by Julia Watts
“And I like her,” Chrys said, meaning it.
“She’s not been raised to be a homophobe, but there’s a big difference between accepting your friends and accepting your mom.”
“True. And when kids think about their parents’ sexuality, there’s always a certain ick factor, no matter what the parents’ sexual orientation is.”
“True,” Dee said. “Wow. I feel good.”
“Me too.” She reached across the table and took Dee’s hand. “Hey, what if you and Anna come to the family cookout tomorrow night? Nanny would love to have you there, and I guarantee you’ll find meeting the rest of my family…interesting. Plus, since it’s the Fourth, I’m pretty sure illegal fireworks will be involved.”
Dee grinned. “Okay, but only if the illegal fireworks will be shot off by people who have consumed an unwise amount of alcohol.”
Chrys pictured the Daddy-and-Dustin pyrotechnics of Independence Days past. “I can guarantee it.”
If taking it slow was the rule, Chrys couldn’t think of a better invitation than to one of her family’s cookouts. Short of going deer hunting with her daddy, one would have to work hard to come up with an idea for a less romantic outing.
* * *
Until she arrived at the Fourth of July cookout, Chrys didn’t realize that she was supposed to dress for the occasion. Her mom was wearing a T-shirt with a sequined American flag, and Peyton was sporting a stars and stripes bikini along with her tiara. “Look at me! I’m Miss America!”
“You sure are, honey,” Nanny said.
“Miss America is the princess of America,” Peyton said.
“We don’t have princesses in America,” Chrys said. “But we have women who are governors and senators, and one day we’ll even have a woman president.”
Peyton gave Chrys a look that was not dissimilar to that of the students who found her lectures to be an unwelcome distraction from their texting. “I got red, white, and blue ribbons to put around the dogs’ necks if I can catch ’em.” She ran off in the direction of the nearest Chihoundhound.
“I really wish she’d find some women to look up to who aren’t beauty queens or princesses,” Chrys said to Nanny.
“Oh, that’s just her age,” Nanny said. “When you was four you wanted to be a trapeze artist.”
Chrys laughed. “That’s a fine career for someone who’s terrified of heights.”
Nanny smiled. “You wasn’t thinking about the heights. You was thinking about the costumes. We took you to see the Clyde Beatty Circus when it came to Morgan, and you thought the trapeze artist was the prettiest thing in the world on account of her sparkly outfit. Little girls love sparkles.”
“And I guess women senators don’t wear sparkles or tiaras.”
“I reckon not,” Nanny said. “But maybe Peyton’ll grow up and change that.”
“Hey, Sissy, catch!” Dustin said and tossed a PBR tallboy at her.
She cracked it open. “Sorry to sin right in front of you, Nanny.”
“That’s all right, honey. I let God be the judge.”
“Thanks, I guess.” If there was a God, surely He didn’t keep track of such minutiae as one’s PBR consumption. And if He did, Daddy was way ahead of her. He had an empty can at his feet and a full one in his hand as he manned the grill. There were deer burgers as usual, but since it was a holiday, there were hot dogs, too, and chicken legs.
Chrys followed her mom into the kitchen to help carry out the side dishes, a larger array than usual: potato salad, deviled eggs, baked beans, cole slaw and some kind of Jell-O and fruit cocktail suspension. “This is quite a spread,” Chrys said.
Her mom smiled. “Well, it’s the Fourth of July, so we might as well put on the dog. Besides, if your daddy and Dustin blow us all up with fireworks later, this’ll be the last meal we ever eat.”
Amber laughed. “I didn’t know Dustin was such a pyro when I married him.”
“I could’ve told you,” Chrys said, picking up the tray of deviled eggs. “When he was little, his favorite thing to do was tie firecrackers to plastic toy soldiers and blow them up.”
When Chrys carried the eggs to the table outside, she sucked in her breath a little at the sight of Dee, who was talking with Nanny. Dee’s tan legs were lovely in shorts, and Chrys had to remind herself not to stare. Anna was sitting on the ground laughing, while three Chihoundhounds competed for space on her lap.
Peyton ran up to Chrys. “Who’s that girl?”
“That’s Anna. She’s my friend Dee’s daughter.”
Peyton looked at Anna with something like awe. “She’s really big.”
“Yeah, she’s eleven. She’s also really nice. I bet she might help you get those ribbons on some of the doggies’ necks.”
Peyton ran over to Anna, who greeted her with a shy smile.
“Hey,” Dee said, smiling at Chrys. “I brought a salad.”
Chrys wanted badly to hug Dee, but she also didn’t want them to be conspicuous. So she took the bowl from Dee’s hand, letting her pinkie graze Dee’s in the process. Somehow this felt very pleasantly naughty. “Wow, an actual green salad. I don’t think we’ve ever had one of these at a cookout before. Unless green Jell-O counts.”
“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t,” Dee said.
After Daddy brought the meat from the grill, they filled their plates buffet-style and sat at the long wooden picnic table Daddy had made when Chrys was a kid.
Dee sat across from Chrys and between Anna and Chrys’s mom. Chrys, Dee and Anna were the only ones who had taken any of the green salad.
“Good bread, good meat, good God, let’s eat,” Daddy said.
“That ain’t no kind of prayer,” Nanny said.
“The Lord knows I meant no harm,” Daddy said. “He’s got a sense of humor, or else why’d he make me?”
“Our guests must think we’re awful the way you’re cutting up,” Chrys’s mom said to Daddy. Then she turned to Dee. “I think it’s just wonderful that you’re a physical therapist. It must make you feel good helping people that way.”
“It’s a good job,” Dee said.
“I always wanted to be a nurse,” Chrys’s mom said. “But then I got married and had kids and never got around to it.”
This was the first Chrys had ever heard of this. “Really? You never told me that.”
Mom grinned and shrugged. “Well, I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea—to think I had regrets.”
“How come you didn’t go back to school once Dustin and I were school-aged ourselves?”
“Well,” Mom said, “by that time I figured I should just go ahead and get a job…let you grow up and be the college-educated one.”
“’Cause it sure wasn’t gonna be me,” Dustin said, and everybody laughed.
“I’m sure you would’ve been an excellent nurse,” Dee said to Chrys’s mom once the laughter had died down.
“Well, you know after the kids was grown, I didn’t want her to get bored,” Daddy said. “So I cut my arm off so she could nurse me. Now if that ain’t love, I don’t know what is.”
After dinner, as the women were cleaning up, Anna came up to Chrys. “Mom told me there are chickens and a pig over at your nanny’s place,” she said, her face serious. “I wondered if you might take me over to see them.”
Chrys was a little surprised but tried not to show it. “Sure. It’s an easy walk. We just have to go across a field.”
Anna nodded. “Okay.”
They set off. “I loved the first Harry Potter book, by the way,” Chrys said. “I lost an entire night’s sleep finishing it.”
“I’ll send the next one in with Mom when she comes to do your nanny’s therapy. They get better and better.” She walked a few steps and turned around, surveying the field. “This reminds me of the moors in Jane Eyre,” Anna said. “That’s what I’m reading right now.”
Chrys felt a little thrill of bookish-girl kinship. “I love Jane Eyre. It’s one of my absolute favorites.”
“Well, yeah, he is, isn’t he?” Chrys said, laughing. “What was it with the Brontes anyway? Have you read Wuthering Heights?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, Heathcliff and Cathy are both douches.”
They walked for a couple of minutes in silence, and then Anna said, “I’ve seen chickens before.”
“What?” Chrys said, confused.
Anna stopped walking. “I don’t care if we see the chickens or not. I used seeing the chickens as a pretense to talk to you one-on-one.”
Chrys’s stomach buzzed, a beehive of nerves. “A pretense? I wish my college freshmen had a vocabulary as good as yours.” Her attempt to diffuse the tension with humor and flattery had obviously failed. Anna didn’t crack a smile.
“You and my mom…you’re dating, right?”
In her shock, Chrys randomly remembered a line from a famous Monty Python skit: “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” She cleared her throat. “Uh, well, sort of. How did you figure it out?”
“I’m not stupid.”
“I’m sure no one has ever said you were.”
Anna picked a piece of long grass and started fidgeting with it. “When Mom came back from that trip she took with you, she acted weird. She was nervous, she hardly ate anything. She’d get up in the middle of the night and sit at the computer for hours. And if I came to check on her, she always acted startled and minimized whatever she was looking at. I could tell from the search history, though, that she’d been Googling lesbian.”
Chrys gave a nervous laugh. “Wow, you’re quite the intrepid spy, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t mean to spy. The word just popped up when I was Googling something else. And then the other day after she’d seen you, she was all happy and not acting nervous anymore and she mentioned you, like, three times at dinner.”
“So has this kind of freaked you out?” Chrys said. Anna’s tone had been so even she couldn’t tell where this was going.
“It surprised me, I guess, but I’m okay with it. Mom’s taste in men has always been questionable. But based on you, her taste in women seems to be better.”
Chrys let out the breath she’d been holding. “Thanks. So your mom doesn’t know you know?”
“Nope.” A tiny smile crossed her lips.
“Are you going to tell her?”
Her smile grew wider. “What, you don’t think I should let her sweat it out a little longer?”
Chrys returned the smile. “And have the poor woman worry herself to death over how to tell you something you already know?”
“I’ll tell her. Tonight when we get home and have our bedtime cup of tea.”
Chrys couldn’t help imagining herself there with them sharing in this cozy ritual. “Good.” She’d so thoroughly lost track of time that she had no idea if the two of them had been gone long enough to have looked at the chickens and the pig. “So,” she said, “you’ve seen chickens, but have you ever seen anybody hypnotize a chicken?”
Anna laughed. “Chickens can be hypnotized? Really?”
“Really. And you’re talking to a highly seasoned chicken hypnotist. Would you like a demonstration?”
“Sure.”
They walked across the field, side by side.
Chapter Fifteen
“Anna’s sleeping over at her friend’s house tonight,” Dee had said over the phone this morning. “If your mom can look after Nanny, do you want to come over for dinner?”
It was strange how Chrys’s comings and goings depended, as in adolescence, on checking in with her mom, but now it was because Chrys was a caregiver, not a receiver. Even so, she had still felt like an excited kid when her mom said yes.
Dee met her at the door wearing a soft purple sundress. Her hair was down, and her feet were bare. Chrys wanted to kiss her but remembered Dee’s admonition that she wanted to take things slow. But before Chrys could decide what move to make, Dee’s lips were against hers in a soft kiss.
“Hi,” Dee said.
“Hi.” Chrys smiled as Dee took her hand and led her into the house.
“We’re having pasta with vodka sauce but without the vodka,” Dee said, leading her toward the kitchen. “One of the hazards of cooking in a dry county.”
“So it’s the Baptist version of vodka sauce?” Chrys said.
“Yep.” Dee turned on the heat under a pot of water. “The vodka doesn’t make as much of a difference in the taste as you’d think, though. And I did dust off a bottle of wine I had lying around if you’d like a glass.”
“Twist my arm.”
“How about I twist this corkscrew instead?” As she worked on the bottle, she said, “Hey, I need to tell you something. Anna figured out the deal between you and me on her own. Apparently I was nowhere near as subtle as I thought I was being. Well, either that, or I need a dumber kid.” She poured the wine and handed her a glass.
Chrys didn’t know if she should say anything about her own conversation with Anna. “She’s okay with it, though, right?”
Dee took a sip of wine. “She’s totally okay—with it. With you. With us. Really, since the divorce I had only gone out on a handful of dates, and they were all disasters. She says she’s glad I’m finally showing some taste.”
Chrys laughed. “Well, that’s kind of her.” She sipped her wine and thought. She didn’t want to rat out Anna, but she didn’t want to keep secrets from Dee either. “She talked to me, too, last night at the cookout. I made her promise to talk to you right away, so you wouldn’t waste any time worrying how to tell her.”
Dee whooped with laughter. “That little drama queen! I guess I took her out of her natural habitat of other gossipy preteens, so now she has to get her drama fix from adults. You weren’t offended, were you?”
“Not at all. It was kind of great, actually. The way she lured me off on a ruse for a secret conversation. No wonder she loves gothic novels. She has an appetite for intrigue.” Chrys was already feeling Anna tugging at heartstrings she didn’t know she had. “She’s a cool kid. I hope she and I can get to be good friends.”
“I think she’d like that. She’s always been the kind of kid who finds adults more interesting than children. She’s struck up this friendship with this girl up the road, but Holly’s two years older than she is.” Dee stirred the pasta. “Honestly, I think Anna was born a forty-year-old English professor.”
The vodka sauce was delicious, even without the vodka. They sat across from each other in the kitchen with the lights turned down and a candle glowing on the table. “This is a little more romantic than the cookout at my parents’,” Chrys said.
Dee smiled. “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing says romance like a fresh-grilled deer burger.”
“Meredith, my ex, only made it to one family cookout. She was a suburban girl, and the deer burgers just about did her in.”
“Coward,” Dee said, refilling their wineglasses. “Well, I plan to come back to as many family cookouts as you’ll let me. They’re good folks, your family.”
“They are. We don’t see eye to eye on everything, and their views on religion and politics are way different than mine. But they’re still good folks.”
“You said Nanny doesn’t know you’re gay. But the rest of your family?”
Chrys chewed thoughtfully. “They know. It took me forever to get up the nerve to tell them, but they were each accepting in their own way. Dustin doesn’t think what any adult does with another adult is anyone’s damn business. Mama cried a little because there’d be no wedding or babies, but she said I should live my life for my happiness and not hers. I thought her religion might cause some trouble, but she said God made me and God doesn’t make mistakes.”
“What about your dad?”
“He was the toughest sell, no doubt. He had to go fishing and think about it, but he finally got it to jibe with his other coc
keyed ideas about religion and politics. You should’ve heard him during the George W. administration: ‘Dick Cheney goes hunting and loves his gay daughter, and so do I.’”
Dee laughed.
“Overall, they were as cool about it as I could have reasonably expected them to be. I don’t know why I wasted so many years being afraid of telling them.” She mopped up the rest of the vodka sauce with a piece of French bread. “You know, it’s like I spent so much of my life feeling so different from them and wanting different things than what they wanted. I wasn’t going to be a country girl but a city girl. I wasn’t going to be working class but professional. I wasn’t going to be religious but I could be spiritual. And I still feel that way, but now that I’m older, I see that because these are the people I came from, they’re a part of me, and I’m a part of them. Does that make any sense?”
Dee nodded. “It does. That’s why I couldn’t stand to see Papaw’s farm get sold off for mineral rights.”
“Exactly. I feel like I spent most of my life saying ‘not this, but that.’ Now, though, I’m at the ‘both and’ stage. I don’t have to reject everything I grew up with. I mean, it’s okay to like sushi and cornbread, right?”
“Well, maybe not in the same meal.” Dee smiled. “But I know what you mean. In a lot of ways, my upbringing was both urban and rural.”
“So you’ve always been a ‘both and’ kind of girl.”
“I guess, but”—she reached across the table and took Chrys’s hand—“there are still plenty of changes going on in my life, too.”
“Pleasant changes, I hope.” Chrys stroked Dee’s hand with her thumb.
Dee smiled. “Very pleasant and very surprising.” She looked down at Chrys’s hand in hers. “Listen, I know you probably need to get back to Nanny before too long, but I’ve got dessert and a tiny bottle of Prosecco.” She took a deep breath. “And I thought a good place to enjoy these might be in bed.”
Chrys’s face heated up. “What happened to taking things slowly?”
