Homespun (6 page)

Kerry had fallen in love on those winter evenings.

There had been times when the farm seemed like a far-off dream to him. Times when he had doubted its reality until he hopped off the back of a farm trailer or jumped down from the front seat of a Pepsi truck, shouldered his bag, and walked past the familiar sign once again. Real life had been the sound of traffic honking outside his window at three a.m., the throb of music in clubs, the thin mattresses of cheap apartments he shared with half a dozen other struggling artists and actors. Circuit parties. Sex parties.

Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

44

Getting high, losing days, and waking up in strangers’ beds.

Friends dying, lovers dying—dying
horribly
—and the brutal uncertainty of never knowing if there would be a tomorrow for him or anyone he loved.

And then we all grew up, those of us who were left….

He hadn’t been clubbing in years. Had quit drinking almost entirely; hadn’t done drugs in a decade. Partly it was just that the scene had changed—the old hotspots were gone, and going out meant brushing shoulders with a lot of young guys who were just
kids
, twentysomethings who’d come of age in an entirely different world than Kerry’s. The fashions and the slang had changed; new fears and concerns had replaced the old ones. He didn’t fit anymore.

But it wasn’t just that the scene was different. His old friends who’d survived the plague years and stayed in touch were courting middle age now. Most of them had settled down. These days, they were all worrying about 401Ks and stock options and dieting for their health rather than to look good on the dance floor. In another decade or three, he thought, they’d all be talking about wheelchair accessibility and regular bowel habits.

For many years, the farm had been his oasis away from the real world. But age and change couldn’t be left behind so easily….

The screen door opened, making him jump as it roused him from his thoughts. Owen froze at the sight of Kerry and Laura in comfortable domestic harmony, then let the door close carefully behind him. Kerry could normally read Owen’s broad, expressive face like an open book, but tonight the book was closed to him.

Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

45

“Daddy,” Laura said, kissing his cheek. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

“Thanks, sweetie.” He looked past her to Kerry. “Ker,” he said, in a voice laden with uncertainty and hope. Kerry could feel the weight of Owen’s expectations pressing down on him, closing off his options. It made him feel like he was suffocating.

“Owen,” he said calmly, and went to set the table. He was still hyperaware of Owen’s presence, though, like an electric tingling on his skin.

Owen cleared his throat. “You guys have a good day?”

“We got the fence in the winter pasture fixed,” Laura said, handing Kerry a handful of silverware.

“How’s the forage look up there?”

“Good, even with the dry weather. It’s had enough time to rest. I think we can move the flock into it as soon as we have time. Maybe this weekend.”

Kerry tried to blend into the background as much as possible, listening to the conversation while he fetched half a loaf of bread from that damn antique breadbox. It was impossible to turn around in this place without coming across another reminder that Owen and Laura both liked old things, traditional things.

Like holy matrimony,
he thought.
Two by two, male and
female, just like the Ark.

“You’re quiet,” Owen said to him, at exactly the wrong time.

“I’ll be quiet if I want to be,” Kerry snapped back.

“You’re the one who came here in the first place,” Owen said, and he sounded so calm, so damned
reasonable
, it Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

46

made Kerry feel as if he was being the unreasonable one.

Which of course made him madder.

“I didn’t come here to be nagged and ordered around.

Actually, I’m starting to wonder why I came here at all.”

“Funny, I’m wondering the same thing,” Owen said.

Laura had gone very still, her freckles standing out in her pale face. She clutched a dishtowel in white-knuckled hands.

“You want to know why I came back, Owen Fortescue?”

“It’d be nice to have some answers for a change!”

“I came back because my father’s dying, you horse’s ass,” Kerry said.

He hadn’t meant to say it like that. He wasn’t even sure if he had meant to say it at all. But there it was. The only sound was the ticking of the farmhouse’s ancient hot-water heating system. Owen stared at him, eyes wide. Then Laura gasped, “Oh, the casserole!” and yanked open the oven door.

Kerry slipped out the door into the yard. The sun had not yet set, and the farm was bathed in golden light.

“Kerry!” Owen appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kerry shot over his shoulder. “Now or ever. Leave me alone.”

If Owen had come running after him, Kerry wasn’t sure if he’d have screamed at him or fallen into his arms. But Owen left him alone, so Kerry just kept walking, across the farmyard and into the short-cropped grass of the pasture. He had no idea where he was going.
Away
.

Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

47

“IT’S not your fault, Daddy,” Laura said, not for the first time.

Her father looked up at her over an untouched plate of slightly burnt casserole. “Why didn’t he say something?”

“Because he’s Kerry. He never talks about stuff.”

Owen threw his fork down. “I should talk to him.”

“I’ll go,” Laura offered. “I need to apologize, anyway.”

“What do
you
need to apologize for?”

“Stuff,” she said vaguely. “I’ll take him something to eat.”

She found Kerry without too much trouble, sitting on one of the old stone walls at the edge of the winter pasture.

He didn’t look upset, just sad and withdrawn.

“I brought you some dinner.”

“Thank you,” Kerry said politely. He barely glanced at the covered plate she set beside him on the rock wall. “How’s Owen?”

“He’s eating dinner and complaining and feeling guilty.”

Kerry laughed softly. “Sounds like him.”

Laura hesitated, then settled herself beside him,

swinging her short legs. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Because it’s not any of your business,” Kerry said, though not unkindly.

“Of course it’s our business. We’re….” She hesitated, the word she wanted to say poised on the tip of her tongue.

Family
. But Kerry could be so—
strange
about some things.

She didn’t want to drive him away; she had the feeling he was held to the farm by the most tenuous of threads at the moment.

Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

48

“You Fortescues are born busybodies, aren’t you? Can’t stand other people having secrets?”

She was rarely on the receiving end of Kerry’s acid tongue. “It’s not nosiness,” she said, stung into more honesty than she’d intended. “It’s because you’re family, Uncle Kerry.

And family—”

Kerry barked a sharp laugh. “Family does what? Stands up for each other? Knows all your darkest secrets and loves you anyway? In sappy movies, maybe. That’s not how it works in the real world, honey. All that
family
really means is being tied to people you’d rather get away from.”

“Well, you tell me, then, why we put up with you.”

Aargh
—Laura stuffed her fist into her mouth and bit the knuckles. Sometimes she could give Owen a run for the money in the foot-in-mouth department.

For some reason, that seemed to amuse Kerry rather than offend him. “Sweetheart, I haven’t the vaguest idea. But I know what family is. That’s not what’s here for me.”

Time passed; the sun kissed the tops of the trees as long golden light slanted across the field. It was oddly companionable, as if snapping at each other had purged a bit of poison and left them able to relax in each other’s company again. At last Laura spoke.

“I had such a crush on you when I was little, you know.”

Kerry’s laugh was quiet and bitter. “Doesn’t do any good for anybody when little girls get crushes on New York fags, sweetie.”

The slur, ugly in her ears but tripping easily off his tongue, made her startle a little; then, ruefully, she returned the laugh. “I know. But you called me Sugarblossom and brought me presents. What was I supposed to think? I didn’t understand about you and Daddy, back in those days.”

Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

49

She looked at him, really looked at him in the golden evening light. Gray streaks were beginning to show in his spiked black hair. Perhaps they had been there for a long time, she thought, but he’d covered them before with dye; now he was letting them show. The slanting light picked out the network of fine lines around his eyes. Her ageless Uncle Kerry wasn’t young anymore.

“When did you realize?” he asked her, more gentle now, his bitterness put away. “About me and your dad.”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember a specific epiphany or anything like that. I just… knew, after a while. Late teens, I suppose. And you guys weren’t being as discreet around me by then….”

She didn’t mention she had felt betrayed—not by Kerry, but by her father, who had always shared everything else with her.
Team Fortescue
, he’d always said,
us against the
world
, and she had believed him. It had been a slap in the face to realize some areas of his life he kept to himself.

As he still did. And she still struggled with it.
But,
she thought,
that’s okay
. Owen was his own person, with his own life. It didn’t mean he loved her any less. It wasn’t fair to expect time to stand still for all of them, just to preserve the cozy nest of family she’d grown up with. They could all grow and change, and still be part of one another.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For everything. I’ve been selfish and unfair to you, and that’s why I really came out here, to tell you so.”

Kerry raised a hand to brush her cheek, long slender fingers with bitten painted nails, not Fortescue fingers at all.

He curled his hand to let the back of it stroke her cheek, a Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

50

kitten-light touch. There were blisters on his fingers from the day’s work.

“You know what I was thinking about, sitting out here?”

he asked.

“What were you thinking about, Uncle Kerry?” No

matter what happened between her father and Kerry, she couldn’t see herself calling him anything else. Not Dad, certainly. It was complicated. Like so many things.

“I was thinking about the first time I saw both of you, all those years ago. How small you were. How much you’ve grown. How much we’ve all changed.” He laughed, suddenly.

“Remember your baby dyke period, freshman year? You came home for Christmas with your hair buzz cut—I saw the look on your father’s face—”

“It was college,” she defended herself, and tugged on a short braid—six years’ hair growth. “You can’t grow up without trying new things to see if they fit.”

He didn’t reply to that, and she glanced at him quickly, seeing once again the tracks of age on his face, fitting poorly with the punk hairdo.

Maybe that was Kerry’s problem, she thought, or at least part of it. She’d been struggling to deal with the changes in her own life, but for Kerry it was even harder.

He’d fit himself into a skin he couldn’t outgrow. The world was moving forward. He wasn’t.

“Is your father…,” she began, hesitated, and then forced herself onward. “If you don’t mind me asking, how, um, bad is he?”

“Bad,” Kerry said. “It’s cancer. End stage.”

The word struck a very old twinge in her heart, a pain worn smooth as a river stone. “That’s what Mom died of.”

Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

51

“That’s one reason I didn’t tell you.”

Awkward silence, pregnant with uncertain emotion,

grew between them. “I’m sorry about your dad,” Laura said at last.

“Me too,” he said, and toyed with a chip of stone from the top of the wall before tossing it in a graceful arc across the pasture. “I haven’t talked to him since I was seventeen.”

Sometimes, as a child, Laura had fantasized that her mother was only fake-dead, like in a movie or a soap opera.

She had spun out a thousand fantasies—her mother could be stranded on an island after a plane crash, kidnapped by terrorists, working undercover for the U.S. government…. “I can’t imagine having parents and not talking to them,” she said, and felt the chilling of the silence on his end.

“Must be easy to be you, then,” he said tightly.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Remember when I said you couldn’t understand? You really can’t, Laura. I’m not one of your girlfriends. I’m a gay man who’s twenty years older than you. Don’t patronize me.”

Laura clasped her hands between her knees. “It seems like everything I say is wrong. I’m really sorry and I want to help; that’s all. I know that I—” She drew breath and went for honesty. Fortescues were forthright and blunt; it was who they were, who they had always been. “I haven’t always been the best at dealing with your relationship with my dad, Uncle Kerry, and I know it. It’s not the gay thing, at least I don’t think so. It’s the dad thing.”

Kerry heaved a sigh that seemed to come up from his toes. When he spoke, he sounded resigned and weary. “It’s been just the two of you all your lives. I know that.”

Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

52

“No,” Laura said firmly. She put one of her hands over his, covering the blistered fingers, the ragged black-painted nails. “That’s what I’ve been thinking all this time. Me and Daddy. Two Fortescues against the world. But it’s never been just the two of us. It’s always been the three of us. I can’t remember a time when you weren’t in our lives. And even when you aren’t here, we still talk about you. There’s ‘Kerry’s room’ and all the murals and everything. It’s not two, it’s three, and it was selfish of me to imagine otherwise. Uncle Kerry—I don’t know what family means to you. I don’t know if I can ever understand, you’re right. But… that’s what family means to
me
.”