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“One semester Mason took this photography class. He wasn’t that interested in it, but I fell in love. At first I was just taking pictures of friends and random things I’d see around town. But then one of my friends asked me to shoot their wedding, and after that I started doing portraiture. It was awesome.”
Adam looked lost in his memories, pie crust forgotten on the counter.
“River called me one day to tell me that our sister had had a baby. Hell, I didn’t even know she was pregnant. River was just a kid. Marina tried with Gus for a little while, but she—”
He looked around to make sure Gus wasn’t around, and lowered his voice.
“She loved Gus so much, but she never wanted to be a parent. Even if she had wanted to, she was working full-time to support herself and her boyfriend, and they couldn’t afford any daycare. She said she’d rather die than let our parents have anything to do with Gus. So I...I offered to take her.”
Adam blinked, remembering, and his face got the softest expression Wes had ever seen.
“I always wanted kids. Mason... Well, I should’ve discussed it with him first. I know that. I just thought... He was so great and Gus was so great, it had to work.”
Wes cringed. “What happened?”
“He was furious. Said he was supposed to be focusing on finals, not on raising a kid. I told him I’d do all the work. I’d get up with her and feed her and change her diaper. I knew it was a lot to ask, but I thought maybe with a compromise...”
“You wanted her more than you wanted him.”
Adam’s eyes got wide. Had that been too harsh a phrasing?
“I guess...yeah. She was nonnegotiable. The thing is, when she started talking and walking around, Mason was more interested in her. He liked showing her off, liked playing with her sometimes. He wasn’t a horrible father.”
In comparison with Adam’s own father, perhaps. And Wes’.
“But when she turned five, Mason started asking how long this was going to last. Like, like, like he thought we were gonna give her back. At first I figured he was just letting off steam. He’d started working at this tech company and he had really long days. He was tired, stressed, and of course having a kid doesn’t exactly make it easy to come home at the end of the day and put your feet up.
“But we had a great babysitter who watched her while I was out on jobs, and she could’ve taken on more hours. It wasn’t the hours, though. It turned out he just...wasn’t willing to give anything up to be a father.”
Adam started in on the butter mush again, wielding the forks like twin weapons.
“And Gus...there was Gus now. Gus was...she was everything. And I just knew. I was a dad now, and that was the most important thing. Maybe we could’ve found some kind of compromise eventually, I don’t know. But I didn’t want to compromise. I wanted a life with Gus.
“For the last year and a half or so we stayed living together but we weren’t a couple anymore. We dated other people sometimes. Well, Mason did. I went on like three dates and all I could think the whole time was that I’d rather be hanging out with Gus or watching a movie. Or sitting quietly by myself not dealing with another person’s ego. So that didn’t go great.”
“Did you tell Gus?”
“We didn’t tell her while we were still living together. It was complicated enough without adding another variable. But it could only ever be a temporary situation. Eventually, something would change. And it did. Mason met someone he wanted to actually date. I thought...it would be hard for Gus, but we’d work it out. People do this all the time.”
Adam trailed off and peered at the recipe on his phone again. He sprinkled more flour onto the mush and started making it into a ball.
“I started looking for an apartment, but there was nowhere near Mason’s place that I could afford working as a photographer. Not with any kind of money to pay for the help I’d need when Gus wasn’t in school. Then it turned out, Mason didn’t care if we stayed near him. Because he didn’t want to be Gus’ father anymore.”
Adam’s voice broke and Wes knew his grief was for Gus and not for himself. He took out a water glass and started rolling the ball of dough into a disk. When it tore, he smushed it together again. What he ended up with was a Frankenstein of ragged pieces of floury dough that he pressed into the pie plate.
“Should I put the filling in?” Wes asked.
“I think so?”
Wes poured the mixture of apples, sugar, and cinnamon into the crust and Adam put the other half of the pie crust on top of it, pinching the top and bottom together.
