Dinner at Fiorello’s (20 page)

Again, he felt more than heard Vito speaking. “Never mind that. It’s going to storm soon, and you don’t want to see that. Come upstairs. I have a surprise for you.”

Henry followed Vito, snatching one final look over his shoulder. Outside, blackness pressed in once more, and Henry just knew instinctively that something lurked within those pitch-black shadows.

When he turned back around, Vito was gone. Henry ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

When he got to the top, whatever force that had caused sound to disappear returned it. There was a small group in Vito’s living room—Vito, the little dark-haired boy from the photos, the blond man also in the pictures, his mother, and John—all shouting “Surprise!” in unison when Henry entered the room. Everyone was laughing at what must have been the stunned look on Henry’s face.

And then Henry caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the bookshelf and saw that he had no face. The realization caused his heart to skip a beat. Everyone seemed to know that too.

They all laughed.

Then his mother said, “Your face is in the bedroom. Why don’t you go in there with Vito and get it?” She winked.

Henry looked to Vito, confused. But Vito stood in the doorway to his bedroom, taking off his clothes. Henry took in the hairy, muscled body, and even though there were people all around, he felt himself getting aroused.

Vito jerked his head to get Henry to follow him. He turned, and Henry admired the two globes of fur-covered flesh that were his ass.

In the bedroom, Vito lay, waiting for him. His dick was hard and pointing straight up. A line of precome dribbled down the shaft.

H
ENRY
AWAKENED
,
bright sunlight flooding into his room. The final throbs of orgasm stained the inside of his boxers, sticky and warmly wet. He shuddered and moaned, turning on his side and pulling the pillow over his head. The dream images scattered, yet left in their wake a strange euphoria. Henry laughed to himself and thought he needed to clean up.

He forced himself to get out of bed and pad to the shower. He knew his mother would be waiting for him in the kitchen of what Henry now thought of as the main house. They were far from finished talking.

Under the spray of warm water, Henry thought about how rejuvenating a good night’s sleep could be. When he came out of the shower, he was surprised to glance down at his phone and see it was almost noon.

If his mother was indeed waiting for him, Henry realized he was ready to talk to her, not just to hear what she had to say about her own situation but to share who he was with her. It was time.

“M
OM
, I’
M
gay.” Henry thought he would cut her off before she could begin talking about this John person. And what better way to do it than with a shocking announcement?

They had just finished breakfast—Henry’s scrambled eggs and ham and Mom’s black coffee and rice cake—and had moved out onto the patio off the back of the house. They sat on the Adirondack chairs facing the lakefront. Today the water was gunmetal gray, churning, reflecting a cloud-choked sky above.

Maxine was busy inside, emptying the dishwasher.

Rain was coming, and soon.

Henry searched for a sign on his mom’s face that would indicate shock. But her features, behind large Prada sunglasses, appeared placid. “And?” she asked.

“And? What do you mean, ‘and’? Your only son just told you he’s gay, a pole smoker, a queer, a faggot, a fudge-packer, and all those other horrible terms people use for people like me, and all you can say is ‘and’?”

“Well, Henry, if you’re looking for me to be surprised, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not. If your fascination as a little boy with
Martha Stewart Living
wasn’t enough to tip me off, the way you look all moony-eyed at your friend Kade would have done the trick.”

“So you knew?” Henry felt equal parts relief and disappointment. This was kind of anticlimactic. He was expecting fireworks and drama, a “Was-it-something-I-did?” speech.

She shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, not for sure. But I always kind of thought so. Ever since you were a small boy. Little things tipped me off. And please, Henry, don’t make me say something as corny as ‘A mother knows.’”

Henry scratched his head, uncertain. This was not the way he’d expected this conversation to go. “And you don’t care?”

“Well, of course I care, Henry. Care about
you
. That you’re happy. And you are, aren’t you?”

Henry pondered the question. He wasn’t sure he knew the answer, and he told her that. “Is anyone happy?” Henry wondered. So far, being gay didn’t seem to offer him any advantage, certainly not when it came to love and sex. And being out, which he would have thought should be some kind of relief, seemed like no big deal to his mom.

“You’re too young to be talking like that. Don’t be so negative. Happiness can come to us all.”

His mother looked out at the water. A large sailboat drifted by. Henry, for a moment, expected a dolphin to leap out of the water.

Henry couldn’t quite put his finger on why, but this admission and his mother’s lack of surprise, indeed her kind of nonchalance about it, made him feel closer to her than he had in a long time. Maybe she had more character than he gave her credit for. He wondered if children ever really knew their parents, or if parents ever really knew their children.

“So what happens now?” he asked her. He guessed conversation about his sexual orientation was pretty much over. Wow. They’d spent, like, three minutes on it. Maybe this was better—that his mother lived in a world where being gay meant nothing more than a variation on the human theme, where it was—simply—no big deal. Still, Henry couldn’t help but wonder if his dad would be as accepting.

So now he felt ready to talk to her about what she’d brought up the night before. Or at least as ready as he’d ever be….

“You mean with what we talked about last night?” His mother leaned forward in her chair, and her eyes searched his face. She was probably looking for pain, probably trying to assess if he was truly ready to talk more.

“Yes, Mom. What are you going to do? Are you gonna tell Dad?”

She looked away from him at the question, her bright blue eyes scanning the horizon. Henry questioned his motivation for bringing things up again, questioned if he was really ready to hear whatever his mother had to say.

She turned back to him. “Now that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, I think I have to. I mean, this secrecy has gone on for a lot longer than it should have. And seeing you seeing me was, in a weird way, liberating. You kind of forced my hand, Henry. And I’m grateful.” She nodded and slapped a hand on her thigh. “I’ll talk to him when he gets home from work.”

Henry was glad he’d already be at the restaurant when that conversation occurred. It wouldn’t be pretty.

“He’s not gonna take it well.”

She laughed. “That’s putting it mildly.”

They fell to silence for a moment or two. And then Henry asked, “But what are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know.” She got that faraway look in her eye again. She didn’t speak for a long time. “I don’t want to upset you.”

The simple statement sent a chill through Henry, despite the oppressive heat and humidity of the day. He sighed. “Then maybe we should leave it alone.” He stood up, but his mother grabbed his hand.

“Please,” she said. “Please sit back down. We do need to talk.”

“Oh no.” Henry was back to thinking he was too young, still too much of a kid to have this talk. He wanted to bolt, run until his sides ached, until his lungs were close to bursting. He wanted to find his old high school friends on the beach at the end of South Boulevard, where they liked to hang out, and just become a teenager again. Get in a game of pickup volleyball, wonder about his tan line, brave the frigid waters of the lake by diving straight in. Maybe smoke a little weed if anybody had any. Forget….

He wondered if he could ever return to that world.

He sat. “Mom, I don’t know if I want to hear this.” He knew what she was going to say, could feel it coming like he was tied to train tracks with a locomotive bearing down.

“Henry,” she said, her voice and face both sad. “I’m going to go.”

Henry nodded and felt the lump rise up in his throat. Where was Maxine? Why wasn’t she coming outside and interrupting? If she would do that, they could pretend they’d never gone as far as they just had. Maxine would have the magical power to stop things. He gazed desperately at the back door, yearning to see Maxine’s solid form appear in it.

But the doorway stayed empty.

“I need to go live with John. We’ve talked about it.” She tried to smile, but the tears in her eyes thwarted the effort. “I won’t be far away. You can still come see me.” She patted his hand. “All the time.”

Henry shook his head. He felt sick, the acids in his stomach roiling. “I don’t want to
visit
my own mother. I want you to be home.” He felt like his voice and his words were those of a three-year-old, but he couldn’t help it.

She patted his hand again, and he wished she’d quit it. “I know. But once I tell your father, I think I’ll pretty much have to go.”

You got that right
, Henry thought but didn’t say.
Dad will be livid.
He had an idea. “Maybe you don’t have to tell him.”

“What?”

“Maybe you don’t need to say anything. Listen! It’ll be our little secret. I won’t tell.” He tried to smile and knew he was failing. “And then we can, I don’t know, just go on like we were before.” He snatched at his mother’s hand and squeezed it. “We can do this, Mom! And you can still see John. Anytime you want! I won’t say a word. I swear. I’ll even cover for you when you’re with him.” He bit his lower lip, hard, to hold in a sob that was about to escape.

“Honey, you’re babbling.” She shook her head again. “I don’t think I can go back to the way things were. I was so miserable. My mind’s made up.” She looked away again, as if she were sizing up the gorgeous house they lived in and saying good-bye. “It’s been made up, really, for a long time. Getting things out in the open with you helped me see it’s time.”

“But this is our family,” Henry whispered, voice breaking. “Doesn’t it matter to you how
I
feel?” Henry went from sorrow to rage in fewer than sixty seconds. “Doesn’t it matter to you that you’ll be leaving me here all alone? With him?” He stood and began pacing the flagstone pavers of the patio. What would he do? Yes, he’d thought his family was cold, that it was dysfunctional—but wasn’t everyone’s? This was all he had.

“Maxine will still be here. I know how close you are to her.”

“She’s not my mother.” Henry had thought he didn’t care much about his mom. He’d even called her a “cold bitch” many times to Kade and some of his other friends. But this moment, right now, was proving him wrong. He hurried over to her and knelt at her feet. He laid his head in her lap. “Please, Mom,” he whined, the idea emerging fully formed in his brain. “Take me with you. I can sleep on the couch. I won’t be any bother. I promise.”

She stroked his hair for a long time. “Maybe. Maybe in time. Let’s see how this all shakes out.”

It was the same as if she had just said no. It hurt. Henry wearily got to his feet and went inside. He didn’t know where his life would go from here. How could he stay in this house with his father, even if Maxine was around as a buffer?

He trudged back up the stairs to the little apartment above the garage and fell back on the bed. After a while, he gathered the covers and pulled them over his head.

It must have been the shock and the trauma that made Henry do the unthinkable—fall asleep again. When he awakened, the quality of the light in the room told him it was late afternoon. He snatched his phone up off the nightstand and glanced at it. It was after four, and he was due in at the restaurant at five. He would have to hustle.

He kept his mind off his conversation with his mother, or at least tried to, as he took another shower to wake himself up. He could get something to eat at the restaurant.

He dressed quickly in his black pants and white shirt, so he’d be ready to work in the kitchen or the front of the house, wherever he was needed. As he was slipping into his shoes, he heard the crash of glass breaking. The tinkling explosion came from the main house.

Henry crept to his window and looked outside. His parents were out there, on the patio. What was his dad doing home so early? He didn’t usually get home before seven.

She must have called him.
I can’t believe it. She told him something like that on the phone? Or no, maybe she just called and told him to come home, that she needed to talk. Yeah, that was much more likely.
Henry looked down at them. They were frozen in some kind of tableau, a face-off. Both looked distressed, so he had a pretty good idea what they had been talking about. He could see one of their Baccarat tumblers shattered on the fieldstone pavers. If his father kept up his glass-breaking habit, they’d soon have none left.

Their voices floated up to him dimly. He couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying but could discern tone. There was sadness, rage, and shock, sometimes all conveyed in as little as one word.

Right now they must have reached some kind of impasse, because they simply stared at one another. His father’s face was red, and he had loosened the top button on his shirt and his tie, probably so he didn’t pop veins and have a stroke or a heart attack. Even from up here, Henry could see the uneasy and rapid rise and fall of his dad’s chest.

He felt bad for the guy. Tank Appleby was a pretty clueless man, all things considered, when it came to anything outside the law and his work. He’d probably had no idea his wife was unhappy, and Henry would bet anything that it certainly never crossed his practical mind that she was harboring thoughts of leaving. Tank was all about acquisitions. Once he had something, he tucked it away as a win and seldom looked at it again. Maybe the same was true with his family. And he was just now discovering how the strategy failed with real live people, ones whom you supposedly loved.