Jo took his eyes off the screen and made eye contact with him. “Uh, y-yeah, I’d like that, I think. I’m not ready….”
“I understand. Just send me the details and I’ll make it happen.” Her face shifted between several conflicted emotions before she grimaced again. “Look, this is… not strictly professional. But I have extended family in the church that everything is going to. They’re a little bit….” She seemed as if she’d just smelled something rancid as she spat out, “Greedy. They’re greedy fucks. I’m sorry but that’s the truth. So if you want anything from the house other than the box, you better let me know now. They’re like vultures and since you’re not coming here yourself, they’ll be on site as soon as I give the go-ahead for them to start emptying the place for the renovation crew.”
Denny felt a shiver of disgust at the thought of someone doing that to the house where his own had parents lived. It hadn’t really ever been his home since his parents had moved and bought it while he was in college, but it felt like the worst kind of blasphemy.
“I’ll… I’ll think about it, okay? There might be things I can remember if I try. Like….” Jo rubbed a palm over his mouth as his gaze wandered to the window and the street outside. “My grandpa had this pocket watch that he’d given to my mom to give to me. I never met my grandparents, they didn’t like the match my parents had made, but my mom told me that it was supposed to go to the first son and…. If that’s still there. I’d rather keep it than have it go to a church like that.”
“All right,” Garcia wrote it down in her papers. “If you can come up with anything else, let me know today? I assume you want to get this all over with as soon as possible. I’ll put anything you want into that package and send it to you. I promise. Family can be messy, I get that. But once this is all done, it’s done, right? In all possible ways. So think on it and let me know.”
“Yeah, I will. Thank you.”
“I’ll be waiting for your email.”
“Okay, bye.”
Denny closed the laptop lid and pulled Josiah to the couch, where they cuddled for a while.
“Have you told Sammie yet?” Denny asked while Josiah gathered his thoughts.
“No, I want to do it face-to-face. We’ve had so little face-to-face time with her this year. So I don’t want to….”
“Drop a bomb and have her be somewhere not able to hug the life out of you?”
Jo chuckled. “Exactly. You understood why I didn’t call you before, right?” Jo lifted his head and looked at Denny. “You weren’t mad.”
“No, I wasn’t mad. She won’t be either. There’s no reason to. We know how your brain works,” he reassured Josiah.
“Okay. Good. I get wrapped up in my brain sometimes. I think it’s all the therapy lately that’s changed me.” Josiah sighed and burrowed closer against Denny’s side. “I’ve been remembering random things, too. From my childhood I mean.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, like… when I was maybe eight or something like that, I remember these two guys moved into our neighborhood. I think they might’ve been in their thirties. Really nicely dressed, obviously gay now that I think about it. But nobody actually said that, right? It was thirty years ago.”
“Uh-huh, I remember those times.” And he did, he remembered the remnants of the AIDS epidemic and panic and euphemisms and horrible language he’d heard in a lot of places. In hindsight, it didn’t surprise him that he’d buried that side of his own sexuality so deep.
“I think they worked for the city. Some desk jobs or other, I think… it doesn’t really matter what.” Jo sighed, and started to fiddle with that hole in Denny’s sweats like he had before at the cabin when Denny had still been so blind. “I remember adults talking about them though. It became a euphemism. ‘My son would never work for the city’ or ‘there’s something wrong with people who choose to work for the city’ that sort of stuff.”
Denny made a face. “That’s horrible. Even if you were too little to get it, it still meant you would’ve known they were… undesirables, right? To not be like them?”
Jo nodded. “They were kind. I remember they had an old English sheepdog I got to pet once. Their car was yellow, which for some reason pissed off my dad more than anything. Especially after I said I liked it, that it was pretty unlike all the boring ones at our dealership.” Josiah was quiet for a while. Then his fingers made the hole in Denny’s sweats bigger at the same time as he murmured, “I think that was the first time he slapped me.”
Denny felt his own body jerk back in surprise. “T-The first time?” he managed to ask as he fought against his body tensing with rage towards the sorry sperm donor responsible for half of the DNA of the most wonderful person Denny had ever met.
“Yeah. See, I didn’t remember it. I must’ve blocked it.” He glanced at Denny. “And I know I need to talk with Doc about it. I don’t think I’ve ever remembered it before. Not until this weekend. I thought about the house and the dealership and the neighborhood, sort of trying to see if I could still recollect them. I remembered the pretty yellow car first, then the rest.”
They were quiet again for minutes until Jo started to speak with more purpose. “He did it a few times after that. I think, now that I’ve thought about it more closely, that it was always when I was being… queer, I guess, in his eyes. He stopped when I was maybe fifteen. He raised a hand and my mom got in the way. She told him no, and… I don’t know what passed between them in that moment, I couldn’t see her face, only his, but he never did it again.
“He became more vicious verbally then, whenever he saw something LGBTQ anywhere. So now my mind has started to wonder if I remember my mom wrong. If she cared. With the money from the house sale and all that. Maybe she did care but was under his thumb?”
The vulnerability and rasp in Josiah’s voice made Denny kiss his forehead. “Stay put. I’ll make us coffee. Your voice is starting to break.”
“Yeah,” Jo said and continued to stare out of the window across from the couch. He was in a world of his own, and Denny hoped that he could help Josiah back to the surface when this was over.
He needed to call his own parents soon. Come out to them. He’d have his family here if they wouldn’t accept him or couldn’t accept that he was likely going to be with Josiah soon. It would hurt, of course it would, but at least he didn’t have to be a vulnerable child being physically and emotionally abused by his own father.
Denny forced his hand to let go of the mug and set it by the coffee machine. He didn’t feel pure rage often, could remember a handful of times in his adult years, but this… holy shit, he was happy the bastard had died alone, abandoned, and miserable.
Like most sane people, he couldn’t understand violence against someone weaker. He also couldn’t understand homophobia. He could see a weak-minded man of an older generation be so scared about anything but traditional masculinity that they’d be homophobic based on that alone, but to abuse their own child because hemightbe, what,less masculinethan other little boys of his age? If he liked bright colors and thought them pretty?
