My throat thickens at the memory, and I take a moment before answering. “Uh, yeah. She was going to fill this in when I got back from deployment, but… yeah, never got to it.”
* * *
Nick
I was beginning to put together some of the details of how he ended up at ARCH. I didn’t want to push him too hard, but I had to know. “So, what exactly happened?”
“She died of a heart attack while I was deployed.”
I pull him to me in a hug. “I’m so sorry, baby. That must have been devastating.”
“It was.” He goes quiet for a long moment, his throat working. I sit in the quiet with him, having learned a long time ago that some things just can’t be fixed. “And, uh, she hadn’t made a will, so it all went to her sister, who is my mother.”
Wait, what? “I have questions.” I already have a feeling I’m not going to like the answers.
“Yeah, my mom wasn’t super thrilled about the whole gay thing. Hated it, in fact. When she found me making out with our neighbor’s son, she threw me out of the house and told me to come back when I was straight.”
“Shit, dude. How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
Fuck.So, yeah, I already hate his mom. What an asshole. “What did you do?”
“I walked eleven miles across town to my aunt Katie’s house, and she took me in, no questions asked. Almost like she knew that day would come.”
I nod, still fucking pissed at his mom and mourning the fact that I’d never get to meet and thank the woman who saved his life. “So, were y’all close before that?”
“No, not really. When I think about it, I’m pretty sure my mom had been keeping us away from each other, convinced she was a bad influence. I only ever saw her at the Fourth of July barbeque and at Christmas.”
“So, was she? A bad influence, that is.”
A smile plays on his lips, his eyes lost in a memory. “Oh, absolutely. She was a cool old hippie tattoo artist with a flair for the dramatic, essentially the exact opposite of my mom. I loved her to death. We were always going on adventures, checking out weird tourist traps and roadside attractions. Sometimes we’d get in the car and flip a coin to determine our route. One time we ended up in Galveston and spent the night on the beach and then visited NASA. That was the best trip, ever.”
“She sounds amazing.”
“She was. And we had all sorts of projects and plans for the future. In between deployments we’d been updating her house, and we had all of these fun plans for after college. She wanted to take me on a hippie road tour. You know, a start out at Woodstock and end up in San Francisco kind of thing.”
“It must have been terrible when she died.”
He presses his lips together and gives me one sharp nod. “So, without a will, there’s this thing called probate.”
“Yeah, where a judge decides where everything goes.”
“Yeah. So, I was still deployed when all of that started, and by the time I got home six months later, my mother had been given her house and all of her things. I got nothing from the sale of the house that I carefully restored with my aunt, nor did I get anything from the garage sale that sold off all of my memories. When I called to find out about where she was buried, my brother—”
“You have a brother?”
“Two, actually. Hiram and Caleb.”
I wonder if their mother is kind to them, or if she just finds another reason to be cruel. “I’m sorry, I interrupted you. You called to find out where your aunt is buried…”
He exhales in a way that indicates his mother had found a new way to be vile. She had. “Um, well, she’s not buried anywhere. She was cremated, and she said that she’d put the box of her ashes out in the storage shed in the backyard.”
I inhale a sharp breath, unable to imagine how he survived that kind of cruelty to become the kind, funny person he is today. “Well,shit. It’s about the worst thing I’ve ever heard. That wasn’t right, and you deserved to decide what should be done with your aunt’s body.”
“I try not to think about what I deserve; I just try to keep going forward and do the next right thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing after that. That’s what Aunt Katie would have wanted. It’s what showed me to always have hope that things will get better, even if it takes a while.” He sighs as though the weight of the world is on his shoulders. “And anyway, that wasn’t even why I was so emotional.”
“Are you sure? Because if we keep talking about it,I’llstart crying.”
