The Best Kind of People

by Zoe Whittall

  “When Jared’s dad died, he said the most appreciated thing was when friends would offer to do things like laundry or cooking, things that you lose the ability to care about in the face of grief,” Andrew said, putting the skimming tool on the grass and joining her at the edge of the pool. He took off his shoes and socks, and dipped both feet in.

  “I can’t imagine Joan letting anyone else do the laundry.” Clara laughed. “She’d re-fold everything.”

  Andrew laughed and took a long sip.

  They could hear the slow lap of the waves against shoreline below them. They watched in silence as a fat raccoon climbed the oak tree and sat chewing on a stalk of broccoli retrieved from the Henshaws’ trash next door.

  “What are you planning to do about work?” Clara asked.

  “I took a few weeks’ leave. You can’t really be there half-time. I took a medical leave, actually. Stress.”

  “No kidding. Will Jared be joining you?”

  “He wants to come down this weekend to help out.”

  The raccoon climbed down the tree and ambled towards them on the grass, climbing up the steps of the patio.

  “Hey, little fella …” Clara called, raising her glass in a cheers. She turned back to Andrew. “You’ve got balls. Might be nice to have someone around who isn’t losing their shit all the time.”

  Andrew shrugged.

  Clara’s BlackBerry rang, and she answered an email before setting it down on the end table between them. “You know what I think we need to do, Andrew?”

  “What?”

  “Dance it off!” She sat up straight and stretched out her arms. “I usually go to yoga every morning, and I haven’t moved a muscle since we got here.” She got up and twirled around like a little girl, scaring the raccoon back onto the grass at the base of the tree. He turned and looked at them again, got up on his haunches.

  Andrew laughed. “Are you serious?”

  “Why not?”

  “Might be better to go for a hike or something. We’re in Avalon Hills. The only thing around here are square dance classes — could be kind of kitschy?”

  “I seem to remember you were a secret regular at that club in Woodbridge, no? A little house mix of Gloria Gaynor? Come on!”

  later that evening, they parked Joan’s car in the dimly lit lot outside Icons! bar, where Andrew hadn’t been in over a decade. Icons! was a purple cement block on the edge of a strip mall on Highway 2, just outside Woodbridge, and was the least iconic place Andrew could imagine. No sign or advertisements announced it was a gay bar, or any kind of bar at all. Inside it smelled just as he remembered: beer, settled-in sweat, and cologne. It sounded the same too: low, pulsing house music, ten years outdated, on a tinny system. There was a bar along one side of the cavernous main room; the walls, floor, and ceiling were painted black, except for one length of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Tacky all-season Christmas lights were strung under the bar and around a small dj booth. There was a disco ball that had seen better days, but it continued to move in an endless optimistic twirl.

  being at a gay bar with Clara was nostalgic in and of itself. When Andrew was young, Clara was his stepping stone to the gay world. She was a staple on the 1990s New York City party scene. She used to joke that she hardly knew any straight men, a scandalous thing to say in front of Andrew’s grandparents at Thanksgiving dinner. She would breeze into family gatherings hours late wearing bright purplish lipstick and gaudy, shining scarves, and she never wore practical footwear. Even as a toddler he was drawn to her every movement. Joan used to joke that he learned to walk one day when Clara was visiting, for the express purpose of following her around the house. She would sit on the dock in heeled sandals with an oversized sun hat while everyone else was in flip-flops and cut-off shorts. “I don’t need my own kid, you’ll be my little minion forever, won’t you, Andrew?” she’d say, happy to sit at one of his many tea parties, taking tiny sips of water from his carefully presented cups.

  when Andrew was twelve or thirteen, Clara started giving him mixed tapes and cds of music that his parents would never have introduced him to — the Bronski Beat, Depeche Mode, the Pet Shop Boys — coded musical messages he was still too young to recognize. Then she began bringing soundtracks to Broadway musicals and old-school punk music, with little messages on the covers like “Listen to the lyrics — there’s some revolution in there!” with a luminescent lipstick kiss and “Love, your old auntie!” scrawled at the bottom of the track listing. In a town that loved the Spin Doctors and whatever happened to be on the radio, Clara was Andrew’s window to culture beyond the borders of Avalon Hills.

  While George and Joan were nonchalant about his sexual orientation, vaguely uninterested almost, Clara actively encouraged him to “let the freak flag fly” — her words — as soon as he was old enough to come to the city by himself. She would take him to edgy art gallery openings, plays, and restaurants, dressing him all in black and putting gel in his hair. They’d eat ice cream in the park and watch boys and she’d introduce him to her friends, who seemed to always be elegant gay men, and their female best friends. The men would fawn over him like he was a bunny, and that admiration made him able to go back to Avalon Hills for another few months and survive it all. By the time he was sixteen, she was sneaking him into clubs with her and they would dance until dawn, something they didn’t confide to Joan.

  One of Andrew’s most cherished memories was of the summer he was fifteen years old. It was a particularly difficult year, and Clara insisted that he come to visit one day earlier than his family for their annual New York City trip. When he arrived at the train station, she was waiting with an ugly plastic rainbow necklace that she insisted on putting around his neck despite his protestations, and they got on the subway and then emerged out onto the street, where she screamed, “Surprise! It’s your first Pride parade!” He still had defensive bruises on his hands from fighting off Kenny and Bruce Shea in the latest locker room incident, and when Clara spun him around to look at the crowd of people celebrating what those guys had beat him up for, he actually started to cry like a confused, feral child. “Oh, baby,” Clara said, giving him a hug. “This weekend, I’m going to make you forget that terrible little town you live in.”

  He met a group of boys his age in the parade and Clara handed him her apartment key and a clump of bills, and made him write “I will not take any pills and I will always use a condom” on a piece of paper and sign it before she let him go. He laughed because the idea of needing a condom seemed insane to him. He ended up dancing outside until the sun came up, and making out with another shy, geeky kid named Brian from Long Island, who came back and slept on Clara’s couch. It remained one of his most tender memories of adolescence, alongside the times he spent with Stuart.

  Until he told his sister, Clara was the only one he’d ever told about Stuart.

  andrew recognized the bartender, slicing up limes on the counter, as the New Wave guy who used to work the door when he was young. The room was pretty empty except for two tables of regulars and one lone, elderly leather daddy showing off his moves in the middle of the small dance floor. The only thing that had changed was that the bulletin board in the hallway near the bathrooms didn’t just advertise the health clinic and leather ball anymore, but had brightly coloured posters publicizing a fundraiser for the local college’s lgbt club, a gay men’s running club, a drag ball, and a dance-a-thon.

  “Well, I forgot what small-town bars are like,” Clara said, looking around at the half-empty room but still having to shout over the music. They clinked their beer glasses and decided they probably wouldn’t stay long.

  They danced to a Blondie song, finished their drinks, and had just decided to leave when Stuart and his ball team arrived, a jovial group of men in their thirties and forties wearing red and blue team shirts. They pulled several tables together and were served metal buckets of bottle beers on ice.

&nbs
p; “That’s Stuart,” he said, grabbing Clara’s arm before nodding in his direction. “I can’t believe there’s an actual gay baseball team. That would have been inconceivable when I lived here!”

  “It gets better,” Clara said sarcastically, mocking Dan Savage’s recent anti-homophobia campaign as she eyed the sad, lone dancer and the table of drunk jocks.

  Stuart looked up and caught Andrew’s eye. His face didn’t light up the way it used to. Still, Andrew felt obligated to walk over and say hello.

  “Hey guys!” Andrew said, to everyone at the table, and then touched Stuart’s shoulder. “Hey, Stu.”

  Clara hovered behind, trying to get reception on her cellphone. A few of the older guys smirked at each other when they saw Andrew. Stu pulled a cigarette out of his pack and tapped it on the table, then put it behind his right ear.

  “Hey, Andrew,” Stuart said, “I’m surprised to see you here again.”

  “I’m here with my aunt Clara. Remember I used to talk about her?” he said, nodding towards Clara, who stood shaking her hips back and forth a few seconds off the beat of “Dancing Queen.” She met Stu’s eye and nodded hello. Stuart didn’t offer them a seat, just pushed his chair back and stood up, tapping his smoke as explanation.

  “Can I chat with you outside?”

  “Sure,” Andrew said.

  They went outside and stood awkwardly around the old Heinz ketchup can where smokers deposited their cigarettes, looking across the parking lot to the highway.

  Stuart lit his cigarette and offered Andrew a drag. He declined.

  “I know, I should quit. I can barely jog around the track anymore,” Stuart said, shaking his head in shame. Andrew noticed a yellow tinge to the skin under his eyes.

  “Listen, I spoke to one of the girls involved in the case, and I think it’s legit, what she’s saying,” Stuart said, looking around in a paranoid way. A car pulled into the parking lot and Stuart walked behind the building, under an awning where they wouldn’t be seen.

  Andrew had managed to forget about their predicament for almost an hour, losing himself in nostalgia. He kicked at the gravel. “What did she say?”

  “She’s a real nice kid, and fuck, she’s young. She said he paid lots of attention to her, too much really. Asking her if she had a boyfriend all the time.”

  “So? He took an interest in her life …”

  Stuart looked at Andrew. “Whatever. I just thought you should be warned.”

  “Thanks,” Andrew said, watching Stuart take another paranoid scan. “I’m sorry for snapping. It’s happened really quickly, and I’ve been buried in legal documents and I don’t really have perspective, you know. My dad and I, we were starting to get close again. It’s just so fuckin’ weird.”

  “Yeah …”

  Andrew started back towards the door. Stuart called after him.

  “I just want you to know that you really were my true love …”

  Andrew turned. Stuart was standing close to him now. He could smell hours of beer on his breath and was slightly revolted, yet at the same time he felt a familiar wave of nostalgic attraction. Stuart leaned in to kiss Andrew, holding his hands at the waist like they were kids at a school dance. The kiss was gentle, and Andrew pulled back before it got sloppy, or before he tried to draw him into a hug. The smell of Stuart’s cologne and cigarettes was enough to make Andrew feel as though he could fall over from the associated emotions.

  Andrew went in to retrieve Clara, who was energetically dancing to the B-52s’ “Love Shack” on the dance floor, while the leather daddy stabbed a wooden cane in the air for the bang bang bang parts. Andrew waved at the table of Stuart’s teammates as they left. Stuart, standing by the bar, pretended not to see him go. Andrew noticed a young man beside him, probably a teenager, who looked totally enraptured.

  “He’s still got that charm,” Andrew said to Clara, nodding towards the young kid.

  Clara rolled her eyes. “He should be more careful.”

  Tuesday

  eleven

  bennie picked up the family in a Town Car for the hearing. Clara, Joan, and Andrew were all standing in front of the gate at the end of the driveway when he pulled up. Joan had spent twenty minutes looking for Sadie before she noticed a scrawled note on a napkin by the coffee machine reading “I couldn’t sleep, went for a run and to Jimmy’s.”

  Joan had found her at 2 a.m. listening to three threats and several hang-ups on the answering machine in the living room. She had been crying and Joan had walked her back to bed, barely concealing her own shaking limbs.

  The car smelled of stale booze and cigars, and the driver wore a surfeit of peppery cologne that competed with the cherry-scented air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror.

  Once everyone was seated, Bennie turned around from the passenger seat to address them. “This is the arraignment hearing, and it is likely they’ll set bail at some exorbitant amount because they know how wealthy he is,” he explained, though they already knew.

  “So, they’ll use it as an excuse to re-pave the parking lot or to put another Starbucks in the courthouse complex,” said Clara.

  “Yup,” Andrew said, sipping from a travel mug of coffee.

  Before long they were curving through the subdivisions on the hill that hadn’t existed when Andrew was young. They pulled up in front of Jimmy’s house.

  Elaine showed Joan to the breakfast nook where Sadie, still in her running clothes, was eating a bowl of cereal.

  “It’s time to go, honey.”

  Sadie looked down at the bowl, circling the spoon around the remaining Cheerios. “I’m not going.”

  Sadie looked up to briefly meet her mother’s eyes and then returned her gaze to the cereal bowl. Elaine went into the kitchen and rinsed out the coffee maker.

  Joan gripped the back of Elaine’s kitchen chair, poking her fingers through the lattice wicker. She tried her most patient voice. “I understand this is hard, but we have to stick together right now. We need each other. I know you are hurting, and believe me, we all are.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t go.” Sadie dismissed Joan with a wave of her hand, scraping her cereal bowl with her spoon.

  “This is a very complicated situation, Sadie. Love just doesn’t dissolve when something terrible happens.”

  “See? It’s even in the language you choose. Something terrible didn’t just happen. There was no tornado or act of God. Dad may have committed a crime using his own free will.”

  “May have,” Joan said, and then corrected herself. “Didn’t. And maybe if you weren’t seventeen you’d be a little more forgiving of the fact that not everything is black and white.”

  “I understand the dangers of binary thinking, I just don’t think that in this situation there are many shades of grey,” Sadie said, standing up and walking towards the kitchen sink with her cereal bowl.

  “You don’t know everything, honey. No one can. That’s not how the legal process works.”

  “You know what I do know, Mom? I know that the weekend Dad chaperoned that ski trip, you went to work and helped a dozen people live through the night. Those are acts that are commendable, Mom. Why do you have to be the one to suffer?”

  Joan pulled her jacket tightly around her waist. “Sadie, I’m trying to be patient and supportive. And neither you nor I know exactly what happened. There is innocent until proven—”

  “Do you think that maybe you need to be feeling less empathy and more rage, Mom? Do you think the situation might call for that at this point?” She turned on the faucet, scrubbing at her bowl and then rinsing it again. Elaine left the kitchen, walking up the carpeted stairs.

  When you’re a teenager, it seems that the time for rage is always. Joan tried to think of things to say that might change Sadie’s mind. “You have the right to feel however you feel. Your feelings are valid.”

 
“I know,” she said, as if Joan were the stupidest woman in the world, saying the most obvious things. “Mom, sometimes you forget I am no longer twelve.”

  “Believe me, I know how old you are. I would appreciate your support, is all that I’m saying.” She said this so quietly, and it pained her to admit it. She wanted her there; she wanted them all there in a group, together.

  “Mom, it’s not just that I’m mad. It’s that I’m mad and I’m worried that if I see him, my heart will just break. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this information, with all these rumours. I can’t organize it all in my head. It’s like Dad has just disappeared. It’s too devastating. I just have to stay away.” She said this while she looked out the window at the Town Car idling on the street.

  “Okay, honey.” Joan started towards Sadie to embrace her, but Sadie stuck her hand out in protest. She turned and noticed Jimmy’s stepfather, Kevin, standing in the doorway, holding a bowl of cereal.

  Outside, Clara called Joan’s name.

  “Mom, just go,” Sadie said.

  Joan felt as though she didn’t have any choice, so she left, hands curled in fists at her sides.

  the scene outside the courtroom was actually fairly benign, as if they’d all shown up to pay parking tickets, except for the ever-present media team. The building was on the edge of town, next to the golf course. It looked like a community centre. Joan had never really absorbed the fact that it was the courthouse. A group of teachers were there to support George. They had buttons and signs reading things like We Support Mr. Woodbury! Still Teacher of the Year Every Year! A group of angry parents were also present, a small crowd of their supporters shouting outside. In the adjacent municipal park there was a picnic, some sort of community gathering for children, unrelated to the court date.