A More Perfect Union

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  What the hell.

  He opened them both, took them into the living room, sat next to Dalton, and handed him one of the beers. Dalton looked at it for a moment as if he didn’t know what it was and then chugged down what must have been half of it. Lucas simply sipped at his. He’d never grown a fondness for beer.

  They sat for a long time while Lucas tried to make sense of the old show. A man kept referring to an elegant woman as Nora. They drank a lot. There was a dog. Apparently they were trying to solve a crime?

  “This is why I didn’t want us to get married,” Dalton said, almost startling Lucas despite how quietly the words had come. “Can you imagine? Being one of those couples that got married and had fucking voters take their marriages away? What must they be going through?”

  “They can’t take their marriages away,” Lucas replied, just as quietly. “Their marriages are here.” He touched his chest. He touched Dalton’s. “In their hearts.”

  Dalton looked away from both his beer and the TV, studied Lucas. Another tear rolled down his face, shimmering blue in the light of the television.

  Neither said anything for a long time.

  Finally: “Then I guess we’re already married, right, Lucas Arrowood?”

  Lucas nodded. “Yes, Dalton Churchill.” Even if he did want that piece of paper.

  Dalton kissed him then, and they abandoned their beers and Nick and Nora and the dog, Asta, and they made desperate love, and Dalton—who took a long time to cum (although Lucas didn’t really mind; he needed to be taken long and hard that night. It made him feel alive)—fell asleep almost immediately afterward.

  Lucas lay in the dark for a long time, though.

  I’m going to marry him someday came the echo once more.

  It was going to happen.

  It was going to happen if Lucas had to will it into being.

  2009

  1

  LUCAS’S MOTHER found the lump early that year. When she broke it to Lucas, all she could say was that she didn’t want to believe it. She’d simply been taking a shower. She felt the BB-like knob, and she gasped and came fully awake.

  “Have you gone to the doctor?” Lucas asked. It was the only thing he could say. Part of his brain had completely switched off. He felt drunk—and not in a pleasant way. In that way when he’d realized he’d drunk too much and couldn’t figure out how to put his socks on, let alone answer an important e-mail. Like he was trying to swim up out of a deep dark place and tying his shoes took major concentration.

  Cancer? Isn’t that what a lump means?

  “I have an appointment in two weeks,” she said and took a drink of her coffee. It was Saturday morning, their ritual get-together, and Lucas had made eggs Benedict. A product of learning cooking as well as baking.

  “Two weeks? Mom! Two fucking weeks?”

  “Lucas! Language.”

  Lucas stood up, nearly knocking over his cup of coffee. “Fuck watching my language! You can’t mess around with this stuff.”

  She sighed. “I know, baby. But it’s going to be okay. God’s got a plan for me, and I don’t think it’s for me to die.” She reached out and touched his hand. “Sit, baby. Sit. I’m going to be okay.”

  He sat, heart pounding in his chest, stomach clenched, throat working. He didn’t believe her.

  You can’t. You can’t die, Mom. You. Can. Not.

  Lucas looked at his mother. Studied her face. Suddenly noticed lines around her eyes he hadn’t seen before, a shimmer of silver in her blonde hair.

  When had she gotten older?

  Same time you did.

  But he had been doing nothing but playing for the last couple of years.

  Well, and working his ass off to get good grades. There was that. And the part-time job. And keeping the apartment up.

  Which was why he hadn’t noticed the lines on his mother’s face, the silver in her hair.

  “Mom,” he sighed. “I’m so sorry.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “For what? You didn’t do anything. It’s not your fault.”

  He sat there for a long time, trying to absorb what was happening. It was not how he’d expected that morning to go. Why, he’d made eggs Benedict to celebrate.

  Now how did he tell his mother?

  She reached out and patted his hand. “It really is going to be okay, honey. ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,’” she quoted.

  You could put the New Age in his mother, but you couldn’t take the Jesus out of her, Lucas thought.

  He swallowed. Hard.

  “It’s not that, Mom. It’s Dalton. He’s gotten a job offer. A really good one.”

  She sat up straight, beaming. She clapped. “Oh, Lucas! That’s wonderful! What will he be doing? Certainly not creating the zombie apocalypse virus you’re always teasing him about?” She laughed.

  Lucas shook his head. How could she laugh at a time like this? It’s why he loved her so much.

  Lucas shrugged. “Something about microbocal or -bobal or -crobial diseases? Shit. Surveillance? Pathogens?” He shook his head. “I don’t get it. I never really have. That’s why I bake cakes.”

  “You two can finally get out of the crappy little apartment.”

  “I like that crappy little apartment.” He managed to keep from snapping.

  She laughed. “Of course you do. It’s got your wedding bed in it. You’ll always love that apartment.”

  Lucas’s face blazed, which only seemed to tickle her all the more.

  “Mom! You don’t understand. We’d be living in Oakland. Oakland, California.”

  Her smile faltered for less than a second. If he hadn’t known his mother better than he knew even Dalton, he might have missed it. “Well, I’ve always said you needed to fly from the nest. And halfway across town, especially a town like Terra’s Gate, is hardly flying the nest.”

  “Well, I can’t go,” he stated.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “I can’t let you go through what you’re about to go through alone.”

  A sweet but sad smile lifted the corners of her mouth, and she reached out and touched his cheek. “Oh, baby. Don’t you see? We don’t even know what I’m about to go through. It could be simple. It might not even be cancer. There’s no telling. We don’t know if it’ll be surgery or a mastectomy or what the treatment will be. We don’t even know for sure that it’s cancer.”

  From the look on her face, Lucas could almost believe it.

  “Mom?” he said. “Mama?”

  And then they held each other tight.

  2

  IN THE end, she went with them.

  3

  AND SHE lived.

  She decided against the mastectomy, which was directly against the advice of her doctors and Lucas’s appeals.

  “I’ve made up my mind, and that’s it. Now you decided to move in with Dalton—which was against my advice—but what did I do? I shut—my—mouth. And you know what happened. I was wrong. Well, this is my decision. I want to keep my breast. If the lump was as big as my cousin Shelly’s, which was as big as a plum, then I’d do it. But this really is BB-sized, and I’m taking a chance. No, I’m not going to be luring too many men these days with my boobs, but—”

  “Mom!” he cried, shocked.

  “—I’ve got a nice rack, and—”

  “Mom!”

  “—I’m not winning any beauty contest with my face, never could, and especially not at my age, and—”

  Lucas’s face had blazed at the conversation, and he found he could no longer respond.

  “—what chance do I have of finding me a man otherwise?”

  Lucas wanted to point out that if all a man wanted was a nice rack, he didn’t want her marrying him.

  But then he really didn’t have any say, did he?

  So he shut up, and she stuck to her guns, and yes, there were days where he held her head while she puked in the toilet and bought her pot to give her an appetite and even shaved her head for h
er because she couldn’t stand to find it in clumps on her pillow in the mornings.

  And she survived.

  More than survived.

  She thrived.

  She got that minister’s license too.

  2010—2014

  1

  NOT ONLY that, but she fell in love with the RN who administered her chemo—a man five years her junior named Marcus DeWolf—and got engaged. She fell in love with him because even he told her she should have gotten the mastectomy, and any man who married a woman because of her breasts was a scumball who deserved to get cock cancer.

  She accepted his proposal without a second thought.

  She accepted it as he kneeled on the floor in a restaurant with Lucas and Dalton in attendance. He wouldn’t think of doing it any other way.

  But she didn’t marry him.

  She told everyone that she was not getting married until her son did.

  “Mom,” Lucas cried in exasperation. “Marry him! Just because I can’t get married doesn’t mean you shouldn’t! I can’t live with it!”

  “You can and you will!” she shot back.

  “But people don’t care that you aren’t marrying because I can’t,” he countered. “It’s not going to change anything. It’s not going to change the laws. Please, Mom. Marry him! A good man doesn’t come along every day—believe me, I know.”

  “I’ve made up my mind, and if there’s anything you should know, when we Arrowoods make up our minds, they’re made up for good. If he’s the good man you say he is, he’ll wait.”

  Luckily he was a good man.

  Marcus waited.

  2

  DALTON’S JOB was the answer to unspoken and even undreamed fantasies. Exactly what he had always been suited for, and it paid beyond anything they had ever imagined combined. And the icing on the cake was that he loved it.

  They bought a little Eichler house in a neighborhood of Oakland called Sequoyah Hills (although Lucas wasn’t sure why since the plant life was mostly yuccas and palm trees and the like). But they loved it—the candles on the cake. The front door opened onto an enclosed small courtyard with a hot tub (they had to get it fixed, and that took a few months) and yuccas and an awning that could be pulled out during the rainy season (Oakland’s answer to winter). Most of the rooms had glass doors that gave access to the courtyard, and it was all quite lovely. It was, like Dalton’s job, unlike anything either of them had imagined, but they almost immediately couldn’t envision living anywhere else.

  If there was anything better than the cake and the icing and the candles, it was that Dalton was making enough that the house would have been paid for in less than ten years on his salary alone.

  Lucas’s job assured it.

  It started as a fluke. He saw a Help Wanted sign at their favorite bakery. He got the job. His old manager gave him a glowing recommendation. And before he knew it, they were allowing him to try his recipes.

  That was when his business degree turned into something he’d never expected.

  Within a year he was looking at his own store.

  He didn’t even have to worry about his first employee.

  His mother was there for that.

  2015

  1

  ON THE morning of June 26, Lucas took the old TV—the one from that first apartment over a garage in Terra’s Gate, back before they could afford a fifty-inch flat-screen television—to work with him. He set it up on the counter near the register, heart in his throat, hoping for the best. His customers certainly didn’t mind. More of them were GLBT friendly than not. Customers of On the Rise, Lucas’s thriving bakery, pretty much needed to be. Lucas was very out—not that he was capable of being anything else—and often featured baked goods that made it clear that his shop was GLBT friendly as well, especially this time of year when Gay Pride was being celebrated across the country. The cases were filled with rainbow cookies and muffins, and because of the possible SCOTUS decision, lately cupcakes with two artificial rings stuck into the icing and wedding cakes with two grooms or brides atop them (not that he hadn’t made plenty of them over the last year—Prop 8 had been overturned three years before, after all).

  So anyone offended by things gay rarely stepped through the front door unless it was because they just couldn’t resist Lucas’s specialties—cheesecakes, key lime pie, and his coconut cream—all made from the scratchiest of scratch. Not to mention his crème brûlée, which was to live (and not) for.

  And of course his mother’s favorite—baklava. They would always associate it with his coming out.

  In fact, many of his most loyal customers were hanging around that morning—which was saying something considering it wasn’t yet even seven o’clock—and it was a surprisingly large crowd. The front of On the Rise was only big enough for four small tables and the front counter. It made Lucas incredibly grateful, despite his nervousness. These people could have been anywhere, but they were here.

  His mother was there too, even though he’d insisted she didn’t need to be there on her day off (which with the size of the standing-room-only crowd turned out to be untrue).

  “Nonsense,” she told him when she’d arrived shortly after him at five that morning. Tying on her apron, she began setting bread out to rise. “Did you think I wasn’t going to be here with you when the good news comes down?”

  “If it’s good news,” Lucas said, unable to shake his worry.

  His mother tsked him. “Lucas, what other decision can be made? Especially with Justice Kennedy on our side? Look at everything he’s done for the gay movement. He voted against DOMA. He helped strike down the antisodom—”

  “It takes a majority, Mom,” he replied, cutting her off. He was blushing. Hearing his own mother talk about sodomy was too much, at least right now. “It’s not just one judge’s decision.”

  Yes, the almost certain (but not totally certain) outcome was that this was the day that everyone in the United States—at least matrimonially—would at last be equal. But again, no one could really be sure: witness the lesson that liberals learned when they didn’t get up and go vote against Prop 8.

  Lucas would never forget that day. Who would have ever thought it would pass, and by such a small percentage, or that it would take so long to be overturned?

  Yes, the right decision should come down, but would it even be today? There were those who thought it could be days before it happened. But how wonderful would it be to enter Gay Pride weekend with the right to marry!

  It didn’t help that Dalton wasn’t with him. Lucas had tried to be understanding. They didn’t know if the decision would come down today. And Dalton had made it clear that “a piece of paper” meant little to him. And as world-shatteringly important as Dalton’s job as a brilliant microbiologist might be, Lucas still thought Dalton should be able to take one frigging day off to be with him on this possibly momentous day.

  At least now Lucas had some idea of what Dalton actually did for a living. He helped figure out the basic workings of infectious microbial cells so that drugmakers could develop new medicines. Hopefully that had nothing to do with creating zombies.

  And dammit, everyone was here! Why not his man? Husband in heart if not in legal deed.

  “Wait,” someone shouted and pointed to the little television. “Look!”

  The screen showed the huge crowd in front of the Supreme Court Building, but now—now there were people running down the vast white steps! What? What?

  The crowd began to shout. To roar!

  The cheer that rose up was deafening. Lucas thought his heart had actually stopped. He couldn’t believe it. Was it? Was it?

  And then the CBS News special report came on, and the room, which had been filled with cheers, went silent as Charlie Rose and then Jan Crawford told them that all their dreams had come true.

  Same-sex marriage was now the law of the land.

  Then, like a firework streaking up into the sky then bursting into gorgeous fire, Lucas’s heart soared as well
, and it felt as if it too had exploded.

  Gloriously—just like that firework.

  He was shouting, screaming, dancing for joy, crying, laughing.

  His mother threw herself into his arms, and he hugged her back fiercely. Then there was somebody else hugging him and someone else and someone else. Wait! Was that her boyfriend, Marcus, hugging him? When had he gotten here? Then there were more hugs. Lucas found he couldn’t stop crying. Every fear and every hope he’d had for… how many years? Twenty? Twenty-five? No. Twenty-four. Since kindergarten. That was it. A day he could still clearly remember—being told that boys couldn’t marry boys, even if they were in love.

  God. If only Dalton were here. If only. A different kind of tears threatened, and he shook his head and told himself, No, no, I won’t go there. Dalton, if you need to be looking in a microscope right now instead of—

  “Lucas?”

  He almost didn’t hear his name at first because he’d heard it shouted a dozen times in the last few minutes. But when his name was said again—

  “Lucas?”

  —he jumped. Because wasn’t that…?

  He pulled away from the young lady he was currently hugging—her head full of rainbow dreads—and turned to see…

  Dalton.

  His eyes went wide.

  “Dalton,” he cried, and his heart jumped. Dalton was here, and it was too good to be true! Like something out of a movie, and he started to hug him but…

  Dalton dropped to one knee.

  “Dalton?” Lucas said again, and although it was barely a whisper, his voice seemed almost to echo since—except for a few gasps—a hush had fallen over the room. Even the TV had gone mysteriously silent.

  Dalton reached into his pants pocket, and although there was certainly some part of Lucas that realized what might be about to happen, that part of him felt as if it were very far away—on the other side of a canyon, the Grand Canyon perhaps, or ever farther. Miles. The Moon. The planet Altair IV, even.