Page 71 of Marcus in Retrograde
I held up my hand. “Hold on. I haveno ideawhat’s going on here. Someone has to tell me why Rider showed up at my house telling me you were dying in six months, and I had to come out here.”
“I have primary amyloidosis, I have for a fewyears,” Dad said. “We’ve been able to control it pretty well, but in the past six months the drugs I need to control it have needed to be upped, and my body isn’t responding very well anymore. I’m going into congestive left heart failure.”
“The doctor said there are more treatments—” Mom started.
“Beth. We’ve been through this. I don’t want the treatments. I don’t want to be put on a transplant list. I’m not taking a healthy heart away from a twenty year old. I’m sixty-five and I’ve lived my life. Let a kid have it.”
“So,” I interrupted again, “you’re dying but it’s not like, you’re going to keel over tomorrow.”
“They’re going to put in a pacemaker next week,” Dad said. “But there’s not much they can do for the muscle actually toughening up. With the pacemaker they’re thinking two to four years. But I could have a cardiac incident that did me in, in a month, six months, a year from now. My heart just isn’t up to snuff anymore.”
There were tears in my mother’s eyes—Antonio Garcia was her life, and to hear him talking like this had to be breaking her own heart.
“All right, so why didn’t Mom just say something on the phone to me.”
“I told her not to,” Dad answered. “I did you wrong, Son. I treated you poorly. I asked Rider to talk to you, but apparently he decided going to the city would be more effective. When I found out he went, I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, he’d see what I’ve been really learning all this time between the therapy and Reverend Gil.”
Oh, God. Here it went. Reverend Gil was going to be a pseudo-ally who kept telling everyone to love the sinner, hate the sin. Or some other such bullshit-fueled platitude that allowed you to keep preaching at The Gays while still pretending you cared.
“Your father and I changed churches about a year ago,” Mom said.
That caught me off guard. The Garcias and the Cortezes had gone to Paris Lutheran for…generations. “What? Are you serious?”
Mom nodded. “Pastor Allen was a nice man, but we both felt that his utter hatred of non-Lutherans was getting a bit much. I…wewere having trouble sitting in the pews listening to him tell us that there was no redemption for our son. That he was going to Hell because helayethwith another man.”
“Meanwhile,” Dad continued. “Victor Darren’s wife Marilyn was raped and murdered about that time.”
I gasped, “Mrs. Darren? Sweet Mrs. Darren who taught second grade at the school?”
Dad nodded solemnly. “Well, they caught the guy, and it turned out it was one of Pastor Allen’s friend’s kids. He stood up there with that murdering bastard child, and told the court he was a good man, a man of God, who had made a mistake. Andy—who was deputy sheriff and one of the first on the scene—heard that, he got up and left the courtroom. He told me later it was nomistakewhen the victim had been stabbed fifty-seven times. And that wasn’t counting the brutal rape, which he would never tell me more about, save to say it was savage.”
Mom picked up the story. “So, there’s Pastor Allen preaching forgiveness for this man who destroyed a family, a school and a community, but on Sunday he was in that pulpit telling us how our law abiding, non-rapist son who happens to prefer men to women was going to Hell.”
Dad cleared his throat. “Now, Reverend Gil is a good man. He doesn’t like to just tell us how to think. He doesn’t like that. He wants all of his sheep to think for themselves and not just follow the flock. When I sat down with him, on recommendation of my therapist—”
Who was this man? Talking to therapists? Spiritual counselors?
“—he brought out a Bible, like he knew exactly what I was thinking about with all thishow to dietherapy.”
My mother huffed and rolled her eyes.
Dad spun the can of beer in his hands a few times. Even in the air conditioning of the house, the aluminum was sweating, and he seemed to chase the droplet around it.
“Reverend Gil open the Bible, and showed me all the places where it was the Lord had said thou shall not kill. There were hundreds. New and old testament. Some were like the Commandments, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and others were more poetic. But they all followed that same Commandment.
“Then, he pointed out all the parts of the same book where it says ‘Thou shalt not lie with a man as you would with a woman,’ in whatever flowy poetry you wanted to frame it.
“There are seven. Just seven. And four of those are up for serious debate.” He played with the tab on the beer can. “Reverend said that homosexuality is a modern concept. That as psychology began to understand that gender was a construct, they needed words for it. And he said that in the past fifty, Hell, twenty years, the understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender has exploded and expanded and the…Kinsey scale? is an oversimplification of a very complex concept.”
My mother leaned forward. “And then the Reverend Gil introduced us to his boyfriend.”
I saw Marcus sit back in his chair in shock and I was right there with him. That was not the way I had expected that to go at all. Not at all.
“Nice man,” Dad said. “One of the boys from the dairy farm up the road. Hard worker, strong faith. Was a little weird to see them making googly eyes at each other, but…” He took a deep breath and looked straight at me. “Who am I to judge. If they make each other happy, isn’t that really all we can ask out of this life?”
Fuck. Me.He apologized. In his own Antonio Garcia way, he apologized to me.
I stood from my chair, and walked around to him. Leaning down, I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him. Hard. As hard as I could.
