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“Do you?” Christie asks, amused. “It seems to me shotguns are a scary thing.”
“I’m not really scared of much,” Cal says. He glances at me and smiles. This look is not missed by anyone at the table.
“Good to know,” Christie says. “Do you have family back in California, Cal?”
Dammit. He speaks before I can stop him. “I have a Father,” he says quietly. “And many brothers.”
Not quite a lie.
“Big family?”
“You could say that.”
I start to sweat.
“Are you the oldest?”
He shakes his head. “Youngest.”
Oh, that’s right. He’s only a couple of hundred years old.
“What about your mother?”
“Jesus, Christie,” I snap. “What’s with the third degree?”
She looks surprised. “I just wanted to get to know your friend better. Seems everyone in town just adores him, and I wanted to see what all the fuss is about. Besides, if he’s going to date my nephew, I think I have a right to know him better!”
“Dating? We’re… we’re not—” I sputter. “We’re just… shit.”
“Language,” Nina scolds me.
“We’re dating,” Cal tells the whole table quite loudly.
Abe and Nina grin. My mom looks stressed. Mary looks confused. Christie looks triumphant. I look embarrassed, I’m sure. And Cal? Cal looks pretty damned pleased with himself.
“I guess,” I mumble. “Let’s just drop it, okay?”
Dinner resumes, conversations veering here and there. Sometimes I speak up, other times I listen. I try to include Cal, steering the conversation away from any dangerous topics. My mom had asked me before why we just didn’t tell Mary and Christie about Cal since they were the only ones here who didn’t know, but I’d asked her to keep it under wraps for now. Mary, though I love her, isn’t known for her discretion, and I didn’t need Cal’s coming-out angel party to include the whole damned town. In my head I saw the swarms of media that would descend on Roseland, cameras flashing, reporters shouting. Then scientists would come and whisk him away to some secret underground testing facility where they would experiment on him, trying to find some way to hold him hostage and try to ransom him off to God. It was an awful thought, but one I believed to be entirely plausible. I put the kibosh on that idea as soon as it’d come from her mouth.
Dating, I think, barely able to restrain the eye roll. The concept behind it is so completely ludicrous I can’t even grasp it. One does not date a guardian angel, even if one is having sex with a guardian angel. Even if one has developed… feelings for said angel that defy logic or explanation. At the very least, I don’t deserve someone like him, to be sure. One can’t get smaller than being a small-town boy from a place like Roseland. I run the town’s only gas station, which still bears the name of my dead father. I have no prospects for the future. I a
m drowning in my own grief. I am selfishly motivated and desperate for answers I don’t know how to get.
But even then, even with these thoughts, even with the conversations around us, something happens. Abe is talking about the caves in the back hills again, most likely filled to the brim with gold nuggets the size of ponies. Christie listens with rapt attention, her eyes glittering with excitement. Mary and Mother are discussing the upcoming festival, and what they’ll need in order to prepare all the pies that have been ordered. Nina sits counting the peas on her plate with a look of pure concentration on her face, her tongue peeking out between her teeth as she moves each one from one side of the plate to another. This is my family, and the noise around me is soothing in a way it hasn’t been in quite a long time. That’s mostly my doing, I know, given my self-imposed exile in the Land of Sorrow. But hearing the overlapping voices and laughter, seeing the bright eyes and smiles, does more for me than I ever thought it could.
The strangely joyous moment is only confirmed when through it all, the noise, the laughter, the brightness of the room, I feel a hand on mine underneath the table. I turn my hand palm up and long fingers brush along the skin, causing the hairs on my arm to stand on end. I’m electrified as Cal brushes the tips of my fingers with his own. This is nothing erotic, though my dick thinks it’s a fine idea. The touch is not meant to be about sex. It is touch, feelings conveyed through a simple action that mean more to me than any words. He slides his fingers between my own, engulfing me as we blend together. I can feel him watching me out of the corner of my eye, and I think to turn, but realize I don’t have control of my emotions. It’s too much. It’s all too much, and I think about getting up and leaving the table. But he knows, like he always does, and squeezes my hand tightly, letting me know that he isn’t going to let go, no matter how hard I fight against it. Only he knows at that moment what is running through my head. Only he knows.
Eventually, I calm. Eventually, I stop listening to the little voices in my head telling me it won’t matter in the long run; I will lose everything and be alone again. Eventually it feels like blessed silence.
The only thing missing is my father. His presence doesn’t loom over the table as much as it has in the past when the remaining family came together those few times after he drowned. Then, it was like a large unspeakable thing had fallen over us all, threatening to bury us with its weight. It is still crushing. Devastating. Still painful, yes. Still there, yes. But it’s almost muted somehow, like seen through a fog. The warm hand in mine squeezes again and the fog shifts, only to come into sharper focus, and I recognize it for what it is.
It’s in my mother’s laugh, a sound as big as I can ever remember. It’s in the way Nina blushes when Cal winks at her. It’s the way Mary leans over and brushes a lock of hair out of Christie’s face. It’s in the way Abe drops a hand on my shoulder and tells me he thought he heard a rumbling noise in his old Honda and wants to bring it in next week for me to check it out.
We are moving on. We are letting go. I am realizing that some things might be more important than my own selfish desires for answers I might never find. It burns, this feeling. It hurts. It claws at me, but it’s undeniable. Cal glances at me again, those dark eyes sparkling, and it’s like a hammer to my chest.
But then that feeling is taken away only a short time later.
We’re clearing the table when my mother comes out from the kitchen, wringing her hands. I wonder at it, having noticed her pointed looks at Cal that got more and more obvious over the past hour. I don’t know what she’s up to, and I have a feeling I don’t want to know. She’s planning something, her nervous hands doing little to detract from the determined look in her eyes.
