Turkey in the Snow (2 page)

“Ohmigah! That’s
way
more important than Santa!” Justin said, and Hank turned to him, surprised.

“I know but—”

“I can
totally
see why you’d want to do that more! Why can’t you just tell her that? She’s a smart girl, I’m sure she’d understand.”

“Uncle Hank!” Josie called imperiously. “Are you still there?”

“Right here, Bunny!”

“Mommy likes to sing when I’m in the potty so I don’t get scared.”

Hank met gazes with Justin, who grimaced a bit, and then Hank launched into something Hank and Amanda’s mother had played almost constantly when they’d been kids.

“
I’m on top of the world looking down on creation—
” And then Josie’s voice interrupted in command.

“
Christmas
music, Uncle Hank!”

Hank closed his eyes. “
Deck the halls with boughs of holly—
”

“
Tra la la la la
,” Justin chimed in, smiling encouragingly.
Hank smiled back, grateful for the moral support, and they continued.

“
La la, la la.
”

Justin bandaged his arm as they kept singing. They made it through the entire song by the time she was ready to go—after needing some help with the cleanup, of course. Hank figured that there was nothing more guaranteed to let you know where you stood in the order of the world than a four year old bending over the potty waiting for you to wipe her behind.

When he was done, he left her in the gym childcare office for a moment to run and get his stuff from his locker. It was close to seven o’clock, and the locker room was completely empty, which was a good thing. Hank was in the process of pulling a spare pair of sweats over his workout shorts when Justin stuck his head in.

“Who’s with Josie?” Hank asked. When he’d left, Justin had been the only adult in the room and—

“Don’t panic, cowboy!” Justin said, rolling his eyes and waving his hand. “Jackie’s in there—you know, my supervisor? I had something to ask you!” His wrist never stiffened up, did it? But Hank remembered those long, artistic hands working steadily on the cut on his arm and figured that Justin was good at pulling in the swish when he needed to.

“I’m sorry,” Hank muttered, struggling with getting his pants over his shoe. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Don’t worry about it.” Justin rolled his eyes again. “I get that you don’t like me, but I’ve got a plan.”

“For what?” Hank asked, giving up on the shoe. He sat down, toed the shoe off and yanked it through the elastic opening of the sweats while Justin finished speaking.

“If you like,” Justin said helpfully, “I can come get Josie on Saturday and bring her in with me. I just cleared it with Jackie and…”

Hank took a deep breath, not wanting to be indebted to him anymore,
especially
because that thing, that drama thing, was still there, grating against Hank’s teeth. Justin must have seen his refusal because he just kept talking faster like that was going to get him his way.

“…and don’t say no because you’re worried about her, because I’m totally certified in
everything
, and I’m getting a liberal studies degree and units in child development so I can do CPR
and
teach her the alphabet and—”

It was time to inject some sanity.

“Why?” Hank asked bluntly. “It’s nice of you. It really is, but why?”

Justin shrugged and smiled, looking embarrassed and eager and everything. “Well, because I like kids, Silly! If I didn’t like kids, I’d be studying something that made me more money, like banking, right?”

“I like kids!” Hank heard his voice pitch up embarrassingly. God. He should turn in his employee card as Loan Officer at Wells Fargo for that voice crack.

“I know, I know,” Justin placated, holding his hands out. “But, you know, you have to be the responsible parent, and I get that and it’s really great! But I can be the fun Uncle Justin, and she can see Santa! Please?”

Hank let out a sigh. He
was
the fun Uncle Justin right now. At the moment, he was Hank’s best ally.

“Yeah,” Hank told him, getting his clothes situated. He stood up so he could get to the inside of his gym bag. “Here. I’ll get you my address—”

“Oh, I can get that from the computer or find it on my phone…”

Hank felt his eyes bulge out, and Justin backtracked at warp speed.

“…and that would be totally illegal so of
course
I wouldn’t do that, so go ahead and write that down for me, ’kay?”

“Thank you,” Hank said belatedly as he was writing down his info. Justin had his phone out and was punching the numbers into it briskly, and Hank envied him. He was pretty sure he didn’t have many friends at the moment because of his antiquated texting skills, and he kept losing people’s numbers. “She…
we
really appreciate this.”

Justin grinned so widely his eyes almost squinched shut. “I’m happy to help.”

There was a moment, then, an awkward one, and Hank felt compelled to be truthful.

“I don’t ‘don’t like you’,” he said, putting his pea coat on over his workout clothes. His skin was still clammy from the sweat he’d built up and not been allowed to wash off.

Justin had moved closer to get his address, and when Hank turned around from his locker, he saw that Justin was right in front of him, looking up at Hank’s six-foot-three-inch height from his own much shorter build. His eyes were open and blue, and Hank could see the places in his hair where his gel was starting to break down. Justin had apparently put in a long day too.

“Sure you do,” Justin said. “You think I’m a big ol’ flaming ’mo, and you’re way too butch to have anything to do with me, and you don’t think I should be hanging out with your niece and generally you wish my entire people would fall off the face of the earth.” He did the rolling eyes, twitching hips, and limp-wristed thing all in conjunction, and, Hank had to admit, it was one hell of a show.

He hated to put a stop to it.

“I’m gay, moron.” He swung his duffel bag over his shoulder and paused for a moment to admire Justin’s sweet little heart shaped face, open jaw, bulging eyes and all. God, he was pretty. It was a shame about that whole other problem.

“Wait a minute!” Justin said, reaching up to grab Hank’s arm and stop him. He must have remembered at the last moment that Hank had actually hurt himself, because his grip on Hank’s shoulder was surprisingly gentle.

Hank turned around with a long-suffering sigh.

“What?” he asked. The one thing that had been getting him through this day had been his workout. That had been cut short, and he apparently had a commitment with this…
person
in his future, and he was hanging onto his patience with a very, very fine thread.

Still, he couldn’t help but hear the naked hurt in Justin’s voice when he spoke next, and yeah. He felt like shit.

“But, if you don’t have a problem with gay people, why do you always seem like…” Justin was waving his hands and trying to find the right words, and Hank realized he’d have to put the guy out of his misery. Justin was still wearing the company uniform, and he really had been nothing but professional.

“Look, I’m sorry if I’ve been a complete dick,” he said, and looking at Justin’s helplessness and his kindness, he realized he meant it, too. “I am. It’s not the gay, Justin—it’s the drama. I mean, people like you are fun to be around, right up until they let you down. I totally appreciate the help with Josie, and I’m going to take you up on it, because, I’ll admit it, I’m desperate, but….” His head was starting to ache, and he hoped the rolls of cookie dough he had in the refrigerator had enough sugar to counteract that little problem. Maybe the coffee drinks he had in the fridge would help too.

“But what?” Justin asked, curiosity apparently warring with the hurt. He was worrying his lower lip, and it was becoming sort of succulent and red, and Hank realized he’d wandered off in the middle of his sentence.

“But what? Oh.” He flushed. “I guess I just mean, I can’t count on you, that’s all. Believe me. I’ve lived through drama. At the end of the day, it just gets you tired.”

Justin just looked at him, his eyes dark with hurt, his mouth opening and closing, and Hank felt that curious sense of needing to make him feel better.

“It’s like turkeys,” he said, out of the blue, and Justin blinked.

“Turkeys?”

“Yeah! Turkeys in the snow.” Hank sighed and set his gym bag down. “See, turkeys are like the drama queens of the animal world. They freak out at any little thing, but they ignore all the really important things. So, you put a bunch of turkeys in a pen, and let a fox in there, and they look at him and think, ‘Hey! It’s a fox! So the hell what?’ Which is bad because the fox is
eating
the turkeys, right? But these same turkeys see a snowflake, and they’re like, ‘Omigodomigodomigod’, and they run around the pen just freaking out, until they trample the other turkeys in the pen, and they hurt them too.”

Justin was starting to giggle, and Hank closed his eyes, realizing that he’d sort of flapped his arms and made “Omigodomigodomigod” sound a lot like “gobble gobble gobble.”

“Oh no,” Hank said, sighing and hating himself a lot.

“Oh yes!” Justin crowed.

“No, you didn’t get the point—”

“Oh, I totally did!” Justin was laughing and Hank grabbed his workout bag again and slung it over his shoulder.

“No, no, no, no—” He said, trying to get out of the locker room before he had to hear Justin say it.

“Omigah, Mr. Calder! You sounded totally
gay
!”

Hank sighed and just kept right on walking. “Yeah,” he muttered, “I totally know.” This sent Justin into another paroxysm of laughter, which Hank heard rattling around in his head for the rest of the interminable night.

H
OME
. Finally. Mac and cheese, rolling out the refrigerated cookie dough and cutting shapes, icing them, quick bath, bedtime a half an hour too late.

Josie was happy rolling out the cookies, but unhappy with the icing. It wasn’t perfect, wasn’t pretty, wasn’t shiny. Hank had bought the sprinkle things, and that helped, but generally, there was whininess and dissatisfaction about the entire affair.

“You don’t know anything!” she shouted at him when he told her that he thought her Christmas tree was the prettiest. “It’s ugly! Mom says the best Christmas trees have pink!”

Hank swallowed back a tightness in his throat that felt embarrassingly like tears. He remembered Amanda saying that exact thing when she was seven or eight. How wonderful that she’d taught it to her four-year-old daughter, and then gone off and left that kid in the hands of Hank, who had liked Christmas trees best when they were in the house a week before Christmas and not the night before.

“Yeah, I get it,” he said, his throat raw. “Your mommy knows best. You know, Josie, all this great stuff your mom knows might carry a little more weight if she was
here.
”

Josie had started to cry then, helplessly, and Hank picked her up and carried her to the bathroom, and held her—crying—while he ran water and bubbles in the tub. He undressed her—still crying—and set her in the water, soaping her hair and rinsing her off, and the whole time, her mouth was open as a low, pulsing wail was striated out, and Hank couldn’t think of a damned thing to make it go away.

She finally stopped and was down to sniffles and deep, shuddery breaths when he had her dried off and in her nightgown and in her bed.

“I hate this bed,” she told him. “It’s too big.”

“I hate it too,” he told her, because it was a reminder of all the ways in which he was ill-equipped for fatherhood at this particular moment in his life. It was meant to be a guest bedroom/den, so he had the bed and bookshelves and a desk and a laptop—all of the things a little girl
didn’t
want in her room. The bookshelves had big, thick, boring books on finance, and the walls were a stark white. There had been a beautiful, boldly colored print of two naked male torsos—no butt-crack, no peen, but very obviously non-hetero. Hank had taken it down before Josie even entered the room. The blank wall just sort of stared at them now, and Hank wiped his cheek with the back of his hand without thinking, and remembered his plan for Saturday.

Saturday, they would make this room better. They would. And now, thanks to the kindness of one very swishy, sweet-faced twink, that would be a whole lot easier.

“Are you crying, Uncle Hank?”

Hank shook his head no, because crying meant drama, and he absolutely, positively
refused to do fucking drama.
Not right now.

“No, Bunny. I’m just ready for a shower right now.” One of the first things he’d gone and bought her was one of those squishy fleece blankets, the kind that were impossibly plush and soft. This one had a pink rabbit on it, realistically done, in spite of the color, with the ears at helicopter position. It sat on top of the white comforter on Josie’s bed—yet another thing Hank was planning to change in two days.

“Sleep tight, angel,” he said, and bent to give her a kiss on the cheek. She turned unexpectedly and kissed him on the lips instead, and brought her tiny hand up to his own wet cheek.

“I’m sorry I made you cry,” she said in a small voice, and he shut his eyes really tight.

“Grownups get tired,” he told her, weary from his knees to his navel and all points north, south, and in between. “I…” He tried to keep his voice steady. “I was really looking forward to that workout, you know?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice even smaller, and he hugged her tight.

“It’s okay. We’ll try for a better day tomorrow.”

“Can we make more cookies?”

Sure, since I think I may eat half of them tonight.
“Yeah. That’s a plan.”

“Are you going to work out tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. I can see Justin. He’s nice.”

Hank had heard this a dozen times before, but this was the first time his entire heart was in it when he said, “Yeah. Yeah, he really is. We’ll see him tomorrow. Good night.”