Homespun (8 page)

Owen and Laura would be there, going through their nighttime routine. Perhaps they were arguing in the kitchen as they cleaned up. Or maybe they’d be in the living room, Owen going over the farm’s account books while Laura had her laptop on her knees, updating the website’s inventory and printing out online orders.

It would be so easy to walk across that long, dark space, to open the door onto warmth and lamplight and…

And then what? He and Owen would still want

desperately different things out of life. He still wouldn’t fit into Owen and Laura’s cozy little heteronormative, salt-of-the-earth world. Owen would still hide him away like a dirty little secret….

Now with a ring on his finger, claiming him like a prize from a breakfast cereal box and indoctrinating him into Owen’s white-bread world.

You don’t ever win by playing the game their way.

He looked down at his hand and stretched out his

fingers, still stiff from the day’s work, the blisters stinging.

Lightly he traced a fingertip around the left ring finger, shuddered, and let his hand drop.

He’d spent his whole life trying not to be encumbered.

Blazing his own path. Doing things his way. Kerry Ruehling, KayRay, guerilla artist, tattooed and pierced and 100%

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fucking queer. He’d done everything he’d been told not to do by his parents and by society. He’d gone out there and become who he was going to be, no matter what anyone said about it. He was
proud
of that. Being shunned by mainstream society meant he was doing something right.

And now, here he was at forty-two, and somehow the chains had settled on him anyway—chains of family and responsibility and pain.

Many miles away, his father was dying. Might be dead already. Owen, Kerry thought, would drop everything and go.

Because family was everything to Fortescues.

His family had never been like theirs. He wasn’t a Fortescue. But somehow, Kerry had absorbed them, or been absorbed by them.

I came up here to get away from everything. Running
away, not running to. But I ended up making both of you part
of me anyway.

He picked up one of the damp swatches of pink-

spattered wool, smoothed it with his fingers, and then tucked it into his pocket. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was something to remember the farm by, if he didn’t come back.

Maybe it was a promise that he
would
come back. All he knew was it felt right. He rearranged the other tufts of wool so the missing one didn’t leave a hole.

Then he retrieved his backpack, closed the door quietly behind him, and walked down to the road in the dark. There wouldn’t be many cars going by at this hour, but there had to be something eventually. And if not, he could just walk until the sun came up. He’d done it before.

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OWEN was a stress spinner. He always had been, ever since he and Nancy had bought their first sheep and he found himself unexpectedly hooked. Laura was more into the dyeing and fabric-arts side of things, but Owen liked the physical activity of drawing the fibers from a mass of raw wool into a tidy, useful length of yarn.

The farm’s yarn and unspun wool inventory had started out in a big antique dresser, but had quickly outgrown it and was now sorted into plastic Walmart bins, stacked to the ceiling against the living-room wall. Each was neatly labeled with the year, type of wool, dye information, and anything else that Owen and Laura thought might be pertinent. Laura kept a running tally of the number of skeins in each of the yarn bins as she sold them off.

But the actual amount of yarn and wool in the house far outstripped the storage space. Kerry had jokingly observed that you couldn’t turn around anywhere on the Fortescue place without tripping over yarn, and Owen thought he might be right, whether it was a half-finished skein, or a wad of wool with one end partly twisted into a piece of crude single-ply yarn, or any of numerous unfinished knitting, weaving and crochet projects. Most of these were Laura’s, since she was the fiber-crafter of the family, but some were Owen’s as well. Yarn, dyes, and hanks of fiber lived on shelves, in closets, on the coffee table and the living-room chairs and sometimes even the floor.

Tonight, Owen delved into one of the drawers in the old dresser. They might have long since abandoned it in favor of more up-to-date and organized storage systems, but the drawers still contained a hodgepodge of old yarns and fibers, some of it going back twenty years and more. Mashed skeins of yarn in plastic Ziploc bags. Wads of wool with dead flies in Homespun |
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it, crammed into corners. Faded colors and long-abandoned dye lots, all waiting to be rediscovered.

Owen dug out handfuls of old wool and heaped it next to the spinning wheel. There would be no commercial value in this yarn, made from mismatched fibers—some raw, others carded and dyed in colors that had lost their luster. In the worst cases, the wool was so old and badly cared for that the strands broke when he finger-separated them. He still remembered where some of the batches had come from—this was a handful of the wool Laura had dyed with Kool-Aid in second grade; that was a wad of fine black Merino left over from a fleece they’d bought long ago at a craft fair. Others baffled him. What was this slippery reddish-gold fiber with the long strands—alpaca maybe?

It didn’t matter, really. The mere act of sorting out the old fibers was the therapy he needed. Drafting the yarn through his hands, he let himself be drawn into the comfortable, familiar click-whir of the spinning wheel.

Laura padded into the living room in a bathrobe, her hair dark and matted to her head from a recent shower. “Go to bed, Daddy.”

“Need to clear my head.”

Owen dropped back into the rhythm, pausing

occasionally as the fiber snagged on the rough calluses of his mechanic’s hands. When he looked up again, she was gone.

He spun the night away, taking long pauses to oil the wheel, stretch, and make himself coffee. Dawn found him sitting on the porch with his sore hands wrapped around a hot coffee mug, watching the stars wash away as the light turned gray, then pink. Long swatches of mist hung in the yard, looking soft as carded wool in the light of dawn.

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“I still don’t know,” he said aloud to the still farmyard. “I don’t know, Ker. I want to help, and I want to be with you. I don’t know how to do either one of those things. Help me help you, love.”

He walked to the milking barn across the fog-draped yard, composing and discarding speeches in his head. He’d never been good at talking. Maybe if he gave up on words….

Maybe he could take Kerry into his arms and just hold him, like he should have done last night. If Kerry was still asleep, Owen could shuck his clothes and crawl into bed with him.

They could make this work. He still believed so.

He opened the door of the milking barn quietly—and stopped. There was a profound silence to the dark, cavernous emptiness within.

“Ker?” Owen said, and flicked on the light. It was clear no one had slept there. The bed was made. The backpack was gone.

Laura found him later, leaning on the fence and staring at the sheep as the rising sun winked through the trees. “Did you go to bed at all?” she asked.

“Kerry’s gone,” Owen said. The words rang in the

hollowness inside him.

“Oh. Daddy.” She leaned on his shoulder. “Are you

sure? Did you look—”

“I walked all over the farm. Checked all the barns. He took his things. He’s gone, Laura.”

His daughter put a hand under his stubbled chin and turned his head so she could look him in the eyes. “You know how I said I wasn’t going to give you any advice, Dad?”

“I seem to recall something along those lines.”

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“Well, here’s my one and only piece of advice. Go after him.”

Owen frowned at her. She nudged him.

“Go after him. He always leaves, and you never follow.”

“But he always comes
back
,” Owen said. “He needs time. He knows where to find us—”

“Which means he’s always the one doing the work,

Daddy. Now it’s time for you to take a turn.”

Owen could feel the solid ground starting to crumble beneath his feet. “Honey, I don’t know where to look. He could be anywhere. I guess I could start in New York City, but even that’s….” He paused. Maybe there
was
a place to look, after all. “Unless he went home.”

“To his family?”

“His father’s dying.” The more he thought about it, the more right it felt. “He grew up in the Cleveland area. As far as I know, his family’s still there.”

“So
go
.” She shook him gently. “I can take care of things here for a day or three. And I can use the old truck to get around. Hop in the car and go, Dad. Find him. Bring him home.”

CLEVELAND was a seven-hour drive from Hazel, across the rolling farm country of central New York, over the Allegheny Plateau, and down Lake Erie. It should have been a lovely trip on winding back roads, with the trees aflame in their autumn finery—
drag queens on the stage
, Kerry might have said—and little farm towns every seven or eight miles. But Owen was mostly interested in speed. The thirty-five mph signs that signaled another quaint, old downtown were Homespun |
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nothing but unwanted delays, rather than an invitation to explore, as he navigated the maze of country highways between Hazel and the interstate. Alone with his thoughts, he had more than enough time to reflect on recent events—

and to kick himself for being an old, stubborn fool.

Two hours into the drive, Laura called to tell him she’d looked up the Ruehlings in the online white pages and had found quite a few in Cleveland and nearby towns. “I’m reading their phone numbers to you now—”

“Wait, wait. Let me pull off.”

“Safety first,” Laura said, sounding amused.

“You better believe it.”

He got lucky on only the third try, catching a female Ruehling cousin on the way out the door and explaining he was a friend of Kerry’s. There was a pause before she said yes, she knew Mr. Ruehling, whom she called Uncle Bill. He was in hospice care. No, she couldn’t remember the name of the hospice, but she could ask her husband.

Owen waited while a line of trucks passed him,

shuddering the small car. Then she came back on the line and told him the name of the hospice. After another pause, directions followed.

“He’s very sick, though,” she said. “Very sick. He shouldn’t be disturbed.”

“I’m not going to disturb him,” Owen said. “I just want to pay my respects.”

It wasn’t until he hung up that he wondered what sort of “disturbing” she expected from a friend of Kerry’s.

Another hundred miles down the highway, he began to wonder why he’d said “friend” and not “boyfriend” or “fiancé.”

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68

The part of your family that you hide in the barn when
company comes?
Kerry had said, in a voice laced with bitterness.

It’s not like that,
Owen thought. But he began to wonder if Kerry really did have good reasons to feel unsure of his reception with the Fortescues, not because of anything they’d done, but what they hadn’t done.

Sometimes when you hold on too loosely, it’s as if you
aren’t holding on at all.

THE hospice was a handsome building, a rambling Victorian house with a modern frame-and-glass addition in the back.

Its grounds were well kept, though already tucked away for winter—the flowerbeds brown and bare, the rosebushes pruned and the lawn going dull.

When Owen asked after Mr. Ruehling, an attendant

showed him to the newer part of the building. Most of the doors were pulled lightly closed; those that were open revealed small, empty rooms with hospital-style beds. The attendant tapped lightly on one mostly-shut door, then pushed it open for him.

Owen had been holding it together pretty well up to this point, but the sickroom smell—chemical cleaners, with a faint underlying stink of urine and illness—hit him like a hammer blow.
Nancy
. He closed his eyes for a moment, then pushed through it and opened them again.

A handful of personal touches softened the room within, making it less clinical and more homey. The still, pale old man in the bed was the centerpiece of a simple, unplanned Homespun |
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composition: a vase of flowers, a few family photos, a scattering of dog-eared paperbacks…

And Kerry.

Until this point, Owen hadn’t quite believed Kerry would be here. But there he was, tight black T-shirt and punk hair looking even more out of place than usual.

And he wasn’t alone. A woman about Kerry’s age, with graying blonde hair and a ramrod-straight back, sat on the bed’s other side with her hands in her lap. The resemblance to Kerry was clear in her narrow, intelligent face. Neither she nor Kerry were looking at each other; the distance between them was palpably more than just the physical. Both were so lost in their own world, focused on the silent figure in the bed, that neither looked up until the attendant said, “Mr.

Ruehling? Mrs. Harris? There’s a friend here to see you.”

Owen couldn’t read the expression in Kerry’s light eyes.

Startlement, certainly. Pleasure to see him? He couldn’t tell.

“I’ll let you talk to your friend,” the woman—Kerry’s sister?—said in a voice Owen couldn’t read. There was a hesitation before “friend”; it sounded distasteful to him, but again, it was impossible to tell for sure. Like Kerry, she was very closed-off, a flat surface with deep waters beneath. She slid her thin body past him without touching.

Owen found himself wishing he’d worn a hat, brought a cup of coffee,
something
so he’d be able to occupy his hands somehow. He stood in the doorway, feeling big and clumsy and useless.