“They still love you, Roe.”
I turned around like I'd been caught, but Pastor Tim just gave me his patient smile and held out his hands.
“They love you, Roe. They always have. All you have to do is turn away from the darkness and come back into their loving arms, into the light of Christ.”
Kayla appeared beside him. She wasn't smiling. “Don't put them through any more, Roe. Don't hurt them any more than they already are.”
I stood there frozen, but I wasn't scared. I was just tired. So tired. I didn't want this anymore. I couldn't be scared or upset, because I didn't have anything left in me. I hated them, but I didn't even have the energy for that. I figured I would just stand there and suck it up until they were done, and then I'd kiss my mom and shake my brother's hand and go home.
I had forgotten to figure about Haley.
One minute Kayla was several paragraphs into a lecture about the state of my soul and how unfair I was to my mom and my brother, and the next minute I saw Haley appear behind her, looking at the back of Kayla's head like she was really looking forward to ripping it off. I opened my mouth and started forward in alarm.
Kayla held up a hand. “I'm not finished.”
“Oh yes you are, bitch,” Haley said, and she pushed Kayla into the room.
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* * *
Chapter Twelve
“Ladies!” Pastor Tim cried out, but Haley turned on him, and he shut up fast.
“All right,” she said, her index finger aimed and pointing alternately at the two of them. “I'm assuming you're Kayla the cousin and Tim the pastor. That right?” She waited for murmurs of acknowledgment, and once she had them, she nodded and cut them off again. “Got it. Just wanted to be sure. I came a long way to see the two of you. Wanted to make sure I was shouting at the right people.”
“Listen—” Kayla said, back on her feet and pissed as hell, but she had nothing on Haley, who rounded on her, monstrous pregnant belly and all.
“No, you listen. Both of you. You listen, and you listen fucking good. You get your ears turned all the way on, because today I have the gospel for you, and you had better fucking take notes.”
“Your language!” Pastor Tim sputtered.
“Yeah, that's a good place to start. Language. I don't care for yours at all. I don't like the way you talk down to Roe, how you fill him full of bullshit and hate and guilt until he can't move. You tell Roe he's the abomination, you tell him he's hurting his family, you tell him he's a sinner going to hell because of who he loves. Doesn't that even grab at you for a second? Are you that dead inside that he can come home with the man he loves and all you can talk about are a bunch of dead and badly translated words? I've been watching you all day, watching you look at him like Satan himself has appeared and you're ready to stake him and shove him back to hell. Roe is a good man. He is one of the best men I've ever met. He's kind. He's courteous. He's loyal, and he's strong. And I love him. Everybody at Nowhere loves him.
“Love. That's what I was taught being Christian meant. I was taught that Jesus wanted us to love everyone. That he was the original hippie, turning everything on its ear so we could open up and love each other not just now but forever. The one who hung out with whores and lepers and tax collectors. The guy with story after story about social pariahs as the heroes and heroines. The one who talked about ‘loving the least of those is loving me.’ The one who told the story of the fucking prodigal son. Love!” She shook her head, giving Pastor and Kayla a hard look. “You don't love him. What you're doing to him, what you've been doing to him, all of you here—that's not love.”
“Sometimes love is hard,” Pastor Tim cut in, red-faced and angry. “God was angry with his people when they turned away, and like him, we—”
“The cranky, pouty God is in the Old Testament, Timmy, and if you're going to get literal on me, if you're going to say that we can't piecemeal the Bible, then I want to know what the fuck you do with that little bit Jesus laid down that said ‘love one another’ trumped them all!” Haley's face was red now too. “And I want to know how much bacon you shovel down your throat, you hypocrite!”
“Levitican law is based—”
“You can't pick and choose!” She was almost on top of him now, and she was literally backing him into the corner. “You can't say that you need to burn witches and shun gay men but eat all the pork and wear all the mixed fibers you want! You can't decide that ‘loving’ Roe is to make him feel guilty, to feel bad! You don't get to say that ‘loving’ him means turning his family against him so soundly that he never got to make peace with his dad! You don't get to tell me, even, that your vision of the Bible is divinely inspired, that God speaks through you and that makes you right, that you can fill so many people with so much fucking hate in his name!”
“Get away from him!” Kayla shouted, and she launched herself at Haley.
And I moved.
From the second Haley started swearing, I was in a kind of shock. It was like a dream, where I was sure I was going to wake up and have to do the funeral again, this time without Haley bursting in like pregnant Wonder Woman. While she shouted and Tim sputtered, I just stood there, gobsmacked, not knowing what I was supposed to do.
But I listened. I listened to her defense of me, and even though it felt like a dream, I heard it. I listened to her talk about Tim and God and love. I wasn't sure that all of it was right, thought that some of it was her getting all riled up and staking people before they had the chance to attack first again—but then, I thought, wasn't that what they did too? They heard I was gay, and it didn't matter what I actually was. I became the devil by my definition, like she said. This wasn't right, what she was doing either. It felt good to be defended, but this wasn't the way. Hate against hate and shouting over shouting wasn't going to help. There had to be a middle way.
I was listening, but I was watching too. I was watching Tim, and I was watching Haley, and I was watching Kayla, and I saw her glare. I saw the way she looked at Haley. And, funny enough, I saw the way she looked at Tim, at the possession in her gaze, and I thought, whoa.
And then I saw her fists clench and her body go taut, and really, I was moving before she was.
I stepped between her and Haley. I raised my arm and took the blow she'd meant for my friend. It came down hard on my left shoulder and cut into my neck—it would have come across Haley's cheek, and it would have knocked her back into the hall toward the top of the stairs. The realization sunk in of what that could have meant, of how much that could have hurt Haley and the baby, and now it was me looking down at Kayla with cold hate.
“Get out,” I said.
Her face twisted into rage, and she reared back, and I said it again. Louder.
“Get the fuck out of my room. Get out of my house. And don't you ever try to lay a hand on my friend again.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I knew by the weight and the way his fingers curled into my collarbone that it was Travis. I relaxed a little.
Pastor Tim took Kayla's arm and spoke soothingly to her. “It's time to go. There will be another day, another time.”
“No there won't,” Haley said, still sparking for her fight, but Travis murmured “That's enough,” to her, and Kayla and Tim left the room and headed down the stairs without further incident. Once we heard the front door open and close, Travis herded us down too.
My mom was at the bottom of the stairs.
She didn't say anything to us as we left, but as I gave her a quick, uneasy hug, I saw her looking at Haley wide-eyed—but you know, she still looked hungry. My sister-in-law watched Haley too, but she had a lightness around her eyes that surprised me. She gave me a full smile, kissed my cheek, and urged me, with heartfelt sincerity, to keep in touch.
I shook my brother's hand without really looking him in the eye.
We drove back to the hotel in silence. Part of the way, anyway.
“That,” Travis said eventually, “was real
ly stupid, Haley.”
“I don't care,” she said, staring out the window. “They deserved that and more.”
“Yes,” he said, “but if Roe hadn't stepped forward when he did, you could have been hurt. You and the baby both.”
She shrugged, but she also leaned back and rested her head on my arm hanging over the seat. I kissed the top of her head and shut my eyes, breathing in the smell of her hair.
At the hotel, Haley went to her room for a bath, and in ours, Travis pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He poured liberal amounts in two plastic hotel glasses and passed one to me.
“When your father is dead, you drink whiskey,” he told me.
“That a law?” I asked.
“It's what I did,” he said, and downed his glass.
I did too. Three shots later I said, “I forgot your dad was dead too. I guess we don't talk about your family much. Sorry.” I rubbed my foot against his leg.
He reached over and stroked my thigh, and then he poured me more whiskey.
When the bottle was half gone, we fell into bed. I told him, drunkenly, that I loved him. He suckled on my ear and told me that he loved me more. We kissed for a while, and then we drank some more, and then he blew me. After, we drank some more again.
When the bottle was three-quarters gone, I started to cry.
It came up out of nowhere, and to be honest I scared myself. One minute I was shoving my toe into Travis's armpit, slurring and laughing as I tried to tell him the story of how I had crashed my bike at the end of my drive and tore my leg up so bad it had flaps of skin pulled back, but all I could think about was how mad Dad would be that I bent the frame, and I bled all the way to the garage and passed out trying to fix it with a vise—and then all of a sudden I was doubled over and sobbing.
I bawled. I had never cried like that before in my life, and I haven't cried like that since. Once in junior high we read a story about a woman keening, and the teacher had explained the word to us saying that it was a terrible grief, the kind that tore at your soul. I always thought of it when I thought of my mom crying about not being able to have more babies. There in the Super 8, sloppy drunk on cheap whiskey, stinking from sex, wrapped in the arms of my lover, I keened too.
I keened for my dad. For all he had been, and for all he would now never be. For the way I had never come back and even tried to make things right with him. For his being sick too young, for his having to be so frustrated by his disease that he risked his life and that of anybody else who might have met him on the road.
I keened for the years we had lost. For the farming I never got to do for him. For never being able to tell him about the work I'd done at Nowhere. For never being able to show him what a good man I'd become after all.
And I keened, more than anything, for me. For letting so many years of my life go by in silence, for not being able to understand for so long what Haley had seen so quickly, that I was never the devil, that hate can never be love, not for any excuse. I keened for going through so much of my life never having friends because I didn't think I was good enough to have any. I keened for being so afraid of love that if it looked like I might find it, I ran.
I keened for all of it, keened until I choked on the tears and then, inevitably, threw up.
And when it was all gone, when Travis held my head over the toilet by my hair, and I could come up with nothing more than dry heaves, when he had showered me and wrapped me up in his arms in the dark, when it was all still, when he pressed sweet kisses into my temple, I cried again. No more keening, just quiet, steady tears as I thanked the grace of the God who had seen fit, despite my efforts and those of my family, to put me safely in this man's arms.
In the morning I woke to silence.
It was silence inside me and out of me both. I could hear the fan on the air conditioner on the other side of the room and the occasional footsteps in the hall outside, but the air was full of silence. Soft, easy silence. Not quite sad. Shaded a little, maybe. But not even melancholy. It just was quiet.
Inside me was quiet too. I didn't feel empty and hollow quite like I had, but I didn't feel full either. Still. I felt still, like I'd come to some sort of understanding with myself. I think maybe it was just realizing that I had buried my dad and cried until I got sick, and yet I was still here. My family had thrown me out and hurt me, and I'd gone to prison and then gone all across the Midwest—but I was still here. I had cut people out and then brought them in—and I was here.
My father was dead. But I was alive.
Something stirred in me slowly, like an animal waking. Except it was more than just an animal. It felt like that angel that had whispered to me before, that had told me to stay. That morning after we buried my dad, that angel woke, all the way for real, and I was stunned to find out that the angel inside me wasn't an angel at all.
It was me.
I turned in Travis's arms, buzzing with a quiet energy now. I wrapped my arms around him as best I could, and I kissed his chest. I actually kind of felt good. Maybe it wasn't so polite to feel so good right then, with my dad so fresh in the ground, but I did feel good. So good that I wanted to laugh. I wanted to run out across the highway into the park and dance around naked. I was here. I was okay. I was alive.
I didn't run across the highway. I didn't even get out of the bed. I just opened my mouth over the hairy center of my lover's chest, and I kissed him.
In less than five minutes he was fully awake and dragging me up to his mouth, kissing me back. We were both hard, both ready, but we lingered over the kissing like it was the only thing in the world. We might have kissed for fifteen minutes. Maybe half an hour. All the while I just bubbled and built up inside, and eventually I dragged him on top of me and lifted my legs up in invitation. He reached over onto the bedside table.
He came back only with lube.
We'd gotten the all-clear results from the tests the week before, but there hadn't been time for anything but quick jerk offs before bed with all the lambing, and without arranging it out loud, I knew we were both waiting for the right moment.
This felt like the right moment now. It felt right when he slicked us both up and then pushed inside me—just him, nothing else, nothing but skin on skin. It felt good, and it felt right, and it must have felt that way for him too, because it wasn't long before he was coming hard and fast inside me.
I felt him. I felt his fluid inside me, felt it coating my insides. Felt him in me, inside of me. I imagined parts of him would be there forever, merging into my skin. I felt some of the semen leaking out, and when he withdrew, I tried to reach down quick and hold it in place, to keep it inside.
But his hand got down there first, and he smiled as he pressed his fingers flush against my rim.
“I told you,” he said, voice rough but not unkind. “I know what you want, and I give it to you.”
He kept his cum inside me as he jerked me off, kept his fingers firmly in place, and I came like a geyser, feeling him still hot inside me, forever inside me. His mouth came down on mine, still keeping his hand tight against my opening, and I kissed him, loved him, welcomed him. My lover. My partner.
My Travis.
We got a late start the next day, and this time Haley did most of the driving. At one point Travis was snoring in the backseat, and I was leaning over on Haley's shoulder. My hand rested on her belly as I waited to feel the baby kick.
“I didn't have the baby at the funeral,” she pointed out.
“Hush,” I said. “We still have nine hours yet until we're home.”
“It's not going to happen today,” she said.
And she was right. The baby didn't come that day. It came at two fifteen in the afternoon on May 25.
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* * *
Chapter Thirteen
This time I was shearing. I had just got the wether wrestled where I wanted him when Travis appeared in the door.
“Haley's heading to the hospital.”
Both T
ory and I stood up at the same time, and the wether, sensing his moment, bleated and scurried away. I didn't care. I dropped the shears, vaulted over the rail, and headed for the door, where Ez and Zeke met me and barked excitedly all the way back to the house.
“It's going to be hours,” Travis told me, but I just ignored him and bolted for the shower.
We got to the hospital just before noon. Haley was dilated five centimeters.
Her mom was her birthing coach, but she had asked me to be there too, and so there I was. I thought I might catch some hell or be told to scrub down, but nope, they let us all in. Travis tried to stay out because it was so crowded, but Haley shouted at him.
“No! I want you both here,” she said, and so we stayed.
We held her hands while she pushed, me on one side and Travis on the other. Travis looked fucking scared, and he didn't say much, so I did the talking this time, telling Haley she could do it, telling her she was beautiful, telling her she was strong and amazing, and that it was almost over, that it was going to be okay, that she was going to have a beautiful baby girl who was going to kick tail all over the state of Nebraska just like her mom. And then, all of a fucking sudden there was a head, and then, pop, it was a baby. At first, to be honest, she was gross and kind of scary. But then Haley's mom cut the cord, and they cleaned her up, and then they wrapped her up and brought her back to Haley, and my God, but she was the most beautiful baby in the world.
Haley cried. She kissed her baby, and she cried, and then she kissed me and kissed Travis, and she cried some more.
And then she said, “I want you to have her.”
At first I thought it must be the drugs. I glanced at Travis, a little worried, but he was looking at her with a strange expression, something between wonder and terror. And then Haley sat up a little straighter and said in an even stronger voice, “I want the two of you to have her. I want you to adopt her, and I want you to be her parents.”
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