Chapter Seven

“HEARD YOU were a witness to the big crime today,” Uncle Calvin said as he stood back and let Liam through the front door.

“Not exactly a crime,” Liam replied absently. He was distracted by the house, by the familiar and unfamiliar aspects of it. Distracted by how comfortable he was, how instantly he felt at home. “You got a new sofa.”

“About ten years ago.” Calvin clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on into the kitchen. Pour us some wine and tell me about my desperado nephew.”

“He was totally law-abiding,” Liam said. “After that one little glitch, he was fine.”

“And what about this little glitch? What happened there?”

“I don’t know,” Liam said. Easier to be ignorant than to try to explain. “Have you talked to him, or just heard about this from everyone else? He’d probably be the best one to tell you what happened.”

“I called.” Calvin grinned wolfishly as he handed two empty wineglasses over to Liam. “He told me to leave him alone and let him be a complete loser in private. I thought about inviting him over tonight without telling him you were here, just to make his humiliation complete, but… well, I can’t say I thought better of it, but I got distracted by something else, and by the time I remembered it was too late.”

“And that’s the truth? You really didn’t invite him over? Because, Calvin, he’s made it completely clear on both occasions I’ve seen him that he doesn’t want anything to do with me. At all.”

“He’s made it clear to me too. But, you know—we don’t always get what we want.”

“I think in this case he should. I mean, I screwed up. I hurt him.” Damn, even after all the years, it was still hard to admit to that last bit. Liam distracted himself for a moment with pouring wine, but forced himself to continue. “If he doesn’t want to see me, I should absolutely respect that.”

“So what the hell are you doing here?” Calvin sounded calm, curious rather than confrontational. “In North Falls, sure, but—at his uncle’s house? You think of that as respecting his wishes?”

“Well—I mean—I can respect his wishes without being a total martyr, can’t I? You and I used to be pretty close. Coming to a town I used to live in, dropping in on an old friend—that has to be allowed, I think.”

Calvin nodded. “Fair enough. You respect his wishes—right up to the point that they get in the way of something you want to do.” He lifted the wineglass and took a sip. “Come to think of it, that’s kind of what got you in trouble last time, wasn’t it? You saw something—someone—you wanted, and you went for it because you wanted it. Didn’t worry too much about what Ben wanted.”

Liam took a gulp of wine and wished for something stronger. Calvin still sounded calm, but obviously the words were—well. The words were true, and they were exactly what Liam deserved. Except— “Monogamy may not be as important in gay culture as it is in straight culture. You know, we don’t have to worry about pregnancy or anything, and we’re already challenging one social expectation, so maybe it’s not that big of a deal if we challenge another. It’s really much more common for gay men to have open relationships—”

“Wait. Are you saying you and Ben had talked about this, and you’d agreed to an open relationship?”

“Well—no. But if we had….”

“If you’d both been goats, it would have been okay for one or both of you to go and fuck another goat. But since neither one of you is a goat, the hypothetical doesn’t apply. No need to complicate things with a bunch of ‘ifs,’ is there?” Calvin smiled easily and sprinkled some seasoning onto the steaks in front of him. “You cheated. You hurt him. You can just leave it there, without the justifications.”

“So why am I here? I don’t mean North Falls—although, God, if you can tell me what the hell I’m doing back in this damn town, that’d be great to hear. But I can’t really expect you to be able to figure that out when it’s got me so totally confused. But why am I in your house? I cheated on someone you love. I hurt him. I did. So why did you invite me over for dinner?”

“It’s been fifteen years, boy. You were just a kid. You fucked up, absolutely, but you’ve paid for that, haven’t you? Yes, you hurt Ben, but you hurt yourself too. Don’t even try to pretend you didn’t. You loved him as much as he loved you. You losing him?” Calvin shook his head. “Damn. That’s enough punishment. You don’t need to have me adding more on top of it, do you?”

And Jesus Christ, there were the goddamn tears again. They were coming faster, Liam was pretty sure. There’d been absolutely no warning this time: he’d been fine, if a little tense, and then? Fuck.

He turned away and took another gulp of wine. He looked up at the ceiling because after the last ridiculous incident he’d googled ways to stop crying and apparently looking upward was supposed to help. Made him feel like he was praying to the second floor of the house, but maybe that wasn’t completely inappropriate—he and Ben had definitely come pretty damn close to heaven up there in Ben’s narrow little bed.

“You upset?” Calvin asked. “You getting a wittle weepy about your horrible man pain?”

“Okay, you’re a man too. I think ‘man pain’ is really only an insult when it comes from a woman.”

“It’s not an insult at all. You’re a man and you have pain. It’s legit.”

“And the ‘wittle weepy’ part?”

“Well, that was a bit much, maybe. But I’m giving you a damn fine dinner. If I want to say some stupid shit while I’m cooking, that’s just a cross you’ll have to bear.” He jerked his head toward the counter. “Grab the wine bottle and those potatoes. It’s time for grillin’.” He lifted the steaks and started toward the back door. “You can season our meat with your salty tears.”

The potatoes were wrapped in tinfoil, and Liam could smell the garlic as soon as he lifted the packet. His mouth watered in anticipation—great, maybe his mouth could steal some of the moisture supply that kept his eyes so ready to spill over—and he wondered why he never made any of these foods for himself. It wasn’t like the recipe was tricky. But it was garlic powder, he remembered, not fresh garlic.

It wasn’t that the recipe was too tricky—it wasn’t tricky enough. Not fancy enough for his sophisticated life. Gobs of butter, heaps of garlic powder, halved new potatoes, and tinfoil. It was food for peasants, for rural folk, for suburbanites, not for the urban elite like him.

It was going to be so damn tasty.

And whether it was the salivating or the upward-looking, his eyes seemed to have dried up. He handed his precious cargo over to Calvin, who set the tinfoil packet on the preheated grill, and then they both sank down on opposite sides of the battered picnic table.

“This is good,” Calvin said, swirling his glass. “Argentinian Malbec, I believe? Nice and earthy—probably a 2012?”

“I saw you reading the bottle.”

“I didn’t read ‘earthy,’ though! I made that up myself!”

“It should go well with the steak.” And Liam was pretty sure he would have been happy to just keep talking about wine and steak for the whole rest of the night. Just a breather, a rest, a respite from whatever the hell was going on in the rest of his life.

Calvin, of course, wasn’t known for letting things rest. “So, what’s going on with you? You’ve been in town two times in three days. Your parents are long gone, and nobody much else has heard from you since—well. Since you did that horrible thing you did. The thing so terrible it cannot be mentioned. The earth-shaking, soul-shattering betrayal of all that humanity values. Since that. So why are you back up here now?”

And just as much as Liam had wanted to keep talking about meaningless things? Now he suddenly wanted to talk about this. Because he was sitting across the table from Uncle Calvin, slightly manic Sage of the Northlands, and it would be a shame to lose the opportunity. “How old do you have to be to have a midlife crisis?”

“Haven’t had mine yet, and I’m in my sixties. Try another excuse.”

“Vision quest?”

“You’re a little old for that, if you’re thinking of the Native American ritual. And a little young if you’re thinking about the wrestling movie.”

Liam sighed, then refilled his wineglass. “I’ve been up here before. Lots of times. I usually make it to the town sign and turn around. But the other day—I kept going.”

Calvin held out his own empty glass for a refill. “Why?”

And Liam told him all of it. No deep analysis, no conclusions. Just the shit with the project, the conversation with Tristan, the overwhelming sense—and if he was honest, it was a sense he’d had before, not just since things started going wrong at work—that he was missing something. That he wasn’t doing life right.

“Maybe your boss wasn’t wrong.” Calvin had stood up halfway through Liam’s story and put the steaks on the grill, and now he was standing over them, tongs poised and ready. “Pompous and annoying? Yeah, probably. But all the shit about finding your passion… was he wrong about that? Have you really been passionate about what you’ve been doing?”

Liam wanted to stand up and pace, but he forced himself to stay still. “You’re saying this? You run a small-engine-repair shop. You think—I mean, where’s your passion?”

“Small engines,” Calvin said as if it was obvious. He turned to face Liam as he said, “I fucking love them. The logic of them, the self-contained genius of it all. I can tear a small engine down and build it back up all with my own two hands. I run my own business, because that’s self-contained too. Small engines are the ultimate passion for someone who values independence. Hell yeah.” He turned back to the grill, lifted the steaks up onto the warming rack, then turned back around. “Now you tell me. What’s so cool about architecture? About working for your power-tripping boss and all your Richie Rich clients. Tell me why it’s great. But before you do?” Calvin leaned down so their eyes were level. “Pretend you’re talking to Ben. Pretend you’re talking to someone who sees through your bullshit and your smooth talking, someone who know you for who you are. Tell him what’s so great about your job.”

Even without the extra, Liam might have been honest. But thinking about telling it to Ben? Shit. That pushed him over the edge. “Part of it’s the prestige,” he admitted. “The ego boost. Seeing something I designed getting built? Like, someone spending a hundred million dollars on making something from my brain into reality? That’s a rush. Absolutely.”

“And your name goes on it.”

“Well, no. The firm’s name. Tristan’s name. But that actually proves it’s not all about ego, right? I mean, the clients probably know who did most of the work, but the rest of the world doesn’t. And I’m okay with that, more or less.”

“More or less?”

“I’m not saying I don’t resent it sometimes. But—no. I’m okay with it, mostly.”

“You love your job. You just quit a job you love.”

“Are those steaks ready? There’s been a lot of buildup for this meal, and I don’t want a dried-out steak just because I started babbling about some stupid job bullshit.”

“The steaks are resting. Did you just quit a job you love?”

“No,” Liam said. As soon as the word was out of his mouth he knew it was the truth. “But lots of people don’t love their jobs. I made good money, I met interesting people—”

“Interesting people? Or rich people?”

“Some of the rich people were interesting. There’s no monopoly on character for the working class, you know. Just because someone’s got money doesn’t automatically mean they’re shallow or boring.”

“Roughly what percentage of rich people are deep and interesting, would you say?”

“Probably about the same percentage of poor people who are deep and interesting.”

“Damn. That few?” Calvin pointed his chin toward a stainless-steel bowl on the table. “Toss that, will you? Salad.”

“Green.”

“That’s right.” Calvin was working on the potatoes now, tumbling them out of their greasy, garlicky foil and splitting them evenly between two plates. “This is a well-balanced meal. Now we just need to work on your well-balanced life.”

“Yeah, maybe that’s part of it,” Liam mused as he dished up the salad. “I’ve been working a lot, for a long time. Maybe I just kept coming back up here because when I lived here I didn’t work. I mean, being a camp counselor over the summer isn’t working, right? So maybe I’ve been drawn to North Falls because it’s the last place I really had any leisure time.”

“Leisure time. And when you had that leisure time, what were you doing with it?”

Hanging out with Ben, obviously. But Seth had been there too. Lots of people had been there. “We talk about kids today being overscheduled. Maybe I’m an overscheduled adult. It wasn’t so much that I was doing exciting things with my leisure time, necessarily, it’s just that it was free. I could just lie on the grass and listen to the river flowing by, if I wanted.”

“And have you done that yet on this visit? Gone to lie in the grass by the river?”

“No. But maybe I will tomorrow.”

“Or maybe you should go see Ben tomorrow.” Calvin gave no indication that he’d just dropped a bomb like that. He was still totally casual as he lifted the steaks off the grill and slapped them onto the plates.

Liam, on the other hand, was reeling. “Ben. Go see him. You think—no, we’ve been through this. I should respect his wishes.”

“Has he repeated his wishes lately, or are these just the ones you heard fifteen years ago?”

“There was a lot of ‘fuck you’ at the cemetery. And I think he told me to go away. He definitely said I was an asshole.”

“But that could have just been the shock talking.”

“And today he kept muttering, ‘Why are you here, why are you here.’ It didn’t sound like he was all that happy about it.”

“Well, he’d just rammed into Laura Doncaster’s cruiser. He probably wasn’t thinking too clearly.”

“Is this real? Do you actually think this would be a good idea, or are you just trying to fuck with both of us?”

“Liam?” Calvin said quietly. “How do you feel right now? Excited, nervous, apprehensive but eager? Maybe even some butterflies?” He found a seat on the other side of the picnic table and casually speared some lettuce onto his fork. “When was the last time you felt this way at your job?”

“So—wait. Was all this stuff about visiting Ben—was it just a test? A trap? You were trying to get me worked up about something so you could prove I’m not worked up enough about my career? Or do you actually think I should go see Ben, and you just threw the work stuff into the conversation because you’ve always got to be clever and talking about two or three different things at the same time?”

“What do you want the answer to be?”

“Aw, fuck you, Yoda, you’re not my shrink and I’m not playing your games.” He speared a potato and chomped it, and his hostility melted away as the rich, garlicky butter washed over his taste buds. He groaned in pleasure. “Son of a bitch, I missed these potatoes.”

“The potatoes missed you too.”

“Wait. The potatoes missed me?”

“Yeah, that didn’t work. I was trying too hard—you got me inspired with the ‘Yoda’ business, and the thought of three different meanings when I’m usually sweating just to have two. I meant—damn it, Liam. Ben loved you. He’s gotten past it—it’s not like he’s been sitting around pining over you, not by a long shot. But he loved you, and he’s missed you. You guys were good friends before you were anything else. Maybe it’s possible for you to be good friends again. If you have the balls to give it a try.”

Liam looked for the trap but he couldn’t find it. “Maybe,” he finally agreed.

“Okay. That’s enough for tonight. Now you can tell me about your glamorous, outrageous life in the big city, with plenty of anecdotes, hopefully including some about celebrities, and I will listen and enjoy without even the hint of a question about whether your life there is as meaningful as it should be.”

“And you’ll tell me gossip about everyone in town, hopefully with no mention of celebrities, and I’ll listen without wondering if there’s a hidden meaning or moral to your stories.”

“Sounds good.”

And with only a few glitches they managed to stick to their conversational plans.

Liam strolled back to the B&B shortly before midnight, not drunk but certainly not in any condition to drive, still pleasantly full from the meal, and overall feeling more satisfied, more at peace, than he had in years.

It was probably just the alcohol making him feel that way, but he’d been drunk plenty of times in the past fifteen years. He could give the credit to the steak, but he’d had lots of steak.

Damn. It was the potatoes. The buttery, garlicky wonders.

It wasn’t North Falls, wasn’t the conversation with Calvin, wasn’t the thought that he could go see Ben the next day with a reasonably clear conscience since he was operating with Uncle Calvin’s blessing. No, it was the potatoes.

“I’m going to make them for myself,” Liam said out loud as he turned up the path to the purple house. “I can have garlic potatoes anytime I want.”

But he wasn’t sure they’d taste quite the same in the city. Wasn’t sure the magic would work outside of North Falls.

“I’ll figure something out,” he told himself. It was surprisingly optimistic, considering everything that had happened lately. Must have been the potatoes giving him such a good attitude.