Promise Rock 03 - Living Promises (MM) (38 page)

Jeff: Living Promises

J
EFF
actually knew his first name—Ambrose—but it felt like this was a surname sort of situation. Kevin had loved him and feared him in equal parts, but then Kevin had been the oldest and had shouldered the responsibility of being a good example and the caretaker of the younger kids. Kevin had once told him that he might have come out in an act of adolescent rebellion—if he hadn't worried about Martin and his brothers and sisters and how hard that would make life for
them.

And also, he had admitted that he'd miss them like hell once his parents kicked him out of the house.
So Jeff thought he was prepared for meeting Ambrose Turner, colossal size and all.
He was wrong.
The big man narrowed his eyes and said, “Who?”
Jeff swallowed. “Kevin Turner. Your son.”
Ambrose Turner shook his head slowly and thrust his lower lip out. “I don't know who that is.”
Jeff sucked in a breath, because it felt like he'd been gut shot.
Oh, Kevin. I know who you were. Martin remembers you. Don't worry, baby. We've got your back.
“Dad….”
Ambrose turned toward his youngest son with a snarl. “I told you to go get your stuff!”
“He's not going until he's ready,” Jeff said, and went to move between them.
“Who in the hell are you to tell me what my son is or is not going to do? You are nothing to him—”
“We're his family!” Collin snapped, moving up next to Jeff.
Jeff was so grateful he reached for Collin's hand and was reassured to feel those long fingers wrapping around his.
Thank you, Collin, for helping me carry my baggage. It's not nearly as heavy anymore.
“
I'm
his family.”
“And so are we,” Jeff said firmly. “Martin came here to find out about his brother. His brother would have wanted me to take care of him, and I have.
We
have. That makes him family. Please respect that we've got his best interests at heart too.”
Ambrose Turner's upper lip curled, and his fists shook at his sides. “I don't have to respect anything about you. You're the little faggot that fucked with….” He swallowed. “You made Kevin wrong. And now I don't have a son. And I'm not going to let you do that to Martin.”
“Oh no, Dad!” Martin said excitedly, with the heartbreaking teenage certainty that once
he
saw the truth, the world would have to see it with him. “That's a myth. It's totally not true—I'm just as straight as I was two months ago, I swear!”
“
I said get your shit, Martin, and let's go!
” Ambrose Turner's panicked roar cut through the background chatter and rattled the tiny apartment. There was a sudden wail from Jeff's bedroom, where Parry and Lila had been playing with Collin's nieces under his mother's supervision, and the entire atmosphere went from tentative to hostile in one breath.
And that was when Deacon invaded the little space in the hall and took the hell over. “Mr. Turner, you need to step outside with me and Jeff here, and maybe Collin, Shane, and Crick too.”
“I'm not—”
“You just made my niece cry, Mr. Turner. You've got to the count of three before you step outside and have this conversation, or Shane here is going to call his old partner on the force, and there's going to be a squad car here where you just scared the hell out of a room full of children. How ugly do you want this, Mr. Turner? Because you just took it from uncomfortable to scary, and that means you need to get the hell out of Jeff's home for the rest, you hear me?”
Jeff looked up and saw that Crick had put his hand on Deacon's shoulder, and Deacon covered it with his own. He was up to this—he hated to talk to people, but dammit, no one made Parry Angel cry.
“Deacon….” Martin sounded really unhappy, and Deacon turned to him and winked.
“No worries, Martin. I hate to go talk about your future without you, but I'm thinking maybe your father needs to listen to someone he's not pissed at right now, okay?”
“Dad, so help me, you lay one finger on these people and you couldn't keep me home in an iron cage, you hear me?” With that, Martin stalked back down the hallway, presumably to help calm down the girls, and his father opened the door behind him and backed out, glaring warily at Deacon, and then at Jeff, Collin, Shane, Crick, and—
Benny
?
“What are you doing here?” Jeff hissed under his breath, and Benny grinned.
“Well, he needs to know it's not all gay men, right?”
“Jon? Andrew? Guys who could hold their own?”
Benny rolled her eyes. “He's not a woman-beater, Jeff. He's not going to start throwing punches with me here. And I think Andrew would just piss him off.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The fact that I had to physically restrain him when Parry started crying. Getting slugged in the face really would piss Mr. Turner off.”
Jeff had to laugh a little, but then Deacon started talking, and the urge to laugh passed.
“Don't
ever
threaten my family again, Mr. Turner.” Now that they were outside, Deacon was in his element. His spine was straight, and the scowl he'd leveled at Kevin Turner's father was unwavering. “We can resolve this here like adults, but don't raise your voice unless you mean it. No one speaks that way to my people.”
“Who in the hell are you?” Mr. Turner sounded outraged—and also puzzled.
“Family,” Deacon said evenly. “And I think you know something about it. Now Martin wants to stay, and Shane here knows more about runaway rights and CPS than you can possibly imagine, and, like I said, we can do this ugly. But I will tell you this, and I say it with everything I know in my heart. You make a scene, you throw a punch, you drag your son out of here kicking and screaming, and you will have lost him. He may end up coming back to you today, but once that kid gets out of your house, you will never see him again. You let Jeff here have him for Christmas, let them remember Kevin together, and you may get a chance to know him as a man, and maybe know your grandkids to boot. But a lot of that hinges on this thing right here. You take him out now, and he will never respect you. You give him this, and he might forgive you just a little for shitting on Kevin's memory.”
Ambrose Turner looked positively dumbstruck. “Who
are
you? I don't know any of you from Adam, and now you're telling me not to threaten your
family
? I just want my son!”
Jeff took a deep breath. “We don't want to keep him from you,” he said, feeling brave. God, it seemed so easy for Deacon—he stood up, he spoke from the heart, and people listened. Jeff was good at getting people's attention when he cracked a joke, wiggled his ass, and flopped his wrist—but this stuff, the important stuff… God. It seemed that the only way to get them to listen was to come unglued.
“Then what in the hell do you call this?” Ambrose waved his hands at the crowd of people standing around, glaring at him, and Jeff got frustrated enough to step forward and wave his hands.
“Family! Goddammit, aren't you listening? Kevin and I were
family
, and you can deny it all you want, but the fact was, we were everything but married!”
“Bullshit, you faggot motherfucker!” The words rang and hung there, in the frosty, damp night, and Jeff fought the temptation to roll his eyes. Like he hadn't heard
that
before.
“You can call me all the names you want, Ambrose, but that's not going to change the fact that you lost one son because he was afraid of you doing just what you're doing now, and you're about to lose another son, and eventually, even you are going to run out of children to piss off, so you may want to learn a thing or two!”
There was a terrible moment then—a dangerous moment. Ambrose Turner had never been abusive; Kevin had told him that. But every man had his limits, and it looked like that idea—the idea that he might lose his son—that was his limit. He struggled with tears for a moment; then his face twisted with anger and he took one violent step forward—and that was all it took. Suddenly there were four big men in front of Jeff looking angry, and then, to everyone's surprise, one tiny college student standing in front of them.
“Get out of my way, little girl!” He sounded angry, but he was clearly bewildered, and some of the violence seeped out of his shoulders, his expression, and the situation became just a fraction less violent.
Benny felt it—she must have. “Oh I don't think so, asshole!” she snapped. She sounded irritated, like a sister or a friend, and not like a fighter. Jeff thought he might throttle her later, but now he was grateful. Decking Jeff? A real possibility—Jeff was a man, and one who'd hurt him deeply. Decking Benny? Not Kevin's father. And Benny was capitalizing on his hesitation, without a doubt.
“These guys look all big and mean and tough,” she told him conversationally, “and I'm sure they'd take you down, but I'm the one who's had to sit in hospitals or be on the phone about hospitals or worry about hospitals for all of them, and I'm not going to do it!”
“Benny….” Deacon said, obviously trying not to let any humor seep into his voice.
“Don't you patronize me, Deacon Winters!” Benny snapped, turning around to him and glaring at him with her hands on her hips. “I'm done, do you hear me? I'm fucking done. You come out here and posture all you want, but a single one of you gets hurt or loses a nostril hair or catches a cold—that's you, Collin, you
asshole
, did you even bother to put on a coat?—and I will end you. I will quit cooking for a month, or… or send Parry Angel to boarding school in Japan… or… I don't know, go down to Georgia to meet Drew's folks and not come back. Are you listening to me? Any of you? Because right now, the only one here
not
on my let's-scare-Benny-pissless shitlist is
Jeff
, but we've all been worried about him since we met him, so he doesn't count!”
Benny whirled back to Ambrose, and all of the other men, Jeff included, shifted restlessly and met sheepish eyes. It occurred to Jeff, and probably to everyone there, that maybe they might have wanted to bring Andrew, Jon, Mikhail, and Lucas after all. Hell, even old Joshua would have been a better bet than Deacon and Collin at this point, not that either of them would have admitted it.
“And you, Mr. Turner,” Benny resumed, “you should be ashamed of yourself. Your son is
proud
of his family—why in the hell do you think he's here? He's proud of Kevin, and he wants to make sure Kevin's memory is done right, and you're here shaming him in front of Kevin's family!”
“I
was
Kevin's family!”
Benny took a step back—they all did—but they didn't retaliate. They couldn't. How could you retaliate when someone that angry let that much pain slip through? Jeff pushed his way through his honor guard, letting his hand linger on Collin's hip as he went, and then stood next to Benny, holding her hand.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” he whispered in her ear, and she wrapped her arm around his waist and shivered. None of them had bothered to put on jackets, and Jeff figured he was about half a minute from shooing Collin and Deacon back into the apartment on general principle.
“Mr. Turner?” he asked quietly, when the silence of letting the big man pull himself together had gone on long enough. “Mr. Turner, we all really love Martin. We don't want to keep him from you, I swear. We just want to borrow him from you for a little while, and he wants to stay here and see what kind of person his brother was when he could be himself.”
“I was his
family
!” Ambrose Turner whispered, looking at Jeff with an agonized plea for understanding, and Jeff nodded and hoped that maybe, at last, they had some common ground.
“So was I,” he said softly.
“How in the hell can you even
say
that?” The words were angry, but the volume, at least, had softened.
Jeff looked around and shrugged. “Don't you see? That's why there was a letter for me at all.” And God. Just saying that out loud put paid to a lot of pain, didn't it? “Because I was someone Kevin wanted to say goodbye to. I was someone he would have trusted Martin to—that's what that letter meant to me, do you understand? And this here, and all those people in the apartment—they are
my
family. You want to know how we all fit together, that's fine. Come inside, have some dinner, and meet everybody.”
He dropped his voice because he wanted this next part to be sincere. “We'll be civil to you, I swear. But when you've met and talked to everyone, and you know that we're mothers and sons and fathers and brothers and we're not all degenerate and we
don't
all want to convert Martin for our evil purposes and share the gay, I
really
hope you let him stay. Please? Kevin always said you were tough but fair. You've got to know I haven't seen any of the fair yet. Please don't make a liar out of him.”
There was a weighted silence, and Kevin's father stood up and glowered at them all—but he was moved, Jeff could tell. Jeff took the attention off of him for a moment by saying firmly, “Deacon and Collin, get your skinny asses inside. Neither of you are in a position to stand out here in the cold, do you hear me? Benny—do your thing, sweetheart. I'm behind you!”
Collin looked at him with a little bit of hurt. “Jeff….”
Jeff's stern expression softened. “Go inside, baby. Don't make me worry about you, okay, Sir Galahad? Shane and Crick'll take care of me, right? I mean
look
at them. Shane's like the Terminator—he'll take a beating and just keep coming back.”
“And what does that make me?” Crick asked, a little offended.
“Too gay to hit with a clear conscience,” Jeff said dryly, and Crick returned with an outraged, “
I fought in the war, dammit!
”
Deacon was the one who turned around and said, “You were wounded in the war, Crick—you're the one who told me that the fighting thing was sort of an overstatement.”
“Get your ass inside, geezer,” Crick snapped, and Deacon looked over at Kevin's father and made sure they had eye contact.
“Mr. Turner,” he said levelly, indicating respect—and a solid stand. He waited for a minute, until Kevin's father caught his eyes and nodded. Then he did what Crick and Benny had asked and went inside with Collin, and Jeff loved them both more for it.
After that, there were fewer of them, and Kevin's father, and a whole lot of bewilderment.
Ambrose Turner looked at them and swallowed, wiped his cheek on the inside of his sweatshirt, and swallowed again. “You were in the war?” he asked out of nowhere.
Crick shrugged, held up his twisted hand. “Medic,” he said briefly. “That's where I met Drew—he's inside, and from Georgia too.”
Ambrose chuffed out a breath. “Who's Drew?”
“The only other black man in the room besides your son,” Crick said dryly. “Benny and Drew, they've sort of got… an understanding. He's definitely family.”
Well, good, Jeff thought. Maybe that would put paid to the race thing—or at least not make it quite the elephant that it could be. More like a water buffalo, maybe?