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I called my mama on my way home from the station a few days before the dance and told her to stay put, that I would be on her doorstep in a few minutes.
It had come time for us to have a conversation.
Pulling into the drive in front of her trailer ten minutes later, I shut off my truck and sat still for a moment, watching the sun fall behind the mountains to the west. The purple and strawberry-colored sunset filled my chest with this feeling that I couldn’t put a name to.
I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say to my mama. And I had no clue how to stop her from trying to run from the subject of my sexuality this time, but I needed it to be over. I needed everything to finally be out in the open.
It was time for her to listen to me and time for her to finally hear me.
If she and I were going to have any kind of relationship going forward, I wanted it to be a real one. An open one. I needed it to be because I’d spent my life always wondering where I stood, never knowing where I fit in, so I’d tried to fit in everywhere.
My daddy had all but disowned me. He fed me and clothed me, but I’d always thought that had been only out of his own sense of responsibility—he knew his parents would’ve rolled in their graves if he’d kicked his own child out—and Mama had done what had been expected of her by keeping quiet and not talking to me when he was around, but she’d always held onto me. Kept me in her life.
She’d tried to keep me part of the family, even when Daddy had worked hard to make me feel separate, like when he’d bought my brothers new cowboy boots and hats for Christmas, and I’d been given new work gloves ’cause that was the only use he had for me after he knew I was gay—a ranch hand. He tried to distance himself from me so the shame he felt about me didn’t choke him. His shame made me feel like I was never good enough.
But I was. And I fit just fine now. I fit with my friends, my brothers, my niece, my co-workers. My community.
And I fit with Devo.
It was time for my mama to accept it.
She could like it. She could not. But she needed to come to terms with her only daughter. She needed to make a decision. Daddy died a long time ago, so it was time for her to choose me or live her life without me.
It took a few more minutes of breathing deeply and evenly, but I finally gathered my courage, climbed out of the truck, and ascended the four stairs leading up to her front door. I knocked twice on the weathered, cheap-as-shit wooden screen door, then pushed it open.
It clattered shut behind me, and I jumped at the noise, then turned to find Mama waiting for me at her small square oak dining table. The TV wasn’t on in the living room. No music played. The only sounds I could hear were a couple of magpies out back, squawking and squabbling at each other on her back fence. Apparently, she knew it was high noon too.
“So,” I said as I sat across from her. I rested my hands on the table, then folded them, locking my fingers together.
“So what?”
She looked nervous, but she wasn’t puffing away on a cigarette for once. In fact, her trailer didn’t smell like an ashtray like it usually did, and I could tell she’d washed her curtains and had been in the middle of a major house cleaning when I called. A broom leaned against the kitchen wall, and the vacuum cleaner I’d bought her stood in the living room, waiting to be used.
Maybe she had finally realized she couldn’t avoid life any longer, couldn’t hole herself away in her trailer anymore, chain smoking and avoiding all the things in her life that were too painful for her to face.
She couldn’t avoid me any longer, that was for sure.
“You quit smokin’ or somethin’?”
“I did,” she said.
“Good. Proud of you.”
“Thanks,” she whispered.
“I love you, Mama.”
She smiled a little, but “I know” was all she said.
“I’d like to talk to you about Devo and me. About your opinion on the subject of my sexuality.”
Her eyes became glued to the table beneath her hands, and she smoothed her right index finger back and forth over a long grain in the wood. The arthritis had gotten worse. Her hands looked mangled and swollen, like knotty wood. I wondered how long it would be until she couldn’t even change the channel on the TV with the remote.
She pursed her lips but then released them, blew out a breath, and tried to relax her face, as if she knew that this time, her usual responses wouldn’t work with me. “What about it?”
“We’ve never talked about it. After Daddy… After you became aware that I was a lesbian, I expected you to talk to me about it, but you never did. Daddy certainly didn’t.”
She looked at my hands clasped together on the table. “What was it you wanted me to say?”
