Cut Both Ways (19 page)

“Why?”

“Well, Roy had said something to me in passing this summer and I was glad he did. Kept me on the lookout. Roy, it turns out, has some experience with this. With addiction and getting sober and everything. More experience than anyone his age should have, actually. And so I called him last night, while they were processing everything, and he kind of gave me his take on detox and what the family should do.”

I looked at my mom. She wasn't really
the family
anymore, was she? Not as far as my dad was concerned.

Still, she didn't say anything. Just sat there, listening.

“Your dad, he just doesn't get it, you know? And he's not looking that hot. I mean, that's the truth. Physically and mentally. He's being kind of, I don't know.”

“An asshole?” my mom supplies.

Garrett nods. “Roy says that detox is different for everyone, but generally, the staff recommends no visitors. Limited phone calls. There can be issues . . . manipulation. The pressure on families can be intense. There are lots of medical things they need to monitor and it's better if family stays out; it can be difficult to witness.”

My mom puts her hand on my shoulder. It doesn't feel like she's comforting me; it feels like the other way around.

“And also, he's not going to be ready to talk about behavior or programs or anything. He might want to just focus on getting out. The hospital staff can advise on this, I guess. He's made it clear he's done with me, that's for sure. So it's your decision: if you want to visit; if you want to stay back. Maybe you want to give Roy a call?”

“Yeah.”

He asks if I have his number and I say yes. And then there's nothing left for us to do. We just leave and walk to our separate cars in the parking lot. I want to go with Garrett, a little, just because I know that he'll leave me alone, let me go lie down in the hotel bedroom, but my mom is steering me toward her car and I can't say no.

We get in the car and instead of driving home, she makes a few stops. I kind of can't believe that she does, but it's like she can't stop getting things accomplished. She's even got a list in her purse. Walgreens, the vitamin store, SuperTarget—I go with her, like some kind of robot. Walking behind her. Pushing the cart. Watching her fill it up with stuff: shampoo, granola bars, fruit cups, trash bags.

Carrying everything out, waiting for her to click open the hatch on the back. Loading all the bags. Like her butler, or just a really nice husband. Like Jay does.

She doesn't say much to me, beyond directions, this whole time. She stops at a gas station where we're almost to Oak Prairie and asks me to pump until the tank's full while she goes inside. She comes back with a Diet Coke and a regular Coke, both from the fountain-drink area. Hers is small, mine is giant; they are 99 cents here, for fountain drinks, any size. My mom is the only person in the world who probably gets the small, though.

I thank her, put the drinks in the cup holder. We buckle up and she starts the car and we drive home, listening to the news on the radio.

It's not until she pulls into the driveway and garage that she says anything.

“You're here now, Will. With us. With me. I should have done this long ago. I should have done something about your father. I didn't. But I could have. I just didn't want to.”

It's something she's admitting. But she's not emotional about it, and neither am I. I'm not angry, like I normally am when it
comes to her talking about my dad; she's not weepy, either, considering she's admitting a fault.

I say, “yeah” or “okay” or something. I don't want to say anything, but I know she needs acknowledgment, or we'll sit in the driveway all afternoon until she gets it.

“We're going to have a nice Thanksgiving. A nice Christmas,” she says. “All of us together. It'll be very good. Fun, too. Your sisters will love it. And your father, well. He's in the best place he can be now. He really is.”

I think of the house. The shit in the basement. The way everything smelled. The hot water coming and going. The power surging and blowing fuses. The cold.

“Yeah, Mom,” I say. “He really is.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

AND JUST LIKE
my mom declares, they are nice, the holidays. At least from the top, everything seems nice. But I don't get any flashes of happy. Underneath everything, I feel bad. We have Thanksgiving at one of Jay's brother's houses over in Minnetonka, and Kinney and Taylor go bananas with all their cousins from their dad's side and I sit there and eat a lot and try to seem normal and then watch football a little, but it's weird, because I don't know any of these guys and nobody talks shit about Joe Buck or whatever.

My mom gets hovery. It's December and she's in full shopping mode. It would be fine if I couldn't tell how stressed she is. She's always putting her fingers at the sides of her head and breathing slowly. Making lists. One thing she's determined about is my graduation party. She's planning it. Asking me about the cake and what kind of food we should have. If I want a certain theme.

“A theme? What?”

She lists off ideas: it could be a pool party, or a barbecue, or something traditional, like fried chicken. I have no idea what she's talking about. I tell her that I like chocolate cake, but whatever else she wants is fine.

I text Brandy. We text a lot. She got grounded until New Year's; her aunt found the picture she took of me that one night when we first had sex. I didn't even know she'd developed it; she took it with old-school film and I didn't think she'd ever bothered to process it.

I had to go over there and sit in the living room and talk to Brandy with her aunt Megan right there. We had to talk about our decisions and plans and how much younger Brandy is than me and did I know Brandy's mother had her when she was very young?

“Too young,” Megan said. “Way too young to be a mother.”

“She'll never be old enough to be a mother, if you ask me,” Brandy said. Megan didn't dispute this but she didn't agree, either.

“I trust you both, but I wanted to get this out in the open. I don't want any more secrets, or lying. You wouldn't want that between the two of you, would you?”

“No,” me and Brandy both said, together.

“Then be clear with me,” Megan said. “I'm not a prude and I'm not an idiot, but this is something that's a big deal. You need to be sure that you can handle it, that your relationship can handle it, and that you understand the consequences. I'm not saying you guys can't see each other. I'm just saying, I need you to really stop and be aware of how sex changes the game.”

In terms of wishing the earth would open up and swallow me
whole for the rest of human time, this experience with Brandy and her aunt would rate as a top number-one thing. It was only maybe ten minutes that we talked about the consequences of our game-changing sex, but it felt like thousands of years. And in the end, Brandy was still grounded, which didn't make sense to me. Hadn't she said we could still see each other?

At least we could text. Which wasn't the same, even if Brandy started sending me dirty texts, and once, a picture of her with no shirt. Which, I have to say, was pretty fucking cool. And even though she told me not to send it to anyone else, ever, I was like,
relax already
. Why the fuck would I ever send a picture of her boobs to someone else? I mean, it was like they were
my
boobs, too. Nobody else got to see them but me. Which was why we were together, right? Even if I had to mail her my Christmas present, which was this necklace that she'd told Shania she liked once, only not with an orange charm on it, but a green one, and two packages of Gummi Worms and a photo book that cost almost seventy-five bucks but that she kept checking out from the library every second, which was just a bunch of selfies this woman took back in the fifties or whatever, and which nobody ever knew about until some guy bought a box of negatives at a rummage sale.

“My girl Vivian,” she called the selfie woman. I guess that was her name, the lady who was in all the pictures the guy bought. It was sort of depressing, that book, considering how much it cost. But I wanted to make her happy. We'd had a few phone conversations that involved Brandy crying a little, so I was feeling extra bad.

One night when his family's having this Christmas-party thing, I go over to the Racklers' and find out that Angus got into that college in Chicago he liked. Arty, musical place. Very small. He was pretty happy about it, too, and he shows me the catalog and all the crap they'd mailed him and everything.

“There's like a train downtown,” he says, shoving the glossy catalog at me. “And you live in these apartments, too. Like pods. You have more than one roommate. So, that's cool. In case you don't like one person, odds are good you'll like another.”

I guess that's one way of putting it. I mean, Angus is made of statements like this. Like, he hated his boss at the nursery place he worked this summer.
Hated.
But he liked the other people on his crew so he didn't quit. And he told me once,
just once
, that he hated his boss. Which was pretty amazing, considering the reason he hated his boss was because the boss called people fags all the time. Yet, Angus kept working there, because the other people were cool, he said. None of that made sense. Angus didn't need money like I did; he could up and quit that shit if it offended him. I mean, it offended me, and it wasn't even my goddamn job.

But that's Angus. Like, everything is just cool and ironed out. Add a little pot and he's just fine. He's, like, the only gay person I know who is super calm and happy about his gayness. About everything else, too, seems like.

I look through the catalog while he goes upstairs to get us food from the Christmas party. There's a stupid movie on TV where the kids save Christmas with Santa Claus and get the parents back together by the power of the magical season or whatever and
I can't even change the channel, because I can't find the remote.

While I'm tearing around the sofa cushions, looking for the remote, Angus comes down carrying a bag of chips, two plates loaded with snacks, and a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew.

Then he finds the remote (under the coffee table) and hands it to me.

Why is everything so easy with Angus?

We sit down and eat and he finds a movie we both haven't seen but want to see (again, a miracle, and not anything that happens easily most of the time) and then I feel kind of weird. Nervous. There's an adult party going on above us; my mom might even stop over with Jay, and Angus's sisters are home visiting, one with her husband and she's pregnant, too. They're all upstairs; they all said hi to me when I came in.

But here we are, in the basement, with the lights low, eating and watching a movie and I wonder if his family knows. Does Angus tell them this shit? I used to tell my dad more about what I did, especially when I was a younger. I thought that was just because he was mostly cool about it and because I didn't have any older siblings to ask. Maybe you don't do that, when you're a guy, with your sisters. Who does Angus tell, then?

Another thing: both of us are sober. I don't know if Angus has any weed; if he does, he hasn't made moves to dig it out. There's plenty of booze we could swipe upstairs, but he hasn't said anything about that, either. We haven't done anything sexual since summer, and I know getting fucked up might have led to it happening in the first place, but that makes it sound like an excuse.
Once is a fluke. But more than that is not. And it's not just sex, either. It's not. It's like, he's
Angus.
He's like my brother.

Well, not that. Maybe I don't know what a brother is really like. But it's not because I'm just fucking horny and need to get off. Obviously, I don't. I shouldn't. I have a goddamn girlfriend.

We watch the movie and drink the Mountain Dew and Angus gets us two more rounds of food that doesn't seem to go together—lasagna, steak on skewers, egg-roll wraps, cheese dip and chips, pasta salad with pepperoni slices, sugar cookies shaped like wreaths. It's all good.

Between Brandy and him, Brandy's the one who'd be crushed if she knew what was going on. Angus knows about Brandy but I know he's handling it okay. I wonder if maybe this shit happens sometimes, with guys who are friends. Maybe it does and maybe I just need to relax about it. Maybe it doesn't have to mean anything.

That night I give off a vibe or something. Probably because we don't drink. Because Angus's sister, the nonmarried one, comes down and hangs out. But we don't do anything physical that night. And it kind of sets the tone for the rest of Christmas vacation, which is good, I guess, because we hang out a ton, Angus and me, almost every day. Watching TV, playing video games, going out to get food. We even mix our friends together: Angus's friends from his school and his job, and me introducing him to people at Time to Eat, including Carl, whose roommate happened to have some weed that Angus wanted to buy.

“Carl's weird,” Angus says the day before Christmas Eve, when
we're leaving Carl's apartment after settling up on the weed and watching a little basketball. “But he's cool.”

“Yeah,” I say. I'm embarrassed around Carl a little, still. I haven't been on the schedule regularly in a while. Garrett asked me to come in a couple of shifts for Carl and everyone looked at me like they felt sorry for me for having an insane drunk-ass dad. Carl's face is still bruised under the eye. It makes him look kind of badass, except it was my drunk dad who did it, so I just feel mostly shitty when I look at him. I don't know why it hasn't gone away; Garrett says sometimes bruises are like that.

Being Carl, though, he never brought it up. He just watched basketball and did bong hits and let his roommate who sells the weed talk. The roommate was a blabbermouth, which I suppose is a good thing, when you're essentially in sales. When you sell pot, you can't just be all,
fucking bitches, making money
, like Carl is. Though Carl laughs a lot more after he does bong hits. It's not like he's slow in the head or anything. He just doesn't produce a lot of verbal stuff unless he needs to. I mean, he knows how to cook, he's taught me lots of stuff. He just isn't a big talker. The world does need that other half to do the listening and everything.

“You want to smoke?” Angus asks as we get into his car.

I do, but I say no. I have to visit my dad soon; he's in the day treatment program at the hospital and I'm meeting him there with Garrett. I could have visited him before, but I haven't. I know Garrett's sick of me putting it off.

Angus smokes out quick, then drops me at my mom's. He tells
me I can come over later if I want. There's a part of me that's tempted. Maybe it's smelling the weed.

I'm in the house like five minutes when Taylor is showing me this sign she's making for Santa Claus, which is like a checklist questions and reminders: Do you like our cookies?

Do you really like milk? Be honest. I hate milk. You can hate it if you want it's not like you can get in trouble it's just feelings.

Make sure you rest your reindeer because animals get tired too.

The doorbell rings and Jay's like, “Who the hell could that be?”

“Daddy, you swore,” Kinney says. Jay apologizes and wipes his hands off on a dishtowel as he goes to the door. He's been off all week and he's wearing the same workout crap he had on for the gym but now he's making hot pretzels with Kinney, so he's all covered in flour.

“Oh, yeah. Hey,” he says. “Come in.”

It's Garrett. I'm sitting at the counter with Taylor and her list and Garrett's standing there, in my mom's house, looking very out of place. It's like if my dad himself were here, sort of. My dad has never been inside my mom's house. Not even to run in and pee or compare calendars or any of that stuff. They did all that scheduling over the phone and email, and he's only seen the house from the driveway. It was like he couldn't accept that she lived here.

Garrett says hi to the twins, who stare at him like he just fell to Earth from space, and I quick get my shoes on. There's something
about him seeing this house that embarrasses me more than my dad's house. Everything here—the plum-colored walls and the lavender sofa no one sits on and the rugs on the floors—green, purple, red—and the Christmas decorations on every goddamn surface. It's just so fakey. Unreal. A place that I had nothing to do with. A place that has room for me to stay, but that isn't anything about me. Isn't for me.

While I put on my coat, Jay and Kinney go back into the kitchen to roll out their pretzels on the granite-topped counter. Garrett's watching them. I feel embarrassed to be here, embarrassed for Jay. I don't know why I didn't see it before but there it is: whatever his faults, my dad is a real man. My dad isn't macho, but he isn't making pretzels from
Martha Stewart's Holidays with Kids
cookbook, either. I know there's nothing wrong about making pretzels; Kinney loves to make things with her dad. Taylor's all too happy to eat them, too. But seeing Jay and my sisters in this giant kitchen, this overly decorated house, with its wood floors that are obviously fake laminate and not real wood, and Jay's gym body in his high-tech fabric wind pants, I can hear my dad laughing about it. Saying Jay's neutered. Boring. Pussy whipped, even.

I can't imagine Garrett saying it, though. Not to me, at least.

We get into Garrett's truck and the whole way to the hospital, we talk about the stupid weather. It's snowing out; it's been snowing on and off for the last few days, but finally it looks like it might accumulate. Kinney and Taylor take snowboarding lessons so it's the kind of thing that everyone's always focused on lately.

Talking about weather's better than discussing my dad and where he is and why I haven't visited him. Garrett hasn't said a word about it but this is worse, I think, than being yelled at. I've had teachers like that, too, who just look at you and instantly your shitty actions begin to throb inside you like a heat ray until you have to fix it or just combust.