Matt is some kind of social guru. I don’t have to introduce him once. “Hi. I’m Matthew Rincorn, the new guy,” he says, right off the bat, to anyone who comes up to us.
“Always nice to see a fresh face,” Pastor Ryan says, shaking his hand. “Good to meet you, Matthew.”
“The pleasure is mine,” Matt says huskily, every damn time, over and over, until it makes me want to giggle. No one catches his tone. It’s a sea of wide smiles and compassionate eyes.
“And good to see you, Kermit.” Pastor Ryan hugs me warmly, but I can’t relax enough to lean in. I haven’t seen him since the funeral, though he’s left me multiple voice mails, one for each time I missed youth group. Thoughtful, caring messages at heart, with a healthy scoop of pressure on the side.
He squeezes my shoulder. “Anything you need, my man. You know I’m hip to the struggle.” Pastor Ryan was born in the wrong decade. He’s the millennial the sixties forgot. Every other sentence he drops a “groovy,” and his whole vibe is way laid back. He’s got shaggy brown hair and a thick mustache like a Vietnam vet and drives a Honda Rebel when he’s not driving the church van. On anyone else it would come across as a grown-up trying way too hard to be cool, but he’s like twenty-eight and impossibly fucking earnest about everything.
Three girls I’ve known since confirmation cluster toward me. “You’re back!” They hug me exuberantly in turn.
“I made the cranberry sauce. Are you over your intense hatred of cranberries yet, Kermit?” one of them asks.
“Gag me,” I answer. That one came easy.
They giggle, and Matt laughs, too. “Good one,” he says.
The girls simper in his direction. Guess his appeal cuts both ways. Only a few of the kids in youth group go to our school, so despite my worries, it’s reasonable that almost no one here knows Matt is out.
“Doesn’t it look amazing?” says the second girl. “Do you have any idea how much work we put in?”
“I have a grasp on it,” I say. Last year, I helped with the cornucopia decoration.
“The turkey is ginormous,” the third girl says.
We look toward the end of the long serving table. “Oh, that’s a big one,” Matt says. “Looks like it’s time to undo my belt.”
“How are you holding up?” one of the younger guys asks me.
“It gets pretty hard.” I can’t believe I’m doing this.
“I’m so sorry.” His attention flicks to a burst of laughter across the room. There’s fun to be had elsewhere, and I’m not fun. Holidays are supposed to be about merriment, not delicately stepping around sadness. I would have thought that, too, if I was him. “Anyway, welcome,” he says to Matt.
“Thanks. It’s a really nice spread.”
The guy looks at me for another moment. “You’re strong,” he says. “You’ll be okay.”
“Yeah, you know. Gotta push through.” I paste on a smile. Beside me, Matt is grinning. I could kill him.
And then the guy is walking away.
It’s bizarre. This room is full of my people. People I’ve known my whole life, people I’ve sat in Bible study with, talking about the essence of who we are or who we should be. People I’ve held hands with often enough to know whose skin is warm and whose is clammy. Their lives are intertwined with mine, brothers and sisters in Christ and all. We dip small pieces of bread in a communal cup and say we are bound by something larger than what we can know.
But standing here right now, I’m apart from them. As if I’m in another place entirely. The person I want to break bread with, the person whose hand I want to hold is Matt’s. He’s somehow drawn me closer in our fifteen minutes of friendship than anyone here has in fifteen years.
He stands at my shoulder, letting us be apart from the laughing, mingling crowd. He’s not so much here as here with me, that much is clear. My body cries out for that moment, not long ago, when he put his arm around my shoulder, squeezing courage into my cells so I could get through this. But since we’ve been in here, he hasn’t touched me. Because he can’t. The lightning strike might rend the ceiling in two.
Still, I turn to him. He meets my gaze. My mouth opens, and there’s no thought formed, but I know I have to speak. I have to tell him—
Pastor Ryan claps his hands, breaking the spell. “Groovy crowd tonight. All you cool cats, gather round and let’s pray.”
“I love a man who tells me exactly what to do with my hands,” Matt whispers. I snicker.
After the blessing, we line up with paper plates. Pastor Ryan wields the electric knife like a light saber, zhoom zhoom zhooming his way through the turkey breast.
“Right on,” he says, laying slices on each of our plates.
Then we’re standing around, gnawing on turkey and sampling the sides, eyeing the pies laid out on the dessert table.
“We’ve missed you at youth group!” yet another friend exclaims, braces gleaming as she smiles in greeting.
“Thanks. I needed to pull out,” I say. Holy cow! “It was the right thing to do.”
“The best Thanksgiving ever! Don’t you think?” She claps her hands, grinning at me expectantly.
A handful of simple answers flit into my mind, double entendres all. Instead, I turn to Matt, who’s beaming.
“Arugula.”