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I asked, “Is this the same apartment you grew up in?”
“Yeah. She’s lived here more than thirty years. That’s our unit up there,” he pointed to the second floor, “and Miss Eleanor lived in this first unit down here on the ground floor.”
We came bearing gifts. Gabriel had asked me to stop at a grocery store along the way, and he’d bought a big bouquet of flowers and crammed four grocery bags with cookies, chocolates, muffins, and other goodies. “She never treats herself,” he explained, “and she has a raging sweet tooth. She’s going to try to say I shouldn’t have spent all this money, but we’ll just tell her it was your idea. Then she can’t argue.”
When Guadalupe Morales opened the door for us, she grabbed her son in a hug and spoke to him in Spanish before turning to me with narrowed eyes and shaking my hand. She was a tiny woman whose dark hair was pulled back in a bun and shot through with gray, and she was wearing a flowered dress and low-heeled pumps. Gabriel asked, “Are we keeping you from something, Mama? You’re all dressed up.”
She surprised both of us by saying, “You never brought a boyfriend home before. I wanted to look nice, since it sounds like I’m meeting my future son-in-law.”
I followed Gabriel into the apartment. We cut through the tidy living room, which had a huge cross above the TV, and went into the kitchen, where we placed all the grocery bags on the counter. Then he turned to his mother and said, “I am planning to marry Riley someday. Are you okay with that?”
She pulled a pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator and said, “I’ll admit, I had a hard time with the fact that you’re gay at first, because I’d always been taught homosexuality was wrong. But I finally realized this is the way God made you, and I know you’re a good boy, Gabey. You’re not doing anything wrong. I already had to stand up to my whole family when I got pregnant out of wedlock, and I can stand up to them again when you decide to marry the man you love. If they don’t like it, well, so what?”
Gabriel looked like he was fighting back tears, and I blurted, “Thank you Ms. Morales, that really means a lot to us.”
“I just said I accepted Gabey for being gay. I didn’t say I accept you yet. First, I need to find out if you’re good enough for my son.” She handed me the pitcher and said, “Take this to the table and sit down. You and me, we got a lot to discuss.”
“Yes ma’am.” I was grinning ear-to-ear as I did as I was told.
That night, we lingered over dinner with Gabriel’s friends at Seahorse Ranch. They were sad about the fact that he wasn’t coming back to stay, but we promised to make frequent visits to Catalina, and they promised to visit us in turn. Eventually, we went to pack Gabriel’s things, and when we finished we both collapsed onto his bed. “Just think,” I said, “we get to do that again tomorrow with my stuff.”
“We can handle it. We’re tough.” He smiled at me, and I kissed his forehead. After a pause, he murmured, “Today was full of miracles, between that amazing warehouse and apartment, and my mom not only accepting our relationship but totally falling in love with you.”
I grinned and said, “I don’t know if she fell in love with me, exactly.”
“She told you to call her mom when we were leaving. Face it, she loves you.”
“That was a nice surprise.”
“For both of us.”
I looked around and asked, “Are you sad to be leaving?” The room had been restored to its former, fairly generic décor, and the glass doors were open, framing that beautiful view of the lights of Avalon far below us.
“I’ll miss my friends, but I know it’s time to move on. This place was exactly what I needed at a certain point in my life. It was a safe haven, apart from the rest of the world. In a lot of ways, Seahorse Ranch helped me heal, and I’m not the same person I was when I first came here. Actually, I’m not the same person I was six weeks ago.”
I said, “I’m not, either.”
“It’s wild, isn’t it, how much we’ve both grown in such a short time?”
