2. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
W ell, I’ve worked hard to stop being a man who hates constantly. It wasn’t easy, but I think with plenty of time and honest introspection, I’ve been relatively successful.
But I fucking hate everything that just happened.
Bearing witness to Tobias’s slow but steady implosion over the last year has been one of the most unpleasant, impotent experiences of my life. Every time I see him, I’m hit by a Mack truck-sized urge to do something— anything —to help him escape the pit he’s fallen into, and every time I’m immediately reminded that I’m utterly powerless in this situation.
I can’t help him unless he wants help. Until then, I can only watch. And try to be supportive in whatever ways a casual acquaintance can be.
“Who pissed in your cornflakes?”
A deep voice interrupts my spinning thoughts, and I snap my attention away from the door Tobias disappeared through several minutes ago. Sav, my new barback, is staring at me, not bothering to hide the concern in his eyes, even if he is smiling at his own joke at the same time.
“I’ll give you three guesses, but you’re only going to need one. Your BFF was here again.”
All traces of humor fall from Sav’s face. If there’s anyone here who hates Eamon more than me, it’s him. I don’t know why, but I’m sure he has his reasons. All of which fall under the general umbrella of Eamon being a selfish, arrogant, abusive piece of shit.
“Was he looking for me?”
“Not this time. He came for the kid.”
I try not to say Tobias’s name out loud too often. I know it’s irrational, but I worry that something about the way I say it or some expression I make might give away how overly involved I am with this one.
I have plenty of people in my life who I helped get out of shitty situations they didn’t deserve to be in. Not because I’m some sort of hero; it’s just my thing. It’s the only thing that lets me sleep at night, if I’m being honest. I have enough to redeem myself for. But I’m known for collecting strays.
Kasia was one; when I first moved back here, and she was escaping from her own shitty, abusive relationship. Sav is another, although he’s still pretty new and I don’t know the details of what he’s got going on. All I know is he’s got the same Banna snake tattoo as Eamon and Tobias, which means he’s gang-affiliated, but he’s also got a lot more tattoos that scream extremely-fucking-affiliated , and he came in here one day, begging for someone to give him a break on a normal job. A normal life. So, if he’s not free from it already, he must be trying.
Sav only grunts in response to my answer, looking as pissed as I feel as he picks up a rack of dirty glasses and starts carting them away to wash.
I can’t stop myself from interrupting him.
“Hey,” I say, making him turn around a little to look at me. “Do you think there’s anything else I—we—could do for the kid that we’re not doing already?”
Sav sighs and shakes his head. He doesn’t even give me any words. He just shakes his head, holding my gaze for a minute, before continuing his march to the kitchen.
“You need to let go of your fixation with this guy. You’re already way too involved. You’re totally powerless to help him and if you try, you could get hurt. The people he runs around with do not fuck around, and you know that.”
Kasia is staring at me from the other side of the bar. Thankfully, it’s still early on a weekday, so no one is close enough to overhear her, but still. I don’t appreciate her pointing out the obvious flaws in my plan when I’m already aware of them.
“He’s just a kid, Kasia. He doesn’t deserve this.”
She moves closer, still holding a cocktail shaker in one hand that she uses to point at me.
“A) Of course, he doesn’t deserve this, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s mixed up with dangerous people who will fuck you up if you try to take him away from them. And B) He’s not a fucking kid. He’s an adult who ended up in a terrible situation. Just like me. Just like the walking wall of muscle you hired, because we didn’t have enough homophobes floating around here already.”
“Sav’s not a homophobe,” I interrupt. “I think he’s been through a lot. I can tell. He needs to be around people who aren’t going to make him feel like he has to stay in whatever toxic criminal box he’s spent his life in. His brother’s gay. He’s coming around, I swear. We’re good for him.”
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t change the fact that he still gapes at any same-sex couple who shows affection in here. Or nervously averts his eyes. Which are both equally bad. It’s embarrassing.”
“That’s not—” I start, but Kasia continues before I can really figure out what I’m trying to say.
“And like I said, the kid , as you keep calling him, is not a kid. You don’t look at him like he’s a kid. You look at him like you’re a Looney Toons character and he’s a cartoon steak. You can’t even keep your eyeballs in your head and treating him like a child isn’t fooling anybody. Including yourself. So, stop—” she waves her fingers in a circle in my general direction with a humorless grin, “—doing all of this. You’re not fooling anybody. Leave that man alone unless you need to call the cops for him.”
I huff. “Because they’re so helpful in these situations.”
“They’re helpful in not letting you get yourself killed over someone who probably wouldn’t appreciate the effort right now. He has to want to get out, or it’s all a waste of energy.”
“Fine.”
I don’t have anything else to say to her right now. She’s right, but I don’t want to admit it. It’s already annoying enough to know that I haven’t been hiding my stupid, problematic infatuation as well as I thought.
It’s not like I would ever, ever get involved with him. Not only is he too young for me—even if he is an adult, like she said, twenty-two years old is still a big screaming leap away from my thirty-six—but I don’t get involved with people who I help. It’s too murky, ethically, and the consequences are potentially too severe if things go wrong.
I learned that the hard way.
“Do you want to close tonight, or do you need to head home?”
It’s an obvious attempt to change the subject, but I don’t care.
“I’m fine. Magdalena doesn’t work until late tonight. She’s leaving her kids with me, and I’ll take over all the child-minding when I get home.”
“I guess that’s a system.”
“Yeah, well, you gotta do what you gotta do. I would rather have a sister I actually see, but at least the kids can hang out with their cousins every day, and no one has to pay for childcare they can’t afford.”
“Fair. If you ever need help, let me know, though. I’m still here for you, even though you’ve pulled your life together on your own.”
She rolls her eyes at me fondly.
“Yes, daddy .” Her tone is facetious, but it still makes me cringe. “You’re first in line to be my personal savior. I’ll never forget.”
“You know that’s not—” I rub at the bridge of my nose, where the pressure of a headache is swiftly forming. Today has been weird and unpleasant. I’m already ready for it to be over. “You know it’s not like that.”
“I know.” The smile she gives me is softer this time. “But I like teasing you, anyway.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re hilarious. Go do some work instead of trying to put me in an early grave, maybe.”
Kasia shrugs and turns away from me. I want to breathe out a sigh of relief, but I can’t find it. There’s too much pressure. In my head, on my chest, in my general state of existence. No matter how hard I try to focus, I can’t stop thinking about what Eamon and Tobias are doing right now. If this is going to be the day that Tobias never comes back again, and I’m left spending the rest of my life with nothing but what ifs for company.
Soon, more customers filter in, and at least I have something immediate to distract myself with. For whatever that’s worth.
Whenever I visit my mother, I go after work. Because it’s late, and it’s kind of a drive, which gives me an excuse to cut the visit short if she starts to rub my nerve endings raw.
The deliberateness of this makes me feel like a horrible person. But I have to do something to protect my sanity if I don’t want to end up abandoning her altogether.
“Do you want some tea?”
“I’ll get it, you sit down,” I say, seizing the opportunity to escape the initial bustling around me she does when I walk in the door. I’m never quite sure what she’s fussing over, but it always feels artificial, almost performative, in a way that makes me deeply uncomfortable.
I return to the sitting room a few minutes later with two glasses of iced tea in my hands and place one in front of her before I install myself on the well-worn couch.
“How are you doing? Do you need anything?”
Mama blows out a breath, already in the eye-rolling stage of our conversation, obviously.
“I’m fine, Gunnar. I can take care of myself. I’m a grown woman, after all.” She peers at me over the lip of her glass for a minute, and I feel like I’m about to be peeled apart and placed under a microscope. “What about you? You seem more high-strung than usual. Do you need something?”
“No,” I answer on instinct. There’s a pause while I huff out a breath and run a hand down my face, trying to collect my frazzled thoughts. But those images from before of Tobias—where he might be right now and what he might be suffering at Eamon’s hands—are still screaming front and center in my mind, distracting me from reality. “I’m just tired. It’s been busy at work recently.”
Mama shakes her head in that way she always does, and it makes the tiny muscles in my neck tense up. If I stay here too long, I’m going to develop a migraine. I can feel it in my bones.
“I still can’t believe you moved home to open a gay bar. In these parts, after you made such a fuss about wanting to get out of Missouri. You could have stayed in Chicago if you wanted to do that.”
Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes, which feels immature but is also unstoppable.
“It’s not a gay bar, Mama. It’s inclusive. If everyone who cares about being progressive moves to the city, then there’s no one left to support the people they left behind. Believe it or not, but queer people in the countryside also want to have safe spaces to exist.”
“I suppose,” she says, taking a large sip of tea.
There’s a mountain of unsaid words there, but I mentally breeze past them. My mother’s not a homophobe. She’s just… I don’t know. I can’t even think of the word.
Because the only one that comes to mind is ‘hateful’ and that’s the kind of thing you’re not supposed to think. Maybe ‘bitter’ is a nicer shade of the same concept.
Yep, that’s definitely a migraine I feel brewing. All the muscles in the back of my neck are tightening bit by bit, like ropes slowly being ratcheted to their full tautness, and the skin around my hairline is beginning to feel like it’s pressing inwards into my skull.
I need to flee before lights start doing that glittery, overwhelming thing they sometimes do, and driving becomes a crapshoot.
“It’s not too late to buy your father’s shop back. Have something to show for his hard work. Help people instead of selling them liquor.”
I manage not to scoff. Only Mama could do the mental gymnastics required to consider a pawn shop proprietor some kind of pillar of the community. She acts like my dad was out there running soup kitchens instead of barely legal grifts. Ever since he died, it’s like she’s trying to canonize him in her memory. There’s a faint sneer at the end of her words, though, and it combines with my burgeoning headache to make this situation seem suddenly intolerable.
A thought flashes through my mind— you can’t sit in the same room with your mother being snide for twenty minutes, but you’ll stand by and wring your hands while Tobias suffers god-knows-what . But I don’t have time to pull it apart right now.
“Look, if it’s going to be one of those conversations, I’m going to go home. I’m tired, it’s been a long day, and I have a headache. I’ll come back in a couple of days to see how you’re doing, okay?”
Mama sighs and looks away from me, clearly dedicated to being in a huff.
I get up and put my glass in the kitchen sink before coming back and leaning down to kiss her on the cheek. She softens a little, looking me in the eye.
“Do you want some aspirin before you go?”
“No, thank you Mama. I have some meds in the car. I’ll see you in a few days. Call me if you need anything.”
She rolls her eyes again, but the tension has leached out of the atmosphere at least.
“You too.”
That’s all I need to slip out of the door. I couldn’t have picked a better moment; my forehead is starting to throb, and the streetlights are bright, sparkling little points on the horizon that are disorienting for no particular reason.
It’s time to go home and bury all my thoughts in sleep.