Having Jack living with us for real definitely has its benefits. We are so much more comfortable with each other now—and he does do all the voices when it comes to reading books to Chrissy and Joey. He’s even picked up a bag of about twenty books from the library.

But there’s just one thing.

Giving up half my closet space isn’t an issue for me—I’m happy to share and there’s plenty of room. But relinquishing scarce square footage in my home gym in the garage to make way for a pommel horse and set of parallel bars that look like they were made in a prison wood shop might be asking too much.

These came out of Jack’s storage unit, along with some other exercise gear that makes no sense to me.

“What do you do with this stuff?” I ask, examining the worn leather upholstery on the pommel.

Jack grins, shoving the thing to the center of the floor, crowding my bench press. “Upper body and core strength stuff that’s lots of fun,” he quips. “There wasn’t room for my gear at Kathi’s. I’m glad to be able to get back to using it.”

“Is this like gymnastics stuff?”

He nods, tossing me a ring on a rope. “Yep. You should try it out. Yoga too. It’ll help your strength and balance at work.”

“My strength and balance are just fine,” I reply, watching Jack set up the ladder, then fasten one of the rings on its rope to a ceiling beam, high overhead.

“You think so?” he asks, reaching down for the ring in my hand to attach it above next to the other, effectively securing the metal loops at the rope end securely with hefty carabiner clips.

He climbs down from the ladder, then faces the rings which are suspended about head high. He takes them in closed, sure fists, his fingers and thumb wrapped tightly around them. The next thing he does nearly blows my mind. He spreads his arms out wide, lifting himself off the ground, then turns his entire body so it’s parallel with the floor, feet pointed north, head pointed south, his arms pointing east and west. With muscles tense and trembling, he holds himself mostly still in that position, breathing deeply but evenly.

I’ve never seen anyone do a move like that except on television, and only during the Olympics.

“Fuck,” I laugh. “Where’d you learn to do that?” I’m impressed.

Jack grins, wincing with the effort. He relaxes, dropping slowly to the floor, landing on flat feet, looking winded.

“My mother was a cheerleader and a gymnast,” he says. “She sent me to gymnastics classes when I was a little kid. I never really stopped. I took up yoga when I was in the Navy, just to give me something I could do to stay flexible and strong. It’s good for the head too. Keeps you focused and on an even keel.”

Jack is nothing if not focused and on an even keel.

“What else can you do?” I ask him, truly intrigued. I spend a lot of hours in the gym every week keeping myself fit, but I doubt I could even attempt to pull off anything like what he just demonstrated.

“I’ll show you sometime,” he says. “We’ll get a heavy mat to put on the concrete floor so when you fall, you don’t crack your head.”

“I won’t fall,” I protest.

He grins again. “Yes. Yes, you will.”

“You’re gonna have to teach me,” I insist. “I want to freak out the guys at the fire station. That shit’ll have them scratching their heads.”

Jack nods. “Right. Okay, we’ll start with some easy stuff, but not today. It’s almost time to go and I need to get the cooler packed.”

We’re due at my Uncle Charlie’s at noon and it’s a forty-minute drive up into the hills, west of Damascus. It’s going to take more time than it should to organize the kids. Getting them moving in the same direction is a gymnastic event, all by itself.

“Hey,” I say, as Jack turns toward the door, heading back in.

He stops, looking back. “Yeah?”

“I’m really glad you’re here,” I say. “All moved in. I like it.”

He pauses, his expression warming. “I’m glad too,” he finally says. “It feels… good.”

It does. It’s only been one night, but it seems right. I love waking up beside Jack. I like falling asleep next to him, with him wrapped up in my arms. We haven’t done enough of that, and I’m just starting to realize all I’ve missed.

“I’m going to go pack the cooler,” he says, smiling at me. “Start wrangling the kids.”

“Okay.”

This is going to work. I feel it in my bones.

* * *

“You weren’t kidding about them being way out in the middle of nowhere,” Jack observes, watching mile after forested mile pass by his window. “We’re almost in Tennessee.”

We left civilization many miles behind us. Now we’re in the dense backwoods of the middle of nowhere. The only people who live this far out, high in the hills, are generational Appalachians who either don’t want to leave or can’t escape, or city people who buy weekend mountain retreats because they think living in a remote location without access to modern convenience is somehow romantic. The latter group gets to leave whenever they want. The prior group is stuck, whether they acknowledge it or not.

My family falls into the prior category. I’m not sure how my ‘people’ wound up in this part of the country, but we’ve been here as far back as anyone can remember or bothered to write down. Deep inside the footprint of my Uncle Charlie’s property is a little family graveyard. The earliest graves are marked with uncut, undated rocks pulled from a nearby waterfall. Family lore has it that these graves belong to my great-great-grandparents and their children. Sometime after the Civil War they started marking the graves with names and dates carved on quarried granite stones. My grandparents are buried up there, their graves marked with fancy polished markers with full names and dates and a little bit about their lives incised in the granite. Their graves may look more modern, but they lived their entire lives in the little hollow between two mountains, subsisting on what they could grow themselves, hunt, fish, or barter for. My grandfather never had a job or wanted one. He cut trees and split the wood into logs for heat in the winter, cooked corn mash in the fall for moonshine to sell or trade to his friends and neighbors, hunted for deer meat and traded hides to tanneries in town for finished leather. He raised a new foal or two every spring and kept a cow, so the children and grandchildren always had fresh milk.

His neighbors saw him as a rich man despite the fact that he had very little in the way of cash money. During Prohibition he did better than most. Afterwards, during the Great Depression, he and his family struggled.

My Uncle Charlie managed to get out of the hollow when he took up with a surveying crew from the Forest Service who were mapping land nearby in advance of raising the dam on Beartree Lake. He spent the summer following them around, learning the trade and ended up getting into work as an unpaid hanger-on. At the end of the season the lead engineer on the project offered him a job. He moved to town, spending the next twenty-some years tramping the forests and byways of south-western Virginia, earning a good living working outside, while still enjoying the benefits of electricity and hot and cold running water.

His brothers and sisters all stayed in the hollow, following the old ways. My father, Charlie’s younger brother, learned to make some of the best moonshine distilled in the entire county; that, and grow pot. His talents were known far and wide, and soon caught the attention of law-enforcement. I think I was about six years-old when my father first went to prison. Kimmie (who was just a baby then) and I stayed with our mother up in Manning Hollow, surrounded by a clan of Mannings who lived hard on the land just as every Manning had for at least a hundred years.

I remember the outhouse, the Coleman lanterns, pumping water by hand into a bucket for breakfast. I remember being barefoot with snow on the ground and sleeping under a pile of handmade quilts in the winter when the air in the house was so cold my breath froze in front of my face.

I remember too, when my mother died and going to her funeral in Abingdon. Her sister bought me a suit to wear, and a little blue dress for Kimmie. After the funeral she met my Uncle Charlie beside his car and gave us to him along with a cardboard box filled with our clothes and a framed photograph of our mother. He put the box in the trunk of his car, and us in the back seat. He said we were coming to live with him; as that was what our father wanted, and our mother’s sister agreed. She had a houseful of kids of her own and was barely making ends meet as it was.

It sounds like a sad story, but it’s not. Uncle Charlie raised Kimmie and me just like we were his own. We spent a lot of weekends with the family clan up in Manning Hollow, but during the week we went to school, I played sports and worked a part-time job at the grocery store as a teenager. We had normal lives in a loving home, with plenty of friends from school. After school I followed Gil Steele into the Marine Corps, but family eventually pulled me back. Family ties are strong—often unbreakable among Mannings. It’s never mattered that there’s a world of difference between me and my aunts, uncles, and cousins still living up in the hills.

I’m scared to death about what Jack is going to think of them, and almost as worried about how they’ll react to him.

Jack’s a city boy, through and through, from the way he speaks to the way he looks, all the way to the way he conducts himself in company. The Manning clan is as bone-ass redneck as it gets. They all regard me as the oddball in the family; the one who got too big for his britches. They all know I’m gay and seem to accept it, but I’ve never forced the issue by bringing anyone home to meet them. I never had anyone I cared enough about to take that risk with.

I guess they would have told me not to bring my boyfriend. I did use that word, and they do know I’m a dude.

I’ve just never done this before.

Jack is different. I just hope they don’t make a big deal. I hope Jack isn’t too freaked out by barefoot, snaggle-toothed cousins and some spontaneous banjo play. I hope Charlie doesn’t get a wild hair and decide to show Jack his still. That’s his favorite thing to do with strangers. He likes to goad them, testing their mettle, seeing just how badly he can intimidate them.

“You okay?” Jack asks, peering at me over his sunglasses.

I nod. “A little nervous,” I admit. “Mannings can be… a little… overwhelming. Try not to be freaked out by them. Okay?”

Jack offers me a sweet smile. “I’ll try,” he replies. “I’ll summon my inner redneck and try to fit in as best as possible.”

“Don’t let Uncle Charlie intimidate you. He’s all bark and no bite. I swear.”

He laughs. “I’m way more worried about these spinster aunts you’ve been telling me about. They sound way more formidable.”

“You may be right,” I agree, thinking on it. “Hell, Aunt Nita still scares the shit outta me.”

“Me too,” Jordan mumbles from the back seat. “She’s huge and she smells like bacon.”

I glance in the rearview, smiling back at him. “That’s true,” I observe. “But let’s keep that to ourselves while we’re up there today, okay?”

Jordan shrugs, a small smile tugging at his lip. He’s amused with himself.

“Sure,” he replies. “Whatever.”