Food for Thought

To Mate, Mary, and all assorted Spawn. And to Marie, RJ, and Amber, ’cause lobby-con can do strange things to women,
 and this was one of the best.

E
MMETT
G
ANT
looked at himself in the mirror of his dorm room, and wondered how gay he looked. He had a long bony face and gray eyes, so usually he looked just… solid and placid, a sober, rawboned specimen of American manhood.

But he knew he was gay. He’d known since his long ago junior high crush on his best friend, Vinnie. His crush on Vinnie had gone away—for one thing, Vinnie was just too awesome a friend to crush on for long. He was the kind of friend who would sneak all the seniors on the football field in the pissing rain, after the last home game, so they could perform their competition band show without instruments, singing their parts at top volume. He was the kind of friend who would show up at your dorm in Sacramento from
his
dorm in Chico, with a keg in the back of his aging Mini Cooper and a plan to go eat sourdough bread and look at girls on the beach.

He was the kind of friend who would nurse Emmett through a broken heart and not ask the name of the person who broke it—wouldn’t even ask the gender.

He was a brother kind of friend—but he wasn’t a crushing on kind of friend, not anymore.

Emmett had lived through the crushing on kind of friend, and had broken his heart, and he’d managed to pull his grades out of the toilet from that semester, and managed to put on some of the weight he’d lost too.

And now it was time to tell his father why he’d looked like hell for three months. Because right now, only two other people in the world knew, and they weren’t likely to tell a soul.

Emmett decided that whether he looked gay or straight, his sandy hair wasn’t going to get thicker or more interesting looking and it was time to go. He pulled out his cell phone and hit his dad’s picture. Ira Gant had a farmer’s face—but he’d been a factory worker, so maybe that was just the kind of face he was supposed to have. Raw-boned, like Emmett, unsmiling, he always seemed to be looking at a grimmer version of the world than Emmett could imagine, and his picture in Emmett’s phone wasn’t any different.

“Hey Dad? You must be outside mowing the lawn. Anyway, just a reminder that I’m on my way today, okay? I’ll cook dinner—I know you get tired of eating out. See you when I get there!”

Emmett’s dad didn’t say… well,
anything
, but Emmett
had
figured out that his dad liked it when he cooked. When he’d been about six, he’d once tried to make popcorn in a pressure cooker, because he’d been home alone and hungry, and they’d had an air popper, but he hadn’t been able to reach it. He had, fortunately, not killed himself by blowing up the kitchen, but the lid to the pressure cooker had frozen, and when his dad got home, Emmett was crying over the pressure cooker, because he was starving and all of the popcorn was
right there
and he couldn’t pry the lid open.

His dad had taught him how to make noodles then, and mac & cheese, and even open a can of beans and add hot dogs. Emmett had been the one to find the kids’ cookbook at the library, and then Vinnie’s mom, Flora, had helped him through the basic recipes.

Emmett’s dorm had a hot plate and a minifridge, but once a week and on the holidays, Emmett went to his dad’s place and made things like chicken cacciatore and roast pork with new potatoes, and he enjoyed that. He didn’t want to do it for a living, but being able to give his dad some sort of substantial proof that Emmett was grateful for his upbringing: that was important.

Emmett didn’t remember his mom—she’d left before he went to kindergarten—but Emmett’s dad had… well, been there. He’d hugged Emmett when he’d cried—although he hadn’t offered any advice on how to stop. And he’d tried to make sure Emmett grew up as a healthy child, although Emmett had needed to go next door to Vinnie’s house to know how to grow up as a happy one. No, a communicator Ira Gant was
not
, but Emmett was still sort of sure his daddy loved him.

For one thing, every Sunday when Emmett arrived, his dad was sitting out on the rotting wooden porch of the old stucco house waiting for him, even if it was near the summer and a zillion degrees outside.

This particular mid-April day, it wasn’t supposed to get above 80, so Emmett was surprised at the end of the two-hour drive to find that his dad wasn’t there on the porch. The house looked like it always did—the stucco was chipped and peeling, the porch needed to be painted, and the roof was probably falling down—but Emmett’s dad was nowhere to be found.

“Dad? Dad?” Emmett knocked on the door, but heard nothing. He had to use his key to get in, because it was still locked, and his dad hadn’t turned on the air or opened up any of the windows.

The house smelled… bad. Funky. Like a science experiment left in the petri dish too long, or one of his current roommate’s socks.

Like something organic and animal left to rot.

By the time he got to his father’s room, he knew what he’d find, but that didn’t make it any easier.

Later, after he’d called an ambulance and they’d come to take his father’s body away, the doctor would tell him that it was a massive cardiac infarction. That didn’t make it any easier to find his father, eyes open and milky, face blue, tongue black, dead in the same bed he’d slept in since Emmett was a kid.

T
HE
FUNERAL
was a quiet affair. Dad’s colleagues from the local clay-making factory showed up, looking sober and uncomfortable. Emmett had the impression that they would probably mourn his dad over beers, in much more color, later when they weren’t standing at the gravesite.

Vinnie and his mother and father and his entire family turned out.

They
provided color, and
they
brought all the flowers, and every one of them stepped forward to say something nice about Emmett’s father. They talked about how he always brought soda to the family picnics when he was invited, because it was the one thing that Vinnie’s mom did
not
let them have. They talked about how many times he’d brought home a ribbon or a doll or a backpack that one of Vinnie’s sisters had dropped, and how he’d spent an entire night looking for the youngest’s—Cecily’s—kitten when it ran away. Cecily came forward, crying, a beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed teenager by now—and told everybody that he’d found her kitten run over, but had gotten a look-alike from the pound the next day and had tried to pawn it off.

“Mom and dad had already told me, but we had a game of pretend, you know? I pretended I didn’t know, and he pretended it really was Snuffles, and Snuffles the second is still living in my room.”

So everybody had something nice to say about Emmett’s dad.

Emmett stood up and said, “Dad…”
Dad, I’m gay.
Dad, I’m gay and I never told you. I’m gay and my first broken heart almost killed me, and I don’t know if I can be gay and get my heart broken and be a man if you’re not at home on the porch, ready to just be my dad.
“Dad, we had so much to say to each other. And all we had was silence. I know there were ‘I love yous’ in the silence—those will have to be enough.”

As he and Vinnie were walking away from the grave site—and to Vinnie’s mom’s house, where there would be the giant reception with all the food—Vinnie took him aside.

“Look, I know he didn’t say it, but he loved you.”

Emmett nodded. He’d been pretty clear-eyed today—probably because he’d gotten all his hysteria out of the way when he’d found his dad dead. “I know,” he said, his voice dry and far away.

“No—I mean, remember how you used to show up on our porch?”

Emmett nodded. Of course. Vinnie’s mom and dad had helped raise him.

“Well, you’d just get up and come over, and my mom would ask if your dad knew you were at my house. You’d just shrug, right? So she’d have me or one of the girls go over and tell him that you were okay. And every time, we’d get up to where the yards met, and he’d be standing at the fence, watching you at the porch. He always knew where you were, Emmett. I think… you know… sometimes he just thought we’d do a better job for you than he could.”

And that, right there, were the first tears Emmett shed at his father’s funeral.

But it was the last time he’d think to himself,
I’m gay. And my heart was broken.
It didn’t seem all that important right then.

He should have known it was everything.

E
MMETT
’
S
FRIEND
Vinnie had the best family reunions.

Emmett, who had grown up as an only child with his dad, had always envied them. Fourth of July arrived, and Emmett and Vinnie would be on chair duty, setting up the backyard for relatives, over a hundred of them, people even
Vinnie
didn’t know. The pool would be filled and cleaned for the kids, and trees needed to be pruned so they didn’t drop leaves into the pool or on anybody’s heads or in the giant vats of food that every one of Vinnie’s female relatives brought or helped prepare in the kitchen.

Emmett and his father were always invited, and for Emmett, getting to run around with the other kids carrying sparklers and playing in the pool was better than Christmas. At Christmas, Emmett got presents, but at the reunion, he got
family
.

Emmett’s father passed away in Emmett’s senior year of college, and Vinnie got married to Angela this past year, and the reunion seemed especially important. Christine, his girlfriend, hadn’t been able to make it—she had to work, and since she was planning to take Emmett to her parents’ house for Christmas, Emmett figured he could go alone.

Besides, he really was surprisingly ambiguous about the whole “Christmas” thing, but he didn’t know what to do about that.

Instead, he immersed himself in the reunion, taking instructions from Vinnie’s mom, Flora, and eventually, after helping load the pig into the barbecue pit and the prime rib into the slow cooker, he became her helper in the kitchen.

“Okay, so, six and a half cups of warm water in the pot,” Flora said. She was doing something complicated with a meat grinder and stuffing fixings, even though it was the middle of July. Emmett had tasted her Fourth of July stuffing, though, and he had no objections whatsoever.

“Done,” Emmett said promptly.

“Three tablespoons of yeast.”

Emmett looked into the brown yeast container and tried not to think that this was a living organism, waiting to be released from dormancy. He threw the little bastards into the warm water and said, “Done!”

“Good, now three tablespoons of salt—stir it until it’s dissolved.”

“Done!”

“And now thirteen cups of flour.”

Emmett grinned at her, a slight, middle-aged woman with graying black hair and drooping breasts under a flowered apron that her mother had probably worn. Her five kids had been fixtures in Emmett’s life from kindergarten and beyond. “That’s not gonna be so quick,” he said promptly.

“I know it. That’s good, though. We can talk. Now tell me about this girl.”

Emmett started carefully counting cups of flour. “She’s nice,” he said vaguely. “You’d like her.”

Flora would
adore
Christine. Christine came from a large family, she was kind and sassy and liked to cook.

“Yeah, what would I like about her?”

“She’s got a big family. She believes in ’em. So, you know. Emmett gets a big family.”

He smiled happily while stirring the flour into the thickening mass of dough, because he really wanted that family.

“Emmett has us,” Flora said, not sounding as happy as Emmett had hoped. “I would prefer Emmett had a girl he wanted to make babies with.”

“Ew!” Emmett cried, and then held up the spoon with a gooey dollop of dough on it. “It’s, uhm, too wet. I think I need another two cups, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh.” Flora watched him add the flour, her usually generous mouth compressed into a firm line. “Please don’t lie to me, Emmett.”

Emmett looked away. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he lied.

“I happen to know that Jordyn is a boy’s name too,” she said, her tone brooking no bullshit, and Emmett kneaded the dough with unnecessary force.

“It’s a girl’s name,” he said.

“You’ll wreck that bread—it’s mixed enough. Put the towel on top and put it in the corner of the counter.”

Emmett did as he was instructed, thinking hard to try to get out of this. At the beginning of his junior year in college he’d taken the bus from Sacramento to Chico, just to have dinner at Flora’s table before he saw his dad the next day. He hadn’t announced why he was coming, he’d just asked Vinnie if his mom would mind.

That night, as he got ready to sleep in Vinnie’s room, Flora came in with an extra blanket.

“You look like hell,” she said quietly. “Who broke your heart?”

Emmett said the name without thinking. “Jordyn.”