It's All Relative

by J. M. Snyder

  But it wasn’t out of charity or some misplaced psychic sense that Penny phoned—that much is evident when my mom daubs her eyes with her napkin. “Mom?” I ask, concerned. “I didn’t think you’d be so upset…”

  “Aunt Evie’s passed,” she cries, dissolving into tears. So that’s the reason for the call. A hole opens in my heart. The only thing I can feel is Dan holding my hand. Aunt Evie.

  Ray doesn’t get it. “Passed what?” he asks, looking around the table. Even Caitlin can’t rise to that—she’s staring at the potatoes on her plate and blinking rapidly, trying unsuccessfully not to smudge her makeup. Twin black lines streak down her cheeks, like tears of a clown. To my mother, buried in her napkin, Ray asks, “Is this about those gallstones again?”

  Because I’m closest to him, I kick his ankle and hiss, “She means she’s dead.” Dead. Once released, the word takes on weight and hangs between us over the table like a chandelier. My eyes feel hot and tight, my heart hurts, I want to crawl into my bed now and let my lover hold me close. Dead. I don’t want to believe it.

  Mom blows her nose noisily, then glares at me like this is somehow all my fault. I admit I’m gay, her worst fears realized, and Aunt Evie dies. My fault. Her gaze drifts to Dan, sitting proud and stoic beside me, his hand in mine beneath the table, lending me strength I simply don’t have. “Oh God,” she sighs. “What else?”

  As if waiting for this moment, Caitlin opens her mouth and out pops her tongue. With her front teeth, she jiggles the silver rod rammed through the center of it.

  The color drains from my mother’s face, her hands fist in her napkin, and then she bursts into fresh tears. Without looking at either my sister or his wife, Dad takes another bite of his pot roast and says, “Caitlin, go to your room.”

  This time she doesn’t argue.

  Chapter 2: Going Home

  Aunt Evie was my mother’s mother’s sister…my Great-Aunt Evelyn, to be exact, but she was Evie to everyone and too young to be a great-aunt. To hear my mother tell it, Aunt Evie practically raised her as her own. Mom’s mother Clara was barely fifteen when she became pregnant, no one knows who the father was. Family legend has it some drifter who came through Sugar Creek in the late ‘40’s, an older boy with big hands and a roaming eye who didn’t stay long after he found out about the baby on the way.

  Sugar Creek used to be big back in the day, before the interstates steered traffic away from the county roads, but for as long as I’ve known it, it’s just been a tiny little town at the crossroads of Route 1 and State Highway 650. That’s where Mom grew up, raised by her teenaged mother and a gaggle of aunts she came to love as sisters—seven of them, Marjorie twenty-one the year my mother was born and the oldest of them all. They went down in age after that, a year apart: Barbara who was called Bobbie, Sarah, Wilhelmina who was Billy, Evie, Jessica, and Clara.

  Aunt Marge never married, spent all her days raising her sisters and tending to their ailing parents, who waited too long to have children—by the time Mom came around, they were elderly patients in a back room that she was never allowed to enter. She had to tiptoe down the hall whenever she passed their closed door. They finally died on her ninth birthday, both of them, hours apart. As the little girl who would become my mother blew out the candles on her cake, Aunt Billy went inside to get plates or something, I’m not sure just how the story goes, but when she came back, her eyes were wide and her skin pale, and she whispered something to Aunt Marge that made both of them disappear inside again. “Come on, Laura,” Aunt Clara said, cutting the cake as she threw furtive glances at the house. Mom called her aunt, too, never mother. “Happy birthday, baby. Don’t worry, Billy’s coming right back.”

  A short while later, when two long black cars from the local funeral home pulled to a stop in front of the house, it was Evie who led the children to the backyard for a game of hide-and-seek to keep them out of the way. Mom said she hid under the front porch and watched through the steps as the bodies were taken out, but I think that’s just something she’s added to the tale down the road. Aunt Evie wouldn’t have let her get away with that.

  Marge died of ovarian cancer in her early forties, before I knew her. Clara had two more kids, both before she turned twenty-five years old, Mom’s sister Penny and a boy who died in childbirth. No one ever named him. Clara passed at the same time—down here we say passed when someone dies, as if the euphemism somehow makes death less painful. The others married or moved on, all but Aunt Evie. She stayed in the house, which sits on three acres at the edge of town, and the creek runs through her backyard. I spent a week or two every summer there as a kid, for as long back as I can remember up until I was seventeen, when I graduated from high school and moved out on my own. Well, college dorms, but it was out of my parents’ house, and it’s farther than Ray’s gone. When he graduated, he thought moving into the basement was newfound freedom. College never crossed his mind. Sometimes, when I look at him and Caitlin, I’m almost sure I’m adopted and no one’s thought to tell me yet. Ray at the deli and Caitlin the poser-punk, and then there’s me. The middle son, still in school for my second master’s degree, this one in business admin, with a steady job at a big name law firm in the city and a boyfriend I’m almost ninety-nine percent sure I’m going to settle down with for the rest of my life. And suddenly I’m the bad guy for coming out to my parents over dinner.

  Mom doesn’t say she’s mad at me, but it’s in her snippy tone of voice, her curt answers, the way she doesn’t quite look at me so much as around me. “Gay,” she says, as if it’s a new word and she can’t get over it, she keeps muttering it to herself under her breath and saying it out loud to anyone who will listen. Clearing the plates from the table, it’s all I hear. “Gay. My son.” Her hands tremble and she breaks down again in the kitchen, the dishes clattering into the sink as she covers her mouth with one hand. I’m not sure if she’s crying about me or Aunt Evie, and I’m too afraid to ask.

  Somehow, I expected anything but this. Yelling I could deal with, I could get angry and shout back, I could storm through the house, I could get dramatic. I’m good at drama. Quiet acceptance would have been nice, though I knew better than to think things would go over that easy. But this crying, these tears, how do I counter that? I try a hug, coming up behind her and wrapping my arms around her waist. She seems so small and frail in my embrace. “I’m sorry,” I murmur into her hair, which smells like hairspray and cigarette smoke. “I’m so sorry, Momma.”

  “I wanted grandkids,” she sobs, but she doesn’t shrug me off. Instead, she blots at her eyes with a paper towel and I look up to see Dan in the doorway, watching us. I give him a wan smile—I wish he could hold me right about now, but he’s in shy mode, standing there halfway in the kitchen and halfway in the dining room, looking stern and disapproving. I don’t know if my mother sees him or not—she’s doubled over the sink, crying into her hands. “I wanted you married, Michael,” she’s saying, and I roll my eyes just to make Dan smile. “You’d have such beautiful children.”

  Yeah, I would like kids, but since I was old enough to masturbate, I knew I liked guys. Hard, lean bodies turned me on, flat stomachs, bulging muscles, thick arms and tight asses and big cocks. Dan’s not body-builder material, but he’s in shape, I have the Army to thank for that. He’s stronger than me, too, a fact he loves to tout in bed when we’re getting playful and he pins me to the mattress just to lick my nipples. And he’s definitely got nothing to worry about in the ass and cock arena.

  I don’t tell my mother that. “There’s Ray—” I start, but that makes her cry harder. Yeah, the thought of Ray having children is almost enough to make me tear up. “Caitlin?” I ask. Jeez, just saddle me with this guilt. “Mom, I’m…I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”

  “Now we’ll have to move him out of your room,” she sniffles. “Put him on the couch, or something. We just don’t have the extra space.”

  “He sleeps with me,” I tell her. Slowly, I unwrap my arms from around
her waist and take a step back, a dull anger starting somewhere in the back of my throat and spreading down my chest like heartburn. “I didn’t drive all this way for a weekend apart, Mom. Either he stays in my room with me or we get a hotel. You said this wouldn’t be a problem.”

  Her words, thrown back at her—a ploy I find quite useful when it suits my needs. When I called to tell her I was coming down, I mentioned I’d bring a friend along. My roommate, was how I put it. Dan has quarters on post, of course, along with a footlocker and Army issue bed sheets spread out over a narrow cot, a bunkmate who thinks I’m an just old high school friend, and a bathroom shared with a dozen other recruits. But half of my closet is filled with his clothes, and his toothbrush sits on the sink in my bathroom, and the pillow on the left side of my bed belongs to him. For the past eight months, he’s lain beside me each night and woken to his alarm clock set two hours before mine. I get up while he’s in the shower and stumble into the kitchen to make him coffee and eggs while he dresses. He comes up behind me while I’m at the stove, kisses the back of my neck, and smells faintly of soap and the Niagara spray starch he uses to keep the crease in his pants sharp. Once a week he stops by his barracks, but for all intents and purposes he lives with me. Sleeps with me, eats dinner in the evening after a long day on post and breakfast in the morning after a night in my bed. He’s mine.

  When he had a few days leave coming up, I wanted to take him home and show him off. There was no doubt in my mind he was coming with me; I wouldn’t leaving without him. Maybe it was my mother’s constant harping, asking “Have you found a girl yet?” the minute I answered the phone. Maybe it was Dan himself, telling me he wanted me forever after we made love the night before. Whatever the reason, I woke up Thursday morning and knew I wanted to tell my parents about him. Someone this good I had to share.

  Over breakfast, I asked Dan if he had plans for his leave. “Not really,” he mumbled into his eggs. He’s not a big talker. Most of the time, I feel as if I’m gushing on and on, and then he’ll look at me with a sparkle in his eyes and say, “I love you.” Three little words, they bring me to my knees. He’ll grin and kiss me speechless, my words gone. That morning, he looked across the table at me and asked, “Why? You have plans?”

  “I was thinking of going home for a few days,” I said.

  He sort of nodded in a noncommittal way and turned back to his eggs. He had to be on base for PT in thirty minutes. I studied him as he ate, my gaze loving over his short dark hair, his thick eyelashes, his thin cheeks. Beneath his nose, his smooth upper lip curves into twin humps like the letter M. He doesn’t have facial hair, even at twenty-three. Claims it’s because he’s part Native American, it gives him the dark hair and sultry skin. There’s a little fuzz along his jaw, just below his ear, but that’s about it. I like him smooth, though—no hair on his face, none on his chest, just a few scraggly bits on the soft muscle of his lower belly before you get to the shock of dark curls at his crotch. Imagining myself exploring down his stomach, down below his waist, down lower to that secret part of him I love so much, it makes me dry up with lust. At that moment, I didn’t want him to leave for duty, I didn’t want to go to work myself. I wanted the two of us back between the sheets for a few quick, heated moments. We could make it work.

  But he would be late then, and if his CO caught him, his leave might be canceled, and I didn’t want that. Five glorious days without the Army vying for his attention, I couldn’t wait. I already scheduled my vacation around his free time—we’d make the most of it. “I thought you might like to meet my parents,” I said cautiously. I didn’t want to scare him away. I had never mentioned taking him home before.

  He looked at me again, this time a small frown creasing his forehead. Toying with my eggs, I tried to keep my voice steady as I added, “If you want, babe, it’s up to you. I know this is your first time off in God, I don’t know how long, and if you just want to stay here, I’m cool with that. It’s still not too late to get a house on the shore, if you want to do something like that—”

  “Michael.” The way he said my name made me stop and look at him—I was rambling. With a slight smile, he told me, “I’d love to meet your parents. That sounds great.” His hand found mine beneath the table, giving my fingers a reassuring squeeze before he stood and leaned over to kiss me. “I have to run. Love you.”

  “Love you, too,” I murmured against his mouth, and before he could pull away, I gave him another kiss. As he skirted the table, I smacked his butt, the slap of my hand on his tight ass loud in the quiet morning.

  Over his shoulder, he growled at me, raising his eyebrows suggestively. “You’ll apologize for that tonight,” he promised.

  I laughed and rose from my chair, raced through the kitchen, intent on surprising him before he could make it to the front door. But he met me in the hall, having hurried through the living room and around the foyer to catch me in his arms, and he held me close as I pretended to struggle against him. “Love you,” he whispered, kissing me again. This time his lips lingered on mine as if imprinting them with the memory of my touch.

  “See you tonight,” I replied with another kiss. I took a step back and he followed—another, and he shuffled after me. A third, and we were outside the door to our bedroom. Straightening his tie, I sighed lustily. “If we just had five minutes, you know?”

  “Tonight,” he told me. That’s a vow we make every day, tonight. That’s when the rest of the world falls away and it’s just me and him, our souls meld together as one. Tonight.

  With his promise still ringing through me, I laid down on the bed and listened as he left. The front door shut quietly—he does everything quietly. Down the front stoop to the parking lot—my window was open so I heard his dress shoes on the pavement, his heels click click clicking to his Land Rover. The car door opened, shut, the engine started, and faint music streamed out into the day, low because he doesn’t listen to it loud while he’s driving. The engine revved once, the gears shifting into place—I knew each sound, I anticipated it. The Rover backed out of its spot beside my Lumina, the motor evening out as he guided it around the small parking lot to the street. Then he faded into the rest of the traffic and was gone.

  I dozed for another hour, like I usually do. Woke to my alarm, showered—the bathroom held Dan’s clean scent. The towel was still damp from his body, the washcloth filled with his soap. As I lathered myself, I pictured him in the shower before me, splashing these tiles, his hands on his body the way mine trailed over my own. It took all the self-control I had to will my erection away but he promised me tonight, so I dressed in a pair of khakis and a sports coat, usual office attire for me, and headed into work.

  I’m a legal assistant at a fairly big law firm in the city, and while it’s nothing exciting, it pays the bills and keeps us fed. Actually, it has its perks, like a timeshare in the Bahamas that I’ve scheduled for January, when Dan’s up for a full week’s leave that just happens to coincide with our one year anniversary. And it’s paying my tuition—I take two courses a semester at the campus not far from where I live. I have a bachelor’s in law and a master’s in social work, and I’m not through yet. This term I have an internet lit class that meets in a chat room online Monday nights, and an accounting course on Tuesdays. Dan drops me off just to get in a few extra kisses in the parking lot before class starts, and he’s always waiting for me when I get out.

  At the law firm, my day starts at nine. On Thursday, I waited a half hour before I phoned my mother, who I knew would be home. “I’m thinking of coming down,” I told her. “Just for the weekend. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “A girl?” she asked, hopeful. My mother is like rice paper—you don’t think you can see through it but if you hold it up to the light, everything shines right through. My getting married is a quest for her, on par with the search for the Holy Grail. “Michael, you know I think it’s time you settled down.”

  I didn’t tell her that I am settled. And unfortunat
ely, I didn’t tell her it wasn’t a girl I was bringing home. Instead, I said, “We’ll come down Saturday, if that’s alright with you. Don’t worry about an extra room, Mom. Do you still have that cot?”

  “I’ll set it up in your room,” she told me. Then, with her not-so-funny laugh, she added, “Or should I set it up in Caitlin’s instead?”

  No, Dan’s definitely sleeping with me. I watch her try to compose herself at the sink, but each time she manages to find a clean section of tissue to blow her nose in, she starts to cry all over again. This has to be for Aunt Evie—I’m gay, not dead. Jesus, it’s not that bad. I mean, at least I’m here, right? At least I’m still alive. “Mom?”

  With a loud honk, she blows her nose again. She turns her runny eyes from me to Dan and back again, then she shakes her finger at me as if I’m just a child. “He stays on that cot, do you hear me?” she asks. When I don’t answer, she glares at Dan like my being gay is his fault—she always needs someone to blame.

  From behind him, Caitlin calls out, “Move it, militia man.” He turns so my sister can stalk into the kitchen, her plate in hand. My mother glares at her just for something to do. “What?”

  Ignoring her, Mom’s watery gaze finds me again. “I run a respectable house, Michael,” she tells me. “There’ll be no sex under my roof, do you hear?”

  Before I can reply, Caitlin pushes between us to drop her plate in the sink. “There hasn’t been in sixteen years,” she mutters. I catch Dan’s eye and we both stifle a laugh. “That’s why you didn’t have any more kids after me. I know—” She waves off whatever Mom wants to say. “To my room, yeah yeah. I’m going already.”

  Chapter 3: In The Service

  We go into the den, our retreat in times of crisis. Every single one of Ray’s suspensions from high school was faced in this room, every prom, every wedding, every family trip planned right here. I should’ve waited until after dinner to make my announcement—this is the room where I should have told them, sitting beside Dan with his arm draped across the back of the couch, casually around my shoulders. Maybe then Aunt Evie would still be alive.