DAD’S GOT HIS TIE on today, tight around his neck—the too wide blue-and-white speckled silk that signals Big Meeting Day, an event that’s happened more often since his promotion. He keeps apologizing that he can’t fly to Los Angeles with me, but I stopped listening. I’m too upset.
“I called the airline and they told me I can transfer the ticket free of charge so I was thinking—is there another friend you’d want to invite?” He takes the Raisin Bran and almond milk I left on the counter and puts them away. “Is Sharane available?”
“She’s leaving tomorrow. I told you.”
“Right,” Dad says. “Right.”
I get that the new position means he’s busier, and I get that the bump in pay allows him to afford my school and Angela’s, but Mom would have come with me. She never would have missed it.
“What about Devin? Or Regina?”
“Devin leaves for Penn State on Friday and I haven’t seen Regina all summer.” I swirl my spoon around the bowl to mix the dry flakes with the milk. I hate biting into the crunchy bits. “I don’t know if you noticed.”
“I noticed you mope around this house all summer,” Dad says, packing up his backpack with the laptop from the dining room table, where he works almost every night.
“Funny,” I say.
I spent my third straight summer working at the high school, this time with a promotion to Special Projects Czar—my term, not an official title, since I was charged with assigning tasks to sophomores and juniors working there for the first time. Angela was doing her residency at Penn State, and Mindy was away too, for five weeks in Manhattan at a United Nations program for gifted students. I spent most of the summer alone.
“I asked Donna, but it’s her shift this weekend and it was too late to switch,” he says. “She told me to apologize.”
“She doesn’t need to apologize.”
I set my spoon down to focus all my ire on him. He zippers up the backpack and returns to the kitchen. Oblivious.
“Well, I’m apologizing again, Cyrus,” he calls out through the opening between the rooms. “There’s no other option.”
I visited Mom’s gravesite yesterday, the grass around her headstone brown and trampled with the weather stuck on scorching all August. We talked—or I talked and she listened, like she always listens. I told her how anxious I was about college, or the move across the country, that I don’t know how to get around campus or how to buy books or how to share a dorm room with someone who’s going to snore, or bitch that I snore even though I don’t snore, I don’t think. She would have made a list, the way she always made lists—for all the supplies I needed and whatever clothes I should buy, sitting across this table with the pen and long pad, jotting down notes while I ate my cereal, her bushy brown hair drifting into her eyes.
“What about Jeff?” Dad says, loading the backpack with the power bars that serve as his lunch on meeting days, when a client comes in or he has to visit the satellite office in Philly. I forget which it was today.
“Did you really just suggest that?”
“Yes.” He returns from the kitchen, backpack zippered and set on the table across from me. “Listen, Cyrus, I know you two had a falling out—”
“He called me a ‘faggot’ and punched me in the face. Then he stopped talking to me completely.”
My jaw still clicks between the bone and the back teeth on my right side, if I open my mouth too wide eating a hoagie or a cheesesteak.
“I know what happened. And I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” Dad says. “But you said you talked to him. The other night at Sheetz?”
“Just by coincidence. We weren’t hanging out or anything.”
“I know you weren’t hanging out,” Dad says, clutching the chair like he’s debating whether or not to pull it out and take a seat. “But you said it was nice.”
“I said he was being nice. I was surprised.” I was shocked when I saw him—how different he looked, the way he’d gotten taller, his hair longer and more disheveled, the tan not as bright as I remembered. At first glance, I didn’t recognize him. We hadn’t talked in twenty months.
“Do you hate him?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, do you still feel animosity toward him, that you can’t let go of?” He attempts to adjust his tie but he pulls the fabric too loose and skews the silk to the right. “You said he offered to drive you home. That maybe it was his olive branch to you.”
“I did not say ‘olive branch’,” I say. “I wouldn’t use those words.”
I scoop another spoonful of the Raisin Bran, the flakes now soggy in the bowl.
“What I mean is—” Dad pulls out the empty chair and takes a seat. “I know what you went through losing Jeff. Believe me, I was right here watching how devastated you were. When he first left for school and when he came back that Christmas—” He folds his hands on the table and tries to check his watch without me noticing. “The thing is, Cyrus, I’ve lost some friends in the past—close friends—and every once in a while, I think about them, wonder how they’re doing. And it’s okay to move on and find new people to spend time with but it’s much harder to make friends later in life. It really is. I don’t want that for you. And I don’t want that for Jeff.”
“Well, talk to Jeff then,” I say. “I’m not the one who ended it.”
“It’s not my place to talk to him, Cy,” Dad says, reaching across the table. I keep my fingers clutched around the spoon. “You’ll have to.”
“No shit,” I say. “I’m not an idiot.”
“You don’t get to talk to me like that, Cyrus.” Dad pulls back. “I know you’re upset I’m not going away with you and I’m upset too, but we talked about this. My company hosts this conference every year and we lost two team members to a competitor last week and I’m the one person who can fill in. They need me.”
“So do I,” I say.
He glances at his watch again, biting his lower lip.
“I know, Cyrus, I know. But I’ll be there for parents’ weekend, which is only—what—a couple weeks from now?”
“I guess,” I say. I push the soggy bowl away.
“And I was thinking, you know, this might be an opportunity to—I don’t know—” He stands up, lifting the backpack. I don’t look up. “Did I ever tell you about my friend from college—Dan Preston—the one who came out to me senior year? Actually, he came out to a bunch of us when we were away on spring break and the word spread around the campus and—well, things were a lot harder back then, being gay and coming out.”
“It’s still hard,” I say. “In Dallastown at least.”
Mindy and Sharane and I went to Philly Pride this summer—not willingly, on my part, but Mindy insisted I meet the “Philly gays” before I fled to California for college, and it was fine, I mean it was overwhelming and wild and insanely hypersexual but a couple kids from the cross-country team posted some vile shit on Sharane’s Facebook page when she posted pictures of us in front of the parade. Mindy cursed them out before Sharane took the posts down.
“I know, Cyrus. I’m not trying to diminish what you’ve gone through at all. I just—what I was saying was that I tried to reach out to Dan, after we graduated, and he didn’t return any of my e-mails. This was before cell phones so all I had was a number for his parents and I left a couple messages but he never got back to me. I think he lumped me in with all the people who made his life difficult at the end of senior year and that wasn’t me—you know that wasn’t me, but—” He folds his hands together like a child. “I wish I’d done more to support him. Before he came out. And after.”
“And this has what to do with me and Jeff?”
Dad shakes his head, biting his lips.
“I’m just saying maybe give him a call,” he says. “Before you leave. Sounds like he’s ready to talk to you now.”
“I don’t know,” I say. He should have been ready a long time ago. “Maybe.”
“Okay. Well, I have to go,” Dad says, walking away from the table, through the living room toward the door. “But I’ll take off on Friday and help you pack, okay?”
I get up with my bowl and stumble into the kitchen, ignoring the goodbye wave he throws away as he rushes to his car because the Earth would stop spinning if he were ever late for anything work-related.
I don’t hate Jeff anymore. I did for a while. A long time. Not anymore. I would forgive him, I think, if he apologized. Even now.
But he has my number. There’s no fucking way I’m reaching out first.