Page 2 of Roommate
“Perhaps,” I say, trying to sound like it isn’t my only option in the whole world. But if I step over the threshold and stay with them, it has to be because I’m invited. I won’t live with their disdain. Sleeping in the car would be better.
“You want to stay here,” my father clarifies. He’s still holding that TV remote. And he still hasn’t opened the screen door.
It’s not a good sign.
“Just for a little while,” I say. “Until I find a job and a place of my own. I’m a baker.”
“You…what?” my mother asks. “Like, cakes?”
“Bread, mostly. I went to culinary school. I specialize in bread-baking.”
My father squints at me, and that’s another clue this isn’t going to work. “Culinary school,” he echoes. There’s dismissal in his voice. Baking is not a real man’s job. I might as well have said that I’m a ballet dancer, or that I star in a drag show. My father’s ideas of what a man should do with his life are straight out of the fifties.
“No more guitar?” my mother asks. She’s hoping I’ve grown out of being the queer little music nerd my father couldn’t tolerate. She’s trying to sway him.
“No guitar,” I agree, although it kills me a little to imply that I somehow got with Dad’s program and outgrew music. The truth is that I accidentally left my guitar behind in Nashville.
I did outgrow musicians, though. But that’s another long story.
“If you stay…” My father purses his lips. “It’s our house, our rules.”
I swallow hard. “I’m a great house guest. I even cook. And clean up.”
My mother makes a happy sound and reaches for the latch on the screen door. She even elbows my father a little to shift him out of the way.
He doesn’t move, though. He’s still staring at me like I’m a puzzle he’s trying to figure out. “But you’re not… You won’t…” He falters.
“I won’t what?” I ask, already knowing where this is going.
Dad can’t even spit out the loathsome words. “You have a girlfriend?” he asks.
Coward. I shake my head. “I don’t have anybody. That’s why I’m standing on your front steps. I had to leave a bad relationship with nothing but my clothes and a box of books. But I still date men, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m still gay.”
My mother lets out a sound of dismay. And the way my father’s face shutters, I know I came here for nothing.
“You haven’t been to church,” my father says, as if that isn’t a non-sequitur. But to him I suppose it isn’t.
“Not lately,” I admit. “My life blew up, Dad. I have nowhere to go. I’m asking to stay in my old room for a couple of weeks until I can regroup. And I’d help out around here, of course.”
There is a terrible silence while we stare at each other. And then he slowly shakes his head. “Not until you ask God’s forgiveness.”
It’s really astonishing that you can storm out of a house at eighteen in the middle of a shouting match, and then pick right up again in the same place eight years later. We’re still trapped in the same dialogue we’d had my entire last year of high school.
“I am humble before the Lord,” I say quietly. “But I will not apologize to Him for who I love, or who I am.”
My father gives me a disgusted look, as if I just announced my committed worship of Satan. He folds his arms across his chest. The posture is clear. Go away. You are no longer my son.
Message received. I feel a flash of the old hurt, but it’s followed swiftly by exhaustion. My anger is muted by two days behind the wheel of my car and by already having years of living with his rejection.
Still, I look him right in the eye. You arrogant fuck. Who says you can judge me?
My mother sniffs, and I know she’s crying. Mom wants me to come inside. But she doesn’t want it enough to stand up to him.
That’s when I finally realize I’m done here. Probably forever. There is nothing left to do but turn around and leave.
I take one last look at him. But there is no softness there. No affection for the kid he used to love, although I’ve always been me. I’m the same boy who caught all those baseballs with him in the various yards around the country where we lived when he was in the Air Force. I’m the same son who mowed the lawn and got up early to go fishing, because I craved his attention.
He doesn’t even blink. His rejection is unmoving.
