The Hideaway Inn

by Philip William Stover

  “Your family was poorer than mine. Your mom worked two jobs just to make ends meet. She left for the diner before dawn and didn’t get home until after the gas station closed. You hated that.”

  Vince rolls up his window and stares out blankly. I shouldn’t have mentioned his mother. She passed away a few years after we graduated high school, when Vince would have still been in college. His mother was the only family he had, since his dad had run off while she was pregnant with him. “It must be hard to be back here and not have her around,” I say as gently as I can.

  “It’s fine,” he says without emotion.

  “Everybody liked your mom,” I say. She served eggs and pumped gas with the same friendly smile. If you ate or drove, it was hard not to know her.

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “For what?”

  Now that’s a hard question. For your mom dying. For letting you down. For not loving you back. I decide to go with the easiest of the three—and it’s not lost on me that confronting the death of his mom is suddenly the easiest option. I wanted to say goodbye to his mom when I heard that she had passed so suddenly but Vince made it impossible. He didn’t have any type of memorial service. Still, I should have tried harder to pay my respects, to let him know I cared.

  “For not reaching out,” I say, hoping that covered multiple options. I keep my hands on the wheel and focus on the road. The scent of lavender slowly evaporates, taking the carefree moment with it as the mood becomes somber. Vince turns his head to look out the passenger window.

  What do I do now? Would it be too weird to grab his hand to let him know how much I cared about him, that I still care about him? I glance down and see his hand on the seat of the truck. It would be so easy to just hold it right now. It would let him know so much of what I want to tell him beyond the restaurant, beyond New Hope, beyond everything.

  “Thank you,” he says quietly, the breath barely leaving his mouth. “It’s nice to hear that. And nice to remember that everyone liked her.”

  We hit a bump in the road. The truck rocks up and down and bangs Vince’s head against the roof. It cracks me up to see how pissed off he gets every time he hits his head so I aim for the potholes like I’m playing a video game.

  A line of massive ash trees creates a canopy over the driveway to the farm. I pull over to a patch of field just a few yards from the largest barn on the property. I hop out of the truck and smile at Vince, thinking about our conversation and how close it made me feel to him. I just needed to know that we could still do it. We can still connect at that deep emotional level even though he fights against it.

  My eyes catch his for just a moment and then his quickly dart away. We’ll get there. We just need the right moment.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The estate Tack’s brought me to is beautiful and clearly not a weekender’s country house. The mud-covered tractors, well-worn tracks to the open fields and smell of manure make it clear that this is a working agricultural space, but the main residence is right out of a real estate brochure: vintage stonework that will last at least another century and white clapboard with just the exact amount of paint peeling to make it look rustic.

  A scraggly brown and white goat runs over to Tack like a kid going after a second slice of birthday cake. The goat lets out a loud bleat.

  Tack puts his hand on the goat’s neck and gently pats. “This is Paul,” he says.

  “This is a goat,” I say plainly and maybe with a hint of incredulity. “You brought me all the way out here on a hot morning to meet a goat?”

  The goat bleats even louder this time.

  “Paul thinks he’s my boyfriend.” Tack takes a carrot out of his pocket. The goat—Paul, rather—licks his fingers and then inhales the carrot in one single gulp. Paul would be very popular at The Eagle on Dollar Beer Night.

  But I see an opening. I’m tired of tiptoeing around Tack’s sexuality. I spent most of my young adult life guessing is he or isn’t he. Was it all in my head or did he feel the same things I was feeling? When he married Evie I thought the book was slammed closed but it seems like that book has been taken off the shelf and opened. It’s time to find out who is what.

  “So, you have boyfriends now?” I ask as casually as possible. I lean over the fence as if I couldn’t care less about the answer. I could have asked him about the weather or the gross national debt or directions to the closest Staples. I pet the other side of Paul’s neck so I have something to do with my hands.

  “Not really,” he says, just as casually as I asked. I turn my head and can’t help but roll my eyes. Is that how he is going to play it?

  “Oh,” I say, my tone frigid.

  “I mean I’m bi. I could have a boyfriend,” he says, catching my eye and hanging there for just a moment longer than he should. “I just don’t have a boyfriend right now.”

  Vinny would have asked a hundred questions and tried to have gotten Tack to open up but I don’t do that anymore. I don’t let my emotions get the better of me. I won’t let Tack have power over me. The steelier silent I am the more power I have. I breathe in and out staring straight ahead. Not a word. Until there are all the words.

  “So you’re bi. I didn’t know that. I mean, I knew you married Evie and then broke up but I wasn’t sure if you were into guys. I thought you might be gay because, well, but... I didn’t want to assume and I didn’t want to ask although I guess I just did. So, you’re bi.”

  I slap my hand to my mouth like I am brushing something off my face but really, I am holding my big trap shut. So much for my polished study in controlled masculinity.

  “Yeah, I’m bi,” Tack says. “Obviously it took me a while to confront those feelings with any maturity. But I’m out. Everyone knows.”

  “Even your dad?” I ask, squinting my eyes, afraid of the reply.

  “Even him. I don’t think he’ll be starting a PFLAG chapter anytime soon but he knows.”

  Wow. That’s really incredible news. I want to run over to him and hug him and celebrate and tell him how proud I am but I don’t even let a trace of that emotion reach the surface.

  “Is that why you and Evie broke up?” I figure if I ask one question instead of a parade of interrogative statements I’ll be able to maintain my composure.

  “Partly, maybe. Not really. I don’t know. Things with Evie never really worked that way and I think we both knew it. We tried, but once we were married things got even harder. It wasn’t just confronting my sexuality. It was more about confronting my identity. Evie was on her own path too. But people expected me to do certain things and act a certain way and it was so much easier to meet everyone’s expectations.”

  The goat bleats again and Tack soothes the animal by petting him on the top of the nose.

  “I can understand that.” I think of walking into a real estate closing and how important it is for me to dress a certain way and perform this “master of the universe” routine for everyone. It’s easier to play the part people expect you to play.

  “I’m surprised you understand,” Tack says quietly.

  “Surprised I understand? What do you mean?”

  “In school you didn’t exactly meet people’s expectations. You always did your own thing.”

  My own thing? That isn’t exactly how I would think of it. Mostly I was invisible and the times I wasn’t, I was considered a complete freak or weirdo. The only time I felt normal was when I was with him that summer. With him I felt like it was okay to just be myself. At least I felt that way until it was clear he didn’t want anything to do with me. The rejection was hard and it made me not want anything to do with me either. I thought poetry and makeup experiments were part of the reason he rejected me. How could he be with someone who was the object of so much ridicule?

  “Vince, I don’t think you have any idea how much I looked up to yo
u in high school.”

  I am solid stone, completely—not because I am performing my hyper-masculine emotionless robot but because I am so shocked by what Tack has just said.

  “For what?” I ask, thinking back to the way I felt so small and unimportant as I walked down the hall, hoping no one would notice me and shove me in the shoulder.

  “Are you serious?” Tack asks. He truly has no idea what I’m asking.

  “I want to know what exactly you looked up to back then. The way I was teased by your friends every time I walked anywhere near the boys’ locker room? Or maybe you looked up to me from the other side of the locker I was pushed into? Or when...”

  “All right, I get it. Enough. I was trying to pay you a compliment. I can’t do anything right around you anymore. I feel like shit for what happened to you. How you were treated.”

  He still doesn’t get it. I don’t care about how I was treated. That isn’t the wound that’s still tender. It’s his role on the sidelines that still kills me.

  I take a pause from the argument to gather my thoughts. The sun is climbing in the sky and I can feel the sting of its rays on my neck as I try to think of a way to show him what I mean. “Do you remember where you were when I was getting teased and harassed?”

  “I don’t know. At the farm working?”

  Paul must feel the intensity of our conversation since he slowly walks away, leaving us alone by the fence.

  “Sometimes,” I say. “But a lot of times you were right there.”

  Tack can’t look at me. He darts his eyes to the side. “I never teased you. Not once. I never called you names.” He is defiant at the very thought that I would accuse him of harassing me.

  “No,” I say. “Of course you didn’t. I know that.” I try to get the conversation to a more reasonable tone so I can make my point. “Look, you remember the day that Mark Noonan pushed me into the locker because I wore eyeliner to school?” Another makeup experiment I immediately regretted.

  “Yes,” he says and I see a tiny smile on the edge of his lips.

  “This is a good memory for you?” I ask sharply. The hint of a smile instantly disappears.

  “No, of course not. I was thinking of how cute you looked in your eyeliner. Like a rock star. I’m wondering if you still wear it.”

  “Never,” I say flatly. As if I would go to an acquisitions meeting dressed like Elton John. He sees me now and he must see how ridiculous that question is. “Don’t change the subject. You remember Mark doing that.”

  “Yes, I do,” he says solemnly.

  “Did you read my diary to have that memory or did I tell you about it?”

  “No, of course not,” he says.

  “So you remember because you were there. You and Mark were friends, for fuck’s sake.”

  “We weren’t friends,” he snaps back.

  “Tack, get off it. You were on the same teams. You both played football and ran track. You went to parties at his house with Evie all the time.”

  “But I...” He trails off. His soft eyes look tense and his lower lip covers his upper lip. A calm silence fills the pasture and I look away. I can hear goats playing on the other side of the pen and a tractor growls farther in the distance. The acid smell of fertilizer cuts across my nostrils. I turn back to look at Tack. His face is twisted and his eyes are tense. My first reaction is to comfort him. I don’t like seeing him so upset but I also know I need him to face the truth. I can’t work with him and live with him without him knowing that his act of complicity created the deepest cut.

  “I know,” he says, looking right in my eyes. “I should have said something. I should have stopped it but I didn’t. I stood there and let it happen time and time again. I’d see you at school and avoid you. I told myself it was the best thing to do. I thought if I just kept my head down... You have no idea how many times I would make those guys walk a route that would not put you in harm’s way or distract them or redirect their stupid aggression. But I didn’t stop it when it was happening and there is no excuse for what I did—or what I didn’t do.” A tear falls out of Tack’s eye and runs down his hot red cheek. I don’t know if the tear is for him or me or for the us that once was and can’t be again. He wipes another potential tear from his eyes and stands face to face with me.

  “Vince, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened to you and I’m even more sorry that I didn’t stop it.”

  Just hearing those words and knowing he understands what he’s sorry for makes something inside me collapse. One of the many walls I have built crumbles to the ground.

  “Thank you,” I say simply, honestly and quietly.

  “I’m truly sorry. And there is something I want you to know. Something that’s important for you to know,” Tack says, and then I notice his hand moving toward mine.

  “Tack O’Leary, you handsome stud of a man, flirting with my goats! What are you doing here?” A tall muscular man with a bald head and a smile bigger than the pasture comes out of the barn behind the goat shelter. His boots leave behind deep footprints and the goats follow him like he is a god. He does have the body of Hercules though, all thick muscle like he was once a body builder.

  I want to yell, “Go back. Go back! Can’t you see we are having a moment!” But this guy is a human bowling ball. There is no stopping him.

  “What? What did you want to tell me?” I ask Tack quickly while the guy is still far enough away that he won’t be able to hear my intimate tones.

  “Vince, I want you to know that...” He pauses for a second before saying, “Evie and I, we have a child. A six-year-old. An amazing six-year-old.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  My mouth drops open at Tack’s confession, and I wonder if it’s medically sound for my eyes to pop out of my skull as far as they are.

  “And who is the handsome specimen you brought with you?” the man walking over asks as soon as he is in front of us.

  How can I shift gears like this? A six-year-old? How did that happen? I mean, I know how but it’s not that which has me so stunned, it’s knowing that Tack is a dad. I’ve been willing to expand the hot-farmer box I have him in to possibly include talented chef, but dad? My box is beginning to bust and I have about a thousand questions but I can’t ask any of them in front of a stranger. Once again, Tack’s timing completely sucks.

  “Kevin, this is Vince Amato. Vince, this is Kevin.”

  Kevin stops in his tracks and pulls off his sunglasses in a dramatic sweep of his hand. “This is the famous Vince Amato. He’s even more delicious-looking than you described. Those eyes. And darling, I’m going to require that you wear that tank top every time you come to visit the farm here. I do hope it’s not cutting off your circulation.” He shrugs. “Even if it is, I still demand that wardrobe.”

  I did put on one of my tightest tank tops and I know the scoop neck shows off my thick chest hair. With Kevin’s mention I notice Tack’s eyes drop a bit to take in my body. I’d remind him that my eyes are up top but I don’t mind him checking me out at all.

  “Kevin, you promised you wouldn’t embarrass me,” Tack says through slightly clenched teeth.

  Kevin waves him away with his hand. “I promised no such thing. Anyway, it’s much too late for that.” Then he turns to me. “Don’t worry about me. I’m perfectly harmless and happily married to the man of my dreams.”

  “Where is Evan?” Tack asks.

  Evan and Kevin? Couples with rhyming names really need to rethink their life choices.

  “He’s dropping off some eggs at The Black Bass Hotel. They had a run on omelets this morning and needed more. He’ll be back soon.”

  “That’s exactly why we’re here. Vince, Kevin is the man who is going to make sure last night’s disaster never happens again.”

  I cannot let the disaster from last night repeat itself. I have to block out the bombshell Tack just
dropped and focus on business at least until we are alone again.

  Kevin opens the paddock and steps outside of the gate between us. His physical presence does something to shift the intense energy and help Tack and me reset. We move from lingering feelings about the past to both being concerned about the present.

  “Kevin and his husband Evan run this place. Chickens and goats, all humanely raised, all organic and all local. The goat cheese is known for being some of the best in the region,” Tack says, looking at me.

  “Sounds expensive,” I say, as my transformation from heartsick to puppy to sharp business wolf completes.

  “Oh, a number cruncher,” Kevin says. “I get that. Evan was a hedge manager of a private firm and I worked at Goldman.”

  “Goldman? Impressive.”

  “Well, thank you for the compliment but I’m not sure how useful my degree from Spelman in economics is when I’ve got my hand under a chicken’s ass. Still, I love it out here.”

  “Why would you give all that up to come out here? It’s beautiful but...” I can hear a bit too much surprise and disappointment in my voice. All I want to do is get back to that world. I want to get as far away from this place and Tack and his kid and all these complicated feelings as fast as I can.

  “Uh-oh,” Kevin says. “This one is tightly wound. I can see that. Let’s take a walk around the farm and maybe some peace and calm will rub off on you. We’ll see what Chickira and Hennifer Lopez are up to.” He walks past the gate and starts down a shady path that leads down a grass-covered hill.

  “What happened to Lindsay LoHen?” Tack asks.

  “So sad,” Kevin says, sighing. “She ran off with Jamie the Fox.”

  * * *

  The rest of the morning is a relaxing tour of Kevin and Evan’s beautiful farm. The estate is a sprawling network of open pastures, shady retreats and stone and clapboard outbuildings gathered along a spring-fed stream that “twists and turns over stones on its way,” as it were. We see goats and chickens but also a few fields of fresh herbs and even an orchard of blueberry bushes laden with huge purple-green berries that should turn blue by the beginning of July.