Forty

Lola stared from son to father.

Father stared at son.

Son, at the table.

No one spoke. Lola reached for the bottle, swallowed, waded in. “What does being gay have to do with drugs in the park?”

“Everything. Everything.” Malachi’s voice had gone from high-pitched adolescent embarrassment to barely audible.

“Wait.” Munro found his own voice. “This is a real thing? The drugs?”

“It’s not what you think,” Malachi said, even as Lola spoke over him.

“It’s a real thing, all right. But for him, not for me.”

Munro gained some equilibrium. He took the bottle back from Lola. “Best to be sober for this. You go first.”

“I saw him selling drugs in the park.” Truth, albeit highly edited.

“To her! She bought them!”

“Wicks?”

Lola fought an urge to slump in her chair, tuck her chin to her chest, and cross her arms, mirroring Malachi’s pose. “I use them to help me sleep, like I just said. I, uh, lost my prescription. Rather than go through the hassle of calling my doctor and finding a pharmacy, I thought I’d buy a few to tide me over while I was here.”

“Vikes to sleep? That’s a good one.” Moral superiority straightened Malachi’s spine. “And—a few? Try twenty.”

“Vikes?”

“It’s what he calls Vicodin. I mean—” Too late. Redirect, redirect! “How do drugs have anything to do with being gay?”

“Wait.” Again, Munro tried to play catch-up with the barrage of new information. “You’re really gay?”

Malachi nearly disappeared back into his sweatshirt with a mumble that mimicked assent.

Munro’s sigh was longer than any of the previous questions. He slid his chair around the table, put his hands on his son’s shoulders, and turned Malachi to face him. “First things first. I love you. Gay, straight, it’s immaterial. I love you. Got that?”

Lola would have preferred violent sobs to the silence of Malachi’s tears. He drew several long, shuddering breaths.

“Mom doesn’t. She kicked me out.”

“What? Where’s my goddamn phone? I’m going to call her right now.” Munro stood and patted his pockets.

“No. Dad, no!” Malachi pulled him back down. “She felt like she didn’t have a choice. That new rule.”

Donovan delivered an opinion of the church with such intensity and length that Lola and Malachi exchanged fearful glances. He finally broke off with a dazed look.

“When did this happen?”

“About a month ago.”

“A month? Why didn’t you say something?”

Malachi’s look told him why. He’d already lost one parent. Like Margaret. Except Margaret hadn’t had a choice. Malachi’s mother had made the incomprehensible decision to excise her son from her life.

Munro visibly gathered himself. “All those nights I thought you were staying at your mom’s house. Where were you?”

“Friends, mostly. And—” His glance slid away.

Lola knew that look. So, apparently, did Donovan. “And?”

“And what?”

The tactic reminded her of Margaret, who often lobbed questions right back at Lola, possibly in hopes of sidetracking her mother or wearing her down, neither of which ever happened. Reading Munro’s expression, Lola could have told Malachi to save his breath. But maybe the technique had worked with his mom. Until it hadn’t.

“Where did you stay when you weren’t with your friends?”

A mumble, from even deeper within the sweatshirt than before.

“I didn’t catch that.” Munro’s tone had gone from loving to icy. She felt a reluctant flash of sympathy for Malachi, the youth so apparently determined to destroy her.

“Motels.”

“Motels?”

Lola wished Munro would quit talking in italics, as annoying when spoken as they were in print.

“Motels where?”

Lola was unfamiliar with the neighborhoods Malachi named. Munro wasn’t. “Those places are nothing but drug dens. And speaking of drugs—”

Malachi’s face was white. “They were in the medicine cabinet at Mom’s. They’ve been there for years. I sold them to help Trang get to Vietnam. And to pay for the motels. I don’t use them. I never have. I promise.”

“I believe you.” Lola was shocked to hear her own voice enter the fray. She remembered the way Malachi’s hand shook as he’d handed her the baggie of pills, his jitters as pronounced as her own. She’d attributed it to being in need of a fix. But if that had been the case, he had the means at hand to satisfy a jones. He just wanted money. “But here’s what I don’t understand,” she added.

Malachi turned to her, seemingly relieved to be out from under his father’s interrogation.

“Why’d you keep trying to dime me out? To your dad and then to the police in Hanoi?”

Malachi’s bafflement appeared as unfeigned as his earlier anguish. “What are you talking about?”

“Yes, Lola. What are you talking about?”

Lola rubbed a hand over her spiky new cut. “I don’t care that you’re gay. And I’m glad that you’re not using. But it doesn’t erase the fact that you tried to stop me from pursuing a story. Why?”

Both shook their heads, identical wags. “I didn’t call anybody,” Malachi said.

“He didn’t.” Munro tucked his hair behind his ears, that irritating teenage-girl gesture. “I don’t know about this Vietnam business, but I know my own son’s voice. The person who called me about you wasn’t him.”

Something teased at the edge’s of Lola’s brain, something she needed to ask. It slipped away. She stalled for time, trying to coax it back. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Malachi said. “It wasn’t me. Why would it be? Telling on you would only get me in trouble. And I wouldn’t begin to know how to call Vietnam. So it doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Lola said, even though she half believed him. “You know how to use the internet, right?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Munro echoed his son.

Yes, it did, Lola thought. It mattered very much to her. Had the cabdriver not found Mai, she might be sitting in a jail cell in Hanoi, not knowing when or how she was going to see Margaret again, a removal at least as ominous as the one sketched by Amanda Richards.

At the thought of her daughter, her heart lurched. She recognized the same emotion on Munro’s face as he took his son’s hand. “Getting kicked out of the house, skulking around Pioneer Park selling drugs to dangerous people—”

“Hey!”

Munro ignored Lola’s protest. “Staying in fleabag motels. This last month must have been hell for you. Why’d you tell your mother and not me?”

“I didn’t tell her.” Yet again, Malachi receded turtle-like into his hood. He slid his hand from Munro’s grasp and tucked it back into the pouch.

“How did she find out?”

A long pause. The hood rustled.

“Come again?

“We got caught.”

A long, quivering silence.

“We?”

“Me and … ”

“It doesn’t matter who,” Munro started to say. Too late.

“Me and Trang.”

The gasp Lola heard was her own.

Munro’s own reaction came in slow motion.

“Your mom. Caught you. With Frank? How?”

Lola watched him struggle to accept the same images flashing through her own mind: his son embracing another boy, leaping apart at the sight of Bevany.

Wrong image.

“My computer.”

Of course. These days, the downfall of anyone with a secret. And especially for gay kids, a double-edged sword—on the one hand giving them a way to find community, to discover the answers to all their never-ask-aloud questions, but on the other offering a quick reveal to a prying parent. Lola vowed that when she finally allowed Margaret her own computer, she would never look at it. Never, ever. Her fingers twitched. She forced herself not to cross them and tried to get a grasp on the subject at hand.

“Back up. You and Frank are gay?”

“Yeah. Trang, Dad. That’s his name. We are.” A bit of defiance now, along with some palpable relief that things were out in the open, that he could finally say the forbidden thing.

“I don’t get it.”

“Oh come on, Lola. Even where you live, there must be some gay kids.” Munro, the old sarcasm roaring back.

She rolled her eyes at him. “No shit. Bisexual, too. Like Trang apparently is.”

“No, he’s not!” Malachi’s head, powered by outrage, emerged from the sweatshirt. “He’s never liked girls. He’s always known. Just like me.” He chanced an abashed glance at his father.

Lola felt the satisfaction of spite as she pricked at his certainty. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed that he hadn’t made those calls. “Trang got caught with Tynslee, too. You didn’t know that I knew about that, right? The question is, did you know?”

“He wasn’t with her. Not like that.”

“Yes, he was. She told me so herself.”

“It was all an act. We were afraid Trang’s mom would throw him out, too. We knew Mom had told her. So Tynslee and Trang went to her and said that Trang’s mom was confused, that she and Trang were actually the ones fooling around. And it helped that Tynslee really had been caught sneaking out of his house at night. She’d gone over there to talk about what to do.”

“Now I’m confused,” said Lola. “Why would you do any of that?”

“Because as bad as it is to have sex before you’re married, it’s even worse if you’re gay. And we knew that no matter what Mom saw, she’d be happy with any other story.”

“But she’s not,” Munro said. “Because you’re still living on the streets. Or couches, or wherever. You sleep here from now on. Got that?”

Malachi nodded grateful assent before his face clouded anew. “You’re right, she’s not. She said she’d believe it when Tynslee and Frank walked down the aisle. Not until.”

“Sounds like her,” Munro muttered. The Scotch reclaimed his attention.

Bevany sounded like a right proper bitch. “So you all were going to go ahead with this sham marriage.”

Malachi lifted a thin shoulder. “If we had to. Trang and I would be able to keep seeing each other. Just like—” He stopped.

“Like people used to do? News flash, those days are long gone.”

“Not here, they’re not. They … never mind.”

Lola thought that if she hadn’t cut her hair, she’d now be chomping on the ends, à la Jan, out of sheer frustration. “Never mind? Fine for you and Trang to keep things on the down-low, although why you’d want to is beyond me.”

“Try living here for five minutes and you’ll know why. Everything here revolves around the church. If you’re not part of it, you’ve got no life at all.”

“So go someplace else.” During all her years bouncing around the country and the world, Lola had never understood people who tied themselves to one place. And then came Magpie. An image of the Front arose, the perfect triangle of Sinopah rising above Two Medicine Lake, the heart-catching dominance of Ninahstako. Chief Mountain. She’d hated being told to leave it, even for what was supposed to have been just a few days in Salt Lake. What if someone told her she had to remove herself forever?

Still. “You were willing to sentence a young girl, your friend, to a lifetime of lying, too. What if someday she met someone and fell in love? What was she supposed to do then?”

“She said that from what she’d seen of marriage, she never wanted to get married. Besides, we figured that the longer the engagement went on, the more Mom would be able to persuade herself that she’d made some sort of mistake. That maybe she hadn’t seen what she thought she had, and that I could come home. We didn’t stop to think what it would mean to his mission. He was so sure he could talk the church leaders into sending him to Vietnam.”

“So everybody knew about this. “Lola held up her hand and counted on her fingers. “Your mother. Trang. Tynslee. Melena—Mrs. Shumway. Maybe even Mr. Shumway.” Which left the obvious question.

How much had Sariah known?