Page 69 of His Holy Chaos

"Thank you," he says to the doctor, and his voice is almost his. Almost the controlled man I know.

They bring Angel back. She's quieter now, the fever-bright flush of her cheeks already fading toward pink, and when the nurse places her in Ford's arms, she exhales, content.

During discharge, Ford handles the paperwork. His hands are steady again. He signs forms and nods at instructions and accepts the printed aftercare sheet. I hold Angel.

She's heavy with exhaustion, her body limp against my chest, her head tucked into the curve of my neck. I stroke her hair, the wispy blond curls. I sing to her very quietly. So This Is Love, from Cinderella. Her favorite.

We don't say much on the drive home. The city is different at four in the morning. Quieter, emptier. Like an abandoned place. Traffic lights cycle through their colors for no one.

Ford doesn't take Angel to the nursery. He carries her to his - our - bedroom, and I follow. He lays her in the center of the bed, and we lie on either side of her. Rain taps the windows.

We don't speak. But we exchange looks. And I smile.

Chapter 30. Ford

The text arrives while I'm sorting Angel's laundry, and Jude's name lights up the screen.

He went home, and I miss him terribly. Especially because I removed him from weekday choir when I found out how little he was sleeping to make it. Just to be with me. With his night shift, it was impossible, so he's only singing at Sunday services now.

But I can't keep going like this, seeing him so rarely during the week. We'll have to change this situation soon, because that boy has become my oxygen.

After what he did for me and Angel when Angel was sick… it might look simple from the outside. He drove us to the emergency room. But it was so much more than that. He was able to help me in the one situation where I wasn't capable of being in control. The trauma, the grief… they took over me. And he was there. Something in me changed permanently that night.

Jude: So my parents want us to come to Sunday barbecue. Like. This Sunday. As in tomorrow. After service.

The math is simple. I'm fifty-three. Jude's parents are… what, late fifties? Early sixties? I'm closer to their generation than to their son's. I am, in fact, the kind of man that parents warn their children about at exactly the age I'll be sitting across from them at a picnic table. The older man. The one with resources and authority and all the leverage that differential implies. It doesn't matter that Jude sought me out, that he chose this. What matters is how it looks from the outside.

But I don't care. I'd do anything to prove to anyone that I deserve that boy. That he's the love of my life and that he is mine.

I type: I'd be honored. What should I bring?

His response is immediate: a string of emojis I'm too old to decode, followed by: just yourself and that pretty face daddy, and then a winking face that I refuse to acknowledge has an effect on me. It has an effect on me. My neck warms. I set the phone down and return to the laundry.

First, we attend Sunday's service, and he's devastatingly beautiful. He's wearing a baby blue button-down with linen pants, and I feel my mouth water looking at him. I'm wearing a tailored cream suit. If it feels like too much, I have the excuse of church.

In the car, the suburbs unspool around us with their mailboxes and trimmed hedges and basketball hoops. I can picture Jude growing up here.

"What exactly did you tell them about me?" I ask.

"That you're a fifty-three-year-old silver fox who runs a choir and has a baby and makes me feel like a human person for the first time in years." Jude is angled sideways in the passenger seat, one knee drawn up, his white sneaker on the upholstery. A transgression I've stopped correcting because some battles aren't worth fighting and this is one of them.

"Did you mention the age difference?"

"I said, 'Mom, Dad, I'm seeing a man who's older than me and he's wonderful and he has a daughter and I'm happy.' They're just happy I'm dating someone who owns actual furniture, Daddy. The bar was underground."

I exhale. I shouldn't be this nervous.

The house appears. A modest two-story with blue siding and white trim. Window boxes spill red geraniums. A basketball hoop hangs over the garage. I feel ready.

"Let's go, baby boy," I tell him, and turn off the engine.

☐

Jude's mother is small. She barely reaches my shoulder. Her eyes are Jude's eyes. Her hair is brown, gathered in a loose knot that's coming undone at the temples, and she's wearing an apron over a floral blouse, and she smells like vanilla extract and charcoal smoke, and before I can extend my hand or offer the bottle of Burgundy I brought, she's hugging me.

So that's where he gets it.

"So you're the one," she says, and her voice carries the same cadence as Jude's humor, the same bright irreverence, except in her it's been aged into wisdom. "We've heard everything. Come in, come in. Erwin, they're here."