Chapter 34 Burying the Hatchet
You really won’t tell me who it is?” Debbie asked.
One could also argue that if Nicholas hadn’t married and divorced her, Debbie wouldn’t have been fired in the first place. She would have had a different life entirely.
Debbie loved it, of course.
Nicholas should arrive in fifteen minutes.
Matt sat beside Debbie on her couch. Cleopatra dozed on his lap. Butch and Sundance perched on the back of the couch, on either side of Debbie’s head. Butch batted at Debbie’s hoop earrings.
“And this mystery person helped me get my job back?” Debbie asked, repeating the little bit Matt had told her. “They hurt me and then helped me?”
Matt nodded. That pretty much summed it up. Nicholas had missed his calling. He should have gone into public relations instead of assistant local news production.
Matt heard a car pull into the driveway. He picked Cleopatra off his lap, set her down on the couch, then peered out the window. Nicholas had arrived.
Matt hoped, for Debbie’s sake, that this meeting went well, that she got whatever closure she needed. He didn’t know what that would look like.
In his opinion, people, Christians especially, jumped to the whole forgiveness part, as if that were the only acceptable outcome so you might as well get it over with.
He’d seen people on TV, parents whose child had been brutally murdered, offering forgiveness to a stone-cold killer who hadn’t even asked for it.
The body’s still warm and here’s the grieving parents forgiving the pedophilic murderer.
It just didn’t seem right. Even God didn’t forgive people ‘til they asked for it.
Wait too late and you got a one-way ticket to hell.
Anyway, point being that if Debbie just wanted to unload on Nicholas and tell him to go fuck himself, that was her business. Matt had told Nicholas as much.
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Matt said to Debbie.
Debbie rolled her eyes. “How else am I gonna know who it is, seeing as you won’t tell me?”
Matt smiled. He was glad to see she still had her spunk.
He planned to stay long enough to gauge how she was doing. He would not hesitate to ask Nicholas to leave if Debbie fell apart. She’d had a rough few weeks.
Matt had another meeting scheduled after that, one to plan Colton’s comeuppance. Colton, at least, was beyond redemption. He had shown no quarter to his victims. There would be none for him.
There was a knock at the door.
Whether or not to knock had been the question Matt pondered when he had finally gone to his parents’ house for Christmas break—on December 22nd, once he knew that Debbie would be rehired.
He had not been there since leaving for college in August. His parents had not returned his phone calls, nor had they driven the thirty-mile distance to watch any of his soccer games.
By the time he parked his car, he was nursing a serious grudge.
He had slung his duffle bag over his shoulder and marched inside.
His mom had been in the kitchen preparing dinner. His younger brother, Brian, was out with friends. His dad was at work at Tinker Air Force Base. Matt and his mom had the house to themselves.
“Hi mom,” Matt had said in greeting. The word felt odd on his tongue, as if he were betraying Debbie.
“Hi honey!” his mom had said. She wiped her hands on a towel and rushed him with a hug.
“I’ve been praying you’d come home for Christmas,” she had said. Her eyes were moist. “I made extra just in case. I even made your favorite: beef stroganoff.”
Matt had not expected the hug or the near tears. If anything, based on the four months’ radio silence, he had half expected to find the door bolted against him, to be presented with a No Trespassing Notice like the one Debbie had received from MCU.
He had pulled away from his mother’s embrace. This—this whole Norman Rockwell “welcome home for the holidays, here’s your favorite meal” act did not erase the last four months.
“Let me put my bag away,” Matt had mumbled.
He had carried his bag to his room. Plopped it on the floor. Surveilled the familiar surroundings. The bed, neatly made, blanket stretched tight enough to bounce a quarter on it, the pillow perfectly centered. The little desk where he had done his homework, its top clutter free.
He did not need to look in the closet to know that the shirts all hung facing the same direction, that the shoes were arranged neatly on the floor.
The only wall décor was the mounted baseball bat with its engraved, plaque reading “REAL MEN STEP UP TO THE PLATE.”
Captain Griffith was a lot of things, but subtle was not one of them.
Matt had returned to the kitchen in time to see his mom rummaging in the rear of one of the cabinets. Eventually she retrieved a bottle of wine! Brandished it sheepishly.
“Would you like a glass?” she had asked, pouring one for herself.
Matt had been gobsmacked, as in seriously wondered if he had walked into the wrong home or if some alien entity had taken control of his mother’s body.
Theirs was a respectable fCOC family, teetotalers on both sides of the tree branching back generations.
Nora Griffith—the mother he knew—would not even use alcohol in a recipe that called for it, did not care that the alcohol would cook out.
It was “the principle of the thing,” she had said on more than one occasion.
Matt hadn’t needed to ask if his father was aware of this sacrilege under his roof.
He’d seen how well the bottle was concealed in the cabinet, watched his mother check the clock to make sure she had time before his father got home, noted that she poured the wine into juice glasses.
Glasses—plural—because, yeah, if his mom was offering him a drink, Matt could surely use one.
His mom had led him into the living room, motioned for him to sit beside her on the couch.
She had sat with one leg folded under the other, which was almost as scandalous as her drinking wine. Nora Griffith ALWAYS sat with both feet on the floor, knees together—like any Stepford wife would do.
Matt had remained standing, still reeling at the changes in his mom. Angry that the focus was on her drinking instead of his hurt.
“When?” he asked, as in when had she started drinking.
“August,” she had said. “Come. Sit down. Tell me all about your semester. Classes. Soccer. Everything.” Her voice had that fake cheerfulness she used when chatting with other wives after church.
Matt had shaken his head. She could not just pick up the thread of his life as if nothing had happened.
“When in August?” he had asked. His mother was hiding something.
“You haven’t even commented on the tree,” his mom had said, motioning towards the Christmas tree in the corner of the room.
Matt had shrugged. It was the same tree they’d had for years, in the same spot it had occupied since they moved to this house in ’89.
The only real question was how much nagging on his mom’s part had it required to overcome his dad’s stubbornness about setting it up.
One year the tree hadn’t been set up until Christmas Eve, had remained in place until Valentine’s Day—just to prove who was really the boss.
Matthew Griffith, senior, did not like his authority to be challenged.
“When in August?” Matt had repeated his question. Fuck the Christmas tree.
His mom had taken a long sip of wine, stared out the picture window overlooking the patio. “About a week after you went to school,” she finally said. “Please sit down. This feels like an interrogation.”
Matt had wanted to scream that it was an interrogation. What had she expected when she revealed her little secret? Instead, he settled in beside her on the couch. Turned to face her. He still held his juice glass of wine. He still wanted answers.
“I have one glass a day,” his mom had said sheepishly. “I’m not an alcoholic, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Matt had been thinking a lot of things, but alcoholism wasn’t one of them. He’d been thinking of the many times throughout his life when the two of them had sat like this, sharing, talking—times when his dad was out of the house, like now.
In many ways, his mom had been his best friend—until she hadn’t.
Until that morning when he was thirteen and she’d found his bloody underwear and pieced together the story that he’d been raped—and had ratted him out to his dad.
The morning she blinked passively while his dad raged at him, called him a “faggot,” threatened conversion therapy…
The evening she had stood by while his dad grabbed the baseball bat and dragged Matt to the car to go teach that “faggoty youth minister” a lesson.
Same baseball bat now hanging in Matt’s room, dark spots in the wood grain where the youth minister’s blood had soaked in.
It—and that fucking plaque—had nothing to do with baseball, everything to do with reminding Matt that he had failed to stand up for himself when it counted the most. Reminded him that he wasn’t a “real” man in his father’s eyes.
Held out the faint hope that he might yet make up for it.
Matt had sipped his wine. It tasted sour.
Nora had sighed. “I should have…”
Matt had ached to hear what Nora Griffith thought she should have done. He had a long list.
Instead, she had taken another sip of wine, stared at something beyond the picture window. “You know, when I married your father twenty years ago, I was the age you are now. All I wanted was to be Mrs. Matthew Griffith.”
Matt had scowled. If she was looking for sympathy, he was fresh out. He’d seen her wedding photos. His dad had been an arrogant prick then as well, smirking at the camera like he was doing Nora some big favor. Never mind that, by any objective standard, he had been lucky to win her hand.
Sip.
“Men don’t even think about changing their names. Girls do. I did.”
“Boo Hoo,” Matt had thought. Try being gay and knowing there was nowhere on the planet where you could be someone’s husband. Who cared what last name you used?
Sip.