Marcus in Retrograde

by S A Sommers

  I squeezed his hand. “I get it, babe. I am there for you to lean on, figuratively and literally, if you need it. But I am going to be listening for your grandmother’s text.”

  Nodding, and not letting go of my hand this time, we headed for the front door of the house. When we were on the porch, I let go of him and stood back, against the porch support, a good ten feet from the door. Chase saw what I was doing and I could tell he wanted me closer. It wasn’t smart though.

  I wasn’t about to shove our relationship in their face.

  Chase lifted his hand and knocked on the door. Three hard, short raps, and stepped back just a little. We waited. It was a good minute before I heard the tumblers in the door turn to open.

  The door swung in, and the mirror image of Chase stood on the other side—save with white hair and sallow skin. Right down to the blue eyes. And each set of them was frozen on the other.

  Chase cleared his throat. “Hi, Dad.”

  The man blinked a few times, wrinkled his brow, then finally cleared his throat. “Chase?”

  “Yeah,” he answered. “It’s me.”

  “So, then, Rider found you.”

  “You always knew where I was,” he answered.

  “You didn’t call.”

  Chase huffed. “You didn’t either.”

  The older man pursed his lips. “I’m doing this wrong, Chase.” His son looked like he was about to lay into him, but held up a hand to stave him off. “I don’t want to fight. I’m done fighting with people.” He moved his hand from its raised position into an offer to shake. “Thank you for coming, Son.”

  Slowly, Chase reached his hand out and shook his father’s hand. “You could have picked someone better than Rider to ask me.”

  “You’re telling me? He hasn’t shut up about the cocksucker comment since he came home.” His father tossed a look at me standing there. “Well done, young man. Not much throws Rider out of his own orbit. He needed it.”

  I nodded in acknowledgement.

  He turned back to Chase. “Come in, please, Son. Bring your friend in. Too damn hot out here for me.”

  Chase tossed a look at me, and I moved up so I could follow him into the house. We walked into the foyer and the cool of the air conditioning washed over us while I closed the door behind me. I could see where the back of the house had the addition, and the stairs were straight up on the left. There was a bench, and a small table with flowers, and whitewashed wainscoting ran along the walls.

  “Tony? Who is it?”

  A woman just a little shorter than Chase and his dad appeared in the door to the kitchen. She was wearing a sunny yellow apron, skinny jeans and striped top. Her hair, a more muted gray and black, was up in a messy bun.

  She gasped and put a hand to her mouth, staring at Chase. “Is that really you?”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  She launched herself at him, and the tears just burst out of her. “Oh, my God, Chase. Chase, I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what to do or how to talk to you or—”

  “Don’t smother the damn kid, Beth,” Tony grumbled. “Get him back and kill him with kindness. Damn.”

  The small chuckle escaped me, and I covered my mouth with the back of my hand. Chase extracted himself from his mother and took my hand. “Mom, Dad, this is my boyfriend, Marcus. Marcus, these are my parents, Tony and Beth Garcia.”

  I reached out and shook each of their hands. “Nice to meet you.”

  Tony shook his head. “Doesn’t just come back, has to bring a boyfriend. Lord. Come on, come into the kitchen. I got some beers and we can chat.”

  Beth looked terrified for just a moment. “Tony, I’m not—”

  “Beth, the boy doesn’t care if your stove has stains. He doesn’t. Just come in and sit with him. Damn.”

  This was going to be interesting.

  CHASE

  THE KITCHEN WAS STILL YELLOW.

  I’d bet the living room was still blue, the dining room still gray, and their bedroom still beige. My room would still have the boats and sails from when I was ten, and Rider’s room was probably still full of race cars.

  Things didn’t change on the Garcia farm.

  Well, maybe that wasn’t so true anymore.

  My grandmother living in the old cottage was one of the changes. I hoped there were going to be more.

  My father took a drink of the beer. I was going to make a comment about the 11:30 in the morning beer, but I didn’t think it would be the best move.

  “So, uh…” He spun the can of cheap brew in his hands, and stared at it. It took him a minute to look up again. “I owe you an apology. Whether or not I agreed with your lifestyle, I was wrong to throw you out and I was wrong to not listen to you. I’m sorry for that.”

  I just about fell off my chair. It wasn’t the most elegant apology, and certainly not the purest, but it was an apology.

  “Thank you, Dad,” I managed.

  “This How to Die therapy they have me in—”

  “It’s not How to Die,” my mother snapped.

  “Oh, jeeze, this again…” He shook his head. “Fine. The Death With Dignity therapy I’m in has me talking about what I screwed up in life…”

  My mother let out a giant sigh. “It’s a Death With Dignity therapy designed to help end-of-life patients deal with their own grief, and the regrets they might have. It also encourages different thinking and both trying to rectify regrets and living with them.”

  Dad was staring at the ceiling until Mom was done. “So. That thing. And it did get me thinking—”

  “After he finished cursing me out and being an ass about all of this,” my mother added.

  “—that I don’t have a whole lot of time left. Maybe these head shrinkers weren’t completely wrong about things.”

  I held up my hand. “Hold on. I have no idea what’s going on here. Someone has to tell me why Rider showed up at my house telling me you were dying in six months, and I had to come out here.”

  “I have primary amyloidosis, I have for a few years,” Dad said. “We’ve been able to control it pretty well, but in the past six months the drugs I need to control it have needed to be upped, and my body isn’t responding very well anymore. I’m going into congestive left heart failure.”

  “The doctor said there are more treatments—” Mom started.

  “Beth. We’ve been through this. I don’t want the treatments. I don’t want to be put on a transplant list. I’m not taking a healthy heart away from a twenty year old. I’m sixty-five and I’ve lived my life. Let a kid have it.”

  “So,” I interrupted again, “you’re dying but it’s not like, you’re going to keel over tomorrow.”

  “They’re going to put in a pacemaker next week,” Dad said. “But there’s not much they can do for the muscle actually toughening up. With the pacemaker they’re thinking two to four years. But I could have a cardiac incident that did me in, in a month, six months, a year from now. My heart just isn’t up to snuff anymore.”

  There were tears in my mother’s eyes—Antonio Garcia was her life, and to hear him talking like this had to be breaking her own heart.

  “All right, so why didn’t Mom just say something on the phone to me.”

  “I told her not to,” Dad answered. “I did you wrong, Son. I treated you poorly. I asked Rider to talk to you, but apparently he decided going to the city would be more effective. When I found out he went, I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, he’d see what I’ve been really learning all this time between the therapy and Reverend Gil.”

  Oh, God. Here it went. Reverend Gil was going to be a pseudo-ally who kept telling everyone to love the sinner, hate the sin. Or some other such bullshit-fueled platitude that allowed you to keep preaching at The Gays while still pretending you cared.

  “Your father and I changed churches about a year ago,” Mom said.

  That caught me off guard. The Garcias and the Cortezes had gone to Paris Lutheran for…generations. “What? Are you serious
?”

  Mom nodded. “Pastor Allen was a nice man, but we both felt that his utter hatred of non-Lutherans was getting a bit much. I…we were having trouble sitting in the pews listening to him tell us that there was no redemption for our son. That he was going to Hell because he layeth with another man.”

  “Meanwhile,” Dad continued. “Victor Darren’s wife Marilyn was raped and murdered about that time.”

  I gasped, “Mrs. Darren? Sweet Mrs. Darren who taught second grade at the school?”

  Dad nodded solemnly. “Well, they caught the guy, and it turned out it was one of Pastor Allen’s friend’s kids. He stood up there with that murdering bastard child, and told the court he was a good man, a man of God, who had made a mistake. Andy—who was deputy sheriff and one of the first on the scene—heard that, he got up and left the courtroom. He told me later it was no mistake when the victim had been stabbed fifty-seven times. And that wasn’t counting the brutal rape, which he would never tell me more about, save to say it was savage.”

  Mom picked up the story. “So, there’s Pastor Allen preaching forgiveness for this man who destroyed a family, a school and a community, but on Sunday he was in that pulpit telling us how our law abiding, non-rapist son who happens to prefer men to women was going to Hell.”

  Dad cleared his throat. “Now, Reverend Gil is a good man. He doesn’t like to just tell us how to think. He doesn’t like that. He wants all of his sheep to think for themselves and not just follow the flock. When I sat down with him, on recommendation of my therapist—”

  Who was this man? Talking to therapists? Spiritual counselors?

  “—he brought out a Bible, like he knew exactly what I was thinking about with all this how to die therapy.”

  My mother huffed and rolled her eyes.

  Dad spun the can of beer in his hands a few times. Even in the air conditioning of the house, the aluminum was sweating, and he seemed to chase the droplet around it.

  “Reverend Gil open the Bible, and showed me all the places where it was the Lord had said thou shall not kill. There were hundreds. New and old testament. Some were like the Commandments, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and others were more poetic. But they all followed that same Commandment.

  “Then, he pointed out all the parts of the same book where it says ‘Thou shalt not lie with a man as you would with a woman,’ in whatever flowy poetry you wanted to frame it.

  “There are seven. Just seven. And four of those are up for serious debate.” He played with the tab on the beer can. “Reverend said that homosexuality is a modern concept. That as psychology began to understand that gender was a construct, they needed words for it. And he said that in the past fifty, Hell, twenty years, the understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender has exploded and expanded and the…Kinsey scale? is an oversimplification of a very complex concept.”

  My mother leaned forward. “And then the Reverend Gil introduced us to his boyfriend.”

  I saw Marcus sit back in his chair in shock and I was right there with him. That was not the way I had expected that to go at all. Not at all.

  “Nice man,” Dad said. “One of the boys from the dairy farm up the road. Hard worker, strong faith. Was a little weird to see them making googly eyes at each other, but…” He took a deep breath and looked straight at me. “Who am I to judge. If they make each other happy, isn’t that really all we can ask out of this life?”

  Fuck. Me. He apologized. In his own Antonio Garcia way, he apologized to me.

  I stood from my chair, and walked around to him. Leaning down, I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him. Hard. As hard as I could.

  He sniffled. I knew he was crying. “Wish I’d realized that with more time on the clock but—”

  “We still have time on the clock, Dad.”

  My mother let out a huge sob, and covered her mouth trying not to ugly cry. Marcus was seated with his arms folded and a smile on his face.

  Abuelita walked up the steps of the front porch where my father and I sat on the porch swing. She was carrying a basket of something.

  “Momma, why didn’t you call and have one of us come over?” Dad said.

  “Because you’ve got less time on your ticker than I do, Antonio. So shut your yap and let me bring over my fried chicken.”

  “Oh, shit, Abuelita, are you serious?” I gasped, just as the smell hit my nose. “You are!”

  “Do I smell fried chicken?” Marcus called from behind her, walking up with our bags. “Oh, God, Maria, tell me that’s really homemade fried chicken?”

  “I put it in the buttermilk this morning.”

  “Praise Jeebus,” he mumbled.

  I pulled the door open for the two of them, and watched as my grandmother made her way to the back of the house. I held up a finger to have Marcus wait, and I smiled.

  “Oh, Momma! Yes!” my mother yelled from the kitchen.

  “No one makes fried chicken like Abuelita.” I smiled.

  Marcus laughed, dropping a quick peck on my lips and headed inside. My parents had insisted we stay with them through the weekend, and when I had seen they hadn’t left my room with the single bed and sailboats and had instead painted it neutral and put a queen in it—I realized they really were trying. Maybe more than trying.

  “Who do you have taking care of the pumpkins?”

  “Rider is supposed to, but he’s not exactly good at it. Momma has some neighbor boys she pays. She loves that patch. And honestly, so do I and your mother. It’s not just income. It’s a tradition.”

  “Does it bother you that you can’t work it?”

  “Some days. Other days, I’m glad for the porch and a cold beer and the chance to just sit.” He sighed. “How’s your shoulder?”

  “Oh, long healed,” I answered. “I got to a clinic and had them help me out. Took a lot of the money I had saved, but I got it straight.”

  “Are you set there in New York?”

  “Great apartment, great coworkers, two cats, one dog, and a boyfriend.” I smiled. “That’s about as good as it gets.”

  “He treats you right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. He does.”

  “Good.” He patted my knee.

  “The prodigal son returns.”

  We both turned and found Rider mounting the steps to the side of the porch. He had a scowl on his face, and he was filthy from whatever he was doing.

  “I came to make peace with my father, Rider. I have no beef with you.”

  “Did you let Mom slaughter the fatted calf?”

  “Rider…” My father shook his head.

  “I’m not here to fight.”

  “Of course not! Everything is fine now, isn’t it? We’re all happy with the fag in the family!”

  I had no idea where Marcus had come from, but he slugged Rider right in the jaw and sent him stumbling sideways into the railing.

  Marcus dropped his fists to his side and stared my brother down. “I’m not just good at cocksucking, jackass. I’m also pretty good at sucker punches.”

  “What is wrong with you people?” Rider screamed at our father. “Why the hell are you suddenly okay with queers? Why don’t you see how disgusting this is? How unnatural!”

  “That’s your problem now, Son,” Dad said, calmly. “You keep saying those words and thinking those thoughts, and people like Marcus here, are going to keep educating you on what equal rights and shut your damn mouth mean.” He jerked his head at the door. “Go inside. Abuelita and your mother will get you some ice for that jaw. Marcus, I’ll say this just once. Don’t hit my son, no matter how much he needs it.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry.”

  “Apologies go to the offended.”

  I had to hold back the snort that threatened me. My dad was still my dad. But Marcus nodded and walked into the house. I saw my dad’s eyebrows shoot up when the door closed.

  “He just went in there to apologize?”

  “Yes. Marcus is an amazing man, Dad.” I ran a hand over my mouth and leaned agains
t the railing and looked at the door where he had disappeared. “I don’t know if it’s the right way for things to happen, but I am seriously, seriously falling hard for him.”

  “Son, Chase…there is no right or wrong when it comes to falling in love. There are no timelines.” He let out a sigh. “I love your mom with all my heart, and we’ve been fighting about this heart thing for months. Of fucking course I want more time with her. A thousand years wouldn’t be enough with her. We fight, but half the fun of it is making up.”

  “Dad…”

  “Sorry not sorry,” he said, waving me off. “What I’m trying to say is that if you think you’re in love with him, don’t waste time.”

  “Sage advice from an old man.”

  “Not that old.”

  “Then why aren’t you on the transplant list?”

  He shook his head. “She wants me on the transplant list, but I’m not young. Where do I get off taking a heart from an eighteen or twenty year old who hasn’t had a chance to live?”

  “I get the selfless act, Dad, I do. But if you’re otherwise healthy, why shouldn’t you get a chance at another twenty years?”

  “Because those kids could get sixty or eighty out of it.”

  I ran a hand down my face. “Will you let me do some research? Be open to other ideas?”

  “Of course.” He nodded. “If you can work on immortality for me and your mother, that would be great.”

  Marcus pushed back out of the house, red and shaking and hurried down the stairs around the house with a quiet “excuse me.”

  My father tossed his chin at him. “Go. See what Rider did this time.”

  I trotted after Marcus, hopping down the stairs, hoping he wasn’t too far ahead of me. I only made it just around the corner before he grabbed me and shoved me against the house. His mouth was crashing over mine, and I groaned quietly against his lips.

  The kiss lasted a while, going back and forth from hard and soft, and finally he pulled away, resting his forehead on mine. “Sorry. I just needed a reminder why I put up with homophobes.”

  I groaned, “You stopped…”

  He laughed. “You want more, baby?”