Promise Rock 03 - Living Promises (MM) (3 page)

He was doing fine, thank you.
But still, that didn't keep him from wishing with all his heart on days like this, and not for things like a cup of hot chocolate either. So he let himself wish, telling himself he was a fool, because wishes— especially
his
wishes—were the kind that wouldn't come true. The permission didn't help: as much as he wished he could go back in time and get a condom that wouldn't break, or warn Kevin about the ambush in the road, or even warn himself not to take a smoke break on a muggy June night, he couldn't help but add one more wish in the wishing star hat before he straightened up and swished like a man into the clinic for his consult.
It wasn't wrong to wish for one more glimpse of that absurdly beautiful, heartbroken kid who walked like he owned the world, was it?

Jeff: My Baby Sent Me a Letter

F
IVE
years later, Jeff still didn't regret falling in love with Kevin Turner—but he still hadn't told his mother about him, either. He'd told her about the HIV, but he wasn't even sure if his father knew.

He called his mother every Monday, 8 a.m., like clockwork, and he had since his father had kicked him out of the house shortly after he'd started college and come out to his parents. (Herbert had once asked him how much of a shock could it have been to Jeff's father, and Jeff had shrugged, his expressive, angular body making the move dramatic. He wasn't sure either, but a surprise it apparently had been.)

The problem with his mother went beyond the fact that Jeff hadn't lived at home for ten years and beyond the fact that he was gay. It even went beyond the fact that Jeff had to actually
bribe
his mother's nurse to let him speak to her, since his father had told the nursing home not to accept his calls.

The problem went directly to why she was in a nursing home at age sixty-two to begin with, and it had started not long after Jeff went to school.

“Jeffy?” His mother always sounded so breezy and confident, much like she had when he'd been a kid and she'd been the most popular soccer mom in Coloma, with the best goodies and the house full of neighbor kids because their house was the best, that's why.

“Hey, Mom!” Jeff made his voice match hers and waited to see where mom was on the space/time continuum this week.

“How are the kitties?” Lillian Beachum asked, and Jeff blew out a sigh of relief. She was apparently pretty close to current. Sometimes she wasn't always in the right year, and he would have to remind her that he was no longer in med school, and that his career goals had changed, and sometimes, he would even have to remind her that he was gay, and he wasn't going to be looking for a nice girl to settle down with. Lillian would always laugh then (as Archie, her husband, had not) and say, “You know, Jeffy, you think your father and I would have figured that out, right?”

But not today. Today, she asked him how he was feeling and if the doctors were sure he was going to be okay, and then she asked him about Constantine, the big sloth, and today, she even remembered Katherine the Great, the Maine Coon cat that his friend Shane had given him for his birthday this year, only about a month late because Shane had been recovering from broken ribs (big dumbfuck ex-cop) and hadn't been able to get Jeff what he'd had in mind all along. Jeff had tried to protest that he didn't need another cat-mountain in his condo, but Shane knew his cats. This one was large, even as a kitten, drooled a lot, and went completely limp as soon as you picked it up. It was even calico, and all that long calico hair was just so
pretty
, and Jeff had been charmed immediately.

“Katy and Con are fine, Mama,” Jeff told her now. “Katy still hasn't stopped drooling when she sleeps—it's just so sad! She lays there with her head sideways and her tongue lolling out! I mean, if I'd wanted a cat who did that, I would have bought a boxer, right?”

Mama laughed, and Jeff counted that as a score for his side. Anytime Lillian Beachum laughed, that was one for the angels.
And then the angels wept.
“So, Jeff, when are you going to visit me? I don't see anyone anymore! Your father was here this weekend, but Barry's always so busy with his job, and I haven't seen you since… well, I can't remember when!”
Jeff took a careful breath in and out of his nose. “I'll try to make some time next week, Mama,” he lied. He would—if his father wasn't standing guard over her like a pit bull, afraid he was going to spread the gay. Like gay was any worse than Alzheimer's, right?
“Are you still worried about your father?” she asked innocuously. “Oh, honey, he'll get over it. You can't be as proud as he was of you and think a little thing like who you kiss is going to get in the way!”
Except he had. Jeff's father had let a little thing like that get in the way. And then he'd gotten in the way of Jeff and his entire family. Jeff's older brother, his mother, aunts, uncles, cousins—he'd been part of a collective in Coloma, dammit! He'd been surrounded by Beachums and Porters and Martels and Beauforts, and then, the summer before his freshman year in school, before his
free ride
thanks to a swim-team scholarship and top-notch grades, Jeff thought he'd tell his family, the closest, inner core of his family, who he really was.
And he'd lost all of them, inner family, outer family, just plain
family
, forever. His mother's phone calls had started getting vague about six months after that. Not long into Jeff's junior year in college, he'd had to do some quick talking around nurses who had been coming to take care of her. One of them had taken pity on him and arranged the talks he had now.
And some days Mom remembered that her youngest wasn't invited home, and some days she didn't.
“Well, Mom, as long as you know that I wish I was kissing you on the cheek right now, okay? Now give the phone to Becky—I want to get a picture of you.”
He did this every so often—and he sent Becky one of himself. Sometimes his mother was stunned at how old he looked. Sometimes she remembered that he was in his thirties. Either way, he made prints of the pictures he got back and kept a progression of his mother, almost as if he'd been allowed to visit her for the last eleven, twelve years.
“Bye, sweetheart,” his mother's voice quavered over the phone. “I love you.”
“Bye, Mama,” he said back, locking that steel cage around his heart so it wouldn't break. “I love you too.”
His mother looked like she always did in her picture: her needlepoint in her hands, her hair—black once, like his, but all gray now—brushed back into a ponytail, and her face, lined and serene, beaming into the camera. Leave it to his mother to go old and crazy in the sweet, saintly grandmother way. If she'd gone crazy in the ravingold-bat way, Jeff might have had an easier time pretending that he had no family, none at all.
It hurt, but it was an old pain, and the rest of his day was promising, so he dislodged Katherine Shedding-Fur-Monkey from his chest Comatose from his lap, where one of his legs had gone a bit numb. Con flopped over to his side, one gray paw curled against his massive chest and the other stretched out, almost above his head, and glared balefully at Jeff. Kat glomped on top of Con, and the two began a contest to see who could groom the other one best. Jeff sighed and then smiled at them, because they were absolute darlings, and he adored them both. Then he stood, brushing the stray cat hairs from his red satin dressing gown, and padded down the hall in his fleece-lined leather clogs to get dressed.
He paused at his room and pumped some man-sturizer/handsanitizer onto his hands from a bottle on the dresser, then pulled his pressed white coat with the three-quarter sleeves out of the closet along with his natty black slacks with the slick, shiny leather shoes. He put on something dressy underneath—a crisp poly/wool button-up shirt with a mandarin collar and pink-and-black vertical stripes—and took out his lined belted leather jacket to keep him warm in the November chill. He considered the outfit and then smiled softly and went to the rack of scarves he'd brought out in late October.
He liked scarves—he had silk/cashmere blends, angora, sturdy wool—but he picked one from his “scarf of honor” peg. All three scarves on the peg were hand-knitted. The first one was in a simple garter stitch, in handsome eggplant, that went on forever. Jeff's best friend, Crick, had a sister who liked to knit; she'd made that for him last autumn, and it was one of his prized possessions. Shane had a scarf from Benny as well, but Shane, the big furry traitor, had given his scarf to his snotty little boyfriend Mikhail. If Jeff hadn't adored Mikhail almost as much as he adored Katy and Con, he wouldn't have let Shane live that down, but since Mikhail had worn the thing damned near into June that summer, Jeff figured he'd let it slide.
The other scarf on his rack had been knitted by Crick himself. Crick had taken up knitting on Jeff's advice for physical therapy on his hand and arm, injured in battle when Crick was serving in Iraq. Crick's knitting was painful, stitch-by-fucking-stitch knitting, and while Deacon had gotten his first effort, Jeff had gotten his second, in forest green, and he wouldn't trade it for the world.
the Great-Big-Fat-Droolingand then Constantine-the
The last one, Jeff had knitted. He usually knit for charity or for friends or the people at work, but this one, he'd knitted for himself.
Jeff was really good at it. This was a complicated braid cable, in a handsome space-dyed wool/silk blend of subtle navy and charcoal with a hint of green every so often in the mix. He fingered the wool, liking the texture under his skin, and then sighed. So pretty—but it didn't go with his shirt.
He picked the eggplant one that Benny had knit him instead, even though she wouldn't be there to see it. God, he missed Benny—everyone at The Pulpit, Deacon and Crick's home, did. But Benny was down in SoCal, getting her education, and Deacon and Crick were here, being family to the rest of their odd assortment of people, and Jeff would have to settle for an evening after work, knitting with Benny's family, instead.
He was looking forward to it. Hell, he was
dressing up
for it. That would have to be enough.
Work was fun—some of his favorite patients were on the roster for that day, and he loved a good, chatting patient with fun stories to tell.
Marjorie Bell was one of those. She was a big woman, far bigger than was healthy, with a face that refused to line, even in middle age. She had short, blonde-gray hair and a wide freckled face, and a neck that hadn't recovered from a car accident about five years before.
She taught high school, now that her husband had retired from the Navy, and her stories about her students made Jeff laugh until he needed to pee. He always scheduled an extra fifteen minutes to her sessions just to talk with her, and she always used it. Today was no different.
“Okay,” she was saying this day, as Jeff applied his magic heated sonic wand of love to the tissue at the base of her skull, “so we've just covered Lord Byron, and how the guy slept with anyone and everyone, male and female, and was driven out of England for totally boinking his half-sister, Augusta. That's out of the way, we've got fifteen minutes to go, so I decide to launch into my „Don't get knocked up during Winter Ball' spiel, right? I mean, it happens every year. You see these kids with the six-month baby-bump walking the stage at graduation, and you're like, „Really? Winter Ball? You couldn't have fit a couple of rubbers in your teeny-tiny little handbag with your cell phone or something?'. So in the middle of this, a girl comes in from the office—she just got to school and doesn't know what we're talking about—and she says, „Okay, so what're we doing?'.”
Margie let out a low moan of relief at that moment, because Jeff took the heat massager to just—that—spot on her neck, and Jeff kept it there for a minute until her whole body shuddered with tension relief and she could continue her story.
“So what did you say?” Jeff prompted, and she laughed a little and arched into the sonic vibrator for another knot in her painfully twisted neck.
“I told her we were talking about how not to get knocked up during Winter Ball, and she says, „Don't worry about me! I'm going with my cousin!'.”
Jeff couldn't help it. He had to pull the sonic wand away so he could laugh. “Ohmigod! That's hilarious! What happened?”
Margie stretched, the motions graceful and svelte, almost like Constantine's stretching, and at odds a little with her size. “Well, the whole class totally broke up, and then this one guy, who was lost on the whole Byron thing anyway, suddenly breaks out with, „Man, and make sure your condom's fresh! Those things go bad after a year!', and there was only five minutes of class after that—like I was going to get
that
class back!”
Jeff snorted softly, still laughing. “Oh, honey, that's priceless!”
Margie laughed with him and then swiveled around on her little “victim's stool,” as she called it, and rolled her eyes. “Yeah—let's see if I can keep my job after that gets to the parents, though!”
Jeff frowned and took the little K-Y covered baggie off the end of the wand, then wiped the rest of the glide gel off of Margie's neck. “How do you mean?”
Margie's shrug was resigned. “People get awfully het up when you talk about sex, you know?”
Jeff rolled his eyes back. “Well, they get pretty homoed up about it when you talk about gay sex, so I guess that's about right!”
It was Margie's turn to laugh, and she did so with gratifying heartiness. God, he loved to make someone bust up. He collected stories in his head all day, witticisms, catty remarks, anything he could think about. It was like his drug, the one thing he could do that would make himself feel better, and he indulged in his emotional crack as much as possible. He thanked the gods for folks like Margie, who just handed it out for free by the truckload. They pretty much kept him sane.
Margie grabbed her 4X T-shirt and threw it over her head, over her lunchroom-lady bra, and turned comfortably around to Jeff, who was making notations on her chart.
“You're doing about the same, Margie,” he said, trying not to nag, “but you know what would really make this whole PT thing take off?”
Margie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, Doctor Jeff. If I lost the extra human hanging around my neck—I figured.”
Jeff smiled at her softly. Weight problems sucked. He knew it. It was one thing for him to spend hours at the gym or to measure his calories with a scale and a calculator—he had the time. But Margie? Margie still had three kids in school. Her time after work was a maddening whirlwind of soccer fields, dance studios, and Aca-Deca meetings. Margie was lucky if she could order McDonald's and remember not to get the extra-large fries.
“Well, darling, you know I worry. Who else is going to keep me apprised on the doings of the depraved youth of America, right?”
Margie grinned and waggled her blonde eyebrows wickedly, then turned away and started to pack up her purse with a rather studied air. “Um, that reminds me, Dr. Jeff—I won't be making my appointment for next week. I'll be back the week after.”
“Yeah?” Jeff cocked his head. “What's doin'?”
Margie shrugged and kept her back turned. She mumbled something that sounded like “ohw paedgent mercury.” Jeff blinked and asked her to repeat it, and on the fourth try, he was able to make out the words “outpatient surgery.”
Jeff stared at her blankly. “For what?”
Margie still wouldn't look at him. The sides of the walls—which he'd decorated with seascapes and kittens, and the floor and the ceiling—
those
she looked at. Finally she looked at him, her shoulders hunched defensively, and her chin quivering alarmingly.
“C'mon, honey—what's doin'?” he asked, as gently as he could.
“No big deal,” Margie said, trying to keep her jaw stoic. “Just, you know, a Lap-band. The stomach-stapling thing, right?”
Jeff blinked, not sure where the verklempt woman came in with the everyday procedure. “Isn't that a good thing, sweetheart?”
Margie shrugged again and looked away. “You know, doll, it's just embarrassing. You want to lose it all by yourself. It's… it's humiliating to find yourself in this… this emotional vortex, and you can't pull your way out of it, you know?” She shook her head and shrugged and tried to wave away the tears, and Jeff had a sudden memory of Crick's voice on the phone.
He'd been slouched on the couch with Constantine on his lap, and wondering—without framing the thought, mind you—if maybe Constantine wouldn't be happier with the Mr. and Mrs. Doc Herberts forever. His favorite show, CSI, had just gone to reruns, and, dammit, his last cigarette had made him throw up, and so had his last cookie and his last hamburger and his last anything-the-fuck-else that made life worth living and his little personal pharmaceutical/biology experiment worth the potential outcome.
And to make matters worse, a group of teenage boys had practically run over him on skateboards as he'd left the supermarket that day, calling him an “old faggot” as they did.
Now the “faggot” part he could have lived with—but the “old?” That was just too fucking much.
And then the phone rang, and he didn't recognize the number, and then when he picked it up….
“So, hey. This is Crick, the poor bastard you tortured the other day, you remember?”
Holy shit. The gangly kid with the motor mouth and the horrific injuries and the smoking hot boyfriend and not a trace of self-pity. The one he'd talked to for the whole session, and whom he had thought about—not even in a sexual way—for the next two days. The kid had been fun. He'd been funny. He'd been one of the best things about Jeff's week.
“Yeah, sweetcakes, how could I forget?”
“So, um, Deacon's busy, I'm still a walking liability, and, um… hey. Do you want to go shopping or something? God, Deacon can't shop for shit, and I feel so damned slow when it's Benny and the baby. You think?”
Jeff had almost cried. “Oh babydoll, I think you're gonna regret that. Do you know how many malls I can haul your gimpy ass around? What did you want to look for?”
Yeah. Jeff knew about emotional vortices, didn't he?
Jeff didn't care if Margie weighed at least twice as much as he did—she was a sweetie, and every week, she made him laugh. He opened his arms and waggled his fingers, and she stepped awkwardly into his best fairy-Jeff-father hug.
“We all need help sometimes,” he said softly, and was gratified when her hug went from awkward to earnest.