“Gee, thanks for pointing out the obvious,” Dad said, rolling his eyes.
“Finished!” Nana said. “Paul, when you do stupid things, it makes me sad. I couldn’t believe when Sandy called us and told us that you’d gone behind your partner’s back to see his mom! And then, to make it worse, you locked yourself in your room and started to cr
y. I wish that things could go back to the way they were before. Like the way they were yesterday. Yesterday was a good day. Do you remember? You came over to my house with Vince and we all had dinner and I showed him Slutty Snow White and Johnny Depp loved him and Vince tried to eat your face outside after he found the bike. I wasn’t supposed to see that, but it was kind of hard not to notice when you got slammed up against the side of my house. In conclusion, you should go after Vince, and never do meth because you’ll lose your teeth and get weird spots on your face. No one likes weird spots.” She looked up at me and smiled.
“That was lovely, Gigi,” Sandy said, leaning his head against her leg. “You are such an eloquent speaker.”
“Thank you, honey,” she said, preening. “It goes on for an additional sixteen pages, but I felt that was enough to make my point.”
“Paul, do you love him?” my mom asked suddenly.
I didn’t have time to think. “Yes… oh shit. I meant no. Of course not. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
They waited.
I sighed. “Yes,” I whispered. “I don’t know how or when or why, but yes.” I hung my head.
My dad reached up and rubbed my back. “Paul, did you know that me and your mom almost got divorced?”
I snapped my head back up. “What? What are you talking about? You guys met, everything was rosy, and a week later you were married. There was no divorce. There wasn’t even an almost.”
“No. Not completely. Oh, I knew I loved her right away, and I knew she loved me after she tried to kill me with her car, but I didn’t know if that was going to be enough.” He smiled over at my mom whose eyes were a bit watery. “It’s one thing to love a person, but it’s another to love them regardless of their faults. And I had a bunch of them.”
“He really did,” Mom mused happily. “So many faults.”
“So many,” he agreed. “So when I asked her to marry me, I was sure she was going to laugh at me, even if she did love me. It was going to be too fast, I thought she’d say. We were too young. We didn’t really know a thing about each other. But I knew what I wanted, and I wanted her. For the rest of my life.”
Sandy sighed and wiped his eyes. “So lovely,” he sniffed.
“But she said yes. She said yes with this little laugh she has that sounds like bells. She said yes and we got married down at city hall and she moved in the next day. A week later, she moved out.”
“He was a bit of a slob,” Mom said. “And a jerk. He wanted things done his way and on his timeline. And, of course, that didn’t work for me. At all. I was used to living my own life, and suddenly I was thrust in with this man that I really didn’t know. So one day while he was in class, I packed up and moved back home.
“How long did that last?” I asked, unsure why I’d never heard this part of their lives before.
“Six months,” Dad said. “I was devastated when I came home, but I understood. Or at least that’s what I tried to tell myself. I went over to Nana’s house and begged her to come back but she said no. I asked her if she wanted an annulment, and she said no to that too. I asked her what she wanted. She told me she wanted to date.”
“We’d already gotten the falling in love part out of the way,” Mom explained. “That was the hard part, and we got it done before most people would. What was left was just learning about each other to make sure the love we had was something that would last. Sometimes it’s enough to love someone just the way they are. Other times, you have to work at it so that it doesn’t fade away.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked quietly. “Why now?”
“Because you love him,” Dad said. “Even with all the little voices inside your head saying it’s too soon, that it’s not enough, that he’s so much better than you are, you love him. And he loves you. And you know it as well as I do. Someone who tells you that they’re going to fall in love with you, or that they’re partway there, is already there.”
“But you’re not letting yourself believe it,” Mom said, admonishing me slightly. “You’re so used to what you had before that this is scaring you. And it’d be easier to walk away. It would be easier to pretend this never happened. But the things we want in life will never be easy, and if you want it, if you really do, then you need to fight for it with everything you’ve got. It’s only yours to lose, Paul. Only you can make it go away.”
“It’s like all of you are after-school-specialing on me,” I groaned. “I feel so cheap and used and covered in grossness, like some twink after a bareback gang bang.”
“And how would you know what that feels like?” Dad asked. “Is there something we should know?”
“Not at all,” I said quickly. “Just an expression gay guys use.”
They looked to Sandy, who shrugged. “I understood what he meant.”
I like you, I mouthed to him because I wasn’t quite back to love yet. He rolled his eyes.
“So what now?” Nana asked. “I feel like this intervention was modestly successful. I don’t think Paul will be doing meth again anytime soon.”
“I wasn’t on meth!”