by Tanya Boteju
Admittedly, the smell of the café’s simmering beef stew increased the rumble in my stomach. But that rumble turned into a tight cramp after the server had brought us water and we’d ordered our food. Jill clasped her hands in front of her on the table.
Here it comes.
“So, my dear, we gotta deal with this stuff, no?”
I slurped as obnoxiously as I could on my straw. “Nope.”
“Nima.” Her voice was annoyingly calm. First perky. Now calm. What a jerk.
I started tapping my fork against the table without looking at her. I could be annoying too.
Jill leaned forward. “Doll, we’ve been friends too long to sit here like this. I know you’re mad. You should be. I’d be furious.” She reached into her back pocket for something. “I gave you a week to be pissed at me, but now we gotta figure out what to do about this letter.”
I looked up and watched as she laid a crinkly piece of paper on the table and smoothed it out with the palm of her hand. She’d roughly taped the letter back together after I’d torn it up. A surprising wave of relief rolled over me.
“You kept it?”
“Of course I kept it, you nugget. It’s the only thing we have that will allow us to contact her—if we want to. I mean—if you want to.”
I pinned the napkin in front of me to the table with a tine of my fork and twirled the tip around and around, drilling a little hole into the paper. After a moment, Jill gently pushed the letter toward me.
I stared at it, still twirling, twirling, twirling. The few short words on the paper, now shiny with bits of scotch tape, renewed my anger all over again. “Give me one good reason I should see her.” My napkin began to fray in the middle.
“Besides the fact that she’s your mom?”
I stopped spinning for a moment to glare at her. Then I shifted my eyes back to the fork and continued to twist.
“Okay. Well, besides that, don’t you think you’ll regret it if you don’t? Don’t you want to hear her side of things?”
I half threw the fork into the middle of the table and the napkin went with it. Leaning back in my seat and folding my arms, I said, “Apparently, you can tell me all that, can’t you?” Eyeball bullets. Pew pew pew.
She leaned back and folded her arms as well, her eyebrows raised, but a typical Jill smirk just beginning to contract the edges of her mouth.
“Don’t laugh at me,” I said, as gruffly as possible.
“Nima, I’m not laughing at you.” She unfolded her arms again and leaned one elbow on the table, then laid her head in her palm. “I just saw a little bit of your mom in you, is all. She could be endearingly stubborn too.”
Something about the way she said it—the way her eyes began to glisten—told me that this was part of the story she was refusing to tell me. “This letter says you’ll tell me everything. So why won’t you?”
Jill sighed. “I don’t know why your mother said that. It wasn’t fair of her, in my opinion.”
“What if I refused to see her? Would you tell me then?”
She peered at me, thinking. Then she sat up straight, back to no-nonsense Jill. “Let’s try this. I’ll tell you as much as I feel is my story to tell, and you tell me about your new friends.”
Huh? I sat up straighter. How’d she know about my “new friends”?
Doesn’t matter. Hell if I’m going to make this easy. “Not much to tell.” I grabbed my napkin back and wound it into a tight spiral.
“Oh yeah? Your dad said one of them is pretty fabulous.”
Thanks, Dad. I shrugged, unraveling my napkin.
“So Deidre’s a . . . drag queen? And this other girl you visited? Is she in that business too?” She took a sip of her water.
Good grief. Great sharing, Dad. “Yeah, and?” Twist, untwist, twist.
“That’s pretty exciting.”
“Not really. They’re just regular people.” Except they weren’t at all. But Jill could be like a dog with a bone, so I offered her a tidbit, hoping to appease her. “I met them at the festival. I accidentally found myself at a drag show.”
“Accidental drag show? Sounds like a fun accident.” She was trying extra hard to look nonchalant, scanning the restaurant, laying her arm across the back of the seat—but I could tell these were deliberate responses.
“Yeah . . .” Thinking on my feet had never been my strong suit. Images of Winnow’s sexy performance spun through my mind. “It was fun, I guess.” I tore a strip off my now slightly damp napkin.
“So,” she murmured just before taking another sip of water, “you gonna see any more of these two ‘regular people’?”
I shrugged again. “Maybe.” If the Great Hot Tub Barf hadn’t completely ruined my chances, that is.
“You know, I’ve socialized with a few drag queens in my lifetime as well.” Her sentence stopped my busy hands. My napkin lay in limp white ribbons.
“Oh yeah?” I tried to keep my voice calm, even.
“Yup.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Yeah, kings too. Queens and kings. And a few princesses, that’s for sure.”
What are you telling me?
Jill stared at me, her right eyebrow peaked and a glimmer of merriment in her eyes. She was totally enjoying this.
I couldn’t remove my tongue from the roof of my mouth.
She lowered her eyebrow and leaned forward, removing the last shreds of napkin from my fingers. Then she took my hands in hers. “Nima, what I’m trying to say in a silly, roundabout way is that I’ve spent a lot of time in that scene because, well . . . husband or no husband, I’m as gay as the day is long.”
I didn’t know what to say. The gay part wasn’t a huge revelation or anything, though this was the first time she’d confirmed it. The bigger surprise was Jill parading around with the kind of crowd I’d met at the festival. It was a difficult scene to imagine.
My bewilderment must have been obvious, because Jill left her seat and came around to sit next to me. She wrapped an arm across my shoulders. “Looks like we have something in common?”
I looked at her. Something tweaked in my brain. I thought about Gordon’s dad and how he’d called Jill a dyke. Was it just something that crappy people called single adult women who could take care of themselves? Or did he actually know? And how did he know when I hadn’t even really known? When most people in town didn’t really know?
In her typical Jill way, she rubbed my back with an intensity that shook my entire body and said, “Listen, babe, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know that, right?”
I did know that. But something else wasn’t sitting right about this conversation.
“I’m not ashamed. But—why didn’t you tell me about this before? Does Dad know? Why’ve you been hiding it if there’s nothing to be ashamed of?”
Her arm slipped off my shoulders and she laid her hands flat on the table. “I haven’t been hiding it, exactly. I just—I was waiting for a good time, I guess. And your dad does know, kind of.”
What? Kind of? None of this was making any sense. “Since when do you wait for a good time to talk about anything?” I edged away from her on the seat.
She released an impatient sigh and stared at her hands. “Well, shit, this deal isn’t working at all. Somehow we’re talking about me again and you haven’t told me anything!”
“I didn’t have to. Apparently you know everything anyway. Not fair, Jill.” I had even more questions now, and that just made me madder.
She pressed her fingers into her eyes, forehead, temples, cheeks—a signal she was ruminating. Just as our food came, she let out a long breath, twisted in her seat, and told me a story I never would have guessed.
I’d known that my mom and dad first met Jill nine years ago when we’d moved from a tiny house up near Biddy Park to the one we lived in now. Jill had relocated here a few months before and was a Realtor at that time, to help pay the bills while she tried to build her Garden Emporium business. I vaguely rememb
er the move—watching my mom pack up the closet-size room I’d had and throwing a massive hissy fit when she forced me to choose at least half my stuffies and put them in a box for Old Stuff.
What I didn’t know was this next part.
Jill looked up at the light hanging above our booth. She inhaled, and with her exhale, allowed her eyes to fall somewhere around my chin. “The first time I shook your mom’s hand, outside that shitty little house near Biddy Park, I—” She glanced at me as if she’d stolen something, and her voice dropped. “I had to will myself to let go. Even after I did, it was like I could still feel her fingers in mine as we went through the house—up those shitty stairs, in and out of the shitty bedrooms, into the shitty backyard.” She looked down at her hands, as if seeing my mom’s and hers intertwined even now. “By the time the tour ended and we had to shake hands goodbye, it was like . . . like we’d been holding hands the entire time.”
At this early point in the story, I’m fairly sure my mouth fell open and remained just so for the next several minutes.
Jill said even after she’d miraculously managed to find a buyer for the Biddy house, and Mom and Dad had moved into our present home, the three of them remained friends—my dad and Jill united by their mutual love for tinkering, and my mom and Jill bonded by what Jill described as a powerful yearning for change and excitement.
“I mean, I guess I had other motivations as well, but I wasn’t really ready to acknowledge what I was feeling at the time. All I knew was that I loved spending time with both your parents, Nima, and with you. You felt like instant family to me.” She gave me a half smile.
As she spoke, the image of the “phantom hand holding” flitted through my mind every so often. Each time it did, I shifted in my seat, trying to alter the confusing mixture of shock, warmth, and bitterness churning in my stomach.
“I guess as time wore on, I started to realize my feelings for your dad differed from my feelings for your mom, but I didn’t know if Kate felt the same way. Plus—” Her eyes shot up to mine. “Plus . . . you know I’d never willingly mess with your parents’ marriage, right, babe?”
I watched her mouth move around the words but couldn’t form my own. My head dipped in something like acknowledgment.
“You have to believe me—I tried to stuff my feelings for your mother way down. And I managed to by convincing myself that my feelings were one-sided. I mean, watching your parents work together to build your dad’s mechanic business, and to raise you so beautifully—it was easy to believe your mother only had eyes for you two.”
Jill’s eyes and lips smiled, and I could see in them how much she loved us too. But my lips couldn’t find their smile just now, and in the next moment, Jill’s flattened out again as well.
“Over the next few years, though, I started to notice some things and realized that maybe, just maybe, Kate had feelings for me too.”
A ball of fire formed in my stomach and burst out of my mouth. “Like what?” I said, loudly enough that the people one table over glanced up at us.
She looked up, surprised. “I—well, just little things, I guess. A touch here. A whisper there. Sometimes she’d show up after dinner, on her own, for no reason at all.” Jill’s brow formed deep creases. “It got harder and harder to push my own feelings down, Nima.”
My stomach rumbled, insistent and noisy. I reached across the table to grab my fork, then thrust it into a piece of beef in my stew. As I lifted the fork to my mouth, juices dripped across the table, my jeans, and my shirt, but I didn’t care. I clamped down on the mouthful so hard my teeth scraped against the steel fork as I yanked it out. I ground the meat in my jaw, ignoring the juice dribbling down my chin.
Jill’s forehead rose a little as she stared at my mouth. She waited until I swallowed, then offered me her napkin, which I ignored.
Dropping her hand to her lap, she went on. “About a year and half ago—November—your mom came over one night.”
November. A year and a half ago. My sophomore year. Easy to remember because that was when Mom left. I wiped my chin with the back of my hand.
“We were sitting in the courtyard. The air felt so crisp in my lungs it hurt, and I couldn’t understand why your mother wanted to stay outside in the cold.” Jill’s eyes fixed on a point somewhere between us on the table. “But then she used the chill as an excuse to put her arm through mine, and it all made sense. My thoughts just flew away when she did that. And my hands . . . they got so sweaty in my jacket pockets. I remember thinking how weird that was, since it was freezing out.”
In anticipation or nausea—I wasn’t sure which—my face grew hot just as a shiver passed through me. My left knee bounced up and down like a jackhammer, the rapid beat matching my heart rate.
Jill didn’t seem to notice any of this, though, clearly lost in the moment she was re-creating for me and for herself. “All of a sudden, I felt her lips brush against my neck. I lost all my words, but my shock finally made me look at her, and seeing her—the way she was looking at me—I don’t know. I—I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t stop myself. . . .”
At that moment, Winnow’s lips emerged in my mind and I swear I could feel that piece of beef dissolving in my stomach acid. The last thing I wanted was to think simultaneously of Winnow and this . . . this thing Jill was telling me. My arm shot out for my water glass, and I slugged back the entire thing.
Jill stared blankly at me as if in a trance until I’d gulped the last mouthful of water. When I finished, she just continued, thankfully skipping any kissing details.
“I finally got ahold of myself and pulled away, which wasn’t easy. I told Kate I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t hurt your dad or you. I couldn’t be that person.”
But you are that person, I thought, jabbing my fork at various items in my bowl for no other reason than to see the points disappear again and again.
“Kate was furious. She instantly blamed me, saying that I’d been putting out all the signals—which wasn’t untrue—and that I couldn’t just stop what I’d started.”
Jill’s next words tumbled from her mouth. She’d remained adamant. She admitted her feelings and apologized, but made it clear that this had been a two-way street. My mother didn’t take that too well either, apparently. She shouted at Jill, and when Jill tried to calm my mom down, Mom pushed her off and stormed out of the yard, toward the school.
“I ran after her, of course,” Jill continued, now shifting her body and her gaze back to the table. “I followed her all the way into the middle of the baseball field before I could get that woman to pause for a second. She was always so damn quick in everything she did.” Jill began pulling at her own napkin. “But when she finally did stop, she just turned and kissed me hard.”
The baseball field is only four or five blocks from our house. Behind my school. Anyone could have seen you. My fears were confirmed in her next sentence.
“Out of nowhere, we heard a voice. Bill Grant’s voice.”
Gordon’s dad. The acid in my stomach bubbled up into my esophagus.
“He’d been drinking himself silly behind home plate, like he always has, and saw us. Even as drunk as he was, though, he knew exactly who we were and made sure to yell all kinds of trash at us.”
Shit.
Jill said he’d stumbled into a standing position and started to slump toward them. “I panicked. I pulled away from Kate, who was horrified too but still clinging hard to me.” Jill’s hands mimicked the damage I’d done to my own napkin, slowly tearing it to pieces. “I could see the hysteria in her eyes—she was already thinking about what would it mean if this got out. I couldn’t let that happen—to her or to you or your dad, Nima. But Bill just kept coming and coming, so finally I pushed Kate away from me—hard—and told her to go home. To her family.”
She let the napkin shreds fall to the table and dropped her forehead into her hands. The rest of her story she aimed into the torn scraps.
“Bill paused—I guess I’d confused him enough—an
d was listing so heavily to one side that I thought he’d tip right over. Instead he just sneered and flung his empty beer can at us, then staggered off in the direction of his house.”
Jill was hunched over the table and her back rose and fell deeply, as if she was trying to pump the air through her body. Without thinking, I placed my hand against her spine. After a few moments, her breathing slowed enough for her to continue.
“When I turned back to Kate, the look on her face . . . her mouth was all contorted but her eyes were so . . . blank. When I tried to reach for her, she backed away and said that I could keep this boring, predictable life, but she wanted more. That if I wasn’t willing to be with her, we had nothing more to say to one another. And then I watched like a fool as she left me standing there.”
The words “boring” and “predictable” echoed in my brain. She wanted more.
The next morning, my mother was gone.
Jill’s story rolled over me like distant thunder—muted rumblings followed by fierce, crackling mountains of sound, then low, deep growls. When she was finished, my back was sweaty and my T-shirt clung to the vinyl seating. I leaned forward and ruffled my shirt to run some air over my damp skin. Jill sat very, very still, remaining bent over the table.
I didn’t know whether to scream at her or comfort her. Jill loved my mom. My mom loved Jill. My mom left because Jill wouldn’t let her cheat on my dad. My mom wanted to cheat on my dad and left when she couldn’t. The person I really wanted to scream at, who I would have given anything to scream at, wasn’t here.
When I looked over, Jill’s eyes were focused on some point in front of her again. Her jaw was set and she was gulping like someone holding back tears.
We sat like that for a long time, Jill’s neck undulating with the pulse of her broken heart, and me, twisting and unraveling, again and again.
Over the next several hours, Jill and I walked in alternating bouts of talk and silence. I hated that I wanted to walk with her, find out more. That I needed to. Wasn’t it her fault that my mom left? I just couldn’t leave her side, though. I craved every bit of info she had, and Jill allowed me to ask as many questions as I wanted.
