Stones in the Road (12 page)

Yes.

Then why are they coming?

It’s their job. They have to. But it will be all right. I just want the house to look nice so they don’t have anything to complain about. And I want you to be careful when you talk to them.

Why?

Just be careful. Don’t tell them you sleep with us sometimes. They don’t like that sort of thing.

Why?

They just don’t.

Are you mad at me for sleeping with you?

Of course not.

I was scared.

I know.

I didn’t mean to make you mad.

You didn’t make me mad. Just don’t tell them anything like that.

Why?

You’re too big to be sleeping with your dad. You’re supposed to sleep by yourself.

I know. I’m sorry.

Don’t be sorry.

I don’t want you to get in trouble.

We’re not in trouble.

I know I’m no good.

Don’t say that.

It’s true.

Sweetie, please don’t say that.

I’m not like the other boys. There’s something wrong with me.

There is not. You’re funny, you’re smart, you’re handsome like your daddy, and everyone likes you.

You’re just saying that.

I’m saying it because it’s true. Now help me clean up
.

We picked up his dirty clothes, ferried the whole lot of them to the washroom.

Are they going to take me away?

No
, I signed.
Why would you say that?

K said the government takes you away because your parents are bad and they make you live somewhere else.

They’re not going to do anything like that.

Did I do something to get you in trouble?

No.

You’re not lying?

Cross my heart. Swear to God
. I made the sign of the cross to show him I was sincere.

Then why are they coming?

I don’t know
, I admitted.
Somebody complained about us, told them to investigate.

Why?

Because I’m gay.

You like other boys?

Yes.

So?

Some people don’t like it.

They don’t want you to have a boyfriend?

No.

Why
?

Just help me clean up.

M
Y
FIRST
mistake that day was to think home cooking would somehow make our apartment seem more normal, more “real,” as opposed to the “false home” we lived in, given that Jackson and I were raging homosexuals. Or… whatever. Since Italian food is about all I know how to cook, I started early by boiling down tomatoes to make real homemade sauce. Nothing said “mother” and “apple pie” and “wholesome family values” like homemade pasta sauce.

Jackson worked a disappearing act on the cornrows in Noah’s hair for fear that it might look “unusual.” I trimmed my goatee a little, and I only do that for funerals and presidential elections. As noon approached, we dressed in wrinkle-free clothes, and I even went so far as to wear a belt and trim my fingernails and put on socks.

While we waited, I tossed a salad and cooked pasta, sausages, and peppers, intending to invite the lady from the DHS to dinner, knowing she would refuse for professional reasons but thinking this would put me in a good light.
That nice man invited me to stay for lunch. Home cooking! He must be a wonderful father! He must be
—

I’d forgotten I wasn’t Paula Deen.

At about ten minutes to noon, when our collective nerves had reached somewhat of a fever pitch, I used potholders to lift the large pot of sauce off the burner and move it to the counter to cool. When I turned around, Noah was suddenly—inexplicably—right behind me, dressed to the nines and looking like a cast member on
Eight Is Enough
.

Several things happened rather simultaneously.

“Hah!” Noah squawked, as though he’d run into the hot pan and burned himself. That was all I needed, an injured child—a burned child, for Christ’s sake!—with the DHS on my doorstep.

The strength went out of my hands at the sound of his squawk, and I shouted while dropping the pan on the nice tile floor. The pot hit the floor with a loud bang and tilted at a crazy angle as red sauce splashed everywhere—and I do mean everywhere. This is a property of tomato sauce that is not widely understood by modern science, this propensity to shoot anywhere and everywhere at the drop of a hat. And then the pot crashed over and emptied itself on the floor, but not before throwing out long red arms and covering Noah’s freshly pressed trousers and shoes, not to mention my own.

“Are you all right?” I demanded, looking at the stricken expression on Noah’s face.

I stepped forward to inspect him, slipped, tumbled over, and went down.

“What the hell is going on?” Jackson called.

“Daddy!” Noah moaned.

“Shit!” I said, putting a hand in the sauce to right myself.

“Daddy!”

“What are you doing?” Jackson demanded.

“Making dinner!” I snapped.

“They’re going to be here any minute! What a frikkin’ mess! I told you not to cook anything!”

I struggled to get to my feet while Jackson sent Noah to his room to change.

The doorbell rang.

“It’s not even noon yet!” Jackson exclaimed in annoyance.

I stared helplessly at the door.

The bell rang again. Impatient, these DHS people.

Although I had sauce on my shirt, pants, shoes and hands, I hurried to the door.

“Go change!” Jackson ordered. “I’ll handle this.”

“No, I’ll do it,” I said, thinking it would look odd if I didn’t answer the door. Like everything else that morning, it seemed the right thing to do.

“You look like a mess!” he exclaimed.

“It’ll be all right,” I assured him.

I opened the door, and two ladies stood there.

“Susan North,” the older white lady said, putting her hand forward, then withdrawing it when she saw my hands were covered in tomato sauce. She frowned as she peered over the top of her glasses to look me up and down. “May we come in?”

“Of course,” I said, stepping aside. “We’ve had a bit of a….”

“This is Cynthia Holland,” Miss Susan said, indicating the young black lady who accompanied her. “She’ll translate for us. Is Noah here?”

“Um, sure,” I said. “Would you like to sit down?”

“Perhaps we could look around, if that’s not too inconvenient?”

“Of course.”

She went straight for the kitchen, which smelled heavenly.

“This is Jackson Ledbetter,” I said, introducing Jackson.

“I’m a pediatric nurse, and I know all about home visits,” Jackson said in a friendly but rather edgy tone of voice. “I realize you are here to do your job. I want you to know that I’ve talked to my lawyer, and I’m well aware of my rights in this situation.”

“We are merely here to visit,” Miss Susan said easily. “Your cooperation is very important. We are here to see to Noah’s best interests and nothing more. If I understand correctly, you are Mr. Wiley’s partner?”

“Yes, I am. We’re engaged to be married.”

“You’re aware that same-sex marriage is not legal in the state of Mississippi.”

“Perfectly.”

“So Noah is being raised in a same-sex household?”

“Well, yes he is.”

“Very good.” The way she said “very good” made it sound rather bad. She wrote down something on her clipboard and glanced sideways at Cynthia Holland.

Noah chose this moment to reappear, wearing nothing but underpants, a smear of tomato sauce on his chin making him look like someone had just socked him and bloodied his lips.

Now what am I going to wear?
he signed.
I don’t have
—

He broke off suddenly when he caught sight of Miss Susan and Cynthia standing behind us.

“Well,” Miss Susan said in a disgruntled voice. “Doesn’t he know how to dress himself?”

“I can explain,” I said.

“Are his lips bleeding?”

She did not wait for an explanation from me. Rather, she stepped around Jackson and me and approached Noah with quick, firm steps. Noah took one look at her, offered a fearful “Hooo!” and hightailed it to his bedroom, then slammed the door behind him.

Cynthia Holland looked at me, her large eyes full of questions and a fair amount of disapproval. Not exactly the best way to greet the DHS, those large eyes said.
Tsk! Tsk! Mr. Wiley
!

“I can explain,” I said, flustered.

As I turned around to make sure they weren’t stepping in the spilled sauce—I had carefully positioned myself on the edge of it to keep them away—I stepped in the sauce myself again and felt my foot slide. I reached out to the counter to steady myself, and my hand landed on the towel I’d spread out to dry extra dishes on. My foot slid a little bit more, I involuntarily jerked on the towel, and the glasses and coffee cups slid right off the counter and shattered on the floor.

The ladies moved back in alarm as glass burst and shot across the tile floor.

When I knelt down to collect the bigger pieces, my face burning with embarrassment and nostrils flaring with indignation at this fresh
humiliation, my knee hit a piece of glass, and a world of hurt shot upward through my leg. I threw out a hand for balance and found more glass, and I wound up flopping on the floor like a fish thrown on a dock.

“Wiley, what the hell?” Jackson said in an increasingly worried voice. “I told you not to cook anything!”

I struggled to my feet, my knee throbbing with shrill, insistent pain that I valiantly tried to pretend did not hurt.

“I can explain,” I stammered.

“We really would like to examine Noah,” Miss Susan said. “Why isn’t he dressed? Seems you would have made sure he was prepared for a visit such as this. Do you mind if we go to his room and see if he’s all right?”

“We’re required to show you around
at our convenience
,” Jackson said tightly, “and when it’s convenient, we’ll do just that. Would you like to sit down on the sofa?”

“He looked like he had blood on his face,” Miss Susan countered.

“It was tomato sauce!” Jackson shot back. “Now would you please like to sit down?”

“I believe I’d like to have a look around,” Miss Susan said. “That
is
why we are here, Mr. Jackson.”

“And I’ll be happy to show you around when I’m finished and it’s
convenient
. Would you like to sit in the living room while you wait?”

She seemed taken aback by Jackson’s abrupt Yankee tone and manner. She looked down at the clipboard and wrote something else. “That will be fine.”

Jackson took me to our bedroom, looked at my knee, which was bleeding, stood by while I washed sauce off my face, changed my clothes, and tried to make myself look presentable.

I was so upset at this point that I started to cry.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Jackson demanded.

“I wanted everything to be perfect!”

“Honest to God!” he muttered.

“Well, I did!”

“I told you not to cook!”

“I thought it would look good.”

“Let me do the talking. Please?”

We paused at Noah’s door, and Jackson did some last minute adjustments to Noah’s clothing choices.

Why are you crying, Daddy?

I hurt my knee.

Did I do something wrong?

No, baby
.

He offered me a look full of doubt.

It’s going to be fine
, Jackson signed to him.

Is my daddy in trouble?

No
, Jackson signed impatiently.
Now let’s go
!

I
LIMPED
to the chair next to the sofa where Miss Susan and Cynthia Holland sat and kept my eyes lowered. Jackson sat on the love seat facing us, and Noah sat on the floor next to him, looking up at all of us with a pale, pinched, and rather bewildered face.

“These visits can be upsetting,” Miss Susan offered.

“You have a job to do,” Jackson said. “We understand that.”

“I’m not sure Mr. Wiley does. Do you, Mr. Wiley?”

I glanced at her, my heart filled with dread. She had a patient, understanding look in her eyes, but at that moment all I felt was judgment and condemnation, as though her only purpose in life was to hammer the nails into the coffin of my supposed parenting skills. She looked like the sort of woman who might enjoy that line of work.

“Parents can get a little stressed when we drop by,” Miss Susan said when I didn’t answer. “It’s understandable.”

There was something condescending in her tone of voice that irked me. “Every time I turn around, there’s somebody standing there telling me what a lousy parent I am,” I blurted out.

“We’re not here to tell you you’re a lousy parent,” she replied.

“You’re
not
a lousy parent,” Jackson said strongly. “And talk like that is not going to help.”

“I know I’m not the best dad,” I went on, unable to stop myself, “and sometimes I’m not even a good person, but I try, and I don’t know what more I could have done, which was certainly a hell of a lot more than my own father did, God rest his miserable, rotten soul, but he was a heterosexual, so he didn’t have to answer to the Nazi Child-Rearing Police of the DHS.”

“Stop it,” Jackson said, sensing—quite correctly—that the train was now veering off the tracks.

“If you want to know what a lousy father I am, why don’t you ask Noah?” I went on, gathering steam and digging myself in deeper. “He’ll tell you what a miserable, lousy, good-for-nothing piece of crap deadbeat dad I am, hanging around the house all the time and looking after him when I ought to be out there getting teenage girls pregnant and screwing senior citizens out of their life savings so that I’ll have a nice nest egg when I retire. And maybe he’ll tell you about all the money we’ve thrown down the toilet on hearing aids and speech therapy and special ed classes and what a miserable rotten bastard I am for not taking him to McDonald’s all the time so he can get serious about obesity and maybe even get a head start on childhood diabetes. Ask him! I’ll bet he can’t wait for you to throw him into an orphanage so he won’t have to live with a homosexual pervert who loves him more than life itself and would chop off his own fucking arms if he thought it would make his life better.”