Page 4 of Blue Umbrella Sky
“You wanna gather some stuff up?”
Milt shook his head. “It’ll be okay.” Barefoot, morose, he stepped through the sliders and outside.
“Atta boy. We’ll get settled over at my place, and then we can do a little search-and-rescue mission. I’m sure she’s not far away.”
“I hope not.” Milt followed Billy Blue into the unseasonably damp day. Steam was already beginning to rise off surfaces not under water.
The sun was beginning to come out again, revealing blue skies.
Milt couldn’t see it, though.
Chapter 2
“I DON’Tknow what I’m going to do,” Milt said in response to his best friend, Dane Bernard’s, question. Tugging at his black necktie, he longed for some air, some clarity. An escape. Yes, he just wanted to be away…
… from this nightmare
… from this death
… from this reality, a reality that revealed a dark future, one that seemed, right now, to be devoid of hope.
Where was the life Milt had planned? You know, the one that included growing old with Corky, that clichéd notion of being in rocking chairs, side by side, fingers intertwined.
“You don’t have to decide right now. You have plenty of time. And nothing, really, has to change. You have a wonderful community here—a great network of friends who love you dearly. Students who look up to you.” Dane, a big man, Milt’s best friend and coteacher at Summitville High School, had experienced his own loss of a spouse a few years ago when his wife, Katie, had perished in a car accident out on Route 11. Dane squeezed Seth’s hand and then let go. “And of course, you can always count on Seth and me to be there whenever you need us.” He grinned a little. “And even when you don’t, to the point where we become irritants.” He shrugged. “Give yourself time. You’ll know what to do when the time is right.”
“Said by a person for whom everything changed when their life partner passed.” Milt raised an eyebrow. He sat across a folding card table from Dane at the American Legion hall, which Milt had rented for the after-funeral lunch. There’d been a buffet of rigatoni in meat sauce, fried chicken, and tossed salad. A Texas sheet cake waited on a table for someone to be the first to cut into it. There was punch and, for the drinkers, beer and horrible red wine in boxes.
Dane nodded. After his wife died, Dane had come out, to the school’s and the town’s shock. He was now married to yet another teacher at the high school, Seth Wolcott. The three men were, far as Milt knew, the only gays at the school, at least on the teaching end. He had suspicions about Betty Beaver, who ran the school cafeteria.
Milt, Dane, and Seth were best friends—not because they had the unusual distinction of being the only gays in the village, so to speak, but because each was possessed of a singularly large organ.
Their hearts.
“I have no regrets about being married to Katie. You know that.”
“You got the kids.” Milt nodded, as if that rationalization was obvious. Dane had a teenage son and daughter. Both were smart, well-adjusted, and turning out to be gorgeous—both inside and out.
“Yeah, that’s true. I got the kids, but that’s not the only reason.” Dane chuckled. “That’s the reason most people think, now that they know—and I know—I’m gay, but I really loved her, Milt. In my own way, as much as I love Seth. I miss her every day.” Dane studied Milt, and Milt could see Dane’s eyes growing shinier, which caused sympathetic tears to well up within Milt’s own eyes. He was feeling extremely vulnerable these days.
“I’m gonna miss Corky every day. I can’t imagine a world without him in it.” Milt shrugged. “Hell, I already miss him.” He sniffed. “Actually, I’d been pining away for him since long before he passed. He was gone….” Milt’s voice trailed off, and he shook his head, breath fluttering. He gripped the table, all the air in the room suddenly sucked out of it.
Finally Milt got control of his tears and continued. “He was actually gone that summer day, a couple of years ago, when he told me he couldn’t find his sunglasses.” Milt wanted to weep at the memory and wished he were alone instead of in an American Legion hall full of sympathetic and sad faces. Instead of crying, though, Milt dug down deep and summoned a chuckle. “How we laughed about it that day, because they were right on top of his big old bald head!” Milt laughed some more but then quickly grew serious. “But this was thesecondtime we’d laughed about it. We cracked up about itagainbecause it had only been about ten minutes before that we’d laughed over it when he’d confronted me with the very same problem.” He looked pointedly at Dane. “I always remember that moment, silly as it might sound. But that’s when I started to get scared that something was wrong. His mom and his aunt, her sister, had both passed from Alzheimer’s. He was always worried about it coming to him. Who knew it would rush right up to him, and him so young?” Milt looked away at the people in the hall, with its knotty pine paneling, American flags, its black-and-white checked tile floor where, once upon a time, he and Corky had had the courage to slow dance in front of his coworkers at a Christmas party.Thatwas a moment he’d never forget either—proudly holding his big, strong bearded man in his arms as they waltzed around the floor to Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” Milt recalled the line about wanting to spend a life with that special person. He didn’t know, that Christmas just four or five years ago, how short their life together was destined to be.
Milt stared down at his paper plate. He picked up a chicken leg and took a bite. The meat tasted like paper or Styrofoam—like nothing. He chewed slowly, though, telling himself he had to hold it together for just an hour or two more. Then he could go home—to their little redbrick ranch overlooking the Ohio River—and break down. He could stare at the muddy water as it curved, serpentine, through their town and watch the snowflakes melt as they landed on its surface. He could imagine warmer, happier times when he and Corky would wend their way down the banks on what they thought of as their secret trail to skinny-dip on hot summer afternoons from the pebbled shore.
He’d savor these memories alone.
When he looked up again, he forced himself to smile. And Dane, the relief apparent on his face, smiled back. He squeezed Milt’s hand. “As I said, you don’t need to make any decisions now. Everything can wait. Don’t rush yourself. This is a vulnerable time. You’re in no condition to make big choices.” Dane reached over to pat Milt’s hand. “Nothing has to change.”
But everything has changed, Milt thought.Everything.
Dane’s words felt like a weight pressing against Milt’s chest, sucking away his air. No. Everythingcouldn’twait.
Things had been waiting, waiting, waiting for the past two years as Corky deteriorated. The forgetfulness was a joke at first, then more and more terrifying as the disease cruelly progressed. And then came the personality changes and watching his big kind bear of a husband become mean. That was something Milt hadn’t been prepared for. His big lovable bear was the type to trap a spider and release it outdoors rather than kill it. And yet, at his worst, Corky had punched and slapped Milt more times than Milt had ever let anyone know, hiding his bruises when he could and, when he couldn’t, concocting stories to explain them innocently away. But he knew Corky hadn’t been himself. And then, faster and faster, everything went to shit, with Corky no longer knowing who Milt was—and that hurt far worse than any fist to the jaw—and then his constant, and sometimes successful, attempts to escape their home. Dressed or not.
Putting him in a home broke Milt’s heart. But he just couldn’t handle things alone anymore. The move to the home, he told himself, was for Corky’s own safety. And it was. It really was. But it was also for Milt’s sanity. Still, it just about killed him to see Corky there, in that antiseptic place with the wheelchair-bound, the bright, artificial Muzak, the smell of Lysol barely masking the odors of shit and piss.
Fortunately—or not—that almost-final letting go and putting him in care was for only a very short time. Once there, Corky quickly declined—and moved on for good.
