Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (7 page)

“Yeah. We have a gig tonight in Worcester and I figured I’d come home for the long weekend.” Gene reached forward to grip my hand. We didn’t hug, but he shook my hand every time I see him. He did when I was thirteen and he moved in, and he still did now, eleven years later.

“The queen requested your appearance at court, didn’t she?” he asked with a laugh. Gene was as blonde as my parents were dark, with eyes that always freaked me out as a kid. One was the exact color of honey, while the other was a milk brownish green. He wore sunglasses most of the time, but in bright sunshine it was like looking at two different people sometimes. 

I pretended to bow and gave him a half smile. “When the queen calls—you come.”

“Women,” he said with a head shake. I started to say something back but paused. It was easy to make fun of Mom, but his words made me hesitate. Women. Gene never came around with women. Never dated. He lived alone in the apartment and until this very moment I’d never questioned any of it. Gene was just there. A guy who worked with Dad and lived above the garage.

Was he gay?

I wasn’t asking. No way. Gene got a funny look on his face, like he was about to say something, but then stopped himself.  

“Yeah. Can’t live without them, can’t duct tape their mouths,” I finally replied.

My head suddenly hurt, shot forward on my neck from a massive smack from behind. The pain was mild but the surprise made me yelp.

“Joseph Herbert Ross, that was one of your baser moments.”

“And they sneak up on you, too,” Gene said with a snort.

I turned around, rubbing the back of my head, to find myself looking down at fifty-eight inches of pure evil in a one-hundred pound package of bones, sinew, flesh, and Botox.

“Mom,” I said. “You don’t count.” 

“I’m not a woman? I have a vagina. I have ovaries. I even have a hymen,” she said proudly.

“I’ll take that as my cue to leave,” Gene said with a wave, eyes catching mine with an expression that said,
Have fun, bro.
 

“I don’t want to talk about your hymen, Mom,” I muttered, walking to the house, still rubbing my sore head. What the hell had she hit me with? I glanced over.

A yoga brick.

Of course.

Her little, sculpted legs were covered in the latest fashion from LuLuLemon and she pumped them fast to keep up with me. “My hymen is part of me, Joey. Why wouldn’t I talk about it? If I had surgery on my ovaries you’d hear about it. Why not my hymen?”

I slowed down, overriding the instinct to just start running and never stop. “You had surgery on your hymen. Is everything...okay?” These are conversations men are not meant to have with their mothers. Ever.

“It’s fine. Our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary is coming up, and your father is getting quite a surprise. A restored hymen.” 

“A...what?”

“The surgeon makes my hymen intact. I’m a virgin again. Hymen reconstruction is the new anal.”

I didn’t know a brain could splatter like a cantaloupe dropped from a seventh-story window.

But it can.

“Hey! Joey!” Dad called from a second story window. “Come on in! I want to show you something!”

“As long as it’s not your hymen!” I shouted.

That got me another hit on the head. Good. Maybe if Mom hit me enough I’d be rendered unconscious and could stop thinking about my mother getting her hymen...somethinged. As a present. For my Dad.

I sprinted into the house. Mom kept up with me. She also kept a long stream of chatter going without even breathing hard. 

“School okay? You’re keeping your grades up, right? Need to keep those nice and strong for law review. And you’re in the good study groups, not the ones with the slackers. No amount of beer and fun is going to help you get an associate’s position at Ropes and Gray. How’s your love life? Sowing those wild oats now, I hope. Can’t do that once you’ve settled down. But you’re wrapping it. We can send you condoms in bulk, you know. Easy to ship them...”

See? Duct tape. 

I bounded up the stairs, already in a sweat, and slammed into my Dad’s body. He reeled back and hit the wall, hands fumbling to catch himself.

“Joey! What the hell?” His eyes tracked behind me and looked at Mom, who was still emitting a steady stream of words.

“Oh. Gotcha.” He grabbed me into a bear hug. My parents are a study in contrasts. Mom is tight and taut, uptight and up-to-date on fashion. She’s determined to turn fifty into the new twenty, and I guess hymen surgeries are part of that strategy. 

Dad looked like he’d swallowed a keg of beer and it was just resting under his skin.

Mom gave Dad a look of barely concealed impatience. “I was talking, Herb.”

“You’re always talking, Joanne.”

She ignored him and looked at me. “And so when you do pick the right woman, make sure you don’t give her any diseases.”

Dad and I exchanged a look like hostages in a bank robbery.

“Too bad Suzy turned out to be so unstable. She had such good genetics.”

“What did you want to show me, Dad?” I groaned. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and led me to my old bedroom. Chez Ross has six of them, and five bathrooms. Mom complains that it’s so hard to clean five bathrooms. What she means is that it is so hard for the maid to clean five bathrooms. Mom goes through a new maid every six months or so. MetroWest Boston is littered with enough ex-maids that we could form a football game of two teams and they could hold a playoff. 

Winner gets to burn Mom in effigy.

“Ignore the horrible toilet, Joey! Cecelia has been using something with petrochemicals on it again,” Mom called out from her shoe closet.

I followed Dad down the long hallway, the floors hardwood and the walls covered with pictures of me. I’m their only child, and the stories I’ve heard about Mom’s c-section and my heart surgeries as a tiny baby make me bite my tongue and not make fun of what Trevor calls the “Joe-o-Rama” of my parents’ hallway. It was like a photographer vomited nothing but
me
everywhere.

A new picture made me halt, though. It was from our big concert last December, the one where the snake tried to eat Mavis the chicken. I’m on stage with Darla, arm around her waist. Trevor’s on top of the snake, prying open its jaws, and Liam and Sam are off to the side. The photo is one of those in-motion moments caught perfectly in time. I’d never seen this photo.

It was amazing.

“Where did you get this?” I asked Dad, who stopped and turned, following my eyes.

He raised an eyebrow. “Garrett McCarthy. He said he went to your performance and hunted down a professional photographer there. Had a bunch of these made up. Sent one to all the parents.” Dad was tall and dark, like me, but he was massive. A tight end gone soft. His thick eyebrows turned down and deep brown eyes met mine. Man, he looked tired. Grey sprinkled in his eyebrows and hair. Never saw that before.

“Nice.”

“He sent one to Sam’s parents, too.”

We stood in silence, eyes locked. Dad and Mom were there with me when we found Sam after his dad beat the shit out of him. 

“Why?” Garrett knew about Sam’s past.

“Said his mom was struggling. His Dad’s in a long-term rehab facility.” Dad’s voice dropped. “He’s never getting out. The alcohol destroyed him. Swiss cheese brain, from what I heard. Garrett thought she’d appreciate it.” Dad sighed. “I know Sam has every right to cut off his parents, and I know why, but I can’t imagine.” He reached down and squeezed my shoulder, voice choking. “I can’t imagine.”

“Can’t imagine what?” chirped Mom from behind us.

“Having your own kid cut off contact.”

“Joey!” she screeched. “Are you thinking about doing that? Why? Because I talked about my vagina with you?”

Dad’s eyebrows shot up. “Why in the hell would you do that, dear? No boy needs to hear his mom talking about her private parts.”

I was suddenly thirsty and slipped out from between them, racing down the stairs to the kitchen.

A wall of shining steel greeted me. Huh. Last time I was here, the appliances were all white. Mom must have remodeled. Every room in the house had been remodeled since I was in middle school. Maybe she had a secret schedule hidden somewhere, a rotation of renovation that required her to completely overhaul the entire house every decade. We had contractors who practically lived here. At once point, I started calling the plumber “Dad” because they looked so much alike. 

And the plumber was here more.

I opened the refrigerator door. It made a pneumatic click, then a wheeze, like opening the airlock hatch on a space ship. The door had a seltzer water dispenser and I half expected a hand job option there, too. That would be a cool feature, but I had to settle for grabbing a half gallon of raw milk and a bowl of organic, wild blueberries to stave off hunger. 

“Those are for my smoothie, Joey!” Mom shrieked behind me as I shoved a handful in and downed it with milk. “And use a glass, for god’s sake. Who knows where your mouth has been, and I don’t want to have to tell the doctor I got herpes from my own child.”

I choked, spraying tiny blue balls and milk in an impressive fan of horror.

She shook her head and sighed, now calm. “And Cecilia just came this morning. You always pick the day before her day off to make a mess. It’s like you’re torturing me on purpose.”

Milk dribbled down the front of my chin and shirt like I was the lead in one of my roommates’ favorite porn videos. She wasn’t even looking at me any more, her attention averted, fingers tapping the screen of her smartphone.

If I were at any friend’s house, in my own apartment, or at Trevor and Darla’s place, I’d clean up the mess I’d just made. That’s how life worked. You made a mess and you took care of it, out of courtesy to other people and because that’s just part of being a decent human being. Clean up your own shit. Don’t put that burden on someone else. I could go into the legal framework for how that specific moral code translates into the legal structure in the United States, but I won’t. Not now.

Not when Mom just transferred her own shit on to me.

I stormed upstairs. She ignored me. Covered in milk and coated in a kind of visceral shame that made me already regret coming home at Mom’s insistence—notice how we hadn’t even gotten to that part yet?—I needed a shower. Bad.

I marched into my bedroom, yanked a t-shirt and jeans out of my drawers, and opened the door to my bathroom.

To be greeted with a wall of sheer plastic and a plumber’s ass crack so big it could be the Grand Canyon.

“Uhhh, what?” I barked out.

The guy on the ground stood and turned around. “Hey, Joey!” 

That’s right. Dad. Not my real dad, but Paul the Plumber was damn close. I broke out into a grin in spite of myself, my eyes jumping all over the gutted room.

“Again?” I asked ruefully.

“Again,” he said with a sigh. “Your parents are paying for my son David’s braces.” Paul was a beast of a man. Reminded me a little bit of Darla’s Uncle Mike. A rough talker, and not well educated. But Paul was a smart guy, and he loved to talk sports.

I snorted. “Glad their money’s put to good use.”

He frowned. “I’d say putting you thorough law school counts, too.”

Oh. Great. Now Paul was guilting me?

A corner of his mouth shot up. “Gotta have someone on my side when I’m sitting in the drunk tank. The second you pass the bar, I want your card.”

My shoulders relaxed. Okay. Not guilting me. Being back home made me tense and on guard in ways I didn’t even realize.

“JOEY!” Mom’s screech could cut glass. “Use the shower in my bedroom. And don’t forget to use the blue bathmat this time, and not the cream one, if you’re going to use a blue towel.”

Paul’s eyebrows arched up in question.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Mom’s rules.”

“She makes you match the towel to the bathmat?”

My body halted, not sure how to explain. Ingrained into me for years, Mom’s rules made sense. It wasn’t until middle school that I realized other families didn’t make their maids iron the curtains every week using distilled water and lavender in the iron’s steam, or make sure that the coconut oil they stir fried their edamame in was slave free. 

“Yeah.” It was easier to take the simplest explanation.

“That explains a lot.”

“You’ve known her for years, Paul. Remember when she got all upset with you because the trim in the bathroom had three percent of its materials from China and she was terrified we were all going to get antimony poisoning?”

“I remember. All while she was sucking down sulfite-free, organic wine like it was a sports drink.”

“Mom doesn’t get irony, Paul.”

“Your mom’s checks cash like anybody else’s, bud.”

And that’s why I liked Paul.

“How about that Superbowl?” I asked, leaning against the doorjamb.

“JOEY!” she screamed again. “I NEED YOU.”

“She needs you,” Paul said, giving me a look of sympathy.

“She needs a muzzle,” I muttered as Paul snickered, my hand in a salute as I walked downstairs, complying with Mom’s request. 

She was standing in front of the refrigerator, fingers tapping. Dad was on the ground, cleaning up my mess. A wave of resentment poured over me.

“You don’t have to do that, Dad,” I said, bending down.

“Yes, I do,” he snapped. “If you don’t do it immediately and do it right, it just makes a bigger mess later.”

The words churned inside me, making me uneasy and a bit sick. My body tensed, abs tight and centered, like I was about to lunge, but the nerve impulses kept me in place, teeming on the surface of my skin. Why did that comment resonate like that?

“Joey, I called you home for a reason,” Mom said, grabbing me for a big hug, which is hard to do when you’re four-foot-ten but she did it. Her hugs felt like being embraced by a twisted wire coat hanger scented with lavender. 

“Yeah? You want to tell me more about your hymen?”

Dad’s head snapped up from the floor. “Her what?”

Mom’s fingers dug in as she dragged me into the great room off the kitchen. “That is a surprise!” she hissed through gritted teeth. “For our anniversary.”