Mickey’s quieter than usual while he eats his hamburger. I lean back in the chair and let the silence sit because for once I’m too tired to fill it.
“Tell me about you and Tex,” I say after a while. “I’ve been coming here and I barely know anything about you except that you’re a cop and you like coffee.”
His face relaxes in a way it doesn’t when we’re talking about the shooting or his legs or anything that happens in this hospital room. Tex is safe ground.
“We met in seventh grade,” he says. “First day at Middle School. He was already six feet tall. I was not. He sat behind me in homeroom and the first thing he ever said to me was, ‘Hey! Is your head always this blonde or is it a summer thing?’ I told him it was a genetic thing and he said, ‘That’s cool,’ and that was it. We were best friends from that day.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah. Some people you meet and there’s a whole process, getting to know each other, testing the water, figuring out if you fit. Tex and I skipped all of that. He was just my person from day one. We played football together all through high school. We were both on defense. Linebackers. He was already the biggest guy on the team by sophomore year and I was the second biggest. Between us we were a wall.”
“I’m trying to picture you two playing football and it’s working very well.”
“I was good,” he says. “Not great. Good enough for the team, not good enough for a scholarship. Tex was the same. We were both big fish in a small town pond and we knew it. But the football wasn’t really the point. The point was having something to do together, some place to be where we fit.”
He takes a sip of his cold brew and his eyes go back to a version of himself that’s seventeen and playing defense.
“When we were seventeen,” he says, “we stole a bottle of peach schnapps from my mama’s liquor cabinet. Went out to his daddy’s dock. We drank about half the bottle, which, if you’ve never had peach schnapps, is like drinking syrup that someone lit on fire. Terrible stuff. God, it was awful. To this day, the smell of peach schnapps makes me want to puke. It was a great night though. We were seventeen and hammered on stolen schnapps. Tex turned to me and said, ‘Mickey, I need to tell you something.’”
I lean forward, listening so hard.
“He said, ‘I think I like guys instead of girls.’ Just like that. No buildup. Just Tex being Tex, saying it directly because he’s never known how to say anything any other way. And I sat there on that dock with peach schnapps burning my throat, the moon glowing on the bay stretched out in front of us and I said, ‘Really? Me too.’”
“Wait,” I say. “Let me get this straight. Tex came out to you when you were both seventeen? And you didn’t know?”
“No, not exactly,” Mickey says, still eating fries as if this isn’t critically important. “We came out to each other that night.”
“What??? You’re gay?”
“Yeah, we’re both gay.”
“I knew Tex and Stormy were together. But how did I not know this about you? You’re gay? For fuck’s sake! Mickey! How could I not know this?”
“Is that a problem?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “Of course not. Why would that be a problem?”
I feel a sudden sharp heat in my cheeks, not just because I was surprised, but because I’ve accidentally given him the unedited version of myself before I’d even decided if I liked him. I thought about my unwashed jeans and how I probably smelled like gas station coffee for days straight. I’m a person who lives for the big reveal, and I’ve completely botched my own.
I’m the guy who tells brides that a single stray hair will ruin a close-up. I’m the person who carries a lint roller like a weapon. And yet, I’ve been sitting here in a wrinkled T-shirt with a bruise the color of a rotting lime, looking like I climbed out of a dumpster.
I thought it didn’t matter because he was a straight cop who only saw a civilian. But he’s a gay man who saw everything, and I didn’t even have the sense to hide it. I’d been walking into his room assuming he wouldn’t notice how I looked.
“It’s just... when I told you why I didn’t leave the bar when Sheila asked me to, you didn’t say a word about those guys being homophobic assholes. Why?”
“That was your story to tell and I wanted to hear what you had to say,” he says.
“But you could’ve still told me or said something. Especially since I’m obviously gay and don’t hide it.”
He shrugs one shoulder. “Well, Iwasgay,” he says, waving a hand at his legs. “Now I’m not anything.”
He says it matter of fact. Like he’s reporting something he’s already accepted and doesn’t see the point in dressing it up. And then he picks up a second hamburger, unwraps it, squirts ketchup on it and takes a bite.
That’s it. That’s all he’s going to give it. A shrug, a wave at dead legs and he’s done. He’s not gay anymore.
But I’m not done with this.
My brain is running back through every conversation we’ve had, every visit, every look. He’s been gay the whole time. Every time he watched me walk in the room. Every time his eyes tracked my hands when I set up the food. That one time I caught him looking at my neck, right where the chain sits, and he glanced away so fast I thought I imagined it. Maybe I didn’t imagine it.
