Chapter Twenty-Two
IT TURNED OUT Kelly and Walter were a natural phone-sex couple, and Walter went to bed that night sated and more comforted than he’d expected after witnessing his mother and Tibby’s row at dinner. He wondered, as he drifted off to sleep, if that technique could work all break long.
The next morning, however, ushered in a full day of undiluted family, making it clear the confrontations and meltdowns would continue to jar his day at any given moment and usually when he was the most vulnerable. He was weak after fielding an upset call from Rose or realizing he was going to be lucky to see Cara once during his entire break, unless he skipped his Minnesota visit and hung around her back door. The few emails he’d exchanged with Williams didn’t help matters either—not that much would happen between the announcement and the end of break, but inactivity felt like lost ground. By the end of the first weekend he’d convinced Rose to let the Facebook group start, and it was heartening to see more than eighty people join in the first thirty hours. Everyone was full of outrage and ideas, and most of them had letters drafted, ready to submit to the school paper, or already submitted to the board. Mostly they continued to make plans, but it was progress, and progress was good.
His mom and Tibby were dual lead weights putting drag on any momentum toward even fleeting happiness at home. Worse, somehow Walter had internally become a drama queen—little things, sometimes tiny events, upset him. Each subtle dig they took at each other over breakfast, each fit over when Tibby would be allowed to go to the barn or buy Harper a new blanket set him on edge. Every one of his mother’s sighs while she washed dishes or flipped through a magazine made him tense up. He felt stupid, because there were no more big fights after that first night, but Walter reacted worse to that somehow than bloody knock-downs at every meal.
Kelly tried to soothe him, but that he needed soothing at all made Walter feel that much more ridiculous, so he took to soft-pedaling his reactions even though he ached to vent the odd emotions he couldn’t seem to control. He kept his focus forward, on his impending familial obligations and on his now-established trip to Windom on December twenty-seventh. They’d decided to stay in Minnesota through the third of January and would make up their mind about spending the last six days there or in Chicago later.
In the meantime, unfortunately, Christmas had to be dealt with.
Walter had fun shopping for Kelly and the Davidsons—he still planned to get a big food basket on his way out of town, but in the meantime he dealt in non-perishables, such as the vintage leather jacket in Boystown that had started it all and a swath of Doctor Who figures Kelly had picked up but put back down. He bought the Corruptible T-shirt too, and a less suggestive but still sassy Registered Princess one for Lisa. Never mind that Gaymart generally sold that one to proudly swishy gay men. Kelly’s parents were more difficult, mostly because he knew they’d be upset if he spent too much, though Walter very much wanted to give a token to each to show his willingness to please and impress them. He ended up getting Dick a handsome desk set at a Lakeview gift shop and a gorgeous mirrored chotskie box for Sue. Both were actually quite pricey but still seemed humble—they were exactly the message Walter wanted to send.
Presents for his own family was the usual circle of hell, which made him sad, that he’d been so happy shopping for near-strangers but depressed making purchases for his flesh and blood. Part of the problem was nobody in his family wanted for money or things, so to make a splash with a gift he had to blow a serious wad, which wasn’t practical en masse and tended to make the next shopping season that much more impossible. As usual, he had to stick to predictable and boring. His sister was easy: listen for fifteen minutes about what it was she wanted from Dover Saddlery and then run to the internet. His dad was even easier: golf balls, a few assorted crap ready-made gift sets from the internet, and a big gift card. None of it was inspired, none of it would make them smile beyond the traditional thank-you version, half of it they’d not use or change their mind on by Christmas Day. Walter didn’t let himself care.
Grandma Marissa, his mother’s mother, was always the worst, because Shari Lucas hadn’t gotten her dark view of the world from a vacuum. After hours and hours of combing stores and online shops, Walter ended up ordering a handmade quilt from Etsy and hoping for the best. Probably she’d think it was shoddy construction or decide it was infested with bugs or something equally dismissive. If she didn’t like it, though, it would end up in Shari’s spare bedroom, and Walter could steal it for school.
Might as well be practical.
Grandma and Grandpa Lucas were moderately difficult, though that was only because they lived in New York. Since his parents’ separation, he’d barely seen them at all because they were angry with their son, though they hadn’t ever cared for his wife. Grandma Claire wrote Walter letters every few months, and originally they’d intended to come to Chicago over New Year’s, but they’d started waffling on that even before Walter committed to Minnesota. It would have been nice to see them, but not nice enough to skip Kelly for. They spoke on Skype instead a few days before Christmas.
“You look tired, Walter,” his grandmother said, frowning at her screen. Walter wished he could look into her eyes. She had soft, gray ones that had always made him feel she was magic. In fact, when he’d been a kid he’d called her his fairy grandmother.
“It’s been a little rough here,” he confessed to her, immediately wishing he hadn’t been so forthcoming. Why did he keep spilling his guts like that? He didn’t want her to worry.
Claire frowned. “Is it your mother? Or your worthless excuse for a father?”
“No, it’s fine. Just Christmas crazy.” He decided to distract her with something she’d love to hear. “I’m cutting out of Chicago right after Christmas too, so I’m getting ready for that. Heading up to Windom, Minnesota for New Year’s.”
“Minnesota?” Claire pulled a face. “Goodness, what for?” Walter smiled slyly in answer, and she gasped. “Walter Andrew, you scamp, do you have a boyfriend?”
“I do, Grandma,” Walter confessed.
It was fun to watch Claire clap in glee and pull Grandpa David over to look awkwardly happy for Walter too. In fact, for a full fifteen minutes Walter only had to grin and enjoy his grandmother melting down over the fact that she could finally talk about her grandson’s gay love life at the club.
“Walter, this is so wonderful. I’m so happy for you. You have to send me a picture. I’d ask if he’s cute, but with you, I know he must be.”
“He’s adorable.” God, now he wished he were going to see them. “If you guys come to Chicago, how long are you staying? Maybe I can arrange for you to meet him.”
Claire’s face fell. “It’s not going to work this time, honey, I’m sorry. But we’re going to make it work sometime in the spring, and I’d better meet your young man then.”
“Well, if we’re still dating then, sure,” Walter said, not wanting to tempt fate.
Claire waved an angry finger at him. “Don’t you even try that. You made me wait this long, you’re going to date him long enough for me to meet him.”
Walter laughed. “I’ll do my best.”
Claire’s smile promised trouble. “You know, we have gay marriage here in New York now, and I know the perfect place for a ceremony.”
“Grandma.”
She laughed, but the scary thing was Walter knew she wasn’t kidding. “I do want that picture. Regina Nelson has been bragging about her lesbian daughter dating a former model, and I want to at least keep pace.”
“I’ll email it as soon as I’m done,” he promised.
He ended up sending them a luxury gift basket full of wine and chocolate, which was less personal than he’d have liked, but it was clear his forwarded photo of himself and Kelly mugging for his phone was the gift she’d truly wanted.
GRANDMA MARISSA ARRIVED the same day as the present for the family from her ex-husband—not Shari’s biological father, but the father of her heart. It was the usual explosion of things none of them needed but desperately wanted, luxurious food, drink and condiments, iPad minis, noise-cancelling headphones, gift certificates to truly posh horse suppliers and tech companies and department stores, with a handful of exotic shops from Harrods of London to push the whole thing truly over the top. It was always this kind of a deposit, and the fact that it arrived on the same day as his ex-wife and her meager trolley of carefully hoarded and unwanted toys, was the only present the manipulative old bastard needed. Not that any of them but Shari shopped for him any longer.
Predictably, Marissa superseded all other meltdowns by locking herself in the guest bedroom and sobbing for hours while Shari knelt outside of it and wept with the determination of one still learning how to properly fall to pieces. Unable to stand it, Walter took Tibby to the barn and out to dinner afterward. His sister seemed appreciative but distant, and Walter understood the reaction: while it had probably been a very welcome move, she didn’t want to get too attached to the idea of him doing it again.
Walter felt guilty because even knowing he’d be abandoning her, he was still glad this was the case.
When he got back to the house, to put the icing on the cake he’d missed Cara stopping by—why she hadn’t texted to let him know she was coming, he would never understand. She brought a fruitcake—a fucking fruitcake—and a gift card to Amazon.
Grabbing a bottle of vodka, a shot glass, and a bag of chips, Walter headed to the basement den to get drunk. He was pretty close to smashed when, at nine thirty, Kelly called.
“Hey, you,” he said, trying to scramble back into happy. “I didn’t expect your call tonight. I thought you were at your grandparents.”
“I am, but I still have a phone.”
Walter shut his eyes and drank in the beautiful sound of his boyfriend’s voice. “God, but I’ve missed you.”
“What’s wrong? And don’t give me that dismissive crap you keep giving me. Something’s really wrong this time, I can tell.”
Walter shut his eyes tighter. “No, it’s just collective. And then I got drunk, which I think may have made it worse.”
Kelly’s frustrated sigh was a balm even as it made Walter feel guilty for causing it. “I wish you were here, or I were there.”
“Three days,” Walter reminded him. He hadn’t started counting the hours yet, but he wanted to.
“You can come earlier if you want. You can come tomorrow.”
Why was it Kelly’s offerings always made him feel good and bad at the same time? “I’m not interrupting your family stuff. Besides, I have my sentence in hell to finish out first. Including a purgatory dinner with Dad tomorrow night.”
“There’s nothing left to interrupt here, and you wouldn’t have anyway. It’s just us tomorrow and Christmas Day, and everybody’s going crazy talking about meeting you, except for Dad who keeps getting grilled over the two hours he’s spent in your company. You don’t have to wait until the twenty-seventh. Come anytime you want. Let me know you’re on the way as you leave.”
“Maybe I’ll come on the twenty-sixth,” Walter said, the vodka unfurling his resistance to barging in on the Davidsons.
“Awesome. I’ll tell Mom.” Kelly’s voice went soft and sad. “Take care of yourself, Walter. Don’t let them drag you down. And stop lying to me about how much it’s bothering you.”
Walter’s throat was thick. “It’s not only you I’m trying to lie to.”
There was a long, heavy pause on the line. “Come on Christmas Day. Please. For me. Because I’m going to be a wreck until you’re here. I don’t care if that sounds pathetic or clingy or if you hate it. I’d beg you to start out tomorrow, but I know skipping Christmas Eve and Christmas morning will make things worse. Maybe you can’t come Christmas Day, but God, I want you to. Just come. Please.”
The word cut across the center of Walter’s chest, and he said, his voice almost a whisper, “All right.”
The rest of the conversation was Kelly babbling excitedly about what time he should leave and what the weather was like and how he should respond if it upset his family that he was leaving early. Walter heard about a third of it, caught up in the spinning sensation of relief that came with realizing he was about to get the hell out of hell. He went to bed that night not entirely sure it hadn’t been part of a drunken hallucination, but in addition to one mother of a headache, he had two emails and seven texts from Kelly with further weather updates and admonishments for him to not go back on his promise to come on Christmas Day.
The kitchen rocked with the drama between his grandmother, mother, and sister—they were making cookies, ostensibly, but mostly this was the backdrop for a Real Housewives of Northbrook episode—so Walter slipped out to bring home dinner for them from Whole Foods and prepare his long-coveted gift basket for the Davidsons. It proved more difficult than he’d thought, and he nearly broke down twice in the frozen section because he couldn’t quite work out how to get chocolate coconut ice cream to Minnesota without it melting. He ended up at a low-rent grocery buying a massive cooler and enough dry ice to stop global warming, then went back to cleaning Whole Foods out of everything he thought Kelly and his family might ever possibly desire.
He ended up dropping eight hundred dollars on the food basket, not including the two hundred he spent on a handcrafted wicker container from a boutique next door to put the whole thing in—and it wouldn’t all fit. It barely fit in his hatchback, and God, but he hoped the dry ice would last that long. It was far, far too much.
It didn’t feel even close to enough.
By the time Walter got to dinner with Tibby and his father at Fogo de Chão, he was so strung out he could barely eat. Kelly texted him every hour, demanding reassurance that Walter was okay. Walter wasn’t, but he kept both of them sane by reporting everything as it happened, that his mother and grandmother had made his gift of dinner into a sign of how badly their family had fallen apart and retreated to their rooms, that Tibby seemed wooden, and he worried, that his dad had brought his girlfriend and it was beyond awkward. Before heading back home after with Tibby, Walter texted Kelly his longing to reach out to his sister, but admitted he feared teasing her with more help than he could give. Kelly suggested he take her out to the barn for Christmas Eve to see Harper, which was so brilliant and perfect Walter felt dumb for not thinking of it. It turned out to be ten thousand times better than the present he had under the tree. Watching his sister love her Friesian had a side effect of healing Walter too, and when they finally got home for the night at eleven, they both went to bed with smiles on their faces.
In the light of Christmas morning, he doubted the wisdom of leaving that day. He couldn’t comfortably get away until after lunch, and that would put him at a Windom arrival of nine thirty at the earliest unless he drove like a bat out of hell the whole way—which given the fact that he’d face at least two bands of snow flurries en route, seemed stupid as fuck. He was debating whether or not to try for a midpoint hotel at least as a backup due to weather when they sat down to open presents after breakfast—and there his grandmother and mother tossed the flaming turd that finally broke Walter’s back.
Shari had opened Walter’s gift to her: a high-end silver photo frame with gorgeous cutouts and collage space for photos, which Walter had painstakingly filled with images of himself, Tibby, and his mother and grandmother, images ranging from Shari’s birth until the day before when he’d been able to snap the three women smiling before another snarling match. It had been the project he’d done in his room to save his sanity, and as he watched his mother open it, tears in her eyes for its beauty, he wished he’d have taken even more time to polish it and make it the best offering he could. For that moment, the gift was everything Walter knew how to be.
Grandma Marissa leaned over Shari’s shoulder, sniffed and tipped her mimosa to her lips. “You look at it and feel Cal’s absence like a knife, don’t you?”
Shari blinked, then blinked again, and as Walter watched, all the light and happiness he’d put there drowned in the return of her pain.
It was too much. It was too far. It was such a smack across the face Walter didn’t even yell, didn’t so much as cut his grandmother a glare. He only rose, went to his room and started to pack. He barely had three items in his duffel when he heard someone at his door. Stiffening, he readied himself to face his mother or worse, his grandmother. When he turned, however, it was Tibby who stood in the doorway, looking tired and sad and a lot more grownup than she had a right to be.
“I’m sorry,” she said, giving an apology for the other women she had no business having to deliver. “It’s a beautiful frame. I’m going to do my best to convince Mom Grandma is a piece of shit and that we should hang the collage over the mantle, especially because Dad isn’t in it.” She spied the duffel on Walter’s bed and grew sadder. “You’re going to Kelly. You’re leaving now.”
Walter paused with a pair of socks in his hand. I can stay for you, he wanted to say, should have said, but when he opened his mouth, all he could manage was, “I can’t take it. I’m so sorry.” He looked away. “I should stay for you, I know, but—”
“What?” She sounded almost angry. “What the hell would that accomplish? That we’d both be miserable?” She curled her lip and shook her head. “I mean, God, I’m so jealous of you being able to get away I’m sick with it, but it’s not as if you being here would change anything. Just one more person to fight with.”
“I don’t want to leave you here alone.”
“Well, you’re not taking me with you unless you bring Harper too.” Her face softened. “Thank you so much for taking me to the barn last night. That was the best, seriously.”
“If I were here, I could take you more often.”
“Please. I’ll bum a ride or use my Christmas money from Dad to take a taxi. Besides, I get my license in three months. I plan to sugarcoat Dad and his bimbo until they buy me a car. Or I’ll hoard my allowance and buy some piece of shit that gets me from here to there and nowhere else.”
“I’ll help you if you need it,” Walter promised.
Tibby smiled, still sad, but she looked a lot stronger than Walter had realized she was. “It’s going to be okay. I promise you: it’s going to be okay. You’re going to go to Minnesota with your boyfriend, and I’m going to get my ass to the barn this afternoon if I have to hitchhike. We’re all going to be fine.”
He ended up taking her on the way out of town—they grabbed Chinese takeout for brunch, enough to hold her over until dinner if she could get away with staying that long, and he left Tibby heading for the barn lounge burdened with bags of tack and gifts and food, seeming ten thousand pounds lighter than she’d been in the living room with their family.
Walter watched her go, remembering what she’d told him yet again as he’d dropped her off, their mother and grandmother’s cries of betrayal and abandonment still ringing in his ears.
“We’re going to be okay,” he whispered to the snow falling gently against his windshield. “We’re going to be okay.”
He let the words echo for a minute, then pulled out his wireless handset and dialed Kelly as he headed north for the interstate.