Page 61 of The Lipstick Flip

“You’re a human being. Families are complicated. Life is a shit buffet.”

Snuffling laughter made it through a few more tears.

“Do you know what my mom said to me?” The question popped out of me before I realized I was going to say it. “When I got into the academy, I mean.”

I was eighteen, and God help me, I was going to get out of that fucking trailer if it meant joining the Army or enrolling in the academy or sucking a string of dicks from sea to shining sea. It was my good luck—or not, maybe—that the academy came first. They had a little booth at the high school’s career day. And I picked up a flyer.

Noah raised his head from my shoulder and turned to look at me. I’d never talked much about my family. About everything before. But Noah had picked up enough. He’d understood. Some of it.

“‘If your father could see you now, he’d kill you himself.’”

“Howie.”

She’d been in a housedress, one arm in a cast, her legs scratched to hell. The night before, she’d gotten blasted and stolen a kid’s bike and tried to ride it through the trailer park. She’d crashed into a dumpster, broken her arm, and cut herself so badly on a piece of metal they said she would have bled out if we hadn’t gotten her to the hospital. Ralph was gone by then, so it was just me shoving my shit in a bag while she screamed. There was always someone in that house who was screaming.

What I said, though, was “My dad was dead by then, so it didn’t matter.”

“Oh my God, of course it matters.” He hesitated. “I didn’t know your dad was dead.”

Probably because I’d told him early on my family was off-limits. I didn’t talk to them. I didn’t talk about them. But all I said was “Yeah, well, he had a fucking stroke on the shitter. Who wants to tell that story?”

Noah was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry your mom said that to you. That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“No, that’s not why— I wasn’t telling you because—” I stopped because I wasn’t sure why I was telling him. Or where it had come from. “I don’t know why, I guess. I wasn’t trying to one-up you. I just thought of it.”

“I want you to tell me things,” Noah said. His hand found mine; it was warm from the mug of tea, and I was amazed, again, by how well his fingers fit between mine. “I want you to feel like you can share things with me. God, I’m so sorry she said that to you.”

“Well, she was a drunk, and he’d been a drug dealer, among a lot of other shitty things, so it’s not like it carried that much weight, Noah. She was right, though. He hated cops. God, sometimes when I think about why I joined the academy, I think there was some of that shit going on, the stuff that’s like candy for shrinks. I mean, what’s the one fucking job that my dad would hate more than anything? What’s the one thing he never wanted his sons to be?”

A fag, a voice said inside my head.

And my own voice had a strange tremor as I continued, “And that’s what I chose. Just to stick it to him one last time, even though he was in the fucking ground.”

“Howie.” Noah squeezed my hand.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Why would you be sorry? I’m your husband. You can tell me anything.”

The trailer. And the light off the snow. And the cover of the Playgirl: SEVEN WAYS TO MAKE HIM SCREAM.

At the back of the trailer, in the bedroom, someone was screaming.

I kissed the top of Noah’s head. My lips were dry. “I wish your dad saw you the way I did,” I said. “I wish he saw how wonderful you are.”

Something in Noah’s face softened. Something I hadn’t even known was still there—some last-ditch wall that had been there so long, for years maybe, that I’d stopped seeing it. “Thank you.” The poor guy must have been trying to think of what to say, because he said, “I’m sorry, Howie. I wish your family had treated you better.”

“Hey, look at me,” I said, and I even managed to smile. “I turned out all right.”

19

Somehow, the conversation moved upstairs to my bedroom.

And when Noah said, “I think I’m going to sleep over,” I said, “Okay.”

It reminded me of how things had been when we’d first started dating. When I’d been freaking out about people seeing Noah coming in and out of the building. When I’d tried to figure out times and routes and plans so I could sneak him in. Not that I thought of it that way, at the time. It was just something I did. The way I handled a lot of my shit.

The first time that Noah had slept over, all those years ago, it had been so casual, so matter-of-fact, that I hadn’t even realized it was happening. It’s late, Noah had said. We’d been on the couch, him curled up inside my arms. I don’t want to move. And then, like we’d talked about it already, You don’t mind if I stay over, do you?