The Icicles

Chapter 2

“Snow’s coming down harder than what weatherman Jack said it will,” Sandy says, always throwing Jack Lane, a mutual friend of theirs, under the bus for doing a shitty job.

“Jack’s a good guy. He can’t help it that he sucks at guessing what the weather’s going to be. We have to give him credit when it’s due. He at least gets half of his predictions right.”

Sandy cracks the driver’s side window, cooling the cab of the truck. Someone has to since it’s too hot and feels like the shuttle to hell.

Does Jonah think this two-day trip is going to be a disaster for Sandy? Yes, of course. Sandy should have stayed put in Pittsburgh. Nothing feels right about this trip. He’s nervous as hell, but he doesn’t really know why. The right corner of his left eye twitches, and his hands are shaky. Jonah believes Sandy will have a breakdown by the end of this short trip: an explainable explosion of corpuscles along both temples. Boom! and boom!

“Jack told me you have a bunch of loons in your family. That’s what he called them. Loons.”

Jonah chuckles in the passenger seat. “He may be on to something. What else did he tell you?”

Sandy lifts his right foot off the accelerator. He’s careful of the combative weather and the road’s icy and slick condition. Nasty s**t. Bad weather all the way. ”Let’s just say it should be an interesting Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.”

“Jack and I go way back, which you know. He’s spent summers by the lake with my family. My mother treats him like one of her own sons, better than me most of the time. He knows a lot about the Icicles. All the good and bad things.”

“Has he spent holidays with you and your family?”

“Too many to count. Jack has seen the love and hate in full force. He’s always had a bird’s eye view of the chaos, love, tragedies, and whatnots. It’s probably why I’ve always considered him a brother.”

There’s a case of white zinfandel behind the seats, gifts for the Icicles. The bottles clink together in their box, and the sound is irritating. A perfect gift for an already polluted family.

The plan for the next two days is simple: drive northward bound from Pittsburgh to Channing, Pennsylvania, in Sandy’s truck and spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Jonah’s family. It’s the first time Sandy will meet the Icicle clan: Jonah’s mother and father, his younger brother, his younger sister, and his brother-in-law with a funny name.

Sandy and Jonah are nervous about the trip, each in different ways, having discussed the adventure for the last week or more. They try to analyze the trip before it happens, pulling it from the inside out, creating the worst scenarios and the best ones. So much talking. Endless amounts of chatter.

Sandy admits, “I’m nervous.”

Jonah replies, “I’m nervous for you. I can’t recall my family ever treating one of my boyfriends well. It’s always a disaster when I take one home.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t go. Maybe this is the biggest mistake of my life.”

“If you want to be my boyfriend…if you want to be coupled with me, Sandy, I want you to meet my family. It’s something you’ll have to do to be able to love me more.”

Sandy refuses to tell him the trip to Channing will be much harder than going to the arctic to study glacial melting and global warming. Sandy thinks it will be easier to spend the three weeks with his coworkers—a bitchy twink named Renaldo, an alpha male named Christopher, and an uneducated clown named Dixon who acts as if he is twelve—at RIES (Rowan Independent Environment Studies) than to spend two days with his boyfriend’s family. Sandy believes dealing with the freezing temperatures near the North Pole surely can’t be worse than confronting the Icicles. Surely.