A Fool and His Manny

by Amy Lane

  “Yeah,” he said, turning back around and padding barefoot toward the side door where they’d come in. The stairs landed about six feet away, so the upstairs occupant had easy access to the laundry and the inside entrance, as long as they had a key.

  “What do you mean, ‘welcome’?” His mother was following him now as he just kept going up the stairs. “Dustin—what do you mean, I’m welcome? Where are you going to sl—”

  He turned around just as they got to the landing and looked his mother compassionately in the eyes. “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember my graduation night, behind the pool house?”

  She nodded soberly. “Yeah.”

  “I left because it was your job then, right?”

  “Yes—it’s still my job. Quinlan’s well-being is still my job.”

  He nodded slowly. “Well, now it’s my job too.” Then he turned and went back inside. He held the door open for a moment when he realized she hadn’t followed him in. “Mom, it’s hotter than Satan’s sphincter out there—do you mind?”

  She ventured in slowly, still eyeballing him like he’d lost his mind. “Jacob?”

  “Hm?” Dad sat at Quinlan’s table, eating some of the groceries Dustin had brought.

  “Oh, Dad—a sandwich? For me?” There were two on the counter and one on the paper towel he was eating from.

  “Yeah, sure. What did you do to your mother?” Dad squinted at Mom for a moment, one eye closed a little more than the other.

  “He’s… he’s…. Where are you staying the night, Dustin? I want to hear you say it.”

  “Quinlan’s bed, Mom. Do you feel better now?”

  “No,” she said, sinking down at the table. “Not even a little. Jacob?”

  “Mmmf?”

  “Aren’t you going to say something to him?”

  Dad looked at him and winked. “It’s about time, son. I’m not sure he could have waited another year.”

  “I didn’t want to push,” Dustin admitted. “He needed to get used to the idea.”

  His father’s smile was a clear leftover from the days when Jacob Grayson could pass for a clueless slacker and a waste of phenomenal intellect: easy, sweet, and sunshiny bright, it had always told Dustin that the world was a much better place than generally anticipated.

  “You’ve got a good start, son. Don’t worry. He’ll come around.”

  Dustin remembered their conversation, Quinlan letting his guard down, letting Dusty comfort him. “He’s getting there.”

  Patience. First he had to get well.

  Fortress Around Your Heart

  “C’MON, Quinlan—time to eat.”

  Quinlan tried desperately to open his eyes. The EMT had come and gone, hooking up another IV bag and injecting it full of goodies before making Quinlan pee in a plastic bottle specially designed for his penis.

  “Would you be doing this to me if I was a woman?” he’d whined.

  “No. If you were a woman, I’d have someone else in here to lift up your ass so we could shove a little toilet under it.”

  “Goddammit.”

  “Just be glad your kidneys are working. It’s the only reason you get to sleep in your own bed tonight. That and the incredibly nice family all camped outside this room. How many kids do these people have, anyway?”

  “Six,” Quinlan muttered. “But two of them are grown.”

  “Well, I assume one of those is your boyfriend, and yes. He’s the one who kept his mom from running in here and defending you from me. I think you owe him something really awesome for Christmas, because she was pretty adamant.”

  Quinlan groaned. “Did your mother nurse you when you were sick?”

  “Yup,” the EMT said unrepentantly. “She was a pit bull. This one coulda given her lessons. Good luck with that!”

  Quinlan groaned again, not reassured in the least when the guy stuck a thermometer in his ear. “And, 101 still. Brother, whatever you were doing, this is, like, God telling you it’s not a good idea anymore. Now I’m going to go tell that nice family outside how to take care of you, and my advice to you is to let them. Don’t walk to the bathroom unless you think you can make it without killing yourself—I’ve left two more emesis containers, and yes, as gross as it is, they need to keep your pee so we can see if your system is still working after you’ve beaten the crap out of it. I’ve injected medication in your IV bag. If your fever starts to spike, they can give you ibuprofen but not acetaminophen, and if it does start to spike, call our service and we’ll get the ambulance out here. Deal?”

  “Can’t I just curl up like a slug and die?” He meant that.

  “Tempting, but your boyfriend might string me up by my testicles, and my wife likes them where they are.”

  “My boyfri—”

  “Yes. Don’t try to tell him he’s not. His mother keeps trying to have that conversation, and she’s gonna win about nursing you, but I’ve seen these before, and she’s not going to win at this one. Just relax and give in to it and you’ll be happy at the end.” The guy, late middle age, patted Quinlan’s shoulder and gave the IV bag a flick before he left.

  For a few blessed moments, Quinlan was in the dark alone, where he was content.

  Then Nica came in, a bowl of soup in one hand, a water bottle filled with something besides water in the other.

  Quinlan tried to smile, but by the look on her face, it came out pretty ghastly. “This isn’t really nece—”

  She rolled her eyes at him—loudly—and shook her head. “We’re not having that conversation.”

  “Uh—”

  “Soup. The nice man said you could have some soup, and we have some iced tea that’ll help you keep it down. You ready for that?”

  He groaned, not used to her mommy voice when used as weapon. “I’m….”

  “If you say you’re not hungry, I’ll laugh in your face, Quinlan.” She sat down in a kitchen chair someone had moved in while he’d been sleeping and busied herself with the soup. She had to prop him up with pillows and feed him, because his hand shook too hard to hold the spoon.

  But the soup was delicious.

  He told her so, and she wiped a corner of his mouth with a napkin. “Quinlan, we’ve been a good team these last years, you think?”

  He nodded. “Been awesome.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t think I’d ever need or want a nanny, you know? But Taylor came along when I was pregnant with our princess, and it was just such a wonderful luxury to have someone we trusted, someone who loved the kids too, help us out. Was worth adopting another person into our family, not that Taylor woulda been a burden anyway. And then we had a couple other college kids try out, and they didn’t last. But you—I knew you’d do the job right as soon as I saw you frog-marching my son out of the bathroom.”

  Quinlan smiled at the memory of Dustin as a surly adolescent. “Really?”

  “Well, yeah. You just had this look on your face, like nobody was going to hurt these kids, not even themselves.”

  “Sammy’s family,” Quinlan explained, not sure why this had never come up before.

  “Was that what it was? See, that makes it even better. And it makes sense—you’d take on Felicity and Keenan and Letty when we asked nicely—you never even blinked. You just sort of took the whole family in, one big hug.”

  Quinlan breathed in deeply, comforted. “You were all so nice.”

  “Yeah.” Her hand felt cool on his forehead. “You fit right in. And I thought, ‘Yeah, sure, he has his secrets. And he was sort of hurt when he got here. But we’ll do okay.’”

  “We did, right?”

  “Sure we did,” she said softly, her hand still moving. “But you were the good kid, Quinlan. You were my good kid. And it’s like Conroy. Sometimes he’s such a good kid, he doesn’t get enough attention. Remember when he had the abscessed tooth?”

  “We didn’t know,” Quinlan murmured. “I felt so bad—he yelled at his sister, and I asked what was wrong and he just started crying.
”

  “Yeah. Well, I didn’t know either. ’Cause that’s the thing with good kids. You don’t worry about them until suddenly they’re so sick they can’t walk. And they don’t want their moms to see them weak, and you’re wondering why.”

  “You respected me,” Quinlan mumbled. “I was part of the family.”

  “You thought that would go away? If I saw you sick?”

  He looked away, seeing Dorothy Gregory’s carefully blank features as Quinlan left the dinner table the last time. His father had always been sort of an asshole—but his mom…. Well, she’d made a show of being tender on birthdays and holidays, at least.

  “Did your mom do that?”

  He grunted—it felt like a hit in the stomach. “She wasn’t a great mom anyway,” he said. If he could have moved, he would have shrugged.

  And still, the gentle hands on his skin. “Describe ‘not great,’ hon. Not great as in you’re better off without her, or not great as in me and Taylor go find her and put her in the hospital?”

  He chuckled weakly. “You’re so not violent.”

  “You think Dustin’s a surly asshole by accident? There are genes in there, Quinlan. I’m not joking. Clarify ‘not great.’”

  “She visited the nursery on my birthdays and special occasions,” Quinlan clarified, wishing it didn’t hurt when he said it. It could have been abuse—but it wasn’t. Just neglect.

  “Mm. Well, we won’t break anything, but that’s a damn shame. You would have been a fun kid.”

  Quinlan closed his eyes and wished for Dustin. “I never organized a farting contest between nine kids, but I did okay.”

  Nica’s peal of laughter was almost healing. “Did he do that? Oh my God! How did I never hear about that?”

  Quinlan let out a chuckle. “Because it was in the pool. Sammy, Coop, and I were sort of shooting the breeze on the patio, and suddenly the pool looked like a hot tub. Sammy told Channing that St. Peter had an accident and that’s why they had to have it drained.”

  “Oh my God! What a rotten kid!”

  “Hm… sixteen was a fun age.”

  The hand in his hair stilled. “He’s not sixteen anymore.”

  Quinlan actually ached, he yearned so badly for the grown-up Dustin to be there, next to him, not a fever dream. “No.”

  “See, that’s why I had to know about the mom thing, Quinlan. That’s why you didn’t want me to see you, right?”

  “She just watched me go. I was… gay. Defective. Not worth keeping.”

  “I may still beat the shit out of her,” Nica muttered. “But that’s not my point. Here’s what you need to know. I’m not giving you back.”

  He turned and squinted at her in the dim light. Dustin had pulled the blackout curtains, because the late afternoon sun hit his bedroom window like the fist of doom, but it meant his bedroom was really dark. “Giving me back where?”

  “To wherever you came from when you got here, when you were afraid to eat at my table or crack jokes with my husband or… or cry because your friend was going to be okay. Dustin wants to be your grown-up now—that’s fine. But if that doesn’t work out, you’re still welcome here, in this apartment. Nanny or not. Now, I’m prejudiced—my family has happy endings at a very young age, so I’m going to root for you. But if it doesn’t happen—I’m not giving you back. I claimed you, you understand? I’ve been your mom for seven years. You remember your birthday? The first one?”

  Quinlan nodded, trying to swallow past the pain in his ears, his throat. “Yeah.” His birthday was January fifteenth—which was always sort of a letdown after Christmas. Nica had asked for his help to round up the kids on the weekend, when he usually got weekends off at that point to perform. He’d been so relieved—when he didn’t have a performance, his weekends had been lonely things back then. Bobbie had been courting John, Chrissy had been studying in Europe, and Sammy had been getting sicker and spending the time he had with Cooper.

  Quinlan would sit up in the apartment and hear the family below him, squabbling, playing, laughing in the front or backyard, or trooping off to sports or dance or drama functions, and he’d be the lonely kid in his room again, or the kid at prep school who never went home.

  But that Sunday Nica had needed him, and he’d been secretly relieved. He’d done the nanny gig, took half the kids in the second minivan, and they’d all ended up at Sammy’s uncles’ house….

  Where a giant hand-painted banner that read “Happy Birthday Quinlan” was draped in front of the living room.

  The kids had made a big deal about him sitting down and not clearing his own plate or getting his own cake, and then Princess Tay had crawled into his lap and given him a present from her Grandma Stacy.

  It was a picture of him from Christmas, when Nica had “made him work” as well. He was sitting on the couch next to Sammy with St. Peter in his lap, Tay between them, and Letty in Sammy’s lap.

  Children and young men were all sound asleep, heads tilted back, snoring.

  That had been the start of Quinlan’s collection of pictures—and the end of any “day off” nonsense. Sure, he could take days away from the family if he needed to—he had school, he had performances, and some weekends he really did get to sleep in. But school was usually at night, and the entire family started showing up at his student performances.

  His weekends were never spent being the lonely boy in the room again.

  “Sammy tipped you off,” he said into the silence of memory.

  “Yup. We’re never going to unlearn your birthday. You’ll never be uninvited to Christmas. If you and Dustin break up, you’ll get Belinda and Melly in the divorce.”

  “Dusty would be relieved.” Complaining about his sisters was Dustin’s second favorite hobby, next to hiking.

  “So see?” she said gently. “It’s win/win.” She stood then and kissed his temple. “You’re beat. I’m going to go cook dinner for everybody else and give them the extra-strong ‘But Mom, that’s so embarrassing!’ hugs. And before I go to bed, I’m coming in again to check on you, because you’re mine. Remember that. You will always be mine.”

  And with that she left the room.

  Quinlan was tired of the stupid helpless tears—he really was. Shouldn’t he be saving all that moisture for the inside of his body? But his body didn’t care, and his heart didn’t either.

  He fell asleep again, and when he woke up Jacob was sitting by his bed, eating a cold salad with chicken tossed in it, ready to give him some more water and some soup and to take his temp and his vitals and help him relieve himself. He phoned the results in to the concierge doctor and then went to the fridge to grab another IV bag, which he hooked up to the tube in place of the empty one.

  “Don’t tell on me,” he said to Quinlan. “I told the guy we had a nurse in training who could do this. Double-checked with Belinda on the phone before I came in.”

  Quinlan frowned. “Should I be afraid?”

  Jacob grinned his slacker-dude-bro grin. “Absolutely. You’re dating my oldest son, and he’s an asshole. But not about this. Nica used to need fluids when she was pregnant with Petey—she’d throw up until her body turned to dust. I picked up some things.”

  “Being pregnant’s hard,” he muttered. One of the few things he remembered was his mother’s incessant complaints about labor and losing her figure.

  Jacob shrugged. “Yeah. Sucked to watch her do it. But she always said it was a ‘gateway hard’—got you ready for the real job. She didn’t have to pop you out of her oven to worry over you.”

  “Make her stop,” he groaned.

  “Nope. It’s good when couples do things together. Do you want to pretend to watch some TV while you sleep?”

  “Murder mysteries. Any flavor.”

  “Good man.”

  Quinlan fell asleep to Law and Order like half of America and woke up again when Nica was kissing him good night. Shortly after that, Dustin showed up, bare-chested in sleep shorts.

  Quinlan’s entire bod
y relaxed.

  “You disappeared,” he accused.

  “I went and got a bunch of my stuff from the apartment after dinner,” Dustin said softly. He grabbed some extra pillows and stacked them behind his back. “Did you miss me?”

  “No,” Quinlan muttered, irritated that he had.

  “Worst liar in history.” Dustin leaned over and kissed his forehead. “But you’re feeling better, or you wouldn’t be trying to fight. The EMT is gonna be here at ass-crack o’dawn to check your fluids and give you another bag.”

  Quinlan groaned. “I’m going to have to pee before then.”

  Dustin chuckled. “Is that a nice way of asking me to handle your junk?”

  The humiliation was utter. “No.”

  “Well, good. ’Cause when I handle it, it’s not gonna be junk. But since it’s not sexy to move on someone when they’re hooked up to a banana bag, I’m going to propose we just pretend it never happens.”

  “Maybe I can walk?” He did feel better—not throwing up for nearly twelve hours was like a party for his entire body.

  “Let’s not.” Dustin’s hand in his hair comforted him beyond comfort. “Tomorrow morning, yes. Tonight, let’s just pretend I’m a quick grope in the dark and get it over with.”

  Quinlan groaned and, careful of the IV in his arm, rolled to his side toward Dustin.

  “This was so not how I’d planned to come home,” he confessed.

  “No?”

  “No. I was going to… I don’t know.” This—this was embarrassing. “I wanted to go hiking next weekend. With you.”

  “Yeah? Anywhere in mind?”

  “Tahoe, I guess. Maybe get a room. Just… you know. Alone.”

  “Oh wow,” Dustin whispered, sliding down the bed and propping himself up on an elbow. “You thought of me.”

  “You sent me a selfie every day, Dusty. You’re not exactly a troll.”

  Dustin chuckled, low and filthy. “Glad you noticed.”

  “Vain asshole.”

  His guffaw echoed in a room that had been sickbed whispers all day, and suddenly Quinlan felt alive again.

  “Did you think about kissing me?” Dustin’s eyes had green flecks in them, and they seemed to dance in the dim light from the end table lamp.