“Hey Brandon?”
“Yeah.”
“Give me a few minutes later on. Okay, bud? I’d like to talk to you.”
I pause for a second, the fight draining out of me, and then a whole vanload of kids in matching St. Matt’s Elementary t-shirts come rushing over. They’ve got all the usual grade-school-music-class instruments with them—triangles, egg shakers, jingle bells, probably the exact same ones I played at some point. Father Mike gives them a thumbs-up and a distracted smile. He won’t let me walk without an answer.
“Sure,” I mumble. I’m watching the kids. Pigtailed and sneakered, trusting and open. “I guess.”
“Awesome. Meetcha back here.”
I walk away. I walk fast, but his voice travels. “Hey, guys!” he’s saying. “How’re my SonShiners today?…Yeah? Let’s try that a little louder!” He starts strumming the opening bars of that cutesy “Whatever God Wants” song that still gets stuck in my head; I don’t want to glance back, don’t want my brain to sing along. I look for something else to focus on. I find it across the field by the popcorn stand.
My parents, standing side by side with their arms around each other. Like instead of waiting for me to cross the field and catch up, they’re watching me walk away.
***
We sit at a weathered picnic bench that’s survived about fifty St. Matt’s Funfairs. The bench is etched with decades of graffiti: BILL N SUE, KEVIN + KAYLA 4EVR. I trace the old names and promises, scanning my brain for the right thing to say.
Judging from past battles with Nat, I thought Dad would come down on me like the hammer of God. But he doesn’t even seem angry. It would be easier if he did. He seems remote and unsettled, like an alien’s replaced his son and he’s approaching with caution, trying to figure out what this new thing is capable of.
“Did you remember to clean out my refrigerator?” he finally asks me.
“We did.”
He ignores the we. “And did you empty the tanks?”
“Yes.”
“The black and the gray?”
“Yeah. I returned your camping stove, too. It’s back in the garage.”
“I hope it’s clean. If you let grease and food particles build up it can…”
He keeps going. The checklists and lectures might go on until sundown if I don’t do something. I squeeze Plastic Cadmus and Plastic Sim.
“Hey. Guys?”
“I wasn’t finished,” Dad snaps.
“Greg. Let him talk,” says Mom.
Dad bites his lip and taps the table with his fist. I take a deep breath.
“I’m sorry I lied,” I tell them. “I’m not sorry for what I did, or for anything that happened on the trip, but I’m sorry I lied. I’m not going to do that anymore. And I’m sorry I called you backwards.” I catch Mom’s eye. “Really.”
Mom nods. Dad’s eyes are shiny. He scrapes a splotch of dried mustard off the table with his thumbnail and blows the yellow dust away.
“So that’s all?” he says.
“I guess. For now.”
“We’re glad you’re home safe,” says Mom. “Right, Greg?”
“I—”
Dad just sighs. He looks like he wants to say more, but I know it’s not going to happen. Not today, not here. He drums at the table a couple times and then he gets up slowly and scuffs away, his ancient sneakers kicking up sad little puffs of fairground dust.
Mom watches him go.
“You were…safe, weren’t you? You and…” She clears her throat. “You and him.”
I blush. “Yeah. Of course.”
“That’s the most important thing. I don’t care what you’ve heard—”
“Mom, I know. I know. You don’t have to worry.”
She exhales, long and slow. We sit there for a complicated minute.
“Your dad just—doesn’t know what to say.” She says it like she’s apologizing for him, like she’s got no problem with this at all. I watch him fix a game booth, pounding nails into loose beams. I wonder if it’ll be like this all the time now, if I’ll come home from college and he’ll ask me if I’m passing my tests and keeping the bathroom clean and locking the doors at night, and then go off to the basement and start snipping his bonsai and hammering birdhouses together until I go to bed, and the danger of looking me in the eye has passed.
Mom, softly: “Are you in love?”
“You don’t have to ask.”
“I want to know.”
I squirm in my seat. “I screwed everything up.”
“You did?” Her eyes get big. It’s cute.
“I tried to get him back. Sort of.” I trace a heart carved deep in the bench’s center slat. This is so weird. “But I don’t really know how. I think it’s too late.”
“Oh.” She sighs. “Honey.”
A cursor blinks in the conversation. She looks like she wants to give me advice, the way she gave Nat advice before Nat shaved half her head and stopped listening, but I know she can’t. Especially not here, with the big gold cross on the St. Matt’s spire looming above the trees. She’s probably doing the math: Give your gay son love advice = twelve and a half years in Purgatory.
There’s nothing much else to say. I reach in my back pocket, pluck out the rolled-up David Darras head shot. I push it across the table to her.
“He couldn’t sign the TV Guide, but I got this.”
She smiles a thank you—not because of the autograph, but because I’ve changed the subject.
“I forgot I asked you,” she says. Her glossy fingernails rake the rubber band off and the picture unrolls.
“He did sign it. It’s just kind of messy.”
“How was he?”
“Funny. Really nice.”
“Was he just as handsome in person?”
I nod. “Even more.”
She reaches across table and grabs my hand. She pretends she’s looking at the Darras photo, but really she’s looking right through it. A light breeze curls the corners of the photo and ruffles her pale yellow curls. In the distance, Father Mike and the kids are running through “His Banner Over Me Is Love.”
“Are you staying?” she says. “For the fair?”
“I can’t.”
She nods; I can tell she expected that. I watch her gaze shift to the crowded food tables and the jumble of raffle prizes. She’s scrawling one of her checklists in her head, thinking about all the stuff she has to do before the Funfair starts, and if I fast-forward the future I can see her and Dad here year after year, arranging decades of gelatin stars and angel eggs and repainting the same ten game booths until the two of them are finally old and sitting side by side in their blue canvas lawn chairs, counting fireworks together.
The sun’s starting to slip away. More volunteers are coming with stacks of raffle-ticket rolls, bags of game prizes. She’s still holding my hand. I let her, for a long time.
Then I’m like, “Save me an angel egg?”
I squeeze her hand twice.
“I’ll save you two,” she says, and then she lets go.
***
I’m already in the car by the time Father Mike realizes I’m leaving. I see him with his guitar as I ride the brakes past the Funfair field: strumming another song with the kids, a whole fresh flock to teach. He looks small and breakable, like one of those ceramic saint figurines Gram keeps on her windowsill.
If this were a hey_mamacita fic, I would have confronted him before I left. The dialogue: “Bring back any nice souvenirs?” “Yeah—a boyfriend.” That would’ve left him comically stewing, his face purple and steam shooting out of his ears. I remind myself he’s not a cartoon. He’s not even a bad guy. I don’t need him now, but I don’t need to hurt him, either.
He glances up, catches me idling in the car. He lifts a hand from the guitar strings and waves, like C’mon over, bud. Come back. I stick my hand out the open window and give him a gentle return wave. Goodbye.
I slip Cadmus and Sim out of my pockets and drop them both in the dashboard cupholder, their limbs tangled loosely together. Then I shift into drive and start rolling forward, down the winding road away from St. Matt’s.
Chapter Thirty-One
I’ve got a plan.
Home first, to shower and change my grubby travel clothes. Francie’s Florals next, for the biggest arrangement of sunflowers I can afford (which at this point isn’t much). Then the candy shop in the mall—do they have cinnamon jelly beans? I call them up while I’m whizzing past the DQ, my old high school, the pizza place where I worked last summer. They do.