by Julia Kent
“She carried a briefcase everywhere she went, full of schedules and doctor’s statements and prognoses and test results. That woman berated and bullied doctors and nurses into getting you whatever you needed. Your heart surgery was experimental.”
I started breathing again and gasped out, “Yeah, she told me.”
“She told you everything?”
A creeping sense filled the back of my head. “What do you mean, everything?”
“The research trial for the new infant heart surgery rejected you. I don’t remember the details, but Joanne got on a fucking plane when you were four weeks old and marched into the office of the head of the study and by the time she was done, you were in the trial and she was handing him his own balls back.” Gene reached out and touched my hand. “You would have died without that surgery.”
I stared ahead, blank and empty, overwhelmed and swirling inside.
“I didn’t know that.”
“I figured you didn’t.”
“She...did she ever clerk?”
“No. Gave up law the day you came out of that surgery and they said you’d be fine. Devoted herself to you and only you.”
I covered my mouth with my hands and rubbed. “Yeah.”
Gene clapped me on the back and laughed. “You sound so grateful.” I bristled under his touch. He pulled back.
“No,” I said slowly. “I am. I just...I didn’t know that about the surgery. Helps to understand why she’s so worried about me all the time. Why she just can’t let go.”
“Right. It’s crazy, though. It really is.”
In the dim recesses of my mind I realized he’d deftly changed subjects. How had we gone from talking about why he lived above the garage to my heart surgery? I wanted to go back to that but I couldn’t. Not with the stuff about my mom ricocheting through me.
I chugged my now-warm espresso and gently tapped the counter with the bottom of the cup. “Gotta go finish my paper.”
“Yeah. When your mom and dad get back, they’ll be happy to hear that’s done.”
“They’re out to dinner?”
“Herb said they were going to a dinner party at the Connor’s place.”
“Trevor’s house?”
“Yeah. Something about meeting his new girlfriend. The one who manages your band. Darla?” He gave me a questioning look.
“Trevor’s new girlfriend, Darla,” I repeated. That heart mom had worked so hard to save began slamming against my ribs.
“Right.” He frowned. “You didn’t know? I guess they’re together, and all I know is the Connors invited Herb and Joanne over for a dinner party. Joanne said she ran into—”
I didn’t hear the rest as I grabbed the keys to my car and sprinted out the door, racing to Trevor’s house.
This could not happen.
This could not fucking happen.
Trevor
We were at the table, Rick silently making his way through his salmon, a big glop of something white with green grapes in it on his plate.
The table was about as tense as an an Obama-Putin joint press conference. A detente of sorts appeared to have descended over the seven of us, Rick blissfully oblivious of the social tension while I, for one, needed a twelve pack of beer, a jar of Joe’s concentrates, and about a pound of ’shrooms right now.
Barring that, I’d just drink as many glasses of mom’s organic sulfite-free Pinot Noir as I could get away with drinking while she pointedly glared at me, and I smiled pleasantly back at her.
Joanne Ross was a fucking piece of work. She was the epitome of all that was wrong with Sudborough, and the longer I had to sit here across the table from her and listen to her yammer on about what a shame it was the anti-vaccination parents were ruining the world for the rest of us, or how transgendered people really should be more delicate when it comes to public bathroom use, or how breastfeeding women should be able to whip it out and nurse anywhere, any time, or how the president wasn’t liberal enough in, well—everything—the more I came to see that poor Joe’s assholery was a safety valve.
He must live in constant pressure from this woman. She didn’t.ever.shut.up.
On the rare occasions that we did go over there, we always just hung out in his bonus room or the basement, so while we’d had to endure her in small doses, she’d been annoying but like all the other mothers, right?
But this? Why in the hell did my mom and dad invite them over?
As Mrs. Ross prattled on about something, Darla, who was sitting to my right, between me and my dad, reached over and gave my thigh a squeeze. It wasn’t sexual—this was like an anchor. She needed to make sure I was still here. Thank God she didn’t have long fingernails, because when Mrs. Ross turned to ask Darla a question, that squeeze turned into a vise grip.
“Joey tells me you handle the finances for the band. I’m sure you’ll be fine with having our accountant audit your books?”
“Excuse me?” Darla and I said in unison.
Something birdlike and sharp shone in her eyes. “Your books. The financial records?” she said slowly, like she was explaining this to a stupid person. “You do keep careful accounting records for the band’s business, don’t you?” she said to Darla, ignoring me.
The accusation didn’t have to be said. Joe’s mom was either accusing Darla of ignorance or malfeasance.
And neither could stand.
I opened my mouth to say something, but Darla beat me to the punch.
“The bookkeeping is handled by an online bookkeeping service, and the CPA for the band is one you’ve heard of.” Darla named the biggest accounting firm in Boston. Even I had heard of them.
Herb looked between Darla and Joanne, eyes narrow and calculating. Something in his face rippled. It was amusement.
“Ah. I’m sure that was Joe’s doing, then. I’m friends with one of the principals at that CPA firm, and I recommended them to him some time ago,” Joanne said tightly.
“Actually, no,” Darla said. Her cheeks were flushed pink with what I knew was utter rage, but her voice remained surprisingly calm. Neutral. “One of the principals saw the band play and asked to have the account.” Darla’s smile was wide and ferocious, like a crocodile going in for a kill. “He asked for our business.”
“Our?” Joanne tittered. “Our? Isn’t that a bit presumptuous, dear? You’re not part of the band.”
“She absolutely is,” I said, my anger evident. Darla squeezed again, a message to back off, but nope. Fuck that. “She’s our manager, and as—”
Joanne cut me off. “I’d hardly call a ‘groupie’ a ‘manager’.”
“And I’d hardly call a stay at home mom of a twenty-four year old man a ‘lawyer’.” Darla’s words were like hot lava ejected from an active volcano.
Showdown.
The front door burst open just as Darla and Joanne opened their mouths to speak. Since we only had me, Mom, Dad and Rick in the family, and no one else had the privilege of just barging in to the house, Dad and I leaped to our feet and started running into the living room.
I smacked into the body of Joe, racing into the dining room. Our chests collided, arms grasping at each other, legs tangled and we smashed into the couch, tumbling head over ass into the coffee table.
“Are they fighting?” my mom gasped.
“No. They’re just clumsy,” I heard Darla say.
“My Joey is not clumsy!’ Mrs. Ross shouted, as if Darla had said something offensive.
Joe thrashed against me, struggling to get up, muttering the word “fuck” over and over and over. He was covered in sweat and slick, and I couldn’t stop him from pushing against me, making it worse. It was like fighting quicksand to stand up. Instinct told me to just stop moving, and finally he stood, chest heaving from exertion, eyes wild.
“My parents are here?” he shouted, completely oblivious to the fact that they were in his face, his mother right there. How could you miss her and the ribbon of shit that floated out of her mouth nonstop, the words like
diarrhea?
“Are you hurt, honey?” she asked, reaching for him and wrapping her arms around his shoulder. Joe didn’t hug her back, and instead shrugged her off.
“I’m fine. We just ran into each other. Geez. Stop making a big deal out of it.”
“What’s wrong? Why are you here?”
His eyes locked with mine. We couldn’t say anything, but I realized why he was here.
Motherfucker.
He thought we were going to out him. Us. All of us. As a threesome. As if we’d do that without him here? Darla’s face changed, too, as she got it, the push-pull tension of keeping up appearances fighting with the dawning horror of realization that Joe was willing to crash my parents’ dinner party and make a scene simply to keep it all under wraps.
To keep it hidden.
To keep the secret.
Darla equated secrets with shame.
Joe’s shame poured off him like a pheromone.
I looked at him, then his mom, and finally—his dad.
And Darla was pointedly looking at me. That “groupie” cheap shot from Mrs. Ross hurt.
But more than that—my silence and Joe’s explosion hurt, too.
I looked at her from across the room, Joe next to me, his mom hanging off him like a vine. My dad and Herb were in the doorway between the dining room and living room. Rick ate at the table, either unaware or not caring what the rest of us did.
Darla and my mom were off to the side a little, by the fireplace, mom’s hand at her neck, worrying those beads.
Darla looked like she would reach into her own chest and worry her heart if she could.
“Why are you here?” my mom asked in a quiet voice. Joanne cut her a nasty look and she added, “Not that you’re not welcome! Would you like to stay for dinner?”
Why did Joanne have so much power?
“No,” Joe said, clearing his throat. “Um, thank you. I came because I—because....” He frowned, clearly trying to spin a lie as fast as he could.
“Was it about the contract for that new concert we booked for summer?” Darla asked in a quiet, neutral voice. “Today’s the deadline and you haven’t signed it yet.”
She was a better liar than Joe. Faster, too.
Learn something new every day.
His eyes lit up. “Yes.”
Darla turned to my mom, and reached for her hand. “You know, Susan, I’m not feeling very well.” She looked at my dad and smiled a sweet grin that made my stomach drop.
Oh, no. Suddenly I wasn’t feeling well, either.
Mom frowned, but she wasn’t stupid. Later, when I replayed this scene a thousand times in my head, and then another thousand times because that’s what you do when you’re in mourning for a relationship that was the best thing in your life, I’d remember the look on Mom’s face. How her eyes skipped over every single person the room, including Rick, to see what emotional intelligence she could gather.
Darla normally did the same, but it looked like she’d done it long ago and twice as fast. Right now, she shook hands and made a polite withdrawal, pointedly going out of her way to grip Joe’s mom’s hand like she was asphyxiating it and making eye contact like Hannibal Lechter.
And then she walked out of the front door, Joe nervously calling back to the grown ups and Rick, “Just checking on this contract with her!”
Rick began to play a slow, sad “Adagio for Strings” by Samuel Barber.
I sprinted out the door, too, waving. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, heart racing as all four adults looked at me, faces puckered like tight anuses, a giant wall of judgment in the flesh.
Darla
I was too mad to cry. You know that feeling? Even if you’re an angry crier, there’s a point where something inside you breaks. This isn’t about shutting down. Lots of people cultivate the ability to shut down in an emotional crisis, and I applaud them. You do that on purpose and for a very good reason. Because the world can’t be trusted.
Now, I’ve had my share of moments like that. Mama used to drink so much she’d sob half the night while looking over old photo albums of life before the car accident. Cigarette stained photos, all yellowed around the white edges, pictures of her and Daddy when they was in their teens, when she was whole and free and Daddy hadn’t had too many and gone and ruined everything.
You can love someone even when they cause you the greatest pain of your life. Even when they intentionally hurt you every second, every hour, every day with every fiber of their being.
The problem is figuring out whether they’re doing it on purpose or because they’re just an ignorant hosebeast incapable of change.
And that was my problem right now.
So I wasn’t crying. No fucking way was I gonna cry.
But I knew what I had to do.
My good-bye was clearly welcome back there. Mr. and Mrs. Connor were perfectly fine. Wound tight and living under a set of social rules I didn’t quite understand. In what kind of fucked up world was it okay that all the reasonable people in the room were supposed to tolerate the negativity that came out of Joe’s mom? It was like she was the batshit crazy old demented aunt who thinks it’s still 1944 and it’s wartime, so it’s fine to let her reuse toilet paper and scream at you for throwing away a broken rubber band.
Except none of that was true when it came to Joanne Ross. She was just mean to the bone, and in these social circles they ignored the mean shit and adapted.
Worse. No, it was worse. They took her shit and acted like it was a delicious chocolate mousse.
There had to be a word for that. Maybe next semester, when I took abnormal psychology, I’d know what it was.
Joe came running up behind me, huffing hard. “Jesus, that was fucking close.”
I said nothing, just walked to Josie’s car. If I was too mad to cry, I was also too mad to talk.
For now.
“Good save on the contract. Thanks.”
Silence. I tried to lengthen my stride to get to Josie’s car as fast as I could. A sense of cold purpose built in me. I was ready to make a wall around myself in this very moment. To reject everything that I had built for the past two years out here. If I wasn’t good enough to reveal to your parents, then what was I? We said I love you and we acted like a team behind closed doors. This wasn’t 1890s England, where what we did could be punishable by death.
It was fucking 2010s Boston, in a state where gay people could marry each other, and where people might raise an eyebrow if you told them about me, Joe and Trevor, but if they judged us, we could just shrug and realize they were out of our club.
If you’re too judgmental, you shut your self off to so much richness in the world.
Fuck them in the eye.
And fuck Joe and Trevor, too.
Footsteps behind me said Trevor was coming, too. “You okay? I know you’re not sick.” Trevor touched my arm. I snatched it away like he’d poured melted pewter on it.
I could feel Joe stiffen next to me.
“You’re mad,” he said simply. It was an observation. There was a blankness to his voice, as if he were carefully gathering evidence to determine how to shape a case.
Except if he was doing that, I’d be fine with it. He wasn’t, because I knew Joe.
He was judging.
Judging me.
These two little fuckers were so worried about how everyone else would judge them that they’d decided it was easier to judge me.
Me.
The so-called love of their life.
I said nothing as I got to the car and put the key in the lock, turning it open, and creaking open the door to the old Honda.
“Darla,” Trevor said in a quiet voice. He came up on the other side of me, Joe silently slipping in, too. Their joint heat filled me, made me hotter and madder.
Made something in me start to cry, a low sob that just went on and on and on for what might have been.
But I didn’t let it rise to the surface.
With great delib
eration and the kind of superhuman strength you call on when you just don’t think you can live one more second (and yet you can), I forced myself to look Trevor in the eye.
“I’m done.”
He sighed. “Yeah, I know. That was rough in there, and Joe’s mom is just a total bitch.”
“She really is,” Joe agreed.
“We’ll finish up here and meet you at the—” I cut Trevor off with a palm and looked at those eyes, so conflicted and yet clear, like the ocean on the Island of Eden at sunset.
“I’m done.”
Then I looked at Joe, who still looked blank.
“I loved you. That means more to me than it does to both of you. I still love you, and it’ll take time for that to drain out of me. It might not ever leave, not every drop. But I can’t let that love linger inside me like a poison, eating away at my soul.”
My heart stopped. Just...stopped. My words felt like they were coming out of a slab of granite.
“Darla,” Trevor said, suddenly as cold and silent as my chest felt.
Joe didn’t move a muscle, his eyes on me.
“Your mother is a bitch,” I said calmly. Reasonably, even, to Joe. “And Trevor’s mom is a pushover for letting your mom be a bitch in her home.”
I kept my hand on the car door, hip brushed up against it, deeply aware of where every part of me was in time and space. My heart shattered into a thousand tiny pieces and carried on out of my chest, a bloody swarm like a bunch of bees all swept off my the wind.
“But you two are the worst.”
They exchanged a brief glance. Joe opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it.
“Because you two ain’t got my back. And when a man don’t got his woman’s back, he don’t deserve the woman.” I affixed them both with a look that felt like I was pulling the drain plug on the ocean. “I’m not your quiet little fucktoy any more.”
Their voices rose in protest and I answered them with twin middle fingers, one for each of them.
“You’re both number one, guys. Too bad you couldn’t make me number one.”
And with that, I climbed in Josie’s car, turned it on, and drove away.