After Ben (6 page)

Sliding open one of Ben’s empty dresser drawers, he carefully put them away instead of placing them under his pillow, smoothing the fabric, lips pressed together tightly as he told himself that this too was progress. Then he grabbed his keys and left the apartment, directionless, purposeless, just wanting really badly to be somewhere else for a while.

It wasn’t until he took the I-5 north toward Vancouver that he realized he was headed toward his parents’ house.

He hadn’t visited the lake house—his childhood home—for nearly a year. It wasn’t that Theo didn’t have a relationship with his parents; he did. As a family, they weren’t as close-knit as Ben would have liked, but Theo had grown up with their reserve and was somewhat used to their reticence around “new” people. It wasn’t until he and Ben had been together for over a year that he realized his mom actually had an issue with their relationship. Initially he had been disbelieving, trying to force situations where the four of them could spend time together. How could anyone not love Ben?

It took a few years for Theo to pretty much give up hoping, and honestly, it wasn’t that much of a wrench. His parents seemed perfectly happy with their own company, even though they had all been so close when he lived at home. They came into Seattle at least monthly, and Theo met them for lunch on his own, taking Ben up to the lake house only on the holidays. His parents were always polite, and Ben used to try so fucking hard to find things to talk about with them. Eventually, his mom’s brittle edginess around Ben just made them both sad.

The concept of adults still seeking parental approval had been the subject of heated discussion on the message board earlier in the week. He and Morgan had messaged privately several times about the subject—sometimes there were aspects of debates that bordered on being too personal for open discussion—and Theo had felt touched that Morgan chose to share the loss of his parents with him.

It was understandable, of course, that people in their age group lost their parents. Theo guessed that they were all getting older; his own parents were in their seventies. But Morgan’s message had made him really consider his parents for the first time in ages.

MORGAN: I wish I could talk to Dad again. Just for one last time.

Theo understood.

MORGAN: Sometimes I wonder if he would be proud of me. Sometimes I’m absolutely certain that he wouldn’t be. Not right now, anyway.

Yeah, parents.

MORGAN: If I could go home right now, I would.

Theo stopped at a service station when he was half an hour away from Big Lake and spoke briefly to his mother, holding the phone away from his ear at her burst of delight. The rest of the journey flew by, leaving him with little time to think, which suited him just fine.

Thinking had kept him up all night.

Thinking made his palms tingle, as if he still had Peter’s skin—hot, soft, not Ben—pressed under them.

As he turned right onto East College Way, just a few miles from home, he started counting food outlets to distract himself—McDonald’s, Domino’s, Quiznos, Pizza Hut, Subway, Denny’s, Taco Bell—thinking that Morgan had been right yet again.

During an online debate on the nation’s health he stated that if you put junk food within a mile of students, that’s all they would eat, and that students were targeted with a higher density of junk-food choices than any other demographic in America. There had been a lot of talk about personal responsibility, but he had turned the tables neatly, asking if anyone on the forum had heart health issues. There had been a flurry of assent. Then he asked if they would have chosen tofu and sprouts when they were teens and first away from home.

Maybe, Morgan suggested, someone should care about kids’ hearts, not just the hearts that cost insurance companies the big bucks when it was already too fucking late. It was a far from perfect argument, but it had stuck with Theo. He thought about that, fretting slightly that maybe Morgan was also in the heart-health age group as he passed the Mount Vernon campus of Washington State University. Minutes later he turned onto the road that led to the cove on which his parents’ house was situated.

The house looked no different.

His mother was at the door, waiting, while his father stood halfway up a ladder against one of the upper-floor windows.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” The man was seventy-three years old. Theo was out of his car and across the lawn to the foot of the ladder in moments, holding it steady, suddenly overwhelmed with something close to guilt. His father shouldn’t have to do dangerous repair jobs like this on his own.

“Theo,” his father smiled down at him. “I’m nearly done here, so go get some coffee with your mom. She’s been annoying me for the last half hour.” He felt his mom’s warm hand on his shoulder, then her arms slipped around him, hugging him lightly.

“Baby boy.” It was always like this. His dad pretended that he was invincible and that Theo was still a kid who couldn’t help him out. His mom reverted to seeing him as an infant. Sighing, Theo wondered why they never saw him for who he was: a grown man in his forties with responsibilities of his own. Later they took their places at the kitchen table just like when Theo was a kid, while his dad probed him about work. They talked shop until his mom sighed before asking if he was seeing anyone nice.

“What? I’m sorry, I mean…. What?” While his parents had always been quietly supportive of his sexuality, they never, ever asked for details of his personal life.

“I just wondered if you had met anyone, Theo. I’m sure they’d be nice; you’ve always been a good judge of character. I just….” She looked across at his dad, then pushed her thick white hair away from her face in a gesture that Theo recognized as his own before adding, “It’s been a year.”

Theo excused himself and headed for the bathroom, where he splashed his face with cold water until his eyes stopped burning. Fuck. This—this—was exactly why they didn’t spend time together. Returning to the kitchen, which looked just the same as when he’d groaned over his homework at the table as a kid, he resumed eating, tasting absolutely nothing.

His mom tried again. “Since Ben—”

“You don’t get to talk about Ben.” Theo drew in a breath, shutting his eyes for a moment, hauling his temper back in. The manners he’d learned as a kid battled with his need to set the record straight. Morgan’s typed messages of a few days earlier seemed to be written on the back of his eyelids.

MORGAN: People treat you exactly as you let them.

MORGAN: Sometimes you have to say “Fuck that shit.”

MORGAN: I have trouble with that.

Theo doubted there was much that Morgan had trouble with. He’d obviously lived, perhaps experienced tough times, but his words stayed with Theo. He let out a long sigh, then opened his eyes and met each parent’s gaze in turn, pitching his voice low to stop it from shaking. “You don’t ever get to talk about Ben. You had fifteen years to talk with him—or with me about him. You chose not to, for reasons I will never, ever comprehend. We were together for longer than most marriages last.” He pushed away from the table, hands shaking. “Now, what do you need help with?”

He spent the rest of the afternoon helping his dad with repair work. The house had been built in the 1930s and needed more and more tender loving care each year. It was too big for just the two of them now, involving far too much upkeep. He suggested, as he had many times before, that they move somewhere more manageable. After Theo had helped his dad replace some rope on their boat, they stood at the far end of the jetty and looked back at the house together.

“Why would we move, son?” His dad looked genuinely puzzled. “This is where our memories are. Why would we ever leave those behind?”

His mom approached, carrying steaming mugs on a tray, coffee for them, hot chocolate for him. A peace offering. They drank in silence. His mom shivered. She was much frailer than Theo remembered. He watched her press her lips tightly together, seeing himself once more in her unconscious habits, before she addressed the lake without making eye contact.

“We don’t want you to be alone, Theo. We only want you to be happy.” She shuffled a little closer, bumping her hip against his leg, offering only token comfort that came far, far too late.

Theo slipped an arm around her thin shoulders.

“I was.”

Chapter 4

T
HEO
stayed the night, which pleased his parents so much. He hadn’t slept a single night in his childhood home since he realized that his mom wasn’t going to change her mind about Ben. They had always made the drive back to the city instead, no matter how late they stayed after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners. Waking with a lurch on Sunday morning, sitting bolt upright in the guestroom bed, Theo slumped back for a moment, mentally compiling a list of the work awaiting him in the week ahead.

The smell of bacon lured him downstairs.

His mom had been busy.

“You’re too thin, Theo.” She heaped his plate with food, sliding it across the table toward him. “Are you sure that you’re looking after yourself?” Worry creased her face.

“I’m good.” He plowed through his meal staring at the table rather than at his mom, then decided that he might as well speak honestly. There had been precious little honesty between them since he had returned to Seattle with Ben fifteen years before. “I still forget to eat.”

“Oh, Theo. You have to look after yourself.”

“I know.” He paused while his mom sat buttering her toast. “Ben used to make me eat. Now that he’s….” He heard the slow scrape of butter over toast stop. “Now that it’s just me, I guess I find it hard to get motivated about cooking, or eating, or anything really.” He ignored her silence. “I should have paid more attention to him when he cooked. I should have made him write his recipes down somewhere. I should have—”

“Theo….”

“No, don’t stop me, Mom. I should have paid more attention. I should have. Maybe if I’d done that he’d still be here.”

“Oh, Theo. You can’t think that.” When he looked up, his mom was white faced.

He shrugged. “I can, and I do. I think it every single day.” It was the truth. Every single time he went into the kitchen, every single time he opened the refrigerator he was reminded, over and over and over of what he’d lost. “Ben did so much for me. He just loved having someone to look after. He was a family man through and through, Mom, and I got spoiled. It’s been kind of hard to get motivated to do things for myself, but lately I feel like I’m starting to get there.” He helped himself to more bacon. “Yeah, I’m getting there, I guess.”

His mom put her knife down, her movements precise. She focused on her plate before saying, “I could cook for you, Theo. I could fill your freezer with meals. I’d love to do that for you, if you would only let me.”

“That’s okay. I’m good.” He almost smiled at her raised brows. “Well, I’m trying harder, anyhow. Making progress.”

They finished their meal in silence.

After breakfast, he kissed his mom and hugged his dad before climbing back into his car and heading for the city. The sky was clear, and the interstate was relatively quiet. He made good time and stopped at a grocery store where he stocked up on produce, aware that trying harder probably meant nuking fewer frozen dinners. He chose vegetables, knowing that Ben would have turned his nose up at his selection. He’d been such a fucking food snob. When he got home, he threw open the windows to change the air, then settled at his desk to balance his checkbook and pay bills.

His e-mail in-box was full of alerts from the debate forum, and he had a ton of private messages waiting for him. Logging on, starting to read, Theo’s smile lit up his face. Morgan had been a sneaky shit while Theo had been at his parents’ place. He’d found prior messages of Theo’s and rebutted every single one, demanding answers, challenging him to debate and promising a virtual spanking.

Pushing up his shirtsleeves, checkbook balancing forgotten, Theo got to work. When Morgan came online later, Theo messaged him immediately.

THEO: Anyone would think that you missed me.

MORGAN: Who are you?

They kidded around and tag-teamed on a health-care-reform debate into the early evening, right up until Theo’s cell phone chimed, alerting him to a text from Peter asking if he could come and see Theo that evening. He called him right back.

“I thought you were leaving.”

“I am. I meant to leave yesterday, but something’s come up. Can I see you first? I can be with you in twenty minutes.” Theo could almost picture his frown. “I need to see you, Theo. Can I come over? I won’t take too much of your evening. I really do have to leave later tonight.”

Agreeing quickly, he logged out of the forum, then paced his apartment, feeling awkward and uncomfortable in his own skin. Peter had sounded strange. When he eventually heard the buzzer, he wasn’t sure if he was relieved or worried as he opened the door.

“Hey.” Peter was in uniform.

“Hey, yourself.” Theo wasn’t sure if his mouth was hanging open. He shook his head a little, closing his eyes for a moment, then started again. “Come in. Are you okay?” He showed him to the kitchen, pulling out one of the counter stools and offering him a drink.