The Family We Make

by Dan Wingreen

  Tim sighed very audibly. “I have no idea. I’m sorry. You’re right. He was rude.”

  “And bad for you.”

  “And bad for me.”

  “Because of the rudeness.”

  “Because of a lot of reasons.”

  “Hm.” She paused, probably trying to decide if she was going to accept that or push to get Tim to admit Rudy was a shitty boyfriend solely because he was rude the one and only time they’d met. “Good. I’m glad you finally see that. Very well named, that one.”

  Tim stared at the floor and muttered an agreement. Then he muttered several more to the various other disparaging comments she decided to make about Rudy. The conversation drifted, as conversations with his mother tended to do after she got past the things she called to talk about, and by the time they hung up, Tim could barely keep his eyes open even though it was barely five in the afternoon on his day off. He loved his mother, he really did, but there were very definite reasons he hadn’t even tried to look for colleges within two hundred miles of his childhood home.

  Tim tossed his phone on the small Ikea coffee table and then collapsed back onto his threadbare couch, trying to ignore the all-too-familiar way the lonely silence of his tiny apartment started creeping back in. It didn’t help that their conversation had brought up several things he’d been trying very hard not to think about for the last few weeks. Opening a bakery six mornings a week was not how he’d been expecting to spend his postgrad years. The work wasn’t hard—he’d been baking with his mother since he was seven—but moving halfway across the country just to end up alone and doing the exact same thing he’d been doing since he was old enough to work felt like the worst kind of failure.

  He kind of wished he was as religious as his mom. She’d always said God never gives a person more than they can handle, and he ached for a reason to be optimistic. To not feel like he was hanging onto the edge of an icy cliff seconds away from plummeting into a bottomless pit.

  Tim groaned and covered his face with his arm. God, he wished he could just fall asleep; waking up being optional, of course. He briefly played around with the idea of downing some NyQuil and passing out for twelve hours, but he’d been dosing himself a lot lately, and the last thing he needed was an addiction to cough medicine to go along with his probable depression and the unhealthy way he kept repressing his problems. Of course, he could be wrong; psychologists weren’t supposed to diagnose themselves, after all. Not that he was one, and he probably never would be either. Not if Professor Carmichael followed through on his threat to smear him to every professor he knew running a graduate program, which was a pretty screwed-up way to react to being turned down. If college taught Tim anything, it was that fully grown adults could be as petty and childish as actual children.

  I need to stop thinking about this. Today hasn’t been great, but tomorrow can be better. Things aren’t as bad as they seem. You still have things in your life that make you happy.

  Tim took a few deep, calming breaths, closed his eyes, and kept repeating those words like a mantra over and over in his head, trying to force himself to believe them. Tomorrow he’d make time to go visit that new youth center and see what he needed to do to sign up as a volunteer. Tim always felt better when he was helping people, and he really should have gone down there weeks ago.

  As for today? Well. Maybe another twelve hours of nothingness wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.

  Chapter Three

  Three weeks later, Spencer wasn’t any closer to finding out who was harassing his son, though not for any lack of trying. Nearly every free moment he had was spent patrolling the halls during his one free period and between classes, hoping to spot some of the bullying Connor claimed was happening to other people. He wasn’t sure if the kid was lying or if bullies had gotten smarter about avoiding teachers since his day, but the most detention-worthy thing he saw was a senior getting what looked like the world’s sloppiest blowjob from his girlfriend in the boys locker room. He spent the entire walk to the principal’s office listing every kind of fungus that grows on locker-room floors and making pointed comments about how the skin on the girl’s bare knees seemed like it might be starting to fall off. Fun, sure, especially when he started throwing around phrases like “health hazard” and “epidemic” and “need to inform your parents” but ultimately disappointing.

  At least things with Connor had finally started getting better. The fight they had after school the day Spencer found out about the bullying was easily one of their top five worst. By the end of it, his usually even-tempered kid was red-faced from screaming at him, and Spencer was little better. The few days after were incredibly tense, and even when things calmed down, there was this uncomfortable undercurrent of tension any time they were alone in a room together. Nothing had been resolved, and they both knew it. Connor was still determined to suffer in silence, and Spencer was still determined to find out the names of those kids and rain unholy hellfire down upon those who dared lay hands on his boy. It didn’t help that, in his effort to catch the bullies in the act, he’d started watching the kid closer than he ever had before and made more than a few discoveries about Connor’s life that really bothered him.

  “He doesn’t have any friends!”

  It was Thursday afternoon in the teacher’s lounge, and Spencer was gesturing wildly as he paced back and forth, his lunch of cafeteria chicken nuggets and a bottle of Snapple forgotten on the small round table next to him. Across from his abandoned food sat Cassandra Baker, the middle-aged home-economics teacher and one of the only staff members Spencer actually liked. Mostly because she was the only other unmarried ninth-grade teacher with a family—her own son, Jason, was off at his second year of college—and when Spencer first joined the faculty, they’d quickly bonded over their shared experiences as single parents.

  “I mean, that can’t be normal, right?” He abruptly stopped pacing. Cass was leisurely chewing her sandwich, seeming content just to watch and observe. “Even I had friends in high school. Well, friend. Well, sort of a friend. We hung out a bit, and he was the only person who didn’t drop me like fashion dropped the fanny pack when it came out that I’d knocked up Becky. Probably because it stopped most of the rumors about me and him having sex in the janitor’s closet every day but still. I had someone to hang out with, and even just one person was a lifeline. Connor doesn’t have anyone. Except me.”

  Spencer forced himself to shut up and leave an obvious opening for comment in the conversation. Cass languidly finished her chewing, but instead of taking another bite, she placed her sandwich on a napkin and sat back in her uncomfortable plastic chair.

  “Your histrionics are showing,” she said calmly.

  Spencer glowered. “I’m aware. Do you have anything else to say? Maybe something actually pertaining to the thing I’ve been histrionicing about for the past twenty minutes?”

  Cass didn’t react to his scathing tone at all aside from a short pause to make sure he was done talking. She tended to deal with life with an equanimity Spencer both envied and was grateful for since it meant his occasional slip into being a piece of shit didn’t drive her away. The week before, as a joke, Cass had sent him a link to this new-age website that supposedly described a person’s personality based on their favorite color. The whole thing was mostly a bunch of neo-hippy garbage that didn’t have a shred of basis in anything even remotely resembling reality, but he’d been struck by how eerily accurate it was in Cass’s case. She was a brown through and through: steady and dependable with stamina and patience aplenty. Come to think of it, it kind of worked with Spencer too since purples tended to be temperamental, fastidious, sensitive—or oversensitive in his case—and sarcastic. Of course, they were also supposed to be artistic, witty, and dignified, so what the hell did some stupid website actually know?

  “Look,” she said eventually. “It doesn’t really sound like that big of a deal. He has you, right? So, he’s not alone. As long as he doesn’t go around telling oth
er kids his dad is his best friend, I don’t really see a problem here.”

  “But what about when he doesn’t have me?” Spencer asked, lowering his voice. They were alone in the lounge, but he hated admitting his failures as a father out loud. “My parents are either back in Ohio or traveling around the country in their RV, so when we’re fighting, he’s all alone.”

  “He’s been away from his grandparents for a while now though, right?” Spencer nodded. “So, why is this a problem now? And if you tell me you and your son never fought before, I’m going to laugh in your face.”

  Spencer shook his head and collapsed into his own plastic chair. “Of course, we’ve fought before but not like this. And I know I sound like every single ‘oh my God, my kid’s growing up not my little baby’ parent ever, but he’s not ten anymore. He’s a teenager with hormones and mood swings and ideas about how things should be that don’t line up with mine. We’re not…making up like we used to.”

  “And are you sure you’re worried about this being a Connor problem? Because it sounds more like a Spencer problem to me.”

  “Of course I have a problem with it! In every important way, he’s all I’ve got too, but even I have you to talk about this stuff with. He doesn’t have anyone. I’ve never seen him open his mouth to anyone at school unless it was to ask them to borrow a pencil or something. When I’m being ‘unfair’ or ‘not getting him’ or whatever, he doesn’t get to complain to anyone; he just sits in his room and stews. And I know how much that shit doesn’t help.” He glanced at his soggy nuggets for a moment, but his stomach was still too twisted up for him to seriously consider eating. “Didn’t anything like this ever happen with Jason?”

  Cass smiled sympathetically. “Jason was a pretty popular kid. My problem was getting him to spend any time with me at all. Whenever we had really bad fights, he had dozens of couches to go sleep on.”

  Spencer felt vaguely ill at the thought of Connor running away after a fight and said so. Cass only laughed.

  “He wasn’t running away. He just needed some time away from home. Whoever he stayed with, their parents always called to let me know where he was, so it wasn’t like I was up all night wondering if he was dead in an alley somewhere. And honestly? I needed the time away from him too. It helped both of us calm down.”

  “And Connor doesn’t have any of that,” Spencer said. “He just has his room that shares a wall with mine.”

  “And that might be okay for him.” Spencer started to protest, but she cut him off. “It might be. My point is you don’t know. You two don’t have long, drawn out teenage hate fests, not yet anyway. Even this fight you’re having is pretty pathetic by teen standards.”

  “How can you say that? I’ve never felt further away from him!”

  Cass rolled her eyes. “Has he said he hates you?”

  “What? No.”

  “Did he say he wished you were dead?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Did you throw his Nintendo out into the street?”

  “We don’t have a Nin—” Spencer paused. “Wait, did you throw Jason’s Nintendo out the window?”

  Cass nodded. “Oh yeah. And we lived on the eighth floor. Smashed it into a million pieces. I was lucky it didn’t land on anybody.”

  Spencer worked his jaw as he tried to form words. “You did that? You? I…I don’t think I’ve ever seen you raise your voice.”

  “No one can push your buttons like your own child,” she said with a shrug. “Now do you see why it was for the best we had some time to cool down away from each other?”

  “Shit yeah,” he said. He couldn’t imagine getting so angry at Connor and then having to coexist in the same house together.

  “And you two haven’t even gotten to the name calling yet.”

  “He said I was being unreasonable,” Spencer pointed out.

  “Oh. No,” Cass said, deadpan. “I hope you got out the belt for that. If you don’t reassert your authority, he might knife you in your sleep.”

  Despite himself, Spencer laughed. “Okay, fine. Maybe our fight was lame in hindsight. But it still feels wrong, you know? And I still feel bad he doesn’t have anyone else in his life he can talk to.”

  Cass hummed thoughtfully, then hesitated. “Can I say something without you getting pissed off?”

  Spencer thought about it. “Probably not,” he admitted.

  Cass’s lips twitched. “Well, I’m gonna say it anyway. Do you think, maybe, what you’re feeling isn’t so much about Connor as it is about you?”

  “You already asked that. And I already said I was upset about fighting with him.”

  “I don’t mean the fight. I mean…” Another uncharacteristic hesitation. “I know what it’s like to be a single parent. It’s hard, and it takes up your whole life, but even though your son is your only focus, it can still get lonely.”

  “I’m fine,” he reassured her. “Like I said, I have you to talk to.”

  “I’m not talking about friendship,” she said. “I’m talking about—”

  “If you say ‘getting laid,’ I’m leaving.”

  “Falling in love.”

  Spencer shifted uncomfortably. “I’m perfectly fine on my own.”

  Cass raised an eyebrow.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to figure out if the only reason I can’t actually smell the bullshit is because the stench is so overwhelming, it’s shorted out my sense of smell altogether.”

  “I’m not bullshit! I mean, it’s not—I’m not lying.”

  Smooth as always, you fucking loser.

  “Oh, you’re bullshit all right,” she said. “And I know exactly how much too. Being alone sucks. There were times when I would have killed to have someone to share my life with after Dick left, but at least I had a marriage as short as it was. You’re half my age, in the prime of your life. Don’t even try to tell me that if you didn’t have Connor, you wouldn’t either be in a relationship or actively looking for one.”

  Spencer couldn’t meet her suddenly too-intense gaze. “But I do have Connor,” he said to the table. “It doesn’t matter what my life would be like if I didn’t—and that’s not something I even want to imagine.” Not when it could have so easily happened. “And it’s not like I haven’t tried, you know? I’ve done the dating thing, and this may come as a surprise, but being a dad isn’t really very attractive to potential gay boyfriends.” He paused. “Well, not unless ‘Daddy’ has a very different meaning.”

  Cass rolled her eyes. “And when’s the last time you had a date?”

  Spencer pretended to think. “I’m not sure, but it got cut short because his unit was being deployed to fight World War II so…”

  She snorted. “And you don’t think that maybe you should give it another shot? You’re not that young anymore—”

  “Thank you for that. Because being an old single dad is so much more appealing to the average American gay than being a teenage single dad.”

  “You’re not that young anymore,” she repeated. “Which means your potential partners aren’t that young anymore either.”

  “Oh, totally. You know, I can just see going up to my ex and saying, ‘Hey, remember how we dated for two months in college, and you dumped me when you found out I had a five-year-old at home? Well, now I have prematurely graying hair, I haven’t exercised since Bush was in office, and that five-year-old is in the middle of puberty. Wanna get hitched?’ No way that could fail.”

  Cass’s sigh was almost artistic in how many different levels of exasperation it managed to convey.

  “Stop exaggerating. You don’t have a single gray hair, and if you even try to say you’re fat when I’m sitting here with this gut”—she poked her belly—”then I’m going to hurt you.”

  “I do so have gray hair.”

  She made a point of studying his head. Spencer squirmed. He hated being examined. “I don’t see a single one.”

  “Great. That means they fell out, which
means I’m probably going bald too.” He tilted his head toward the nearby window. “Shh. If you listen real close, I think we can actually hear a line of guys starting to form outside my door.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Oh! They just started beating it down.”

  “You’re not even gonna try to listen to me, are you?”

  “That’s the plan.” He smirked, but the expression quickly faded when he saw the disappointed frown on Cass’s face. He hated that look. The one that said someone had expectations of him, and he’d fallen completely short. He let himself down enough. He didn’t need to see visible proof other people knew how much of a failure he was. “Look, I know you’re just trying to help, but I promise you it’s pointless. Even if—if—I was lonely, the amount of effort I’d have to put into finding a guy who was not only attracted to me but could put up with my shitty moods, my terrible personality, and my teenage son would take up hours upon hours of my life I don’t have to spare. Perfect guys don’t just fall out of trees.”

  “Or you could find the right guy the first time out of the gate.”

  “Did you miss the bit where I briefly outlined a few of my many flaws? And that was me lowballing it. I’d be here all day if I listed all the reasons no one would ever want to date me.”

  And even if by some miracle someone does want me, no one ever wants us.

  “And I could be here all day shooting every one of those reasons down. Trust me. As someone who’s sampled more than her fair share of assholes, you’re not really all that bad.”

  “It’s amazing I ever got hired without having you to quote as a reference,” he said, sounding snippier than he intended. Cass—beautiful, wonderful Cass—didn’t even blink at his attitude.