Page 58 of Margins

There’s silence for several seconds, other than another passing car, but then he hears Elijah exhale. “Yeah, I’m—I’ll be okay. I will. How much longer do you think you’ll be at your parents’ house?”

“I can probably get out of here pretty soon, actually. I think my sister knows about us, or at least knows there’s something to know, and she’ll help me out.”

“Sounds like you’ve got stuff to tell me, too,” Elijah huffs. “But yeah, I—shit, okay. If you can meet me at my place in like an hour or so?”

“Sure,” Alex agrees. “You wanna give me the bottom line here, or should I just wait for the long version?”

“No, I—you don’t have to wait, it’s—it’s Uncle Edgar. He’s still alive.”

Alex is at Elijah’s front door 57 minutes later, his sister having helped distract from his whirlwind of goodbyes right after she’d pulled him close and whispered in his ear, “I want to meet this guy, so just tell me when we’re on for dinner.”

Elijah throws the door open and ushers him inside, Alex crouching down to say hello to Poe while Elijah locks up behind him. As soon as he’s standing again, he studies Elijah and closes the distance between them, his arms wrapped around him as they hug for a very, very long time. Alex doesn’t think Elijah is crying, and maybe he’s not even that upset, but he’s been thrown off balance again, one surprise after another kicking him sideways over the past couple of months. When Elijah finally starts to back away, they thread their fingers together and crumple onto the sectional, Poe quick to lie down where he can keep an eye on Elijah and whatever might be wrong.

“So,” Alex starts.

“So,” Elijah echoes. “Your sister knows?”

Alex laughs in spite of the wild day it’s been. “Really? You want to do this backwards?”

“Your drama will be much faster to tell than mine.”

“Okay, yeah, that’s true because there’s really almost nothing to tell,” Alex says. “I was smiling too much, she saw right through me, and she wants to have dinner with us. Your turn.”

“Dinner? I’m in.”

“Your turn,” Alex repeats, squeezing Elijah’s hand.

“Yeah, all right. Like you said, I wasn’t going to bring anything up, but I guess the few times I called my mom to ask questions was enough for her to know she had to sit me down for a much bigger conversation. She said she was waiting because she knew we’d see each other today, so she didn’t bother telling me anything over the phone, even once she realized I must have found the books and the Poe box.”

“So, she knows everything.”

“Everything,” Elijah confirms. “Some first-hand, most of it from my grandpa.”

Alex nods. “Okay, go ahead.”

“She confirmed the stuff we pieced together about their early years. While my great grandfather was working at the firm, Uncle Edgar was some kind of warehouse worker or stock boy or something, and he picked up a little extra cash for running errands.”

“Including deliveries and pickups.”

“Yep. They met, and I guess it was a whole big love at first sight kind of thing, but it was about a year or so before Uncle Edgar got the idea to pass the same couple of books back and forth. They were as careful as they could be for the next several years. Gay in the 1940s, from two drastically different social classes, and while Uncle Edgar was an adult, he was actually closer to my grandpa’s age than to my great grandfather’s, which might’ve been fine on its own, but probably looked like one more perversion in their case.”

“Did she know anything about the attack on Edgar?” Alex asks.

“Nothing that we didn’t already know or assume,” Elijah says. “He got jumped and beaten and left for dead. A couple of other workers found him and may have saved his life.”

“Okay, did she say anything about when your grandpa found out?”

Elijah smiles, a softly sad little thing. “Pretty soon after he left for college. He wasn’t really that far away, and he went home unannounced one weekend. Saw them, but they had no idea he was there, so he quietly left again. Then he privately freaked out for a little while before he realized this was the man who had loved him and cared for him and treated him with so much respect, and he made the conscious decision to give nothing less in return. Took him a whole lot longer to actually say anything about it, but they got there eventually.”

“And then your grandpa met your grandma, and they had your mom—”

“And my great grandfather and Uncle Edgar became more interested in the growing movement around them, they finally started living together, and they engaged with some of the community, at least having occasional dinners with other gay couples. They were still careful about everything then, but with time, they got more comfortable, too. My mom remembers seeing them pretty regularly when she was little, obviously without understanding their relationship, but still—they were family. Which was wonderful for all of them until my great grandfather and Uncle Edgar started acting as messengers for the movement, something my grandpa didn’t actually find out about until the arrest.”

They’re still holding hands, but Alex pulls away now to turn toward Elijah, fingers brushing against his face until Elijah’s fully facing him, their foreheads falling together. He’s doing okay, Alex thinks, but it won’t hurt to breathe for a minute, patience as important here as it has been anywhere else.

Eventually, he steals a quick kiss and sits back again. “We never got your grandpa’s take on that—or your mom’s, obviously. Does she remember much of it?”

“Yeah, she was 8, so she remembers that the three of them were having lunch when her grandfather had to go ‘run an errand,’ and then he just didn’t come back,” Elijah explains. “She was nervous, maybe just because Uncle Edgar was visibly worried and hurried them out of there, and she knew something must be wrong because they weren’t getting ice cream, but she doesn’t think anyone said anything to her after that. She went back home to her parents, and she saw her grandfather and Uncle Edgar one more time after that, and then the visits and lunches and everything just stopped.”

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