by Sidney Bell
He lowers his voice even more because the last thing he needs is someone overhearing. “Yes, I’m still sober.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean—”
“Yeah, you did. But it’s fine.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Mom. It’s fine. I don’t blame you for asking.” He tries to say it gently. He even mostly means it.
She sighs. “Good. Okay. Good. Sorry.”
“You and dad are good? Healthy?”
“Your dad has diabetes,” she says.
His knees go weak. “Is he—he’s—is it bad?”
“It’s well-controlled. He doesn’t like the diet, but you know how he is.”
His father has always been a big believer that vegetables were only put on a plate to keep the gravy from your mashed potatoes from getting all over your steak. “How’s he dealing with the diagnosis?”
Yet another long pause. “He’s—he was diagnosed a few years ago. He’s fine. It’s only—you asked after his health, and that’s part of it.”
They didn’t call him. He rubs a hand over his head. He’s not sure why that surprises him. Why it hurts. Of course they didn’t call him. That’s the whole point of estrangement, after all. Not having to call. “Right.”
She clears her throat. It sounds uncomfortable. “And you? You’re healthy?”
“Yeah.” He glances around the store again. The lights seem really bright and fake today. “I run every day.”
“How’re your knees?”
He laughs softly. “Getting a little temperamental these days, if I’m honest.”
“Maybe you could switch out a few days a week with something low-impact.”
“I’ve been thinking about cycling, but I don’t know if I really want to do it.”
“I have a friend who cycles. Well. The exercise bike. She likes it though. You probably would too. What’s keeping you from trying?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t ridden a bicycle in... God, decades. All I need is to fall and break my face in front of someone who has their phone out. The internet would love that.”
“Oh. Right. Maybe...uh, rock climbing?”
“Rock climbing?”
“It’s good for your arms, I’d suppose.”
What are they even talking about? “You always used to say that rock climbers were taking their lives in their hands.”
“You seemed to think it was interesting, though,” she says, tone going defensive.
“Yeah, but you said no.” He distinctly remembers a conversation they had back when he was a Boy Scout, when his troop was going to a climbing gym and she wouldn’t sign the permission slip. “You said it was dangerous.”
“I’m sure that the equipment is very safe—”
“Mom, what’s going on?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“Why?”
She makes a sound then that has him gripping the casing of his phone tighter. He’s opening his mouth to ask if she’s okay when she says, “Because you’re my son and I don’t know you. I don’t—I don’t like this. I worry about you. I suppose you don’t believe me, but I do.”
He rubs his forehead again. “I believe you.”
“All right.”
“Why now, though?”
“No particular reason.”
“Right.”
“There isn’t,” she insists.
He gives up. He’s never won an argument with her in his life. Not much point in trying now. “Okay.”
“How’s work?”
“It’s fine.”
“And Zac?” she asks uncertainly, as if she doesn’t know if she’s remembering Zac’s name right, which is ridiculous, because she’s met Zac multiple times. Then he realizes why she’s hesitant—she isn’t sure that Cal and Zac are still friends as well as bandmates. She must think that Cal’s drinking probably torched that relationship too.
He’s kind of tempted to laugh. There’s an irony in her concern when he’s pretty sure he’s going to be receiving a proposal this coming weekend. Zac and Anya have been whispering behind their hands a lot lately, giving him innocent faces, walking out of the room to answer phone calls where he can’t hear. Anya keeps asking him if carnations are really and truly his favorite flower, keeps telling him how disappointed she is in his lack of style and taste, complaining about how embarrassing it is for her to admit to a florist that yes, she does actually want carnations. Not that it’s any of Cal’s business what those carnations are for, of course.
Cal fucking loves it.
But he can’t say any of that. His mother would assume he was drinking again. Or that his upcoming marriage won’t be real. Or that there’s something degenerate about all of them. She’d worried about him when he moved to LA for that very reason. All he heard about for months beforehand was how dangerous the city could be, how much trouble he could get into, particularly in the music scene. She went on a lot about drugs. She hadn’t thought to mention liquor.
“Zac’s good.” He pauses. “He’s married now. And has a son.”
“Oh?” She sounds doubtful. It irritates the holy hell out of him.
“Yeah. He got really lucky. Anya’s amazing. We’ve become really close friends and she’s incredibly supportive.” If that comes out sounding a bit like a dig, well, it’s too late to fix it now. “And he’s a great father. Patient and loving. PJ’s a happy kid.”
She clears her throat. “I’m very pleased for him.”
“I’ll pass it along.”
“And you? Are you...” She clears her throat again. “Are you seeing any nice girls?”
He can’t do this. He can’t open up a whole box of thoughts and feelings for her that he’s only just begun to make sense of himself, not at her whim, because she finally bothered to call. It feels alarmingly good to be talking to her, but he’s also got a whole vat of anger brewing that he has no idea how to deal with. He’s not sure he’s allowed to be angry, that it’s reasonable or fair for this anger to exist when he was the one who failed them all in the first place, but the anger is here all the same.
He says, “You know, uh, I’m in the grocery store.”
“Oh. That’s—do you have to go?”
“I should. Uh. Ice cream’s melting.” Not that there’s any ice cream in his cart. There’s only a dozen jars of baby food. Peaches, bananas and pears. PJ has a sweet tooth that rivals Cal’s. Anya makes wry comments about it actually. Further proof that he’s your son. It gives Cal a desperate, grateful sense of greedy happiness every time he hears it. He hasn’t dared to call PJ his son out loud himself yet, but he’s thought it. He’s thought it a lot.
He can’t tell his mother about that either. And really, if he can’t be honest about his son, what’s the point? “Sorry. It’s not a great time.”
“No, I hate to keep you. I already—anyway. I’ll let you go.”
“Okay.”
But then neither of them hang up, not even when the long pause stretches into something anxious. It takes having someone come down the bread aisle, to force Cal to move his cart to the side, to say excuse me, for his mother to say, “I can tell you’re busy. I’ll let you go.”
“Yeah. I should...” He’s trying to think of whether he should say I love you or not. He does love her. But he’s afraid that she won’t say it back. And it seems like even if she did say it back, it would ring hollow. Surely if they meant it when they said it before, it wouldn’t be something they could go almost seven years without repeating.
“I’ll talk to you soon,” she says, while he’s thinking, and his brain stops short in his skull. He would think he has a concussion from that abrupt halt if it wasn’t for the fact that he hasn’t actually been moving.
“Uh,” he manages.
“Soon,” she insists. “Your father says hello. Take care.”
She pauses one more time. “I love you, Calvin.”
“Uh,” he says again, and tries to make the nerves that lead to his mouth do something, but it doesn’t much matter. She’s hung up. She didn’t give him a chance to say it back—or not. He adds a healthy dose of appreciation for her consideration to the messy soup of feelings bubbling inside him.
He puts his phone away. He’s been squishing the loaf of bread in his hand. No one else will buy it looking like this. He winces and puts it in his basket, then grabs a second, unsquished loaf for Anya. He’ll eat the mangled one himself so it doesn’t go to waste.
The call grates on his nerves as he finishes shopping. His distraction is such that he forgets several things on his list and doesn’t realize until he’s checking his phone in the car and has to go back in to pick them up, mindful of the melting ice cream—bought primarily because otherwise it means he’s a liar—in the trunk. He’s lucky he doesn’t get into an accident on the way home.
When he walks into the kitchen, Anya’s making dinner—there’s chicken in the oven that smells fantastic and she’s at the table, bent over a big glass serving bowl of spinach-and-pear salad, glaring at the contents and mumbling about the ratio of red onion to pear. The first time she made it for him, Cal was dubious at best about the combination of flavors. It’s one of his favorites now. Zac is beside her making stupid faces at PJ to get him to eat.
He bends to kiss Anya’s cheek and gets a grope on the ass from Zac. He brushes a hand over PJ’s head so that the baby—his son—beams up at him with a big smile, three nubby white teeth showing.
He unpacks the groceries and reminds himself that you have to begin as you mean to go on. He’s going to have an engagement ring on his left ring finger any day now, and he intends to live up to what it will stand for. No more secrets. No walls.
Cal takes a deep breath, braces himself, and says, “Hey, can I talk to you guys about something kind of important?”
Anya straightens, her gaze going wide and curious, even as Zac’s eyebrows climb into his hairline.
“Will wonders never cease?” Zac asks, probably only half-joking. “He can be taught.”
“Shut up.” Elbowing him, Anya turns a sweet smile on Cal. “Of course, Cal, you can tell us anything.”
And it turns out she’s right.
Part Three
Epilogue
Zac
It’s Anya’s turn to pick the movie, and predictably she chooses some aesthetically gorgeous but boring piece of art house fluff. Zac loves his wife but she has terrible taste in movies. He gets it ready to stream under protest, telling her about all his firsthand experience with critics being stupid and pretentious and having no sense of fun, but Anya ignores him, sailing into the kitchen. As much as a seven-months-pregnant woman can sail, anyway, not that he would ever, under pain of death, suggest otherwise.
“Cal!” Zac bellows up the stairs, and he gets a distant yell of acknowledgment back.
Zac finds PJ toddling down the hall, and he scoops his son up and keeps going, applying wild raspberries to PJ’s neck and grinning at the maniacal child laughter he gets in response. In the kitchen, he pauses, toddler thrown half over his shoulder, and jerks his chin toward the ceiling and the man upstairs. “Should we intervene?”
“He’s fine.” Anya’s eating a carrot stick and watching the popcorn spin in the microwave. Pop. Pop. Pop.
“He’s been up there for two hours.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t insane. Just that he’s fine.”
“Fine and insane are contradictory terms.”
She lifts a hand, wobbles it back and forth. “Depends on the task at hand.”
“Buying airline tickets is not that hard a task.”
“How would you know? Have you ever bought a plane ticket in your life?”
“Yes. No. Yes? I think so. I mean, I’ve been on a plane. Obviously.” He shrugs. This sort of thing is why people have managers.
She snorts. “You’re lucky you’re pretty.”
“Nice. That’s lovely. I appreciate your respect.”
“Aw. Did I hurt your feelings? I’m sorry, baby. You’re really smart. You’re smart and pretty. You’re so damn pretty, Zac, baby, sweetie, snookums.”
“Stop trying to seduce me with all that dirty talk. I already told you I’m not having sex with you again.” Zac juggles the kid so he can hold two fingers up in the shape of an awkward cross to ward her off. She sneers, as if to say that such a weak talisman could never hold her off. He has to admit she’s right. He eyes her warily.
He’s managed, somehow, to forget about how horny she got during her second trimester with PJ. He’s pretty sure this time around is worse. Seems like every couple of days, Anya’s grabbing him and Cal by the collars, throwing them on the bed, and devouring them. It’s terrifying, both the sense of being out of control and the worry that he might not be able to give her what she needs. She turns into some mystical being lost to a rhythm and music coming from deep inside her that only she can hear, a goddess bent on feeding, unknowable and far too powerful for his puny masculine strength to keep up with. It’s outrageously hot, but he also feels a little like a bug about to hit a windshield, and he still isn’t sure if several of the best orgasms of his life are a fair trade-off.
Between him and Cal, they always manage to satisfy her, but sex these days leaves them both drained and exhausted, sprawled across the bed and weakly begging for mercy. Pregnancy hormones are no joke.
He’s getting hard from thinking about it, but he also sort of wants to take a big step back so he’s got a head start. “Seriously. I think Cal’s afraid of you. You’re going to your grave without having sex again. Give it up.”
“Like I’d sleep with you anyway.” She throws a carrot at him. It bounces off his forehead, making PJ laugh. “I’ve reached the next stage. If you touch me, I’ll kill you.”
“Oh, thank God,” he sighs, and goes to give her a hug. “I’m forty years old, woman. There are limits to what my dick can do these days.” He pauses. “Don’t tell Cal I said that.”
“First thing I’m gonna do.”
He pretends to be wounded, hoping she might take pity on him. “You’re more beast than woman, Animal.”
“Yep.” She eats another carrot, unconcerned about his pride. “Brought that one on yourself, pal. Pick up that carrot from the floor, will you? Do we live in a barn?”
He sighs. He should’ve known. She doesn’t have a single bone in her body capable of pity. He wishes that weren’t so attractive. He kisses her cheek, resigned to Cal giving him that face, the one that says he’s laughing at you inside his head, behind his polite Midwestern blandness. He picks up the floor carrot and starts thinking about how he can convince Cal that there really aren’t limitations to Zac’s dick.
The microwave bell dings.
“Yessssss,” Anya hisses, yanking the door open. The smell of butter billows out into the room, thick and heady. “Come to mama.”
Zac puts PJ down when he starts to squirm, and figures that means he doesn’t have an excuse not to get drinks for everyone. He glances up at the ceiling again. Bellows, “Cal! Get your skinny ass down here!”
There’s another faint yell of acknowledgment.
“Really?” Anya asks, unimpressed, with a pointed nod at their toddler, who is fortunately banging a truck into the wall and ignoring his father, bad language and all.
“Look, I’d say I’m sorry, but we both know I’m not.”
“You can explain to his teachers why he has a foul mouth when he starts preschool.”
“Fine!” Zac throws his hands up. “I will. Because we’re gonna have to get used to it. He’s gonna have a terrible vocabulary. He’s being raised by two rock stars and an LA photographer. He’s going to be a punk. He’s going to be the only eight-year-old in eyeliner. Screw it. I’m fine with my life
choices. And I’m fine with PJ knowing that his papa has a skinny ass. Life. Facts. Kids need ’em.”
“Would we call it skinny?” Anya tips her head to one side. The popcorn bag is open and her fingers are sloppy yellow as she crams popcorn in her mouth. It’s disgusting. He wants to kiss her. He wishes Cal were down here, because he’s missing the sight of their cultured, terrible Anya looking like a werewolf as she gnaws on her prey, only with butter all over her face instead of blood. Which should not remotely be an appetizing image, but it is. Whatever. Zac takes no responsibility for the things his brain does.
“Obviously it’s not skinny.” Cal has an ass that speaks of long hours running and occasional bikes around the neighborhood hauling PJ around in that little seat. His ass could be hewn from stone. Zac very much appreciates Cal’s dedication to working out. He could probably stand to do some of that himself, but he doesn’t want to. Not that that will stop Cal from trying to get him to go running with him. He glares up at the ceiling, outraged all over again that Cal even dared suggest such a travesty. What an asshole. “You know, I don’t think he’s going to do it.”
“He will.” Half the popcorn is gone. She’s staring aimlessly into the now-empty microwave as she eats. She’s a glutton. He’s married to an asshole and a glutton. He grins at how damn cool that is and goes to the pantry to get another bag of popcorn.
“If he was gonna, he would’ve done it two hours ago.” He looks up at the ceiling and yells, “Two hours!”
“I’ll bet you ten bucks.”
“You’re a multi-millionaire. Ten bucks is embarrassing. What the hell? I’m disgusted.”
“Fine. I’ll bet you babysitting duties next Monday. Cal’s going to be in Anaheim doing the photo shoot for that bass endorsement, and I want to go out and get pizza with the girls before I get too big to fit in a booth.”
“But Monday’s Dancing with the Stars! I can’t watch Dancing with the Stars with PJ in the room. You know the mess he makes when he tries to dance. He’ll interrupt everything. I can’t concentrate on my vote if he’s running around like a monster with his head cut off.”
