It's All Relative

by J. M. Snyder

  “I didn’t say drink it,” she says with a grimace. Bobbie gives me an exhausted smile and digs into the pumpkin again, scooping out more slop. “Hold up,” Caitlin mutters, picking white seeds out from the goop already in the sink. “I’m still on this batch.”

  The room smells overripe and Aunt Bobbie sighs as she scrapes more seeds into the pile my sister’s going through. “This is nasty, Caitlin.”

  “Cat,” my sister corrects absently. She picks at the seeds with the tips of her fingers, like she knows it’s nasty and she’ll be damned if she gets it all over her. Each seed is placed in the cup of her hand, and when she gets a few saved up, she dumps them on a cookie sheet set out next to the sink. After the pumpkin’s been carved into a jack o’ lantern, they’ll roast the seeds in the oven. From the corner of her eye, Caitlin looks up, her gaze not quite finding me—she’s clearly annoyed. “Tell your brother I didn’t give you the damn milk.”

  Your brother…so she’s still playing like that. Crossing the room, I peer over Aunt Bobbie’s shoulder down into the hollowed-out pumpkin and point out, “I’m right here, Caitlin. You don’t have to talk about me in the third person.”

  In an eerie imitation of our cousin Emily yesterday morning, Caitlin cocks her head to one side and asks no one in particular, “Do you hear something?”

  I curl my hands into useless fists to keep from hitting her. “How did you put it?” I ask, my words curt. “That’s childish and fucking stupid?”

  “Mike,” Aunt Bobbie warns. “Please don’t—”

  “Say fuck,” I say, grinning at the frustration that crosses my aunt’s face. “I know, I’m sorry.”

  “If you were sorry,” Bobbie points out, “then you wouldn’t have said it again.”

  A strand of hair slips from behind my aunt’s ear to curl in her face. Tucking it back into place, I tell her, “It’s true, though. She is being childish.”

  Aunt Bobbie shakes her head, but her lips curve in the ghost of a grin and she plunges her hands into the pumpkin again, scrapping the inside of the gourd to clean it out. “She’s not the only one,” my aunt says, nudging me with her hip.

  On the other side of her, Caitlin snorts with stifled laughter. “Shut up,” I mutter, and in an unexpected move, I reach around Bobbie and smack the back of my sister’s head playfully.

  The look she gives me is pure fury. Before I can say I was only teasing, she lashes out, one foot kicking my ankle despite my aunt between us. “Hey!” I cry, indignant. “Stop it with the kicking already, will you? First you kick my car—”

  “Because you were being mean to me,” Caitlin retorts.

  “Oh, now you’re talking to me again?” She rolls her eyes and shakes her head but doesn’t answer. As Aunt Bobbie pulls out another handful of pumpkin guts, I pick a few of the seeds out myself and peg them at my sister. “I wasn’t mean to you.”

  Caitlin swats away one of the seeds before it can hit her in the face, but the others fall harmlessly to the floor. “You were, too,” she mumbles. The next seed she picks out, she aims at me, and she’s a better shot than I am, it hits right below my eye and sticks. As I wipe it away, she falls back into her ignoring me routine. “He said ugly things about me, Aunt Bobbie. Called me ugly names.”

  With an exasperated sigh, I protest, “I did not—”

  “Michael?” my aunt asks in mock surprise, but I can hear the amusement in her voice, she thinks this is funny. “What kind of names?”

  “She kicked my car first,” I stress. This is an important factor in our fight, I don’t think Caitlin realizes it. I’m not the villain here. “Dan and I were minding our own business—”

  My sister raises her voice to talk over me. “They were getting dirty.”

  “We were having a little bit of fun,” I correct, “of the horizontal variety, when she comes busting in on us and kicks my goddamn car!” At Aunt Bobbie’s reproachful glance, I add hastily, “I’m sorry.”

  Behind us, Ray frowns into his cereal and asks, “What were you doing?” Apparently that horizontal comment confused him. I didn’t think he would get it.

  “We were getting it on,” I explain. And because he’s my brother and I know him all too well, I fist my hand and pump it a few times in a jerk-off action just so he gets my drift. “You know…?”

  He does. He laughs so hard that he almost chokes, and milk sprays from his nose as if he’s sneezed. That sets Caitlin giggling—Ray’s the only adult I know who prides himself on being as disgusting now as he was twenty years ago. “In the car?” he asks, like he’s never heard of sex in the front seat before. The thought bugs his eyes out wide, and he stares at me with something akin to God-fearing awe. Then he turns to Caitlin. “You saw them?”

  “No, stupid.” She throws a seed at him—it pings off his forehead and he rubs at the spot with a tiny ow. She would probably throw another one but Aunt Bobbie stops her by plopping another heaping mess into the sink. Remembering that she’s been wronged, Caitlin picks at these fresh seeds and mutters, “Despite what he thinks, I’m not as bad as you. He actually told me that, Aunt Bobbie, can you believe it? He said I’m as bad as Ray.” Worried, she frowns up at the older woman and asks, “Am I?”

  “As bad as me?” Ray starts to laugh that long, braying donkey laugh of his—he shakes his head like this is all just too funny for him, and then it hits him, it was an insult, he’s laughing at his own expense. I have to grin as it dawns on him. His eyes go blank, his face freezes, he obviously can’t laugh and think at the same time. Then his brows draw together, somehow we’re picking on him and that’s not funny, not one bit. “Hey,” he cries. “Wait a minute. I’m not that bad.” He tries to think of something more but can’t, so he pouts into his cereal and glares at us, Caitlin and I giggling by the sink and even Aunt Bobbie smiling now. “I’m not the one getting a piece of ass in the car,” he mutters, like this is the worse insult he can come up with.

  “You’re not getting a piece of ass, period,” Caitlin tells him. Before Bobbie can scold her, I add, “I’m not getting any either, standing here shooting the shit with you guys.”

  “Such language!” my aunt exclaims, even though she’s getting a kick out of our bickering, I can tell. “From the mouths of babes.”

  With a nonchalant shrug, I tell her, “We try.”

  But Caitlin is through playing. She remembers that she’s mad at me and that she’s not supposed to be talking to me, and she turns back to her seeds with a vengeance. “He started it,” she says. It’s still all my fault, isn’t it? “That bad as Ray comment hurt, Mike.”

  My brother gives a sort of little half-laugh that ends with him choking on the food in his mouth. “You think?” he asks.

  “Do you?” I counter, but I know the answer to that question already. For a few tense moments, no one speaks, we’re drifting away from easy banter and drifting towards something darker, something mean. I wouldn’t say I started it, but I realize that I’m keeping it up, just because of the thought that looms foremost in my mind—the reason I came out here, to go talk to my dad. The longer I fool around here, the more I manage to put off that impending conversation. Or maybe I’m trying to build up my anger, get Caitlin and Ray pissed at me enough to steel myself for the coming confrontation with my dad.

  Whatever the case, it needs to stop. I’m sick of this fighting—even if it is the norm around here. Dan and I are alright again, I don’t want anything my family might say or do to interfere with that. Why can’t I just put an end to all of this madness? What would it take, what could I say, to make my family like the families you see on TV, where no one gets offended or hurt by off-color remarks, where the drama is wrapped up in a half hour, where they’re all friends in the end?

  Or hell, like Dan’s family, maybe—he’s an only child, there is no fighting when we go to visit his parents. His mom is the stereotypical June Cleaver type of woman, always cooking or sewing or running off to Bingo on Tuesday nights. She knows that I’m Dan’s lover and sh
e’s okay with that, unlike my own mother. The first time he brought me home, for his parents’ anniversary in June, he told her straight up, here’s how it is. It seemed so easy for him, too. The three of us sat at a picnic table under a canopy outside of the American Legion, where his dad was helping with a weekend cookout. His mom made some comment about meeting any nice girls yet and Dan just shrugged. “I’m not looking,” he told her, taking a bite of his cheeseburger. I remember thick juices running down the side of his hand, that instant is frozen in my mind, the reddish brown drop coursing beneath his pinky in a bumpy pattern and I could see myself leaning over right there on that warm spring day, right there among the veterans, leaning over and licking that drop away. I could almost taste it, and the image glowed in my mind as brightly as a white shirt on a stage bathed in black light. What would Mrs. Biggs have said then? When the boy she just met, the one her son introduced as his roommate, leaned over and licked Dan like a dog?

  From across the picnic table she frowned at us, at Dan and then at me. She swatted an annoying fly away and her eyes narrowed, as if she were processing what Dan just said, running it through the circuits in her mind, matching it up with what she saw in front of her eyes, me and Dan sitting a little too close together on a narrow bench…it hit her the same way an abstract thought or complicated sentence will hit Ray, suddenly and without warning, a rush that tears through the mind like a train through the night. Her eyes held my gaze, I couldn’t look away. “Michael,” she said softly. She always speaks softly, his dad does, too—it must be where Dan gets it from. I’ve never met people who can talk as low as his family does and still command a presence wherever they go.

  I ducked my head, ashamed of the sordid thoughts I was sure she could read written out in my eyes. Beneath the table, Dan’s hand covered my knee, much the same way it would months later when I finally came out to my own parents and needed all the strength I could muster to face them. I wonder if it would have made any difference in the way things turned out if Evie hadn’t passed away, if Penny hadn’t called, if we hadn’t overstayed our welcome and could have just gone home at the start of the week instead of up here to Sugar Creek, where my mom is forced to watch the two of us together and see how we feel for each other. But has she even really seen that yet? Has she seen what he means to me? If she did, how could she possibly find anything wrong with our love?

  Maybe I should have shirked the responsibility and let Dan tell my parents for me—he did a good job with his mom. As she stared at me, trying to pin me in her mind as her son’s boyfriend and not just a guy he knew off-base, Dan told her simply, “We’re in love, Mom. He means everything to me. I’m just not interested in anyone else.”

  For a full minute, she said nothing. Just watched, thinking. I would have given anything to hear those thoughts. Perhaps they were much like my own mom’s at the time, I don’t know. When she finally spoke, it was with a slight nod that didn’t seem to condone our relationship so much as accept it—this is how it’s going to be, she knew she could do nothing to change that. “You’re happy,” she said. It wasn’t a question, more like a statement of fact, she could see what I did to her son and it was enough for her to know that he was loved. Dan nodded, though, and she glanced past us to the large grill several feet away, where her husband stood in oven mitts and an apron, turning hot dogs for the kids. “Were you planning to tell your father?”

  I knew that Dan was hoping to come out to both of his parents, and on the long drive from D.C. to Ohio we talked over different scenarios, ways to get them both together, ways to just come out and say it, we’re a couple. Together, in much the same way they are, though we haven’t gotten quite that far in our relationship yet. I’m hoping, and I know Dan’s thinking it, we’ve pretty much decided that we’re both in it for the long haul and prior to this weekend, we had just reached the point where he made a comment about marriage and I didn’t feel a cold hand seize my heart in my chest. But his mother asked about girls and that sort of hurried things up a bit, and a quick look at my lover told me that he thought maybe springing it on his dad at this point would seem as if we were all ganging up on him. It would be unfair. Still, he’s the quiet type, doesn’t like to appear to be directing the show, so he shrugged again and asked his mom, “What do you think we should do?”

  We, including her into the secret circle, making her feel involved. “I think maybe now isn’t a good time,” she replied, and Dan nodded, I nodded, yes, there might be a good time somewhere down the road but now was probably not it. “Let me feel him out, honey. I’ll tell you when.”

  Four months later and when hasn’t rolled around yet. But Dan’s okay with it. “As long as Mom knows,” he says, and the quiet assurance that gave him made me think that telling my own parents wouldn’t be so bad. But standing here in the kitchen with my brother and sister both glaring at me, I wonder what the hell was going through my mind to make me think that telling my parents anything wouldn’t be so bad.

  At the table, Ray shoots me a hateful look that I meet with a steady gaze, until he’s the one to turn away. I need to go talk with my dad, tell him Dan’s not coming to his beck and call. I’ve wasted too much time arguing here—by the time I return, Dan won’t even be in the mood anymore. Heading for the back door, I call out bitterly, “I’m sorry, okay?” I’m talking to Caitlin but she’s not looking at me, she’s probably not even listening. “Just stop fucking interrupting us.”

  “Stop interrupting you fucking,” she corrects. Her slight smile tells me we’re cool again.

  “Caitlin!” Aunt Bobbie warns. I make my escape, the sounds of my sister’s quick laughter following me outside.

  Chapter 38: My Dad

  The grin slips from my face as I step out onto the porch. The screen door slaps shut behind me with all the finality of a coffin lid—what the hell am I doing? I feel like a father who has to tell his son’s friends sorry, he can’t come out today, only it’s my dad I’m going to see, to tell him that he can’t play with Dan, the boy is mine. And what will he do, yell at me? Laugh? Or slip into his silent treatment and not talk to me, not acknowledge my presence—he’s better at that than Caitlin is, worlds better. When Henry Knapp is mad with you, you damn well know it. You cease to exist for him. Some days I don’t even need to make him angry to feel like I’ve already disappeared.

  Outside, the sky is a deep denim blue, and dark, wispy clouds scurry away above the trees. The wind is colder now than it was this morning—there’s an edge to it that cuts through my sweater to bite at my chest and arms. In the distance I can hear the tell-tale buzz of power tools, a drill or saw or something like that, reverberating with a hollow echo inside the garden shed on the other side of the yard. That’s where he is, where I’m headed. Beneath the noise comes the steady rush of water from the creek, an ever-present sound out here. Shoving my hands into the pockets of my jeans, I cross the porch and take the steps quickly, it’s too chilly to linger. I think of Dan, half naked among the bed sheets, that spurs me on. The thought of him in a warm bed, it’s enough to get me hard all over again, and a fierce heat burns at my groin, spreads through my legs like melted butter, churns my stomach into giddy knots.

  I start across the back yard, my shoes rustling in the wet grass, the cuffs of my pants growing damp. Once I’m out in the open, the wind picks up like an overeager puppy happy to see me—it snuffles over my back, my sleeves, nips at my face, tousles my hair. I bow down before it, my face turned studiously away, my lips pressed together to keep from getting chapped. This is winter, this wind, a harbinger of what’s to come. For the first time since we arrived in Sugar Creek, I have to admit that I’m glad I’m going back home before the rest of this weather comes through. Going home for good, I think, and I nod even though I didn’t say that out loud. I just know. I’m not coming back here again.

  The wind catches my sweater, pulls it out in front of me like an insistent playmate. Run, it tells me. Take flight with me and make a memory. Make this moment count
, make it stand out in your mind, make it forever. “I did that already,” I say quietly, my words whipped away in the short, quick gusts that rail around me. Before the rain, back in the woods, that part of Sugar Creek that I shared with Dan will always stay with me, more than all the summers I spent here in childhood or the winters I came and played in the snow, all the times I tasted Stephen Robichaud and held him and Jesus knows, all the times I let him taste and hold me. Most important of all, that time with my lover cancels out the wounded look in Stephen’s eyes that has haunted me since yesterday, when he kissed me goodbye.

  Goodbye.

  It’s cold out here, colder than I thought it would be, and Dan’s waiting. I pick up the pace, weave through the tables with their folded umbrellas and their chairs tucked in to keep them from blowing around. Up ahead I see Kenny and my Uncle Doug putting a coat of weatherproofing on what looks like a freshly constructed bench propped up against the garden shed. My dad built that, I’m sure, probably as a place to set the trash cans, to keep them out of reach of raccoons or whatever other woodland animals will come up from the creek for food. As I approach, the sound of my shoes swishing through the grass makes my cousin look up at me, and he smiles as he squints into the noon sun. “Mike, hey,” he says, waving the paintbrush at me. “Heard you were back. Things okay?”

  “Fine,” I tell him. Heard you were back…in this family, gossip spreads like poison ivy, you can’t control it. So I’m sure he and Doug know about the scene on the porch this morning, they must have a pretty good idea of what happened between Dan and me on our little drive, and from the way they’re grinning, I know they heard about us getting frisky in the car out front. I don’t even feel disgusted at that anymore—it’s just a fact of life. I’m part of this family, my life is an open book to them. There’s no such thing as privacy at Aunt Evie’s.