Tangled Lights and Silent Nights

by Kelly Stone Gamble

  “You had him hooked good.” He looks at me with a broad smile. “That is one nice bass. Got to be seven pounds.”

  “I can’t believe it. First cast.” I’m out of breath with adrenaline and the effort of fighting the largemouth.

  “I taught you well.” Dad pulls a blue nylon stringer from the tackle box, and pierces the bass’s lower lip. He ties the stringer off the boat, letting the fish back in the water. It fights for a moment, but the stringer holds. “Now that we’ve caught the baby, let’s find the big one.”

  I chuckle at the joke; this is by far the biggest bass I’ve ever caught. Dad is practically glowing with pride, and I realize this is my moment.

  “Dad? I need to tell you something.”

  “Shoot.” He grabs his corncob pipe from his shirt pocket and smacks it against the heel of his hand to empty the bowl.

  “Dad, I’m … I’m … I’m gay.”

  He doesn’t react. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t move. But I know he heard me. The silence drags on for 5 … 10 … 15 seconds. Everything seems to have stopped. The pond surface is as smooth as ice.

  Thump!

  The fish on the stringer thrashes against the side of the boat, breaking the spell. Dad bangs the pipe on his hand again. He slaps it a dozen times; I don’t think he’ll stop until it breaks. But he does stop. He fills the bowl with fresh tobacco. Lights it. Puffs in silence.

  “Dad?”

  He responds by picking up his rod and casting toward the bank. The action turns him away from me. He doesn’t need to say anything. I get the message loud and clear.

  I barely cast my rod again. It feels like a lead pipe in my hands. Instead, I just sit, watching the sun rise above a stand of pecan trees on the east side of the pond. My father doesn’t say a word the entire rest of the morning. Not in the boat. Not in the truck on the way back. When we get to the house, I jump out of the truck almost before it stops moving and escape to my room. I don’t have anything to say either.

  I refuse to come out, even when Jill knocks on the door and asks me to come to dinner.

  “Your father told me what happened,” she says. “You don’t have to come out, but I thought you should know he cooked your fish.”

  I don’t respond. I can sense she’s lingering by the door. She says, “I made hush puppies and collards. I’ll make a plate for you and put it in the fridge.”

  I’m hungry, but I don’t eat out of stubbornness. Later, I hear the phone ring, and Jill knocks on the door again.

  “Sean, it’s for you. It’s your friend, Matt.”

  I want to scream that he’s not my friend; he’s my boyfriend. I also want to run out and grab the phone. But leaving the room means confronting my father.

  “Tell him I can’t talk to him right now.”

  There’s a long pause. “Ok.”

  By the next morning, I’m starving, and the smell of bacon very nearly coaxes me out. But my willpower is stronger than bacon, which surprises even me. Jill knocks on the door again to let me know she and my father will be out visiting friends for the afternoon. She invites me to Christmas Eve services.

  “Thanks but no thanks,” I say through the door. I don’t need to be saved by their church.

  Once I hear the kitchen door swing shut, I venture out to see if there’s any bacon left. Jill has left a tray by the door, and when I lift the cover, there’s not just bacon, but a waffle, some orange slices, and a small mound of congealed grits. I don’t even care that the grits are basically wallpaper paste; I eat everything.

  I watch some TV; Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is on. The stop-motion animation is hokey, but I used to watch this every year when I was little. It takes my mind off the disaster this visit has become. When I hear the truck pull into the driveway, I retreat to my room again, feeling not unlike Rudolph running away to the Island of Misfit Toys.

  Christmas morning is gray with rain, which seems appropriate. I’m 1500 miles from my mother and my boyfriend in New Hampshire, where this depressing rain would be a beautiful blanket of snow. I think of Matt opening presents with his parents; both of them as supportive as possible. Meanwhile, I’m stuck with my father who hates me, and my well-meaning stepmother who seems nice but doesn’t know me at all. I’m contemplating another day hiding in my room, when Jill knocks on the door again. This time she doesn’t wait for a response. Instead, the door opens a crack, and then wide enough for her to enter. She sits on the end of the bed.

  “Sean, I know your father didn’t handle what you told him very well. But you should know he’s trying.”

  “Then why isn’t he here? Instead of you?”

  “I don’t think he’s ready. I’m going to guess that you needed time to tell him, and just like you, he needs some time too.” I don’t respond right away. I realize she’s right. I spent so much time thinking about me, what I was going to say, that I didn’t stop to think about anyone else.

  I finally muster a weak “Yeah.”

  “Listen, you don’t have to, but I’d really like it if you’d come out and spend Christmas morning with us. I made cinnamon rolls.” She pats my leg through the blankets.

  After she leaves, I reflect that I haven’t been fair to my father. Maybe I should give him a second chance. Even my mother needed a little time when I came out to her. Besides, there’s cinnamon rolls.

  My father and Jill are sitting on the couch drinking coffee. They’ve exchanged gifts and now have cinnamon rolls on small plates.

  “Help yourself.” Jill gestures to the plate on the coffee table. I grab a roll. It’s still warm. “There’s coffee in the kitchen. Can I get you some?”

  I nod, my mouth full of my first bite. “Myesh blease.” Jill gets up, leaving my father and me alone. For a second, no one says anything. Then my father leans over and grabs a small box from beneath the tree. He hands it to me.

  “Merry Christmas, son.”

  I look at him in his flannel robe, salt and pepper hair still mussed. His disheveled appearance makes him somehow less threatening, more sincere. I take the box.

  “Go on. Open it,” he says.

  It’s just a few inches long and not quite as wide, but heavy for its size. I find the wrapping paper seam on the back and rip it open. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. It’s a cell phone.

  “Do you like it?” my father asks.

  “Yes. I’ve been asking Mom for one. This … this is awesome!”

  My father nods. “I talked to your mom when we were planning your visit. It was her idea.” Jill returns with the coffee and hands it to me. She gives me a wink.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “I charged it up for you. You can try it out right now if you want.” Something in his voice tells me I should try it out right now.

  I pull the lid off the box. It’s not the fanciest model, but that doesn’t matter. It’s my phone. I hit the power button along the top, and the screen comes to life.

  Dad says, “I added in a few contacts to get you started.”

  I tap the contacts button, expecting to see his number and probably Mom’s. And he has. But there’s one more in the list. Right between Dad and Mom, there’s an entry that says, “Matt.”

  I look up.

  “Matt’s your friend from the play, right?” Words aren’t coming, so I nod. Dad says, “I thought you might like to call him first.”

  And even though he doesn’t say it, the words hang in the air … because he’s your boyfriend. My eyes feel warm, and I wipe away the tears with the palm of my hand. Dad gets up, gathering the plates and cups from the coffee table. He and Jill head to the kitchen.

  Just before he leaves the room, he turns. “It’s Christmas. You should always call the people you love on Christmas.”

  Books by Timothy

  If I Told You So

>   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543211-if-i-told-you-so

  About Timothy

  Timothy Woodward grew up in a small town in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and later moved to the city where he was a high school teacher and an advocate for LGBT youth with Greater Boston PFLAG. His students inspired him to write his first novel, If I Told You So, an ALA Rainbow List selection about coming out and finding first love.

  Timothy has BAs in Cinema Production and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University. He currently lives in Las Vegas.

  Get in Touch

  He can be found on the web at http://www.timothycwoodward.com/.

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/timothycwoodward/

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/timcwoodward

  And Mercy Mild

  by Justin Bog

  We all make mistakes. Around the holidays these mistakes beat with a pulse, amplified undercurrents. I try to make amends. My mother says this annoys her to no end.

  In my teens, I never owned up to my faults, purposeful meanness, character flaws, or weaknesses—lack of a soul even. Yes, once I would’ve defined myself as a mean girl, a good soldier wielding barbs for a bee with higher status, ordered around by a cold and popular sociopath who didn’t do me one favor. I wanted to fit in so much I became a shadow used for someone else’s shade.

  That’s what others said about me, that I’m just as bad, and that I must’ve known. These gossips are strangers to me. I have a new last name through a second marriage to Ethan, and only those with killable curiosity search online to dig up my past.

  My mistake?

  Marrying trouble, a snake charmer of a man, the first to say he loved me, and he did, but obsessively (not in the stalker way, but the adoring way—I was his world), made me feel rebellious. I know he found this rebel side of my personality intoxicating.

  We met at an Eminem concert when there still was a Palace of Auburn Hills arena. I was almost eighteen, yet seen as too immature by my mother to go chaperone-less to a concert that brought out a high proportion of the unseemly, again my mother’s coloration of who attends these concerts. I’d been too dishonest during my high school years. My parents had every right to worry, but I was a fresh high school graduate, accepted at Michigan State University where I’d major in early education (and drop out before that graduation), with my whole damned life ahead of me.

  At the concert, high up and far from the stage in the cheap seats, Jeremy and his brother stood behind my two girlfriends and I—these classmates were long gone and I don’t go back to reunions. We were bullies, and even if we meaningfully apologized for misdeeds, we’d never be welcome at future gatherings. I glanced back at Jeremy too much. He wasn’t watching Eminem, our hometown hero. All of us wanted to lose ourselves that summer. I gave this boy my number. He ended up moving to East Lansing to be closer to me. His brother roomed with him in a dingy apartment. They worked odd jobs and partied with fraternity boys, supplied drugs (they denied this to my face and Jeremy always soothed my worries), acted like they belonged there.

  Jeremy and his brother, who instigated everything, every sibling plan, from mild to horrific, were altar boys from a Catholic church in Grand Rapids most of their youth, until they kicked them out for vandalism, graffiti—learning to attempt what wasn’t right from a young age, to get away with it, that was the high they lived for—the brother (I can’t even say his name anymore, can’t stomach it) and I got along like feral cats, circling one another, never giving ground except to remain on edge. We agreed to avoid each other as much as possible.

  Jeremy, after pursuing me for weeks, told me he had a sealed juvenile record. His tough-kid days firmly in the past, I didn’t care about it because I believed him; he swore on his daddy’s grave.

  I married Jeremy. He said, “I do,” with more fervor than I could muster; I felt at that moment as if I’d said my vows from the bottom of the deepest, waterless well. His brother was Jeremy’s best man.

  Even then, I didn’t want my parents to be right, and that wasn’t a sane reason to marry anyone. Only my dad attended if only to walk me down the aisle, and after handing me a slim envelope he wished me well and hoped things would get better. He didn’t come to the reception. I emailed family updates to my parents, the rest of the family I no longer spoke with weren’t sad at all.

  The first time I introduced Jeremy to my parents, my mother, the rancid scent of too many whiskey sours wafting my way, whispered to me, “I don’t see any tattoos.” And then, later, “How can a nice girl like you fall backwards? We gave you everything.”

  “He doesn’t have a single tattoo, mother.” I sounded so weak defending Jeremy.

  “Well, I see them all the same. He’s that type. How serious is this? You’ve never introduced your boyfriends to us before.”

  “Too embarrassed to ever do that, mother,” I said this meaning she would embarrass me, but she missed that, thought the reverse. My mother wanted to ruin this relationship, and I don’t know why I didn’t let her beyond me being a stupid punk, a young malcontented resting-bitch-face master. My only sibling, Chad (the second in a budding dynasty, making our father proud—he struggled up from dirt poor relations. Chad followed our father after learning how he’d invested all his superintendent money well in tech companies from the very beginning), remains estranged. Chad knew which side of his toast was buttered—he also didn’t believe people were evil; he’d been shielded, protected—same family, different childhoods.

  My parents talked to both of us when we were older. Told us how to behave if stopped on the street, in our cars, out in public. Be civil. Be courteous. Be kind. Stay alive. They’ll twist your anger into something like a real weapon and it doesn’t even matter if your parents have money. Chad graduated four years ahead of me, and then went to Business school at the University of Michigan. He now works for a boutique money management firm in Birmingham, the well-heeled city close to Detroit. He’s married with two girls of his own. When we were on speaking terms, I could sense he and his dutiful wife, Savannah, would be terribly disappointed if their third child turned out to be another girl; he needed another Chad. I love my two girls. Toxic masculinity is a term I’ve embraced.

  Back then, before the long Michigan winters grew too bothersome, my parents first retired to the posh side of Petoskey, where I’m sure one or two or more neighbors were unhappy solely about this, that retro-Archie Bunker mentality thriving in less diverse pockets of every state, one of the fanciest Lake Michigan summer resort towns (the show of wealth used to be anathema here), told me they didn’t support my making the biggest mistake of my life: marrying Jeremy.

  “Mom? Can Daddy Ethan take us to Disney on my birthday?” My youngest, Macy, asks this using a tone of sugary bewilderment, as if she’s a Disney princess lost in a dark woods in search of a prince—she’s almost eight and too old to beg for fairytale fulfillment. It’s an affectation she’s picked up from her older sister, Bonnie, who usually makes these needling requests. Bonnie’s almost eleven, born between Christmas and New Year’s Day, was old enough to remember that terrible Christmas in the past, where most of the time I couldn’t stop crying.

  “No,” I say, with a warning attached. “Daddy Ethan and I make those big decisions together. Disney’s too pricey to wait in the heat for hours to get an autograph from a pixie princess.”

  “I want to see the Lion King show!” More baleful whining commences. Macy’s threatening tone works some of the time, testing my parenting skills.

  Macy pouts for the rest of the day, sits in front of the television watching an animated sponge giggle and direct underwater traffic. The main advertiser on local cable during commercial breaks annoys, and Macy seldom mutes this one.

  “Head on over to Rudy’s Discount Christmas In July Extravaganza.
We’ve gotcha covered!” Polar bears dressed like elves, animation far from the Disney standard, dance, as tiny penguins build toys (it’s creative the first dozen times you see it). A Santa bellows orders with a twinkle. “Toys, toys, toys…games, games, games…dolls, dolls, dolls!” A screechy sing-song chant drills its way into my brain, “And for you moms and dads, we’ve got everything you’ll ever need to trim your tree, brighten your home to a warm glow, make your neighbors envious by placing a shiny star on your chimney top (whoop whoop)! All at seven-tee per-cent off!” That’s how the fake Santa says it, so obnoxious in this Florida haze. The girls find it hilarious how much the silliness bugs me and sometimes turn the volume to full Armageddon.

  It’s the beginning of July, just after the Fourth, one big bang of a day, and the Florida heat and humidity attack my soullessness—that’s how I define myself these days, when I’m feeling sorry for myself. Macy’ll keep making these suggestions until I wilt.

  Ten minutes later, the commercial comes on again. I stand behind Macy in her favorite rocking chair. Her arms are so thin, wiry, peppered with energy. I watch while an idea forms, and then this new thought strikes me like a winning Lotto ticket.

  Hurricane season’ll begin within weeks and thank God we didn’t lose much in the last one that passed nearby, a loose window screen went flying. Our own number will be called soon enough. I’m not a nihilist. I don’t even think of myself as a realist anymore.

  Later that night, when my second husband, Ethan, arrives home from his construction job, tired, his light fuzz beard speckled with dry wall dust, I tell him I want to make a change, a big one. Ethan’s his own contractor, knows how to build anything, renovate old or historic, or damaged structures. He could be a one-man show, but he has a small work force grateful simply to have jobs.