It's All Relative

Chapter 6: Road Trip

Chapter 6: Road Trip

My dad was up before any of us, getting the car serviced. “You should get yours looked at, Michael!” Mom hollers up the stairs. “You don’t want it to break down between here and Sugar Creek. They don’t have a Jiffy Lube, you know.”

“Close the door,” I tell Dan. We’re in my room, repacking everything I diligently unpacked yesterday, when I thought we would be staying for the next few days.

“Michael?” My mom comes up a few steps. “Did you hear me?”

As Dan eases the door shut, I call out, “Yeah! We’re busy here, Mom. I’ll be down in a minute.” I toss clothes from my closet onto the bed and sigh heavily. Can I just skip to the end of the week? “God.”

Dan takes the hangers from me and says, “Sit down, babe. Don’t let her get to you like this.”

“It’s not just her,” I tell him, “it’s everything.” But I let him guide me to the bed, where I flop back on top of the clothes and stare at the ceiling. Tonight I’ll be in Sugar Creek—my stomach churns in anticipation, the way it used to when I was a little boy. I would be packed for weeks ahead of time, and the night before we left for vacation, I was nothing but a bundle of nerves, as if it were Christmas already and I just knew I was getting something good. Sugar Creek always made me feel that same breathless excitement—finally I’d see cousins I hadn’t seen since the previous year, I’d go swimming in the creek again and ride bikes with Stephen Robichaud down to Grosso’s. There was so much to look forward to, homemade ice cream and large cookouts and late nights spent camping out by the woods or sneaking between bedrooms to tell ghost stories. Shaved ice from the cart in front of the tackle shop, fishing and building forts and waging battles against the girls. There were so many of us at Aunt Evie’s at any one time, it was like an instant play group—someone always wanted to do something. And in the evenings the kids would goof off in the backyard while the adults sat around, sipping cool drinks that made them giggly and pinked their cheeks, margaritas and piña coladas and shots of Schnapp’s. When I took a break from my cousins, Aunt Evie would pull me into her massive lap and let me stick my fingers in her drink. I can still remember the icy, slightly acidic taste of the alcohol. I knew I wasn’t supposed to have any, and that made me want it all the more. No drink has ever tasted quite as wonderful since.

My mom used to frown at me when I’d sip at the drinks. “Michael, no,” she’d say, slapping my hand away from the salt and lime. “Run along and play. You have a drink.” I had slushed Kool-Aid, which didn’t tingle through my stomach and coil in my groin the way Aunt Evie’s drink did.

But at Evie’s house my mom was just another child, we were all the same in her eyes. “Laura, hush,” she’d murmur, one large hand smoothing down my hair. “It’s just a little bit. Won’t harm him none.” That’s another reason I love Sugar Creek so much. There Evie ruled over us all, a matriarch who had the final say in anything. Punishments were lenient, rewards frequent, and if my mom rose her voice in anger, Evie was just behind her, hands on her hips and shaking her head. “Don’t carry on so.” Brushing past Mom, Evie would gather me up in her arms and tell us both, “Vases mend, Laura. Chairs can be fixed, water sopped up, the carpet vacuumed. Don’t yell at the child. He didn’t mean to do it.”

My throat closes tight in sudden emotion. I’m going to miss that woman.

She would’ve loved Dan, I know that without a doubt. This past summer I even thought about taking him for a drive up there, just to show him off. But I wanted to tell my parents about us first—Mom would’ve been livid if Evie and Penny knew before she did that her son was gay. So when Dan had a week’s leave, we went to Ocean City instead, took in the beach, the boardwalk, the nightlife. There was always next year, I reasoned. I could always visit Aunt Evie then.

Tears well up in my eyes and I blink them back. Dan looks at me as I turn away, I don’t want him seeing me cry again. I don’t want to cry, I hate this. Thrilled at the impending trip one minute, heart-wrenched the next.

Dan stretches out beside me on the bed and runs a hand up my arm, across my chest, over my shoulder until he’s hugging me close. With a sad sigh, I tell him, “I think I’m over it, you know? I think I’m okay, I can handle this, I’ll move on. Then out of nowhere it hits me again, the littlest things.” My voice breaks. He kisses me as one tear slides down my cheek. “I can’t imagine it without her there,” I whisper, burying my face into his neck, where he smells like Tommy cologne. “Evie was Sugar Creek to me.”

In his low voice, Dan says softly, “I understand.” When he was a boy, his parents would visit his father’s mother in West New York, New Jersey, a long, nauseating car ride from his hometown in central Ohio. He gets carsick in the back seat, and he tells me that he learned early on how to distinguish the rest area road signs from the others. Every one they passed, he would complain about having to pee, just to get out of the car. The minute his feet hit the tarmac, he was fine, but he dawdled at the rest areas, splashing in the sinks and hiding out in the stalls just to keep from getting back into the car. “It made me sick for days,” he says, talking about the road trip. “The first night at Ma’s, I couldn’t eat a thing. I had to take a handful of children’s aspirin and lay down in the back bedroom, the a/c on high and all the lights out while everyone talked quietly in the other room.”

Ma and her second husband, whom Dan called Uncle Ernie, lived in a condo building a stone’s throw from the Hudson River—from her balcony, they could look out across the stretch of water to the New York city skyline. “World Trade Center right there,” he says, his voice hushed. I fist a hand in his shirt and think about all the pictures I’ve seen of Manhattan Island—I’ve never been there myself. “We ate lunch on the top of one of the towers once. Ma kept saying the whole building was shaking, she could feel it every time the wind blew. I don’t even want to imagine what the view from her condo is like now that they’re gone. If you leaned out just right, on clear days you could almost see the Statue of Liberty. When we went up there the week of the fourth, we would sit on the balcony to watch the fireworks. Best seat in the house.”

The way Dan tells it, going to Ma’s was for him how Aunt Evie’s was for me. There was a pool at the condo, free for residents and their guests, and he spent his days splashing in the chlorinated water, playing water polo with the older kids, learning to dive. Sometimes they would go into “the city”—he remembers Rockefeller Center, shopping in tiny stores along the sidewalks, watching the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Everything that’s so stereotypically New York, he did during his summers growing up.

Uncle Ernie ran his own electrical business so he missed a lot of the trips, but Ma always tagged along. She held onto Dan’s hand with a death grip, but he didn’t mind. “I loved her,” he tells me, unashamed. I love the way he can open up to me when we’re alone. “She was short—when I was eight, I was as tall as she was, five four, five five tops. Really short, wiry hair like steel wool, always a mess of curls but close to her head, you know what I mean? Very thin, almost scrawny, with the biggest damn mouth you’ve ever heard.” He grins at a memory, his tiny Ma holding him in hand and bitching out a waiter because Dan dropped his ice cream cone. She wanted another one, no charge, and she wanted it now. Dan mimics her in a high, eerie voice that makes me laugh. “So hot outside, it’s a shame you give kids melted slop like that in a cone. And you have the nerve to call that ice cream? It’s nothing but milk.”

“Did you get another one?” I ask. We’re still lying together on my bed, and the more he talks, the closer I draw to him. With a hand against his chest, I can feel his words rumble through my fingers, up my arm. Packing is the last thing on either of our minds.

He smoothes the hair back from my temples and kisses me quickly. “Damn straight,” he murmurs against my skin. “Ma had a way of getting what she wanted, no matter what. The Pope himself wouldn’t have been able to withstand her. She was like a force of nature.”

Was, I hear the past tense in his voice and smile sadly. “What happened?” I ask quietly.

Quiet for a moment, Dan rubs my arm, my back, and I wait. I can feel the change in his emotion like a lull before an impending storm. “She died,” he tells me, his voice almost a whisper between us. “When I was twelve. Lung cancer, I believe. She always had to have her smokes. Menthol lights. She took long drags on her cigarette and always coughed when she laughed, but I was just a kid. I didn’t think anything of it.” I kiss the exposed flesh of his throat and he hugs me to him like a security blanket. “She lost more weight,” he sighs. “The last time I saw her, she had dark circles under her eyes and her skin was really loose, and I remember thinking she’d be in the sun too much. She was starting to look old in my eyes, you know?” I nod, yes. Though his voice is steady now, I know that it must have been something horrible for him at the time, and I know he probably kept everything inside, because that’s the way he is. Or rather, was, until he met me. I know him too well to let anything fester.

“My Papaw was in the Army,” he says. Ma’s first husband, his father’s dad. “Died in World War II, shot down in the Pacific, few days after my dad was born. I think that’s part of the reason I always wanted to be in the service. I’d see his graduation picture on Ma’s wall and he looked so proud in that uniform, so regal. She used to touch the frame and tell me that’s your Papaw. He died to keep us free. The way she said it, it was the most noble thing he could’ve done. I wanted to make her that proud of me.”

He never got the chance. In April of the year he turned twelve, Ma lost the battle with her cigarettes. It was the only time the Biggs family ever flew to see her, and the first time Dan rode in a plane. Being in the Army now, flying is old hat, but at the time he was terrified of crashing. “I kept asking why can’t we drive?” he says, and now it’s me trying to kiss away his memories, his pain. “What happens if I have to pee? I said. There’s a bathroom in the back, my mom told me, but I was too nervous to go. I just knew something horrible would happen if I left my seat.”

They flew into Newark, took a rental car to the condo. Uncle Ernie was there, alone. A big man with thick muscles on his arms who always reminded Dan of Brutus in the Popeye cartoons, he dwarfed Ma, but that day Dan said he never thought a man could shrink the way Ernie had. “Just sort of shriveled into himself,” is how he puts it. “Like he lost weight so fast, his body didn’t know what to do with all the extra skin. When he looked at me and I saw he’d been crying, that’s when I started to cry, too. I thought if whatever happened to Ma upset a man like him, it was okay to cry.”

They stayed a week. “Mostly to help Ernie square away the bills and whatnot, and there were a ton of insurance papers that needed to be filed. I kept thinking Ma was out visiting someone down the hall and she’d be back any minute. The day of her funeral, my mother woke me up really early because we had to get to the church by nine, and I didn’t…” Dan sighs. “I wasn’t thinking. I dreamed Ma was still alive. My mother was like Danny, come on. We’re leaving soon. And I was so mixed up inside that I asked her if we were leaving to pick up Ma.”

I stare at him for a full minute, savoring the way the early morning light that seeps through the curtains catches the highlights in his short hair and warms his face. “I love you,” I whisper, because I do, and I hope that my kisses, my hands, can ease the memories of the frightened twelve-year-old boy he used to be. “I’m glad you’ll be with me.”

“We’ll make it,” he promises. “You’ll get through this, Michael. I’ll make sure of it.”

I believe him. “I never went back there,” Dan says, “after the funeral. I just couldn’t. I thought I had moved on. But in September, when they kept showing the skyline on TV? It all came back. Every single moment I spent there, every word Ma ever said to me, everything. In such vivid detail. I closed my eyes and was back in her condo again. I could see the pictures on her walls, I could read the headlines of the newspaper she kept folded up on the kitchen table so she could do her crossword after dinner.” All the years in between were gone. I know exactly what he means—I feel that way thinking of Sugar Creek.

“I’m afraid I’ll forget her,” I admit. Here in his arms, I can tell him anything. “I’m scared that one day something will remind me like that, but I’ll have nothing to remember. It’ll all be gone. I don’t…I don’t want that.”

His arms tighten around me. “You don’t forget,” he assures me. “When you love someone like that, you never forget them.”

He’s right, I know he is. Aunt Evie’s too much a part of me to just slip away like the blurred faces of the boys I knew before I met Dan. Disregarding the clothes beneath us, I roll onto my back and pull him with me so that he straddles my waist the way he did last night. He fits perfectly, his legs alongside mine, and he leans down over me, his arms on either side of my head as his lips find my own. My hands rub his thighs, causing the light hair to stand up under my palms. My fingers slip beneath the fabric of his shorts, tickle along his upper thighs, rub against the confines of his underwear, and he grins against my mouth. “You’re bad,” he whispers, but he leans into my hands and I don’t hear him complaining when I start to stroke across the front of his crotch—

Suddenly there’s a knock on my door, and before I can extract my hands or Dan can slide away, Caitlin enters the room. “You’re worse than newlyweds,” she tells us, closing the door behind her. As Dan rolls off me and I sit up, Caitlin plops down on the edge of my bed and starts to pick at the clothes I laid out to pack. They’re badly wrinkled now. “Oh, don’t let me stop you,” she says, sarcastic.

“Caitlin,” I start.

“Cat,” she corrects. I’m going to have to get used to saying that.

“Cat,” I say, emphasizing the word. I cross my legs and frown at her—can’t she see we’re in the middle of something? Dan lies propped up on one elbow beside me, his body pressing against my hip so I can feel the interest hardening in his shorts. If she would just give us a few more minutes…but she doesn’t look like she plans on leaving before she’s told me whatever’s on her mind. With a sigh, I ask, “What is it?”

She looks past me at Dan, then meets my gaze, her eyes rimmed with smudged black eyeliner, her lashes a mile long with the mascara she has caked on them. “Let me paint you a picture,” she says. She wears dark lipstick the color of crushed garnets, and even though she’s still dressed in the faded shirt and boxers that she wore to bed, she already has a studded dog collar in place around her neck. The clasp hangs at the hollow of her throat like a locket. My sister, the freak. “Imagine yourself in a car,” she tells me, and I nod quickly—anything to get this over with and her out of the room so I can have Dan to myself again. “Mom and Dad in the front seat, fine. Ray beside you.” She lets this sink in. “For eight hours,” she adds. “How many rounds of that damn license plate game do you think he can go through in eight hours?”

I have to laugh. At least it won’t be me listening to him cry out, “I see Virginia!” every three minutes. Uncrossing my legs, I give her a slight push with my foot to get her off the bed. “Sucks to be you.”

“Michael, listen!” She grabs my foot and stands, dragging me to the edge of the bed. If it wasn’t for Dan’s arm around my waist holding me back, I’d fall off onto the floor. “Let me ride with you guys. I’m not asking much.”

“No,” I tell her.

She sighs dramatically. “You’re not listening to me,” she says. “I’ve got headphones and my Gameboy and a pile of magazines, a book I’m about halfway through—don’t shake your head at me. I won’t say anything the whole trip, I cross my heart.”

“Caitlin,” I sigh. “Cat, no.” The last thing I need is an audience. Eight hours in the car with Dan, that’s fine. Add Caitlin to the mix and Dan won’t say much, he’s terribly shy. She’ll think he’s being standoffish, she’ll pluck on our nerves, eight hours with Ray would be hell but I can’t imagine Caitlin being much better, headphones or not. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”

Dan tickles my stomach to get my attention. “Why not?” he asks, surprising me.

When I frown at him, she seizes the moment. “Yeah, why not?”

Ignoring her, I ask Dan, “Are you sure?” He shrugs like it’s nothing to him one way or the other, but that’s his way of telling me it’s cool with him if she rides with us. When I raise an eyebrow in question, he nods slightly. “Okay,” I concede.

Caitlin lets go of my foot and whoops in my ear as she gives me a quick hug. I push her away. “Just for this,” she says, “I won’t tell Mom you two got your freak on last night.”

“Caitlin!” I shout, embarrassed. I swat at her but she laughs and dances out of reach. Before I can say anything else, she’s through the door and gone. With a glance over my shoulder at Dan grinning at me, I point out, “Eight hours of that. I’m going to remind you that it was your call.”