”

  “Love you, too, Bubba. Call more often.”

  “I’ll try.” And he would definitely call Kat. But first he shot Jason a text message. He was ready to swallow his pride and work with a mentor. You could care about solving problems or you could care about holding on to your pride. He was going to do this right, and maybe, if he was lucky, he could get what he wanted, too.

  August

  As the summer went on, April grew gradually more comfortable using his card, and he grew gradually more comfortable giving her directions. April grew gradually more desperate and invested in her denial and he continued to find new ways to tease and torment her. They attended the Shibari workshop together and came away with a million filthy ideas, then went back to his house to try them out. Reggie had kept his word; the house was still mostly uninhabitable, but the master bedroom and en suite were ready.

  He watched in admiration and managed to mostly stay out of the way as Natasha stood up the all-new Tech Support call center, only intervening to keep her path clear of meddling from the COO. He managed to prevail in his own battle with Leo Graham, too—the data migration was on, although he knew he’d spent just about all his capital with O’Reilly. Hell, he was in debt up to his neck, to tell the truth. He’d made promises and he would just have to deliver. When the tension started building in his neck and he felt like he was forgetting how to smile, he blew off steam shopping online and sending more mysterious packages to April. (He was becoming an expert in finding the rare sites that sold lingerie for trans bodies.)

  He preferred to have his arguments with Graham on his home turf when they had to be face to face, and the COO’s quick temper made it easy to tempt him into stomping down to the fourth floor to Dennis’s office. On one occasion when he had been forced to come to the other man’s territory, he’d seen a flash of sandy hair go past the glass door and thought for a moment April was there. That was when he knew he was far gone. The situation had to change. But he had to be ready first.

  In early August, he joined Jason, April and a handful of others from Frankie’s on a float in Austin’s Pride Parade. While April ran around herding cats, Jason introduced him to Tony Bulsara, an older olive-skinned man, well-built, with grey in his moustache. “Jason says you’re looking for a mentor in the lifestyle,” he said in a gravelly voice.

  Hi
s eyes flicked to Jason, who seemed uncharacteristically subdued. Did he and this guy play together? “Yeah, that’s right. I’m...mostly self-taught. The Internet, stuff like that. Whatever I’ve picked up hanging around the scene. It doesn’t have to be anything too formal, but I’ve made mistakes and I...don’t want to make any more.”

  Tony nodded. “I can make time tomorrow. Jason, you can come unlock Frankie’s early so we can get in?”

  Jason eyes darted back and forth between his friend and the older man. They waited. Finally, Jason said, “Yes, Mr. Tony,” as sotto voce as he dared and then looked away.

  Dennis blinked. Okay then. Anybody who could make Jason act like that was worth learning from.

  “I have to warn you,” Dennis said the next day, as they faced each other across a table in the empty bar. “I may have to go out of town soon. I was hoping we could do this mostly by phone...”

  “We can,” agreed Tony. Jason had let them in, then scurried to his office with the bar manager, Vic. “But some things it’s better to do face to face.” He waited a long beat. “What did you do?”

  Dennis cleared his throat. “Excuse me?”

  “You said you made some mistakes. You’re carrying it around with you, and that’s the easiest way to make more mistakes. If I’m going to help you...” The older man opened a hand. “What happened?”

  Dennis took a deep breath. It was an easy question to ask. It wasn’t an easy one to answer. He’d told Jason. He’d told his therapist, now. “I just met you,” he said quietly.

  “Trust. It’s all about trust. None of this—” Tony gestured to encompass him, Dennis, the whole bar. “None of it works without trust.”

  “I know that,” Dennis snapped. The air-conditioning wasn’t on outside of business hours, and the bar was sweltering. His T-shirt was sticking to him. “But I’m not your sub.”

  “You want my help.” It was mild.

  “What’s the worst thing you ever did in the lifestyle?” growled Dennis, harsher than he meant to. “How about you?”