Life really was about baby steps, Matt thought. You came to a crossroads and sometimes made terrible choices, and the only way back was one tiny step at a time. Maybe, somewhere the youth pastor was trying to redeem himself. Matt hoped he was.
Matt felt the moon seducing him—or maybe it was the dizzying haze of the nicotine and having been slapped around once too often by the scotch. He set his cigar and scotch aside, stood—and stripped naked.
“Did I miss something, dahling?” William asked. “I thought we’d established that sex was off the table. Not that I’m necessarily opposed to a creative exception.”
“It is,” Matt said, “off the table. Luna is waxing gibbous. A wise woman told me that I need to absord Luna’s healing rays.”
William arched an eyebrow. “Mind if I join you?”
He stood and stripped as well.
They sat there naked, sipping and smoking.
“Slanj-a-va!” Matt said, toasting his friend.
“Slanja-a-va!” William returned.
Saturday, March 30, 1996. 10:02 a.m.
As usual, Debbie’s yard was hard to miss. On one side stood two Harvey-sized Easter Bunnies surveying a scattered clutch of plastic eggs that, but for their colors, were large enough to have come from the set ofJurassic Park.
On the other side of the yard stood a cross outlined in Christmas lights. Arrayed around the cross were the plastic shepherds and angels who, a few months earlier, had stood vigil at a plastic manger. Whatever else could be said of Debbie, this much was true: what she lacked in taste, she compensated for with quantity. As far as she was concerned more was always better.
Matt hesitated at her front door. He had not been there since January. He probably wouldn’t be there now had Debbie not called and asked him for a favor. She needed him to move something heavy.
He felt like shit. He was hungover from last night’s drinking bout with William. Plus, he’d been a lousy friend to Debbie. The last time he’d seen her had been when he’d mediated her reconciliation with Nicholas.
He’d known then that he had to come out to her, had told himself he would, but had put it off. How exactly did you come out to a woman whose most life-shattering event had been when her closeted husband divorced her?
So here he stood, weeks later, having daily kicked the can down the road, where each day’s procrastination had made it that much harder to imagine telling Debbie his secret, that much more necessary to kick the can again the next day. He’d been borrowing time from a loan shark, paying his debt in shame, and the interest kept snowballing.
Debbie’s front door swung open. She bounded out and smothered Matt in her arms. “MUSTANG!”
“Hi mom,” Matt said, his voice flat. He was the prodigal son.
Debbie sniffed his shirt and looked up at him. “Rough night?”
Matt nodded sheepishly.
“Come inside. I’ll get you some coffee and aspirin. That’ll have to do. My cats wouldn’t approve of any hair of the d-o-g stuff in their home.” She gave a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure the cats hadn’t deciphered her spelling.
Matt chuckled.
Debbie directed Matt to take a seat on the couch while she fetched the coffee and aspirin. She raised her voice while banging around in the kitchen. “Growing up in a teetotaler family, I never knew what that meant: ‘hair of the d-o-g.’ Then, towards the end of my marriage, Nicholas starteddrinkin’ heavily. That’s where I learned it—that phrase. Looking back, I think he was under a lot of stress because of…well, because of who he was.”
“Do you think that’s why?” Debbie asked, returning to the living room and handing Matt a cup of coffee. “Nicholas’s drinkin,’ that is?”
Matt shrugged. It was odd hearing Debbie talk about her gay ex-husband.
They sat on the couch while Matt waited for his headache to abate.
He tried petting Cleopatra, but she retreated to Debbie’s lap and stared at him—with her one good eye—accusatorily. Butch and Sundance, who had never warmed to him, perched atop the back of the couch, tolerating his presence in that half-lidded, dismissive “you-never-fooled-me” cat gaze.
“Congratulations on your election!” Debbie said. She was all smiles and twinkling eyes, not a hint of reproach for his weeks-long absence from her life.
“Thank you.”
Debbie beamed. “I knew you were special, but even I didn’t imagine you were capable of being elected as vice president, then becoming president the next day! As a freshman! That’ll look good on your resume.”
