Page 124 of The Fed Sex Man

Tyson

John pluckeda football from the trough, looked it over, and then let it dangle at his side. “Can’t say I know if it really matters. Six months. Twelve months. Eighteen months. Hard sayin’ what’s normal. When the time comes, I ‘spect you’ll know it.”

“I feel like it’s already here, and I’m just too set in my ways to accept it.”

“Been livin’ on your own for half as long as you been on this earth,” he said. “Makes sense that you’d be kind of cantankerous when it comes time to make change.”

“You aren’t opposed to us living together?” I asked. “When the time does come?”

“When the time comes?” He belted out a long belly laugh. “Need I remind you that the two of you have been ‘living together’ for some time now? Remember, Jo tells her mother everything. Then, that woman tells me everything.” He hoisted the ball, hesitated, and then threw it through the center of the tire. “That chain of events makes me kind of all-knowing.”

“I was meaning actually living in one home,” I explained. “Right now, I feel like I’m sleeping in a hotel half the time.”

“Jackie and I moved here when my father fell ill. Hell, we lived here when we got married. At first it seemed strange, living with my wife in the very same home I grew up in.”

“Did it?”

“Damned sure did. Making babies in the bedroom you grew up in as a kid ain’t an easy task to do, let me tell you. My father had been buried for near a decade by then, and every time we get to feeling a little hanky-panky was a good idea, I could hear him bitchin’ at me to keep ‘er quiet.”

“That’s funny.”

“Wasn’t funny back then,” he said with a laugh. “Creepy is what it was.”

I certainly didn’t have any qualms about making love to Jo in the home I grew up in, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d feel better living elsewhere. The thought of selling the home scared the hell out of me.

If I did, I feared I’d come to regret it later.

I picked up a football. “Do you ever regret making this place your home?”

He gazed beyond the tire, toward the fields. For a moment, he seemed to get lost in thought. “Only home I’ve ever known. Personally, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”

I threw the football, missing the tire entirely.

“That little toss looked like a dying quail.” He faced me. “What’s on your mind, Son?”

“I think I’m scared.”

His eyes narrowed. “Of change?”

“I don’t know that it’s fear of change, in general,” I said. “I think it’s a fear of certain changes. Specific things.”

“Care to enlighten me a little more?”

“I’m not sure I can bring myself to sell my house.”

He shrugged. “Don’t.”

“Jo loves her home. She goes on and on about how she saved money for her first two years of working so she could afford to remodel the kitchen.”

He chuckled. “After she graduated college, she’d spend her Sundays here lookin’ at them damned architectural magazines, circling the pictures of the kitchens she liked. She modeled that kitchen after the ones in those books. Hell, them magazines are still back there, in that old room of hers.”

I shook my head. “Asking her to walk away from that seems like a cruel thing to do.”

“Her home’s too damned small to raise a family in,” he said.

“It sure seems like it’s what she wants.”

“Let me tell you something about women,” he said. “Women like a man to make decisions for ‘em as opposed to making them on their own. They’ll act like they know what they want, but half the time, if a man made a decision for ‘em, they’d be much happier. If I told Jackie we were goin’ out to eat at a place that fried up dog turds and served ‘em on a plate of beansprouts, the only thing she’d ask me is ‘what time are were leavin’?’ Jo might like that kitchen she has, and she might even have a little attachment to it, but if you told her you were goin’ to live in a big cardboard box on the side of seventy-five, right under the bypass, she’d ask you when the move in date was. Women are awfully strange creatures.”

I laughed. “You’re not going to get any argument from me on that.”

He took a seat on the edge of the trough and rested his hands against his knees “My only advice is to be sure and consider Jo’s feelings when you’re making decisions. No one likes havin’ a beansprout covered turd for dinner.”

The sound of the dinner bell caused him to stand from his relaxed position.

I turned toward the house, still uneasy regarding my decision, but knowing I needed to make one. John took his normal place at my side and draped his arm over my shoulder.

“Chicken fried steak is back on the rotation tonight,” he said. “Man can’t complain about a meal like that, can he?”

“No, Sir.”

On our walk to the house, I did as John suggested on the first day I’d heard the dinner bell ring.

I thanked the good Lord for what I had. In doing so, I came to realize just how fortunate of a man I was.

By the time we reached the front porch, my decision was made.