Page 29 of Sam & Justin

I was almost there when I heard a ghost from my past, calling out my name. It didn’t take me any time to place that voice. Even if I hadn’t heard it in years, I’d know it anywhere. My mother.

I turned around and saw her. She looked older than the last time I’d seen her, but it had been more than fifteen years. Her dark hair was streaked with gray, and there were wrinkles by her eyes and around her mouth. Those wrinkles became more defined as she smiled at me. “I thought that was you!”

I stiffened at the warmth in her voice because the last time she’d talked to me, there hadn’t been any warmth there.

I could still remember all of it, plain as if it had happened yesterday. I’d gone back to Gomillion for my friend’s wedding, and I thought that things might have changed. I thought that my parents would’ve had some time to deal with the fact that I was gay. I went back to the trailer I’d called home for most of my life and knocked on the door. My mom answered. I still remembered the flour, stark white against the dark blue of her shirt. I remembered the way her brown eyes turned cold whenshe saw me, so different than the warmth I saw looking at me now.

“Thought your dad told you not to come back,”she’d said.

I remembered the way those words stabbed me in the chest. Nothing had changed in the two or three years since I’d come out. I didn’t think anything had changed, but there was still that small, hopeful part of me that thought maybe it was different now.

“Hey Mom,” I greeted her. My voice was a croak, and I fucking hated it. Why the fuck should my mom have any kind of power over me after all the shit that had gone down back in the day?

My mom looked down at the two suits on my arm and up at me. “Another friend’s wedding?”

“High school reunion.”

Her eyes might have been warmer. Her tone might have been, too, but there was a cold kind of tension between us. I remembered baking with her some mornings back when I was a kid, when my dad wasn’t home. My mom had made the best cakes, all from scratch. She’d taught me too, but I didn’t remember the recipes. I’d stopped doing it when I hit double digits, when Dad found out, and time had taken its toll on the memory. My mom hadn’t pushed me to keep it up, but my dad, on the other hand, had been the one telling me that I didn’t need to be learning how to bake. It didn’t match his definition of what it meant to be a man.

My mom took in the words while she studied me. She was looking at me like I was a stranger, and I suppose I was. She didn’t know anything about my life now. “Has it really been that long?”

“Twenty years,” I confirmed, shifting from leg to leg.

My mom kept looking at me. She was smaller than I remembered. Had she been shorter than me the last time I saw her? She’d felt larger than life back in the day, and I did have to wonder if my dad would seem as big and imposing if I was facing him now.

“How have you been? Are you still in…” She trailed off.

“King’s Bay,” I filled in the blanks. Did she really not even know where the hell I lived now? I knew we were strangers to each other, but the fact that she didn’t even know where I lived stung like that time I accidentally kicked a hornet’s nest when I was a kid. My mom had been the one to mop me up back then, wiping my tears and taking me to the doctor’s office to make sure I wasn’t going to have any kind of reaction. “Yeah, I’m still there. I have my own practice now.”

“Practice?”

“Therapy practice. I’m a therapist.”

My mother nodded. I watched the way her eyes moved down to my hand, landing on my wedding ring finger. “No wife?”

My stomach clenched and twisted.No wife. As if she didn’t fucking know that I was gay. It hit me then, not only did she not know jack shit about me now, she’d missed so much of my life. She didn’t know I’d been married. That I’d had a whole ass husband and went through a painful divorce. It made me sick. It pissed me off too, because how the hell had I gone through all that shit coming out to her and my dad, got cut off, and she still had the balls to ask if I had a wife.

“I’m gay,” I reminded her, impressed that my tone was pretty steady. I wasn’t letting her have any of this anger. “In fact, getting an outfit for the reunion’s prom, because there’s this really hot guy I’m wanting to spend some more time with.” Okay, maybe I was letting her havesomeof my anger. Probably a bit messed up that I was willing to imply shit about me and Justin to my mom when I’d been bugged about saying anything about me and him to Axel.

“I thought you might have gotten past that,” she mused. That twist in my stomach grew worse.

“It’s not something I’m growing past,” I shot back. “Had a husband and everything, Mom.”

For a moment, I thought I saw something that looked like regret flash behind her dark eyes. Like maybe it was hitting her that she’d missed so much of my life. I wasn’t the same person now that I’d been back then. Or maybe she was mourning the fact that she hadn’t gotten to see me on my wedding day. Though if I knew her, she was more mourning the fact that I hadn’t met some girl to change me into the son she and my dad always thought they had.

She didn’t say anything, and I shook my head. “Gotta get these tried on. It was good to see you.”

I pushed past her to the dressing room, and that twist in my gut just kept growing.

I don’t think I realized how much I’d been hanging onto the idea that maybe, my parents might come around some day. That they might realize that they lost their only kid because of their closed minds. I’d kept a lot of information about myself public over the past two decades, and now I was realizing how fucked up it was that I’d been hoping things might change. Everything else in my life had—for the better and all that.

But as I tried on the ugly ass suits I found, I realized that some things didn’t change. I looked in the mirror, checking the fit on a gray suit that was less offensive than the garish powder blue one, and I realized another thing.

I was okay with that.

12

Reunion - Saturday Afternoon