The Speed of Slow Changes, page 27
Both that morning and the night before, we had taken full advantage of having the room to ourselves, using all four condoms he’d brought. We’d also slept together, in the “non-sex bed,” as Al called it. It felt exact and casual in the way true compatibility can sometimes. I honestly could have been on vacation.
We had a conversation over dinner about what it would take to be partners. It amazed us both how differently we thought about the title. Even when I got frustrated, he didn’t back down, insisting I explain what I wanted and needed from him. I wasn’t really used to starting with myself. By the end of the conversation, I was elated and terrified. We were really going to give this a shot.
Packing up and checking out didn’t take long. I had gotten a text from Chandler confirming our brunch plans, and I had confirmed for us. I wasn’t as sad or angry or confused or bereaved as I had been the afternoon before. It was all there, but some of it had receded into the past. Enough good had come from the trip that it was worth it even if nothing deep or fatherly grew from my relationship with DeAndrew. I had pretty much decided I was going to keep talking to him. Maybe I’d call. Or maybe I’d write so he had something tangible.
“You know, if Chekhov gave directions like you, the Enterprise would’ve been lost in space,” Al said.
I blinked back to the reality of being in the truck with him. “Ask Google, grandpa. Sorry I couldn’t print you out the MapQuest directions.”
“Penny for your thoughts?” he asked.
I shrugged and told him I was thinking about how to stay in contact with DeAndrew. I also gave better directions to the restaurant. This time it was a ritzy-looking pub-style place with mostly elderly white people in yacht shoes and pearls. Chandler waved at us from a table by the front windows. He was dressed in a suit, so the only identifying thing about him was his bright, tropical blue Miami Dolphins snap-back.
“Damn, I’d say I’m underdressed, but I did bring a white guy, so that’s got to count for something.” I laughed, shaking Chandler’s hand.
“This seems like a nice place,” Al said, looking around like he had never been anywhere that had actual tablecloths.
“Look, don’t let it fool you, in about twenty minutes a Judy or a Carol is going to get into a full-on fist fight with a Martha or a June. This might be a nice place, but it’s still the South, and the mimosas are bottomless. Besides, your grandmother owns this place.”
I looked around, floored. Then my anger flared. “If she owns something like this, why does DeAndrew Junior walk around starving?”
Chandler put his hands up. “I know…I know, but you’re walking in on the fifth inning, nephew. Welcome to the team.”
I took a breath. Al patted my back and asked, “Is she here, your mother?”
Chandler sighed. “Ma Nation? She’s not my mother. She’s DeAndrew’s, but she’s gotten used to me over the years. That’s also why things with Latisha are the way they are. Latisha is Ma Nation’s youngest and her hellraiser, but she felt like Ma left her to clean up after our father. Ma really has tried with Latisha. Anyway, Ma is on a culinary journey in Europe right now. But I wanted you to see the place. Besides, do you think you could’ve handled a grandmother too? I thought you were going to melt like a wax figure in hell the way you left the nursing home.”
“I wouldn’t have melted,” I grumbled. Al made a face as if to disagree. I just kneed his leg under the table. He laughed.
Chandler smirked at us. Then he reached down and pulled a photo album out of the bag he had set near his chair. He handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked, taking the black book. It said Memories on the front.
“It’s DeAndrew’s. I asked him if I could borrow it.”
I opened it. Inside were pictures of absolute strangers whose faces were almost familiar.
“I…I guess I wanted you to see how he was…how we were. I used to go to a support group for people who had family with memory loss. It was a lot of dementia and Alzheimer’s families, but it was nice. The only thing was I couldn’t decide who had it better. They talked about their loved ones losing their memories slowly. A little, then a little more. That part I couldn’t relate to. Then I was surprised by how many of them would finish their stories with ‘then all of a sudden, they didn’t know me anymore.’”
“The speed of slow changes,” Al said softly.
Chandler smiled at him. “Right. But for me, it was all at once. DeAndrew was fine one day and then the accident. To him I’ll always be twenty-one. Or at least that’s what we thought.”
“What do you mean?” Al asked.
I wanted to ask, but I was too engrossed in the photos. Him behind the wheel of a car holding the keys. A woman and a man holding a puppy, DeAndrew laughing beside them. Him in profile looking out a window. A woman, his mother probably, cutting the ribbon in front of this very restaurant. Painted Waters, Albany. Me—
I froze. In the back few pages of the book were my senior photo and, next to that, the letter I wrote when I was a kid. I looked up at Chandler, and he shrugged, already looking at me.
“I went over there this morning and I asked him if I could borrow his book. He said sure. Then for no reason at all he opened to that photo and said, ‘The kid at the back is named Lucas, he’s got my genes.’”
I lost sight of Chandler through the tears suddenly in my eyes.
“He remembered?” Al gasped.
Chandler shook his head. “Who knows? Years ago after he told me about you, Lucas, he let me look through the book. Whenever I’ve looked through it with him, he says certain things at each photo, even now the same thing every time. But at your photo, he’d only look at that picture with pride, then move on. He said that exact sentence once and never again until this morning.”
“What’s it mean?” I asked, wiping my face on my unknown grandmother’s fancy napkin.
“I’m not really sure. Maybe nothing. Maybe you mattered to him even when you thought you didn’t.”
Al put a hand on my knee. I looked at him in a way that I hoped was reassuring.
“Sirs, what can I—oh, do you need a minute?” the waiter asked.
“Naw…wait, I mean yes, we haven’t looked at the menu,” I said, closing the photo album. I would have to sit with that for a while. I didn’t know how to feel about my father keeping my photo, my letter. Mostly I realized, sitting across from my uncle and next to my partner, that I missed my mothers.
v
Al and I started the drive home right from the restaurant. Chandler said he’d call as soon as he was back in Georgia. He had some news to follow up on in California. I texted Ky and Dani that we were on the road. To my surprise, Al put on one of the audiobooks I suggested. It was my favorite horror novel. I fell deeper in love, watching him grimace and groan as the tension in the novel progressed. He made it three hours.
“I can’t,” he shouted, pausing the book when the killer stepped into the nursery.
“He doesn’t kill the baby,” I said. Al looked at me. All right, maybe he was looking a little green. “Okay, okay…thank you for trying.”
I took his phone to turn on his radio app for him.
“Is it weird that book reminds me of Wynona?” He half laughed.
“Who? The killer?”
“No, the parents. They don’t even believe their kids!”
“Al, do you want me to tell you how it ends? I’m worried you’re taking this personally,” I said, taking his hand.
“It’s your favorite book,” he snapped, teasing.
“Trust me, my high school therapist was worried.”
His phone rang. He pressed answer on the steering wheel. “You got Al.”
“What’s up with Coach?” Teach said.
“Uh, I left him with you, so…” Al said tiredly.
“Is he okay? Seizures?” I asked.
“Naw, not health. I know he texted you, but he’s being a cryptic weirdo.”
“Oh, that. No, he said he had news, but that’s all he told me,” Al said.
“That’s all he told me and Bets too. I thought he’d tell you more. Fuck, I wanna know,” Teach shouted. “Okay, bye.”
And he hung up.
“News?” I asked.
“News,” Al confirmed.
v
A month of holidays and joy passed before we found out what Jeffery Jefferson’s news was. That year’s Christmas was one of the best I’d had in the last few years. It took a week of trial and error to get Al’s new shorter work schedule to work for us, but it felt amazing to have that time together. I had been feeling relatively lonely for the past year, without patients and with my friends being far away and Ky traveling. But Al filled those spaces for me. He came with a whole world, his kids and wife and father and siblings, all passing through my days. And of course, there was Chandler and DeAndrew Junior and my mothers. Come the new year, I felt as if I had stepped into a new life. It was scarily beautiful.
I was reflecting on this when Ky, Lila, my mothers, and I arrived at Grace’s the third weekend in January. Ky got out of the truck first to get Lila’s seat buckle, then Jojo hopped out and Silvy went to help Ky. But I paused behind the steering wheel and watched people going into the restaurant. Betsy Ross and her husband were holding the door for Paul, Al’s business partner, someone who I had yet to meet formally but felt like I already knew. Al’s van pulled in right after us, and children were already pouring from it.
“What a crowd,” Ky said when I finally exited the car.
“Right?”
“What’s this for again?” Jojo asked.
“All Al said was Coach had something he wanted to celebrate.” That reminded me to grab the sparkling cider from the back seat.
“Lucas, Ky,” I heard.
“Hi, Rose,” I said, rushing out of the truck and taking her into my arms. She was radiant in her blue winter coat and furry boots. Her blond bangs peeked out from under her hat. “You remember my parents?”
“Of course, Silvy, Jojo—you look great. Lucas, you look well. How was your trip?” she asked.
“Who told you about that?”
She winked at me. “Word gets around in a small town.”
“Al told us,” Fin said, trailing behind her. His fiancé trailed behind him. I hugged them both.
“Al told who what?” Al asked, coming up behind me.
As a group we moved toward the restaurant, talking over each other, absorbing Ky and Lila as we went. Lila loved Rose more than anyone, so she ditched us in favor of her as fast as she could.
The inside of Grace’s was alive with people, feeling more like a family reunion than I would have expected. Coach had rented out Grace’s for a private party in order to announce his mysterious news. I did my best to talk to everyone as we waited on Coach and Teach to arrive. At some point, I ended up at the bar talking with Ms. Wilhelmina.
“I know Chandler’s mother,” she was saying.
“Excuse me, sorry. Can I get a beer?” a very tired voice asked.
Both Ms. Wilhelmina and I looked over. It was John Adams. I didn’t say anything, I just looked back at Ms. Wilhelmina.
“What’re ya having, Gage?” she asked.
He told her. Then he looked at me.
“Hello,” he practically mumbled.
“Hey, John Adams,” I said.
“Gage,” he said. Ms. Wilhelmina brought him his drink, and I expected him to take it and walk away. Instead, he turned to me. “Thanks, by the way.”
“For?”
He hunched, looking more uncomfortable than I had ever seen him. “Helpin’ Al out when the girls were sick.”
I tipped my glass to him. “I got you.”
He made a face that looked like a mix of pain and annoyance. Or at least it would have on anyone else. He was a grimy-looking man most of the time, but for this event he had cleaned up and even had his sandy blond hair combed back in a TV show drug dealer sort of way that, for all his faults, wasn’t unattractive. I realized his weird expression was him making a decision.
He put out his hand, thick and empty. I looked at it. Then, more by instinct than anything else, I took it. For the first time in the months we had known each other, Gage Jefferson and I shook hands. He nodded once and looked as if he were going to say something, but the room erupted in a deafening cheer. We both turned toward the sound.
Coach and Teach came into the restaurant. Teach dipped out of the path of the attention fairly quickly and Coach waved his hands to try and silence the crowd. He looked well, his face bright from the cold. He had a manila envelope in his hands. The room finally fell silent.
“I bet you all are wondering what this is about?” he said softly.
I met Ky’s eyes across the room, and she shrugged and squinted suspiciously at Jeffery Jefferson. They had met over an impromptu Christmas gathering at Al’s house when she, Lila, and I went over there to drop off a gift for their household. I waved at her and moved into the crowd to try to hear him better over the sound of the giggling children. That brought me shoulder to shoulder with Al. Al felt me step up beside him, because without hesitation his hand came around mine. Everyone here knew, and if my handshake with Gage said anything, no one here cared that Al and I were together, no one cared that we were married and dating, queer and interracial—none of it.
“Well, most of the time people get together to celebrate happy things,” Coach said.
A small murmur went around the room.
“Nothing happier than a finalized divorce, I guess,” Coach said, grinning.
There was a moment of confused silence. We all looked at each other. I wasn’t quite sure how to put two and two together. Coach stared back at us, his shit-eating grin more pronounced than I had ever seen it.
“You mean from Wynona?” Al asked.
“No, son, my other wife,” Coach said before doubling over with heaving laughter.
The room erupted as his news sank in. Everyone cheered wildly, and his oldest sons lifted him onto their shoulders like he had just won a sporting event.
“I’ve never celebrated a divorce,” I said to Dani, laughing. We had been pushed around in the swarming crowd and ended up shoved into a booth out of the way of the parade of Coach and his children.
She whistled with two fingers, high-fived Coach as he passed, then leaned back into me and said behind her hand, “I hope it gave Wynona a heart attack.”
On principle, I didn’t usually wish ill health on people. Looking at the Jefferson family and the distance they had come to undo the damage she had done, I figured I could make an exception.
About the Author
Sander completed his master of science from Purdue University in 2017 and has been published in scientific journals, is a speaker for Ignite Talks, and is a published poet. Wanting to see more of himself in fiction, his works feature LGBT characters and characters of color. He lives in South Florida with his partner, his best friend, and their many pets. As a Colorado native, he spends too much time telling Floridians how great the mountains are.
Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
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