While mine felt like it was ending one second at a time.
I shook myself out of my self-decorated and catered pity party and decided to take advantage of a rare lull at the shop. I locked the front door and jogged across the street to the diner. It was overrun with the usual lunch crowd, but it wasn’t so big a place that I couldn’t see where they were sitting from the door.
Out of breath, I slid into the booth and announced, “I need some help.” My mouth was dry, and I realized I was so worked up I was close to having a panic attack. I grabbed Brad’s Coke and downed it, trying to calm down.
“Hey,” Brad said, scooting over to give me some room. “Um, help yourself.”
I nodded as I finished the drink. “Thanks.” I looked across the table and smiled. “Hey, Kyle.”
Kyle waved back, still half shocked that I had crashed their date.
“So what’s up?” Brad asked, probably wondering if I was having a heart attack or something.
I felt my mind start to lock up as the familiar fear of being found out came back full force. Before I was completely crippled, I blurted out, “My mom is trying to set up me with someone.”
Brad looked at me, confused. “Your mom? I thought she lived in Florida.”
I heard myself snap at him. “She does, but she still owns a phone.” I mentally berated myself immediately—he hadn’t done a thing to me. That thought was followed by the humbling fact that I was a grown man talking to two teenagers about my love life because I didn’t have any gay friends my own age.
I was truly pathetic.
Brad paused for a moment before asking me in a neutral voice, “Okay, so who is she trying to set you up with?”
“Matt Wallace,” I said, picking a piece of ice out of the glass.
“I don’t know him. He’s from here?” he asked, no doubt curious because he hadn’t heard the gay population of Foster had doubled overnight.
“He’s from here, but he doesn’t live here,” I corrected him. “We kind of went to high school together. He lives in San Francisco.”
“Your mom is trying to set you up with a guy who lives in another state?” Kyle asked.
I nodded. “Well, he’s coming back for Christmas; his parents still live here.”
“So she’s more setting you up for casual sex,” Brad clarified. Kyle and I just gaped at him. “What? It’s not like you’re going to date him for a week.” Neither one of us said a word. “Come
on
! Like I am the only one here who knows what a hookup is.”
I shook my head slowly. “I’m pretty sure my mom is not trying to set me up with a hookup.” Even though the same thought had crossed my mind a few times.
He shrugged. “Okay, so then what’s your problem?”
“I don’t know if I should meet him,” I said as Gayle brought them their food.
“Oh! Hey Tyler, you eating?” she asked, surprised to see me sitting with them. Gayle had run Nancy’s forever. When I was Brad and Kyle’s age, I remembered her working the counter. The only differences between then and now were her hair was a little grayer and there were more lines around her eyes. She seemed like a fixed point that held Foster together. Even though I had never said word one about my sexuality to her, I was pretty sure she knew everything there was to know about my life, sexual preference included.
“I’m not staying that long, but thanks,” I said, giving her a smile.
“Okay. Guys, here are your burgers. Holler if you need anything,” she called over her shoulder as she walked to another table.
As soon as she was gone, I sighed. “I mean, you’re right, I can’t date him for a few days. But God, it sucks being gay here.” I picked at Brad’s plate, eating a fry and making an effort not to get too maudlin.
“Have you tried online?” Kyle asked, putting ketchup on his burger.
“Ugh,” I said, eating another fry. “Complete waste of time.”
“So then meet him,” Brad offered.
“But what if I like him?” I asked honestly.
“So then don’t meet him,” Brad suggested, grabbing his burger. I was pretty sure he thought I was going to eat it too.
“But, God, Christmas sucks when someone’s alone.” I sighed again. God, I sounded like a moping teenager.
“So then meet him, but as a friend,” Kyle suggested brightly. “There’s nothing saying you have to date or have sex with him. But you can make a new friend and see where that goes.”
“Yeah, that’s an idea,” I agreed between fries. “Actually, a really good idea.”
Kyle made sense, a lot of sense, actually. For some reason the option of just meeting Matt as a friend had never crossed my mind. All I had been focused on was “What if I fell in love?” and all that crap. What was wrong with me? “You know? I mean, who said it has to be all or nothing?”
“Well, you did,” Kyle countered bluntly. I looked over at him and he added, “You did! All your mom is saying is that there’s going to be another gay person in Foster over Christmas. You’re the one imbuing it with more importance than it deserves. To be honest, that says more about you than it does about your mom.”
I had known he was smart; Linda couldn’t brag enough about her genius son when we went out. This was the first time I had been on the receiving end of Kyle’s intellect. I had always assumed she’d been bragging as parents tended to do. But looking at him staring back at me, I realized he was special. Jokingly I said to Brad, “You date someone this smart? You are a braver man than I am. But you’re right; my mom is just trying to be nice and I completely misread it.” I looked at Kyle and asked him seriously, “Do I seem that lonely?”
Without a second’s hesitation, he answered, “Yes.”
That took me aback, literally. I kicked back in the booth, not expecting that quick an answer. Was it that obvious? Was I that pathetic?
I really hated that the answer might be yes to both questions.
“Yeah. Maybe meeting this guy isn’t such a good idea,” I said after a while. “If I’m this wound up, I’m just going to mess things up.” Looking at Kyle, I grinned. “Good call.”
“Thanks,” he said, taking a drink of his tea. “Let me ask you something. Why not go out with Robbie?”
Oy! Again with Robbie. Looks like I am going to go over those memories no matter how much I don’t want to.
Explaining Robbie will take some time, so bear with me as I try to thumbnail it for you. When I came back to Foster after my accident, I was torn between two opposing desires. The first was to remain hidden so no one would know I was gay. The second was the crushing loneliness I felt when I lay in my bed staring up at my ceiling. At first, it was easy: just shut up, ignore it, and hope it would all just figure itself out.
Time passed, and all that happened was it got worse.
Shortly after my mini-meltdown when I came out to my parents, I found out about the Bear’s Den. It’s a small gay bar on the outskirts of town, the only gay bar for almost a hundred miles around. It’s where most of the gay people in the sleepy little towns around Foster got to socialize and meet. I heard about it when Riley, a friend of mine I went to high school with, came to the shop saying he was moving back into town.
Riley was one of those rare guys who was a jock but smart. And no one hated him for it. Everyone liked him, but no one ever felt like they knew what lay behind his hazel eyes. When people talked about him, I felt they were talking about me when they brought up the way he kept people at arm’s length. Riley was one of those people you wanted to know more about because he was a private person, and I could relate. I had crushed on him, as I had with every other guy I played football with, but never moved on it. So when he came to the store and told me he was moving back into town with his lover, Robbie, it kind of floored me.
Riley’s dad was into oil in some way or another, maybe distribution, maybe actual production, but something with a lot of money about it. The family had more than enough money to be considered wealthy around these parts, more than enough money to send their son out of state for college, which was where he met this Robbie guy. Riley explained all this to me over a Coke while he asked how my parents were and what I had been up to. We caught up on lost time as I resisted the urge to just blurt out “I never knew you were gay.” Instead, I sat there nodding and smiling, dazed. It wasn’t until he was done and said I should head out to the Bear’s Den to meet Robbie one night that I realized he knew. Somehow he knew I was gay and was throwing me a lifeline.
You know what? I was right. I’m not ready to keep going down that path right now. Let’s just say that Robbie and I do not get along.
“He isn’t my biggest fan. Besides, I don’t think we’re each other’s type,” I said cryptically.
Kyle leaned forward. “What type is that?”
I paused for a second, wondering how much he knew. “What did he tell you about me?”
“Kyle is working for him,” Brad interjected quickly. “At his store.”
“Oh,” I grunted, knowing that was a bad thing. “Well, then, I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about me so far.” I was about to ask how much Robbie had told him when I noticed a couple of people standing in front of my shop peeking in the window. “Damn it, I knew I couldn’t leave the store for more than five minutes.” I got up. “We’ve been swamped, and I’ve had zero time to think about this.” I laid a twenty on the table. “That’s to make up for me eating all your food.” I was about to walk out when a thought hit me. Turning to Brad, I asked, “Hey, you need a job?”
“Me?”
I laughed and pointed to Kyle. “Well, he already has one.”
“Um, yeah I guess,” he replied after a few seconds.
“Awesome! Come by after lunch and I’ll start training you.” I looked at Kyle and then back at Brad. “And you were right, this one is a keeper.” I saw Kyle redden slightly as I walked toward the door.
Kyle jumped up. “Mr. Parker, wait!” He hurried over to me. “Can I ask you a question?”
I saw Brad watching us curiously. I nodded. “Sure, what’s up?”
“Have you heard anything about Kelly Aimes?”
I paused and tried to connect the name with a face. Kelly Aimes sounded familiar but honestly, a lot a kids went through the shop and I never caught their name. “Which one is he?” I asked.
“Big guy, plays football. Friend of Brad’s? Dark hair?” he described.
And suddenly the name clicked for me. Kelly had been Brad’s shadow since junior high. Yeah, right—Kelly Aimes—big kid, played good ball. I shook my head. “No, what should I have heard?”
He just shook his head. “Nothing. I was just curious.”
I was about to press the point when I saw a couple more people walk up to the front of the shop. “Shit. I have to go. Everything okay?” I asked him.
He gave me a pretty good fake smile and nodded. “It’s all good, thanks.”
It was pretty obvious that “it” was all not good; but I didn’t have the time to dwell on Kyle’s question. I jogged across the street, and, within an hour, all my thoughts consisted of ways to get through the day. In fact, it was a couple of days before I was able to find enough time to hang out with Linda and ask her about it.
“So I had a talk with Kyle,” I said over our third beer.
She nodded. “I heard. He asked me how hard it was for you to be that cute and secretly be gay. He couldn’t understand how some girl didn’t figure it out.”
“And what did you say?” I asked, knowing she was setting me up.
“I told him some girl did figure it out. Me.” She gave me a bratty smile, and I stuck my tongue out at her. “So, you make a decision on the Wallace boy yet?”
“Your son seems of the opinion that I am overthinking it,” I commented between sips.
She chuckled. “My son seems to have nailed the problem in one. Admit it, he has, hasn’t he?”
I grumbled before I finished my beer. “He might have a small point.”
“Oh no! He is completely, 100 percent correct, and you know it.” She sounded so smug, it killed me because she was right. I hated it when she was right because it usually meant I was wrong since we didn’t agree on much. “You, as always, have that four-cylinder brain working overtime making a simple problem a thousand times more complicated. You need to decide if you are going to meet him or not, and then just stick with it, because if you keep thinking about it, a gear is going to burst out of your forehead and kill someone.”
“I am not going to kill someone,” I mumbled.
I
didn’t even believe what I was saying at that point.
“I didn’t say you were going to kill someone, I implied that you were going to get so frustrated that a literal cog would bust out of your head, fly across the room at terminal velocity, and strike another human being, doing serious injury and ending their life.” I looked at her in disbelief and she added, “Just to be clear.”
I asked her sarcastically, “Have I informed you lately that I hate you?”
She shrugged. “It’s a given.”
I nodded as we finished our beer.
“So Kyle quit his job,” she said in the gap.
That got my attention. “The one with Robbie?” I asked, trying not to seem too interested.
“Yes, that one.” She rolled her eyes. “Are you happy now? One more person is on the ‘Robbie is an asshole’ bandwagon.”
“I never said Robbie was an asshole,” I informed her, wishing I sounded as if I really meant the words. However, Linda knew the truth.
“Oh please, you guys have never gotten along and you know it.”
In her eyes, that was how she had always seen things between Robbie and me, though the truth was something much stranger than fiction.
I
HAD
taken Riley up on his offer to visit the Bear’s Den and meet his new partner Robbie the weekend after he came to see me. The bar itself did not fill me with a warm fuzzy feeling when I pulled into the gravel parking lot, but I parked anyway. It looked like every bar in a movie where someone gets killed, raped, or both. I sat in my car for almost an hour trying to convince myself to open the door and get out.
I refused to move.
I knew if I got out of my car and walked in to the Bear’s Den, everything would change. I was no longer curious; I was no longer confused. If I walked through that doorway, I would no longer be some homosexual version of Schroeder’s cat—is that right? Wait. Schroeder was the character from
Peanuts
. I meant Schrödinger’s cat, which is some weird thought question they ask in physics. I have no idea what it really means, but my roommate in college tried to explain it to me once. You put this cat in a box with a vial of poison and close the box. Now as long as the box is closed the cat is not dead, which sounds crazy but it goes like this—the cat is alive until someone sees it is dead, so the second it is observed it is made real. Until then, you can just guess that the cat is dead.