Summer Lessons

by Amy Lane

  “Just in time for summer vacation.” Mason gave quiet, fervent thanks for his day job.

  “Swimming, the zoo, trips to San Francisco.” Dane’s teeth flashed in the midst of what was growing into a full beard. “Mom will be thrilled.”

  Mason nodded, wondering if he should broach the one little glitch in the plan.

  “I kissed him tonight,” Dane said quietly, his joy suffusing the air like balm.

  “Yeah?” Mason squeaked.

  “He responded. It was only a couple of seconds, but there was tongue.” Dane poured his own glass of chocolate milk and leaned against the counter, throwing back a couple of meds.

  Mason’s heart started to beat again. “Next move?” He had never actually seduced a supposedly straight boy. He had no idea.

  “Wait,” Dane said. “Hope.”

  And there went Mason’s heart to his feet. His face must have shown it.

  “I said hope,” Dane told him. “Not fantasize. Although that too. Don’t worry, Mace. I keep telling you, I know the deal.”

  Mason closed his eyes and came clean. “I always worry,” he said. “Always. This morning was rough.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dane said.

  Mason opened his eyes to see Dane studying his chocolate milk. “I know. Just… I’m going to nag you. Like be paranoid for a week or so. You understand?”

  Dane met his gaze and nodded. “Yeah. I get it.” He looked away and changed the subject. “So, Terry?”

  Mason didn’t try to fight the smile that crept up. “I’m going to bring him a snack.” Chocolate milk and cookies.

  “Mace.”

  Mason reached for the glasses and poured Terry a cup, and then turned around to get the cookies behind his head.

  “I’ll carry those up for you,” Dane muttered. “Why didn’t you send him down?”

  “Because he cleaned up after lunch and dinner and I’m tired of feeling like an invalid.” And he really was gaining weight. Water aerobics at the work gym helped, but it didn’t do the same as a good run through the neighborhood.

  “So are we really spending our Sunday cleaning out his backyard?”

  “He says there’s blackberry bushes. I’m going to need you to go buy those Teflon gloves Dad uses for roses and two kinds of garden shears. I already texted Skipper about everybody wearing jeans and long shirts and waffle stompers and—”

  Dane held up a hand. “Oh my God, calm down, Mason. You got the job! You’re the top dog organizer of the entire world, Mr. MBA. I’m just asking—what’s your endgame here?”

  And Mason was proud, because they had one. “Help him clean up his mom’s house. Help him move out and be his own person.”

  Dane regarded him steadily.

  “Hope he comes back,” he conceded with a sigh.

  “See?” Dane said, smugly superior. “Hope. It’s a fucking thing.”

  Brambles and Brush

  TERRY LEFT early the next day, after a lingering kiss and an admonition for Mason to stay in bed for another hour. Mason had managed a half an hour before he pulled Dane out of bed and got them both ready so they could go to the hardware store and buy several sets of gloves, some clippers, and the super-strong garbage bags that wouldn’t puncture if you tried to shove a spear through the sides.

  When they arrived at the tiny ramshackle house in Carmichael, Mason’s first thought was that Terry hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d talked about his mother’s backyard. There was a rotting wooden fence keeping the garden entropy from taking over the driveway, but the brambles and weeds were literally too thick to see through.

  Mason seriously wondered about going back to Lowe’s and asking if they sold machetes.

  Carpenter arrived, and he and Dane set Mason up with fleece blankets and a folding chair and those wonderful little hand-warmer things. Skip and Richie showed up about the same time Terry got back from taking his mom wherever he’d taken her. Terry had tried to explain where she was going, but he outlined a series of stops, from her friend’s house to church to the mall to somewhere else, to a place where someone would be who would drop her off at six. Mason didn’t follow it. Mostly he was glad she was gone.

  Terry waved at everybody and then ran inside the house and came back wearing jeans—for once—and a long-sleeved denim shirt. He’d also tied his hair up in a bun, and as he came out of the house, he was sliding Mason’s stocking cap over it and pulling the warm blue wool over his ears.

  He greeted Skip and Richie while Carpenter and Dane were still fussing with a way to prop Mason’s foot up so it didn’t hurt. When they were done, he walked over to Mason’s chair and copped a squat, grabbing one of the little chemical hand-warmer packets out of the box.

  “So you break open the little pellets inside and they keep you warm?” he asked curiously.

  Mason nodded and squeezed the ones inside his gloves. “Yup. Love them.”

  Terry grinned, opened up a packet, and shoved it up under Mason’s shirt.

  “Wha—”

  He fiddled with Mason’s clothes for a moment, intense and searingly personal, and then settled the packet between Mason’s T-shirt and his sweatshirt, right over Mason’s heart.

  “Gotta keep it warm,” he said, peering into Mason’s eyes with a twinkle in his own. “So it can keep on warming me up.”

  Mason’s flush made up for the frigid gray fog that blanketed them all and the lack of even hope for the sun. “Just warm for you,” he promised.

  Terry kissed his cheek again, then stood up and asked Skipper what they should do first.

  Although Dane gave Mason crap about being a weenie and letting his friends do all the work, the truth was, the next couple of hours were hard to watch.

  They started out one cut at a time, cutting the blackberry bushes and weeds that grew over the fence, and then worked their way through the next foot, and then the next one, and then the next one.

  Richie and Terry kept up a blue streak of cursing as they filled up trash bags with brush, brambles, trash, old boards, newspapers, rusty garden implements, pots, birdcages, and the wooden leftovers of what might have been a chicken coop.

  The gloves helped, but everybody—Carpenter, Dane, Terry, Skip, Richie—ended up with big scratches over their faces, and Mason turned out to have a job after all: first aid. He swabbed a lot of hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin that day, and then taped gauze over the offended areas.

  After two hours they had worked their way about halfway through the yard, and besides being both sweaty and freezing, scratched, bleeding, and disheartened, they were also hungry—and running out of room.

  The trash bags covered most of the driveway.

  They paused for a moment and had a discussion about what to do next—nobody had a car big enough to haul—when a big pickup truck with extra rails built on for gardening implements pulled in front of the house and Cooper hopped out with Menendez by his side, because you never could have enough soccer buddies to help.

  They made an unlikely pair—Menendez, small with curly dark hair and movements like a spring-loaded toy; and Cooper, tall, with broad shoulders and long limbs, as well as a wealth of thick reddish-brown hair he’d pulled back from his face into a ponytail. Mason had enjoyed playing soccer with both men, and he could tell from the suddenly alert, active cant to Terry’s shoulders that seeing them was a welcome surprise.

  “Wow!” he said, bouncing. “Where’d this come from?”

  “It’s my dad’s,” Cooper said. “He’s got like five of them in his business, but this one’s got the weakest rack on it. We use it for hauling. Tony knows where the dump is—he’s got a buddy who works there.”

  “Who’s Tony?” Richie asked blankly.

  “I’m Tony, asshole!” Menendez spoke up. “Jesus, you don’t even look at a player roster?”

  “I just thought you were Menendez,” Richie said, not apologetic at the least.

  Terry shrugged. “I gotta admit, I woulda been hard-pressed to remember your actual first na
me. I mean, do you even know mine?”

  Menendez gaped at them—and then flushed. “Gerry?” he hazarded.

  Cooper busted up. “And I’m Wyatt! Pleased to meetya, everybody—it only took six years. Now do you want us to haul some trash?”

  “A-fuckin’-men,” Terry sighed. “I’ll call you anything you want, just help us get this shit out of my driveway before dark!”

  It took them four more hours—and three trips to the dump outside of Roseville—to clear out Terry’s backyard. In the end, it also took two Weedwackers to get the chin-high weeds down to knee level, and Terry used his old push mower to reduce that to stubble. Skipper jury-rigged a couple of cage lights from his and Cooper’s cars so that he and Richie could rake the last batch of cigarette butts, condoms, and bubble-gum wrappers from the stubble that remained. Everybody was filthy and exhausted, everybody had war wounds, and everyone had a war story about some horrible thing they’d discovered in the course of the day.

  For Skip it was a cat skeleton. For Richie it was a pile of chicken bones. Carpenter had stepped in rabbit remains and screamed like an actress in a horror film.

  Someone’s dog had been crapping steadily in the back corner, where the fence had broken down years ago. Dane had stepped in that pile, and had been scraping the crap out of his waffle-stomper for an hour.

  About the only thing that wasn’t wrong was hunger, and that was because Mason had ordered half-a-dozen extra-large pizzas from the nearest Round Table a little after noon, and people had been noshing steadily on that. He’d also run to Starbucks for a giant traveler of coffee, and that too had been appreciated.

  But now they were done. All but the last bag had been hauled, and they stood, loose-limbed and happy with their day’s work, underneath the cage lights and told their horror stories like warriors after the battle.

  “Oh my God!” Cooper was whooping. “That fucking gravel pile on the other side of the house—did you even see that shit?” he asked Carpenter.

  Carpenter had a few bruises and punctures on his thigh that indicated he had not seen the pile of fish gravel before he got there with one of the Weedwackers.

  “Oh hell,” Dane swore, coming out of the dusty, cramped house. They’d all gone in at one time or another to use the bathroom or wash their hands. The last of the pizza now sat in a box on the battered Formica table. “Dammit, Clay—here, come back inside and I’ll put some Neosporin on that shit.”

  “I’m fine.” Carpenter waved him off. “Promise. It’s only a flesh wound.”

  “That could get infected,” Mason said, a subtle warning in his voice. Dane would obsess, and whatever was between them, this was one of those sitches where it was easier to give in.

  Carpenter blinked. “Fine, fine—geez, you two. Mason sprains his ankle and we’re all tragedy bound.” But he went.

  “They think you’re bad,” Terry said staunchly, “you should have seen Richie and Carpenter freaking out when Skipper was sick in November.”

  Mason started to laugh. “You mean when he answered the phone ‘Tesko’s teeth, how can I burp you?’”

  There was general laughter.

  “That’s not what I said!” Skipper protested.

  “How would you know?” Mason teased. “I’ve never heard anyone so stoned on cold medicine!”

  Richie shook his head. “You guys should have heard him when he got home. He kept telling me he was going to join the gay soccer league with the cat.”

  There was more generalized laughter, and at that moment, a car pulled into the driveway.

  Terry moaned. “Guys—this is gonna be… well, awful, okay? Ignore everything she says. I’m hella grateful. You need me for anything and I’m your guy. Rodents in the plumbing, monsters in the closets, I’m totally there.”

  And with that rather cryptic promise, he trotted to the incoming car to help his mother.

  “Who are these people, Terrence?” his mother snapped as soon as the door opened. “What have you been doing all day?”

  The false and desperate brightness of Terry’s voice made them all cringe. “My friends and I cleaned up, Mom. Look—we’ve got a backyard now. Took all day.”

  “Why would you want to do that? It’s just gonna get crapped up again. Waste of time.”

  From across the driveway, they all saw Terry’s agonized look toward them as they watched the exchange.

  “I want to make the place good so you don’t have no trouble with it,” he said. “You know, so I can go get an apartment and you’ll be okay.”

  “You can’t live by yourself,” she snapped. “You’re a kid. Jesus, you’re covered in dirt. And you brought a bunch of people I don’t know here? What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking I’m fixing the bathroom next weekend,” Terry said, his voice bleak. “The toilet’s leaking, and Mason almost fell through the floor.”

  He had, in fact, rolled his bad ankle again. He’d been trying to move without crutches, at least to the bathroom and back, but he’d needed Terry’s help to get to his chair.

  “Who the hell is Mason?”

  “He’s my….” Terry’s voice faltered. “He’s my friend, Mom. He’s my uh—you know. Friend.”

  Mason grimaced, and Skipper squeezed his shoulder. Well, as coming out went, it could have been worse.

  “I’ll just see about that,” the woman promised. She stuck her head back inside the car and said something to the driver—it must not have been too friendly, because the car peeled back almost before she could shut the door. “Bitch,” Terry’s mom said succinctly. “Like I wanted to sit next to her retarded dog anyway.”

  “Mom, that’s the only person left who will talk to you.”

  “Shut up. Who’s this friend of yours?”

  Terry’s mother came forward into the circle thrown off from the cage lights. She wasn’t bundled as she had been at Skipper’s place, and her hard-dyed blond hair was pulled back from her face in a tight ponytail.

  She was wearing a plain blue sweatshirt and ill-fitting blue jeans with a cut Mason remembered moms wearing when he was in the third grade. Her face was the same shape as Terry’s, and her eyes were brown behind the squint, but her mouth was tight and pulled in at the corners, and her nose wrinkled with distaste.

  Poor Terry. Mason wasn’t sure what had twisted her, but the process seemed to have been irrevocable and highly painful for anyone in the vicinity.

  “Mom, this is, well, my soccer team, really. That’s Skip and his boyfriend, Richie—”

  “You brought fags to my house?”

  It was like water crashed over them all and congealed on their skin in an icy rime.

  “Mom, that’s fuckin’ rude,” Terry said after a shocked moment. “They’re my friends, dammit—”

  “Why are you hanging out with them? Do you want me to think you’re a—”

  “Yes,” Terry snarled, grabbing her arm. “Yes, that’s fine. You think what you want.”

  “Terrence—”

  “Whatever. I just asked these nice people to come to your house and clean up so when I leave I’m not leaving you in a shithole. Now unless you want me to leave tonight, you need to tell them you’re sorry.”

  For a moment they locked gazes and stood, furious and shaking, in the center of the frigid, foggy driveway. Finally she turned her sour gaze to the group of men who had labored for her home.

  “Sorry,” she snapped, then looked back at Terry. “Let go.”

  “Now tell them thank you,” he growled.

  “I am not—”

  He shook her. Not hard, just enough to emphasize that he was there.

  “Thank you all for doing something I didn’t ask you to do,” she said nastily.

  “We were glad to do it for our friend, ma’am,” Skip said. “We’ll come back and help him any time.”

  Terry squeezed the bridge of his nose and then looked at Skip and nodded. “Thanks, Skip,” he said gratefully. “I don’t know how to pay you back.”

 
Richie’s almost inappropriate laughter seemed to break the spell of horror that had settled upon them. “You said it yourself, Jefferson—monsters in the damned trees. You owe us Halloween cleanup for the next five years.”

  Skip slapped his arm—“Richie!”—but Terry’s face lit up with joy and relief.

  “You hold me to that,” he said softly. Then he turned back to his mother. “Now, let’s get you inside before you can scare them away. Mason bought pizza. There’s leftovers for dinner.”

  “Wait, Mason? Isn’t that your—” She took time to sneer. “—friend?”

  “Yeah, Mom, but forget about—”

  Mason, leaning heavily on Skipper and Richie, had pushed himself up to balance precariously without his crutches.

  “Ms. Jefferson?” he said politely. “I’m Mason Hayes. It’s, uh, a, uh, experience to meet you.”

  He would have thought he’d totally blown it, but Terry was standing next to his mother, nodding and holding a thumbs-up. “Experience?” she asked, arching her eyebrows. “Not even going to try ‘nice’?”

  “You gotta earn nice,” Cooper—Wyatt—said from his spot in the circle. “Mason fed us today—if he doesn’t think you’re nice, we’re all behind that.”

  There was some general noise about how food was good, and they were all about food, and Mason got some pats on the back.

  “You all are easy,” he said, just softly enough to elicit several smirks and a few snorts. Oops. Accidental dirty joke during a tense moment—he had a new thing to add to his FML list of stupid things to say while adulting.

  “Whatever,” Terry’s mom said, crossing her arms.

  “I might try a little harder if I knew your name,” Mason lied.

  “Julie Jefferson. What do you care?”

  “I just want to know the people important to Terry,” he said in complete sincerity. “Terry talks about you all the time.”

  She snorted. “Bitches about me is more like it.”

  “That may be true,” Mason said, “but maybe if you said nice things to him, he’d say nice things about you.”

  “God. This is my life? A bunch of idiots in my driveway and some fag telling me how to raise my son?”