Turkey in the Snow Read online

  “I don’t ‘don’t like you’,” he said, putting his pea coat on over his workout clothes. His skin was still clammy from the sweat he’d built up and not been allowed to wash off.

  Justin had moved closer to get his address, and when Hank turned around from his locker, he saw that Justin was right in front of him, looking up at Hank’s six-foot-three-inch height from his own much shorter build. His eyes were open and blue, and Hank could see the places in his hair where his gel was starting to break down. Justin had apparently put in a long day too.

  “Sure you do,” Justin said. “You think I’m a big ol’ flaming ’mo, and you’re way too butch to have anything to do with me, and you don’t think I should be hanging out with your niece and generally you wish my entire people would fall off the face of the earth.” He did the rolling eyes, twitching hips, and limp-wristed thing all in conjunction, and, Hank had to admit, it was one hell of a show.

  He hated to put a stop to it.

  “I’m gay, moron.” He swung his duffel bag over his shoulder and paused for a moment to admire Justin’s sweet little heart shaped face, open jaw, bulging eyes and all. God, he was pretty. It was a shame about that whole other problem.

  “Wait a minute!” Justin said, reaching up to grab Hank’s arm and stop him. He must have remembered at the last moment that Hank had actually hurt himself, because his grip on Hank’s shoulder was surprisingly gentle.

  Hank turned around with a long-suffering sigh.

  “What?” he asked. The one thing that had been getting him through this day had been his workout. That had been cut short, and he apparently had a commitment with this… person in his future, and he was hanging onto his patience with a very, very fine thread.

  Still, he couldn’t help but hear the naked hurt in Justin’s voice when he spoke next, and yeah. He felt like shit.

  “But, if you don’t have a problem with gay people, why do you always seem like…” Justin was waving his hands and trying to find the right words, and Hank realized he’d have to put the guy out of his misery. Justin was still wearing the company uniform, and he really had been nothing but professional.

  “Look, I’m sorry if I’ve been a complete dick,” he said, and looking at Justin’s helplessness and his kindness, he realized he meant it, too. “I am. It’s not the gay, Justin—it’s the drama. I mean, people like you are fun to be around, right up until they let you down. I totally appreciate the help with Josie, and I’m going to take you up on it, because, I’ll admit it, I’m desperate, but….” His head was starting to ache, and he hoped the rolls of cookie dough he had in the refrigerator had enough sugar to counteract that little problem. Maybe the coffee drinks he had in the fridge would help too.

  “But what?” Justin asked, curiosity apparently warring with the hurt. He was worrying his lower lip, and it was becoming sort of succulent and red, and Hank realized he’d wandered off in the middle of his sentence.

  “But what? Oh.” He flushed. “I guess I just mean, I can’t count on you, that’s all. Believe me. I’ve lived through drama. At the end of the day, it just gets you tired.”

  Justin just looked at him, his eyes dark with hurt, his mouth opening and closing, and Hank felt that curious sense of needing to make him feel better.

  “It’s like turkeys,” he said, out of the blue, and Justin blinked.

  “Turkeys?”

  “Yeah! Turkeys in the snow.” Hank sighed and set his gym bag down. “See, turkeys are like the drama queens of the animal world. They freak out at any little thing, but they ignore all the really important things. So, you put a bunch of turkeys in a pen, and let a fox in there, and they look at him and think, ‘Hey! It’s a fox! So the hell what?’ Which is bad because the fox is eating the turkeys, right? But these same turkeys see a snowflake, and they’re like, ‘Omigodomigodomigod’, and they run around the pen just freaking out, until they trample the other turkeys in the pen, and they hurt them too.”

  Justin was starting to giggle, and Hank closed his eyes, realizing that he’d sort of flapped his arms and made “Omigodomigodomigod” sound a lot like “gobble gobble gobble.”

  “Oh no,” Hank said, sighing and hating himself a lot.

  “Oh yes!” Justin crowed.

  “No, you didn’t get the point—”

  “Oh, I totally did!” Justin was laughing and Hank grabbed his workout bag again and slung it over his shoulder.

  “No, no, no, no—” He said, trying to get out of the locker room before he had to hear Justin say it.

  “Omigah, Mr. Calder! You sounded totally gay!”

  Hank sighed and just kept right on walking. “Yeah,” he muttered, “I totally know.” This sent Justin into another paroxysm of laughter, which Hank heard rattling around in his head for the rest of the interminable night.

  HOME. Finally. Mac and cheese, rolling out the refrigerated cookie dough and cutting shapes, icing them, quick bath, bedtime a half an hour too late.

  Josie was happy rolling out the cookies, but unhappy with the icing. It wasn’t perfect, wasn’t pretty, wasn’t shiny. Hank had bought the sprinkle things, and that helped, but generally, there was whininess and dissatisfaction about the entire affair.

  “You don’t know anything!” she shouted at him when he told her that he thought her Christmas tree was the prettiest. “It’s ugly! Mom says the best Christmas trees have pink!”

  Hank swallowed back a tightness in his throat that felt embarrassingly like tears. He remembered Amanda saying that exact thing when she was seven or eight. How wonderful that she’d taught it to her four-year-old daughter, and then gone off and left that kid in the hands of Hank, who had liked Christmas trees best when they were in the house a week before Christmas and not the night before.

  “Yeah, I get it,” he said, his throat raw. “Your mommy knows best. You know, Josie, all this great stuff your mom knows might carry a little more weight if she was here.”

  Josie had started to cry then, helplessly, and Hank picked her up and carried her to the bathroom, and held her—crying—while he ran water and bubbles in the tub. He undressed her—still crying—and set her in the water, soaping her hair and rinsing her off, and the whole time, her mouth was open as a low, pulsing wail was striated out, and Hank couldn’t think of a damned thing to make it go away.

  She finally stopped and was down to sniffles and deep, shuddery breaths when he had her dried off and in her nightgown and in her bed.

  “I hate this bed,” she told him. “It’s too big.”

  “I hate it too,” he told her, because it was a reminder of all the ways in which he was ill-equipped for fatherhood at this particular moment in his life. It was meant to be a guest bedroom/den, so he had the bed and bookshelves and a desk and a laptop—all of the things a little girl didn’t want in her room. The bookshelves had big, thick, boring books on finance, and the walls were a stark white. There had been a beautiful, boldly colored print of two naked male torsos—no butt-crack, no peen, but very obviously non-hetero. Hank had taken it down before Josie even entered the room. The blank wall just sort of stared at them now, and Hank wiped his cheek with the back of his hand without thinking, and remembered his plan for Saturday.

  Saturday, they would make this room better. They would. And now, thanks to the kindness of one very swishy, sweet-faced twink, that would be a whole lot easier.

  “Are you crying, Uncle Hank?”

  Hank shook his head no, because crying meant drama, and he absolutely, positively refused to do fucking drama. Not right now.

  “No, Bunny. I’m just ready for a shower right now.” One of the first things he’d gone and bought her was one of those squishy fleece blankets, the kind that were impossibly plush and soft. This one had a pink rabbit on it, realistically done, in spite of the color, with the ears at helicopter position. It sat on top of the white comforter on Josie’s bed—yet another thing Hank was planning to change in two days.

  “Sleep tight, angel,” he said, and bent to giv
e her a kiss on the cheek. She turned unexpectedly and kissed him on the lips instead, and brought her tiny hand up to his own wet cheek.

  “I’m sorry I made you cry,” she said in a small voice, and he shut his eyes really tight.

  “Grownups get tired,” he told her, weary from his knees to his navel and all points north, south, and in between. “I…” He tried to keep his voice steady. “I was really looking forward to that workout, you know?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice even smaller, and he hugged her tight.

  “It’s okay. We’ll try for a better day tomorrow.”

  “Can we make more cookies?”

  Sure, since I think I may eat half of them tonight. “Yeah. That’s a plan.”

  “Are you going to work out tomorrow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. I can see Justin. He’s nice.”

  Hank had heard this a dozen times before, but this was the first time his entire heart was in it when he said, “Yeah. Yeah, he really is. We’ll see him tomorrow. Good night.”

  He escaped then, practically running to the shower. He turned the water on, hot and full, and left his clothes in a puddle as he stripped and jumped in. He hadn’t even soaped his hair before the day caught up with him, and the frustration and the frantic, palm-sweating, heart-pounding fear that somehow he was doing it wrong.

  His body was jerking, his face contorted, his breath coming in gasps before his brain fully caught up to the fact that he was blubbering like a little kid, but once his brain caught up? Game over. He was lost, brain disengaged, while the stress and the panic and the disappointment of the past few months caught up with him, and he cried in the shower like he hadn’t done since his break-up with his first boyfriend.

  None of the Heartbreak

  HE WAS feeling much better by the time Saturday morning rolled around. He’d actually gotten in a long workout on Friday for one thing, and he brought his running shoes and his sweats to work on Thursday for another, and managed twenty minutes of exercise during lunch. He thought he might start doing that a couple of days a week—it helped take off some of the day’s stress when he couldn’t make it to the gym.

  Friday night, when he’d dropped Josie off in the gym’s daycare, he was actually disappointed to see that Justin wasn’t there. When he’d asked Jackie, the supervisor, the girl had winked at Josie and told them that Justin was helping to get ready for S-A-N-T-A. After Josie went off to play with the dollhouse, she’d told Hank that Justin had needed the night off to study for finals, and Hank felt stupid. He was a nice kid, but surely, Justin was entitled to a life of his own, right?

  But that didn’t change the fact that his stomach was distinctly fluttery on Saturday morning. It took him a while to identify the feeling, and unfortunately, when the cause surfaced, it was in a particularly uncomfortable way.

  He’d gotten Josie all ready, and she was sitting in the living room with the few toys she’d had when she’d arrived and a couple more that he’d bought her since. If he left the cartoons on with the volume low, she’d start singing to the dolls. He loved that sound—Amanda used to do the same thing when he was watching her.

  He’d just finished his first cup of coffee when Alan and Keith showed up. Alan breezed by him in the entryway without even saying hello.

  “Hi, Hank,” Keith said, embarrassed, and Hank grimaced and nodded.

  “Hi, Keith.”

  “Stop sucking face and get me a beer!” Alan snapped, and Hank grunted, looking to see if Josie had heard. She hadn’t—small blessings.

  “There is no beer in this job,” Hank said evenly, and Alan made that little whining sound that Hank deplored so much. Of course, when they’d been together, Hank had found it adorable. That had changed when Hank had walked into their apartment and heard him making it with Keith buried to the hilt up his backside. Poor Keith. Alan had hidden the pictures and told him it was his apartment alone. Keith wasn’t that bright, but he’d been mortified. Well, that was okay—now it was Keith and Alan’s apartment. Hank had been coming home early to tell Alan about his big promotion at the bank they worked at—and now Hank was Alan’s boss.

  They’d had to settle into an angry détente—jobs in the financial world were hard to come by these days, and neither of them wanted to look for a new position. So Hank made the teller schedule and did the counts and Alan made snide comments about Hank buying his suits from a funeral home, used. Hank’s raise was enough for him to make a down payment on the house, so moving out was timely, and it was all copacetic—or, at least for Hank, drama free.

  And it worked out well when Alan wanted to take an extra day off for Thanksgiving. Hank had a teller with a new baby who needed the hours, but requisitioning for overtime was a pain in the ass, and not the kind Hank used to give Alan, either. This had been Hank’s compromise—come over, break down the bedroom, paint it, and help him decorate it. Three strong men could do it in eight hours, when it would take Hank all weekend by himself.

  Of course the downside was working with Alan.

  “What do you mean, no beer?” Alan asked, curling up his lip. He had a small pretty face, and a slight build—a born in the butt bottom, as he liked to say—as well as blond hair that he could grow fashionably long. (Hank had tried to grow his thick, brown hair long in college, when they’d been dating. Gel, blow-dryer, it didn’t matter—more than two inches of length, and Hank had what they’d called back in the ’70s, a “’fro.” It was not a good look for him.)

  “No beer,” Hank repeated. “I’ve been a little too busy to have a beer lately, is that okay with you? Now here, let me show you what I need done.” He took the guys back to the bedroom and explained the situation—he’d stripped the bed that morning when Josie had been eating her cereal, and he had Alan and Keith on their way to his garage with the mattress when Justin came knocking at the door.

  He answered it, hot and breathless, and startled enough to smile warmly when he saw Justin there, fidgeting, wearing his trademark Cal-Fit jacket.

  “Come in,” Hank said, gesturing. “Geez, Justin, aren’t you cold?”

  Justin had just opened his mouth to answer when Josie saw him, and unlike Alan and Keith, Justin was not to be ignored.

  “Justin!” she squealed, and came running across the living room through the entryway. “You came! Hank said you’d come, but you weren’t there last night so I thought you might be gone. People go sometimes. But you’re not, and we’re going to see Santa, right?”

  Justin squatted down and hugged her, and talked to her from that level, earning Hank’s eternal appreciation.

  “Of course we’re going to go see Santa. And then, if it’s okay with your Uncle Hank, we’re meeting my sister-in-law with her kids at Chuck E. Cheese, and you can play there. Do you want to do that?”

  Josie’s face lit up. “Oh yes!” She turned to Hank. “Can I go, Uncle Hank? Can I? Oh, please? Mommy never took me because she said it was ’spensive, and I’ve never been!”

  Hank cringed at the thought of Chuck E. Cheese—oh hells, the lights, the noise, the giant rat, the crappy pizza… and then he looked at Justin, squatting in his entry way and smiling like he knew exactly what Hank was thinking. Hank saw that smile, the slightly crooked front two teeth, how his cheeks dimpled up, the way his blue eyes crinkled in the corners, and his stomach got even more fluttery. He had the sudden realization that Justin was taking her to the dreaded faux-pizza den of the six-foot rat, and Hank was going to be completely in the clear.

  Oh geez, it was enough to make a guy fall a little in love, right there.

  “Of course you can, Bunny,” he said, smiling back at Justin and feeling a little shell-shocked. “I’ll just go get some money for games and things.”

  “No, Mr. Calder. That’s all right!” Justin stood and put his hand on Hank’s arm as Hank was turning around.

  It wasn’t Hank’s sore arm, and he didn’t flutter or grab too hard, but suddenly the two of them stopped still and looked at Ju
stin’s chilled red fingers on Hank’s bicep. Hank shivered, and covered the hand with his own, and turned back around, smiling hesitantly.

  “You’re a college student, Justin, and you’re doing a really wonderful thing here. Please let me pay for her games.”

  Justin nodded, and Hank wasn’t imagining it—a dull red settled under his eyes and across his high cheekbones.

  “Thanks, Mr. Calder,” Justin said quietly. “I appreciate it.”

  “Well, hel-lo gorgeous!”

  Both of them jerked when Alan came in from the garage through the kitchen entrance, Keith at his heels.

  “Here, Bunny,” Hank said, bending down to heft Josie into his arms. “Let’s go get some money for Justin and a bag of clothes for you, just in case, okay?” One of his first lessons about having a little girl was that little girls had accidents. If Josie was going to be gone for more than a few hours, an extra change of clothes was very, very necessary. He looked up to where Alan and Keith were zeroing in on Justin and smiled apologetically.

  “Justin, this is Alan and Keith. They’re helping me out with the bed. Alan and Keith, this is Justin. Don’t talk to him, don’t touch him, and if you have to communicate, do it in Morse code with your bulging eyeballs, are we clear?”

  He scowled in particular at Alan, who rolled his eyes and said, “Touch—ee!” and Hank decided this whole thing would go best if it went quickly.

  “Okay, Bunny,” he muttered, “let’s work fast, because I’m telling you, Alan works faster.”

  Josie, encouraged by the triple threat of Justin, Santa, and Chuck E. Cheese, wasted no time at all in helping to pick out her clothes as well as Lisa, her very bestest most special doll. They were back in the entryway no more than three minutes after they’d left.

  Alan was already holding Justin’s arm companionably as he and Keith laughed about something. To his credit, Justin looked like he was trying to escape.

  “Alan, hands off before I break your fingers.” The words sounded mild, but Alan let go quickly with a sniff.