Home Making

by Lee Matalone

  And one day, I will be gone and there will be new patterns, new cycles, new stays against the world. That’s what I’ve attempted to do for Chloe: to give her a cycle she could rely on. It may not have been the most exciting childhood, but didn’t you feel loved? Didn’t you never not feel whole of love?

  Chloe,

  This is one of the songs I sang to you over and over. You will have to try it out and see if it fits for you and the Baby. You will never know until you try it for yourself.

  Hush little baby, don’t say a word,

  Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird,

  And if that mockingbird don’t sing,

  Mama’s gonna

  “Still soggy? I’ll get back to you in a moment. Wait.”

  And if that diamond ring is brass,

  Mama’s gonna

  “Got a case of the zoomies, Henri? Okay. Okay. One second.”

  And if that looking glass gets broke,

  Mama’s gonna

  “Let’s go, baby, let’s get you toweled off for good.”

  Beau

  An emu! That’s what I thought when you came out of your mother. Not any emu, but one I saw walking down a feeder road off of I-10 as a boy. He was not supposed to be there, of course. He looked, as much as a bird can look, lost. He did not know where to go. From the backseat of my daddy’s truck, I watched him walk along the fencing of a cattle ranch, a tall, lost bird. Finally, he, she, was out in the open world, unfettered.

  Maybe it was the way you came out of your mother, a round little head and eyes that bulged out of your red face. You were, like your mother, unusual. You were all eyes and mouth, like you couldn’t wait to see what followed the light, to shout your existence. Positivity is a good thing. It’s not a trait your mother or I have—I’m not sure where you got that from, perhaps your mother’s biological mother. But I know it’s a rare quality in a person these days, one that will set you apart.

  Of course you, like the emu, were headed into a complicated situation, into a complicated world, and you’re a complicated boy. But you’re ready for it. I believe that.

  For the first time I’m hopeful. Good things are happening. I sound so damn cheerful. The twenty-two-year-old me would think me a fool.

  Happy birthday, Ru. The first of many, many, many. Kisses, cher.

  What superpower would you have? In the top left-hand corner of my screen, his question arises at the bottom of a box, a space Ty and I are carving out together.

  Beau: You’re starting with the serious questions.

  Tyler: Well?

  Beau: Well . . .

  Tyler: I’m waiting.

  Beau: Okay okay I’d have to say

  Tyler: ?

  Beau: To stretch time.

  Tyler: How so? To make it faster or shorter?

  Beau: Both. Longer and shorter than time as we experience it

  Tyler: What would the point of that be?

  Beau: Well. We could hold on to moments we wanted to stay in and we could skip over the ones we didn’t want to.

  Tyler: I see. What moment would you hold on to?

  Beau: You know what moment. How long have we been on here tonight?

  Tyler: Let’s not think about it that way.

  Beau: I don’t think about it that way. I’m just nervous. You make me nervous.

  Tyler: That’s ridiculous. Come on. We know each other.

  Beau: I don’t know. It’s been so long. I have to go. Ru’s crying.

  Tyler: I can’t believe you’re a baby daddy. Actually, I can. Even as a kid, you were maternal. You held those puppies we found behind the Save More dumpster in such a way.

  Beau: A baby daddy of sorts. More of a part-time baby daddy.

  Tyler: Where is she?

  Beau: Chloe? She’s on a date.

  Tyler: Good for her.

  Beau: I think that she’s finally ready again.

  Tyler: I’ve missed you.

  Beau: I haven’t seen you in a millennium. You don’t know me.

  Tyler: We both know that’s not entirely true.

  Beau: There’s time to figure this out. I’m not in a rush. You have no competition here in the country.

  Tyler: You have no competition out here in L.A.

  Beau: Hush.

  Tyler: Goodnight, B.

  Beau: Goodnight, Ty.

  Before you were born, after your mother first moved into your house, I spent a lot of time worrying about her, though worrying was not a part of my upbringing. I wasn’t raised to be such a heady person, always drowning in my own thoughts. Back in Dog Hill, men were supposed to chercher à malfaire, knuckles bared and whiskey imbibed. Boys were bred and beat to grow up blood and bone and gristle. If he turned out right, a man would have the world in a jug and a stopper in his hand. Driving in his truck, Daddy’d tap along to the radio on the steering wheel, slapping red time on my summer knees. Ta maison est brûlée. Ta femme elle est pas là, he’d chant, nearly shouting, soft Sunday drunk. Elle a quitté hier au soir. Pour s’en revenir avec moi! At that line, he’d take a swig of beer from the can in the console and pass it to me, little me, eight or ten or twelve years old. Your house is burnt, and your wife is not there. She left last night, to be back with me.

  I did worry. Maybe that worrying helped your mom. In my own way, I did what I could to help her.

  I think you were the real cure for her pain. For mine, too.

  After all this time, Ty and I’ve found one another. Actually, he found me, on Facebook, where all lost people are found these days. We talk every day. Not on the phone, yet. Just over text. Over email. Over Facebook Messenger. We’re not ready to break the three-decades-plus of silence. Once we hear the other’s voice, there will be expectations. There will be real dreams. Right now, it’s all harmless. Our longing is tempered by the intangibility of the web.

  The phone rings and rings and rings on the kitchen counter. “Pick up the phone, Beau.” Hours later, on a voice message, Ty’s pleading echoes in the apartment. “Don’t you want to be happy? Don’t you want that? Jesus.”

  For my seventeenth birthday, my mother gave me a plastic Jesus, though I didn’t have a car. She had wrapped him up in blue tissue and tucked him at the bottom of a shiny red-and-blue-striped bag. When you leave this place, He will take care of you.

  I had not said I was leaving, but she knew my marks in school and that a quiet young man with a fondness for stray animals and books was never going to make a life in this corner of the South.

  He will show you all the love you’ll ever need, she said, a preacher not believing her own gospel.

  “Do you want me to be the type of man to show up on your doorstep uninvited? Because I know you want me there, you just can’t ask. Ask, Beau.”

  “I want you to show up on my doorstep.”

  “Really?”

  “This is all just a ruse, isn’t it? You must be married with a child and a bulletproof glass house. I’m just a flirtation.”

  “That’s not it at all and you know it. It’s just I never thought you’d actually say it.”

  “Of course I want you.”

  We could have made Ru a number of times, a million times, a time like this one:

  “You make things up,” Chloe said. All I could see of her was her right foot, a sliver of metatarsal and toes dangling over the edge of the tub.

  I fanned the magazine’s pages wide open at her. “That’s the headline. See?”

  “It doesn’t say that at all,” she said, grabbing the magazine with wet fingertips. “It’s saying just the opposite. Why We Need Time Zones. And stop picking at your face.”

  “But,” I said, turning from the mirror. I stopped picking. “Just think if we abolished time zones. If we lived in Fiji, we could wake up on Tuesday and go to bed on Wednesday.”

  “I don’t think it would affect either of us very much. Neither of us work normal jobs.” Her foot receded back into the tub. Water whirled down the drain.

  “If we lived in Fiji, we
wouldn’t be working the jobs we have now. I’d be a fisherman and you’d be a fisherwoman. We would wake up on Thursday and go to bed on Friday.”

  “You hate fishing.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  With her hand, she shooed me out of the bathroom. I closed the door behind me. Tito stayed with her. Water drip dripped off of her onto the tile. He licked, licking licking, the puddle forming around her feet.

  “What’s the point?”

  “The point is,” I said, the faucet rushing over my voice, “we would have a different life.”

  The door opened. Back then she wore her hair bobbed long, and she had combed it flat against her ovular head, hair slicked smooth with water so that the strands stuck to her nape. Around her, she wore an ugly terry cloth robe that I had given her. I’d read somewhere that it was the most comfortable piece of clothing imaginable, and she needed comfort.

  “Isn’t that always the truth?” she said. “How one altered detail can change everything?”

  This robe was hideous, but it did what it was supposed to, hugged you in close, made you feel at home, wherever you were. I bought one for Chloe at the beginning of her home making.

  “Your imagination needs a leash,” she said. “The kind they put on toddlers.”

  “You know it’s harmless.”

  “Of course I do. You’re no evil genius.” She rested her head against my chest. Her pillowed, tufted body quivered. The night was over. She took my chin in her fingers and said, “Stop picking.”

  “I can’t,” I said, picking at a whitehead on my forehead. “I’ve been practicing this craft since I was fifteen. I can’t stop now.”

  “You have to leave now,” she said, walking down the hall to her bedroom.

  “You have a good night,” I said.

  But we did not. We never did. Ru could not have been made in a bed. We were not the kind of couple who could perform such an act of creation. Our family would be different, from conception forward.

  “Where do you want the couch?” The moving man looks at my apartment, the sea of unstained white carpet. In the center of the room lies a three-by-five rug Chloe picked out for me at an antique mall before Ru was born. She had said, Now that you’ve helped me, it’s time for me to help you—and besides, Ru will need a place that feels like home when he’s there. When the doctor told us that the procedure had worked, that she was pregnant, I invited her over. It was time, after all this time of bantering, bathing, tending to her, creating a child together, for her to see where I slept. On first seeing my place, empty as a sailor’s promise, she said, Oh, Beau. A week later she bought me the rug, all orange and blue diamonds, inviting color to the white space.

  The rug is too small for the room. The two beautiful moving men look at me and think, It is too small.

  “Evidently, anywhere,” I say. “Where would you put it?”

  “How about right here?” the other moving man says, gesturing with his chin to his partner. An inky purple honeysuckle grows out from the top of his T-shirt and blooms on his Adam’s apple. They set the couch down in the middle of what most would consider a living room, facing a window that looks out over my small street.

  “Seems right to me,” I say.

  “How long have you been living like this?”

  “I should be offended, but you are not completely out of line in asking. Five years.”

  They wipe their foreheads at the same time with matching blue bandanas.

  “Well,” the one with the neck tattoo and white teeth says, “better late than never.” I want to press my lips to the flower, suck the nectar.

  The pretty movers leave the apartment. I lie down on the too-little rug, feeling all the space for the first time.

  To a child, the drive out to the duck blind is timeless. In the dark in the warmth of Daddy’s truck you feel as if you are in a womb, warm and full of potential, eager. Perhaps that’s where this desire for you started. Maybe fatherhood in its own strange shape was something I was waiting for my whole life. Maybe I was conscious of you in some way, as a little boy in the back of my own father’s truck. Maybe that anticipation was for something bigger than the hunt. Maybe it was for the day when I would have my own little boy to bounce around in my own truck. All I’m saying is that it makes sense that you are here.

  “I wouldn’t say this about your art, but as far as home making, Those who can’t do, teach really does apply here.”

  “It’s a matter of desire, dear. If I had wanted to make this place look nice, I would have.”

  Chloe gives me a look before her drill screws the curtain rod bracket into the wall.

  “These curtains will be perfect. Ty will think I am some sort of Lord Byron with all this velvet.”

  “That was my intention!”

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “Your curtains are hung!” she screams, though I can hear her fine now. “Take me to lunch. I want a fish sandwich with big fat French fries.”

  “Only the fattest for you, love.”

  We are both a little bit too sweaty and a little bit too tired for dining out, but we leave the apartment and walk down the street toward the corner pub that is slightly Irish and slightly yokel and has the right carefree atmosphere for our current moods. She orders French fries fried in bacon fat and a glass of wine and I order a salad and tap water.

  “He must really be special if you’re skipping these.”

  “It’s not for him,” I clarify. “It’s for me.”

  She gives me another look.

  “Perhaps it’s for the both of us. It doesn’t hurt, you know, to be healthy once in a while.”

  “I hope I get to meet him, but if not, I understand.”

  “I would like you to. Ru, as well, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “I do not mind. You both should come over. I will cook something. Is he a vegan, vegetarian?”

  “How did you know?”

  She looks at my plate, at my face.

  “Thank you for your help with the apartment. God-willing he will be impressed by me.”

  “He will swoon.” She takes my face in her hands and kisses my forehead. She holds up a French fry to my mouth and I take it. I fork a bite of greens and feed her. “Just a few more weeks,” she says, and she is right.

  I look at my phone’s calendar, my imminent schedule cleansed of teaching and office hours and administrative meetings for the academic break, my mornings and afternoons to be reserved for studio time, my evenings for quiet, for thinking, Saturday afternoons for Ru, and then, Ty will be here, and for one week, we will have all the time in the world.

  Drip. Drip. Drip. From the ceiling and onto the kitchen island. It is cold outside and the rain is coming hard though it shouldn’t be coming at all like this in January but we are not worried.

  “Of course, when you finish the bathroom, something else falls apart,” I tell Chloe, bourbon in our hands, the light hovering over us. Ty arrives in two days.

  “It’s fine. I’ve come to expect it as a constant project.”

  Her cheeks are rosy, not from blush, fever, or flu. Just health and happiness.

  “I’m baking his cake tomorrow and you will get the balloons and—” She pauses, licking the alcohol on her finger from a clumsy sip. “What else are we missing?”

  “We have everything. His birthday party will be a bash, a blowout, the party of the year.”

  She takes another, cleaner sip and knits the liquor into her lips. “The best party of the year in this house, anyway.”

  She is seeing someone now, someone who I can actually tolerate. He brings Ru books he cannot yet read. He takes Chloe and Tito to the dog park, though Tito is more of a hobbler now than a runner and just sits in their laps the entire time, just so he can be around his kind. He will not come to the party because he is a good man and understands it is too early for him.

  Ru is crying through the baby monitor and Chloe has set dow
n her glass to go to him.

  “I’ll go and get him,” I say. “You enjoy that Booker’s. If you don’t, I’ll be offended.”

  The nursery doesn’t look like a nursery at all. It has no cutesy anything anywhere, no mural with giraffes and elephants, no oversized stuffed animals. The overall impression is a sea of blue on which a white bassinet gently rocks. Without words, I pull him to my chest. He stops crying. He has my glacial forehead and Chloe’s expressive lips and time will tell what of either of our personalities he has, though I sense that he has our curiosities as well as our sensitivities, which will make him vulnerable but empathetic. He could be stubborn like me, like Chloe, or maybe he will be like Cybil, not stubborn at all, open to the world’s fluxes, its cruelties. Maybe he will be a good baker, like my mother, or perhaps he will flounder in the kitchen but will always remain persistent, always trying, like his mother. Maybe he will cuss like my father, drink like my Cajun blood portends. We cannot wait to see what he will be, but we can also wait, don’t want to rush him into his future. Ru and I wait in an easy silence. There will be plenty of time for words tomorrow.

  Tyler: I’m about to get on the plane.

  Beau: I’ll be there to pick you up at 5:14, three minutes to spare, enough time to ensure my lipstick pops just right

  Tyler: Haha. Do you remember right before you moved to Texas how I drove us up to Natchitoches and my aunt made us go on that holiday house tour with her?

  Beau: Vaguely. My mind wasn’t quite there then, as you likely remember.

  Tyler: Really? You nearly punched the homeowner when he told us the slave quarters were exquisite. You always were a little warrior.

  Beau: I do remember that.

  Tyler: My aunt also tried to set you up with my cousin Amber. You weren’t having it.

  Beau: I was feverish with pain. You missed me bursting by a few months. Glad you were spared.

  Tyler: I never knew how badly you suffered. You never showed it.

  Beau: Texting is not the best place for this . . . but the short of it: My sister had died a month before we went up to Natchitoches. And I was going to lose you, too.