Maisie threw her arms around her uncle, gathering the fabric around his waist.
“Okay, well, don’t wrinkle it. It’s fashion.” He took her hand and walked her back to find Grant.
“You’re wearing a dreth.” Even through his goggles he could see that clear as day.
“You want one?” Patrick offered. He was even willing to cut one short for him.
“No.” Grant flinched.
Patrick tapped Maisie on the shoulder and gave her a little nudge in the direction of her bedroom. She scampered away to change, leaving Patrick and Grant alone. After a moment of awkward silence, Patrick offered, “This is a caftan, not a dress.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a dreth.”
“It’s a caftan! Do you know who Mrs. Roper is? She’s basically my fashion icon.”
Grant shook his head.
“From Three’s Company? Jack? Chrissy? Janet? SUZANNE SOMERS? Let me guess. You don’t like television, only YouTube. Jesus, you kids are missing everything.”
SEVEN
Patrick didn’t have to knock on JED’s door; Lorna the Labrador started barking the moment he stepped onto their circular drive. Eduardo, the E in their moniker, answered the door wearing some sort of pink wrap that resembled a miniskirt and not much else; it looked downright neon against his beautiful, tanned skin.
“Patrick, mi vecino, my amigo.”
Patrick leaned in for a hug, but not too tight; he didn’t want to crush the intricate dream catcher necklace Eduardo was sporting.
“How was the trip, you poor thing? Come in, let me make you a drink.” He waved Patrick inside, careful not to let Lorna escape. Of the three of them, Eduardo was the most physically fit, and while Patrick was unclear on his age, he suspected by JED’s arrangement that he was older than the late-thirties he looked; it seemed, at least to Patrick, that a throuple was not the sort of something you enter when life still felt full of possibility. But honestly, what did he know?
“Is that Patrick?” John emerged from the living room dressed in a more conventional costume, shorts and a tank top with a pineapple design; the two of them side by side would be a lesson for Maisie in wearing what makes you comfortable. “We were planning our burn. You just have to come with us this year.”
“Your what?”
“Our burn. Burning Man?”
“Burning Man.” Patrick acted as if it should have been obvious. “As much as I would love to,” he added as Lorna planted her face in his crotch. He leaned down to massage her behind the ears. “Scratch that. I would not love to. I’m not cleaning sand out of intimate places well into autumn.” His washlet, even with its mystery hurricane button, would be no match for a week in the windy Nevadan desert. “Besides, I came back from my trip with a bit of a surprise.”
“Syphilis?” John asked while twisting one end of his handlebar mustache. “Half the people on the playa have something. I’m sure it will be gone before then.”
Eduardo moved into the kitchen off the hallway to fix Patrick’s drink. “I was going to make Patrick a drink; I’ll make a round for everyone. Dwayne!”
Patrick continued. “No, not syphilis.” Good lord. “My niece and nephew, Maisie and Grant.”
“Oh, those poor children,” John said as Dwayne materialized in the doorway in hospital scrubs, presumably having just come from work (Patrick hoped; nurses presumably shouldn’t drink before they start their shift). JED was now fully present and accounted for.
“Those poor children?” Dwayne asked. “Patrick’s not that awful. I’m sure they’ll have a fine time on their visit.” He winked in Patrick’s direction.
John pressed his forehead against the palm of his hand in frustration. “Their mother just died? The whole reason Patrick went home? We got his mail?” He looked at Patrick apologetically. “We have your mail.”
Patrick often wondered how their needs were ever met in this arrangement. Any divisions in a threesome, like with his siblings, were usually two against one. It would be difficult, he imagined, to be in a relationship like this, and also the slightest bit emotionally frail. It was one of the reasons he admired them.
“Why I’m here,” Patrick said, and flipped through the stack of his mail on the entry table. He hadn’t missed much if the top few envelopes—bills mostly, and a few solicitations for money—were any indication.
“Oh, but stay. Can you stay?” Dwayne asked.
“We’re very sorry,” John said, placing a hand on Patrick’s shoulder.
He couldn’t deny the air-conditioning felt good (a few degrees colder than he kept his own house), and while he had his issues with JED, it was already a refreshing change of pace to be around adults. Kids had so many questions. All the time. “For a few minutes.”
Eduardo shouted from the kitchen, “I’m making Aperol spritzes!” Patrick heard it in Grant’s voice—spwitzes—and smiled.
“The kids are with my housekeeper. I left them looking at videos on my iPad. Can you believe it? I have a sixty-five-inch television and they have no interest in watching it.”
“They’re not size queens like you,” John teased.
“Oh, leave them be,” Dwayne fussed. “I can’t imagine what they’re going through. Is your brother here, too?”
“Greg? He’s in Rancho Mirage.”
“He’s not staying with you?”
“Are you ready for this? He’s in rehab.”
“Rehab!” they chorused. Even Eduardo peered around the corner, his necklace clinking against the hutch. They had a tendency to do this, chime in together. It reminded Patrick of the Bobbsey Twins, books of his parents he read when he was young in which two sets of twins would always exclaim things in unison. He always thought that read remarkably false—that couldn’t actually happen with twins, could it?—but now he had a newfound appreciation.
“For what?” John asked.
“Pills. Since Sara’s diagnosis. Apparently, it’s how he made it through.”
“Pills? Come, come,” John motioned, beckoning him into the living room. Patrick looked at the décor; there wasn’t a knickknack or piece of folk art they didn’t love. On the side table was a collection of African carvings in varying sizes of warriors with huge, erect penises, and the house was full of macramé.
Patrick settled in the drab olive-green lounger covered in crushed velvet that he’d silently dubbed the Ike Turner Chair, then kicked off his sandals before resting his feet on an ottoman. “The whole family was shocked. We had no idea.”
Eduardo joined them in the living room with a tray of drinks, handing one to Patrick before John and Dwayne reached for the others. “John was an addict once.”
“Cocaine,” John admitted. “But I don’t think it was addiction so much as the seventies.”
“We only let him have the occasional drink.”
“That’s right, only four or five a day. Tops.” He winked.
“What was your sister-in-law’s name again?” Dwayne asked, taking a seat across from Patrick.
“She was more than my sister-in-law,” Patrick said, before realizing he didn’t want to share more. “Sara.”
Dwayne raised his glass. “To Sara.”
“To Sara.” In this instance, the unanimous chorus was endearingly authentic; still, Patrick bristled. Once again, more people stepping in to mourn her, when he selfishly wanted her all to himself.
“How wonderful to have the children, though. Not the circumstances, but to have this time with them.”
Patrick realized he must have made a sour face when he looked up from his glass and saw JED staring at him from the other three corners of the room.
“You never wanted children?” Eduardo asked.
“No, of course not.” Patrick took another sip of his cocktail. “Did you?”
“Oh, yes,” John said. “Because of my niece, in fact. We we
re driving one time on the highway. I don’t even remember where we were going. But we passed a big truck filled with chickens in wire coops, and white feathers rained down on us like snow. She watched tiny clouds of feathers float around us and then she asked, ‘Uncle JoJo?’ She called me JoJo. ‘Does that hurt the chickens?’ How marvelous, I thought. We were having this strangely beautiful moment, and she wanted to know if the wind was hurting the chickens.”
“I love this story,” Dwayne said, as if they sat around and told it every night.
“I just remember thinking, children’s souls are so gentle. I wanted to be around that all the time.”
Patrick smiled. “This morning Grant asked me what was inside an eel. He had this image of shucking one to see what he would find.”
“Well, that’s just boys,” Eduardo said, and the others agreed.
“I wasn’t like that.” Patrick chuckled, remembering as a child only caring to know what was inside Julie Andrews that allowed her to hit those high notes. He raised an eyebrow. “You all feel this way?”
John nodded and Dwayne said, “We do.”
“Then why not have kids?”
“Oh, sweet Patrick,” John chided. “You’ve been in the desert too long.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
John pursed his lips and his sharp cheekbones became even more pronounced. “It’s not exactly a traditional arrangement we have.”
“So? This is California.”
“It doesn’t matter. No one’s going to give us a kid. No agency is going to work with us.”
“But you would be such good parents!” Patrick pulled a coaster from a stack; he looked at it twice before recognition set in. It featured the X-ray image of a man receiving oral sex. “Maybe after a little baby-proofing.”
“That’s very sweet of you to say. Still.”
“The world is changing, but not that quickly,” Dwayne added.
“Well, two of you could adopt formally, and then all three raise the kid.”
Eduardo sighed. “Alas, we’re like the Musketeers. All for one and one for all.”
“Eduardo actually has a child. A son, in Mexico. But he’s not allowed to see him.” John moved a potted fern away from his chair and into the light.
“You’re kidding. That’s so unfair!” Patrick didn’t know if this was some family or immigration issue and didn’t want to pry about anything as personal as Eduardo’s citizenship status; they were friends only to a point. And it’s not like he was employing Eduardo to get his mail—he had volunteered. On top of that, despite his remarkable successes in life, Patrick knew about as well as anyone that life was unfair; he didn’t need it explained to him.
“Them’s the breaks.” Dwayne shrugged. Eduardo looked at the floor.
“There must be something,” Patrick started, then stopped. Who was he to tell JED they hadn’t thought this through or exhausted every avenue. These things—adoption, egg donors, surrogacy—were very expensive and he was sensitive to the differences in their financial situations. John had mentioned offhand once that he’d invested well (of the three of them, he was the only one who didn’t seem to currently work), but that it took all three of them to afford this house. He gave up and repeated, “Them’s the breaks, I guess.”
“What is inside an eel?” Eduardo asked, begging off the topic.
Dwayne shrugged again and suggested, “More eel?” They laughed.
“Well, now I want unagi,” John said, placing his hands on his knees, and they all chuckled again.
“You have no idea the questions I’m fielding. And it’s only been two days! Who invented swear words? Why do we have two eyes, but only see one thing? Why don’t dogs have eyebrows? What was the last day I was a child? The inanity is endless!”
“I don’t know,” John said, “it sounds pretty profound. For instance, what was the last day you were a child?”
“Oh, heavens. I don’t think you ever know. Certainly not at the time.” Dwayne looked up at the ceiling fan and watched it spin. “Wouldn’t it be nice to go back, though? To relive that day? One last perfect day of feeling completely safe. Creative. Free.”
“What?” Patrick was having none of it. He put his spritz on the coaster. “Who says your last day as a child was carefree?”
“Because if it wasn’t you’d already be partially grown up.”
“The day before my father died,” Eduardo blurted, and everyone fell quiet. Even Patrick, who was reaching for his drink, froze. “Everything changed after that.”
John scratched his chin, recalling a memory. “My bicycle was stolen when I was in the sixth grade. It sounds trivial now, but I loved riding that bike. I never rode a bicycle again and I don’t know why. Or trusted people the same, for that matter. I don’t think I’ve ridden a bike since.”
“I hear you never forget,” Patrick offered, referring to John’s riding a bike, but perhaps equally about trusting people—a thought that made him shudder.
“That’s it,” Eduardo said, finally breaking the silence. “We’re getting you a bike for your birthday.”
Dwayne agreed and John’s eyes actually watered, and suddenly it was lovely, watching the three of them. For a loner like himself, Patrick often thought of their relationship as the nightmare scenario. Someone always in the kitchen annoyingly standing in front of the spoons, the bar soap in the shower covered in the residue of too many body parts, hands reaching for you from every angle like you were walking through a carnival horror house. But he could see now there was a loveliness to it, too.
“What about you, Patrick?” John asked.
Patrick took a long, slow sip of his drink and savored the biting sweetness. He liked Aperol; he’d read a flavor profile once that described it as approachably bitter (as opposed to say Campari, which was—like himself—inaccessibly acerbic), and it went down easy in the desert heat.
How to answer the question. When was the last day he felt like a child? He used to love to sing “On Top of Spaghetti,” to the tune of “On Top of Old Smokey,” in its entirety. Now he couldn’t even remember the words. (Someone sneezed on a meatball? That seemed wholly unsanitary.) Should he say that? Or was it when he threw out his last pair of Velcro sneakers, or that other pair with the pockets that made him feel like a kangaroo? Was it the day he first saw Scotty Savoy take a shower after gym? That was an awakening, sure, but the end of his childhood? Perhaps just the end of his innocence—but was that the same thing? In the end he settled on the truth. “I think last week.”
To the uninitiated, it would seem like a throwaway answer, a joke, the kind Patrick had long employed to avoid sharing anything real, but JED took it as intended. Specific to Patrick, or not, there was something about being responsible for children that clearly delineated your adulthood from any notion that you were still a child.
“See?” John said. “Profound.”
“What about the kids?” Dwayne asked. “Do you think this marks the end of their childhood?”
“No,” Patrick said instinctually. This morning he found a blanket on the floor of his bedroom. It wasn’t there when he had gone to bed, but there it was at the foot of his bed when he woke up. Someone was sneaking into his room to sleep. To feel safe. That someone was definitely a child. “Not if I have anything to do with it.”
They all looked at their drinks, Patrick hoping he hadn’t soured their afternoon.
“You know the New York Times just published an editorial stating the Aperol spritz was no good?” Dwayne commented.
“I didn’t realize Campari was on the New York Times editorial board,” Patrick stated, and they laughed until the room grew still. He watched some dust floating in a ray of sunlight.
“Top you off?” Eduardo finally asked. “I could make one more round.”
“No. No. I should really get back.” The kids were probably fine, but h
e had already shared too much.
EIGHT
The knock on the door wasn’t a surprise, it happened from time to time. It was the manner in which Maisie answered that caught Patrick off guard. “What,” she said to the UPS deliveryman, like a crotchety old woman in curlers. A week had passed, and despite a continued struggle with the food he served not being—for whatever reason—quite right, they’d settled into a comfortable rhythm of days by the pool and a nightly routine that had Patrick telling stories in bed with them until they passed out from exhaustion and too much sun. Twice he swore he heard them sneak into his room with their blankets and pillows after they thought he was asleep, but if they spent the night, they retreated before dawn. He decided not to make an issue of it. If the kids were getting comfortable in his home, that could only be a good thing.
“Delivery for Jack Curtis.”
“There’s no one here by that name.” Maisie started to shut the door.
Rosa scrambled around the corner from the kitchen, all four foot eleven of her, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “One minute, one minute!” She grabbed the door before Maisie could close it entirely. “You’re so fast, little one.” Her hands dry, she draped the dish towel over her shoulder. “I can sign.”
Patrick appeared from the hall, his morning caftan flowing behind him. (If the kids were going to make themselves at home in his house, he was damn well going to be comfortable, too.) Rosa signed for the delivery and thanked the UPS man. “Here you go, Mr. Patrick. I’m sorry, she answered the door so quickly.” She handed him an envelope. “There’s three more boxes outside. Big boxes.”
“I’ll get them. Thank you, Rosa.”
“He said Mr. Curtis,” Maisie said, confused. “Jack Curtis.”
Rosa cupped Maisie’s face in her hands, sweet child, before returning to the kitchen.
“I’m Jack Curtis.” Patrick opened the door and stepped outside. A moment later he dragged the first of three large Amazon boxes into the foyer. It was awkward in size but not heavy.
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