​FOUR

Mitch

When I was a kid, I'd plant my face against the black hole of the universe—stand outside, face up—and wonder if there was someone else out there whose ribs ached, welted, still warm from his mama’s favorite spoon.

“You git what you git, and you don’t throw a fit,” she’d say, and that spoon would come down, wood against skin, against small strips of muscle. My daddy would sit in his chair, conducting the sound of each thwack with his booze-addled hand, fingers gliding through air—unless he was snoring.

“What I do?” I asked one time. She didn’t answer. Didn’t have to.

She was an old woman at that point even though I was only twelve. Her leg dragged a little from the gout, and every time she’d yank my head back, my vision would catch in her wiry mass of nostril hair. You’d think a twelve-year-old boy would be able to shoulder off someone like that, especially if his daddy was too drunk, too weak to intervene anyways. But in a strange way, I relished the thought of “thwack, thwack, thwack.” Of splinters grazing, wet eggs of sweat on Mama’s upper lip because we both needed a little redemption when coming to terms with who I really was: a queer.

“What’s she like?” Aaron asks. Outside on his back patio, we're just two buddies to the golfers on the green, downing beers, shooting the breeze. Aaron lives on the golf course outside of White Smoke, his three-floor townhouse sidling closely to the sixth hole. This is the third time I've been here, and this is the part of our game we've never played before. Question and answer time.

“Who?”

“You know.” He means Elena. Oh my, how to explain an entire world. I think if I wasn’t like this, it would be easier: “Good in bed, good in the kitchen, good where it counts,” and then one of those soul sucking winks. But it's only a hat I wear in public, and sitting with Aaron, his words still stinging my skin, it doesn’t fit like it should.

“She worries a lot. She cleans when she worries.” I swallow beer, feel Aaron’s eyes on the side of my face. “She smells like bleach.”

“Bleach?”

“Just when she worries. Other times like vanilla, I guess.”

“Okay.” I can feel Aaron smirking at me. I hate that we’re here. I hate that we’re doing this. And I don’t love that he thinks he's better than me. But still, I don’t leave.

“I have a wife and a kid. Not a disease.”

“Okay,” Aaron says again, this time holding his hands up, but the smirk's still there.

“So what’s it like to be you, Mr. Big Shot Little Rock Accountant?” I glance over at the house next to Aaron’s townhome where Greg Mainhardt and his leaky basement live. It was in Greg’s backyard—pretending to be concerned about the elitist jerk’s water damage—that I spotted Aaron outside on his deck.

I think of all the stupid, usual tropes about time stopping, the air freezing, the moments between us staggering like an old man having a heart attack. But nothing about any of that is real. What's real is the way Aaron looked at me, like unlocking the bolt in my chest to read the words between my ribs: I have a wife. I have a child. And I’m attracted to men.

“Beautiful, painful, disgusting, an absolute dream. Isn’t that true about any life?” he says, another swallow of beer on his lips.

“Okay, sure, but tell me something real.” The golfers have left, and nobody's out in Maindhardt’s backyard, so I brush my finger up and down the back of Aaron’s hand. He looks at me, and now it's his words I'm reading.

“You know that thing you told me about your mom? How hard she was on you?” I shake my head.

“My parents were different. They were wonderful. But they had the worse gaydar,” Aaron says, snorting a little. His Adam’s apple undulates with another cold swallow of beer, and I want to place my fingertips on it.

“They loved me so much, you know, like their faucet was broken, and they couldn’t turn that thing off. But then the day came, and if you ever decide to embark on ‘the day,’ let me give you a piece of advice: you’re a fool to think you can handle the reactions you’ll get.” He took another long pull on his bottle, and I wait, but he doesn’t continue.

“So, your parents?”

Aaron shrugs and moves his hand as a new group of golfers drives up the cart path.

“I fixed their faucet.”

#

“You have to leave,” Aaron says later in the foyer. He doesn’t ask it like a question, but we both know it is. At least in an alternate universe it would be, and I would roll it around in my head, and then say, “No, I can stay,” already thinking about Chinese takeout and curling up on the couch. But just not in this one.

Aaron draws me in with his arms, a feeling that’s still as unwelcomed as it is welcomed. It feels like eyes are on us, the word “fag” guts me like a fish. But there’s no one here but Aaron, his shirt unbuttoned to his chest, a faded scar where his heart is.

“Did it hurt?”

“Bet your backside,” he says and smiles. It thumped wrong as a kid. “Ebstein’s Anomaly” he told me last time. I said it out loud three times so I’d remember.

“Everything hurts,” Aaron says as I walk out his door into the edge of evening.

Bet your backside.

#

The cash is already wrapped in rubber bands in the console. Sometimes we get paid in this backwoods way, but cash is cash, and nobody complains about that fact. So, when I go inside looking like I just robbed a bank, Elena will kiss my cheek and say, “Nice work.”

But I don’t go in right away. Instead, I sit in the cab of the truck and think about Elena’s voice on my cell, a quick call after I had splashed water on my face in Aaron’s marble bathroom.

“How’s everything?”

“Good. Gonna be a long one though. When it rains it pours,” an old joke I offered up as an apology for Aaron humming “A Hard Day’s Night” in the kitchen. I had muffled the phone with a nervous hand. 

“Good. Listen, I just wanted to say sorry.”

“No need.”

“Yes, there is. I think we need help.”

“We’re fine.” I said it with too much force, the “not fine” easily detectable in my voice.

“We drink too much.”

“Everyone drinks,” I said although we both know it’s not true wedged this deep inside the Bible Belt.

“Can’t we be better?” she asked, and I could tell she was crying. Aaron had stuck his head out the kitchen’s doorway. He was pointing at a pan with his spatula. “Omelet?” he mouthed.

“Listen, I’m dealing with a real piece of work right now, and I don’t just mean Jimmy. What’s that Jim? You got something to say?” Aaron rolled his eyes, and I turned my back on him, wondering if Elena could hear the tears in my voice too.

“It’ll be okay,” I whispered into the phone.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you more,” because sometimes, I think it’s true.