Dinner at Jack's

Chapter 2: A Brand-New Life

Chapter 2: A Brand-New Life

I know, I know. You were hoping for all the drama, all the confrontation, the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf screaming match and snark. Maybe I’ll get to that eventually, when it doesn’t hurt so much to write about the details. Or maybe I won’t…Maybe I’ll be lucky and can simply move on without too much angst. For now let’s just say that when Ross came home from work that fateful day, things didn’t go as I thought they would. No, I had planned to stick my head firmly in the sand and pretend everything was fine.

Hey, I was almost forty years old, and that was exactly the kind of thing that had worked for me so far.

But I got a shock. He wasn’t prepared to do the same thing. Funny how that works. No, he was all set to give me the farewell speech, the one that goes along the clichéd lines of “It’s not you, it’s me” but which really boils down to “I don’t love you anymore.”

Shrug. Nothing ever lasts, does it?

Sorry to disappoint you, leaving out that big scene full of tears, pleading, accusations, and drama. As I said, maybe one day I’ll be in a better place to tell you all about it. But that day hasn’t come yet.

So let’s talk about now. We now find ourselves here, in Fawcettville, Ohio, the little Ohio River town in which I grew up, some two months later.

Oh Lord, how did I get back here? A place I promised I’d never return to, save for the occasional visit to my homophobic father and my sweet-as-pie younger sister.

I got back here—home—because it’s what a lot of us do when we believe we have nowhere else to turn.

When Ross and I broke up, he gave me a nice little settlement, buying me out of our house, giving me my car title free and clear and even a good chunk of the money in our various accounts. The good side of me believes he did this to be magnanimous, to show compassion and caring for me. The bad side argues he threw a lot of money at me to assuage his own guilt. I could have stayed in Seattle, could have continued my work as a personal chef, banked my money, gotten myself a little apartment in the gayborhood, Capitol Hill, and moved on.

But if I did that, there’d be reminders of Ross wherever I looked. The church we attended, St. Mark’s Cathedral. Our favorite restaurant, Revel, in Fremont. Discovery Park. Green Lake. The Chihuly Garden under the Space Needle. Hell, even Bloody Marys and eggs at the Mecca on Queen Anne on Sunday mornings. And every time I encountered one of those reminders, it would be like ripping the scab off a wound. And you know what happens when you rip off a scab? It bleeds. It doesn’t heal.

But of all the places you could go, you ask, sighing, why in the hell would you pick Ohio? For God’s sake, you had the whole of the West Coast to choose from, for one thing. Palm Springs is crawling with gay men—and it’s always sunny there.

Ohio? Seriously?

The best way to explain it, dubious as it may sound, is to say that Ohio was where my roots were. It was home. Fawcettville is just on the border where Ohio meets the western edge of Pennsylvania and the northern panhandle of West Virginia. It’s pretty there. Tree-covered hills, which in the fall are a riot of color. The river meanders through the town, slow-moving and curving.

And it’s where I grew up, in a little two-story green-shingled house on Etruria Street in the poor neighborhood called West End. Cracked, weed-sprouting sidewalks; rusting, dented cars from the 1990s parked on the street, some actually still running; and an overhanging sense of doom because of the hills crowded around this deep-in-the-valley neighborhood. These were just a few of the features of my hometown ‘hood that Realtors left out of their listings. Dad was a welder, and Mom put all her energies into seeing that my sister and I were fed and clothed. And both of them, I must say, always made sure our home was impeccable, despite the going-to-ruin abodes of our neighbors.

I think it was Mom, though dead now for seven years from ovarian cancer, who really called me back.

When I lost Ross, the first thing I wanted to do was call up Mom, to cry into the phone about the unfairness of life and love. She would have understood. She would have cared.

Except I couldn’t call. They haven’t yet established phone lines or cellular networks to heaven, which is where I’m sure my sainted mother now resides, playing a game of two-card knock with her Sicilian aunts. Still, I imagine her sometimes, looking down on me and shaking her head. “That poor boy of mine—always unlucky in love,” she’d say to her aunt Sarah, who’d sit next to her around a great celestial poker table.

See, I felt no one would care as much about my loss as Mom. Coming back here was my way of being near to her.

And I do feel her now, all around me. Except those reminders are a comfort, not a pain, as I feared the ones in Seattle with Ross would have been. I know she’s watching over me and that I can come to no harm.

No harm? I wonder if there is such a thing.

I mean, Dad is still here, still living in the green-shingled house on Etruria Street. He’s one reason I wonder about coming back. My mother and her memory offer succor, yes. But Dad? Well, let’s just say he hasn’t ever really come to grips with the whole gay thing. Like, for example, when I called him and told him I was moving home.

“Hey, Dad. How’s things?”

“Oh, you know, could be better. My bursitis is acting up again. Hurts like a son of a b***h. And that damn woman who moved in next door with her cats? They come in my yard and s**t all over the place. Swear to God, I’m gonna get out my shotgun one of these days, and—”

I cut him off. I knew from past experience that if I let him, he’d ramble on for an hour or more, cataloging every ache and pain, every perceived slight from the last thirty years. That was Dad for you. Keeping score kept him alive.

“So, Dad? Dad? There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Oh? Don’t tell me you got AIDS?”

“What? No, Dad, no.” My father thought every gay man had AIDS and had held the belief since the early 1990s. “I’m fine. It’s just that Ross and I have split up.”

“Who?” he asked, like an old man who’d misplaced his hearing aids.

I rolled my eyes. He knew perfectly well who Ross was and what our relationship was. I’d brought Ross home for the holidays. Dad was invited to the wedding, even though he couldn’t make it. There was a VFW bus excursion to Atlantic City that weekend, if I recalled right.

“Ross,” I said, calling upon the reserves of patience I’d built up over the years. “My husband. Ex-husband, I guess I should say.” The divorce had just been finalized. Funny, I’d just gotten used to using the word “husband” with my dad, and now here I was, single again.

My father went silent. The whole idea of gay marriage, let alone when applied to his only son, was something he couldn’t yet bring himself to talk about.

“Dad?”

“What?” He’d suddenly gone tense, his tone abrupt.

“Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details, but we’ve gotten a divorce, and I have a nice settlement, enough to live on for a bit, and I thought I’d—” I remember stopping myself there and asking internally, Are you sure you want to do this? Really sure? And even though all the little sensible voices in my head—a whole chorus of them—told me to run in the other direction, I forced myself onward, both in my life plans and in what I wanted to tell dear old Dad.

I continued. “I thought I’d, uh, move back home.”

“What?” My father sounded surprised. “Here?”

“Yeah. To Fawcettville.” I chuckled. “Unless you have some objection?”

The line was silent for several moments. Finally Dad said, “What the hell would you wanna do that for?”

Gee, Dad, thanks for the welcome home. Maybe you might be able to muster up some enthusiasm that your own son would be close by…

He went on, “Son, there’s nothing here. Especially for a guy like you.”

Guy like me? Gosh, whatever could he mean by that?

“What are you gonna do? Work out at the Walmart? Because that’s about it for jobs around here, ever since the mill closed down.”

My father had been a welder at said mill, and it had closed down—about twenty years ago.

“I have some money, as I said.” I felt my stomach begin to flip-flop and beads of sweat pop out on my forehead. These were good, solid signs that I should rethink my plan. “With the cost of living there, I wouldn’t even need to find anything right away. I could buy a house. Outright.”

“The damn cost of living is so low in Fawcettville because no one wants to live here!” Dad thundered at me. “There’s nothing here, son! Don’t be an idiot.”

And my father actually hung up on me.

But did I take that as, oh, I don’t know, a sign or an omen that maybe I might want to steer clear of my old hometown? Oh no. Perversely, I think I was even more determined, after that phone call, to make a home for myself and Ruth back on the pebbled shores of the Ohio where I grew up.

So let me take you back to that first day arriving in town. You’ll see that I was not making a mistake.

Really, I wasn’t.