Turkey in the Snow Read online

  “Jesus, Henry, you’re the one who always says you don’t like drama!”

  “Well, you’re the one causing it. Go start breaking down the bookcases. Set them up in the garage and move the books. I need to call to see if the delivery is on time.” With that he transferred Josie from his arms to Justin’s, and then gave Justin the bag. “Okay, I’ve got an extra set of clothes, her health insurance card—it’s Kaiser—and one of those little school ID cards, and I know you have my phone number and—”

  “It’s okay, Henry,” Justin said, laughing. “It’s fine. Remember—I’ve done this before!”

  Hank flushed, and then he realized that Justin had called him Henry, not Hank or Mr. Calder, and he caught his breath again and looked into those dark blue eyes.

  Justin winked at him. “Henry,” he said again, with inflection, “I do know how to deal without the drama, okay? Now give your Uncle Hank a kiss, Josie-bunny, and we can leave.”

  Josie pursed her lips dutifully, and Hank went in for the kiss—and blew a bubble on them instead. Josie broke into a cackle of glee, and that’s the sound she was making as Justin turned around and took her out the door.

  Hank turned around to Alan and Keith—who hadn’t left yet—and scowled.

  “You two are, under no circumstances, ever, to touch the babysitter. You are not to talk to him, not to molest him, not to lure him over to pervert central with free beer. You are not to show him your etchings, and I swear to heaven, Alan you asshole, if you so much as fondle his shirt, I will fire you.”

  Alan winked. “Now, now, Henry. You know if you do that, you’ll probably lose your job too!”

  Hank looked at Keith, who was watching the two of them with the avidity of a tennis enthusiast at Wimbledon, and then grabbed Alan’s arm and frog-marched him down the hall. “Excuse us, Keith,” he called back, “I need to talk to him a minute.”

  They got to Josie’s room and Hank pinned his ex-boyfriend to the wall with a glare. “Alan, you’re right. I may not be able to fire you without losing my job, but if you so much as talk dirty to that boy, I will do worse than fire you.”

  Alan rolled his eyes in disbelief.

  “You doubt that? I guarantee, if you touch a hair on his sweet twinkie little head, I will personally tell every person you are screwing about the other four people you are screwing, including your little experiment in bisexuality, Julie.”

  Alan’s mouth had dropped open. “How in the hell—”

  “Do you think you’re the only one who likes drama, Alan? I swear to God, you can’t take a piss at work without someone walking into the bathroom and spilling all the business you never wanted to know.” Well, technically, he’d been in the stall, so he’d been doing more than taking a piss, but the point was, he’d overheard plenty—most of it from Alan himself.

  Alan’s eyes narrowed and his lip curled. “God, you just can’t stand the idea of anyone else having fun, can you? Just have to go make the whole rest of the world as goddamned Puritan as you are!”

  Hank grunted. “The Puritans weren’t big on treating people decent, Alan. Find another comparison, but leave me, and my niece, and my niece’s babysitter out of it. Now you’re the one who wanted the day off, and I’m the one who has to deal with the paperwork. You want to make that happen? Move your scrawny uncomfortable ass.”

  Alan gasped and held his hand to his mouth like that was the most offensive thing about the conversation, and Hank ignored him and started shuttling books.

  THEY did it. He was ready to strangle Alan (and have Keith canonized!) by the time they were done, but when Alan and Keith left—Alan actually too tired to bitch, and Keith very grateful for both the day off to visit his parents before Christmas and the pizza and beer Hank had bought—the room was done.

  Hank was in there shutting the window, which had been left open to get rid of some of the paint smell, when there was a knock on the door. He practically ran down the hall, he was so excited to see what Josie would think about it. They’d painted one wall pink and all of the trim in the room lavender, and although they’d left the other four walls white, Hank had put up posters of Disney princesses and Bubble Guppies and Dora the Explorer all over, but that wasn’t the best part. The best part was the day bed—the kind that looked like a long couch and had a little trundle cot that slid underneath—that was all set up in the corner. Hank had ordered it in lavender and also bought a pink comforter with a white eyelet sham with matching pillowcases and pillow shams and even a little canopy.

  That bed looked like an iced party cake and Hank was dying, dying for her to see it, so she could know that she had a home in Hank’s little house, and that she could stay there as long as she wanted.

  He threw the front door open, as excited as he’d ever been about Christmas, only to find her asleep over Justin’s shoulder, so exhausted she was leaving a little puddle of drool on the shoulder of his thin company windbreaker.

  Hank was so disappointed it felt like he shrank.

  “Here,” he said softly, “I’ll take her.”

  Justin shook his head. “Let me put her down, Henry. Odds are better she won’t wake up that way.”

  Hank didn’t protest that he wanted her to wake up, because that had happened once, when he’d gotten her from Mrs. Watson’s daycare really late, and at 1:00 a.m. that night, when she’d finally dropped off to sleep, he’d sworn never ever again.

  He gestured Justin down the hall instead, turning on the hall light as Justin walked into what was obviously her bedroom, so Justin wouldn’t have to turn on the pink tiffany lamp that Hank had installed on the new white bookshelves. He slipped into the darkened room as Justin pulled back the comforter with his free hand, and then laid the limp little body down on the clean pink sheets. Justin was very careful then, taking off her shoes and her coat, and leaving her in her second set of clothes—stretch pants and a T-shirt, which were damned close to pajamas—before pulling the blankets up and tucking them under her chin.

  Hank bent down and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek before she could wake up and then followed him out of the room into the hallway.

  “Well, I—” Justin started to say, and then Hank said, “Thank you so much for—” and then they both stopped and looked at each other bashfully in the middle of the hallway. Finally Hank reminded himself that he was the older of the two of them, and it was his job to break the ice.

  “We have real pizza,” he said hopefully. “And beer, that is, if you’re… uhm, you know. Twenty-one yet. And if not I’ve got milk. But, would you—”

  Justin brightened while he was talking, like the light that made him Justin from the inside had been flipped on.

  “I’d totally love to!” he said, keeping his voice quiet, even if his gestures started to get a little loud. “And don’t worry, Henry, I turned twenty-one in November, so you’re totally safe. Not corrupting a minor or anything.”

  Hank had been leading him down the hall and he turned around and looked at him sharply over that. Justin returned the look cheekily, and Hank turned back around, resolute.

  “Why ‘Henry’?” he asked as they got to the kitchen, and Justin didn’t miss a beat.

  “Because Mr. Calder’s too formal, and that other guy called you ‘Henry’ and it pissed me off.”

  Hank was in the kitchen by now, and he turned slightly, looking at Justin wryly. “Well, people do that when you’ve got history. The only two people to call me ‘Henry’ have been Alan and my mother.” And his sister, but he wasn’t going to mention that.

  “And now me,” Justin said, waggling his eyebrows.

  Hank had no choice but to laugh. He reached into the refrigerator and pulled out two microbrews. “I’ve got pizza, if you like. Slightly higher quality than Chuck E. Cheese.”

  “Please?” Justin begged, holding his hands up like a puppy dog. “Please please please please pleeeze! I’m dying for something to wipe the taste of Chuck E. Cheese pizza outta my gullet… I’d mug your mother for a decent
piece of pizza!”

  Ah, gods, laughter, quiet laughter. It really was a luxury. “Don’t mug my mother,” Hank said, the chuckles freeing something inside him. He handed Justin the plate with the last five pieces on it and added, “She never had money for pizza.”

  “Now tha’s a cwyin shame,” Justin said through a full mouth. He closed his eyes for a blissful moment and chewed. After he swallowed he said, “Omigah—is that Mountain Mike’s? Us broke college students never eat at Mountain Mike’s!” He took another bite, his face lit up and happy in total ecstasy over the pizza. For a moment, Hank let himself bask in the pleasure of a completely happy human being.

  “Come sit in the living room if you like,” Hank said. He moved across the little hallway and pulled the coffee table in front of the brown corduroy couch, getting two coasters and a placemat from the compartment underneath for the beers. He took the recliner and put his coaster on the end table next to it. He had one of those little organizers on the arm of the recliner, and had just pulled out the remote when Justin came in and settled down.

  “No, no,” Justin said hurriedly. “Don’t turn the TV on. Let’s talk.”

  Hank paused midclick and wondered what his expression must have been. He didn’t have to wonder long.

  “Ohmygah! Jeeezus, Henry! I’m not going to torture you with tongs! I just get distracted by anything pretty, and I’m more in the mood to be distracted by you!”

  Henry looked at him. “Because I’m not pretty?” It was more for clarification than because he was fishing for compliments, and he was unprepared for the adult, predatory look to cross Justin’s baby face.

  “You’re plenty pretty, Hank. But right now, I’m more interested in your mind.”

  Hank snorted. “That’s a switch.”

  “We’re not all like your… whatever that was… Alan.”

  “We’re?” Hank asked, flummoxed for a moment.

  “Us drama queens,” Justin said with a wicked grin. “We’re not all like your friend, ex-friend… okay, what is he to you? Cause whatever it is, I don’t see it!”

  Henry took a swig of his beer and swiveled the recliner so he could see Justin instead of the television. “He was my boyfriend. My first serious one, actually.” Sigh. “More serious for me than him I guess.”

  “What makes you say that?” Justin took a dainty bite of his new slice of pizza, as if to make up for stuffing his face from the last one, and washed it down with a sip of beer.

  “Finding him in bed with someone else,” Hank said. He was, he realized, walking a difficult balance between trying not to be a dick and trying not to spill his guts on the floor. Nobody liked guts with their pizza—talk about unappetizing!

  “Nice. Did you really find him in bed? Because you hear that all the time, but you gotta think, like, sometimes, you just catch one guy walking out of the apartment, and then there’s confession time, or, you know, you see a kiss or—”

  “Alan was in our bed, screaming ‘Fuck me harder with that thing!’ and Keith was behind him, doing what Alan said.” Hank had to admit, he did get a perverse pleasure out of watching Justin try very, very hard not to spit pizza out all over his plate. When Justin had mastered himself, and after he’d knocked back another swallow of beer, he cocked his head thoughtfully.

  “That was a lot of drama,” he said, and Hank found himself looking into a pair of surprisingly intense blue eyes.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve seen worse,” he admitted.

  “Mm…” This time Justin was eating thoughtfully, and Hank supposed he was enjoying the hell out of just watching this guy eat. It was like every mouthful was a different mood. He swallowed, and Hank was sure another question was coming. He was wrong.

  “My mom’s the dramatic one in my family,” Justin said, smiling. “She can turn any moment into a joke or a reason to laugh. My dad likes to play practical jokes—stupid ones, like pulling down your pants if you’re wearing them too low or playing hide and go seek when you’ve been reading and you’re not sure if anyone’s in the house. They do this haunted house every year for Halloween—it’s huge, and scary, and the louder the music the better. It always scares the hell out of the neighborhood kids, so my sister Brenna and I are the last two left at home, and we always have to go meet the little ones Josie’s age and take them by the hand and show them how it’s not as scary as they think.” Justin laughed softly. “There’s this one little girl on our block—red hair, blue eyes, freckles, cute as hell and a bossy little shit, too. This last year she left her older brother at the sidewalk with their mom and stalked up to our porch all resolute and everything—she’s like five, right? And she’s got her little pumpkin in front of her, and she’s a little witch with a black hat, and she’s frickin’ adorable, right?” Justin’s shoulders went back, and he clutched his pizza plate in front of him like a little girl clutching a handbag. He widened his eyes and pursed his mouth to a little girl’s kewpie doll pucker, right down to making his rather lush lower lip tremble, and Hank started to laugh.

  Justin kept going. “Anyway, she gets almost up to us, and the lights start going and the ghost drops from the tree and the big cackle comes out of the sound effects machine, and she doesn’t scream, she just turns right around and stalks back to mom and her brother, saying, ‘I’m not old enough! I’m not old enough! I’m not old enough! You go!’” And now he mimicked her shoulders and her posture and Hank had this image of this pudgy five year old, being absolutely in control at the same time she was frightened to death.

  By this time he was laughing so hard he could barely breathe, and as he wiped his eyes and calmed down his breathing, he saw that Justin was grinning wickedly, chuckling through another bite of pizza.

  “That’s awesome,” Hank breathed, still coming down. “I can totally see her. How’d her older brother take it?”

  Justin grinned some more. “Oh, Kaden’s all about the science of the thing. I swear, he’s like, eight, right, and he’s like, ‘Evelyn, I told you that at our age we’re too imaginative to confront a manifestation of our fears!’”

  “Oh get out! No way an eight year old said that!”

  “No, I swear! This kid is something else. Their mom just stands back and listens to them talk and crosses her eyes. She’s a trip—she’s perfectly willing to let them amuse the hell out of her. I love it!”

  Hank sobered a little, still feeling the release of laughing so hard. “Yeah, kids are a trip. I always wanted them, you know? Alan wasn’t so excited, but I always knew I was going to have some someday.” And he remembered Josie, sleeping soundly down the hall. “I wasn’t exactly planning on it being quite so soon,” he said, his voice quiet and thoughtful. “I don’t regret it, but, well, it caught me off guard.”

  Justin nodded, and set down the empty plate of pizza, then drained his beer. “What happened?”

  “Would you like another beer?” Hank asked, making to stand up. “Here, I’ll get your plate for you and get us another round.”

  “I’d mostly like for you to not dodge the question,” Justin said, and unlike when he was telling the story, his entire body was absolutely still, waiting, like Hank was a feral cat and Justin was going to gentle him into submission.

  “Well, I’ll get us another beer anyway.” Hank stood up and took Justin’s plate as well as the placemat and everything else into the kitchen. “They’re the last two in the fridge. No, no, don’t get up. Get comfy, turn on the television—I’ll just be a moment.”

  Justin sighed behind him. As he cleared the living room, he heard Justin on his cell phone, telling someone not to wait up for him. When Hank returned, after rinsing off the plate and wiping off the placemat and putting them in the rack to dry, Justin was sliding the phone back in his pocket.

  “My mom,” Justin said, neither apologetic nor sheepish. “She worries if I don’t let her know I’m okay. She figured I’d be late. I told her we’d probably end up talking after I brought Josie back.”

  Hank handed him the opened bee
r, surprised. “You knew we’d—”

  “Well, I’ve been crushing on you for months, thinking you were straight. No way I was going to let you go without at least a little conversation!” Justin was smiling again, inviting Hank to share the joke, but Hank couldn’t. Months? Months, and Hank had just pushed him away, dismissed him, because he liked to move his hands a lot. It didn’t speak well of Hank, that was for—

  “You’re feeling all guilty, aren’t you?” Justin asked, that wicked grin still in place.

  “No!” Hank lied.

  “Of course you are—look at you. Your house is totally neat; you do everything by the book. I mean, you had a placemat for pizza on the coffee table for Pete’s sake! Yup. Little bit of raging-queen-o-phobia, and you’re all freakin’ out on yourself for not being a better person. I can read the signs.”

  Damn. And now Justin had made Hank smile again. Hank took a drink of his newly cold beer. He needed to change the subject.

  “Do your parents know?” he asked randomly, and Justin blinked. Good. For once he was surprised.

  “That I’m gay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Justin shook his head. “Nope!”

  Hank snickered hard enough to spit out his beer. “The hell they don’t!”

  Justin laughed. “Well, we haven’t officially had the talk, how’s that?”

  Well, Hank hadn’t had “the talk” until college either. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess there’s no reason to yet. Nobody serious yet, no reason to rock their world.”

  Hank nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Did you have the talk?” Justin asked, and Hank looked despairingly at his beer. The beer was full, the pizza was cleaned up, and he hadn’t heard a peep out of Josie in the last hour. It wasn’t even like the memory was that bad.

  “It was anticlimactic,” he said with another swig of his beer. “No drama, nothing to talk about.”

  “Well, tell me anyway.” Justin toed off his trendy little lace-less sneakers and curled his feet up under his bottom, then leaned on the arm of the couch, propping his chin up on his hand. He looked sweet and defenseless sitting there, and Hank found that he trusted that complete lack of defense. For all his drama, there was nothing about Justin that Hank couldn’t see right in front of him.