Nobody's Son (14 page)

Mikey shrugged. “Probably. But it’s only been a couple months. Too soon to talk about any of that.”

Despite the weakness of his voice, Shaun could hear the longing. Mikey wanted that “M-R-S,” in whatever form three men could manage it. And Shaun had no doubt he’d get it. Jimmy and Cory would move heaven and earth for their man if they had to.

And that’s what he wanted in a nutshell. Someone who would do anything in his power to make him happy. Was that person Con? He didn’t know.

But he sure would love to find out.

OTHER THAN
the cookout, the weekend was surprisingly quiet, considering all but three of the cabins were booked out. Shaun stayed in the office nearly the whole time, just taking one dip in the pool after work on Sunday, and he didn’t know what might have gone on in the back section. Other than the usual naked fun, that is.

After work on Sunday, Shaun turned left out of the resort and started to accelerate to highway speed, headed for the interstate, but when he came around the first curve, he had to slam on his brakes. A sheriff’s car sat across the road with its lights going and a man in uniform with his hand over his chest standing at the side. Just beyond, a line of cars with their headlights on turned from the highway onto a side road. Farther on, several other cars sat at the side of the road.

A funeral procession.

Shaun pulled to the side and waited, watching and remembering. He considered it both a blessing and a curse that he remembered every detail about the day of his mama’s funeral. The rides from the funeral home to the church and then church to cemetery, in a white limousine behind the white hearse, with a line of police cars in front and back. The stiff black suit he wore, the tie too tight because he’d fumbled with it so much that one of the men from the church had tied it for him. Bright sunlight cascading down through newly greened trees at the graveside, the beauty of the spring day mocking his grief.

He didn’t learn the details about how Sharon Rogers died until several years later. A routine call for a domestic disturbance at a home known to the force went pear-shaped, the enraged boyfriend disappearing down the hall and coming back with an assault weapon. Sherry dove to cover the two small children in the line of fire, and one of the bullets had slammed into the back of her head.

By the time dust settled, she was dead.

She received a hero’s burial. Not just the usual respect paid to a fallen officer, but the added layers of the little boy and girl whose lives she saved. News vans lined the sidewalk outside the cemetery, satellite masts reaching toward the sky so they could get in their live shots. The house phone rang so much for the first few days that Darnell turned off the ringer and then screened the messages, deleting most of them.

Eventually, the next tragedy happened, and the news moved on. Life moved on.

But in a lot of ways, Shaun didn’t.

He went back to school, graduated, went to college, got a job. Now eleven years had passed, and he still lived at home. He’d moved downstairs, and then briefly into a dorm, but he’d never considered moving out permanently, finding his own place.

Was that strange? Shouldn’t he be eager to leave the nest by now?

Shouldn’t he grow up?

The funeral procession finally came to an end, and the deputy returned to his vehicle, pulling it off the road to let Shaun and the other drivers pass. Shaun drove on autopilot, but his thoughts were miles away. Years away.

AFTER HE’D
won the school essay contest, he’d had thoughts for a while of being a writer for a living. For a few months, he wrote about all kinds of things, some for school assignments and some just because he wanted to. He got tired of it after a while, but he still put extra effort in when his teachers assigned essays.

He was thirteen years old and the school year almost over when his English teacher said she wanted them to write about something they wanted to learn how to do. “Not something you have to go to school for,” she explained. “But something fun, or helpful. Like cooking, or riding a horse.”

How they were supposed to pick just one thing Shaun didn’t know, but he eventually narrowed it down.

He wrote about wanting to learn how to swim.

He got an A on the paper, and his teacher sent the essays home with them for their parents to sign. He hadn’t thought anything about it when he gave Mama the essay except that she would be proud that he got a good grade. And she was. She gave him a hug and told him he was a good boy, and she signed the paper and gave it back.

At dinner a week later, she smiled at him. “I have a surprise for you, baby.”

Shaun was happy, but puzzled. Usually he got surprises at his birthday and Christmas, not on a normal Wednesday night when there was nothing special.

Mama handed him a brochure, printed on shiny paper, for the YMCA. “Fun in the Water!” the headline proclaimed. It was underlined with a bright blue wave. Shaun’s eyes widened, and he read on. “Come spend a week with our instructors and learn to swim! This introductory class designed for tweens and younger teens (ages 10 to 14) covers water safety, breathing technique, and a basic crawl stroke.”

The text went on, but Shaun didn’t care. He jumped up and ran over to wrap his arms around his mama. “Thank you! How did you—”

And then he remembered the essay.

Mama just laughed. “You said you wanted to learn,” she said. “So now you can.”

Except two weeks later she was dead, and he never got to go to the camp.

THE ’70S-ERA
stereo Shaun’s grandpop had nursed for years past its natural lifespan gave up the ghost shortly after Shaun started college. Gran fussed at him the next Christmas when he presented her with a retro-style all-in-one model that played her Motown and gospel LPs along with the radio and the more modern CDs that mostly came from Shaun. But despite her protests, she used the set often, and when Shaun pushed open the front door that Sunday night, the static of the needle told Shaun even before he could place the music that Gran had pulled out her albums.

A few moments later, he recognized the smooth voice of Marvin Gaye. One of his gran’s favorites—and his.

Shaun walked into the living room, and Gran smiled up at him from her chair. “Hey, baby.”

She looked listless, like she’d just woken up or was about to fall asleep. Shaun hadn’t seen her in a few days, between his staying over at the resort and her own busy schedule.

Worried, Shaun crossed over to kiss her cheek. “Hey, beautiful. Everything all right?”

“I’m okay.” She waved off his concern. “Just didn’t sleep all that good last night. That Italian pasta thing Elsie made for our dinner last night gave me a little heartburn. I stayed home this morning, but Mabel brought me some soup for lunch.”

Shaun sat down in the chair next to hers and reached for her hand. “You sure that’s all it was? How long since you went to the doctor?”

She tilted her head down to look at him over the tops of her glasses. “Not too long, and I told you, I’m
fine
. If I wasn’t, I’d go to the doctor. Don’t you worry about me none.”

Shaun shook his head. “Of course I’m gonna worry about you, Gran. You’re all I’ve got.”

His words hit hard somewhere in his gut. He couldn’t lose Gran, not now. Not anytime soon. He’d do whatever it took to keep her in his life.

Even if that meant he had to keep a big part of his life hidden.

“Well, I worry about you too, baby.” Gran patted his hand. “But I know you know how to take care of yourself. I do feel bad that you feel like you need to call if you want to go out with your friends sometimes, though. You don’t need to do that.”

Shaun squeezed her hand. “I want to, Gran. I don’t want you to worry about me if I can help it.”

She smiled. “Then you call if you want, anytime you want. You do what you want to do, okay? I want you to be happy, baby.”

Shaun returned her smile, ignoring the knot of anxiety in his stomach. “I am happy, Gran.” He leaned forward to kiss her cheek. “Now.” He straightened up. “Tell me what I can get for you. Something that won’t give you heartburn again. A glass of warm milk?”

She made a face, and he laughed. She hated plain milk and hated it even more when it was warm. Then she smiled, a sneaky, secret smile.

“You know what we haven’t done in a long time?”

“What’s that?”

“Ice cream for dinner.”

Shaun laughed and let go of her hand, giving it a pat. “One overloaded bowl of Neapolitan coming right up.” She almost always had a carton of her favorite kind in the freezer.

“I think there might be some chocolate syrup too,” she called after him, and Shaun just smiled as he headed into the kitchen. The rest of the world could wait until tomorrow. He was spending the evening with his grandmother.

BY THE
next morning, Shaun still hadn’t made any decisions. Part of him thought the easiest thing to do about Con would be to break things off. They’d had fun, and Shaun could admit—to himself, if not to anyone else—that yeah, he was probably gay, not bi or curious or whatever else he’d tried to tell himself.

He just didn’t know if he was willing to risk his relationship with his gran over something that might be fleeting. He knew too that he should talk to Con about that, before he just ended whatever was going on between them, but just the thought of that conversation made his brain freeze up.

He had even less idea what to do about the Willis Erwin situation. He’d woken up that morning to find a text message from the man, giving him the time and place for the DNA testing: Tuesday morning, at a lab not far from him. He’d just wait until he had blood test results to deal with all that. If the test was negative, Gran never needed to know about any of it. But if it was positive….

His thoughts ran around and around in circles, his head spinning so hard he could hardly think, and it was all he could do to focus on the road and getting to work in one piece. He got things up and running and started dealing with the weekend paperwork, but he still hadn’t come to any conclusions by the time Jimmy ambled into the lobby a little before noon, looking like he’d just rolled out of bed—entirely likely, considering his disdain for mornings. He carried a huge coffee mug in one hand and a plate in the other.

“Here,” he said, setting the plate on the counter. “Help us finish off the food from Saturday night. Cheeseburger with mustard and grilled onions, chips, salsa. We have plenty of beer and sodas too, if you want one.”

Shaun was not about to turn down lunch, though he lifted an eyebrow at the offer of a beer. “I don’t think drinking on the job is the way to go, do you?”

Jimmy snorted. “Honey, some days drinking on the job is the only way I get through it.” He lifted his coffee mug. “But usually it’s just caffeine. Got coffee, if you’d prefer that.”

“I’m good.” Shaun pulled the plate toward him. “I brought a thermos of Gran’s sweet tea in with me today.”

Jimmy rested his arms on the counter, coffee mug held in both hands. “Did you talk to her?”

Shaun feigned ignorance. “About what?”

He took a big bite of the burger, hoping to buy himself time, but Jimmy’s expression made it clear he was onto that. “About your sexuality. About your
life
. Or are you going to keep on keeping all your secrets from her?”

Guilt flooded through Shaun, and he chewed and swallowed carefully. “No,” he finally murmured. “I didn’t tell her.”

Jimmy leaned in. “You need to do that, Shaun. If you keep hiding important stuff like that, either she’s gonna find out anyway, or she’s gonna be gone, and she’ll never know who you really are.”

The bite of burger sat heavy in Shaun’s stomach. “That’s not gonna happen.”

“You never know.” Jimmy tilted his head. “I know it’s hard to think about. Lord knows it like to have killed me when my granny died. But one of the things I have never regretted in my life was telling her I was gay. Well, okay. I didn’t tell her everything,” he qualified. “I was
not
telling my sainted Sicilian grandmother that I’d done porn. But that was just a job. Gay is who I am.” He raised an eyebrow. “And that’s a million times different.”

His words sank in, and somehow, they made something inside Shaun settle. He knew his gran loved him. She’d gone above and beyond for all his life. Even if she did have a tough time finding out he was gay, he couldn’t imagine her cutting him off.

“It’s not easy.” Shaun refocused on Jimmy, who smiled at him. “It might be rough. But it’s worth it. Being who you were meant to be? All of who you were meant to be? Best feeling in the world.”

Shaun nodded. “I’ll tell her,” he said, feeling relief sweep through him at the words. “About me, I mean. I’ll deal with the Erwin thing if I have to. But I know I need to… I have to be honest. I… I don’t know when, or how….”

“You’ll know when it’s time. And in the meantime, if you need to talk, you know where to find me.” Jimmy stood straight and nodded toward the side door. “For now, I’ll be next door for a bit longer and then working in the office. Cory and Mikey have to head back into town later for some froufrou business event.”

“You aren’t going with them?” Shaun reached for his burger again, his appetite back.

Jimmy shuddered. “Oh hell no. Bunch of stiff suits standing around making small talk? There are reasons I quit that law firm job. Heck, if he didn’t love everything else about his job, Cory wouldn’t be going either.” He grinned. “I think Mikey kind of likes it, even if he won’t say so. And I know Cory, and I sure like peeling him out of a suit.”

Shaun laughed, and Jimmy gave him an exaggerated leer and then waved. “I’m off. See you in a bit.”

Shaun waved with his free hand and then took another bite of his burger, watching as Jimmy disappeared out the side door, headed back to his men.

“He’s right, you know.”

Shaun almost choked on his burger, whirling to find Con leaning against the edge of the wall headed into the hallway.