“Jack?” his dad asked. “Who?”
“It’s Jack,” he said again. “Your youngest. I left home. I’m calling.”
“Oh.”
More sounds of liquid, and Nimble could imagine the ice in the glass and the brown liquor. Wild Turkey, maybe, or Jim Beam, whatever had been on sale at Express Cold Beer down the street.
“What do you want?” his dad asked in a way that informed Nimble in no uncertain terms that his dad didn’t give a rat’s ass what Jack wanted. Where he’d been. Why he’d left home. Any of it.
“Asking—” Nimble gulped and clutched the phone even more tightly, till his fingers started turning numb. Swallowing, he tried again. Morgan wanted him gone, so maybe this was the fastest way. “For bus fare home.”
“Bus fare?” his dad asked, as if he’d suddenly grown hard of hearing.
“Bus fare home,” Nimble repeated. His mouth felt stiff, and the small office crowded in all around him, growing colder by the minute. “Couple hundred bucks. Wired to Western Union.”
There was a long silence filled with growing darkness, and Nimble braced himself. Even if he preferred to forget, his body knew what was coming.
And, sure enough, it came.
“What makes you think I’d send any money to a low-down, shitty, selfish son of a bitch who ran off?” His dad drew a breath, raspy and thickened by the liquor. “Your mom had a fit, ended up in the hospital for anxiety.Anxiety.”
His dad repeated the word as if it satisfied some inner urge to cut and slice, a hard message along the phone signal meant only for Nimble. Meant to make him feel bad, even though Nimble knew, as his dad knew, that Mom liked to check herself into the hospital—or, at the very least, the local urgent care—once in a while, just to have someone fuss over her for an hour or so.
“Guess I want to come home, Dad,” Nimble said, hardly believing the words that were coming out of his mouth.
His jaw trembled. Hedidn’twant to go home. He’d left for a reason.
He wanted to stay with Morgan, but Morgan didn’t want him to stay. The idea to call home for bus fare hadn't been a suggestion. It had been a command.
“Well, you can’t,” his dad said, the words coming out crisp and hard, as though he wasn’t drunkat alland still wasn’t holding anything back. “You left, and that’s your problem. Why would I want a faggot to dirty my doorstep?”
His dad took another breath and blasted the same words again, like he was satisfied with the rhythm and wanted to feel it one more time, wanted Nimble to feel flayed open. Wanted to hurt him, like he’d hurt him all those other times: hard looks, cruel words, beatings.
“You come back and it’ll be all over Lawndale that I let a filthy fag into my house. No sir. Nosir.” His dad hung up like he was signing a contract in blood.
Nimble pulled the cell phone from his ear, the words ringing through his head, his chest. He was cold all over, like he’d been dunked in a freezing river, sheets of thick, snow-laced ice forming over his head.
Of course, he could never go home. He’d known from the second Morgan suggested Nimble call his family that it was a mistake.
I’ll drive you to Billings, Morgan had said. Like it didn’t matter. Like Nimble could walk into the nearest snowdrift and freeze to death, and it was nothing to him.
Morgan wouldn’t care, just like his dad didn’t care. Or his mom or his brothers. Or Blue and Star. No one in the whole wide world cared whether Nimble lived or died. What his real name was. What he wanted.
Nobody cared, and acknowledging it cut so deep into him his whole body reverberated with shock.
He couldn’t stay, no matter how much he wanted to. And he couldn’t dredge up the energy to ask—tobeg—Morgan to let him stay. What was the point?
There was only one thing to do: Wait until after midnight, put on his leather coat and his boots, and walk to the railroad crossing that was so close to the house, the train’s whistle pounded the wooden siding of the feed and grain night after night. Sank into it and echoed a lonely sound into the cold air.
He shivered his way up the stairs, then went into the warm, cozy parlor and handed Morgan his phone.
“What’d they say?” Morgan asked. He placed the phone carelessly on the coffee table.
“My dad’s a jerk.” Nimble gave a low laugh, a lift of his shoulders. Like it didn’t matter. Like it didn’t feel as if acid was soaking into him like antifreeze gone wrong. “He said no.”
“But he knows you’re okay,” Morgan said, as if that mattered. “That you’re alive.”
“Sure,” Nimble said. “He knows.”
