Isolation Play (Dev and Lee) (44 page)

My ears are freezing by the time I get to Ranger Rob’s. The bar’s run by a big ol’ wolf who claims to have fought in any number of wars, depending on his mood and the number of beers he’s got in him. He’s not there much anymore, and he’s not there tonight, but he still keeps the bar dim and smoke-free, to give himself a split-second advantage over non-canid intruders. You can take the soldier off the battlefield, but you can’t take the battlefield out of the soldier.

I find a booth in a corner and order a white wine. It’s warm, at least, with soft yellow lighting off the dark wood paneling and the comforting smells of beer and nuts and other liquors. When my father took me out here for drinks, one time when he was visiting me at Forester, I was so nervous. I’d had plenty of beers, and wine, but never with my father. And it was fine. He treated it like he treated everything: like it was no big deal. Then, that was great.

A young arctic fox in camo brings my wine. It’s cold and sharp and not very good, but it settles the flutters in my stomach and the tension in my fingers. When my father walks in the door, I raise a paw casually.

He slides in across from me and orders a beer when the arctic fox saunters over with her order pad. She leaves. He and I sit and look at each other.

He looks heavier than I remember from Christmas. He’s wearing a brown leather jacket over a plain yellow t-shirt, with the same glasses he’s had for years. His eyes are bright and there’s still not much grey on his muzzle, though there are patches on his ears. He doesn’t use fur tint, though, not my father.

His eyes flick to my cast. “What’d you do to your paw?”

I move my other paw, nonsensically, to cover it. “Got in a fight.”

He raises an eyebrow. “With a black marker gang? Can I see?”

Reluctantly, I lift the cast, extend it. He takes it gently, turns it to see the signatures. “Gerrard Marvell. Fisher Kingston. Wow. Your tiger didn’t sign it?”

I pull the paw back, proud that he’s impressed with it. “I didn’t call you to talk about my paw,” I say, which brings another moment of silence as we both contemplate the reason I did call him.

“
Tough break,” he says, finally, and then his beer arrives.

“
Dislocation,” I say, though I know he’s not talking about my thumb.

He sips. “I guess it makes sense, though.”

My ears flatten. “You don’t even know them.”

He gets close to a smile. “I mean, you meeting some other kid from a religious family.”

I squint. “Since when are you religious?”

“
I assumed his parents are.”

“
Not really, actually.” I lift the wine to my nose and inhale it before taking another sip. It smells better than it tastes, fruity and a little sharp. “His dad has this masculinity thing.”

“
Most dads do, I think. Makes the whole ‘having cubs’ thing easier.”

“
Assuming their partner has the ‘female’ thing.”

He inclines his head. “You thinking about having cubs?”

“
Not for a long time. If ever.” I sip the wine. “And who knows how long things will last.”

“
Because of this?” He keeps his paws around the beer mug, watching me steadily. “Would he choose his family over you?”

I sigh. “I don’t think so, but...” It feels odd talking about this with my father, almost as if I’d sought out advice from a stranger in the bar. “He’s just down all the time. I’m doing what I can, but I feel like if we don’t get him back with his family, things will just decay. We live apart, we only see each other weekends of home games. We have to sneak around all the time.” Just reciting our list of woes sends crawls of worry around my heart, or maybe that’s just the cheap wine. I think about going on to mention being in drag all the time, but then I’m not sure that counts because we both kind of enjoy it. Or did, until recently.

“
Doesn’t sound like a great relationship anyway.” Father looks around the bar, at the coyotes at the next table and the wolves at the bar itself.

“
It is.” Automatically defensive, I sit up straighter. “Look, I didn’t call you to be talked out of being gay.”

“
Didn’t mean that.” He rubs a finger up and down his drink. “You had a lot of friends in college. Nothing worked out with them?”

“
No. It’s different with Dev.”

“
Is it the football?” He holds up a paw. “Sorry. I don’t really need to know.”

I shrug. “Maybe. It’s all wrapped up in that. We love the same things. We want the same things.”

His muzzle drops, a moment before he picks up his beer and drinks it. “That’s important.” His voice has that flat tone again, and his scent is subtly different, sinking into the smell of the old wood of the table.

An old army jacket hangs on the wall behind him, a relic from an old war, framed now by his ears. I move the wine away from me and lean forward. “What friends did Mother have over?”

“
I thought we were talking about you.”

“
We have a while.” I indicate his half-finished beer.

“
Whatever your mother and I are going through—”

“
Father...”

His eyes shift to the adjacent table. The coyotes are bickering amiably at the next table with the familiarity of a long-married couple. Father watches them and says, evenly, “An otter from Families United, another mother.”

The group name rings a faint bell. “What’s her name?”

Still looking at the coyotes, he says, “Mrs. Hedley. She says she lost her son to the homosexual agenda.”

My fur prickles. “Mother had her over?”

“
Again.”

“
How long has she been...?”

“
The first time was a month ago.” He rests his muzzle on his paw, rubbing his whiskers with one finger. “She came away from that with all these ideas of literature to send you. That didn’t happen. God knows what’s going to happen after tonight. But you wanted to talk about Marina?”

Not any more, I don’t. I want to find out what’s going on with Mother. But Father clearly doesn’t want to discuss that. “So, ah, what happened with her?”

He straightens, gets back a wry smile. “I’m not sure how much help I’ll be. The family never reconciled with her. She’s still living with Hari, as far as I know, which isn’t far.”

“
Did she do anything to make it worse? Did Grandma ever regret kicking her out?”

He lifts his mug to his muzzle, considers it, and laps one or two sips. “I don’t know. She never told me, if she did. But your grandma kept to herself. Marina was the youngest, and Grandma always said she took liberties. With me and Rob and Rog, she was more strict. Marina was the baby. I think that’s why Grandma took it so hard.”

“
How did Marina tell her?”

“
Partly,” he goes on as if I hadn’t spoken, “it was that Hari wasn’t a red. Partly it was that he was Arabic. Partly it was that Mother caught them kissing on the back porch.”

I can’t help asking. “Just kissing?”

“
That’s what she told me. I’ve no idea what else they might have been doing while kissing, but she threw Hari out and told Marina never to bring him back.”

“
And Marina said she wasn’t coming back either?”

He nods. “Actually, it was more like she just stopped talking to Mother. I don’t think there was ever a big fight about it. I wasn’t living at home, so I didn’t know until she called me.”

“
Grandma?”

“
Marina.”

Marina sounds like a character in a soap or a sitcom. I cup my ears forward and take another drink of wine as my father goes on. “She said she was running away with Hari and that she hated Mother—Grandma—and asked if I could loan her money to help her on her way.”

“
Did you?”

His ears lower a little. “I tried to talk her out of it. I think I said something about her overreacting to Mother’s overreaction. I said Mother would let Hari back eventually. She’d liked him at first, when she thought he was just a friend. Marina said that she wouldn’t, that she would never approve.” He laps again at his beer. “Marina was right, it turns out, although I still say Mother would have let him back if Marina hadn’t run off. If she’d bothered to try to talk things out.”

I let the pointed reference sail over my head, between my upright ears. “Grandma never said anything to you about it?”

“
Apart from prayers for ‘lost lambs,’ not much. When she started to...when we put her in the home, she talked about Marina, but it was always about when we were cubs, never Marina after high school.”

My grandmother, who always smelled like church to me, lived near Port City, in a big empty house. We spent little time with her in person: Christmases, my grandfather’s funeral when I was five or six. I never saw her in the home, except the one time my father took me to say good-bye to her. I was twelve, old enough to understand what was happening, but it was a very short visit. My mother whisked me out when Grandma started to ramble. She died a week later. I didn’t go to the funeral.

I finish my wine and run my finger around the rim of the glass. “What was Grandma like? Growing up?”

“
She was a mother. Took care of us when my father was out at the bank ’til all hours.” He looks over his glasses. “How does his mother feel about you?”

And we’re back to Dev. “She’s okay with me. I think. We messed up a little bit, but—”

“
Messed up? Like, criticized her cooking, or violated her guest room?”

My ears flush. “She doesn’t have the big issues. His father’s the one with the complex about fags.” I shift my broken paw.

He frowns, his eyes avoiding mine at the f-word. They light on my cast, and widen. “
He’s
who you got in the fight with?”

“
It wasn’t a fight. Not really.”

“
What, did you break your paw on his stone jaw?”

“
Dislocated.” I snort and call for another wine, catching the arctic’s eye. “I didn’t throw a punch.”

“
I’d hope I raised you better than that.”

“
You certainly raised me not to get into fights.”

He flicks his left ear. “Did you file assault charges?”

My father and his great problem-solving skills. “No. Didn’t seem like the right way to get in good with the family.”

He leans closer, pushing his beer to the side. “So what happened?”

Keeping my voice low, I tell him about Mikhail’s threat, about our conversation and the snap of ligaments in my thumb. He doesn’t show much emotion when I get to that part. He frowns, again, touches his beer mug without lifting it. “You like to make things difficult for yourself,” he says when I’m done.

“
Thanks,” I say, trying not to sound as cold as I feel. The arctic fox brings me another wine, which I drink from immediately. I’d thought this was going well, and it’s just coming back to the same old thing with him. “Just trying to roll with the changes, like you taught me.”

“
Why couldn’t you just have been quiet?” He taps the mug, gives a half-smile. “I guess why start now, right?”

“
Oh, you’re being judgmental. There’s no way I could have predicted that.”

“
Wiley—”

“
Maybe if I had a college degree, I’d be better able to handle these situations. Guess if I’d taken that last credit in ‘Dealing with bigots your boyfriend’s related to,’ I could’ve graduated and all this wouldn’t be a problem.”

His ears flatten. “I didn’t bring that up.”

“
You would have. It was just a matter of time.” He doesn’t answer. I lean back and take another drink. “I just wanted some help.”

He spreads his black paws. I see grey on the pads, too. “What can I do? You want me to go talk to this guy, make him like you?”

“
Could you?”

“
I could try.”

Twenty years, and I still have trouble telling when he’s joking. “Seriously?”

Now, he takes a drink. He puts the mug down and points with his nose at my cast. “Long as I’m not going to end up in the hospital with a broken paw.”

“
Don’t call his son a cocksucker and you should be okay.”

His eyes widen for a moment. “And you argue when I say you make things difficult for yourself.”

“
I wasn’t arguing. I was just saying it wasn’t very helpful to point out.”

He smiles, wryly. “I don’t think I’m going to be much help anyway.”

“
No, I know.” Sympathy from him, now, that is a new direction. “But thanks for offering.”

“
Sure. Hope you have some other ideas, too.”

I hesitate, not sure whether to tell him about Kinnel. I’m still not sure what’s going to happen with that, nor whether I did the right thing. But his offer of help has mellowed me somewhat. “I kind of might have told a freelance reporter that he kicked his son out.”

When I say it like that, it feels not so good. Father rubs his whiskers, and I know he’s not going to approve. But he only says, “Trying him in the court of public opinion?”

“
He’s concerned about appearances. It might...um...”

“
So you feel justified dragging his family business out in public.”

I point a finger at him, ears flat. “Prejudice survives in dark shadows. When people are made to be accountable, they feel pressure to do the right thing whether they want to or not. That’s completely different from outing someone.”