Five Tuesdays in Winter(35)

Wes called over to the hospital and told them to tell Stacy to come home immediately. Then he called downstairs. We could hear the phone ringing below and their father saying from outside: “Don’t answer that phone!” And Wes breathed out, “C’mon.” And Mandy said, “Everyone is so serious now,” and we shushed her and she started to cry but softly, mewling.

The phone stopped ringing.

“A. J.” Wes gripped the receiver with two hands. “A. J., listen to me. Your mom is on her way home. Don’t open the door, all right? No, I know it’s your dad but listen. Tell him not to, A. J. Tell him—”

But they opened up.

Wes yanked open our door and his feet went down those stairs fast as a drumroll. “You guys know there’s a protective order prohibiting this man from removing those kids from the premises without their mother’s consent. You know that, right?”

“I’m not taking them,” the ex said. “They are.” He pointed to people we couldn’t see. We leaned over the railing. A man and a woman in street clothes were squatting down next to the kids, all three crying now, A. J. the loudest. He was trying to say Mumma but his lips wouldn’t come together for the m’s.

“Who are they?” Jeb whispered.

“DSS,” William said.

“No disrespect,” Wes said, “but you are making a terrible mistake here. Stacy is coming right back. If anyone’s at fault, it’s me. She asked me to watch them and I had to run up to my place for another pack of cigarettes. There has never been a better mom. She loves those kids to pieces. She nurtures them and listens to them and— Look, here she is.” He ran toward Stacy’s car, just pulling in, and said loudly, “Stace, I was just telling them how I had to run up for another pack—”

It all got terribly tangled after that with Stacy sprinting toward her kids and the cops restraining her and the kids howling and hitting the DSS people to get to their mother and her ex suddenly losing it, calling her a fuck-hole and spitting in her face except that it hit the neck of the smaller cop, which he really didn’t like and he let go of Stacy and shoved her ex up against one of the poles that held up the porch we were standing on and we felt the whole flimsy structure shake as he knocked him around. The cop knew he’d gotten on the wrong side of things and needed to make himself feel better.

Through it all Wes kept talking, as if a certain combination of words spoken in the right tone could make it all better for everyone. But the cops took the ex away and the children were buckled into the back of the DSS car. Stacy tried to run after it but Wes held her back. He yelled up for me to throw him his keys and got her in his truck, and they raced out of the lot to catch up with her kids.

William was still looking in the direction of the car with the kids in it, even though the building next door blocked the view of the street.

“Go home to your family, William,” I said.

“I will,” he said in a voice I hadn’t heard before, solemn as a priest.

He went down the stairs and across the lot. He didn’t have on the heels he normally wore with that outfit so the hem dragged a bit through the mud puddles.

Jeb ran the tips of his fingers along my temple and into my hair. He smelled like Vermont and everything I would miss about it later.

Mandy was still watching Wes through the little window next to the sink. “I found him, Mumma,” she was chanting to the glass. “The biggest heart on earth.”

Jeb followed me back to my room. He laughed at the grove of books and stepped up onto my bed in his boots.

I sat on my desk and watched him.

“Let’s start at the very beginning.” He put his finger on the first mark of the timeline: 200,000 BC, the appearance of Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve.

My room smelled of woodsmoke. Wes and Stacy were chasing a car with her kids in it through the city. Mandy and I would wait up for him all night. And someday soon I’d sit at this desk and try to freeze it all in place with words.

Jeb held out his hand to me. “C’mere.”





HOTEL SEATTLE





In college, Paul would buy a fiesta-sized bag of Doritos on Sunday after Mass and lie stomach down on his bed with his textbooks and notebooks propped up against his pillow and do all his work for the week ahead. He didn’t stand up for hours at a time. A cup of coffee and a bag of Doritos was all he needed. Our dorm beds made an L in the room. Every Sunday I could look at his body for as long as I wanted.

We were best friends because we were roommates. I never deluded myself that he would have chosen me otherwise. Socially we balanced each other out. He was the guy who came into the room and everyone was relieved. I made people deeply uneasy, myself most of all. If we hadn’t shared a room I would have been one of those guys on our hall that got a nod from him in the stairwell, maybe a bit of banter at the sink shaving, but no 2 a.m. arguments about transubstantiation or Bret Easton Ellis.

You grow up Catholic (mass, CCD, youth camps) with six brothers, a megalomaniac father, and a mother who is on her knees in prayer whenever you try to find her, it’s hard to scrape through all the voodoo layers to recognize you’re gay. “Sexual urges,” Father Corcoran used to say through the permanent crust of his lips, “are the maggots at the feast.” We learned to zap our urges the minute we felt them. And homosexual urges got snuffed even quicker, before they made it to the brain. They left a mark, though. I knew I was off somehow. For a long time I thought it was just religion I needed to flush out. That the girl in my arms was just not the right girl. I tried another and another. So many willing girls. And none of them quite right.