Chapter Seventeen
KELLY DROVE LIKE a grandmother, which made Walter crazy, but whenever he tried to get Kelly to pull over, the request was met with such a sharp rebuke that finally Walter gave up and retreated into his seat. When traffic got hairy and Kelly’s shoulders started to tense, Walter did what he could to help by turning around to check lanes, keeping an eye out for exits, and to frequently say inane things such as, “You’re doing fine,” and “Good job, babe,” which he couldn’t tell if Kelly appreciated or not, but it made him feel as if he was doing something, so he kept it up.
For his part, Kelly said next to nothing, keeping all his focus on the road ahead of him and on the GPS. There was one tense moment when Walter knew its directions were wrong and he had to manually guide Kelly into the right exit lane, but that went more smoothly than he’d feared, and soon they were out of the worst of the snarls. When they finally made it onto I-55 and much, much easier traffic, Kelly sank back into his seat and visibly relaxed.
“Okay,” he said, his voice shaky. “I should have let you drive.”
Walter wanted to ask why he hadn’t, but he could feel talking coming on, and he had a feeling it was going to be a nightmare. He stared out the window, hoping he was wrong, knowing he wasn’t.
“So,” Kelly began, getting some of his composure back by degrees. “Talk to me about your mom.”
His mom? That wasn’t what he’d expected. Walter shifted in his seat. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know why you got so upset this morning. You said it was more of the same. Except you’ve never told me about her. You’ve said your family is a mess, but I didn’t get how seriously you meant that until now. I want to understand. Because you left the bedroom happy and lit up, and ever since you’re…I don’t know. Withdrawn. Upset.” He slid his hands to an easier position on the wheel. “I can tell you don’t want to talk about it, but you were upset, Walter. It made me upset. I don’t want to make you bring up stuff you’d rather leave alone, but can you…I don’t know, fill me in?”
No, Walter didn’t want to talk about it, but at the same time he really, really did. The idea of dumping some of this crap off his plate and letting someone else help him sort through it was a powerful draw. At the same time, he was painfully aware that was how his mother operated, and the hell he’d ever be her.
“Is she in trouble?” Kelly pressed. “Is she sick?”
“She’s depressed. Cara thinks she’s manic-depressive, but I really don’t know. She sees a shrink, and I figure they’d treat her for that if that was her diagnosis, but maybe not. Maybe it’s not working, or maybe she’s not taking her meds. She’s good at lying about what she’s thinking and feeling, putting up a front. Not to me, though. I get the whole hot mess.” He stopped and grimaced. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone else, Walter.”
Walter waved this away. “It’s not that. You don’t need this, Kel. This is deep crazy, this bullshit.”
“Then tell me about it.”
“No. There’s no way to fix it.”
“All the more reason for you to get it off your chest. Because it’s killing you. Maybe I can’t help, but I can sure as hell listen.”
“I’m not going to be her and dump all my problems on other people,” Walter snapped.
Kelly let go of the wheel to briefly squeeze Walter’s hand. “You aren’t the same as her, Walter. Not even close.”
How could Kelly know that was what he was afraid of? How had he figured that out without knowing his mom, not knowing what Walter would dump if given the opportunity? Obviously he was saying it because it was the thing to say. Except God, Walter loved hearing it, and yeah, he wanted to spill his guts. Which was all the more reason he shouldn’t.
Maybe he could tell Kelly a little. He took a deep breath, held it, and let it out.
“I don’t know how it started. Because it was happening before they got divorced, her trying to dump everything on me, but I didn’t listen then because I wanted to be loyal to Dad too. I didn’t want to take sides. Plus I was thirteen and full of my own problems.” He ran his thumb along the inseam of his jeans. “It wasn’t so bad in high school, either that or I was numb to it. Things got bad when I went to college. That’s when Dad cheated on her too, which sent everything into a tailspin. I felt like a heel because crap, hers had been the right side. Which was part of why I came home. I felt as if I’d betrayed her.”
“How is that betraying her, if you were simply being fair? And why do you have to take sides?”
God, he sounded like Williams. “Because she is all alone.”
“You didn’t make her that way.”
“I went away to school.”
“Well, yeah. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“She fell apart, Kel. It was ten times worse than what you saw.” Though it was only a little worse than what Walter had seen before Kelly came downstairs. His insides began to knot back up.
“Okay, but—” Kelly cut himself off and frowned at the road for a minute. “I mean, I get it. I’d leave Hope to help my family if they needed me, same as you did. I’d do whatever I had to. The thing is, I don’t—” He cut himself off and frowned harder.
“You don’t what?”
Kelly kept quiet for almost a full minute before replying. “I guess what I keep thinking of is the way you looked when I came downstairs. It wasn’t right. I mean, I know I’m naive. I do get that. I’ve been really lucky, and even with the gay thing, I’ve had it easy. So I might just not get it. I might be wrong. Yet I can’t help thinking you shouldn’t be the one to have to save your mom. It’s one thing for me to be careful with money and help out around the house, but if I came home and Lisa looked as upset as you were just now, I’d want to know what the fuck was going on. And maybe I’m thinking a bit more of myself than I should, because maybe you changed your mind, but I also can’t help noticing you were different to me before you went downstairs and after. As if you’d decided, for some reason because of your mom, you didn’t want anything to do with us. That’s not right either.”
Walter stared at the dashboard awhile, letting Kelly’s observations sink in. The last one rang in his head, and he said, “I was thinking some of that, I suppose. Which isn’t fair to you at all.”
“Walter, it’s not fair to you. If you didn’t want to…date, or whatever this is, I could accept it. Yeah, I’d be sad, but I’d get over it. Still, it’s one thing for you to decide that, but another for you to push me away because—I mean, how does that even work? Why does your mom being sad and clingy mean you can’t be happy?”
Why not, indeed? Walter sank deeper into his seat and pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s not that.” He had the distinct feeling he should shut up, but he kept talking anyway. Why not? Blow it up now before things got too personal. “It’s more her breakdown reminded me I shouldn’t rock the boat.”
“Because you think if you date me you’ll turn into your mom?”
It sounded so insane, when Kelly said it. “I don’t know. But I don’t ever want to be that. I don’t want anything to do with that kind of pain.”
“‘Life is pain, princess. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.’”
Walter couldn’t help a small smile. “Yes, Dread Pirate Westley.”
“See? I watch more than Disney movies. Besides, it’s true. Avoiding pain doesn’t make everything okay. It means you’re avoiding pain instead of living.” Traffic had spread out, and Kelly relaxed and took one hand off the wheel. “I thought about that a lot over Thanksgiving. Here and there I saw people from high school, and the word has gone out that I’m gay. They look at me different now, and they whisper. Basically they’re doing the things I was afraid they’d do. In high school that fear seemed so important, and I had all this justification in my head. Mom didn’t help either, because she freaks out about everything and concocted scenarios where I got beat up behind the bleachers or dragged behind cars. I let that be my excuse too. Honestly, though? What I was afraid of was rejection. I liked how people saw me, and I was willing to trade my whole high school experience for that acceptance. An acceptance of bullshit, I realize now. And I don’t care. I don’t give a damn what those people think of me. I see them when we fill up our car at the gas station or go to the grocery store.”
His jaw grew tight, his eyes hard, and he shook his head. “I can’t believe I gave them so much of my life. I can’t believe I let them convince me to be embarrassed about myself, to become so socially backward that while everyone else is hooking up I’m all doe-eyed and gooey like an eighth grader, because I was too busy hiding in actual eighth grade.”
Kelly wasn’t embarrassed at all now, but he did seem sad, and it broke Walter’s heart. “You can’t look back from here and say it would have been fine. Maybe you were right. Maybe you were smart to do it the way you did.” He thought of all the stupid things he’d done in eighth grade and shook his head. “Better to be cautious.”
“Not according to Cher. She says do everything now, that you can always look back and say you shouldn’t have done something.”
“She also says she wouldn’t take her own advice, because advice is kind of bullshit.” Walter settled into his seat, distracted for a moment by thinking about Cher and her all-over-the-map, crazy life. “Though she’s really done it all, hasn’t she? And now she’s Queen of Weird Twitter.”
That was supposed to make Kelly laugh, but he had this determination about him now, and as he spoke he stared at the road, clearly seeing something more than lanes of pavement and traffic. “I really do regret playing it safe now. I’d almost rather have been beat around a bit and been myself and been proud of who I was than hide. It cost me so much. Now not only am I behind everyone else, but I lost years of my life.” He shook his head, his jaw going tight. “I gave up my life, Walter. My life. I’m never doing that again, ever, not for anyone.” He wiped at his eyes, a quick swipe, like he was embarrassed. “You shouldn’t, either. Not for your mom. Not for anyone. It’s her life. And you have yours. What is it you think is going to happen if you don’t make yourself happy as some weird kind of solidarity with her? What is it you’re supposed to get?”
Walter wasn’t doing it out of solidarity, he wanted to argue, but he knew Kelly would say what it was about then, and they’d be back to the life-is-pain thing. “Wouldn’t you want company if you were lonely?”
“She’s not lonely. She’s in a bog, and if you give her a chance, she’s going to pull you in with her. Then all that will happen is we lose two of you senselessly.”
Walter couldn’t think of a retort to that, so he sat there for a few miles, soaking in everything Kelly had said to him. Including the Cher quote. For someone who thought he was naive and clueless and got intimidated by Philosophy Club, he was pretty damn wise.
Probably he should tell Kelly that, but instead he spied an exit and nodded at it. “Pull off here.”
“Why?” Kelly asked, even as he aimed for the off-ramp.
“Because life may be pain, but you hate driving and I’m out of my funk now, so let me. You don’t have to suffer quite that much.” He caught Kelly’s hand and brushed his thumb over the bottom of Kelly’s palm. “Besides. I want to kiss you a hell of a lot harder than I safely can while you’re behind the wheel.”
That made Kelly swerve, but it made Walter smile. When they were parked at a gas station, Kelly turned to Walter—shy, eager, hopeful—and Walter caught his chin before kissing him with all the passion and gratitude that he felt. He let the last dregs of the idea of pushing Kelly away drown in that kiss, let himself sink into the space Kelly had made between them. When they finally parted, Walter pressed their foreheads together and stroked Kelly’s cheek.
“Thanks,” he whispered.
In answer, Kelly kissed his knuckles. Then he climbed out of the driver’s seat and came around to the passenger side, looking relieved, before Walter could even undo his belt.