Three
I had to be at the bus station by 8:30 am Sunday morning to come home. Nothing more was ever said about me or the book being gay. I kept overanalyzing mom to see if she suddenly started acting differently, which would mean Robert told her. She never acted any differently, and neither did he for that matter. I managed to avoid him most of the time until mom assigned him to drive me to the bus station at which I quickly protested.
“Why can’t you take me? It’s not like we see each other that much. I think you would want to see your son off.” I didn’t really care that much, but anything was better than spending a half hour in a car with Robert. Unfortunately the guilt card wasn’t paying off.
“Look, I need to bring your grandma to church because your granddaddy can’t drive anymore. You know she never misses church.”
“So then why can’t Robert bring her to church and you can drop me off at the bus?” I asked.
“Look, Robert and your grandma don’t get along real well, okay?”
“Oh, there’s a surprise,” I interjected. I always thought of my grandmother as a smart lady and this just reinforced my opinion. It also made sense now why Robert was absent from Thanksgiving dinner.
“So,” she said, ignoring my snotty utterance, “having him bring her is out of the question. I would love to be able to see you off, hon, but grandma is expecting to go to church with her daughter.”
I was trying to think of better arguments, but I saw that I wasn’t going to win this battle. I got together everything I had brought and waited in the kitchen. Mom was running out the door, but stopped to kiss me goodbye and promised she would see me again at Christmas. With that, she was gone, and Robert walked in and asked if I was ready to go.
The first ten minutes of driving were spent without much being said. Robert eventually broke the awkward silence.
“Listen, Travis, in case you were wondering, I didn’t say nothing to your mom about that book.”
Now I knew that he knew. He knew and he wasn’t telling my mom. This made me both very nervous and very relieved at once.
“Thanks,” I said, staring at the cracked dashboard in front of me.
“No problem. We all have things that the people we love the most just won’t understand.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by that. He was either being ultra-cool about the situation or had some relatable secret at some point in his life. I wasn’t really interested in finding out which. I just wanted to forget the whole thing.
“Thank, you, Robert,” I said.
“Hey, you can call be Rob, you know,” he said.
“I know.”
I spent the remainder of the ride contemplating what negative effects, if any, would come from the first actual adult in my life knowing my biggest secret. I envisioned a hundred scenarios that might have played out if my mom found out, but never once thought about if it was her boyfriend. His indifference made the situation even more puzzling. For most people, coming out is a significant moment in a person’s life. Now I was out to a person who just simply didn’t seem to care one way or the other. I didn’t know how to process that.
We got to the bus station about fifteen minutes before I needed to board so he waited with me there.
“So anyway, did you finish it?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“That book you was reading.”
“Well, no, I’m only about half way through it,” I told him. “You were right though,” I said.
“What about?”
“That kid is pretty weird,” I said. Then it was time to board the bus.
The bus bound for my final destination contained more people that I had hoped. Thirteen seats back (don’t ask me why I counted – I’m just like that) I found an attractive young man staring out the bus window with an empty seat beside him and decided that I’d not mind having a seat there for a while. I yanked a magazine out of my bag before shoving it up in the overhead and then sat down. The attractive young man beside me didn’t move his gaze. As near as I could tell he was staring at an M&M’s snack vending machine out the window. Peanut butter was always my favorite and I wondered if it was his also.
I was trying to check him out in the most subtle way possible and had the good fortune of having to look his way to see out the window. He seemed about my age or a little older. There was a hint of stubble on his face and he had buzzed light brown hair that was currently topped by a pair of headphones. A washed-out looking, wrinkled black tee shirt was clinging a little tightly to his body. Faded dark blue jeans stretched down to his classic style tan work boots that, unlike the guys I saw at school, looked soiled and beat up like they had actually been worked in.
We rode along in complete silence for about 25 minutes. That is to say, the attractive young man and I were silent while the people around us were coughing and throat-clearing, whistling and humming, and unsuccessfully trying to quiet insufferable children. I had become bored with the scenery both inside and out so I began flipping through my Entertainment Weekly magazine and stopped at an article about a new show I liked called Arpeggio High, where drama and craziness played out at a fictional musical arts high school. I was halfway through the first page when I turned to see the attractive young man give me a peculiar look that made me uncomfortable. What must he think of Arpeggio High? It was a show that soon became notorious for incorporating a wide array of gay and bisexual characters and maybe my new traveling companion was now worried that the guy sitting next to him is a homo. Bad news – he is.
I mindlessly flipped through the remaining pages without any particular interest in anything else and then closed the magazine, still preoccupied with what the attractive young man next to me was thinking. About a minute later he pulled off his headphones and I found out.
“Mind if I read that Arpeggio High thing?” he asked. “I mean, if you’re done with the magazine.”
He had green eyes that were slightly mesmerizing – so much so that I realized after a moment he was still waiting for an answer.
“I’m sorry,” I said, coming back to Earth. “Of course. Feel free.” Feeling stupid, I quickly handed the magazine to him.
Ten minutes later he returned the magazine and thanked me and then returned to his headphones to his ears. They were plugged into his phone and I could just barely make out the music artist’s name as Jason Aldean.
I had tried to convince myself that just because he might like Arpeggio High that it didn’t necessarily equate to him being gay. But each speculative thought led to another. Is he gay? If he is, I found him awfully attractive and he has pretty eyes. Does he think I’m attractive? Would he date me? I won’t tell you where my thoughts were going beyond that. Still, I couldn’t know anything for sure. Why couldn’t he be listening to Lady Gaga? At least that would make his sexual orientation clearer (or at least justify the conclusions that I was jumping to).
I tried to put him out of my mind for the rest of the bus ride, but it didn’t work, mainly because he was sitting merely two inches to my right with his leg brushing up against mine every so often. That alone was enough to cause my contents to shift.
I was staring at a woman. Or at least someone I could most closely identify as a woman. It was large, very tall, and was sitting about five seats ahead of me. It donned a hideous orange flowered sun dress with stockings that didn’t quite reach the bottom of the dress. It had fat legs and feet that were spilling out of tight shoes. A round, middle aged man’s face was surrounded by hair that was dirty and matted, half white and half the color of pink grapefruit. No one dared sit next to it.
“Her name is Sally Parker,” the attractive young guy said to me.
“What?” I asked, turning to look at him.
“Originally born as Salvador Parker.”
“You know him? I mean her.”
He chuckled. “It’s a game my brother and I used to play when we got bored. We would spot someone that looked a little nutty and build a life story around them. I had her pegged f
rom the second I saw her grazing outside the bus station.”
“That’s kind of mean,” I said. “I like it.” I couldn’t help but smile at his demented game.
“One day,” he said, continuing his fictional narrative, “right before he graduated college with a degree in philosophy he was abducted by aliens. They did unspeakable things to him while aboard their ship. Then they left him in a corn field and he was never the same again. He suffers from schizophrenia. Most of his personalities are women.”
“None of whom are acquainted with shampoo,” I added, and we both laughed.
When we arrived at the station, my new attractive bus friend handed my bag to me from the overhead rack and I thanked him and made my way off the bus. On the sidewalk, I dropped my bag and called Patrick to ask him for a ride but he didn’t answer. I watched my bus friend walk into the 7-Eleven across the street and then called Kate. She was unavailable to come get me so my only option was to walk home which would take about an hour. I re-tied my shoes, picked up my bag, and was on my way. Five minutes later I was sweating in the unusually warm November heat. Stupid global warming.
Everything that had gone on lately was putting me in a permanently bad mood. It all started with my dead cat. The cat I loved and who was there for me more than my own damn father. Then enduring a round trip bus ride up to Nothingville, New York only to discover that mom had taken in some stray trailer trash as her live-in boyfriend, who, by my biggest ever stroke of bad luck, now knew my deepest, darkest secret. The icing on the cake, of course, was having to walk home on some kind of mutant 80 degree November day with twenty pounds of luggage. If I had gotten my car fixed before Thanksgiving this wouldn’t have happened.
My whiny inner voice was interrupted when an old green Ford truck slowed down to a stop on the side of the road in front of me. As I walked by the passenger side, I heard someone ask if I needed a ride. I turned to see my cute bus friend looking at me.
“Sure,” I heard myself say before I even thought about it. I pulled on the door handle once and then again, but the door didn’t budge.
“Sorry,” he said, reaching over and opening it from the inside. “Outside handle’s busted,” he told me as I climbed inside and dropped my bag on the rusted floor below.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“It’s cool. Where are you going?” he asked, shifting into gear with a very clunky shifter.
“Do you know where Saint Mary’s church is? I asked. He nodded. “I live right near there.”
“I’m Ryan, by the way,” he told me, extending his hand. He had a good handshake, I thought. You can tell a lot from a handshake. People sometimes have a weak handshake that was not unlike shaking hands with cooked linguini. Even more annoying were the alpha-male Roberts of the world that acted like they were gripping a football.
“I’m Travis,” I said. He shifted again and I heard an awful grinding noise.
“Ugh. This is my dad’s old truck.”
“Not much of a luxury ride,” I said.
“Luxury? We’ll be lucky if all the duct tape holds until we get to your house.” He smiled.
“It’s okay,” I said. “If my own car wasn’t broken down I’d have driven up to Peterstown myself.”
“What’s in Peterstown?” he asked.
“Not a damn thing,” I answered, following it up with a big sigh. “Actually, my mom and grandparents live up there.”
“That’s cool,” he said.
I was desperately trying to think of some way of perpetuating the conversation. I didn’t have much time left and I wanted to get to know Ryan better, but before I knew it, we were near Saint Mary’s and I was giving him turn-by-turn directions to my house.
Ryan pulled into my driveway and asked if the car in front of us was mine.
“Any idea what’s wrong with it?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I told him. “It runs fine until I hit the gas and then it kind of just loses power. Unless I do it real slow.” That sounded dirty in my head, but I didn’t know Ryan well enough to start pointing out my own bad double entendres.
“Hmm. Sounds like it might be a vacuum pump thing.”
“Cars have vacuums?” I asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
I picked up my bag, realizing that my ride had come to a complete stop and I was lingering. I thanked Ryan and jumped out, closing the squeaky door behind me.
“Hey,” I heard Ryan yell through the window. I turned around. “I can swing back here later tonight and take a look at your car if you want.”
I thought for a moment. I definitely liked the idea of him coming back to my house, but I didn’t want to sound overeager.
“Alright,” I said, casually. “If it’s no trouble.”
“Not at all,” he said. “Is 7:00 good?”
“Sure. Thanks again.”
I smiled to myself and realized: if I had gotten my car fixed before Thanksgiving this definitely wouldn’t have happened.
That evening, as planned, Ryan rang my doorbell at 7:00 sharp. I almost felt silly for having spent ten minutes trying to choose the best clothes that would appear as if I had casually thrown them on after my shower. I felt even dumber when I saw him in a grease-stained tee shirt and blue mechanic overalls, which it made perfect sense for him to be wearing since he came to work on my car.
He opened the hood of my car and went right to it while I stood behind him pretending that watching him work on it was interesting. What was more interesting was the view of his butt as he was hunched over the fender.
“Are you a car doctor by trade?”
“Yeah. My dad owns a shop over in Daleville.”
“And you go to school?” I hoped my questions weren’t annoying him.
“Right.”
“Kennedy High?”
He poked his head out and said, “Yup.”
“I go to Cleveland High,” I told him. This small talk seemed to be getting me nowhere. Maybe I had spent all afternoon manufacturing our relationship in my head for nothing.
Five minutes later he told me to start my car and I did.
“I think it’ll be okay now. Let’s go for a ride and see.”
He got into the passenger seat and I backed out of the driveway. When I got to the road I punched the gas pedal harder than usual to see if the car would move or die. It accelerated quickly and easily.
“I figured that would take care of it,” Ryan said.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Just disconnected something you don’t really need,” he said with a smile. “It’s an old grease monkey trick. Only I won’t charge you $150 for it.”
I laughed and it occurred to me that I hadn’t given any thought about owing Ryan for working on my car. I sort of figured he wouldn’t expect anything in return since he offered, but I needed to make sure.
“So what would you want? For working on my car, I mean.”
“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head.
“You sure?” I asked, turning back onto my street and heading back toward my house. Maybe you need a full body massage, I thought.
“I’m sure,” he said. “Hey, it only took, what, ten minutes? That’s nothing.”
“Well, alright then. Thanks,” I said. “If you’re sure.”
“I’ll tell you what; if it makes you feel any better you can get me a drink when we get back. Okay?”
“No problem,” I said. Anything to get you into my house.
I went through the motions of opening the back door as gracefully as possible and led Ryan into the kitchen and flipped on the fluorescent light. From the refrigerator I fetched him a bottle of water as well as one for myself. We sat at the table and I asked Ryan where he had come from on the bus.
“Well,” he said before a long pause, “My mom and brother are up there in Latham.”
“Really?” I asked. “My mom lives in New York, too. I think I already told you that. Anyway, where does your mom live?” r />
“She doesn’t. I mean, that’s where she’s buried,” he said flatly. “My brother, too.”
It was like my head was a chattering television and someone just suddenly yanked the plug out of the wall. What do I even say to that?
“Oh, man. Ryan, I’m sorry,” I said, feeling a bit embarrassed.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said without much emotion. “You wouldn’t know that.” He didn’t seem upset talking about it, but I decided to leave it alone.
We had fallen into an awkward silence so it seemed like a good time to pee.
“I’m gonna run to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”
Ryan nodded at me and I went.
When I returned I found Ryan looking at some photos on the living room wall.
“So, if you were visiting your mom, I guess you live with your dad?” he asked.
“Yeah. You wouldn’t know it though. He’s hardly ever here.”
“Where is he now?”
“Away on business,” I said.