by P D Singer
“Good, because it’s a lot better than what I was afraid you were going to tell me.” Dad chuckled, and the warmth came through his hands to thaw the ice in my soul.
“That I’d gotten someone pregnant? Or something worse?” I tried to imagine what Dad would consider worse, but my thoughts still existed as zots and zaps.
“What I was really afraid you were going to tell me was that you were leaving school, that you’d changed your mind and wanted to do the ranger slash ski bum thing permanently, or go carve novelty moose statues in the mountains for a living.” Dad lifted one corner of his mouth. “It’s the sort of thing a parent would like to know before spending a fortune on education.”
“No, nothing like that.” I might not be the man most likely to hurt himself carving moose statues, but my goals had never wavered.
Scratch that, I had been ready to delay, maybe permanently, the pursuit of those goals, but Kurt had kicked my butt into gear. His words in the dark cabin on a sleepless night echoed in my head.
“Jake, you’re trying to hang on to three things: your future, your fear, and me. You can have any two of the three. I only have control of one of those choices, but I will not let you dump your future without a fight. Choose wisely.”
I had chosen wisely. Letting go of the fear was taking a while. Great globs of it still sloshed around in my belly. Which I could fix to some degree. Dad’s response helped a lot, but I could still do something practical about it. “Be right back.”
Pharmacist, dose thyself. The Tums still lived in the second cabinet to the right over the microwave. I popped three of them, chewing the mouthful of chalk for the sweet relief the antacids would bring.
There was still more we needed to talk about, but I could do it without a belly full of lava. Should have done that an hour ago, but my thoughts were only just beginning to clear. “See, my education is paying off already.”
“Good. You can hand me a couple of those.” Dad put out his hand for the tablets I shook from the bottle.
Guess this conversation had to be as wracking to him as it was to me, even if his fears were different.
“Um, Dad?” I had to know. “You don’t seem all that surprised.”
“The handwriting has been on the wall since you started your second ranger season,” Dad said. “And I’ve had a few other shocks recently that put your revelation into perspective. I worry about other things with you.”
“Such as?”
“Kurt is on board with your plans, right? He’s not going to lure you away to a life of moose carving?”
“He wouldn’t do that.” He’d done quite the opposite. “He’s very supportive.” To the point of buying me textbooks months before classes started. But—I felt off balance, like I’d missed a stair in the dark.
“Oh. Flubbed my cue.” Dad straightened in his seat and intoned, “Kurt is your boyfriend, is he not?”
“He is.” My face burned, because if I hadn’t said, “I frequently have sex with the man currently down the hall in a bedroom in your house,” I’d certainly implied it.
“How long have you been a couple, not just work partners?” Dad relaxed, like his part in this conversation was scripted and he’d finished the required lines.
“Since the big fire.” Nothing like holing up in a cave and expecting to die to get a man to unzip his britches and admit what he wants.
“So, close to a year and a half now,” Dad mused. “He seems like a fine young man, Jake. From everything you’ve ever said about him, and from what we’ve seen. Your mother certainly likes him.”
“She mommed on him when I was in the hospital. Even though…” Even though Kurt had been the one to put me in the hospital. “And she knows. Don’t be mad if she kept it a secret, if she did. But she said she wasn’t going to be the one to break the news, that I had to do it myself. So I brought Kurt home because I wanted everyone to see what a great guy he is. And then maybe they’d be okay with…us.”
“After his run-in with my unesteemed brother-in-law, I’d say Kurt has a big fan club.” Dad rubbed his fingertips against his lips, like he could say a whole lot more but chose not to. But I’d swear there was a twinkle in his eye.
“About that…” After I’d misjudged my father so badly, I wanted help, or an outside viewpoint. “What do you think the rest of the family’s going to say?”
“Well, Jake—” Dad lost the possible twinkle. “I’d say you knew them pretty well and would know just from knowing them, but you were so worried about me, I’m guessing your judgement’s a little skewed. Which I suppose I understand.”
“I’ve been so tied in knots, I don’t know what to think.” I bit my lip, a little bit of controllable pain to help me focus.
“I’m not going to speak for everyone, but I would say a good guide would be to think of who was here tonight and who wasn’t.” Dad cocked his head at me. “Does Shari know?”
“I kind of had to tell her while we were still at the airport.” I grimaced at the memory. “She made a pass at him. Jokingly, but still.” Hadn’t felt like a joke to me, and Kurt didn’t do deer-in-the-headlights all that often either.
“Oh, Shari, we’re still trying to teach you tact.” Dad shook his head. “Okay, that’s your nuclear family who knows. Who else’s opinion really matters to you?”
That was easy: the aunts and uncles could think what they wanted, and I hadn’t expected much from Ed and Patrice anyhow. The cousins, probably all cool. Great-aunt Elaine, lost cause. Great-Grandmother Viola, well, she was a sweetheart, but folks of her vintage came with a long lifetime of conditioning. But one person mattered a whole lot. “Gramps.”
A man who’d missed the Viet Nam war on the early side, who’d come to adulthood during the early part of the Civil Rights Movement.
A man who’d been unfailingly kind to everyone he met. A fair man. A good man. A loving man, protective of his family.
A man I loved fiercely. Who I hated to be afraid of—I’d never been afraid of him before.
A man I couldn’t predict.
My father’s father.
“Your grandfather. Yes.” Dad rose, and I rose with him. “Jake, have some faith, please. But you will have to have your own talk with him.”
My grandfather. A man who grew up with gay equals bad, gay equals don’t do it, gay equals risking prison.
Losing his good opinion would cut me to the bone.
“I’ll go over in the morning.”
CHAPTER 9
We said our goodnights, and I could believe that tonight would be better than last night, when I’d tossed and turned, dreading this conversation. Dad hugged me tight, and I clutched back, harder than ever I had when I was a kid with a bad dream.
“I love you, Dad,” I whispered.
“I love you too, Jake.” Dad patted my back in the old familiar way, no matter that I stood an inch or two taller than he. “Always. I just want you to be happy.”
“Lot happier now,” I told him, and went to share the news with Kurt.
He’d found something to read and was camped out in the leather chair, feet up on the ottoman. He glanced up and was on his feet in a heartbeat. “You’re smiling.”
Yes. Yes, I was. I gathered him up, holding him against me, and reveled in the way his arms wrapped around me. I kissed him, hard enough to be a promise I couldn’t keep tonight and buried my face in his neck. “I talked with Dad. He was fine. Or he said he was fine, that he wants me to be happy, and he likes you.”
“That’s about as good as it gets.” Kurt ran his fingers up and down my spine, rubbing my anxiety away. “That’s four of your family who know.”
I might be an unraveling mess of loosening anxieties, but I could still count. “Three. Mom, Dad, and Shari.”
“Four,” Kurt corrected me. “My new Great-Grandmother Viola thinks you have good taste in men.”
That brought me up with a start. “I do, but—she does?” I remembered seeing
them sharing a moment, and she’d kissed his cheek. How—?
Kurt chuckled. “We talked for a bit, guess Elliott got to serve most of the pie, and she whispered to me that I seemed like a nice young man and she hoped you made me happy.”
“I’m working on it. But jeez.” Age, experience, and an eye for detail had certainly led her to the right conclusion, but… My head spun.
“She said she wanted to tell me because she was afraid you might suspect her of closed-mindedness, and that she was old but not hide-bound.” Kurt rubbed his cheek against mine, rasping our five o’clock shadows. “I’m keeping her. She’s quite the little pistol.”
“She is. She built B-24 bombers at the Willow Run factory during the war.” Maybe I could get her to tell us stories when I took Kurt for the one official talk that I didn’t have to dread. “I’m glad she likes you.” And I was really, really glad she liked us.
Between the relief and the hug, I was feeling better by the moment, enough to know that half of my exhaustion wasn’t going to go away because I’d stopped worrying. Last night had been brutal, the alarm had gone off far too early, and sitting in a plane for hours was a lot more work than it should be. I yawned.
Kurt caught the yawn from me. “It’s not nine o’clock our time, but it feels like midnight.”
By our body clocks, it was seven p.m. and the evening was young. The two-hour time difference always came as a surprise. “We’ll be up at dawn.”
Kurt kissed me, a peppermint brush of his lips over mine. “Think you can sleep tonight?”
Guess I hadn’t kept from thrashing around as well as I thought. “I think so. I’d better, or I’m going to fall on my face tomorrow.”
“I’ll catch you.”
He would. Kurt always did. But I could reduce the need. “Guess we should figure out who’s sleeping where.”
“Still feel squidgy about bunking together?” Kurt regarded me with calm blue eyes.
What I should have said was “Do you want the wall side or the open side of the bottom bunk?” What came out of my mouth was “Now that the parents know, I kind of feel squidgier. Like they’ll be trying real hard not to listen.”
We’d shared a bed in Wyoming and gone the entire weekend without getting frisky in the house. Mostly because I jumped every time we heard one of Kurt’s family in the hall or opening the bathroom door. Kurt had taken me on a horseback ride to a favorite spot near a mountain spring, where we traded enthusiastic, unobserved blowjobs. We didn’t have that option here.
I knew my parents had only to shut their bedroom door. The house was built like a bunker. Shari’s room was across the hall. The problem was all in my head.
Had I just traded one anxiety for another?
“I understand. It’s new and weird. It’ll be okay.” Kurt kissed me again. His hands hadn’t strayed down as far as my butt, and now they wouldn’t. He let go to peel down to his boxers, and then he was halfway up the ladder, a fine angle for viewing except for meaning he’d be too far away to cuddle on. “Good night, Jake.”
We didn’t wear pajamas at home. Hell, we didn’t sleep in boxers at home either.
We didn’t sleep so far apart we couldn’t touch if we wanted to at home.
And that, more than anything, underscored that this house that had been my home for so long, wasn’t home in the same way anymore.
I hit the bathroom and came back to find Kurt making regular rasping sounds. He snored slightly when he was exhausted. Guess this day had taken something out of him, hard though he’d hidden it in the face of my freakout.
The man was my rock.
So why was I down here, looking up at the slats of the top bunk and wishing I was next to the man sleeping in it?
Kurt called me the dumbest smart man he knew, after I’d gotten past the dumb thing and could see myself being foolish. Like now.
I climbed the ladder quietly as I could, every creak sounding loud enough to wake people in the next township. Kurt didn’t wake, but he did roll over at my nudge. I curled up to his back, my own pressing against the wooden rail which better be strong enough to keep me from landing in the double bed below in the middle of the night.
Now I was home.
CHAPTER 10
Wrapped around Kurt, I did manage to sleep, though we woke around four a.m. and decided we needed to be on the bottom bunk, just in case one of us needed to do something silly like turn over. Waking up next to Kurt is always a good thing, so I did it again around eight o’clock.
Pajamas and bath robes are considered breakfast attire in my family, but since we didn’t own the one and couldn’t bring the other, we dressed for the day in jeans and long-sleeved shirts. The weather had turned cold enough to drop all the leaves, and there’d been snow once already this month.
Mom had the Detroit Free Press scattered all over the kitchen table, her coffee in one hand and her pen in the other. Friday’s crossword puzzle looked to be her complete victim in another fifteen or twenty clues. I leaned down to kiss her cheek. She smiled an invitation to Kurt and kept her cheek in presentation mode. Kurt took the hint.
“Good morning…” Kurt trailed to a halt.
Mom gazed up at him. “Mrs. Landon sounds much too formal. You don’t have to call me Mom if you don’t want to, but my other-son is allowed. If you call me Diane, that’s fine.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Kurt stammered. “I mean, thank you, Diane.”
“You’re welcome, dear. Coffee’s in the pot, bagels and cream cheese are on the counter. There’s cereal if you want it. Help yourselves.”
Other-son. I liked that. Mom had taken a shine to Kurt in spite of the arrow incident, and had been treating his presence in my life as a given. Every phone call she’d had warm greetings for him if he hadn’t been around to participate in the chat. Dad had probably heard enough to be able to say my lines for me last night.
Son-in-law? Son-out-law? Getting married sounded way too complicated for now. Kurt and I just were. Other-son worked fine for me, and judging from his smile, it worked fine for Kurt too.
I poured two mugs of coffee and dosed them with the right amounts of half and half and sugar while Kurt selected a poppy seed bagel for me and an everything bagel for himself. He knew what I liked, and the problems with having it. He put the knife to the bagel but didn’t start the fatal incision. “How long does the opium take to clear, Jake?”
I do love my poppy seed bagels, but I also stared at a life of random drug tests and the fear of my breakfast ending my career. Possibly an overblown fear, but until I heard otherwise from an official source about the sensitivity of the testing, I’d err on the side of caution. “It’ll be gone before Monday.”
“Then you can indulge now.” Kurt drew the blade across the bagel.
“Poppy seeds don’t have a bad association for you?” Mom also knew what I liked and bought them, but she also remembered what crop led directly to me getting a near-fatal wound. We’d surprised some ex-Army scoundrels growing acres of poppy in the Uncompahgre National Forest, and they hadn’t appreciated our intrusion.
“I think of it as getting even.” I passed Kurt his mug and went in search of glasses for orange juice. The glasses were where I remembered, but these were new, cylinders curved in at the base and textured with some diagonal ripple effect. The small change disconcerted me.
“Where’s Dad?” I bit into my bagel, reveling in the pop, pop, pop of the seeds between my teeth.
“He and Steve are working on the lawn tractor. It’s developed some sort of hiccup.” Mom scribbled into the last few open squares of her crossword.
A hiccup in the lawn tractor explained the property line to property line coating of horse chestnuts and leaves on the lawn. Dad and Uncle Steve shared the tractor, and whoever had it that week stopped off at Gramps’s to run it across his yard. Mowing during growing season, towing the yard sweeper when the leaves fell.
“Think I should take a look?” Kurt kne
w his way around tractors big enough to cut hay with, and he’d kept our diesel tanker from stranding us in the forest more than once.
“That’s sweet of you to offer, but I think they have it under control.” Mom took a sip of her coffee. “Didn’t you say you were going over to see Gramps this morning?”
There went a nice excuse to put off the potential pain. Maybe I’d misjudged Dad, and Dad was Gramps’s son, so my hope for this going well, or at least not badly to the point of ostracism, grew 0.0015%. But I still expected this discussion to hurt.
“Yes, we are.” Kurt could come with me, remind Gramps of his worth, and maybe take the heat off two degrees. Gramps appeared to like Kurt quite well yesterday.
Liking Kurt and accepting the idea of me with Kurt weren’t the same. I was really grasping at straws. But they were all I had.
I borrowed Mom’s Escape hybrid for the short drive over to Gramps’s, down Lahser Road and across on Fourteen Mile Road. Kurt goggled at the St. Regis church. “That church looks remarkably like a witch’s hat.”
“Mid century architecture, what can I say?” It made a momentary distraction from the coming talk with Gramps. At least this morning I’d chased my breakfast with antacids, so the coffee wasn’t actively corroding my interior.
I pulled down the long asphalt drive to the single-story red brick house my grandparents bought after Dad, Uncle Steve, and Aunt Becky were all grown. I’d ridden my bike over here many a summer afternoon, to hang with the cousins. We’d help with yard work or cookie baking. And we basked in my grandparents’ love.
“This must be spectacular in the spring and summer.” Kurt paused with the Escape’s door still open. “And fall before the leaves drop.”
I looked around the yard, where the swing set still stood under the maples and oaks, towering sixty and seventy feet above the grass. Their bare branches made thick lace against the gray skies. The shrubby blackhaws clustered against the property line, their masses of tiny white flowers only a memory, one Kurt didn’t share. A clump of chokecherries still sported red beads of fruit the birds had yet to eat, and not all of their red leaves had joined the carpet of red, orange, and yellow on the ground.