Chapter Fifteen

Jacob

In the days after my visit to Julian, I found myself thinking about my mom a lot, mostly because Julian made me think about the Reverend. I didn’t want to think about the Reverend, so I worked on trying to ﬁgure out why my mom had put up with the Reverend’s bullshit for so long. I remembered this one time—I must have been ﬁfteen or so—I was coming downstairs, and Mom and the Reverend were in the kitchen. Something made me stop before I went in, something about the tone of their voices. I lingered at the bottom of the stairs, just out of sight, and I listened. Mom sounded pissed off, which wasn’t like her.

‘Just how much more of this do you think I’ll put up with?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ the Reverend said. ‘But I pray about it every day. I pray that you’ll have the strength to stand beside me. All I know for sure is that I need you.’

‘What you need is something I can’t begin to understand,’ she said, ‘much less give you. I’m beginning to wonder why I keep trying.’

‘Because I’d be lost without you,’ the Reverend said.

They were quiet for a while. Whatever it was they were talking about, I couldn’t imagine that the Reverend was right, that it was that simple. I was waiting to hear how my mom would respond when she said the funniest thing.

‘Pass the butter, Mary.’

It was all I could do not to crack up. I loved that about her, the way she could be funny and a little mean at the same time. The Reverend wasn’t funny. Never had been. But Mom could always make me laugh. Now here she was, putting up with whatever it was the Reverend was putting her through, and she was still able to make a joke. That was ﬁerce.

They were so different. I couldn’t imagine what they’d seen in each other when they ﬁrst met. Well, I can imagine what the Reverend saw in Mom, but what could she have seen in him? The Reverend seemed more like the kind of guy Mom would make fun of than marry. She and I had this easy way of being together, full of sarcasm and irony. But the Reverend didn’t like sarcasm and irony. I think he felt threatened by them, like he didn’t know exactly what was going on, what was being said or, worse, implied.

But I have to admit, the Reverend had good taste—in my mom and in boys. The ﬁrst time I saw Julian in the ﬂesh, I understood it immediately. He was beautiful, like he had been designed on a computer. When we were having that ridiculous conversation, I tried to imagine what it would be like to touch him. But I couldn’t, really. His body seemed too dangerous, too complicated. The most I could come up with—and this is weird—was that I wanted to put my ﬁnger in his mouth. And I wanted to grab that left hand of his, which was dancing the whole time we were talking. I wanted to make it stop.

But it wasn’t just his beauty that would have caught the Reverend’s attention. It was the fact that he didn’t seem comfortable in it. Even looking the way he did wasn’t enough. He needed something else, and the Reverend loved people who needed things. He liked nothing more than to rescue. To swoop in and save people. To be the good man.

The good man. God, how he loved being good. He’d wake up in the morning and couldn’t wait to start being good again. I bet he prayed for God to send him the broken and the lost. Please, God, send me a sinner, the more terrible the sin the better. Send me a liar. Send me a thief. Or better yet, oh, dear God, send me a wanton homosexual, the most faggoty fag you’ve got. I will suffer and heal the faggot in your name, dear Lord. All for you. All for you.

Which reminds me. The ﬁrst time I heard the Reverend say ‘wanton homosexual’, I’d thought he was talking about a Chinese queer.

So anyway, the Lord sent him me. Maybe as some kind of a joke. Here you go, Rev. Take a crack at this one. Good luck.

Poor The Reverend. It really pissed him off when I called him that. “Call me Dad,” he would say. “I’m not the Reverend, I’m your father.” He was right. He was my father. Long before I had sprouted my ﬁrst pube, he was my father. He worked at it, too. He tried, he really did. But he couldn’t get it right. It was confusing from the jump. It was clear I creeped him out, and what was worse was that he knew that I knew it. So we had that between us. There was just so much between us. And after a while, everything felt impossible. Everything felt wrong.

Then the holding stopped. That was when I knew that if he had ever loved me, he didn’t anymore. The hate that replaced the love was actually easier to take. It was clean and well deﬁned. It wasn’t complicated like the love, which was hard and messy. The hate was actually a relief, in a weird way. It reminded me of when a big test at school got canceled at the last minute, and my stomach stopped feeling sick.

But it turns out that without the bad stomach, there’s not much left. Just a ﬂat nothing. I wondered whether maybe the fear and the anxiety were better than this nothing, this new day with no real shape to it. The relief was kind of boring. The love was never boring. With the love, I deﬁnitely had to pay attention. Every moment crackled and I had to be ready for anything.

The hate was just so predictable, like he got it out of a book. My son isn’t good at sports. He walks funny. He crosses his legs the wrong way. His voice is weird. I guess I better hate him. I guess I better make his life miserable. I guess I better let him know, through every look, every movement, that he disgusts me.

Which, when you think about it, is just so ridiculous. The pot calling the kettle a fag. Or whatever.

But no, that’s not right, because the Reverend loves the Lord, and the Lord loves the Reverend, and the Lord does not love fags. That’s how you know you’re not one, apparently. If you walk around with the Lord in your heart, even if all you think about is dick, you’re Straighty McStraighterson. No matter what you might get up to, no matter what you might do, or hope to do, or do and promise never to do again, as long as you have the Lord in your heart, you’re good. It’s a ‘Get Out of Homosexuality Free’ card.

For a while, I had the Lord in my heart. I knew what it felt like to be loved. To be protected. I was the happiest I had ever been, which isn’t saying a lot, but it’s something. Then I went and fucked everything up. I imagine some people would say it wasn’t my fault, that I was some kind of innocent victim, but that’s wrong. That’s made-for-TV-movie bullshit. I did what I did. I was in it. Then I fucked it up. And after that, well, let’s just say the Lord didn’t want much to do with me. Neither did the Reverend. I was alone again, and I couldn’t believe it.

Everything got quiet. The house was quiet. The Reverend was quiet. Even Mom, who could normally be counted on to ﬁll up the awkward silences, was quiet. It went on like this for years. I took the little blue pills that Mom had made the doctor prescribe for me, the ones that made it feel like my soul was vibrating, and we pretended at being a family. Mom and the Reverend pretended to love each other. I pretended to be surly and out of control. We went to church and I pretended to believe in the power of the Lord. But most of the time, I pretended that nothing had really happened, that me and the Reverend had always been this way. That this was simply how fathers and sons are.

And the pretending was going well. We were all pretty good at it by this point.

But Julian came along and ruined everything.

I guess I thought meeting Julian might help somehow. I guess I thought if I could see what was so special about him, what he had that made the Reverend unable to control himself, then I’d have some idea of what to do next, of how not to be so alone anymore. Maybe I could stop pretending.

Julian had something I could never have. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have it and never would. It was amazing, and I wanted to stay there and look at him and think about what it would feel like to touch him.

But when he talked about the holding, well, that was more than I could take. Because it wasn’t just that I heard it. I could see it. I could see him curled up sideways in the Reverend’s lap, maybe shirtless, which was how the Reverend liked it. I could see the Reverend stroking Julian’s bare chest in a slow circle, his foreﬁnger making occasional contact with a nipple. His left arm curls behind Julian, and Julian feels the support, the protection. Julian also feels what’s happening in the Reverend’s lap, which is how he knows the Reverend loves him.

The proof is right there. Nothing needs to be said. But the Reverend says it anyway. He tells Julian over and over again how much he loves him, what a good boy he is, and what a good man he’s going to grow up to be. Then Julian closes his eyes because he knows what’s going to happen next, and he knows that the Reverend likes it better with his eyes closed. The hand that’s circling his chest starts to drift lower, and it plays, just for a bit, with Julian’s navel. His ﬁngers ﬁnd the waistband on Julian’s underwear, and they start to probe. They start to ﬂicker. Julian arches his back just a little, to make it easier for the Reverend to ﬁnd what he’s looking for.

What happens next is what always happens next. It’s what the boy spends his days waiting for. It’s what he spends his nights fearing will never come again. Because the look in the Reverend’s eyes afterward—after he’s cleaned both of them up—promises nothing. There’s no smile, and the love is gone. He can only look away. The boy wonders whether it’s over, ﬁnally. Whether whatever it was that held the Reverend’s attention, that kept him loved for just that long, is gone. He wonders what he can do to get it back. He wonders whether it’s gone away forever.