The Best Four Years of Adam Becker - 28. Sophomore Year - Chapter 6

“Really,” Philip said, as the two of us, still in our suits from dinner, ransacked the wine cellar at our Nevada ranch late on Thanksgiving night. “What are they going to miss? There’s like a hundred bottles down here. And we’re all adults.”

We were not, in fact, all adults: Philip was 22, but I was 19, and Justine was 18, and that seemed very far beyond the bounds of what constituted alcoholic adulthood, even in the aggregate.

Though my parents had made it pretty clear that “college” was the drinking age in the Becker house. They were not under any illusion that Justine and I had gone to New Orleans to bible-study.

The wine cellar at the ranch in Pahrump was gigantic, outfitted by the original owner. It was my favorite part of the house when I was a kid: the labyrinth of empty shelves, back, back, back, a secret space. It wasn’t as big as I remembered in the cold light of adulthood, but it could hold 3,000 bottles, which seemed like a ludicrous amount of wine for anyone to have. Considering how infrequently the house was ever used--even when my dad was back in Nevada for recess alone, he’d usually just get a room at the Wynn--the shelves had always been mostly empty.

Philip found the champagne, well-stocked in a pair of wine refrigerators. My dad was perennially overstocked on champagne: “You never know when you’re going to have to celebrate something, but you’ll have to celebrate it right away,” was his credo; he was nothing if not an optimist.

Still, I didn’t know what impromptu celebration would require twenty bottles of champagne, what kind of unexpected ship christening that would suddenly crop up in the middle of the Mojave Desert, but I was perfectly fine to just drink the stuff.

Philip pulled two bottles of Veuve Cliquot rosé from the wine refrigerator, and handed them to me. Then he withdrew two more.

“That’s ambitious,” I said, as I followed him back up the stairs. “You had to take the most expensive champagne down there?”

“Night’s young, Pete,” he said, with a smile.

“I don’t want to get too drunk,” I told him. “I have to drive to California tomorrow.”

I was visiting Kevin. His request; he wanted to show me his hometown. We were meeting at a Panera Bread in Moreno Valley, California, about three hours drive from our ranch in Pahrump. I did not have high hopes, but I had enought cabin fever from a week at the ranch that I was willing to make the effort.

I had lied to everyone: I said I was meeting a group of friends.

Philip and I went back upstairs.

Justine was splayed out out like a cat on one of the dueling couches in the great room. The great room was the center of the mammoth lodge: cathedral beam ceilings and a giant stone fireplace and so much space that the sheer volume felt oppressive. I never liked the ranch house, I never liked being back in Nevada. The house was the magazine version of who we were supposed to be, Senator David Becker and Family; it was not our home.

She sat up when we entered the room. She had suggested they would get changed while we were down in the wine cellar, but inertia had gotten the best of her; she was still dressed from dinner in the gold evening gown she had worn to my formal last year when she was Chris Baker’s emergency date.

“The good stuff,” Philip told her, holding up two bottles of the Veuve Cliquot rosé.

He mugged for us, like he was glancing dashingly at an invisible camera for an invisible sitcom where he played the lead, the heartthrob, and I wondered what it would be like to not just know you were a star but to insist upon it.

“Oh, that is the good stuff,” Justine said, perking up, stretching her arms in Philip’s general direction.

Thanksgiving meant we were all coming off a supremely long day: it was always frantic when we did it in Nevada, because it was all business. We were very active political props.

The five of us spent the morning hugging elderly veterans, which was always my least favorite part of the day. Old people had a particularly pungent smell, and their general frailness and near-deathness terrified me, even though they were perfectly nice.

And then we spent the afternoon being photographed working at a soup kitchen downtown, ladling out brown mystery liquid to heroin-addled homeless, which was Justine’s least favorite part of the day; the homeless were also pungent, though differently so, as was the soup.

Finally, we relieved ourselves of our political pleasantries, checked into a suite at the Wynn, cleaned the day off of ourselves, and decamped to the MGM Grand for the sixteen-course Thanksgiving tasting menu at Robuchon, our reward for putting up with the day without (excessive) complaining.

That was where the Beckers really excelled: five-star dining in eveningwear.

Afterwards, Philip, Justine, and I drove ourselves back to the ranch, back to Pahrump, an hour outside the city. The suite at the Wynn was not meant for us; it was for my parents, who had a tennis match and brunch with Steve and Elaine Wynn early the next morning, during which they would vacuum out their pockets in advance of my dad’s 2012 campaign, which was hopefully a re-election effort and not the nascent spring shoots of a presidential run.

Philip put one of the bottles down on the coffee table, and held the other one in outstretched, theatrical arms. With a giant twist, he popped open the bottle.

“Bottom’s up,” Philip said, as he began to pour into the awaiting champagne flutes. “Justine, have you ever had pink champagne?”

“No, I grew up in a trailer park,” she said, as she accepted a flute from him. “Please.”

Philip grinned at her, but didn’t say anything; he handed me a glass and then raised his. “To being reunited.” We clinked. “This is about sixty, seventy bucks a bottle, you know. Better than the shit we all usually bury in mimosas.”

“Mom and Dad shouldn’t have left us unattended,” said Justine, sprawling back out on the couch. “Big mistake. Big. Huge.”

“If you come visit us in New Orleans, I show you what terrible booze tastes like,” I offered.

“I think I’d like to go to Pat O’s,” Philip told me, “and have a hurricane. Can you get in there?”

“I mean, yes,” I told him, “but not with you right behind me. Even New Orleans bars would notice if two Philip Beckers came in back to back.”

He grinned. “So my ID is still working for you?”

“Like magic,” I replied. “I can’t believe that many people think I look like you.”

Philip grinned, with mock superiority. “I did get the looks, the brains, and the personality, what can I say. Lindsay thinks we look exactly alike. I need to take her to an optometrist.” He shook his head. “I wish she were here.”

“I think it’s too early in your relationship to inflict a Nevada Thanksgiving,” I told him. “Unless she looks good in a hair net.”

“It’s not too early,” he said. He paused, debating the next line, and then said, “I’m going to marry her.”

Justine sat up, with sudden alarm. “What? Are you seriously?”

“Like, figuratively?” I asked him. “Like, you mean down the road?”

“No,” he said, looking suddenly very serious, far more serious than I was used to seeing Philip. “She’s spending Christmas with us this year, and I’m going to propose.”

Justine and I exchanged eyes, disapproving eyes, but neither of us seemed willing to voice the disapproval. Because what could we say? Lindsay was lovely, Lindsay was sweet. Not necessarily the kind of knockout I’d always imagined Philip landing, but she was wonderful.

Philip looked taken aback by our silence, and pleadingly looked to me for confirmation.

Not that I didn’t like Lindsay McCoy, but it just seemed weird to think Philip could be married. He was 22. That just seemed young to me. It was young to me. I couldn’t imagine feeling ready to get married, right after I graduated college. I couldn’t even imagine admitting I was gay by that point.

I thought what would happen if Kevin and I got married. Not that I was thinking that way but, you know, you always have to think about the possibility when you were with someone.

If gay marriage was even legal then, which it was not.

No. Thinking about marrying Kevin--thinking about the number of steps that would have to be taken between where we currently were, regardless of legality--was daunting. And I loved Kevin, but I couldn’t imagine standing up in front of a church (would it be a church, even?) and being pronounced husband and husband, as the tuxedoed Washington elite and his alcoholic mother from the California desert comingled.

“She’s not,” Justine said, and then hunted for the right word: “pregnant, is she?”

“Oh, fuck you, Justine,” Philip replied. “No. I love her. And I want to marry her.”

“It’s just,” I said, “very soon.”

“It’s not very soon,” he said, stiffly. “We’ll be together two years in February. Look, neither of you have been in love before. And you don’t understand what it’s like when you want to be with someone, and you want to celebrate that with the people you care about. Where you want to make her part of your family.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Because I was in love. I loved Kevin.

But I couldn’t say that.

If there was a moment to say it, it was this moment. I would just say, “Well, actually I am seeing someone.”

And Philip would say, “Really? Who?”

And all I would have to say is, “His name’s Kevin.”

And then, it’d be over. It would be something I’d never have to do again.

Instead, I said, flatly, “You’re just so young. And it’s so permanent. How do you know it’s the right thing to do?”

“Because it is the right thing to do,” Philip said, as if that sort of thing should be obvious, as if he didn’t quite understand why I would even ask a question like that. “Like I said. You two have never been in love. When it’s right, you know it. I can’t explain it any other way.”

I just sat there quietly, with Justine, the two of us never been in love, apparently, as Philip continued: “And we wouldn’t get married right away. Engagements last a long time.”

And I thought about that: if Philip was engaged for, say, two years. A wedding in December 2009. Kevin and I first formed some semblance of a relationship during spring break, March 2007, so we would be together for almost three years by that point.

Longer than Philip and Lindsay were together now, at any rate.

And I wondered what it’d be like if Kevin came along, if he was my date to my brother’s wedding. If we could just sit there, cracking jokes together and drinking champagne and his hand on my knee like any other couple, no one looking, the two of us just being.

But of course they’d look, because it’d be a room full of Washington Republicans, news flying that Peter Adam Becker, second son of the good Senator, had brought some dude to a wedding.

Philip was a little irritated that he hadn’t managed to snag the easy approval he was so clearly looking for. “You know what, I shouldn’t have told you guys,” he said, finally. “I figured Mom and Dad might flip out, but I expected better from you two.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Justine told him. “You sprung this on us. We’re surprised. You’re only 22. It’s a big thing.”

“I’ll be 23 in April,” he replied, curtly, as if that made any sort of difference. He grabbed the bottle of Veuve Cliquot out of the ice bucket, and filled back up his glass, then topped off me and Justine’s. “I need to ask Mom for Ouma’s ring while I’m here. I want Lindsay to have it.”

“One-and-a-half karat sapphire,” Justine said, dismissively. “I’d want at least a two karat diamond, minimum.”

“Snob,” I replied, with a smirk. “Better tell Matt Rowen to start saving now.”

Justine shot me a lethal glare, but Philip grinned at me. “Ooh la la, who’s Matt Rowen?”

“God,” Justine said, shaking her head. “Some guy I went out with all of three times, months ago, and now he’s marrying us off.”

“Who is he?”

“One of Peter’s fraternity brothers,” Justine replied. “We hooked up one time after a party, and then we had lunch twice, and that was it. I haven’t talked to him in a month. He didn’t even take me to that top secret Iota Chi party.”

Justine tossing around the word “hooked up” was so lackadaisacal, and Philip didn’t bat an eye, as if our little sister “hooking up” was something we should just all let roll off our shoulders.

Though, somehow, Philip seemed okay with that arrangement, maybe as part of his effort to secure our approvals for his pending nuptials.

“Well, don’t get a reputation,” he warned, finally. “Fraternity guys talk.”

“Oh yeah,” she replied, coldly. “I noticed. Matt Rowen is not a gentleman.”

For a short second, I imagined myself punching Matt Rowen across the face. I didn’t know what “not being a gentleman” entailed, exactly, but I didn’t think I wanted to hear any additional details about what may or may not have transpired between my sister and the hottest guy in my fraternity.

“Well,” Philip said, “maybe avoid fraternities altogether.”

“Just join a convent or something?” Justine suggested.

Philip smirked. “I’m just saying, what’s going to happen if you’re First Daughter, and then the gossip starts flying?”

“I saw myself more in the Bush Daughter mold,” she replied, acidly, sipping her champagne. “Puking on a street corner, and everyone thinking, ‘Well, she’s just living her best life.’”

Philip smiled at that. “God, could you imagine the three of us in the White House?”

“You mean if we had a Secret Service agent watching us steal Veuve Cliquot from the wine cellar?” I asked. “No. Let’s just go on assuming Dad’s not running for President, and enjoy it that our lives aren’t completely fucked up yet.”

“I mean,” Justine said, “it’d be kind of fun. Air Force One. The White House.”

Philip tossed me a disbelieving look that anyone could celebrate even the notion that our dad could become President of the United States, and then went back to Justine. “Dad wouldn’t win,” he said, stiffly. “Against Hillary Clinton’s re-election campaign?”

“Or what if it’s Giuliani running for re-election,” I offered. “Dad’s too moderate to primary him.”

“Well, Giuliani isn’t going to win,” Justine replied. “This bottle of champagne has a better chance of getting elected President than a Republican in this climate.”

We all knew too much about politics, considering I was the only one that followed actively followed it out of the three of us. Philip was drifting more and more liberal, especially since he started dating Lindsay McCoy, who was a sashay away from being a communist like Kevin Malley, and Justine could not care less about politics. But our parents’ careers had given us enough institutional knowledge of what was going on, at least.

“I’m just saying, it wouldn’t be all bad,” she replied. “You don’t have to jump down my throat.”

“No, unified opposition,” Philip replied. “Seriously, if he even changes planes in Iowa, we have to rain down the full brunt of ‘hell fucking no.’”

 

“Oh my God, no, you did not wear a suit to your family’s Thanksgiving dinner,” Kevin said, flipping through pictures on my digital camera. “No way.”

Kevin and I were, in fact, having lunch the next day at a Panera Bread in some upscale shopping center deep in the heart of the suburbs. It was a situation that still struck me as surreal, that my boyfriend was sitting across the table from me in some completely otherworldly place, like the TownGate Crossing shopping center.

“And Justine looks like she’s dressed up for Paris Hilton’s wedding,” Kevin said, big smile on his face, continuing to flip. “No, this is ridiculous, I can’t handle this. What kind of world do you live in, Becker?”

It hadn’t dawned on me that wearing a suit for a holiday was some sort of luxurious excess.

“We were at Robuchon,” I replied.

Kevin gave a thin smile. “You act like that means something to me.”

“It’s the best restaurant in Vegas,” I told him. “At the MGM Grand. Seventeen-course tasting menu.”

“That sounds like way too many courses to sit through with family,” he said. “Ooh, pool pictures. You look really hot with your shirt off in this one.”

I craned over the table, to get a closer look at the screen. “That’s Philip.”

“No, the guy next to Philip,” Kevin said, rolling his eyes. “You. Peter. Looking really hot with your shirt off. Take a compliment.”

“Please don’t call me Peter.”

“You’re Peter in all these pictures. I’m just using the local vernacular.” He handed the camera back to me. “You know, I’ve been to Vegas. Once. With my dad. Circus Circus.”

“So you still have bedbugs, is what you’re saying.”

“No, but I still puke up the 99 cent surf-and-turf from time to time,” he replied, with a smile. “Involuntary. But only when I see people on trapeze.”

“I missed you, Kev.” And I did. I really did.

“I saw you a week ago,” he said. “Remember? I nearly put your entire body through the wall with the sheer power of my hips?”

“Yeah, that’s how that happened,” I replied. “How’s being home?”

“It’s being back,” he said, dismissively. “It’s no black tie, ninety-course tasting menu at the Wynn Las Vegas.”

I chose not to correct any of that hyperbole. “Thanksgiving’s always miserable out here. We’re props all day. We always start the morning off visiting these sick veterans, and they smell just atrocious.”

“Oh, the trials and tribulations of public service,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t believe I’m fucking a Bush twin.”

I chose not to engage on that. “What’d you do for Thanksgiving? Take me through a Malley Thanksgiving. No suits, I gather?”

“No suits,” he confirmed. “I was going to attempt a turkey. But there were only three of us, and we didn’t know if my mom would be conscious for a five o’clock dinner anyway, so I outsourced it. Two-course tasting menu, catered by Boston Market. Have you heard of it?”

“Chef-driven concept, right?”

“Oh, only the finest,” he agreed. “Nick was out sommelier for the evening, and got very avant garde. Paired Sunset Blush with dark meat.”

“How bold,” I told him.

“But Robespierre doesn’t sound awful,” he added, with mock dismissiveness.

“Robuchon,” I told him. “Robespierre was the French dictator they guillotined upside down.”

And it was the mention of France, maybe, that suddenly made me remember how limited my days were with Kevin. And I’d see him over spring break, and we’d be together when he got back, but there were only two weeks left of the semester once we got back from Thanksgiving. Two weeks, and then he’d be gone.

The mention of Robespierre did not seem to awake similar negative thoughts in the brain of Kevin Malley.

“I always get those two confused,” he replied. He crumbled up a napkin. “Should we get going? I want to take you on the tour. My high school’s down the street from here, and then we’ll hit up Colton.”

“Who’s Colton?” I said.

“Colton’s a place,” he said, rolling his eyes, as if this should have been incredibly obvious to anyone. “Colton, California. It’s where we live.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought you lived in Riverside.”

“Well, suburb of Riverside,” he said. “It’s just a couple towns over.” He stood up. “Chop chop, Becker, we’re burning daylight.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and we headed back into the parking lot. “How’d you get here, anyway, if you’re not even from here?”

“I made Nick drive me,” he replied. “He shook me down for gas money anyway yesterday, so I figured I should at least get some use out of it.”

I stopped in front of the Jeep Wrangler, and started unlocking the door. “This is us.”

Kevin looked genuinely surprised that this was our car: a dark green Wrangler, with a cloth roof, Nevada license plates.

“I never took you for someone who would drive a Jeep,” he said. “It’s so rugged and top-ish.”

“Well, it’s not mine,” I told him, as I opened the door and sat down in the driver’s seat. “We keep it on the ranch.”

We had two cars at the ranch: a Range Rover and a Jeep Wrangler; my parents still had the Range Rover in Las Vegas. And it dawned on me how silly it was to have two SUVs, especially a Wrangler, as if either of those cars spent a single moment of their lives going off-road.

“Open the glove box,” I told him, as Kevin strapped himself into the passenger seat. “I brought you something.”

He opened it, and pulled out a bottle of Veuve Cliquot rosé, which I had squirreled away before I left this morning with Justine and Philip still asleep.

He grinned, turned the bottle over in his hand. “You’re ridiculous, you know that?” He turned to me, leaned over the center console, and gave me a peck on the lips. “But I love it. And I love you.”

“I love you too,” I told him.

He put the champagne back in the glove box, and closed it. Then, he pointed towards the driveway to the shopping center. “Okay, go out this way, and turn right. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

I started driving; Kevin started playing with the radio, kept changing the channel, unable to find something he liked, so he finally landed on some top-40 station bathed in static.

And then we kept driving, with Kevin directing me. Until we hit the sign for Las Palomas High School, a small collection of low-slung mission-style buildings around a curved, palm-tree-lined driveway.

“This is my high school,” he told me. “Las Palomas. It’s nice, right?”

“Very nice,” I said. “Should I go into the driveway?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Just pull up to the gate and park in the yellow zone. No one’s here today.”

It was the opposite of the Harrington School’s campus: this was very California, like the high school from Bring It On, built maybe ten, fifteen years ago. The Harrington School was a landmark.

We only made it as far as the front gate, which was padlocked shut, but Kevin snaked his arm between the bars so he could point out the apparent landmarks.

“See, that’s the quad,” he said, pointing to the grassy quad in front of us, lined with more palm trees. “where we’d have lunch?”

“You’d have lunch outside?”

“Yeah,” he said. “California. It’s nice literally every day of the year.”

I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to go to high school and sit in the grass underneath palm trees and eat lunch in, say, the middle of January. And I wondered what it would’ve been like if my dad never entered politics, if he just spent his days bumming around a Las Vegas golf course, and I went to a school like Kevin’s.

“What would you do when it rains?”

“It doesn’t rain,” he replied. “It’s the desert.”

“But it does rain sometimes,” I said. “Even in the desert.”

“We’d go under the overhangs in the hallways, then,” he replied. “On that one day a year when it rained. But I always ate by my locker, anyway.” He moved his finger to the left. “See the locker bank to the left of the quad? In front of the big mural? That’s where I always had my locker. I always had to line up for registration super early to get one there. But that’s where I dealt from, so obviously location was a priority.”

It was so strange to think about--a gangly, sixteen-year-old Kevin Malley, maybe with braces, standing surreptitously over by a high school locker row, dealing dime bags to a bunch of other students as they walked towards the quad with lunch trays in, apparently, constant sunshine. The neighborhood thug--it was hard to picture Kevin like that, with his philosophy and his vocabulary. We’d been together for months and I’d never actually seen Kevin deal drugs to anyone but my fraternity brothers. I didn’t think I wanted to.

“This school is crazy rich,” he told me. “Maybe not Harrington School rich, but all the big houses over by the golf course go here.”

“And you,” I replied. “Somehow slipped through the cracks.”

He beamed at this. “I tricked my way into this high school,” he told me. “I obviously had no business going here. The high school near our house--the high school Nick went to--is one of those warzones, you know? Gangs, drugs, half the girls getting knocked up. And I just knew, God, if I had to go there, I probably wouldn’t make it out alive. And certainly wasn’t going to make it to college. But I discovered a loophole. You could apply for an inter-district transfer if they had a class that wasn’t offered by your district. So I did some research and I figured out that, apparently, Las Palomas is the only high school in the entire Inland Empire that teaches Latin. So I applied for the transfer, telling them that it had been my lifelong dream to learn Latin. And I played the dead father card, of course. And it worked: they let me come here, as long as I took Latin. Which I did for four years.”

“Latin,” I repeated. Because of course Kevin Malley, scrappy Kevin Malley, would find the one loophole that let him go to the rich high school, that would result in him taking four years of a dead classical language.

“Semper ubi sub ubi,” he replied, with a smirk.

“What does that mean?”

“Always wear underwear,” he told me. “Yeah, Latin is rough. I don’t recommend.” He shrugged. “But it was worth it, to get to come here. It was nice to have some time not in my neighborhood, anyway. And you know who buys a lot of pot? Rich kids from Moreno Valley.”

“I’m sure they were thrilled to have you,” I said, “bringing in the gangs and drugs.”

“Just the drugs,” he replied. “The gangs stayed in Colton. I was so scared I’d get caught, and kicked out. But, you know, desperate times. If my dad were still alive, he would’ve pulled me out of Las Palomas anyway, if found out I was slinging drugs. He was straight and narrow. Army, I mean. But after he died, my mom started drinking eveyrthing she could get her hands on, and we were getting eviction notices, and there’s really not a lot you can do at that point. When it was my money, I’d go down and pay rent, and cable, and electricity. Nick was always better friends with the thugs than I was, even though he was younger. But once they found out I was coming here, there were stoked to have someone who could sell their pot in Moreno Valley.”

“Oh, I bet they loved you here,” I told him. “The sexy bad boy. I bet you were standing over by your locker, with a whole line of cheerleaders just waiting to hook up with you. Little did they know your interests were elsewhere.”

Kevin smiled. “I was not popular in high school, let’s leave it at that.”

“Please,” I said, rubbing his arm. “I’m sure you sold pot to everyone on the football team.”

“Well, I did,” he said, slowly, “Everyone knew who I was. But I was the poor kid from Colton, who dealt drugs, and that’s not really the kind of kid anyone from Las Palomas wanted to hang out with in a non-professional capacity.”

I never thought of Kevin, who made everything look so effortless, who was surrounded by so many friends at Tulane, as being lonely in high school. I had Grant and Sarah, and speech and debate, but I was still lonely. And I didn’t like to think of Kevin like that.

“Aw,” I said. “I’m sure it wasn’t all bad.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” he replied. “Really. High school is so far in the past at this point. And friendships were always so transactional for me growing up, with my dad in the military, so it didn’t really matter that much. Like, you’d be in a place for a year, maybe eighteen months, maybe even less. And you make friends fully aware that, in a year, in six months, in however long, you’ll never see them, never hear from them again. And that’s just life. That’s just the way it is. So I kind of approached high school like that: sure, it was a moment where I didn’t have a lot of friends, but then it’d be over, and then you’d move on to another life. Which I did.”

That was the opposite of everything for me. I was eight when we moved to Hamlet; I started at the Harrington School in third grade, and continued through for the next decade, through the Lower School and then the Upper School, until I went to Tulane. The same ninety kids in each grade, with only the occasional new blood passing through. And I had Grant and Sarah, certainly, as friends, but there was just a sense of knowing everyone. That even the kids I didn’t like, that I never talked to, I just knew somehow.

“Well, now you have us,” I said. “Me, Baker, Veronica. And you’re stuck with us until the end of time.”

“Indeed I am,” he replied. “Even though I sell you all drugs.”

“You don’t sell me drugs,” I told him.

“Oh yeah, you’re a mooch,” he replied, with a smile. “Despite having more money than the Vatican. I forgot.”

We went back to the car. “Colton’s not far,” he told me, buckling himself back into the passenger seat. “Fifteen miles up the freeway.”

I pulled the Wrangler back on I-215, and headed north. When I was younger, we drove up the coast of California, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but that was different than driving through Riverside: this was a straight shot through the desert, signs for motels towering over us, power lines.

“Pull off when you get to the shopping center with the big ‘T’,” he said, and I did; I pulled onto the surface street, right near an abandoned strip mall that still had a disembodied blue “T” towering above the parking lot, but no other signage or signs of life.

Colton was a different world from Moreno Valley.

Kevin directed me down the suburban highway, past a row of fast food restaurants, and then onto a residential street, a row of squat, run-down bunglaows perched on brown lots behind chain-link fencing.

“This is us,” he said, pointing to a small white ranch house with the paint peeling. “Turn into the driveway.”

“You can park behind Nick,” he said, as I pulled up behind a white Chevy Monte Carlo, with the back bumper hanging off, secured with zip ties. “You think the Tercel’s a piece of shit? Check out that baby.”

It suddenly dawned on me that we were going into Kevin’s house, that I was going to meet his family.

And this seemed like a very big deal, and a very big deal that Kevin had not, in fact, adequately prepared me for. Were we at the point in our relationship where we were meeting families? When no one but Patrick even knew that we were a couple?

“Um,” I said, slowly, not unbuckling my seatbelt. “I’m going in?”

“You’re just a friend from college,” he said. “Nothing else. We’ll go in, you’ll say hi, we’ll get ice for the champagne, and we’ll get back on the scenic tour of scenic Colton.”

I still hadn’t unbuckled my seatbelt. Kevin Malley’s family, the brother and the mother I had heard so much about, almost none of it positive.

“Come on, Becker,” he said, warningly. “Be a big boy. I met Justine. You can meet Nick.”

Kevin had not only met Justine, but had met her repeatedly, part of the ongoing trauma of Justine attending Tulane with us. But this seemed so much more intentional and so much more serious. Justine had met Kevin as part of a big group, at the Boot for happy hour. Not at my childhood home.

Kevin was waiting for me. I finally unbuckled my seatbelt, and followed him wordlessly inside.

The house was cluttered, shoes piled up neatly next to the door, which struck me almost entirely as Kevin’s doing. The whole house, really, had a look of being freshly cleaned. Again, almost certainly Kevin’s doing, with his charming germaphobia. The only mess seemed to be recent, and seemed to be radiating out from Nick Malley: the pile of Wendy’s wrappers on the coffee table, the dirty-looking bong.

Nick, himself, was laying on the couch in cargo shorts and a white t-shirt watching a court TV show. Or he may have not been watching at all; his eyes were closed, and he showed no sense of realizing the two of us had walked into the living room.

“Yo, shitstain,” Kevin called. “Company.”

Nick’s eyes fluttered open, and he sat up. He looked like a lankier version of Kevin, somehow seemed older even though he was younger; his eyes were more sunken, and he had tattoos on each bicep poking out from underneath his shirt sleeve.

Nick sat up, studied me from head to toe--I suddenly felt overdressed and conspicuous and uncomfortable, in a powder blue Lacoste polo and Sperrys--and his expression didn’t change the entire time. “Hey, I’m Nick.”

“This is Becker,” Kevin replied. “He just came in from Vegas for the day.”

“Nice,” Nick said. “I like Vegas. You go to Tulane too?”

“Yeah,” I told him. I had absolutely no idea what else to ask Nick Malley, because the easy avenues for small talk were sealed off. He didn’t go to school, he didn’t do much of anything according to Kevin, and I certainly didn’t want to risk any awkward questions from him about how I knew his brother.

“Cool, man,” he said, instead, and he apparently also didn’t really have much more to say, because he slumped back down onto the couch, turned onto his side, and raised the volume on the TV.

“He’s a charmer,” Kevin replied, as he led me deeper into the house. “And he’s high as a kite, obviously.” He opened a door. This is our bedroom,” he told me, leading me inside. “Where the magic happens.”

The room was maybe twelve feet square, and there was a literal line spray-painted right down the middle of the carpet, like something out of an 80s sitcom, and the mess strictly adhered to Nick’s side. Clothes strewn on the floor, another dirty bong sitting on a stack of papers on top of the nighstand. And Kevin’s side was predictable in its minimalist, hospital-like cleanliness. Jarringly nothing on the walls on his side of the room, but a big bottle of Purell sitting on top of the dresser.

“Nice line,” I replied.

“I was fifteen when I did that,” he said. “I was going to build a big concrete wall, but I didn’t have any East German contractors handy. Is this room what you pictured? Worse?”

I didn’t answer that: I didn’t know what I had pictured. I hadn’t pictured it.

“It doesn’t even look like someone lives on your side,” I told him.

“No one really does live on my side,” he replied. “I took everything with me to New Orleans.”

“Well, I didn’t imagine you sharing a room.”

“Not easy,” he replied. “With Nick. Nick was only eleven when my dad died, and he was too young to have any of the Army discipline rub off on him. So he’s a lazy, filthy sack of shit.” He went to the closet, and picked up a small red cooler from the shelf. “We’ll get ice for the champagne, and then I’m taking you somewhere special and we’ll crack it open. My favorite place in Colton.”

“Lovers’ Lane?” I asked.

Kevin said nothing, but did crack a smile at that. He led me back out of the bedroom.

“Taking your cooler, asshole,” Kevin told Nick, as we passed through the living room, into the kitchen.

“Don’t touch my fucking stuff, fucktard,” Nick tossed back, without sitting up.

Kevin ignored him. Once we were in the kitchen, he put the cooler on the countertop, and opened the freezer, which was overflowing with frozen meals. There was a whole bag of convenience store ice sitting directly in the middle, on the one shelf.

“One thing my mom never lets us run out of,” he said. “Ice. We’ll go a week without paper towels or bread, but we always have ice.”

He dumped the ice into the cooler, and then off we went.

“Bye, dumbass,” he said to Nick. Nick responded with a middle finger.

“Wait, wait, I need twenty bucks, bro,” Nick called after us, sitting up. “Groceries.”

“I already filled up your tank,” Kevin replied, but he was taking out his wallet. “I’ve only got ten. That’ll be enough. Milk, bread, and cold cuts? Store brand? I want a receipt and change.”

“It’s going to be more than ten bucks, fuckface,” Nick replied, folding his arms.

“Eat baloney,” Kevin replied. “Or eat shit. I don’t care. Take it or leave it, dickcheese.”

Nick didn’t say anything; he leaned across the couch, snatched the ten dollar bill, and then went back to watching courtroom TV.

We got back in the Wrangler, and I was still trying to process my meeting with Nick Malley, which had gone very different than Kevin’s first meeting with Justine, back in April.

I wasn’t sure whether their name-calling was endearing, in a brotherly love sort of way, or if it was thinly-masked hostility. Or maybe both. I couldn’t imagine ever calling Philip “dickcheese.”

I didn’t know what to say, but I felt like I was expected to say something, so I just said, “Nick seems nice.”

Kevin giggled. “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

“I was being serious!” I lied.

“Please,” Kevin said. “I saw the look on your face when you realized my brother looks like a gang banger. I’m not judging--he does look like a gang banger.” He smirked. “And not in a good way.”

“Is he in a gang?”

“Hell if I know,” Kevin said. “He’s too much of a loser to be in a gang. He slings dime bags.” It was a little rich for Kevin to be criticizing him for that, which he seemed to realize, because he amended, “He’s just dumb. He and my mom are both dumb. My dad was smart. He got out of the South Side of Chicago. Canaryville, poor Irish. He knew that the only way out was through enlisting, so he did. And he was stationed at Pendleton when he died, and we just sort of wound up in the desert.” I stopped at a light. “Oh, and that’s the Wendy’s where I got arrested.”

I was floored by that “What? You were arrested? At a Wendy’s?”

“I like how the Wendy’s makes it worse for you,” he replied, with a smile. “I’ve been arrested twice. Never convicted.”

“Oh, just twice?”

“Please--my line of work? Only twice is a freaking miracle. I don’t have a criminal record though, for what it’s worth. No convictions.”

“What’d you do at the Wendy’s?”

“Oh,” he said. “I was fourteen. Right after my dad died, and I was kind of angry at the world. And someone broke into our yard and stole my bike, so I stole one back.”

“You got arrested for stealing back your own bike?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I didn’t steal my bike back. I stole someone else’s bike.” He giggled. “I was so pissed when they stole my bike, and I was like, fuck it, I can steal bikes too. I was sawing off the lock with a handsaw from a bike outside Wendy’s, which didn’t work very well obviously, and a cop came by and was like, ‘Are you fucking stealing that bike?’ And I ran, but they tackle me against a car, and put me in handcuffs, and drag me downtown. So this was my luckiest break: the guy whose bike it was had been in the Army too, and when he heard about my dad, he didn’t want to press charges.” He grinned. “What? I told you, you’re getting fucked by a thug.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Maybe you can recite Plato again to me, thug.” I paused. “What happened the other time?”

“Oh, that wasn’t even technically an arrest,” he replied, casually. “They cuffed us, and let us go. I was in a fight, right outside of my high school. Kid took weed but didn’t pay for it, so after school, I picked a fight with him. Cops came, put us both in cuffs, put us in the back of the squad car, but let us go. Because neither of us were going to talk, and they had bigger things to worry about than two teenage assholes beating each other up over an eighth of pot. And, luckily, neither of us had pot on us at the time. Otherwise, I’d be rotting in San Quentin rather than getting chauffeured around town by someone who wears a tuxedo to Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I told him. “It was a suit.”

Kevin was lost in his own storytelling. “That fight was November 2004. So about two years before I met you.”

I tried to think about where I was in November 2004, and I had the nasty suspicion it was at a speech and debate tournament.

“And I was so fucking scared,” he continued. “Not because I thought I’d be in jail for very long, but because I had just gotten in Early Action to Tulane, and I just saw all of that flash before my eyes. Poof. And, you know. I just remember that. I remember thinking that this was it, that this was where my life ended.” He shrugged. “And then the cops opened the doors and told us to beat it. And I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast in my life.”

“And even that didn’t scare you off of selling drugs?”

“No,” he said. “It didn’t. Look, it’s never been lost on me that you don’t approve of my profession.”

“Profession,” I repeated. “I don’t think selling weed counts as a profession, in the strictest sense.”

“Well, it’s easy money,” he told me. “And I need the money. I couldn’t get by just by waiting tables, or handing out pamphlets at the University Center.”

“That’s melodramatic,” I told him. “Aren’t you on full scholarship?”

Kevin gave me this pitying look. “Yes. I’m on full scholarship.”

“So why’d you need all that money at all?”

“You’re cute when you’re this out-of-touch,” he said, his face settling into a smug smile. “Really.”

“I’m serious!”

“I know you’re serious!” he giggled. “That’s what’s so funny. No. Even if you’re on full scholarship, you still have expenses. Books, and food, and rent, and gas, and car insurance, and clothes, and drinking money. And money you send home because your idiot brother needs bail again. And money you send home because your idiot mother drank away the entire Army pension check and there’s nothing left for food. And money you send home because the power’s shut off, or the gas is shut off, or the landlord comes by demanding to know where last month’s rent is. Or just money you send home because they ask for it, and you’re the guilty gay son who has to overcompensate by honoring every dumbass request they make.” He shook his head. “But you know what? Tulane students spend a fortune on drugs, and better I get it than some guy in the Iberville Projects.” He pointed. “Turn right here.”

We were in an industrial area, and the road--was it even a road? driveway?--that Kevin pointed had pointed me towards was leading down a steep embankment, towards a large dusty basin.

“This is the Santa Ana River,” he said.

The brown dust spiraled off into the horizon, below a series of bridges, but it otherwise did not look like a river.

“There’s no water,” I told him.

“Well, we’re in the desert. Obviously, there’s no water.”

I scrunched my nose, as I pointed the car down the hill. “So what makes it a river then? If there’s no water.”

He rolled his eyes. “Sometimes there’s water. There isn’t any right now.”

“What if water comes? Like, while we’re down here.”

“Water isn’t coming,” he replied. “It hasn’t rained in like six months. Just park up here.”

I kicked the Wrangler into park, on a narrow strip of asphalt just above the dry, dusty river. Kevin hopped out of the car and, with the red cooler balanced on his elbow, began climbing down the concrete embankment to the river. I followed him, with less grace, and followed him down the riverbed until we were underneath one of the bridges.

I could hear cars whizzing above us, but Kevin sat down, leaned back against one of the concrete pylons supporting the bridge. I sat down next to him.

We were the only ones there, but there were bottles everywhere, graffiti covering the pylons and the concrete walls of the bottom of the bridge.

“This was where we’d used to come and drink,” he said, pulling off the lid of the cooler. “And smoke. And get my product to sell at Las Palomas. But I never drank Veuve Cliquot down here.” He pulled the bottle out, stared at the cooler full of ice. “Damn it, I forgot glasses. Do you mind drinking it out of the bottle?”

I shook my head, and Kevin ripped off the foil, and began loosening the cage. He popped it off.

“Cheers,” he told me, and he took a swig, before passing me the bottle. “Damn, this stuff really is good.”

“Justine, Philip, and I snagged some bottles from the wine cellar last night,” I told him. “We had one still upstairs, so I figured I’d bring you a little something.”

In a snooty British accent, Kevin said, “‘Oh, I’m just going down to my wine cellar to fetch a bottle of Veuve Cliquot.’”

“You’re enjoying it,” I replied.

“Oh, I am, I am,” he said. “It’s delicious. I’ve never had pink champagne before. It’s good. A little gay, but good.”

“It is not,” I replied. “It’s stately.”

“It can be both gay and stately,” Kevin replied. “Just like my loving boyfriend.” He took another swig, then handed it back to me. “I’m telling my mom and Nick.”

“What, that you snagged a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and drank it under a bridge while sitting in a fake river, or that I’m stately?”

He smiled, narrowly. “No.” He paused, and much more gravely, he repeated, “I’m telling my mom and Nick. I’m writing them a letter and leaving it for them on my way to the airport.”

That I was not expecting. At all. And I knew Kevin had been itching to tell someone, to tell Veronica about the two of us--which I was still officially, if not actually, thinking about letting him do. But I didn’t know why he would jump straight to Nick and his mother, of all people.

I really didn’t know what to say.

“How do you think they’ll take it?” I said, finally.

“Oh, poorly,” he replied, nonchalantly. “I fully expect to be disowned by the time I land in New Orleans.” He really didn’t seem that concerned; his voice was natural, as if he was describing some anecdote that had happened at the grocery store, instead of coming out and being disowned by his mom and brother. “It’s really fine. I mean that.”

“It’s not fine,” I said. “You’re going to get disowned over this?”

“Probably,” he said. “But it’s not a bad thing. I won’t have an income in France, so I can't pay their bills anyway. And, just in general, it's time to end the charade.” He gave a long sigh, took the bottle of Veuve Cliquot back from me. “My dad was a lot like me. Too nice. He gave and gave and gave, and he let himself get trapped by our family until the day he died. And I’m not going to do that.”

“Why did you do it in the first place, then? If you knew you were going to get disowned, or whatever. Why even bother?”

“My dad told me to take care of them,” he answered, his voice still matter-of-fact, completely devoid of any emotion despite the heaviness that laced every word coming out of his mouth. “And yes, I know, he was desperate, because he was dying of cancer, but he should never have done that. He never should have done that to a fourteen-year-old kid.” He handed the bottle back to me. “The good news is that they'll be the ones to cut me off, not the other way around. And then it's all over.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what I could say. I felt vaguely uncomfortable, and I took a long slug of the Veuve Cliquot. I couldn’t quite grasp the entirety of what he was saying: that he was supporting his family, that he was abruptly going to stop supporting his family. “So what happens to them?”

Kevin shrugged. “In 48 hours, they're going to call me up, and tell me I’m some disgusting faggot, that they never want to see me again. I'm giving them the chance to be good people, but they won't be, because they're not. And then they’ll have made their choice, and I’ll be free of them.” With a smile, he added, “And then I’m going to Paris for six months to live like some Senator’s child.”

There was a dark silence between us, punctuated only by the cars passing overhead. I looked out, on to the dry, vacant riverbed, and then back to Kevin.

“Five months,” I said, finally.

“Five months,” he said. “Did you book spring break?”

“No,” I said. “But I promise I will. I need to talk to my parents first, and they’ve been completely MIA all week. They’re meeting with both the Wynns and the Adelsons today, which means my dad is setting the table for something big. We’re afraid it’s the White House. 2012.”

“Literally, we could not have more different problems,” he said. There was another drawn-out pause. “I hope you’re not mad.”

“At you cutting off your family?”

“They’re cutting me off,” he corrected. “Important distinction. But no: I meant that I hope you’re not mad I’m coming out to them.”

I wasn’t mad. That wasn’t the word. But, between this and the Veronica question, what did scare me was how nonchalant he had started being. I chafed under his relaxation, under the idea that he really didn’t want to be in the closet anymore and, thus, was dropping his guard. Talking about things in front of Jordan, barely bothering to mask things that I still didn’t want people to know, that I couldn’t let people know.

“I just don’t know why you’re going to do it, if it’s going to cause such a scene," I said, finally. "If it’s going to make everyone so miserable.”

“I have to do it,” he said, settling back against the concrete pylon. “I want to do it. It's time. And I don't care what they think or what they do. Look, I know it’s hard to wrap your head around this, because you didn’t grow up like this. I know you just keep thinking that, ‘Oh my God, my mom, and my dad, and Justine, and Philip, and I love them so much and I don’t know how I could ever make them so angry,’ but it’s not the same situation. At all. Believe me.”

“I don’t know,” I replied, feebly, and Kevin shook his head.

“You’re giving me that look,” he told me.

“What look?”

“The look that I knew you’d give me when you saw all of this,” he said, taking the bottle of champagne back from me. “I know you never imagined it was like this. You know what ‘poor’ and ‘dysfunctional’ means in the dictionary definition sense, but I know you didn’t actually know this is what it meant.”

“That’s not true,” I said, bristling at Kevin’s condescension. “I know what poverty is.”

“Come on,” he said. “It’s true. And it’s okay. I wanted you to see all of this before it’s gone. Even if I knew you’d have that look.”

“I don’t have a look,” I told him. “I’m not giving you a look.”

He took another swig of Veuve Cliquot, a final swig, emptying the bottle.

“That went fast,” he said. “Do you feel a little tipsy?”

Maybe just a little. “Maybe just a little.”

He put his hand in the dirt, and pushed himself upright into a standing position. He stared at the concrete wall on the one edge of the overpass for several seconds. And he grabbed the champagne bottle by its neck, spun himself around three times like a discus thrower, and launched the bottle against the concrete wall. It exploded, showering the dirt with dark shards of glass.

“Christened it,” he told me, still staring back at the wall. “‘Becker and Kevin were here. November 23, 2007.’” He looked back down at me, offered me his hand, which I took, and he pulled me up so I was standing too. “I really wanted you to see this. Before I never come back.”

“I’m glad I did,” I said. “But I still think you’ll come back.”

Kevin pulled me close to him, put his hand on the small of my back. I looked to both sides, but there was no one around; we were probably invisible, standing together under the bridge.

“Next year, we’ll have Thanksgiving together in Nevada,” he whispered, in my ear. “I want to wear a tuxedo and eat a thousand courses at Robespierre’s.”

“We’re in Maryland next year for Thanksgiving,” I replied.

“Fine, Maryland,” he said, holding me close against him. “And we’ll wake up next to each other in your bed, and I’ll fuck you into your Snoopy sheets, or whatever shit you have at home. Bury your face in the pillow so your parents don’t hear, because you’ll be screaming.”

“I don’t have Snoopy sheets,” I told him. “And they’ll make you stay in the guest room.”

“No,” he replied. He pulled me even tighter; I could feel his hardening dick through his shorts, up against my thigh, which made me start to plump up too. “I’m not staying in any guest room. I’m going to be so fucking charming that they’ll say, ‘We’re so glad our Peter’s gay, because Kevin is a million times better than any girl he ever could have brought home, and of course they can go fuck upstairs.’”

“Yeah, okay,” I whispered back. “That’s totally going to happen.”

“You never know,” he told me. And he leaned in, and kissed me, a long kiss, slow, sensuous. “You ever have sex outdoors?”

I giggled at that, breaking the mood. “What kind of question is that?”

“Have you ever had sex outdoors?” he asked again, his voice completely serious.

“I gave you a blowjob in Destin on the beach,” I told him. “That’s it.”

He didn’t say anything else; he pushed me backwards a bit, against one of the concrete pylons, and kissed me again. “You know, no one can see us down here. That’s the big draw of this place.”

“Until the next couple comes with their Veuve Cliquot.”

“This won’t start picking up until later,” he whispered, snuggling up to me, my back still against the pylon. “I brought lube.”

“That was presumptuous.”

“I know,” he replied. “But my presumptions are usually correct when it comes to what a horny bottom you are.” He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small travel bottle of lube. “Turn around.”

And I turned around, my forehead resting against the graffitied concrete. I felt Kevin’s hands creep around my waist, undo my button and my zipper, and pull my shorts and underwear down, just slightly, barely to my thighs, just enough so my dick was free and my asshole was exposed.

And I heard him fumbling with his own shorts for a second, and then, finally his warm, strong dick rubbing up and down my crack.

“God,” I whispered, and I heard him crack open the bottle of lube, squirt some into his hand. And his dick was suddenly replaced with one lubricated finger, clawing for entry into my tight hole.

He slowly dug it inside. “You like that?”

I grunted, affirmatively, and he began loosening me up, stretching my hole with his finger. And then another finger. And then they both came out, and I knew it was time for my boyfriend’s big dick.

I heard the lube open again, and then I felt the head of his perfect dick slowly sinking inside me. Very slowly, bit by bit, until he finally crossed into the inner sanctum, and I melted against the pylon.

Kevin’s hands were grabbing my hip bones, as he rammed into me, hard. I grunted, and he pulled almost all the way out, and rammed into me again. And he did that five or six more times, slamming his dick into my spot slow and regimented. And then he started to let loose, started to pick up the pace, jackhammering my asshole, again and again.

His one hand went down to my hard dick; the other one reached under my shirt, and grabbed my chest, and pulled me into him. And I was at his mercy, wrapped in his big arms, as he began to jack me off.

“God, I’m so close,” he told me. “I want you to cum.”

He was still pounding me, and I was just holding onto the pylon at this point, as Kevin got both of us off. And I heard him grunt, and fill my ass with hot cum; and just seconds later, he stroked me one more time, and I shot volley after volley of my own cum onto the graffitied pylon.

“That’s hot,” he told me, watching my semen run down the pylon. He zipped back up his pants, glanced around to both sides, but the riverbed was still the riverbed, the world had continued its frenetic pace no matter what Kevin and I were up to. He leaned into me, put his arm around my chest again, and kissed me again.

“That was,” I said, “not what I thought would happen today. But I’m glad it did.”

“Well, it was exactly what I thought would happen,” he said. He kissed me on the cheek, then slapped my shoulder. “Zip up. One last stop.”

 

Our last stop was a stop we had already been at: Kevin’s house.

While we were driving, I had this vision that our final stop on our Tour de Kevin’s Childhood was going to be a grave. His father’s grave. It was, obviously, not.

When we got back inside Kevin’s house, everything was almost exactly as it had been. Nick had not moved. The bong had. The courtroom TV show had given way to some sort of cooking show.

“Mom’s not back?” Kevin asked Nick. “I wanted Becker to meet her before he leaves.”

Nick didn’t move. “She went down the street. He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling momentarily, then closed his eyes again. “Fuck, I’m so high.”

Kevin ignored that, but turned to me and said, “‘Down the street’ is code for the bar.” He turned back to Nick. “Fuck, it’s only three-thirty.”

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” Nick told him.

“Yeah, but not here,” he said. He looked to me. “Well, we’ve missed the narrow window when my mom is not drinking, so you’ve dodged all bullet.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said. “It’s okay. You’re not missing much. When she’s sober, she’s still in there, somewhere. But not when she’s drunk. I don’t want you to see her when she’s drunk.”

It was all very abrupt. And even more so, once Kevin led me out of the house.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wanted you to meet her. I mean, she’s awful and you’d hate her, but I wanted you to meet her.”

“Next time,” I said. “Because there will be a next time. I know it. It’s not going to be as bad as all of that.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Well, you saw almost everything.”

“When you said last stop,” I said, “I thought you were going to bring me to a graveyard or something. For your dad.”

Kevin smiled. “No, we had him cremated. We spread his ashes at Pendleton.”

“Oh,” I said.

“He wouldn’t have wanted us to remember him as a rock in a cemetery,” Kevin said. “He wasn’t religious, but he was spiritual, and he definitely bought into that whole idea that he should be spread into the wind, not stuffed into a box.” He wrinkled his nose. “Cremation is just as gross as a dead body, though. You think it’s just going to be some box of dust, but the fire doesn’t get everything. Teeth, little chunks of bone--all still in there.” He paused, then reached inside his shirt and pulled out a set of dog tags that he had been, apparently, wearing around his neck all day. “You didn’t see me with my shirt off today,” he replied, turning the dog tags over in his hand. “But I found these while I was cleaning the other day. My mom had them in the junk drawer, of all places.” He shook his head, and put them back into his shirt. “So maybe it’s fitting. If this is the last time I’m here. That I got them. I think he would’ve wanted me to have them.” He smiled at me. “I’m sorry. This probably wasn’t the fun day you were expecting.”

“No,” I said. “It was better than that. I liked it.”

His smile grew wider, and he rubbed the top of my head. “I can’t kiss you in this neighborhood, but I wish I could.”

“A hug, maybe?”

“Naw,” he replied. “Not a hug either.” He extended his hand, and we shook hands, like we were wrapping up some sort of professional engagement. “What time’s your flight land in New Orleans on Sunday?”

“Three in the afternoon, I think,” I said. “I leave pretty early.”

“I’m taking the red-eye back tomorrow night,” he told me. “I can pick you up if you want. You can buy me dinner with your cab money.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s a date.”

We were still holding hands, which we both noticed at the same time. He shook my hand again, gingerly.

“Well, Mr. Becker, thank you for a lovely day,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Don’t forget to keep my warm regards in your ass for the duration of your drive.”

“That you can say,” I told him, “but you can’t even give me a hug.”

“The walls have eyes,” he replied, letting my hand go. “But you can’t hear shit on a busy street.”

 

“Peter, we’re making pina coladas,” Mom called to me, from the kitchen island, as I walked into the great room at seven o’clock. As she overturned a half-empty bottle of Diplomatico into the Vitamix, she added in song: “And getting caught in the rain.”

She and Justine both giggled at that; they were both in swimsuits, and both looked like they had already had a couple, because it was taking the two of them to operate the blender.

Whatever tipsiness I had felt from the Veuve Cliquot, five hours ago, had long evaporated on the soul-crushing drive back through the desert.

I took a glass. “Where’s Dad and Philip?”

“They’re in the pool,” Mom replied. She turned on the blender; it swirled everything into a vortex, amid the destruction of the ice. And I brushed past them, out onto the terrace. Philip and my dad were both sitting in the jacuzzi, each armed with a pina colada of their own.

“Oh, Peter, you’re back,” Dad said, setting his glass down on the concrete. “I’ll put the steaks on in a second, then. How was Californ-i-a? Have fun?”

“Yeah, it was a blast,” I said, kicking off my Sperrys. “Yeah, I was just visiting a buddy of mine. We just hung out.” I sat down on the edge of the jacuzzi, facing them, dangled my feet in the water.

“The Inland Empire,” Philip said. “Yish. You should’ve just told him to come out to the ranch.”

“He didn’t have a car,” I replied. “It wasn’t bad. We were in Moreno Valley. Nice house and all. Hung out with his brother a bit. More fun than sitting around here all day.”

“I’ll try not to take that personally,” Dad replied, leaning back against the wall of the jacuzzi. “You should get your swimsuit on and hop in.”

At that moment, a little bit of Kevin’s cum dribbled out of my ass and into my underwear. I clenched my ass as discreetly as I could, to avoid what would be a potentially fatal error. “I’m fine for now. After dinner.”

Mom and Justine came shuffling out of the house, holding the next batch of pina coladas in a pitcher.

“Need a refill, anyone?” she asked.

My dad and Philip both instinctively held up their glasses.

Once we were all full, and Justine and my mom had settled back into the jacuzzi, my dad held up his pina colada. “Well, I do want to make a toast,” he said. “I know it’s cheesy, but since Philip heads back tomorrow, I just wanted to say something while we’re all still together. I know coming out to Nevada is no one’s first choice--”

“Here, here,” Philip said, raising his glass.

Dad placed an open palm on top of Philip’s face, and continued, without skipping a beat or breaking his calm. “I know coming out to Nevada is no one’s first choice, but I—” He turned back to Philip, dropped his hand, and annunciated the next words, “personally appreciate it. And I know your mom does too. And, despite the photo ops and the meetings and the chaos, it’s nice that all of us are together for the holidays. Because being surrounded by the ones you care about for the holidays is really the most important thing.” With a smile, he added, “And 80 degree weather in November beats the hell out of snow in Maryland.”