The Speed of Slow Changes, page 10
“Okay,” Al grumbled.
“How are my babies?”
“Al and Teach are fine. Teach has a fever. But Al’s good. Oh, your girls are doing great too.”
She laughed.
“All right, thanks,” Al muttered. He stood and handed me the phone. “I’m gonna go check on ’em.”
“I…but,” I said, trying to stop him, pointing to the huge devil curb-stomping his own army trying to get to us.
“What do you think is up with the kids?” Dani asked.
“I’m gonna die,” I called after Al. The devil roared.
“Just run away, that’s what I do,” she said. I followed her advice as Al’s abandoned avatar was swallowed by hell’s mob. “Lucas, the girls.”
“Oh, shit. Well, I took all their temperatures.”
Dani asked a few rapid-fire questions about the kids, then she picked up where we had left off talking about dynamic versus static stretching. Al retrieved his character and took us to a town to buy more health and trade in all his loot for gold. Eventually she hung up. Al didn’t wait. He picked up the conversation as if she had never interrupted and I just vibed, talking about whatever came to mind.
I went home after midnight, making sure Ky got her twenty bucks’ worth. She was asleep when I came in, so I just joined her. It wasn’t until I was about to fall asleep that night that I realized Al hadn’t rescheduled our date. Luckily, I didn’t have to think about what that meant. I just drifted off instead.
Chapter Seven
Alexander
As it turned out, the kids had fifth, as common as any other childhood disease. Teach did as well, and he was completely annoyed. That also meant they were out of school for a while. Teach was home with them, and so was Coach, since he was too old and too vaccinated to catch it. The rest of the kids were staying with Bets.
I tried to reschedule with Lucas for the next Friday, but he was taking Ky out. It was hard to text with him. Most of what I sent went unanswered for most of the day, and even when I called him in the evenings, the conversation never turned toward our dates. It felt like maybe he was avoiding me.
I was very distracted by Friday, the same Friday he didn’t want to go out with me. The same one Ky got to go out on. Not that I was jealous of his wife. I wasn’t. She was great, and it was no problem for him to take her on a date instead of going out with me. Jealousy didn’t even play into it. The Gunner can’t bluff his way out of this one.
“Mr. Jefferson,” the voice on the phone said.
I blinked. My office came back into focus. “Yes, Mrs. Reed, I’m sorry, what were you sayin’?”
“I’m talking about the land behind my house,” she said.
“Yes, I know, Mr. Jacob’s field.” It took everything I had not to sigh.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He keeps tearing up my field. I need you to come out here and flag the property lines so I can fight his destruction of my property.”
I pulled my hat brim, taking it off and tossing it on the desk. Every three weeks or so, Mrs. Reed called to try and talk me into appraising Mr. Jacob’s field as land she owned. I tried to explain Mr. Jacob had earned it by paying off his father’s debt to her father, one of the only examples of sharecropping in the area that I think went the way it was supposed to. But she never listened. Or she had dementia and forgot we already talked about this. I couldn’t tell which.
“Mrs. Reed—” My personal phone buzzed with a text from Lucas.
Got time for lunch? I’m downstairs.
I looked out the window behind me, and there he was on the street looking at his phone.
“Mrs. Reed, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later. Take care.” I hung up without waiting for her to say anything, and I trotted down the stairs.
“Hey,” I said, holding the door open. “What’re you doin’ here?”
“I was at the gym and needed food. I figured you’d be here.”
“Come on in.”
He followed me up to my office. The office was two stories. We met customers on the first floor but kept the private desks on the second. Paul was out of town for the next few weeks and Teach was still recovering, so it was just Lucas and me. I felt suddenly nervous.
“Nice digs,” he said, setting a bag of Chinese takeout on the desk.
“This restaurant isn’t in Painted Waters.”
“True.”
“So, you went to the gym, drove to Valdosta to get food, then drove back?”
He laughed. “Not quite. I was at the hospital in Valdosta this morning to talk with a coordinator, then I went to Beast.”
“Good Lord,” I sighed, sitting at my desk.
“Yup, Dani is a monster,” he said, rolling his shoulder as if trying to work out a knot. Or maybe it was just the memory. Beast was an intense gym, and she was their top personal trainer.
“Tell me about it. I used to work out with her, but I learned better.”
“Anyway, she recommended this Chinese place and suggested I’d probably find you here.”
God bless Dani. I watched Lucas flop into Paul’s chair. I waved him over and cleared shit off my desk as I waited for him.
“It’s good food,” I tried to assure him.
He grinned and rolled up to the other side of the desk.
“Where you takin’ Ky tonight?” I asked. Was I trying to test myself? Maybe. Was I passing? The skeptical look on his face made me think I wasn’t.
He squinted but answered, “She likes Grace’s, so that’s probably where we’ll end up.”
I nodded. “Who doesn’t like Grace’s?”
He pulled out the folded paper boxes of food and placed them on the table. “I figured we could share since I wasn’t sure what was good. Dani made a few suggestions, but fuck if I can tell what’s what.”
I nodded and helped him empty the bag. “Why’d you look at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“When I asked about Ky.”
He squinted again.
“Don’t want to tell me?” I asked as lightly as I could.
“It’s not that I don’t. I guess I don’t really know what you want to know. You know?”
“Huh?”
“Like, Ky and I talk about you because she wants to know. But I also know the stuff she doesn’t want to know about. She has her limits when it comes to information about metas, but I don’t really know where the overlaps are, if that makes sense.”
“I get that. I want to know. I enjoyed hangin’ out with her at dinner and I’m not tryin’ to avoid gettin’ to know Ky. I get if you want to keep it more parallel, though. Just let me know.”
I paused to think about how to say more. I felt like I had known him for years, like he was so ingrained in my life it never occurred to me I might not be as ingrained in his. I knew other poly people who didn’t have a relationship with their metamours, nor did they expect one. I couldn’t keep people away from Dani even if I wanted to. She was too charismatic. I couldn’t tell with Lucas, so I waited for him to tell me.
“Either that tastes like crap or you’re thinking too hard,” Lucas said. To confirm it for himself, he reached over and picked up some of the meat with his chopsticks. “It’s pretty good, so what’s with the face?”
“I was thinkin’.”
“I noticed.” He was sitting facing the window behind me, and the sun was bright on his face, his skin warm and magnificent. His smile was perfect.
“What’s Ky do for a livin’? Like, I know she’s a scientist, but specifically? I wasn’t really listenin’ the other night.” I decided to just keep going as I was.
He chewed slowly and stared. “That’s what you were thinking so hard about?”
“No, I was thinkin’ about what you said about disclosing expectations about information on our partner’s other partners. I’m not really sure what more to say about that and was tryin’ to think of somethin’, but then I realized I didn’t know exactly what Ky does for work.”
“Dr. Kyoko Laverty-Okamoto is a soil scientist for the state of Georgia,” Lucas said. “Her last paper was about the variation of soil nutrition under different crop rotation practices.”
“Wow, that sounds like a read.”
“Yeah, it’s funny sometimes how niche her field seems, but how valuable it is.”
“Hell, who knows the value of land better than this guy,” I said, pointing to myself.
He nearly dropped his chopsticks. “Oh shit, is my type ground type?”
I laughed. “As opposed to fighting?”
He grinned and looked a little impressed that I knew anything about Pokémon. He said, “I don’t fight. I mostly pick up heavy stuff and move it around.”
“So, what’s she workin’ on now?”
He considered me for a second before he answered. “What do you know about biosolids?”
I gulped. And spent the next half hour regretting having asked. Not that I regretted listening to him talk about Ky. That was pretty charming. No, I just regretted learning what biosolids were. The conversation flowed naturally from there into other topics, like how they met, what it was like to go to an HBCU, and how he ended up in Painted Waters. He asked me things too, but I didn’t pay much attention to what I said. We had just finished making fun of the fortunes in our cookies when the bell at town hall told us it was one in the afternoon.
“I maybe should get going?” Lucas said, “You probably have a lot to do.”
He stood and started packing the trash back in the bag the food had come in. I didn’t want him to leave, so I came around the desk and put a hand on his shoulder. Then I pulled him into a hug. Despite having kissed and come together, I don’t think we had hugged properly.
“Thanks for lunch,” I said. Lucas just nodded into my shoulder. He put his hands around my waist and pulled me just a bit tighter.
“Please? Dinner…movie…somethin’?” I asked.
He pulled back and looked at me. “Next week? Saturday?”
“Yeah, perfect,” I said. I didn’t know what was already on my calendar for Saturday, but I was canceling it. I noticed the concern under his contented expression. “I know it seems like a lot of missed opportunities, but I still believe in this.”
I traced the Incredible Hulk on his chest. It was my shirt. He hadn’t actually cut the sleeves off it like he threatened, and I think it meant something that he wore it today, even knowing he would see Dani at the gym.
He rolled his eyes, but I had earned my kiss anyway. I felt something slightly more desperate in each kiss we shared. It was starting to feel like any day now I would start kissing him and find myself unable to stop, attached to him forever. I wanted that. I could feel the thrum of his pulse under my hands on his neck, and I could almost taste the same want for more on his lips. I kissed him harder, deeper, his mouth opening, following the trajectory of my thoughts.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
Lucas and I jumped apart. I had to turn around to see who it was, but the horrified look on Lucas’s face as he stared over my shoulder was enough to let me know it was worse than I could imagine.
“Betsy?” I said, facing her.
“Oh no, no, I will not abide this,” she was saying. She looked ready to kill. “How dare you? Both of you. You have beautiful wives and beautiful children—”
“Bets,” I said putting myself between her and Lucas. “It’s not what you think.”
“The hell it ain’t,” she screamed.
As she talked, she pulled her hoop earrings out and kicked off her heels. She fumbled only slightly getting her suit jacket off. Honestly, I would have rather she pulled a gun, which I knew she carried. She marched up to me and tried a right hook, which I caught on my shoulder.
“Ow, no, fuck, seriously listen,” I begged, shielding my face.
“I can’t believe you’d do somethin’ like this, Alexander. That woman deserves so much better. I thought you were better—”
I took a left jab to my ribs.
“Christ, Bets, we aren’t cheatin’.” I backed up until I was practically climbing my desk to get away.
“They know! Our wives know,” Lucas said from somewhere behind me.
Betsy finished rapid-fire punching my shoulder. Then she took a breath.
“Yeah, they know. I swear, I can explain,” I said.
“What?” she said, her astonishment exaggerated by her breathlessness.
“We’re both in open marriages. They know, Bets. Jesus Christ.”
Betsy took a step back from me and turned in a confused circle. I backed off my desk and found Lucas crouching under it.
“All right,” she said, putting her hands on her hips in a way that looked like our mother, not that I would ever say that to her. She paced away a few steps. “You have one minute to explain before I start makin’ phone calls.”
“Dani and I’ve always had an open marriage. She dates a few other people. Lucas and I only recently started this. It’s called polyamory. She knows he’s here, what we do. She knows.”
“Ky too. Well, Ky doesn’t date anyone, but she knows about him,” Lucas said. He was still half hidden behind the desk.
“What are you, some sort of wife swappers?”
“Do we look like wives?”
She squinted, marched back across the room, and landed a perfect left cross on my already bruised arm. She was just about as tall as I was and maybe slightly stronger. It hurt.
“What the fuck, ow.”
“That’s for scaring me. I swear I was ready to have you both stoned to death in the street like biblical whores,” she said, taking a deep breath.
“Would it be bad if I left? I think I shit myself,” Lucas said, daring to stand.
“No—yeah, I got this. I’ll text you later,” I said.
Betsy watched him leave, which he did faster than anything. When he was gone, she went to the couch and collapsed on it, not ungracefully, but clearly exhausted. In her attempt to kill me, her polka-dot blouse had come out from her pencil skirt, and her hair had come loose from the weird puffy bun she wore. She looked like a suburban wine mom back from mimosas.
“I’m sorry, Bets,” I said, crossing to her.
“Is this real, Al? You really seeing Lucas?”
“Yeah, I swear it.”
“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“I was plannin’ on it, but I don’t even know what we are yet in relationship terms.”
“Naw, not just about him, but about the whole thing. You said you and Danielle were always open?”
I nodded and slowly explained it all to her.
“Welp, I guess I can’t blame you for not sayin’ anythin’ after all this time. Our family ain’t been the best at non-traditional lifestyles, or however the kids are sayin’ it.”
I felt like that was an opening for what I thought should have been a more important conversation.
“Bets, why aren’t you surprised that…Well, you don’t seem surprised to have caught your brother kissin’ a guy.”
She sighed, sat up, and looked wistfully at a photo on the wall. “If I had a nickel for every time I caught my brother kissin’ a boy…”
She stood and went to the photo. It was a fake door hiding what used to be a safe. Our grandfather kept a stash of whiskey in there. She fetched it and poured us both a shot in some of the paper cups that came with the water dispenser.
“You’d be rich?”
“Naw, I’d have two nickels, but it’s interesting that it’s happened twice. Honestly, I always thought it’d be you. After seeing how the Frank and Orion thing impacted you, we all kind of thought it’d be you. Even Wynona caught on. She’s the one who asked Coach to talk to Orion to try and get Frank away from him. When that didn’t work, she tried to get Coach to make him quit the team. She didn’t want him infecting you.”
“No way,” I said, even though it sounded exactly like something she would do. Betsy Ross shot back her whisky like an old pro, and I shot mine back like someone who’d never had whiskey before.
Bets talked through my coughing. “Yup, when she left, I thought it was honestly out of sight out of mind, but then Teach came out. Coach didn’t know what to do, so he called Wynona, and she’s the one who had him sent to her.”
“I thought he wanted to go.”
“Not at all, and I didn’t want to send him, but then I didn’t know what I could do.” Her eyes got very dark, and she looked on the verge of tears. “Well, I did some reading online about homosexuals. The whole time he was gone, Wy never let me talk to him even though I called nearly every day. She was probably just bein’ hateful because I refused to talk to her beyond asking to talk to him.”
She did cry then and looked into her cup. I waited.
“Lord, I remember that day he called like it was yesterday. He’d been there for about a year. I was watching the girls we had around, Gage’s four and my two. Daniel was out of town. I was stayin’ home full-time, pregnant to the teeth with Mag. When I answered, Teach was sobbing so hard I almost couldn’t understand him. He said she was gonna send him to a camp.”
“Oh my God. What?” I said. I’d never heard any of this. I had been at college at the time and had a kid on the way. I was so caught up in my own life, I never thought about what it meant for Teach to be with Wynona.
Betsy looked at me and quickly wiped her face. “Yup, she was awful to him. She had some preacher comin’ out to the house at least twice a week, and then he was forced to go to therapy at the church. Every time he tried to run, the sheriff would just take him back. He had to wait until she was showering to call me, hiding in the shed out behind her house.”
“Holy shit.”
“Right! Anyway, I listened to my poor, beautiful brother cry on the phone for an hour. Then he had to go because she was yelling for him. I tried callin’ back, but there was no answer. Then I thought about gettin’ the girls into the car and drivin’ up there myself, but I knew that wouldn’t work.”
