BAREFACED AND HOODIED, SUMMER LEANED BACK AGAINST the kitchen counter, eating a cold naked Tofu Pup. She dipped the rubbery thing directly into a jar of stone-ground mustard before every bite. A pink vinyl boot drooped out of her half-zipped backpack on the floor.
“Give me a minute and I’ll make some real food,” I said, collapsing into a chair. My back ached from bending over the type and cranking the letterpress’s heavy inked cylinder over and over.
“Have to get to work. The Sandy Jug.”
“But the manager is so evil to you.”
“Awful. But . . .” Summer rubbed at her eyebrow ring. “Rent’s due and I was out sick last week, so it’s either that or the seven A.M. shift at the Acropolis.”
“I’m amazed that people will go to a strip club at that hour.”
“They do. And they order the steak.”
“You deserve better, Summer.”
“Don’t we all?” She popped the last of the Tofu Pup into her mouth and licked the mustard off her fingers. She shrugged on her squirrelly coat. “By the way, someone called for you earlier. A dude.”
“Who?”
“Aaron? Brian?” She stuffed the last of the boot into the backpack and zipped it shut.
“Ryan?”
“Maybe. Yeah. They all sound the same to me.” I frowned, and Summer picked up on it. “What? Who is he?”
“A friend of Flynn’s,” I said.
Summer jangled the keys in her pocket, a sound like Christmas bells. “Do I sense a boundary issue?”
“No, no, he cuts hair,” I said, to her visible disappointment. “Any message?”
“Just a number.” On the counter was an envelope with her red Sharpie scrawl.
I waited until Summer’s taillights had turned the corner, and even then still couldn’t help taking the cordless phone down to the basement for good measure. I flipped on the switch and a string of Christmas lights illuminated a minor junkyard of boxes, bikes, and leftover furniture.
“You probably shouldn’t call me here,” I said when he answered.
“Well, hello,” he said.
I sat down on the arm of a haggard easy chair. “Sorry. It’s just, the walls here have ears. And mouths.”
“What’s to hide?”
“Nothing,” I said. “But, you know, people get ideas.”
“I have an idea. I just got out of practice and I’m starving. Come with me to the Old Nickel for some breakfast.”
“It’s nine thirty at night.”
“It’s been one of those days where nothing went right and I want to start over. Did you eat already?”
I admitted I hadn’t, and that I was facing down some leftover couscous.
“But why?”
I laughed. “Yeah. That’s about right.” I scratched my neck. “I actually could go for something less wholesome.”
“Oh really?”
“Like pancakes,” I said.
“I’m leaving for tour in a couple of days, I just want to hang out.” He stopped me before I could counter him: “Don’t worry, I have no expectations.”
“You have Scrabble in your van?” I was impressed, despite myself.
“Hang on.” Ryan sprang to his feet, swerved out the front door, and jogged across the parking lot. I watched him through the rain-fogged window, a bright mirage.
The restaurant was old and divey, out on Southeast Powell by the train tracks. Smoke drifted over from the bar side. The booths were deep and red, the walls paneled in dark fake wood. The water came in amber-colored glasses with a pebbly texture.
Ryan slid back into the booth and unfolded the travel-sized board between us. “I feel kind of bad,” he said as we plucked the tiny clicking letters from their drawstring bag.
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to beat you.”
“That’s funny, because I was feeling sorry for you.” I reminded him I was a professional arranger of letters. Scrabble was blood sport.
“How about winner pays?” he said.
“Doesn’t the loser usually pay?”
“Right. But if you really care about the game, you’ll try to win even if you have to pay for it.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I’m in.”
A fluffy globe of butter the size of an ice-cream scoop rested in a puddle atop the pancake stack. The pancakes were soft and mealy and tasted like cake, like childhood, like going out to breakfast with my family after church. In between Scrabble plays, Ryan tore bites away with the edge of his spoon, while I extracted tidy triangles from the stack with my knife and fork.
“I listened to your record,” I said.
“Really? You have it?”
“I picked it up on the way home from work. It’s good.”
“I’d have given you one.”
“It’s okay, I didn’t mind. I like to support friends’ bands.”
“We’re friends?” he said, looking up from his tiles.
“Sure, we’re friends.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled; his brow eased. A sort of innuendo tightened the air. I didn’t want to say, What?
Then he laid down HELIX on a double-word score, with the H on a triple-letter and nestled against an O for an exponential point burst.
“Still?” he said.
I fell back and made the requisite sounds of rage and dismay. He looked satisfied and said, almost apologetically, that his mother had brought him up playing Scrabble, with no maternal mercy. “That’s what happens when you move around all the time. Just the two of us. Lots of evenings together.”
“You guys must be close,” I said.
He flicked his head a little. “When we had to be. She’s doing her own thing now.” He flipped the conversation back to me. “Let’s talk about you. Where do you come from?”
“You think I’m not from here?”
“Nobody’s from here.”
“Flynn is.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Western Nebraska. Sugar beet land.”
“Nebraska,” he said approvingly. “My favorite Springsteen album.”
“But it’s all about New Jersey,” I said.
“Good point.”
“I came here for Reed,” I said. “But I dropped out.”
“Didn’t like it?”
“I loved it. My parents stopped liking it when they found out I was gay.”
“Oh.” He carefully rearranged the letters on his rack. “Didn’t take it so well, huh?”
“You could say that,” I said.
We all have our coming-out story, or why-we-haven’t-come-out story. More precisely, we have two. There’s the official version, paragraph-sized for conversation, for when it comes up, usually on level-two get-to-know-you with friends and dates and curious coworkers. That one covers the basics: when, where, how, the end. You will tell it again and again over the course of your life, polishing it to a fine sheen, until it’s as close to frictionless as you can get it. Then there’s the real story, the full version, which you tell only a handful of people ever—even if you’re one of the lucky ones with a good family, with loving parents who eventually accept you. Because, as Lawrence once said, when the only other time you’ve seen your dad cry is at a funeral, what does that mean about you?
Ryan got the short version: nineteen, home for Christmas, Mom overheard me on the phone, they blamed college, the end. “I couldn’t afford it on my own, so.” I cut my pancake triangle into smaller triangles. “I quit. How about you?”
“Me too. The quitting part. But I wanted to.” He took a semester off at UW to tour and never went back. Later he went to barber school. Tired of grunge and Microsoft creep, he’d split Seattle for Portland. Three years later, he’d been here as long as he’d lived anywhere.
For much of the game I’d been plagued with a vowel-heavy rack that spelled nothing but sounds of distress, and right then Ryan laid down two of his last tiles to make OF and IF, the F doing double duty on a double-word. He was now ahead by a solid thirty points and I still had five letters left.
He pulled out his wallet and set it on the table.
“Oh really.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
I laid down all my letters to spell STAKE, pluraling his IF, K on a triple-letter. I took him right out. “Ready,” I said.
Ryan fell back in the booth, slumped to the side, and then slid out of view.
I peered under the table. He was stretched out on his back on the bench. I asked if he was okay.
“Reeling from my defeat.”
“At least you got a free breakfast out of the deal.”
“Aha. What if that was my strategy all along?”
“It was not!” I said.
“No, it really wasn’t. I hate to lose.”
“Me too.” I lay down on my bench as well. Under the table it was dark and shadowy. I could see pale patches of gum stuck to the particleboard. Ryan’s face was half shadowed from the table and half lit from behind.
“There’s a problem,” he said.
“That I beat you?”
“That too is a problem, and I plan to solve it. The other one I’m not so sure I can.”
“What’s that?”
“The problem is that I like you.”
“I suppose that is a problem.”
His eyes fixed upon mine. “But here’s the thing. I think you like me too.”
“You know what’s a problem? Why do men always think that they can convert us? That we’re not really what we say we are?” I said it with a smile, but my mouth felt hot.
“No, no, I’m not trying to convert you. I just have a hunch you’ll like me more than you think.”
“Oh really.”
“Yeah.”
I shook my head. “We’ll see about that.”
“We will? See, already it’s looking good.”
I laughed. “You’re hopeless.”
My arm was hanging over the edge of the booth, and I felt Ryan’s hand bump against my fingers. I batted back at it. Then he slid his hand underneath mine. I let my hand rest there on his for a moment, on that warm plank of hand, a hand like a raft. There is no texture in the world quite like a human palm. The fingers sense it right away; a hand knows another hand the way a dog knows another dog, it responds to its kind.
I turned my head to look at him. He was looking back at me. The table loomed above our heads like a low flat roof, protective, dim.
“You said you had no expectations,” I said.
“I don’t,” he said. “Just a feeling. A little feeling.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said, rising from the table.
In the restroom I washed my hands carefully, then leaned against the sink and lingered. The restroom’s walls and ceiling were tiled in gold-veined mirror squares. There I was, repeated into infinity but fractured and increasingly hard to see. I returned to the table.
“Now I’m going,” he said, and got up.
I slid into the booth and waited. I looked out the window and stared at the handle of my car door. Maybe when Ryan came back, I would get up and go again; I imagined we could trade off like that all night, infinitely patient. Go, wait, go, wait. I did not want to stay or leave.
The waiter brought the check. Ryan tried to pay after all and I battled him off: “Don’t diminish my victory.”
On the way to his van, Ryan’s hand caught mine again. I pulled away deftly, as if we were just doing a high-five trick, and almost said, Not here. This wasn’t our part of Portland.
But to the old people walking by, the families, the truckers, it didn’t matter at all. Ryan and I could head to third base right there in the parking lot and the worst we’d hear would be, Get a room. I slid my hands into my pockets. Holding hands with this guy was not what I had signed up for. I just wanted the game. And pancakes.