Taking Chances (13 page)

“Oh, bitch,
please
. You think you’re so tough. Try surviving clearance day at Valentina’s when she marks down the good wigs. You got nothing on New York drag queens.” He snapped his fingers twice at me, and I felt sufficiently shut down.

“I tell you not to get into it with him, and what do you do?” Riley asked as he opened the door for me.

“He ain’t so tough,” I said under my breath.

“Yeah, I notice you said
that
just quiet enough so he couldn’t hear,” he teased me as we walked in.

I wish I could tell you there was something different about that night from all the other ones, but I can’t. That there was something we talked about or something that happened to make that Friday night unique and stand out in my mind, but I’d be lying. The only thing that made that night different was that it was the last one.

We hung out until after last call, when Tom would turn on the bar lights and most guys would scurry away like cockroaches caught in the kitchen in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the first time Robbie, Riley, and I had closed the place down. It was business as usual. We helped Tom pick up around the tables as we tried to sober up enough to drive. “The boy with the blue shirt was cute,” Robbie suggested as I grabbed a couple of empty beer bottles off a table.

“If he’s so cute, you date him,” I threw back.

“Hey,” Riley protested. “He wasn’t cuter than me, right?”

Robbie moved over and kissed him on the cheek. “No one is cuter than you, sweetheart.” Riley nodded and went back to cleaning. Robbie turned on me. “And there was nothing wrong with him, and you know it.”

“I honestly didn’t even notice him,” I lied, knowing if I brought up that the guy in the blue shirt was nowhere near my type, it would start another debate about me lowering my standards, and I wasn’t ready for that conversation again. “Next time, point him out.”

He shot me a dirty look, but there was no way he could prove I had seen Blue Shirt Guy, so he dropped it. “What else you want us to get, Tom?” he asked, dumping another load of empties into the trash.

“How about out of here?” Tom suggested. “I can pick all this up tomorrow, you know.”

“My mom always taught me to pick up after myself. Besides, I’ve worked enough bars to know that this is too much for one guy.”

“Riley, you want to control your man?” Tom complained.

“Well, there is no evidence up to this point that anyone can control Robbie, but I can try,” he said, ducking under Robbie’s retribution roundhouse swing. Riley lunged toward Robbie, hoisted him up off the ground, and slung him over his shoulder. “Will this work?” he asked, his face lit up with a huge smile.

Tom pointed at the door. “Begone! And never darken my door again.”

“Riley, put me down!” Robbie shrieked, pounding on his lover’s back.

“Okay, I am out,” I said, putting on my jacket. “Riley, are we watching the game this weekend?”

He paused, Robbie still dangling over his shoulder. “Who’s playing?”

“It’s A&M against Arkansas and Texas at Baylor,” I answered, standing in the doorway.

“You can come over if you want. This one won’t be up till after noon,” he said, bouncing Robbie once.

“Sounds good. I’ll bring a case of Shiner,” I said, waving as I walked out into the cold.

I wish I’d known that would be the last time I’d talk to him, because I would have picked a different topic than college football and beer. I got into my car and started it up so the heater would kick in. I sat in my car and shivered as I watched the bar door open and Robbie run out ahead of Riley. He had a pretty good head start on his husband, and I smiled as I saw the joy in their eyes as they ran.

With the headlights off, I didn’t even see the other car until it was right on top of Riley.

It hit him at midwaist, and time stopped as I watched his body fold in a way I had only seen in tackling dummies. He rolled half onto the hood and then off over the driver’s side. His arms just dangled as he fell to the asphalt, and I knew it was bad. A window rolled down from the car, and I saw a head stick out and yell something back at Riley’s motionless body.

In less than a second, the car was gone into the night.

Now here is the part of the story I dread the most. You’d think that would be watching my friend get run down in the middle of the road, but you’d be wrong. A normal human being would take Riley’s senseless death as the low point of the night, but leave it to Tyler Parker to take it to a whole new level of bad. I saw Robbie run back toward him and shake him slightly. I could hear him cry over the noise of the car and the heater, and it was like nails on a chalkboard. I just sat there and watched him.

Tom came out and stood at the doorway for a moment, trying to see what the commotion was. Once he saw Riley not moving, he rushed back inside to call the cops, which was when my mind began to panic. I couldn’t be here. I couldn’t talk to the police about this. Suddenly my excuse that Riley was my gay friend and that I was just being nice coming out there sounded like the bullshit it was, and I freaked. There would be witness statements and a police investigation and that meant an article in the paper.

And my mind screamed at me to get the fuck out of there.

I shifted into drive and began to pull out of the driveway, making sure to avoid the scene entirety. As I was pulling away, Robbie looked up at me, and we made eye contact for just a second. Less than a second, if I’m being honest, but it was all the time in the world. More than enough time for him to scream my name to help him as I drove away. More than enough time for me to look away and take off into the night toward town, in much the same way the guilty party did after killing my friend. Less than a second, but more than enough time for a friendship to end, for me to betray Robbie’s trust, and to leave him all alone with his dead lover in his arms.

I want to tell you that I drove away because I thought Riley would be okay. I want to lie to you and myself that I didn’t think it was that bad and I just misjudged the seriousness of it, but I can’t. Here in the middle of the night, wandering the streets of Foster drunk off my ass, it’s only me, you, and the demons that come to me when I close my eyes and think of Riley, and I find it impossible to lie.

I knew he was dead the second he hit the ground, and I still drove away.

Keeping my secret, maintaining my perceived heterosexuality, was so important to me that I just left them there and drove away, glancing up at the rearview mirror and seeing them getting smaller and smaller. I’ve hated myself ever since. Robbie never tried to talk to me, and I never expected him to. I didn’t go to the funeral because I didn’t want to explain why I was there to others, but more because I knew Robbie would most likely kill me where I stood.

So my life became a series of ever more strangling and entangling lies to protect myself. To escape the truth, I drank myself into a stupor that ended up almost killing me.

The first time I saw Brad and Kyle at Nancy’s, and saw that they were so obviously in love, something just snapped inside me. When I saw Brad, soaking wet and miserable, stumble out of the Vine, I knew I could just turn around and walk back into the shop. I could have just ignored him and what I saw and let him run into the same idiotic walls I spent my life creating so I could slam my head against them. I could; it would have been easy.

But I was done with easy. I was done with hiding. So I stopped Brad outside the shop and turned another corner in my life.

At least, I thought I was through with hiding before Matt. Was I just making the same old mistakes over again with him? Was settling down with him one of those gay things I had been running from my whole life? I’d have to give up any illusion that I might be mistaken for straight if I ended up playing house with him. Was that even important to me anymore? I mean, the fact I was even asking the question meant the illusion of being straight had to still matter, right?

Fuck! I was more confused than I had been in the bar. The walk home was supposed to sober me up, not muddle my thinking even more. But the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced I was being colossally stupid. Matt had been making a joke, but as with all humor, the joke held a grain of truth.

I looked up and was not shocked to see where my feet had led me while I was occupied with my thoughts.

I was standing in front of Matt’s house.

The Wallace house had always been much larger than ours. Even when my dad added the back porch with its infamous red door, our home was still barely half the size of Matt’s. Of course, I was an only child and the Wallace brothers were, in high school, built like a team of Clydesdales. It sounds like an exaggeration, but if I had seen them pulling a Budweiser truck down the street back then, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. By default, then, their house had to be huge enough to hold them and their belongings. In my drunken estimation, the Wallace house still looked like a boy’s house. I could see two Frisbees on the roof, no doubt left up there for years, survivors of a game called when no one wanted to climb up and snag them. A huge tree grew in the front yard, its branches dipping close to the upstairs windows, pretty much guaranteeing it had been used at least once to sneak out after midnight.

I was pretty sure which window was Matt’s, and I suddenly had a burning desire to talk to him face-to-face—to let him know I was being an asshole and I understood what he had said was just a joke. I wanted to say out loud that I was in for the long haul, that I wanted to try something serious with him. Talking to him wouldn’t wait until the morning; it couldn’t. I was ready to be gay, and I needed to tell him now.

Before I lost my nerve again.

I knelt down and felt the edge of their lawn for a rock or an acorn, something I could toss at his window to wake him up. I had to catch myself from falling face-first into the grass twice before I found a quarter-size rock with the tip of my fingers. I threw it at his window and heard it ricochet off the side of their house. I cursed under my breath as I knelt down looking for another. I found a smaller one and threw again. I didn’t hear anything this time, and I figured I’d missed the house completely. I was mumbling a few choice words under my breath while I searched for something else to throw. I looked for more than a minute before my fingers touched a stone. It was the largest one yet, and I was not going to waste it. I took a few steps closer to his window and wound up for the pitch—

The sound of breaking glass echoed throughout the neighborhood.

Years wasted with friends who thought breaking stuff defined a really fun time had trained me to not stop and gawk at the broken window and the muffled screams coming from the house. Instead my traitorous feet, responsible for bringing me to Matt’s in the first place, spun me toward my house and hurtled me down the street, panicked because I had just chucked a boulder through my potential boyfriend’s window at two thirty in the morning.

By the time that fact sank in, I was almost home.

I remember a time I could have made that sprint and not been out of breath. I stood with my hands on my thighs in front of my house, my face wreathed in clouds of breath like the smoke coming off a steam engine, the air was so cold. Lights blinked on in houses all over the neighborhood, the commotion from the Wallace house waking other people up like a chain reaction. I fumbled for my keys, praying I hadn’t dropped them during my rock search.

God obviously favored innocents, which I wasn’t, and idiots, which included drunk people like me. I felt the cold metal in my hand as the lights across the street came on.

I was halfway into my house when I heard a voice call from across the street. “Tyler?” I paused and turned around, standing in the doorway for a moment, my heartbeat sounding like a shotgun in my own ears. “Hey, Ms. Costello,” I called out to her. I looked down the street toward Matt’s house, feeling like I was in a very bad melodrama where I was playing guilty neighbor number three.

“What’s going on out there?” she asked, looking down the street too.

“No idea,” I said carefully. “Maybe kids?”

She sighed heavily and shook her head. “They never learn,” she said, retreating into her house.

“Have a good night!” I called out to her, feeling like I had just gotten away with murder. She didn’t answer as she slammed her door.

I closed mine and locked it behind me as I took a deep breath. I decided I’d just call Matt when I was sober.

I
SPENT
most of the night cleaning up broken glass and trying to assure my mom we were not the victims of a hate crime.

Some kids threw a rock through the window of what used to be my brother’s old room close to 3:00 a.m. and all hell broke loose. My mom started screaming while my dad came charging out of his room with a shotgun in his slippers.

And nothing else.

Recovering from the shock of learning that my dad either slept nude or had gotten lucky that night, I was barely able to keep him from storming out of the house like Clint Eastwood in
Gran Torino
. Only the threat that the people across the street loved to video everything slowed him down. He revved back up again, and I asked him if he wanted to be on an episode of
Grandpas Gone Wild
. Snarling threats, he retreated to the bedroom to put on some clothes.

My mother would only come out of her room after I assured her that, one, there were not armed people in the house and, two, I was going to clean up the broken glass myself.

Nothing dispels Mom-fears faster than the threat of one of their sons cutting themselves on broken glass.

She took the broom away from me and began systematically cleaning the glass up faster than I could have ever done. Once my dad put the shotgun away, and put on pants, we got a board from the garage and put it up over the hole. By that time, there was no way any of us were going back to sleep. So my dad made some coffee while my mom made us breakfast. They hovered around the TV, thinking the local news would surely lead with the “Wallace house gets window broken” story and were mildly disappointed when the anchor said nothing.