“I thought about asking you if I could come,” she whispers. “But then I realized you’d say no, and I didn’t want you to say no. This is better than studying.”
“Tell me you brought your books, though?”
She turns and points to a heavy backpack. “Yep. All of them.”
Ami’s doing a master’s degree in urban planning. She’s going to change the world, one thoughtful community design at a time. I squeeze her again, then step back. “I should get my bag.”
She laughs and shoos me away. “Go.”
The surprise appearance of my best friend is only a temporary respite from the anxiety, of course. I go quiet once we’re in a cab heading for my parents’ place.
Ami’s never met them.
She’s heard of them. Heard my frustration, my sadness, my anger.
And now that’s all going to collide. But of all my friends, I trust that Ami will know how to navigate the awkwardness. She’s got small town roots, too, although her family is more progressive than mine. They fall firmly into the well-meaning category.
Her mom would have joined PFLAG. As it was, their house has a faded Ally sticker and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody in their family is queer.
But Ami will know the limits of my family—maybe even better than I will myself. Somewhere along the way, I lost my ability to moderate for them, and I don’t want it back.
I just want to live my life, as freely as possible.
“What are you thinking?” she murmurs quietly beside me.
“Complicated stuff,” I whisper back.
She takes my hand and squeezes. “I’m right here.”
I smile and squeeze back. “Thank you.”
4
Ami
The house the cab stops in front of is nicer than I expected. Bigger, with fancy wintery decorations out front.
Two cars are parked side-by-side in the driveway. A minivan and a late model BMW.
I wonder if the father who voted for Trump drives a German car. I wonder if he cares about the disconnect.
But most of all I wonder about my own assumptions, and what Fred is thinking about me. She doesn’t move to get out of the cab, so I squeeze her hand.
“Right,” she says, taking a deep breath.
I smile. “I’m with you. Let’s go surprise your parents with a bonus guest, because people love that, right?”
She looks over at me, not quite smiling, but her eyes crinkle. “I love that.”
And that’s all that matters.
We grab our bags. I’ve got two backpacks, she’s got a suitcase, but it’s light—she carries it easily instead of trying to roll it through the snow.
It only takes one knock for the door the swing open, revealing a brightly lit and very warm house on the inside. Her mother, who only has eyes for Fred right now, is mid-fifties, petite just like Fred, pretty and polished. Again, not quite what I’d expected, but hard to put my finger on how. We bustle in and the overhead light in the entrance way bounces off the blue streak on Fred’s head.
“Your hair,” her mother exclaims. “It’s so…bright!”
Okay, that beat of hesitation more like what I expected.
Fred takes a deep breath and turns her body a quarter turn to include me. “Mom, this is Ami. I’ve talked about her a few times. She’s involved in the community garden I told you about. Her holiday plans fell through.”
Ugh, I didn’t mean for Fred to fall on the responsibility sword for me. And the garden? That was like three years ago, and I’d handed off my organizing role in it when I went back to school. But her mother’s face lights up, so I guess we’re going to talk about gardening a fair bit this weekend. “Mrs. DeWitt, so lovely to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you as well, Ami. Call me Brenda. Of course you’re welcome. We’ve got a full house, so you’ll need to bunk in with Fredericka, but…” Another beat of hesitation. “I’m assuming that’s okay?”
“We’re just friends,” Fred says quietly. “But yeah, that’s fine.”
It is. I’ve slept over at Fred’s apartment plenty, and she at mine. Never in the same bed, but I can take the floor. Or I can curl up right next to her, because that might feel good if this visit gets too weird.
“Oh, well…good then.”
Fred frowns a little with her next question. “Who else is coming?”
Her mother’s cheeks turn pink. “Your brother and his family.”
Fred has a brother? I try not to swivel my head in her direction, try hard to channel my shock deep down inside, but I know she knows that I heard that.
She doesn’t say anything, and Brenda plows on. “Your father is getting changed. Tonight is bowling, but maybe we could—”
“Go,” Fred says. “Don’t worry about us.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Please.”
Heavy footsteps on the stairs interrupt the terribly polite back and forth, and Fred’s father comes into view. A big man in every sense of the word, he took up all the space. All the attention.
“Hello,” he says, looking right at me. Stranger first, before his daughter. “We have a visitor, I see.”
He says it like it’s a loaded term.
I treat it like it’s not. “A last-minute tagalong,” I say, smiling. Smiles are always a good first line of defence. “Fred is lovely to include me. I’m Ami.”
He doesn’t introduce himself in return. That’s fine, Darryl. He looks next to his daughter. “All right. Good flight?”
“Yep.”
“We’ve got bowling.”
“Mom said. We’ll catch up when you get back.”
“Good.” He pauses, not quite the same kind of beat as his wife’s hesitation. He’s not nervous. More guarded. “Glad you made it.”
Love is such a complicated thing.
Fred was right. It is going to be a long weekend.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she says after they leave and she leads me upstairs to her room.
“I’m glad.” I look around the space. A double bed, a wide, low dresser, and an armoire that proves itself empty when she opens it.
“You can put your bags in here if you want.”
“Thanks.”
She puts her suitcase next to the dresser but doesn’t unpack. Instead, she goes straight to the bed and flops out.
I follow and sit by her feet. “I don’t know if you want to talk about it, and I don’t want to keep asking, so can we just assume that I’m always asking and also not asking at the same time? So you have can space or a friendly ear, whichever you need.”
She gives me a thumbs up and I laugh.
“What are the house rules I should know about?”
“They’ll make dinner when they get home. They’ll pick up my grandfather on the way, probably, so he’s here for tonight and all day tomorrow. We’ll need to eat with them. My granddad is okay. My mom’s father.”
“And your brother…?”
She groans. “Fuck.”
“You’ve never told me, in six years, that you have a brother. He’s never come up once.”
“Because he’s an asshole.”
“I guessed that much. Fuck is right, Fred. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. More sure because you are here, to be honest. But I’m used to them springing shit like this on me. Do you want a drink?”
“Not really, but I’ll have one if you want one.”
In the end, she finds us orange juice instead, and we take our glasses up to the attic.
“This is why I’m really here,” she whispers as we sit cross-legged beside a carefully labeled set of boxes. Fredericka blazoned on each of them in thick black marker. She didn’t pack these up, someone else did. “Every time I’ve come in the past, I’ve thought, this is the last time I’m putting myself through this. But I always left stuff behind. Something changed in me this year, Ames. I’m not leaving anything behind anymore. Just in case.”
The resolve in her voice hits me right in
the chest. Boom. And I see how this tether is a burden she doesn’t need. “Good plan,” I whisper back, even though we’re the only people in the house. It feels good to share this in a conspiratorial way. “You’ve got all the family you need in New York.”
A flicker of pain crosses her face, and I remember too late how close she is to her cousin.
“And DeAnne,” I hastily add.
She smiles.
“Will she be here tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
I’ve never heard of her brother, but the cousin she adores has filled anecdotes over the years. “I’m looking forward to meeting her finally.”
“Why didn’t you go home for Thanksgiving?”
I jerk my attention up to meet Fred’s gaze. “Uh…”
“Was that too much of a conversation shift?”
“No.” I fidget my thumb against my index finger. “I was going to stay in the city. I told you that.”
“Sure. And last year, we both stayed in the city. In fact, it’s been a couple of years since you’ve gone home for Thanksgiving.”
“It’s ridiculous to go home twice in quick succession. I always go home for Christmas.”
She nods. But she’s looking at me, and after all of my bullcrap about seeing her, I owe her honesty here.
I sigh. “It’s not fun. It’s awkward. My parents want grand babies and I don’t want kids. I don’t want a husband. I don’t want what they have and I’m tired of pretending—” I cut myself off, my eyes going wide, because whoa.
Fred’s eyes are wide, too.
We’ve talked about how I don’t want kids before. It’s just not how I see myself growing old. But when it comes up, I always say I see myself getting married in the future. There’s something really lovely about a couple growing old together, and I want that.
I shift nervously again. “I don’t know. It’s awkward.”
“I know what that’s like,” she says gently. “I do. Hey, want to see if my comic books are as cool as I remember them being?”
5
Fred
We go through all the boxes, and Ami points out that between the two of us, we can bring it all back in checked luggage. So we lug the boxes down to my childhood bedroom.
“Is that why your suitcase was so light?” She asks as she watches me pack away the comic books.
“Yep.”
“Smart. So smart.”
It didn’t feel smart. It felt desperate and duplicitous. But as I fill the suitcase, this feels right. And so yeah, maybe I am smart. Maybe, despite my best efforts to second-guess myself, I do know what is best for me.
“Do you want to talk more about you?”
She buries her face in her hands. “Nope,” is her muffled answer.
I grin. “Then tell me again how you don’t really know who Jem is.”
Her head shoots up. “I’m not that much younger than you.”
“Enough that you didn’t grow up dancing around like one of the Holograms.”
“That’s not my fault. I wasn’t allowed to watch television until I was twelve.” Ami picks up my mint-condition Jem doll. “She’s totally my aesthetic, too.” She winks at me. “How did it take you this long to add a streak of color to your hair?”
I tug on the shock of blue that falls over my eyes. “Dunno.”
“I like, you know.”
“You’ve said.”
“And I’ll say again.”
From downstairs, we hear the front door open, then my mother’s voice calls out. We head downstairs and I do another round of introductions. “Granddad, this is my friend Ami. Ami, this is Fred Stanton. My namesake.”
My grandfather gives her a bright smile and holds out his hand. The tremors are worse than I remember them. She takes it and leans in—because she towers over him—and murmurs something about it being a pleasure.
That’s two out of three people in my family she’s been able to charm immediately over an introduction, and my father’s a lost cause.
I move in next and give him a gentle hug. He squeezes back, and that’s so familiar it makes me want to cry in a good way.
But my bubble of relief only lasts until we’re all seated at the table. The slide back to toxic starts with my mom, not my father. She makes a noise, a choked back little judgement, when my grandfather takes a second swipe of butter for his bun.
The snap back is on the tip of my tongue. The man is ninety. He has congestive heart failure and life is winding to an end, sooner than later. Let him eat the fucking butter.
But I don’t want to speak for him, either. And he ignores her, so it’s fine. Shove down, shove down.
Then my father brings up my brother. How busy he is, how great it is he’s taking off tomorrow and Friday for family time, like he deserves some kind of medal for setting work aside for two whole days.
And also, don’t give him the medal in advance. I’d bet solid money that he ends up working on Friday while his wife and kids go shopping.
Not that I care.
Except I do.
Where’s my praise?
I stab my potatoes and shovel them into my mouth. Have they ever raved about me to my brother?
Does he get angry in return?
“Ami, tell us more about the community garden,” my mother says, just sharply enough that I know she’s seen me stab the potato.
Great. Now I’m not eating right.
I take a long, slow sip of water instead of trying to choke down food I don’t even like.
Ami tilts her head thoughtfully to the side. “Where to start?”
With what’s in the garden, I think darkly. That’s all she cares about.
But my best friend isn’t going to do that, I can tell, and my heart nearly explodes at the love in her effort. She looks across the table at me, her eyes bright. “I think it was the petition you started about the parking lot planned for that space, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, maybe. Lots of people were upset about that.”
“That was five years ago now. Fred was working on a really intense PR campaign, long hours, but she took whatever free time she had and dedicated it to this concern in her community. Have you visited her in Brooklyn? It’s really tight knit,” she says, keeping on, because she knows they haven’t. My father doesn’t fly and my mother is scared of big cities. “I’d graduated and was working as a waitress, so I had mornings free. We split the door knocking hours, me doing the day and her doing the evenings after she was done work. We got a huge petition signed, and the city took a second look at the development plan. It took another year to get interest going in a community garden, but it’s gorgeous now. And that’s all your daughter’s doing. It pays to speak up, that’s for sure.”
Everyone around the table is silent. Me, because I can’t swallow around the lump in my throat.
My granddad, because, well, talking is hard for him right now.
My parents…I can’t read their faces. But they don’t generally believe that speaking up is a good thing. Circulating a rabble-rousing petition against a developer definitely isn’t.
I kind of wish my brother—the bigshot commercial developer, at least by local standards—was here to see this, but I’m glad he’s not, too.
I’m loving this silence and he’d be ripping into Ami right now. I’d never let that happen, though. Not okay. Not ever.
“You left some details out of the garden story,” my mother finally says. “How interesting. Honey, can you pass down the chutney?”
And that’s the end of that.
Across the table, Ami grins at me.
After dinner, I volunteer to do the clean-up and Ami jumps at the chance to help. My parents and Granddad retire to the living room and put on a movie.
“So that was…survived,” Ami whispers as I hand her a tea towel.
“Yep.” I bump elbows with her. “Thanks for the story. I think you put some pretty heavy spin on it, but hey, I can appreciate that.”
She frowns. “Not tha
t much spin.”
“You left out Desiree and her band of dedicated anti-gentrification minions.”
“Good point. She’s a force to be reckoned with, too.”
Too. I’m not a force of anything. “I liked working with her.”
“Maybe you should get back into that loop.”
“I email with her from time to time.”
Her eyebrows lift. “Yeah? You haven’t said anything about that recently.”
“I don’t think I’ve done anything but bitch and complain recently.”
“You’re going through a thing.”
“Time for that to stop, though.” I clear my throat. “Okay, I’ll wash, you dry.”
When we get down to the final few dishes, I turn my attention to stowing away the leftovers. There are only two slices of pie, and the last thing we need before Thanksgiving is leftover dessert. “Do you want one?” I ask Ami, holding out the plate.
She shakes her head. “Nope.”
I quietly walk to the doorway and peer into the living room. My parents have gone upstairs now, and my grandfather is alone on the recliner. “I’ll be right back,” I tell Ami, and I grab two forks.
He’s dozing in and out, but when I sit on the ottoman in front of him, he gives me a smile. Tired, but real, and I’m glad I came back for the holidays. For this moment, the rest of the crap melts away.
“Hey Grandad,” I say quietly. “Do you want the split the last of the pie with me?”
“Ah, my beautiful girl.” He sighs. It’s hard for him to talk sometimes. “Yes. Please.”
I hand him a fork and hold the plate out. We eat slowly, carefully.
“Are you happy, Freddie?” He’s the only one who calls me that. Has ever since I was little, before I knew I didn’t like my full name.
I smile at him. “I try to be, Freddie.”
He laughs weakly. “That’s good. Too many people don’t care about being happy.”
“What do they care about?”
“Pie. Parking lots.” His eyelids drift shut.
Once upon a time, he built parking lots, too. I shove the last bit of pie in my mouth and watch him drift off to sleep.
Rogue Nights Page 24
