Chapter 5 – James #2
She was like a lighthouse on the edge of a cliff, guiding James towards land as he tried to navigate the tangles and knots.
“I don’t want to be alone,” he said finally, sweat beginning to form where their hands were clasped together.
“But I feel like it’s inevitable. Either I live here alone, move out on my own alone, or I insert myself into Leon’s life and his home, and, when things inevitably fall apart, I’ll be alone, but for real. ”
His mom nodded, her face grave, the lines around her eyes pronounced. “You could always get a cat.”
James nearly fell over. The ball in his chest didn’t seem to know what to do with such a random subject change. It slowly settled back into his stomach as his shoulders relaxed from where they had been residing up near his earlobes, and he narrowed his eyes at his mom.
“What?”
“Your fears are valid, honey,” she said, placing her other hand on top of their joined ones.
“You’ve never lived on your own before, and to be honest, neither have I.
I went from college to living with your father, to the three of us, to just living with you.
I didn’t ever want to live alone, and so I haven’t.
I’m not surprised you feel the same way, and I can’t blame you for being scared right now.
Big changes are happening, but eventually you will have to make a decision.
No matter what happens, though, you don’t ever have to be alone.
You have your friends, you have me, Howard, and Linda, and if you’re worried about this house, or a new apartment being lonely, get a cat. ”
James shook his head, even as that ball finally settled into a warm spot in the middle of his core. His mom knew how much he’d wanted a cat. They had talked about it a few times, but as soon as he’d started dating Leon, he’d put a pin in it.
“I would want to wait, so I could introduce them to Yarmen,” James said.
His mom nodded again, her smile soft. “You’ve said that before, because you have thought about it, and you know you do want to live with him.”
“Of course I do. He’s…I think he’s the love of my life.”
“Well,” she said, releasing James’ hand so she could reach down and pick up the paper wreath. “I don’t think moving in with the love of your life is going to make him hate you, even if you are physically incapable of turning off the lights when you leave a room.”
James groaned at the decades-long argument. “I don’t do it on purpose!”
“I know, dear, and you’ll have to explain that to Leon, just like I’m sure he’ll have to explain his own idiosyncrasies to you. That’s part of growing together as a couple.”
James thought of Leon’s inability to ever have his laundry done at the appropriate time, and his obnoxiously loud clicky-clacky keyboard. Almost against his will, his lips pulled up at the sides, and his mom smiled back.
“Just like growing from a boy to a man, there are going to be some growing pains,” she said, handing him the paper wreath.
She reached back down into the box and pulled out a small, misshapen blob of pottery.
It was supposed to have been an apple, but his eight year old hands hadn’t been able to get the curves right.
“But it’s something you figure out together. ”
James huffed and accepted the blob, along with a papier-mache bowl and a hand turkey, as his mom went through the box.
“Are you taking all these with you?” he asked, shaking his head adamantly as his mom tried to place a pile of rudimentary crayon drawings in his arms.
“I thought I would just take that painted flowerpot downstairs and…if I could just find…aha!”
She triumphantly pulled out another set of blobs.
James squinted at it until a memory came to him, and he recognized the shapes.
He dumped his handful of crafts back into the box and gently took the little statue from her.
In seventh grade, he’d done a unit on pottery, and the assignment had been to make something for his best friend.
At the time, all his best friends had been girls, and they had just been getting into makeup and fashion and boys.
While he could relate to the last one, everything else had been a confusing jumble for him, so he’d chosen a different strategy for the project.
His mom had always been and always would be his best friend, so he’d sculpted the two of them standing side by side, their arms linked. Thankfully, his limited artistic ability meant they were basically just two shapeless blobs, without any discernible features or genders.
“I think I’ll put it on the mantle, so I can look at it every day,” his mom said, her voice enviably steady even as James’ bottom lip trembled.
He linked his arm with hers, tipping his head to rest on hers, so they were a mirror image of the statue still clutched in his hand.
Nowadays, he was the taller of the two, the one more likely to reach for her hand than the other way around.
Even though she had two new sets of hands to help her put things away on the top shelf or flatten out the hallway runner so she didn’t trip, James didn’t think he would ever stop reaching for her.
“I can’t wait to tour the place,” he said, turning them around so they could head back to the corner his mom had already started digging through.
“Hopefully it will give you a better idea of how much space there is, so you won’t let me try to bring the whole house.”
James’ eyes fell on a small, dusty box in the corner that held the few stray items they still had from his dad.
The day he’d left, he’d been in such a hurry he’d forgotten a load of laundry still in the dryer, along with his toothbrush and comb on the bathroom counter.
In light of the new life he was starting, those were things he could thoughtlessly discard. Just like James and his mom.
“There’s no chance of that,” James said, his gaze shifting to his old bag of rock climbing gear. He hadn’t climbed since his shitty ex had broken up with him in the parking lot of the gym they used to go to. “I think there are a lot of things we can both let go of.”
His mom squeezed his arm, then let go and picked up the tattered pride flag she put out every June.
She’d been hanging it on their front porch since James was a little kid, long before either she or even he had known he was trans.
It was one of the reasons he’d felt safe coming out to her almost as soon as he figured it out for himself.
“There are also some things that maybe we could do with an upgrade for,” she said, grinning at him, until he found himself smiling back. “Not all change has to be bad. Sometimes it can be exactly the kick in the pants we need.”
James huffed but accepted the next box lid she handed to him.
And the next.
And the next.
Until somehow, they had been up in the stuffy attic for three hours and had managed to organize all the decorations into piles to donate, dump, and pack.
“I’m going to talk to him,” James said, offering his mom a hand down off the final step of the ladder.
She accepted his hand, and he could feel the dirt and grime on both their fingers.
“There’s no—”
“Mom,” he said, and she stopped, with one foot still on the bottom step. “I’m going to talk to him. I just want to get through Hailey’s going away party on Saturday, but I promise, we’ll talk on Sunday. I want him to be part of this…if he wants to be.”
The old house groaned as the air conditioning kicked on, as if the house, too, was sighing with relief.
His mom did a pretty poor job of hiding her grin, and truthfully, he couldn’t blame her.
A wave of excitement that felt suspiciously like indigestion rolled over him, and he had a bit of an anxious pep in his step as he followed his mom into their seldom-used dining room to begin sorting through the “good china” and excess cutlery.