Chapter Twenty-One #2
In a twist of events Aubrey never could have predicted, he called his mother for relationship advice.
“Mom, can I ask you something?”
“Please do. Your cousin is a wonderful woman, but I am entirely too old to be expected to partake in bachelorette-party drinking games.”
Aubrey laughed. “Come on. You love it.”
“Oh, fine.” He could hear her amusement. “I could drink any two of them under the table. I just don’t go in for lime Jell-O shots. Tell me all your problems.”
“Well, they didn’t start over Jell-O shots.”
“I am already intrigued.”
He sat, then stood again, suddenly nervous, like a high schooler about to come out of the closet or introduce his parents to his boyfriend for the first time. “The thing is….” He held his breath, hoping the need to expel it would make it easier to say the words. “I met someone.”
Dead. Silence.
Well, Aubrey hadn’t expected that. When it stretched on for more than a few seconds, he said tentatively, “Mom? Did you hear what I said?”
“I—I heard you.” There was a sigh of air and the sound of shushing fabric, like she’d been so surprised she needed to find a fainting couch or something. “You met someone, you said. In a… romantic context?”
Why was she being so weird about this? Aubrey was suddenly uncertain. He’d been sure his whole life that it was his promiscuity his mother had taken issue with, but what if that had been a cover? “That’s usually what the phrase means, yes.”
“Oh.” Now he had a whole new reason to be alarmed.
Oh no. He’d jokingly told Nate his mother would probably weep tears of joy if he told her they were together.
He hadn’t expected it to be true. And he certainly hadn’t expected the waterworks to begin before he even told her it was solid, family-values Nate who’d swept him off his feet—or maybe checked him off them.
“Oh, Aubrey, I’m just—so happy.”
He swallowed around a suddenly too-tight throat. “Me too, Mom.”
“Oh.” Another sniff followed by a zip, and then more rustling. His mother always carried a fine linen handkerchief in her purse. He imagined her dabbing her eyes with it now. “Aubrey, I… I want to apologize to you.”
Aubrey had been gearing up to explain falling for his cohost, but this derailed him completely. “Again?”
She laughed wetly. “I haven’t apologized for this yet, and it’s important.”
Aubrey sat again. “Okay.”
“I want to apologize for how I scolded you when you were younger, when you….”
“When I slept with any guy who’d look at me twice?” Aubrey suggested.
His mother sniffed in acknowledgment. “I always disapproved of your lifestyle—not your sexuality, Aubrey. I love you, and that includes the fact that you’re gay.
But I hated that you slept with so many men, and I never made a secret of that.
You probably thought it lowered my opinion of you and—well, I suppose it did.
I’m working on that. But that wasn’t the reason I hated it. ”
“Okay,” Aubrey said again, even more off-balance and unsure how to protect himself against the blow he sensed was coming.
“The truth is I was afraid for you.”
Afraid…? Of…? “What, Mom? I don’t get it.”
She sighed. “When you came out to us, you were already a world-class athlete. You took a lot of pride in your body, and you put a lot of value on it. I worried that if you… if you only ever loved with your body, you would believe your heart wasn’t worth anything.”
Aubrey was stunned into silence. His eyes burned with tears—at finally understanding his mother’s objections and at how close she had been to the truth. He took a sharp breath. “You might have been right to worry.” There. Half of the hard stuff out of the way. “If I hadn’t met Nate….”
“Nate?” She perked up. “Nate Overton? Your cohost?”
“Former cohost,” Aubrey reminded her. “We’ve been seeing each other for a while.” He loved her, and he was trying to repair their relationship, but she didn’t need details.
“Tell me about him,” she demanded. “I know he’s handsome and you have good chemistry, so you can leave that out.”
Aubrey smiled, thinking about him. “What do you want to know? He’s close to his family. He used to be married, but he’s not anymore. I wasn’t involved,” he added hurriedly.
“Oh, Aubrey. Of course not. I know you better than that.”
Aubrey had slept with a few married men, actually, but he hadn’t known until after the fact.
But those memories were better left in the past; they made him feel used.
“Okay. Well. Nate is… he likes to cook? He plays in a coed rec hockey league on Fridays at the rink where I’ve been skating with Greg.
” And now to steer the conversation to the advice portion. “He, um. He wants kids.”
His mother sucked in a breath. “So it’s serious.”
Aubrey bit his lip. He flexed a hand at his side to work out some of the tension. “It’s really new,” he said, which wasn’t a contradiction. “But yeah, it’s serious. And that’s the problem.”
“What’s the problem?” she asked. “That’s not a problem. That’s wonderful.”
“It’s a problem because I just got fired, Mom. I’m not staying in Chicago.”
“Why not?” she countered. “It’s not like you need the work. You could stay if you wanted to.”
“The problem is,” he said, realizing as he did so that this was the crux of it, “that I don’t know if I want to.”
“Aubrey! Why not?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Did I tell you I was helping Greg practice for Cirque? We choreographed a whole routine. Two executives came out to watch it, and I guess they saw us goofing off beforehand. They offered me a spot, maybe a choreography gig.” He swallowed.
“I can’t just sit around, you know? I need to be involved.
I’m not going to be able to skate forever, but choreography…
. And there are so many other opportunities in Vegas… .”
His mother hummed. “But Nate’s job is in Chicago.”
“Nate’s job is in Chicago,” Aubrey confirmed miserably. “And it’s only been a few weeks. Is that too soon to start something long distance? Asking him to move to Vegas is absurd, right?”
“Absurd is so relative.” He could almost see her shaking her head. “You’re sure this job is what you want?”
“No!” he exclaimed. “No, I’m not sure. But it’s an opportunity that’s not going to come around every day.
Ever since Greg and I skated for his audition, I’ve been thinking about performing again.
I’m not ready to give it up, I want…. I have more to do, more to say, more to contribute. But how do I choose?”
“Darling, I love you very much. But if you think I am the person to ask about achieving balance between your career and your personal life, you might want to reconsider.”
Aubrey flopped back against the couch, wincing. “Point taken.”
“Since we’re on the subject.” His mother cleared her throat. “I want to tell you something. When you were little, your father and I desperately wanted to have another baby.”
Aubrey was glad he was already sitting down, because that would have about knocked him over. “What?”
“We were so determined, but we just—we couldn’t get pregnant. So we started traveling to see fertility specialists. We flew to Toronto, New York, Switzerland…. Anywhere with an experimental new treatment, we went. We’d be gone for weeks at a time, hoping for a miracle.”
He remembered being eight, ten, twelve years old, wondering why his parents kept leaving him. Remembered too the way his parents had latched on to Rachel, showering her with love, and how jealous he’d been as an eight-year-old to see a toddler getting that kind of attention.
It had hurt him. But now he understood that his parents had been hurting too.
“Mom.”
“Just let me get this out, all right?” He thought she might be trying to sound tough, but in truth, he could hear the edge of tears.
“We loved you so much. It wasn’t that you weren’t enough.
We wanted a bigger family to expand on the love you brought into our lives.
But we were so focused on it that that we abandoned you when you needed us the most.”
Aubrey swallowed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I had no idea.
” How different might he have been if he’d had a younger sibling to look after?
Sure, it would have further divided his parents’ attention.
But he’d have had someone to tease, someone to look up to him.
He’d maybe have learned some of the balance his therapist had spent the past few months teaching him.
He couldn’t help thinking he might have been better off.
“That’s the way your father and I wanted it. No one knew. We kept our grief very private. The process wrung us so dry that by the time we gave up, we were too burned out to consider adoption.”
He could certainly understand that. But… “Why tell me now?”
“Because, sweetheart, I want you to consider the lesson I learned twenty years too late.”
He waited.
“Just be careful while you’re chasing your dream that you don’t sacrifice the blessings you already have.”
Aubrey sat quietly with the weight of that advice for a few moments, wanting to give it the consideration it deserved. “I will,” he said at length. “Thanks, Mom.”
He knew what he had to do.