Taking Chances (16 page)

But after being married to her for almost forty years, let me assure you, I knew I had a better chance of deflecting a tornado with harsh words than I did of stopping Beth from doing what she wanted once she set her mind to it.

Suddenly my wife, who once referred to one of John’s baseball uniform as “his ball costume,” was a regular at Parker’s Sporting Goods store. This woman who could not tell me the difference between a touchdown and a home run was bringing home a variety of sports jerseys, two different beverage coolers, and once an athletic supporter complete with strap and cup. When I asked her about it, she said it was an investment in Matt’s future and that she was saving all the receipts.

If you have never been married, let me give you some advice. Never stand between your spouse and whatever windmill they happen to be charging unless you feel like being knocked down and run over a few times. Beth had it in her mind that Tyler and Matt would work, and far be it from me to stop her.

Damned if she wasn’t right.

Of course, she didn’t have much to do about it in the scheme of things. They ran into each other over Christmas and hit things off, though maybe she had loosened the ketchup bottle that was Tyler’s curiosity some, but life has a way of making things turn out the way they should.

This is all a long way of me saying that I had never seen Matt so happy in his life.

I can’t say that the specifics of what those boys did when they were alone was all that appealing to me, but the fact that someone out there was making my boy feel good was more than enough for me. So when Matt came in from his run and rushed past us and upstairs like he was on fire, I was immediately concerned. That was old Matt behavior, and if old Matt was back, that could only mean one thing.

Beth took a few steps toward the stairs to follow him, but I waved her off. “Let me,” I said, putting my newspaper down. “No boy wants to talk to his mother about his love life.”

“Oh, and old men are their go-to choice?” she asked, even though she knew I was right.

“No. Children in general do not wish to discuss anything that involves a body part below the belt with their parents, but at the very least, another man can understand what a man is going through,” I tried to assure her, but she wasn’t buying it.

“Had a lot of gay relationships that didn’t pan out?”

I waved a dismissive hand at her as I climbed the stairs. One, because I know that just pisses her off, but more so because I had absolutely no answer to that. I suppose she was right that when it came down to the mechanics of things, she might have more working knowledge of what having a relationship with a man is like; but she didn’t know what I knew—how men think. Gay or not, Matt is still a man and, unless someone slipped him a how-to guide when he was in California, I bet he didn’t know any better than I did how to make a relationship work.

I knocked on the door before I walked in, because I was the father of three sons and over the years I had walked in on more things I wished I could unsee than I care to share with anyone else. If you are a male, you know what I mean. If you have a son, you
really
know what I mean.

“What?” Matt’s voice asked from the other side of the door.

“You decent?” I asked, pausing for a few seconds in case he wasn’t. “Because I’m coming in.”

The door swung open and he stood there, trying his best not to look mad. He failed pretty badly, but bless him for at least trying. “I didn’t go by Nancy’s.” I stood there not knowing what the hell he was talking about. “I’ll call about the window in a few.”

Right, the window. Because that was the only thing around here broken.

“Ain’t no hurry,” I replied walking into the room. On the bed was his suitcase, which pretty much confirmed what I had already feared. “Going somewhere?”

“Home,” he answered, going back to the closet and grabbing a handful of clothes. “Work called, and they need me back.”

Matt was a bright boy and was very good at many things. Lying was not one of them.

“They called you, huh?” I asked, sitting on the edge of the bed. He nodded as he went back for another handful. “I must be falling behind with the technology these days,” I commented, sounding as nonchalant as I could muster. “Here I always thought you needed a phone on you to get a call.” He stopped and looked at me in confusion, and then saw I was pointing to the cell phone on the nightstand. “You wanna try best two out of three?”

He shoved the clothes into his suitcase without a word. He’d inherited the silent response from me. When we had nothing in way of a comeback, we just fumed silently and hoped the rage radiating off us would work as a repellent. Matt’s rage might work on other people but never on me.

“So you’re leaving? Just like that?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

He opened the top drawer, took an armful of socks and underwear out, and deposited them on top of the clothes already overflowing from the suitcase. “I’ve been here too long as it is,” he shot back, his voice full of hurt and anger that had nothing to do with me. “I have a life, Dad.”

“Do you?” He froze as those two words slammed into his funk and brought it to a grinding halt. “What happened between you and Tyler?” I asked, cutting through this nonsense, trying to get to what was really wrong.

“I do have a life,” he repeated, ignoring my question altogether. “I know you and Mom don’t think there is anything of value outside of Foster, but there is and I’m happy there!” He wasn’t talking to me anymore. His words were the only way he knew to convince himself. “I am happy out there!” I stayed silent. “I
am
!” More silence.

When he saw I wasn’t going to react, his voice cracked. When a parent has ushered three boys though the perils of childhood into the world of manhood, the signs when one of them is about to fall apart are clear. I cleared the short distance between me and him as he began to cry.

“I fucked things up, Dad” was all he got out before he lost it.

There are few things males will admit out loud because we’re all so caught up in trying to be men that we’re unable to just get over it and tell the truth. At times like this, when the very world itself looks like it has turned against you, there is nothing a boy wants more than his father to just hold him and whisper in his ear that everything is going to be all right.

From personal experience, as a man gets older, if his father has already passed on, his wife makes a more than an acceptable substitute, but don’t tell Beth that. It’ll just go to her head.

I
HAVE
a weird life.

I don’t say that in a poor-me kind of way so I come off like some orphan from a Dickens novel. Pity is one of those things like a pet rock or one of those stupid birds that drink water out of a glass. People think other people want it but if you were to take a poll, no one would ever ask for it. I am more making an observation that my life, when held up against other lives, is fracking weird.

For example.

When I left this morning, my mother was passed out in her room, and the living room looked like one of those crime scenes you see on a CSI show, the one where there’s a chalk outline where the body isn’t. You know what I mean, right? With the bottles all over the place, discarded cigarette butts near the bottles, and a small mirror that had to have been cleaned with baby powder because there is no other earthly reason for it to have white powder on it, right?

I kid. I know what the white powder was.

Anyway, the only thing missing was a dead whore in the middle of the room and that weird track lighting I assume comes with all hotel rooms in Vegas. There are mornings I walk out of my bedroom and expect to hear The Who start to play as I walk into the bathroom, just to warn me what the rest of the place looks like. Normally the whole messed-up living room and mother passed out in her bedroom thing wouldn’t have pissed me off as much as it did. Except she had promised me she was going to change.

The “she” in that sentence being my mom, and change meaning not what had happened last night.

She had really come through for Brad when they tried to kick him off the baseball team last month; and since then it really looked like she was going to change. Of course, like the idiot monkey that always touches the electrified button, I believed her and thought things were looking up.

Long story short, I was wrong and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

So I decided to use a lifeline and phoned a friend. Well, in this case, I phoned a boyfriend and got a hot jock delivered to my door. I am, of course, bragging because I knew this was how other people saw him but not me. I knew who he really was now, so every time I looked at him I saw the small things that made me crazy instead of the glaring, obvious ones that made everyone else lust after him.

Take, for example, the way his hair always looks on the verge of being messy. It’s adorable, I mean just drop-dead cute as hell, and, to the outside observer, must look like when he rolls out of bed. I see it and I smile about the thirty-plus minutes I know he spent in the bathroom with a handful of product trying to get it to look
just
messy enough to look random but good enough to make him that much more attractive. The way his white T-shirt hugs him so casually, showing off his broad chest without being as obvious as wearing a fitted shirt might—to everyone else, he looks as if he threw one on and ran out the door. The truth was that he bought the shirts a size too small and spent a week washing and stretching them to look that haphazard on purpose.

People see an insanely hot guy who looks like that without any effort at all. I see the self-conscious guy behind the curtain making sure as many people like him as possible. And if they aren’t going to like him, at least they will admit he is handsome. I’m sure it sounds vain to you, but I assure you it is as fear-based as anything else we do to make ourselves presentable to the public. The only difference is that those of us who are normal-looking don’t have a bar to reach when we walk out the door. So my hair is shaggy, my jeans frayed. Who cares? I mean, before I came out, no one knew who the hell I was anyway. I could have showed up with a Pokemon shirt and bell-bottoms and no one would have noticed. People
do
notice him, and Brad knows it, and for some reason he is terrified of coming up short.

And for some reason, I find that fear in someone who so doesn’t need to work so hard at being hot is irresistible.

So when he pulled up wearing a ball cap and his letterman jacket, I knew he literally ran out the door to get me out of there. And if that wasn’t worth melting over a little, I don’t know what is.

I left the house in a state of disarray but without dead bodies evident. When I came back after lunch to see if my mother had crawled out of her cave, the living room looked cleaned up, but there was a dead body on the couch.

See what I mean? Weird.

At first, I had no idea who the corpse in question was. Because it lay facedown in the cushions, all I could see was that he was a full-grown man and he had a nice ass. I know that makes me sound like a perv crushing on some old dead guy, but I assure you, some asses transcend age, and this was one of them. I wasn’t aware my mom knew anyone with that nice a body; if I had, I would have been nicer to him. I inched closer to make sure I was just being sarcastic and the guy was really breathing when he snorted in his sleep and turned over to face me.

Holy shit, it was Mr. Parker!

You’d think he was some hideous monster the way I jumped back, but he was anything but. From what I had gathered from my mom, he’d been some kind of high school football star who ended up busting his knee out his first season at college and had to come back to Foster for some reason or another. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that. I mean, bad enough he’d worked his ass off—again with his ass! Man, I need to focus—and actually got out of
Matrix Four: The Mayberry Years
, but to end up being sent back here had to be on par with finding out the golden ticket you found in your chocolate bar was really just a cheap-ass coupon, and, by the way, you and your freeloading grandfather can get back on the bus and enjoy a lifetime of cabbage soup.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t like that for him, but I damn well know if it was me, I’d be wishing some pain on the next fat-faced blueberry chick I saw.

He was handsome in a way that was just wrong on someone his age. Not that he was, like, forty or anything, but he was as old as my mom and by that time the slope down to ancient gets pretty slippery. More times than not, folks my mom and Mr. Parker’s age just look old. Not Mr. Parker. He looked like one of those stupid, hot jocks all grown up with adult clothes on. “Adult clothes” here meaning their pants are actually at their waist and stuff. Brad thought the guy hung the moon, which made me jealous for about five seconds. Then I realized this guy had played against Brad’s dad when they were in high school, and there isn’t a guy who would find his dad hot, even with a gun pointed at his head.

Though he didn’t say anything, I think Mr. Parker had talked to Brad about us at some point, which made the man a superhero in my book. The fact my mom and him were, like, best friends from high school just made the microscopic size of this town all the more apparent to me. The day he stood up for Brad, and I guess me too, at the school board meeting was the day I realized being gay wasn’t automatically a death sentence.

Okay, yeah, I get it, major drama queen, but seriously. At my age, the thought of having to walk around with a scarlet letter on my chest for the rest of my life signifying to everyone I was not like the rest of them… well, death would be merciful when compared to that kind of life. But Mr. Parker was gay, hot, and stuck in Foster, and he didn’t look like he was one bad day away from climbing the water tower over on Elm with a rifle. The fact you can grow up being this way and still look as normal as he did was the first sign that the light at the end of the tunnel might not be a near-death experience.

But none of that explained why he was crashed on my couch.