Luis pulled out his phone and snapped a few photos. Maybe they’d want to know what it looked like. Or was that stupid? Surely they had someone who’d shown them daytime photos before. A landscaper or gardener. They didn’t need Luis for that.
Luis blew out a breath and got into his car.
Home. He needed to go home.
##
Luis took an egregiously long shower. He scrubbed days worth of grime off his skin and detangled the nest his hair had become. Then he lingered until the water ran cool.
His phone on the bathroom counter haunted him. If he didn’t handle it soon, his mother was likely to show up at his doorstep, and that was the last thing he needed right now.
Luis marched himself out of the shower when the water went completely cold, got dressed, and picked up his phone. It immediately started ringing with ‘Night on Bald Mountain,’ as if she knew.
Over the years Cassie had begged and pleaded with him tocut the umbilical cord. If only it were that easy. It had taken him into his thirties to do the one big thing and move out of her house. It had caused months of tantrums that were just now, over a year later, beginning to die down.
If Luis ever tried to cut her off, he had no idea how she’d take it. There’d be yelling, tears. She’d be at his door, making a scene. Working him over until he felt so guilty he just gave in.
He always gave in. On everything except moving back in with her. He’d managed to hold that position. Just barely. On the strength of Cassie’s backbone, really.
When the ringing finished, he took a fortifying breath and opened the text chain.
There were dozens of messages, all caps. The block of text that blurred together. Before he could chicken out, he tapped on his mother’s name to return her call.
“Luis José Vázquez.” She picked up on the second ring, voice loud and razor sharp. He pulled the phone away from his ear.
“Hola Mama,” he said.
“Where have you been?! I’ve been calling you.” She sounded angrier than even the time she’d caught him out back with a neighbor boy.
“Sorry, been busy with work.” She didn’t know he didn’t work weekends, and he’d kept his work schedule vague on purpose. The scoff across the line told him she wasn’t buying it.
“Too busy to give your mother a call back?” She shrieked. “And what if it’d been an emergency? I could have died, and what? My son was too busy!”
With her, it was never,everan actual emergency.
“Work is important too Mama, you know how it is.” He had to tiptoe through this carefully. If he fed her anxieties, they’d balloon up ten times worse with the attention. If he apologized, she’d double down on his guilt. She was like a dog with the scent of prey, sniffing out weaknesses, chasing it down until she could put her teeth into something of his that was tender and tearable.
When she got him, he agreed to do things he didn’t want to do, just to get her to stop. For two months after he moved out, he’d gone to church with her to placate the tantrums. He shuddered remembering it.
It had been a miserable two months listening to how God hated both vampires and gays. He’d listened to the sermons, the stories. Been made to smile and nod along to every bigoted, awful thing those people said so it wasn’t worse.
By the end, his mother hadn’t been placated either.
His mother sighed over the line as though he’d disappointed her. “It just seems like ever since you moved out…”
It always came back to this. Luis bit down on his anger. He imagined crunching down on his feelings with his molars, gnashing them down until they were nothing. Until he felt nothing. Until he could get through an entire phone call with her and not react, not fall into her traps.
She kept going, but the words blurred together, fading into the background. Luis collapsed on the bed, listening only for the gaps in her rant where he was expected to interject a sound that meant he was listening.
Beside him was his guitar, right where he’d left it Friday before he’d gone out. He ached to touch it, to play something to soothe himself.
Could he do that now?No.She’d hear it and he didn’t need to remind her that he was not just a lying, betrayer of a son, but he was alsostill into music. Still dreamed of being a musician.
As far as she knew, Luis had stopped ‘the music thing’ at thirteen when she’d caught him with Mikey’s guitar. She’d almost smashed it, the guitar being the last straw in a laundry list of evidence that told her that her son wassuccumbing to evil, homosexual urges. Luis didn’t quite understand how playing music wasgay, but he’d been made to return it to Mikey and been banned from seeing him.
Only, she didn’t know that a year later when Mikey had fallen out of love with the guitar, he’d gifted it to Luis in secret, and Luis had stashed it at Cassie’s.
A big part of getting his own apartment was finally being able to play alone, in his own space. He’d even bought a new guitar to celebrate, his prized possession.
