Release(4)

Once he warmed up, once the tension was gone, once the sweat had properly broken and his breathing was rhythmically heavy and every twinge of stiffness and pain from previous workouts had been obliterated by adrenaline and endorphins, when all of that had happened, there was almost nowhere on earth he’d rather be, even on up-and-down back roads with no shoulder or, as now, on the old railroad path too crowded with entitled cyclists or groups of power-walking moms in their pastel tops and self-crimped hair.

For forty-five minutes, or an hour, or an hour and a half, the world was his, and he was alone in it. Blissfully, wonderfully, almost sacredly alone.

Which was good, because the chrysanthemums had gone down badly.

“Did you purposely get the colours of vomit?” his mother asked.

“That’s all they had.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure that’s what you want to say? When I can very easily go down there and check myself?”

He kept his voice level and repeated, “That’s all they had.”

She relented, grudgingly. “I suppose it is late in the season. But couldn’t you have tried another flower? One that looks less like … bodily functions?”

“You asked for chrysanthemums. If I’d gotten anything else, you’d be sending me back there right now and then both of us would have wasted our mornings.”

Not to mention money we don’t have on flowers when I haven’t had a new winter coat in three years, he did not add.

She had waited a moment, then picked up the pallet and took it out front without a word of thank you. Moments later, when he’d changed into his running gear and sprinted past her to start his workout, she was already arm-deep in topsoil at the side of the driveway. She called something out to him, but he had his earbuds turned up loud and was pretty sure he hadn’t heard her.

His parents. They hadn’t always been this angry/wary/scared of him. His childhood had been all right, even filled with talk of “blessings” after four years of effort to have a second child had been so literally fruitless they had just given up. As was often the way with these things, Adam was born eight months later.

My Baby, she’d called him. For too long. For too many years. Until it stopped being a phrase of love and started to contain within it an iron weight of instruction. You will never be our equal, they seemed to be telling him, no matter how old you get. Especially when all his little friends growing up were girls. Especially when he never watched the Super Bowl but never missed the Oscars. Especially when he started to seem “a bit gay”.

She’d actually said that in front of him at a Wendy’s one Sunday night after church. “Do you think he might be a bit gay?” she’d asked across the table to his father, as fifteen-year-old Marty looked furiously into his chocolate Frosty and eleven-year-old Adam’s face stung as keenly as a slapped sunburn.

All he had done was mention how fun the dance classes sounded that the son of his sixth-grade teacher was taking.

“No,” his father said to his mother too quickly, too firmly. “And don’t talk like that. Of course he isn’t.” With his eye on Adam, making clear this was only partly belief and mostly command and one hundred per cent denial of any dance classes.

The subject hadn’t come up again, not once, in the intervening six years.

Nobody here was a fool. Not Adam, who had mastered clever Internet searching before his parents knew what a Wi-Fi child lock even was. And his mom and dad were both educated people, not even a little bit blind to what the world was like, how it had changed even in Adam’s lifetime. But sometimes it felt like change only happened in far-off cities and was having too much fun there to make it out to the suburbs, where the benefit of his parents’ education was merely that they smiled and kept mostly quiet about their certainties rather than discarding them.

His father was an evangelical minister, after all. With Adam as a son. Particular denials of reality were going to be necessary for anyone in that house.

So no one talked about it, but there had been curfew and sleepover restrictions that Marty hadn’t suffered, first in Adam’s friendship with Enzo, and only less in his friendship with Linus because they barely knew Linus existed, Angela covering for him to an extent he’d never be able to repay. Church, twice on Sunday, once on Wednesday, was mandatory, of course, and his regular trips to Christian summer camp were more strictly enforced than Marty’s, too – though Marty had been only too happy to go. Even Adam’s joining of drama club at school was not so subtly resisted until he told them he was also joining the cross-country team.

He crossed mile four at the end of the old railroad path, having to turn sideways to get past five moms pushing five strollers side by side. It was usually at this point in the run that he was no longer arguing with anyone in his head. Oh, well.

Angela loved her parents. They were the kind of family that laughed together over dinner. She hadn’t had a curfew since fourteen because they trusted her not to get in any trouble. When she’d lost her “full” virginity, as she called it, the experience hadn’t been what Angela was expecting and she and her mom had actually talked it over afterwards (though not before Adam and Angela had thoroughly debriefed first).

Adam imagined the look on his dad’s face if he’d gone to him the first time after full penetration with Enzo. An elderly man on what appeared to be a home-made bicycle looked up and grinned at Adam’s passing laugh.