Are You Sitting Down? (41 page)

“And you blame your Mom for not telling him?”
I asked.

“Well, I don’t blame her.”

“Think about how hard it must have been back when she first found out about you.”

“She forbade me to tell anyone else.”

“But eventually she came around, right?
I mean, the rest of your family knows now, don’t they?”

“Yeah, eventually her embarrassment subsided and she was ready to talk about it.
She even let me bring someone home one Christmas for
everyone
to meet.”

“I wouldn’t call it embarrassment, Travis.
It was prob
a
bly more like anger.
As a parent, we do our best to raise our chi
l
dren the best way we can.
Finding out one of them is gay all of a sudden makes us think we did something wrong.
We think it’s our fault.”

“Is that how you felt about Justin?”
Travis asked.

I paused and gave it some thought.

“Yeah, I think it
wa
s how we felt.
You think you know a person, Travis, your own flesh and blood.
Finding out som
e
thing like that doesn’t make you love them any less— it shouldn’t—but it sure makes you wonder what else there might be that you don’t know about them.
You blame yourself for having missed out on who they really are.”

“It still doesn’t explain why Mom didn’t tell Calvin that I was gay.”

“Sure it does.
Think about it.
You have an advantage over your Mom.
You come home to visit her as much as you can, but then you get to leave.
You get to go back to
Memphis
where you
are more comfortable being yourself, where it’s more accepted in a big city, I bet.
You can forget all about the hold this small town had on you once.
You broke free long ago.
Your Mom isn’t so lucky.
”

“I don’t think I understand what you are getting at, Mr. Black.”

“Well, look at it from your younger sister’s point of view.
No offense at all toward her little baby.
He’s as cute as a bu
t
ton, but people talk.
I don’t know what they say to her face, if anything, but I do know what they say behind her back.
It’s just like that gossip in the paper.
Now, you think your sister would be talked about if she lived off somewhere in a big city?”

“No, probably not.
Things like that are just more a
c
cepted.”

“Now, think about it from your Mom’s point of view.
She has a gay son.
No big deal really.
She still loves ya with all of her heart, I’m sure of that.
But she lives here too, just like your sister, and—”

“And when I’m not around she can pretend I don’t e
x
ist?”

“Travis, that’s a bit harsh.
Let’s just say your Mom would never parade around town screaming at the top of her lungs that she has a gay son, but in a town like this
there’s nothing wrong with being reserved about such things.”

“Is that how you were with Justin?”

“No.
We never knew about Justin till after he met you.
He moved away
right
after that.”

“I’m always the one to blame.”

“I’m not blaming you, son, please don’t look at it like that.”

I wanted to slap some sense into him.
I just couldn’t get the words to come out right.
I wanted to tell him how he should respect his mother for not wanting to necessarily discuss her son’s sexual preference when he’s not around.
She was a loyal and well-known citizen of this community, and she’d been through enough with her other kids.

She had a mixed grandbaby, a druggie son, a daughter who got raped by her boss, and a son who cheats on his wife with his student who she probably doesn’t even know about.
A gay son was just the icing on the cake.
Sometimes I was glad Helen and I didn’t have any other children.
Raising Justin was hard enough.
I could only imagine the
hardships
of raising five in the White house, had their
sufferings not already been quite publicly known.

Travis had gone quiet again, and I was out of words tr
y
ing my best to prevent an argument with him.
The stairs behind me creaked.
I knew it was Helen.

“Manny, you should have told me we had company,” she said, standing there on the stairs in her heavy pink hous
e
coat and fuzzy house shoes.

“Sorry, dear.
I thought
you might be asleep.” I lied.

It was also the first time I had called her dear in ages.

“Travis, how are you?”
Helen said, coming down the last of the stairs.

Travis stood to give her a hug.

“I haven’t been here long.
Maybe thirty minutes,” he said looking back at me with a shrug.

“How are things with you in
Memphis
?”
she asked.

“Fine.
Lonely at times, but everything is fine.”

“I bet, and how’s
your Mom
?”

“She’s good.”

I laughed to myself inside my head finding joy in how Tr
a
vis opened up and talked to me, but gave Helen the generic “how are you” answers.
No one ever says how they really feel anymore.

“That’s good.
Manny tells me he sees her in church quite a bit,” she said taking a seat on the sofa next to me but leaving at least a foot of space between us.

Travis sat back down in the armchair.

“I was just telling Mr. Black about my plans to go see Ju
s
tin tomorrow,” Travis said.

I really wished he would have refrained from talking about Justin at least for a few more minutes.
The truth was there was nothing else to talk about between us.
Much l
ike Justin, we barely knew Travis at all.
His link to our son was the only bond we had to Travis, so it seemed only fitting for it to be the first thing—and probably the only thing—we’
d talk about now that Helen had entered the room.

“Did you know Justin had his first piano recital when he was in the fifth grade?”
s
he asked out loud, and not partic
u
larly to anyone.

Travis didn’t answer, knowing this was just a prelude to a story Helen was about to tell to fill the time.
She cleared her throat and began to stare blankly across the room as she spoke.

“He hated piano at first.
All the other kids were playing trumpet or saxophone, a smaller instrument they could carry in a case on the bus.
Justin had wanted to play clarinet, but we couldn’t afford one.
We already had a piano, so I made him play that.
He was so mad because he couldn’t carry his instr
u
ment on the bus for all the other kids to see.

“
Years later he was glad for that because the high school kids teased the musically talented kids with their large black instrument cases in hand.
Justin said they called them band nerds or asked if they were selling cosmetics.
Cosmetics?
Can you believe that?
The lady who used to stop by here sel
l
ing door to door didn’t even carry a case resembling any mus
i
cal instrument I’d ever seen.
So, Justin never got teased on the bus.
He said he felt like an undercover musical spy because no one knew he was taking lessons too.
He always did enjoy a bit of mystery in his life, didn’t he?
”

“I guess so.
He never really talked about that before,” Travis said
with the tone of a classroom kid answering a que
s
tion out loud to which he d
id
n’t know the right answer.

Helen went quiet with a limp smile on her face, the kind she smiles when she’s lost deep in her thoughts and memories.
She was probably also smiling for knowing something about Justin that Travis didn’t know.
At least, he led her to believe he didn’t know.

“Justin played the Winter Waltz at that first recital.
He was the best out of twenty-something other
students
.
Most of them were older than him too.
He took home the first place medal in his division.
It was the first time he had ever won an
y
thing.”

I looked at Travis and could tell he was searching his brain for a sliver of that story from where Justin had already told him.
He was probing the boxes in his brain for what the Winter Waltz sounded like.
Had Justin ever played it again for him?
Did he have that me
d
al at his apartment with Justin’s other things?
I saw anger in his face because all of this escaped him.
In the confines of his recollections, he couldn’t find this one.
I couldn’t find it either.
I barely remembered yesterday, much less that many years ago.
Justin had probably lost the medal because Helen allowed him to play
with
it, or another kid had stolen it.

“Justin was so proud of that medal.
It was a heavy gold coin with a piano engraved on it, hanging from a silk yellow ribbon.
He complained about how heavy it was around his neck, but he was really bragging.
I hung it
over
a trophy he won later which we placed on the mantel.
You remember, don’t you, Manny?”

I agreed with a nod.
The mantel was once cluttered with trophies and framed award certificates.
It was hard to keep track of what Justin won them for
.

Helen reached into the pocket of her house coat and pulled out a small flat square box.
It was worn at the edges, like an old jewelry box intended for antique costume jewelry.
She leaned over and handed it to Travis.

“I found this today and I want you to have it,” she e
x
plained.