by Rhys Ford
“I don’t know.” He made a face back at Mason. “Fuck you. It’s not easy. I don’t even know what I’m doing with him. I came over because I thought he… I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. I just had a feeling he needed someone outside of the family to talk to.”
“There’s no talk. Not with him. We bully him a lot,” Mason agreed. “Okay, so I bully. Bear and Luke cajole. Ivo mocks. Gus doesn’t talk—”
“He talks to me,” Rey interrupted. “And did you ever once think maybe he’s sick of fighting with you?”
“He’s my brother,” Mason pointed out, digging a fork into the fries. “I’m supposed to fight with him. Basic family rules. Gus and I understand each other just fine. The question here is what are you going to do now? You struck out. Walk away or try again?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you ask me, I’d rather the two of you didn’t hook up. It’ll make my life a whole lot easier.” Talking around a mouthful of food, Mace stopped and swallowed. “But that being said, he’s… different. I mean, from before he left. Quieter. And I thought maybe it was because it’s almost that time of year when Gus goes out and broods, but it’s not the same kind of quiet. I get he misses his brother, but he’s got to work through it. He can’t keep beating himself up for what happened that day.”
“He ever talk to you about what happened? With his mom and his brother?” The horchata was cold, brisk enough to bite at his teeth, but it went down smoothly, leaving a faint creamy cinnamon sting behind. Rey picked up a fork and pushed a few fries around, contemplating how much to dig into Gus’s past. “He ever talk about Puck? He never did when we were together. Not a lot anyway.”
“Maybe to Bear.” Mace rested his elbows on the table. “Probably not Ivo. Definitely not me. Why? What’d he say to you?”
“Little bit but, nothing about… he mentioned Puck last night, while we were talking. It fucking broke me inside, Mace,” Rey confessed, putting his fork down. “Now with the kid—Chris—I wonder if he’s worried about doing something—”
“His mom was nuts. Not just having mental issues, because God knows, she had those, but there was something broken inside of her, man. Bear wasn’t a kid like they were. He was old enough to know it didn’t matter how much help she was offered, she wasn’t going to take it. She liked being fucked-up. Got off on it. Gus isn’t like that.”
“There’s a lot of crap rolled up in Gus’s head about her. About being in the system. Even about his brother.” He sighed when Mace shoved the half-eaten platter over to him. “She tried to kill them. Well, tried to kill Gus. She did kill Puck… I don’t even want to think what was going through that woman’s head.”
“Your dad set fire to your house, remember? Same thing. Tried to kill you. Difference is you had a mom who had your back. Gus didn’t.” His friend looked away, but not before Rey caught a flash of bitterness in his expression. “None of us did. Well, none of us had… look, I’m not going to cry to you about how shitty it is to bounce from one family to the next. Your crap gets stolen or left behind because they move you without taking you back to get what you’ve got in a box somewhere. You move in trash bags, and everything’s stuff people toss into a bin, thinking you should be happy you get their old spaghetti stains and torn shirts. And sometimes, you are.
“Bear was lucky. He had a decent family for a long time until that bus driver got drunk and killed his parents. Sure, he ended up in Melanie’s lap, but by then, he was already Bear. Gus didn’t have a chance, man. Neither did Puck or Ivo.” Mace took a long draw from his drink, then set it down on a napkin soaked through with condensation. “The five of us ended up okay. Or at least on our feet and with each other. Maybe in the beginning, it was because we’re queer, and that’s a shitty thing to figure out when you’re so fucking lost as a kid or we just rubbed together right, but we’re okay. Now. I know people don’t get that, but that’s fine. I don’t need anyone to validate my relationship with any of them. Gus might. I used to think Ivo was the most broken one we have, but he’s got nothing on Gus. Ivo’s just weird, and I don’t even want to guess the shit he was given.”
His side began to throb again, and Rey stretched back, trying to ease the ache. The pull helped his ribs but did nothing for the heaviness in his chest. Mace watched him like a hawk, catching the slight wince Rey couldn’t suppress when he straightened. He was tired. They both were. The calls were short today, mostly false, but the last one—the collapsing rotten, soaking wet stairs—was brutal. Digging through a flooded apartment for an old woman’s cat should have been an easy enough job, and it had been before the world slid out from under him. As if the fall hadn’t been bad enough, the old lady complained about her cat being wet when he’d limped out of the wreckage, holding the pissed off tabby for her to take.
“Just to remind you, you’re the one who wanted a run,” Mace said, gesturing with his fork toward Rey’s torso. “Probably was a stupid idea. Nearly as dumb as the one you had to talk to Gus instead of just coming in the house and waiting for him to come to you.”
“Thanks,” Rey shot back. “And he won’t come to me. Shit, he won’t go to you and you think he’ll come to me?”
“What do you want from him, Rey?” The irony of hearing Gus’s words fall from Mace’s mouth wasn’t lost on him. “Do you want him back in your life? And as what? Because a few days ago, you were pissed off at him for being… Gus. Suddenly it’s all puppies and kittens?”
“No, that’s not—” He clamped his mouth shut, sifting through the tangle of emotions brewing inside of him. “He said some things the other day, things that… stuck. I treated him like shit, Mace—”
“Bull. I was there. You treated him fucking great.”
“No, I didn’t.” It’d taken him waking up in the middle of the night and going over the countless bits and pieces of anger he’d nursed during his relationship with Gus, and they weighed on him, growing heavier with each turn of a memory. “I thought I did. I thought… fuck, you and I are closer to living the relationship I thought I’d have with Gus, just without the sex.”
“Love you man, but—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Rey sneered. “You wish I had the hots for you. Hell, I should, you know? You pulled me out of a goddamned burning house, and who gets me going? Your baby brother… who I wanted to be more like me and less like him.”
“Might as well ask a crab to fly,” Mace snorted.
“I’m not saying he didn’t… it wasn’t the right time for us. We really did want different things or at least didn’t know how to say what we needed from each other,” he confessed softly. “I used to get pissed off if he was half an hour late or when he forgot something we were supposed to do or he was going to pick up. I was the only one who had expectations, and every stupid thing was a dock against him. So every time I got after him for something stupid, he drifted further away.
“You’re right. I fucked it all up three years ago, and now I can’t let it go.” Pushing the food away, Rey leaned over, sucking in a breath at another twinge. “Gus doesn’t talk, but he used to talk to me. That’s what I should have been working on instead of… keeping track of how many times he failed this limbo dance I kept forcing him to go through, and instead of raising the bar to help him, I lowered it because I was an asshole.”
“I’m sure that made sense in that cracked little head of yours, but how does that translate to you and Gus?” Mason abandoned the tacos, making a clamping motion toward the slender man working the front to ask for a takeout box.
“I miss him, Mace. I do. He made me laugh, you know. He’s… fearless even when he’s crippled with doubts, he pushes forward because that’s what he’s got to do. I didn’t give him credit for that, and I should have. I loved watching him draw or get into researching something somebody wanted. He talked then. Hell, I couldn’t get him to shut up.” Rey chuckled. “I miss that too. Doing nothing with him. I keep coming back to Gus. When we go out, no one’s him. I’ve just been too stubborn
to admit it.
“Right now he needs someone to have his back, and yeah, you guys are there, but it’s not the same, not if he won’t tell you what’s going on inside of him.” Sighing, he rubbed at his face and instantly regretted it when his lower back took up where his side left off. Dropping his arms, Rey said, “So I guess this means I’m going to try to get your brother back, but even if I can’t, he should know I’ll be there for him to lean on. He deserves to know how good he is. That he’s worth… everything. That’s what I want, Mace. I want your brother to know how incredible he is and how thankful I am he’s alive.”
Eleven
THE SCREAMS were horrific. Shrill and terrifying, they carried through the neighborhood, a haunting, startling chorus almost loud enough to set off nearby car alarms. The scene was ghastly, and Rey wasn’t sure he could take much more of it. The worst of it was the donkey. God, the poor donkey, with its ass torn out and its shanks shredded by seemingly a thousand knives, yet none had found the mark.
“Jesus, how hard is it to pin a tail to a papier-mâché donkey?” Rey muttered under his breath from his relatively safe perch on his family’s back deck. He winced when his sister, Sarah, shrieked and danced when one of her blindfolded friends stabbed his pin into the creature’s flank.
“It’s a unicorn. And once someone gives it a tail, it’ll be a piñata,” his mother corrected. “It’s a unicorn party. Even if you won’t wear one of the horns.”
“All the cool kids are wearing them. Your sister insisted.” His stepfather tapped at the inflatable horn he had strapped to his forehead by a valiant piece of overstretched thin elastic. The three other parents who’d been conned into supervising their kids wore them as well, but Rey’d taken one look at the suggestive blow-up headpiece and passed. “And where’s your sidekick, Mace? Not like him to miss free food.”
“I tried to drag Mace with me, but he’s got some stuff to do with his brothers.” He’d gladly turned down the offer to help lay paving stones down at the house’s backyard but agreed to drop by once his sister’s party was done. “I’ll head over later. I’m sure they’ll be glad for any cake donations you might want to make. You know, to get it out of the house because Mom will have your head if you eat all the leftovers.”
His mother paused at the top of the deck stairs leading down to the sweep of green grass littered with confetti, discarded shoes, and cupcake wrappers. Rey knew what she was going to say before she opened her mouth. He knew the look on her face and the slight part of her lips before she poked at his life.
“They’re not really his brothers, are they? Not like Sarah’s your sister. I don’t understand why he keeps going back to that house when he’s not related to anyone there.” It was said without aggression but layered with a refusal to acknowledge Mason’s stitched-together family. Sarah’s shriek was soon joined by a loud burst of cheering and a slight Hispanic girl screaming as she was pounded on the back, her blindfold sliding down her nose.
“Donna,” his stepfather began. “Rey’s just as much my kid as Sarah is. I married you and got a son. Mace just… didn’t have to marry anyone to get his brothers.”
“It’s just odd. Marriage is one thing. You just can’t say someone’s your brother.” She snatched up the inflatable gold unicorn horn she’d left on one of the tables and slid its elastic over the back of her head. “Crap, they got the tail on. I’m going to get them in the pool. After that, we can do the piñata. You two don’t move until it’s time to get the burgers on the grill. Don’t wander into the house to play video games. You’ve got one job, and that’s to get meat on those buns.”
She hurried off, either not realizing or maybe even not minding that she’d kicked her son’s balls in with her careless words.
He wouldn’t confront her. It would have done no good. His mother adjusted her world by shifting words around until they felt comfortable. Mace was his best friend, a relationship she could box up and put on a shelf, understanding how he was connected to Rey, but once any of the brothers were tossed into the mix, she rejected their familial ties.
And sometimes Rey felt as if she was in some way rejecting him.
She hurt him with her negligence at times. Her dismissals were small, slight scrapes at his world, because she didn’t understand how a part of something she hadn’t given him stuck to who he was. Bear pulled her from a burning house, but his mother wouldn’t call Mace his brother. Instead he was Bear’s friend, even as she handed him a double-chocolate cupcake with chili-pecan frosting she’d made especially for him.
He’d never told her about his relationship with Gus, although Randy knew and she probably suspected. Rey wasn’t sure he could have handled it if she refused to acknowledge the family Gus wrapped himself in. At the time, Gus said it didn’t matter, but he’d felt dirty hiding Gus behind the word friend.
Next time—if Gus allowed there to be a next time—things would be different. Or, he thought, watching his mother making a game of cleaning up the backyard, he needed to make things different now.
“It’s chaos, that’s what it is.” His stepfather broke the tension building up inside of Rey with a loud whisper when his mother joined the kids on the lawn. “Who the hell in their right mind invites a herd of eight-year-old kids to a birthday party?”
“The guy with the pool and something to prove to the other parents at school?” Rey peered over the gaggle of shouting children, making sure the water was empty of partygoers. “Admit it, the only reason you wanted me here is because I know CPR and you don’t want anyone to drown.”
“That and you were picking up the big-assed swirly lollipops.” Randy saluted him with his bottle of diet root beer, slouching farther down in his lounge chair. “Because if this party needed anything, it was more sugar.”
They’d all come a long way since the fire, or at least he and his mom, Donna, had. A few years after Rey’s father tried to kill them, she’d fallen in love with Randy, the owner of an auto shop who’d helped her after one of her tires blew out on the freeway. Robust and generous, he’d not just swept her off her feet, he’d also helped her get back on them. He didn’t blink when he found out Rey was gay and rumbled with surprise when his wife returned from the doctor’s with the startling news of a late-in-life pregnancy.
Neither one of them had planned on children, but Sarah arrived anyway, as loud and expressive as her father. Randy dove into parenting as he did everything else, with good humor and an attitude of things happen. After the years of growing up with his own father, Rey hadn’t known what to make of the silver-bearded, laughing man who’d taken up so much space in their lives, but he liked Randy. Especially when Randy smiled at his wife and delight lit up her eyes.
“Yay, more sugar.” He glanced over at his stepfather. Randy was fit, a slab of muscle, Viking genes, and powerful laughs, but he’d trimmed down a bit, stopping every morning at a gym before going to work. “How’s the diet coming?”
“I miss bacon and cheese. Seriously, do you have any idea how many bacon cheeseburgers I ate during the week? Now it’s salads, grilled chicken, and steamed salmon.” Randy chuckled, patting his flat stomach. “But I’ve got a hot wife and a young daughter to keep up with, so sacrifices have to be made.”
“That’s my mom you’re talking about,” Rey scoffed. “No guy wants to hear their mom is hot.”
“She’s got good genes, and well, she had you when she was a kid. You think I pull over to the side of the road during a rainstorm for any woman with a flat tire?”
“Yeah, you do,” he pointed out. “It’s why she married you.”
“Okay, yeah, so only an asshole wouldn’t stop, but if a woman—or man—can catch your eye when you’re going fifty miles an hour down a freeway, she’s hot.” Randy sat up in his chair, scooting it back under the shade of the canvas overhang stretched over most of the broad deck. “I’m nearly sixty with an eight-year-old powerhouse daughter and a wife built like a bombshell who bakes cupcakes for a living. You don’t know how
hard it is for a guy like me at soccer practice or dance class. All the other dads are your age or close to it, and I’ll be damned if some bearded hipster calls me Grandpa Santa when my little girl is kicking his kid’s ass on the field.”
“Really? Grandpa Santa?” He smirked at Randy, who shot back a rueful look.
“I’d let my beard grow out. Just to see how it would look,” he said, rubbing his hand over his tightly trimmed beard. “After that, no bacon and, well, a trip to that toy-stuffing place after Duckie drove the other team’s goalie into the ground.”
“And she’s still okay with being called Duckie? She’s eight now, you know.” Stretching out his legs, Rey rested against the chair’s arm, then shifted when its hard edge dug into the fading bruises on his side. “Almost an adult. Or so she told me. Then she started talking about getting her first bra and my brain shut down.”
“Women have bras, son,” Randy remarked. “You can’t stick your head under the sand every time they talk about their underwear.”
“Hey, if Mom wanted me to grab one for her from a store, I’d do it,” he admitted. “I’m just not ready to make a second trip for my kid sister. She still wears a panda onesie to bed.”
“Yeah, so does your mother, except hers is a hamster.” Randy’s laughter rolled over Rey’s choking fit. Setting his bottle down on the deck, he leaned over, then pounded the heel of his hand on the spot between Rey’s shoulder blades. “God, I love you. You’ve got to loosen up, kiddo.”
“You’re a dick,” he gasped, catching his breath. His back throbbed along with his ribs, pulsating with a low ache. “Jesus, Randy. Don’t kill the only guy at your pool party who knows how to resuscitate people.”
“You’ll be fine. Just breathe.” He rubbed at Rey’s spine. “And you won’t have to do CPR. Like anyone would risk your mom’s wrath by drowning during the unicorn party.”
They sat and watched the kids dance, wiggle, and shout their way to the pool. His mother stood at the deep end, chatting with another woman in tie-dye jeans who’d donned a blow-up horn on either side of her head. They were angled toward the water, eyes constantly moving over the churning pool. Randy was right. She’d held back any touch of time on her face and figure in the years since they’d had to start their lives over. After having him in high school, then struggling to make ends meet while his father self-destructed around them, his mother deserved to be happy. It was just ironic she’d found happiness making a new family while denying Mace his.