The Road Home

by Michael Thomas Ford

  Burke heard mumbling in the background.

  “Rick says to tell you hello,” said Gregg.

  “Right. Tell him to fuck off himself.”

  “Burke says hi back!” Gregg yelled. “I see that country charm has worn off on you,” he said to Burke.

  “I’m thinking of opening a B and B,” said Burke. “What’s going on in the real world?”

  Gregg sighed. “Let’s see,” he began. “Tony met some guy in P-town and was in love for two weeks, but then he decided he couldn’t overlook the back hair anymore and called it off. Dylan found e-mails on Lee’s computer that had pictures of some guy’s cock attached to them and threw a fit, although I’m not sure why, since he’s been blowing that delivery guy at his office for six months. Anyway, they’re taking a break. Abe is still single and complaining that there are no tops left in Boston, John is still single and complaining that there are no bottoms left in Boston, and a certain former male model we know and love had an eye lift and now looks like he could star in The Mikado. Oh, and Peter painted his apartment a hideous shade of brown that makes it look like he’s living inside a colon. And everyone misses you and wants you home.”

  “Naturally,” Burke said.

  He was surprised to find that while listening to Gregg, he didn’t feel homesick. Nor did he find the gossip particularly interesting, or even interesting at all. All the supposed news was nothing more than the usual antics of his circle of friends. They were always hooking up and breaking up, falling in love and out of love, changing their lovers and the colors of their apartments. Normally, he didn’t notice, as it was part of his everyday life. But having been away from it for a while, he now saw it from a distance, and he was finding the view less than breathtaking.

  “Hasn’t anyone done anything?” he asked Gregg.

  “Well, if you mean, has anyone written a novel, or built a bridge, or landed a job as Michelle Obama’s personal stylist, then no. What were you expecting?”

  Burke sighed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I was just hoping life there was more interesting than it is here.”

  “You mean it’s not?” asked Gregg.

  “Apparently,” Burke replied.

  “Well, what have you been doing?” Gregg said.

  “Taking some pictures,” said Burke. “Not much else. I still have the casts on, so I can’t do a whole lot.”

  Originally, he’d thought about telling Gregg about Will. He knew Gregg would love that story. But now he didn’t want to share it. Nor did he want to tell Gregg about Sam and the mystery of Amos Hague. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted to keep that to himself. Thinking about Gregg telling all their friends about how Burke was occupying his time out in the boonies made him irritable. He pictured them laughing over their eggs Benedict at brunch, saying how sorry they felt for poor Burke, all alone in Vermont.

  “Have you at least met some hunky maple-syrup farmer, or whatever they have there?” Gregg’s question brought him back to the conversation.

  “Not so far,” he answered. “But the big lumberjack competition is this weekend, so I might luck out.”

  Gregg laughed. “Sweetie, I’d love to chitty-chat some more, but I have to go.”

  “Lucy said you were going to be in all night,” said Burke.

  “I was,” said Gregg. “Then Lee called and asked if I wanted to go see Wicked with him. He got tickets for Dylan’s birthday, but what with the whole dirty e-mail thing, he doesn’t want to go with him, so yea for me.”

  “You’ve seen that show at least half a dozen times,” said Burke.

  “As if you could ever see it enough,” Gregg said. “I’ll give Glinda and Elphaba your love. Call me in a few days.”

  “Sure,” Burke assured him. “Bye.”

  After he hung up, he sat in the kitchen, thinking. Gregg was his best friend. They had been lovers. But now he almost felt like a stranger. And the familiar world Burke thought he missed now felt cold and empty. Did I really used to think all that shit was real life? he wondered.

  An hour before, he had been in bed with Will, thinking about how different they were. Now he was thinking the same thing about his friends, his city, his life. Nothing felt familiar anymore, or comforting. But what had changed? He was the same man he’d been the night of his accident, the same man who had come into his father’s house a month before. And yet he wasn’t. But who was he? More important, where did he belong?

  He got up and went upstairs. Standing in the doorway of his room, he looked at what was left of his childhood. He’d left all of that behind to go into the world and find out who he was. Now he wondered if he’d ever really figured it out.

  CHAPTER 21

  “So then Luke decides he’s going to ‘accidentally’ fall into the canal, like Katharine Hepburn in Summertime.”

  Luke held up his hand, interrupting Colton’s story. “In my defense, nobody ever bothered to tell me that Hepburn contracted an eye infection from the water and had problems with it the rest of her life.”

  “Yes, well,” said Colton, suppressing a smile, “the gondolier was nice enough to catch him before he went overboard.”

  The rest of the table laughed, Burke included. They were seated around the table in Sam’s dining room. There were six of them: Colton and Luke, Sam, Burke, and Nan and Sophie. The latter were a lesbian couple in their forties. Nan, Burke had learned, taught English literature at a high school, and Sophie was a chef. She had a small restaurant specializing in French food.

  “It was a perfect honeymoon,” Luke said.

  “Fifteen years late, but worth waiting for,” Colton agreed. He looked at Nan and Sophie. “So when are you two going to tie the knot?”

  “Nan doesn’t want to,” said Sophie, sipping from her glass of wine. “She says it’s buying into the heterosexual-relationship model.”

  Nan rolled her eyes and shook her head. “That’s not it,” she said. “I want to wait until everyone can get married, in every state. Besides, I still believe polyamory is the way to go.”

  “Polyamory?” said Sam. “Since when?”

  “Just because I don’t practice it doesn’t mean I don’t believe it works,” Nan replied.

  Sophie said, “She just doesn’t want you to know about the three other women she’s sleeping with.” As everyone laughed, she leaned over and gave her partner a kiss on the cheek. “My little tramp,” she joked.

  Luke looked across the table at Burke. “Do you have a boyfriend back home?” he asked.

  Burke shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “I don’t seem to do relationships very well.”

  “You sound like Sam,” said Luke. “I can’t remember the last time he had a date.” He thought for a moment. “Yes, I can. It was with that Radical Faerie you met at Camp Destiny. The Midsummer gathering.”

  “That was a year ago,” Colton said. “And I wouldn’t exactly call it a date. What did you do? Paint each other with mud and do a spiral dance or something?”

  Sam, looking uncomfortable, glared at his friends. “No, we did not paint each other with mud.”

  “Did you know Sam is a pagan?” Luke asked Burke.

  Burke shook his head. “It hasn’t come up.” He glanced at Sam, who appeared to be doing his best to disappear. At least now I know for sure that he’s gay.

  “I suppose he hasn’t shown you his book, either,” Sophie said.

  “Book?” Burke said, interested. “No, he hasn’t.”

  “Sam published a book of short stories with pagan themes,” Nan explained. “It’s called In the Wood of the Holly King.”

  “I’d like to read that,” Burke said to Sam.

  “It’s not a big deal,” Sam said, looking at his plate. “Just a small press.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Sam doesn’t like to talk about himself,” Colton said.

  “‘We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak,’” Sam quoted. “Besides, I invited Burke here to meet all of you. He
already knows me.”

  “Apparently not as well as he should,” said Sophie. She shot Burke a smile.

  She’s trying to set us up, Burke thought. But that wasn’t going to happen. Sam Guffrey was definitely not his type. He was a great guy, but he was so odd. Burke didn’t know what to make of him.

  “Sam showed me some of your photos,” said Colton. “I really like them. He said you might want to do a show.”

  “I don’t know,” Burke told him. “I don’t really have enough pieces, and I’m not sure this is the right place for—”

  He was cut off by a collective “Oooooh” from the two couples at the table. Surprised, he looked around.

  “You think we’re not cosmopolitan enough,” said Sophie.

  “No,” Burke said quickly. “It’s not that. I just—”

  Sophie raised her hand, stopping him. “It’s okay,” she said. “I thought the exact same thing when I moved here.”

  “Sophie lived in Chicago,” Nan explained. “She and I met when I was there for a teaching conference. We dated long distance for a year, then decided one of us needed to move.”

  “I thought it would be her,” said Sophie. “I mean, I thought it was beautiful here and everything, but move here? I couldn’t imagine it.”

  “How did you convince her?” Burke asked Nan.

  “I told her it was move here or else,” she said.

  “Actually, I agreed to try it for six months,” Sophie told him. “I kept my apartment in Chicago, got the owner of the restaurant I worked at to give me the time off, and came here, fully expecting I’d be able to convince this one to come back to Chicago with me.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  Sophie pushed her hair behind her ear. “I fell in love,” she said.

  “Awwwwww,” said Nan, rubbing her shoulders.

  “Not with you, with the place,” Sophie joked. “Really, it was that simple. One day I woke up. It was February, I think. I’d moved here in October, and I think it started snowing about five minutes after Nan picked me up at the airport.”

  “Lies,” Nan said. “It was at least a week later.”

  “It snowed pretty much every day,” Sophie continued. “I grew up in Chicago. I thought I knew winter. But this was winter. I was literally counting the days until my six months were up. Then one morning I woke up, looked out the bedroom window at the seventeen feet of snow, and thought, ‘This is the most beautiful place in the world, and I can be completely happy here.’”

  “It was cabin fever,” said Luke.

  “I’m serious,” Sophie objected. “I knew that although this was never the place I’d imagined when I’d thought about where my life would take me, it was the right place all along. I just needed to see that.”

  “I had a similar experience,” Colton chimed in. “I used to have a gallery in New York. In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen your work,” he told Burke. “Years ago I worked at Charles Geary’s gallery in SoHo. I remember you had two pieces in a show we did.”

  “That’s right,” Burke said. “I’d forgotten about that. It was something about faces of the city, I think.”

  Colton nodded. “Yours were two of the best. Anyway, a year or two later I was dating this guy who loved to ski.”

  “Philip,” Luke said. “And he didn’t like to ski. He liked to go antiquing and say he was going skiing.”

  “True,” Colton agreed. “Anyway, one weekend we came here to ski. We had a miserable time. I didn’t like skiing, didn’t like antiquing, and, I discovered, really didn’t like Philip. I was so glad to get back to New York and civilization. I dumped Philip, and Luke and I started dating that summer. Fourth of July weekend was coming up. It had been unbearably hot for days and days, and New York smelled like the Dumpster behind a fast-food restaurant.”

  “It was vile,” Luke agreed. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there. My friends had invited us to their place on Fire Island.”

  “And mine had invited us to their place in Provincetown,” said Colton, taking back control of the story. “We couldn’t decide where we wanted to go. Then I realized I didn’t want to go to either place. I was considering it only because it was what you did. If you lived in New York and were gay, on the weekend of the Fourth you went to Fire Island or Provincetown. I just couldn’t do it. Out of the blue I suggested Vermont.”

  “At which point I felt certain I would have to break up with him,” Luke said.

  Colton nodded. “But I talked him into it. I found a little inn that still had rooms, we rented a car and drove up, and we had an amazing time.”

  “Didn’t think about P-town or the Pines once,” said Luke.

  “This time when we drove back to the city, I didn’t feel like I was getting back to civilization,” Colton said. “I felt like I was going back into a cage.”

  “I felt the same way,” Luke agreed. “But I didn’t want to say anything, because I thought Colton would think I’d gone mad. After all, New York is the most important city in the world, right? People would kill to live there, and once you’re in, you don’t think about leaving. Ever.”

  “Only I couldn’t stop thinking about the place,” Colton continued. “We had found some great little restaurants here, and two not bad galleries showing local artists. We saw a great production of Twelfth Night, put on by a local company. I kept thinking that it would be nice to open a gallery myself, something that would encourage an artistic community, instead of just preying on it. Still, I couldn’t let go of the whole New York thing.”

  “At some point you did, though,” Burke said.

  “Labor Day weekend,” said Luke. “I’d been thinking about coming back, too. When the whole ‘where should we go’ conversation started, I said, ‘What about Vermont?’ Colton pretended to think it was a compromise, but on the drive up here he started talking, and before we’d hit the border, he’d admitted that he’d been thinking about what it would be like to live here.”

  “It took a year to actually do it,” Colton said. “I had to find a space, we had to find a house, and Luke had to convince his boss to let him work from here.”

  “I was doing financial bullshit,” Luke explained. “Making money for people who already had too much of it. After six months here I quit and opened a pet boutique. High-end bowls and toys, organic food, hideous sweaters. That kind of thing. I thought it would last a month. It’s been almost fifteen years.”

  “Paws to Consider,” said Colton. “Your one-stop shop for the discerning doggy.”

  “And persnickety pussy,” Luke added.

  “Their point,” said Nan, “is that they all came here with ideas about what it’s like. And they were wrong.”

  “What about you?” Burke asked her.

  “I’ve never lived in a big city,” she answered. “So this felt like home to me from the beginning.”

  “Well, I did grow up here,” Burke said. “And I couldn’t wait to get out. I have a hard time seeing it the way you all do.”

  “Maybe you need to see yourself differently,” Luke suggested. “Not this place.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Armchair Psychiatrist,” said Colton, patting Luke’s hand.

  “Who wants dessert?” Sam asked, standing up. He began picking up plates. Sophie joined him, as did Luke.

  “Ignore Luke,” Colton said to Burke as the trio went into the kitchen. “But do think about doing a show. I can’t promise you a write up in the Times and collectors snapping you up because someone else tells them to, but I can promise you an appreciative audience and a wine-and-cheese opening night.”

  “Wine and cheese?” said Burke. “I may just have to think about it, after all.”

  “Please do,” Colton said.

  Sam returned, carrying two plates, one of which he set in front of Burke. On it was a beautiful little pie in a ceramic dish. On top of the pie was a scoop of ice cream.

  “Sophie made the pies,” Sam said as Luke and Sophie emerged from the kitchen wit
h two plates each.

  “Three are peach and three are apple,” Sophie said. “Enjoy.”

  Burke pushed his fork into the pie, breaking the crust and releasing the smell of peaches. He took a forkful, added some ice cream, and put it in his mouth. It was delicious. Around the table the others made moans of pleasure as well.

  “Who got peach?” Sophie asked.

  Nan, Burke, and Colton lifted their forks. “I bet the apple is just as fantastic,” Colton said.

  “See for yourself,” said Luke, holding out a forkful of his pie.

  Colton accepted it, closing his eyes while he chewed. “I think I’m in love,” he said after swallowing. “I could marry that pie.”

  “According to the anti-gay marriage crowd, that’ll be next,” said Nan. “Pies and sheep.”

  Burke looked at Sam. He had eaten half of his pie. “You should try the peach,” Burke said.

  Sam picked up his plate and exchanged it with Burke’s. “There,” he said. “The best of both worlds.”

  As Burke took a bite of the apple pie, he noticed Luke looking at him. Then Luke switched his gaze to Sam. A smile played across his lips, but he didn’t say anything.

  After dinner they moved from the dining room to the living room, where talk turned to everything from current movies to politics to their favorite childhood games. A lively debate ensued between Luke and Nan over the merits of Chutes and Ladders versus Candy Land, and Burke used the opportunity to make a trip to the bathroom. On the way back he looked into the kitchen, where Sam was rinsing dishes.

  “I’d offer to help, but I’m more likely to break something,” Burke said. “Shouldn’t you be out there, anyway?”

  “I stay out of the board-game controversy,” Sam said. “Besides, I’m just rinsing these off. If they dry, they’re impossible to wash.”

  Burke leaned against the counter, taking the weight of his leg off his crutch. “So, when were you going to tell me that you’re a celebrated author?” he asked.

  Sam chuckled. “It’s really not a big deal,” he said. “But if you want to read the book, I’ll find you a copy. I have a box of them somewhere around here.”