O Little Box of M4M Box Set

The Gift of the Gay Guy-5

“And who’s this?”

To her credit, Editta Halvorson was cool as a cucumber in a twin set when she opened the door to Derrick and Lee. If Derrick hadn’t described the inevitable scene on their drive across town, Lee would never have even suspected that the little dynamo in sensible shoes had been frantically running about the house for the last thirty minutes, swearing in her own father’s quasi-Norwegian as she crammed another place around the pinecone-strewn table and rifled through the upstairs linen closet for an extra set of towels to set at the foot of Derrick’s bed. The consummate hostess, she would have slathered her own hand in sauce and thrown it on the barbecue grill before ever allowing a guest to feel the slightest bit unwelcome or unexpected. Even though Derrick had practically begged her not to bother, he could tell by the bemused eye rolls his sisters-in-law offered at the door like party favors that she had been nothing short of a whirling dervish right up until he’d skidded the rental car into the curb moments before.

She smoothed her hair—as if it had ever exhibited the temerity to go askew in front of company—and bade Lee a warm welcome.

“And as for you,” she said, giving Derrick’s cheek a playful smack. “You continue to insist on gaining weight, I see.”

“Only to annoy you, Ma,” Derrick quipped with an eye roll of his own.

“Now, Derrick,” she scolded. “You mustn’t talk like that in front of your little friend, here. He won’t know you’re joking.”

“Not to worry, Mrs.…um…that is…Dirk’s Mom,” Lee stammered. “He’s told me only wonderful things about you.”

“It’s ‘Mrs. Halvorson,’ dear,” she informed him unceremoniously. “And I’m Derrick’s mother.” She turned to Derrick. “How did you say you two know each other again?” she queried unslyly.

“I didn’t,” Derrick reminded her.

“Well, I’m sure we’re all on the edge of our seats,” she said.

“At least let them inside, Ma,” Derrick’s brother Chad said, lumbering into view from the kitchen. The youngest and largest slab of Halvorson meat, he held sway with Editta that neither Derrick nor their older brother Randy ever had, and she stepped marginally back from her post at the door to let the new arrivals inside. “They had a long night and a long drive,” Chad, who would have been Derrick’s ride from the airport the night before, reminded her. “Maybe after a couple of eggnogs we’ll play good cop/bad cop, you and me, get some information out of them.”

“Ten thousand comedians out of work,” Editta Halvorson lamented, quite possible for the ten thousandth time, “and what do my children want to be?”

“Chad’s a cop in Minneapolis,” Derrick told Lee.

“Yeah,” Lee said. Peering across the room at Chad through narrowed eyes, he added, “I know.”

Did I already tell him that? Derrick asked himself, but Chad surprised him by asking, “Lee Neustetter?” in an incredulous tone and charging across the room to shake Lee’s hand. “It is you. Wow, small world. How’ve you been?”

Lee shrugged. “I’m not at the top of my game right this second,” he admitted, “but big picture, stuff’s good.”

“Yeah, looks like it,” Chad said.

“You two know each other?” Derrick recapped. “How?”

A look passed between his brother and his guest, followed by a non-answer from Chad. “Back when I first started on the P.D.”

“Yeah, definitely a while back,” Lee said with equal commitment to clarity.

“You look…you look good.” Chad said.

“Yeah, thanks,” Lee said. “Definitely gettin’ it together.”

“Good.”

“You, too, I see,” Lee said. Jerking his chin at the kitchen apron stretched tight across Chad’s muscle-marbled chest. “Glad to see you’ve ‘got more time for misbehavin’.’” he teased, reading the catalog apron’s outdated declaration.

“Yeah,” Chad said with a laugh. “‘Since I started microwavin’.’”

“Not,” Editta hastened to chime in, “that anyone has microwaved Christmas Eve dinner.”

“The horror,” Derrick muttered. “Did somebody say ‘eggnog?’”

As the clan traipsed across the house towards the kitchen, Derrick introducing Lee to his sisters-in-law en route, the French doors to the backyard opened, admitting a quick current of frigid air, along with Randy and a swarm of Little Halvorsons crying, “Uncle D! Uncle D!” And once Derrick was ensconced in the breakfast nook with a mug of eggnog and a fervent retinue of young admirers, he relaxed, happy to let the snow-packed miles of highway knotted at the base of his skull melt away.

This was to be Derrick’s first Christmas at home without Peter, whom Derrick’s family had adored. Editta would still be denying that she even had a gay son, Derrick knew, had she not taken such immense satisfaction in being squired around town in the company of a charming doctor and introducing him as such to even the most passing acquaintances as her son-in-law. As in, “This is my charming son-in-law, Doctor Peter Wagner.” (To the hapless bystander who pressed her, “But I thought you only had boys,” she’d invariably harrumph, “Get with the times. Don’t you watch cable?”) Because Derrick could only take his mother in very small doses, and they only saw her once or twice a year, Peter was invariably a sport about distracting her. He’d been to Norway, he had a freakishly complete knowledge of the American Songbook, and he could go drink for drink with her at the card table in a way neither of her other sons’ wives ever could; eventually, horrified at the prospect of ever losing Peter to anything quite so mundane as another daughter-in-law, Editta came to terms with Derrick’s sexuality and what she insisted on calling his “choices.” Whereupon Peter drowned in two inches of water under a pile of especially rough-and-tumble rugby players, and Derrick lost not only a handsome and caring partner, but the one link to his mother that wasn’t charged with resentment and hard feelings. The invitation for Lee to join him at his family’s Christmas would have been wildly inappropriate under any but this unpredictable and oddly specific set of circumstances, but as his nieces and nephews gravitated towards Lee’s friendly and foreign energy, Derrick indulged in a swift and silent prayer of gratitude to Lee’s brother Chuck, thanking him for being such a prick.

Not that Lee had been overly forthcoming with details, but after he got out of the car—leaving the heater running, naturally—and was slogging across Chuck’s front yard, Derrick couldn’t help but clue into the signs that somebody was indeed home at Lee’s brother’s house. A series of little faces, if not the same little face over and over again, appeared between the curtains in the front window, and a television was clearly on, if not right by the front door, then elsewhere in the house cranked to an ear-splitting volume.

“What’s going on?” he asked Lee, inviting himself up onto the porch.

Lee just shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. My brother’s kind of a prick, is all.”

Derrick didn’t understand. “He knows you’re here?”

“Yeah.”

“But...”

“I’m ‘not welcome,’ apparently.”

“What, like, he’s not gonna let you inside?”

Lee shrugged and looked around the bare, frigid porch as if to ask Does it look like he let me inside?

“But it’s like a degree out here,” Derrick pointed out.

“Yeah, well...”

He felt naive and childish asking, but Derrick felt the need to say something. “Is everything okay?”

“Clearly, it is not,” Lee said. “Not that it’s such a shock. Chuck’s not really the forgive and forget type. I just thought, you know…it’s been awhile...”

“Forgive...?”

Lee shook his head. “Don’t worry about it,” he said again. “Look, this isn’t your problem. Why don’t you go on home to your family?”

“And what, leave you here?”

Lee shrugged again, and again the curtains parted on a chubby little face. A sharp staccato bark from inside the house cleared the window, but Derrick couldn’t quite piece together the dynamic he seemed to be witnessing. “Will he at least let you in before you freeze to death?” he asked.

“If he doesn’t, one of his neighbors will.”

“Do you know the neighbors?”

“Who knows?” Lee said. “Used to. Depends on who’s still around. It’s not like we were pen pals.”

Derrick stepped up to Lee and put a hand on his shoulder. “Is he really not gonna let you in?”

With Derrick on his left, Lee looked off over his right shoulder. “He’s really not.”

“Then at least let me drive you somewhere,” Derrick insisted. “Come on, the car’s nice and warm...”

Lee turned back to look at Derrick. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer,” he said, eyes dry, voice cracking, “but where the hell am I supposed to go now? This was pretty much at the bottom of my list of options, as you maybe could have guessed.”

“So come with me,” Derrick said, before he was totally sure that the offer was sincere. His mother would kill him for springing a last-minute guest on her, and possibly a good-for-nothing thief, at that. He had no regrets about pitching Lee out onto his ass in the hallway of the Lamplight Inn the night before, but Derrick had seen enough of Lee playing Santa at the hotel earlier in the morning to know that he had to be good for something, at least in the eyes of those kids; it was this Lee, who’d put plastic movie-star sunglasses for a skeptical little girl he didn’t know ahead of his own clean getaway, that Derrick just couldn’t bring himself to leave on the porch.

Using trusty Louise Burrell and a series of one-time corner stores and used-to-be schools as landmarks, Lee managed to get Derrick as far as the highway, and they’d coasted into St. Paul. It wasn’t exactly a preview of Lee’s tell-all autobiography, but Derrick couldn’t help but wonder just what would have happened to Lee if he’d driven away, and he felt entitled to a few questions.

“Sorry, Meat Ball,” Lee eventually allowed. “It’s not exactly a riveting tale of scandal and drama. My mom died when I was about eight. My dad was way more interested in drinking himself to death so he could spend eternity berating her for leaving him than he ever was in raising either one of us, and when I was fourteen, he got his wish, so much for my mom resting in any kind of peace. Chuck was like nineteen, twenty; a real big man 'cuz he inherited the house and ‘all the money,’ all fifty bucks or whatever my dad mighta had left. He wasn’t gonna have no faggot living in his house, right? Like where else was I gonna go? That’s what he’ll never quote-unquote forgive: I left anyway, and ‘nobody makes a fool out of Chuck Neustetter.’ Like that’s so hard to do. It was his way or the highway, and I made my choice.”

“And so today...?”

“Barely cracked the door. ‘You still a faggot? You sure look like you’re still a faggot. We still got a real strict No Faggot rule ‘round here.’”

“What’d you say?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Lee said. “Not like he gave me much of a chance, but what was I gonna say? ‘I’m straight til the snow melts, let me in?’ Why did I even come here? It’s not like I wanna live in Minnesota again.”

“You live in Denver now?” Derrick asked, the Denver airport being the first place he’d clapped eyes on Lee’s rangy silhouette. “Or where?”

“Yeah, Denver,” Lee said. “Well, I did live in Denver, anyway.”

“And now?”

Lee shrugged. “Not here, anyway.” He let loose a bitter “ha,” and Derrick waited. “I was living with this guy,” Lee eventually went on. “Older guy. It’s not like I was looking for a sugar daddy, but that was a lot easier to find than a halfway decent job. I don’t think he actually thought I was nineteen, but he got off on the idea that I might be. I turned thirty a couple weeks ago; turns out that was higher than he was willing to count. By the time he went out and found himself an actual teenager, I had no job, no place to live, and the credit card I used for this plane ticket had been reported as stolen. It’s my fuckin house too,” he grumbled. “Or at least it should be. I grew up there, same as he did. But I musta been drunk as f**k when I thought I’d ever wanna come back here.”

“I gotta say,” Derrick remarked, “that does sound like a little bit of drama.”

Lee waved off the label. “It’s only drama on TV,” he said. “In life, s**t just kind of happens. You come home, your key won’t turn the lock…Believe me, you wish they’d cut to a commercial.”

“Oh, I know,” Derrick said. Remembering Peter in those muddy short shorts—Why isn’t he getting up?—he elaborated: “Or change the channel, right?”

Lee barked another “ha,” this one in agreement. “Some days there just ain’t s**t else on,” he lamented. “What’s your story?”

* * * *

Derrick spared them both a rerun of The Life and Death of Doctor Peter Wagner, and instead laid out for Lee what was surely almost a play-by-play of his mother whirring around the house in a hostessing frenzy. And sure enough, when it came time to sit for dinner, everyone had his place. Editta nearly had something of a nervous episode when Chad had to fetch a chair from the kitchen, but she was mollified by Wendy’s firm insistence on taking the blame. “I miscounted, Ma.” Editta let her say it four times just to make sure the message was received that she herself had not dropped the ball before finally taking her place at Chad’s right. Randy and Derrick were both long gone from Minnesota when their father took up with a World Champion equestrienne and followed their example, and Editta’s June Cleaver impression demanded a Man of the House. Chad had resisted her repeated entreaties to move back into the house, but on Sundays and holidays he dutifully toted his wife and their five kids across the river to shore up the sense of 1950s stability that Editta seemed to require, and it wouldn’t do to have anyone else at the head of the table. He even cut the first ceremonial hunk off his turkey, but he drew the line at butchering the bird he’d spent the day coaxing into crispy-skinned perfection, and Editta had the grace not to voice her disapproval while Wendy set about the actual carving. “Otherwise it’s torn to shreds,” Wendy confided to Lee, “and you’d have nothing but turkey confetti to throw at the pizza delivery guy.”

Editta shuddered at the sacrilegious notion of pizza on Christmas, and Lee stifled a laugh when Wendy tossed him a conspiratorial wink.

“You do eat turkey, don’t you, dear?” Editta asked him. “You’re not something complicated like a vegetarian or a Hindu?”

“I’m not a Hindu, no ma’am,” Lee assured her, chuckling at the non sequitur. Were Hindus famous for not eating turkey? Perhaps in Norway? “The turkey looks delicious.”

“Well, good,” she said. Then, as plates were passed around, “It does, at that. Vær så god, everybody.”

“That means ‘let’s eat,’” Derrick translated.

“Try and stop me,” Lee said with a wink and a mouthful of turkey.