To Say I Love You (2 page)

My dad wandered down for breakfast first, grunted a hello at us both, and helped himself to the eggs Will had set on the table. Baby arrived just before Jennifer, skidding into the kitchen on legs that only knew one speed.

I’d grown to adore the dog almost as much as my sister did and crouched to rub her belly hard. Baby was a slut and immediately rolled onto her back to receive the attention she thought she deserved. “Baby” was never supposed to be her name; Jennifer had called her Daisy at first, but it hadn’t stuck. When my sister insisted on calling the puppy her baby, she’d started to respond to the affectionate nickname instead.

Baby chewed shoes. My shoes, in particular. For reasons none of us could explain, she never went for any of Will’s shoes, or Dad’s, or Jennifer’s… just mine. I had taken to almost exclusively wearing flip-flops. That way it didn’t matter if she tore them up. I could replace them cheaply.

Will ushered me into a seat, and the dog fell into place at my ankles, waiting for a treat that was sure to come. She’d developed a taste for bacon we were trying not to indulge.

By the time Jennifer arrived, my plate was loaded and Will had hooked his foot around mine under the table. He did that a lot.

“Working today?” I asked her as we settled down.

She nodded. “This morning I have surgery for a few hours.”

That was good. Jennifer had graduated with flying colors from her veterinary school and had opened a clinic with a good friend in the next town over. After Mama got sick she had reduced her working hours, and they’d been paying a temp to come in and pick up the slack. It wasn’t the best solution though; they were leaking money, and I knew Jennifer would likely go back before she was really ready.

The museum had granted me a leave of absence, and though I missed my work, it was better this way. Things were different for Will and me; we’d both managed to work our way up our respective career ladders, and I knew we could afford for me to not work for a few months. Our savings would take a knock, but Will said it was worth it.

With Daddy having retired a few years back, it meant all four of us were at the house from dawn ’til dusk some days, and I worried it was getting claustrophobic. My father would never come right out and say he needed us, or even wanted us around. Instead I was given the job of trying to interpret his moods, which was no easy task.

When we were done with the breakfast things, I nudged Will away from the dishwasher. He’d do everything if I didn’t stop him, and at home—our home—we had a rule that whoever cooked didn’t get stuck with the dishes too.

Once the chore was done, I went back to bed. It was there Will found me a little while later, and he crawled up behind me and held me close.

“I thought we talked about this.”

“About what?”

“Staying in bed all day.”

“Will, it’s barely ten. That hardly counts as all day.”

He stroked my belly lightly and laid kisses on my back and neck until I relaxed in his arms. Things weren’t great, and wouldn’t be for a long time. This was a small comfort, one that I latched on to.

“I need to talk to you,” Will said quietly.

“Sure,” I said, twisting round to face him.

“I need to go home,” he said.

I reached up and touched his face, just lightly. “I’ve been telling you to go home for ages. It’s fine, I’ll come too….”

He was already shaking his head. “You need to be here. I get that, I really do. There’s some stuff I need to tie up at home, then I’ll come back.”

“Your job, though.”

“That’s why I need to go back,” he said with a wry smile, rubbing comforting circles on my arm. “Trust me, I don’t want to leave you right now. I really don’t. But if I go and get this done, then hopefully we’ve got a bit more flexibility to make decisions.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s why I need to talk to my boss.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“I’ll be a few days, that’s all.”

“I’ll be fine,” I insisted. “I’ll miss you, but I’ll be fine.”

He leaned in and pressed his lips to mine firmly, cradling my cheek in his hand.

“When are you leaving?” I asked.

“Tomorrow, hopefully.”

“Oh.” That was soon.

“I can be back quicker that way.”

Will was planning something, I could tell. He wasn’t likely to tell me exactly what until it was done, though, and that was okay. I trusted him.

That night, he held me close despite the heat, stroking my hair until I fell asleep in his arms. We didn’t make love here, not in my parents’ house. It was a respect thing: when I had first brought him home to meet my family, my mom had put us in separate beds.

It did mean we hadn’t had sex since we left Seattle, and I needed him. We were sensual people, and our relationship was based on layers of intimacy. Holding each other as we slept was only one of those layers.

Still, it was better than nothing, and when his lips found mine for a slow, searching kiss, it was better. I tightened my arms around his waist, closing the space between us, and clung to the man who had become my anchor.

The next morning I drove him to the airport in Atlanta. It was a few hours away from my family home, so Jennifer let me borrow her truck for the trip. He was only taking cabin baggage, not checking a suitcase, so he could go straight through to security.

I didn’t want a long-drawn-out good-bye in the airport and kissed him in the car instead.

“I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“I know,” I said, knowing he needed this reassurance. “It’s gonna be all right. Go on.”

“Love you,” he murmured.

“Love you too.”

I didn’t want to have to watch him walk away and pulled out of the drop-off area as soon as there was a space. It was weird in some ways, being set free here without him. Not that Will would hold me back at all. We were independent people, regardless of our commitment to each other.

Since Jennifer didn’t need her car at work, I dropped her off at the office on the condition I’d take Baby out for a long walk while she was working. Her partner would bring her home, leaving me with the whole day in front of me and nothing to do with it.

I mentioned it to my dad, hoping he’d be in the mood to join me. I was expecting him to decline, so I wasn’t surprised when he gave me a wry smile and shook his head. There was a part of me that knew he needed space and time to grieve, another part that hated leaving him on his own.

My parents had met when they were both teenagers, but Mama had married another man when she was eighteen, and my dad had joined the Army to try and get over the loss of the woman he loved. By the time he left the service five years later, my mother was divorced—no one knew why—and dad started trying to woo her.

They had been together ever since.

My mind kept asking questions I didn’t want to answer:
What would you do without Will? Could you cope? Will you be with him long enough to have to deal with one of you dying first? What if you had to live without him? What if you leave him on his own?

It wasn’t helpful. Then again, a sense of our own mortality is what separates humans from the beasts, so it wasn’t like I was the first person who’d had to deal with this internal self-flagellation. It was all the worse because Will wasn’t around.

I took Baby for the long walk through a small forest a couple of miles away. By the time we were done and heading back to the car, she was exhausted and I took pity on her, carrying her the last few hundred yards. She was asleep before I pulled out of the parking lot, and snoring by the time I hit the highway.

F
OR
THE
first few days after Will left, it was weird. We exchanged texts a few times a day and called each other fairly regularly. His absence highlighted how much we had all relied on him while he was here.

Neither I, my sister, nor Dad had managed to settle into any kind of routine. I wasn’t sleeping well and assumed from their tired eyes they weren’t, either. It had only been a couple of weeks since Mama passed, and although I was coming to terms with the fact she was gone, I was having a hard time accepting she’d hidden her illness from us for so long.

I hadn’t lived in Georgia since I was a young teenager, so being back was strange. It was a different way of life from Seattle, that much was certain. There was a much stronger sense of community, of people knowing each other, of interactions with neighbors.

Will and I lived in a nice house on Capitol Hill, the “gay district” of Seattle. Even so, we only knew a few people from the area, and a few more to nod to in passing. Here, everyone knew my family, and by extension, me. It was a little unnerving.

It also meant everyone knew I was gay.

As far as coming out was concerned, I’d done that years ago when I’d taken Will to my cousin’s wedding as my date. That was when he’d met all my family and anyone who wanted to get a good look at the local gays got their chance. That we were still together all these years later seemed to surprise people. Well, fuck them. I really didn’t care what they were saying behind my back.

Jennifer was trying to get Dad to do stuff—go fishing or hunting or anything that got him out of the house. He wasn’t really resisting her, more like she was in his way and completely unable to figure out what best to do. We’d likely pushed her back to work quicker than she was ready, neither Will, Dad, nor I able to put up with her fussing. We weren’t men who liked to be fussed over.

Fussing seemed to be the order, not just of the day. The neighborhood women had taken it on themselves to be an almost constant presence, coming over with cake or cookies or tea and sympathy. I didn’t blame my dad for being sick of it, and told Jennifer I knew where he was when he disappeared when really I had no idea. The man needed space and time, like the rest of us.

I picked up the domestic stuff. Jennifer didn’t really have time to do it when she got home from work, even though she was only doing a few shifts a week. I didn’t want to put any pressure on her to clean or cook when she got in.

Will and I were a pretty egalitarian couple. I didn’t mind vacuuming or shoving laundry in the washer or doing dishes, though he was better at ironing shirts and making dinner and remembering what we needed to get from the supermarket. Taking over completely, not just looking after myself, but my Dad and sister too, felt like a lot of responsibility.

“Where you off to?” I asked as my dad wandered through the house loaded up with a backpack.

“Thought I’d go out on the lake,” he said. He looked at me funny for a moment, then cocked his head to the side. “Wanna come?”

I nodded mutely. He hadn’t asked me before.

“I’ll go change.”

“Okay.”

It didn’t take long to swap my jeans for cargo shorts and sneakers for more sturdy boots. Dad had a little motorized boat docked down on the lake, and I guessed he spent a lot of time out on it when he wasn’t at home. It was more overcast today; the weathergirl was predicting rain later for the first time in what felt like months. We hadn’t even been around for that long, and I was already missing the rain.

Dad was waiting by the door.

“Packed a couple more sandwiches,” he said as I tossed a few things into a bag of my own. “And a couple bottles of that tea y’all like.”

“Thanks.”

The drive to the lake only took about twenty minutes, mostly because we didn’t pass another car the whole way there. Being back in the country was
weird
.

I was a kid the last time I helped my dad out on the boat. Still, some things you didn’t forget, and this was one of them: while Dad checked over the motor and the structure of the boat to make sure it wasn’t damaged, I packed our stuff in tightly and found the lifejackets.

There was just about room in the old thing for two adults, and it wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world. I knew my dad had upgraded it a few times over the years; Mama had always complained about how much time he spent out here tinkering with it.

“Ready?”

“Yessir.”

“Come on, then.”

The engine choked, then spluttered to life, then Dad maneuvered out of the little marina and onto the lake.

Strangely, there seemed to be more traffic here than there was on the roads. We passed a few other boats as we ambled along, Dad lifting his hand in greeting to all of them as we went by. I didn’t recognize anyone. These weren’t people who had come to the house after Mama had passed. They must have been people who hadn’t known her. Or maybe they didn’t know she’d died. My dad wasn’t exactly the type of guy to talk about his feelings. It was entirely possible no one who knew him had heard about his wife.

The idea made me irrationally sad.

He pulled up to an area with overhanging trees, protecting us from some of the heat of the sun, and started to arrange his fishing stuff.

“You want a rod? I got a spare one.”

“No, thanks,” I said, kicking back into a more comfortable position. “I brought a book. I think I’m just gonna read.”

He grunted in reply.

It really was peaceful out here—not quiet, exactly, although quieter after the chug of the engine had cooled down. I kicked my boots off and dangled my feet over the side of the boat, dipping my toes into the cool water.