Chapter 9
LIV
The rental convertible purrs as we cruise through the hills of Maryland, the September sun warming my shoulders.
I'm driving because Blair forgot her license—something about it being in her purse back in New York.
The excuse seemed flimsy; I doubt she even owns a purse, but I didn't press.
Maybe she doesn't have a license and she's embarrassed.
Living in the city, plenty of people get by without driving.
The weather is great for this—mid-seventies with a pleasant breeze that carries the scent of hay and the last crop of summer corn.
Blair has her head tilted back, letting the wind tousle her hair.
Every few minutes, she'll point out something that catches her attention—a red-winged blackbird perched on a fence post, a weathered barn with hex signs painted on its sides, a tractor moving slowly across a distant field.
My hands, meanwhile, are gripping the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles have gone white.
The closer we get to Crayfield, the more my stomach churns with anxiety.
It's been six months since I was home last, and even then it was just for a quick visit.
I always have an excuse—client emergencies, venue walk-throughs, vendor meetings that simply cannot be rescheduled.
Coming home feels uncomfortable. Once I turned my back, it became hard to return.
"This is beautiful," Blair says as we pass a sprawling farm with black and white Holstein cows dotting the pasture like scattered dominoes. "Look at all this space. It just goes on and on forever."
I glance at the view she's admiring—endless green fields stretching toward a horizon broken only by the occasional farmhouse or red barn.
Ancient oak trees provide shade, their leaves just beginning to hint at the colors they'll become in a few weeks.
Stone walls built by farmers a century ago still mark property lines, covered in wild grapevines and Virginia creeper.
It's postcard pretty, I'll give her that. It’s the kind of scenery that makes city people dream about a "simpler life" and "getting back to nature. "
"Yeah, it's nice," I say with a shrug, downshifting as we approach a small town's speed limit. "But too quiet for me."
"Is that why you left?"
I could give her my standard answer—that I wanted career opportunities that don't exist in rural Maryland, that I needed the energy and pace of city life. It’s true, but it’s not the whole truth.
"I wanted more," I finally say, keeping my eyes on the road. We pass a farm stand selling late summer tomatoes and sweet corn. There’s a coffee can where you leave money on the honor system.
"More excitement, more challenge, more... I don't know. Just more than this place could offer. My parents have lived the same routine for thirty years. They wake up at dawn, tend the farm, eat dinner at six, watch the evening news, go to bed by ten. I wasn’t like them, satisfied with small-town life and small-town dreams.”
"Nothing wrong with wanting more," Blair says. "Sometimes you have to leave to figure out who you're supposed to be. I couldn't stay in North Carolina either."
I glance at her. "Ever want to leave New York?"
"Sure," she says with a laugh, but there's an edge to it that wasn't there before. "But I have no idea where I'd go."
We pass the Crayfield town limits sign, and my heart rate picks up another notch.
Main Street looks more or less the same as it did when I left for Columbia—family-owned shops with hand-painted signs, a single traffic light that still blinks yellow after 10 PM, the diner where I had my first job waiting tables for tips that barely covered gas money.
Mrs. Henderson is still tending her flower boxes outside the hardware store, her white hair pinned back the same way it's been for decades.
Mr. Ruben still has newspapers stacked on the sidewalk outside his corner market, weighted down with a brick against the breeze.
It's charming in that frozen-in-time way that tourists love and locals either embrace or flee from.
"This is it," I announce as we cruise past the town center. "Downtown Crayfield in all its glory."
"It's like something out of a movie," Blair says, craning her neck to look at the storefronts. The barbershop has a spinning pole, and the pharmacy still displays hand-lettered sale signs in the window. "Does everyone know everyone here?"
"Pretty much. Mrs. Henderson over there—" I point to the woman arranging marigolds in wooden planters.
"She taught my mother in Sunday school. Mr. Ruben from the convenience store helped my dad fix his combine harvester last spring and refused to accept payment.
The mailman went to high school with my sister.
" I shake my head, navigating around a pickup truck that's moving at approximately fifteen miles per hour.
"Nothing happens here that isn't everyone's business within an hour. "
"Including your mysterious girlfriend making an appearance for the first time?"
"Oh God, don’t get me started." The reality hits me fresh, a cold wave of panic.
"By tonight, half the county will know I brought someone home.
By tomorrow morning, the other half will have heard, and they'll all have opinions about whether you're good enough for me.
" I grip the steering wheel even tighter, and my palms start to sweat.
“I'm one of maybe five openly gay people in a twenty-mile radius, so bringing home a girlfriend—or what they think is a girlfriend—is going to be the talk of the town for months.”
“You’ve never brought a woman home?” she asks.
I keep my eyes on the road. “Once,” I say. “But that was a long time ago.”
Three miles outside town, I turn onto Crayfield Road, and our family's land comes into view.
Five hundred acres of corn and soybean fields, with the farmhouse and outbuildings nestled in a grove of massive oak trees.
The corn is tall and green, almost ready for harvest, rustling in the breeze like nature's own white noise machine.
The soybean fields are beginning to yellow in places, maybe six weeks away from the harvest that will occupy Dad's days and nights.
The house itself is a two-story white clapboard with a wraparound porch, built in 1924 by my great-grandfather with lumber from trees he cut down himself.
It's been updated over the years; a new roof after a storm, a modern kitchen when Mom finally convinced Dad that avocado green appliances weren't making a comeback, central air conditioning installed the summer I graduated high school.
The barn, painted the traditional red with white trim, dominates the landscape behind the house.
Its weather vane—a rooster—spins lazily in the breeze.
To the right are the smaller outbuildings that make up the functional heart of the farm: the chicken coop with its slanted roof and wire run, the equipment shed where Dad keeps the smaller machinery, the old milk house that hasn't been used for milk in twenty years but serves as his workshop for fixing whatever needs fixing.
And scattered across the nearest pasture are the animals Mom insists on keeping despite Dad's protests that they're not practical: six goats that exist purely for her amusement, a handful of pigs, and two old cows named Bessie and Mabel that are basically very large pets at this point.
"Holy fuck," Blair breathes as we turn up the gravel driveway that crunches under our tires. "This is where you grew up?"
"Language, Sailor," I joke. "Mom's rule. No swearing on the property. Dad pretends to enforce it, but he curses when he thinks no one's listening. Especially during harvest season."
The house grows larger, and I see Mom's flower gardens blazing with late summer color—zinnias and marigolds in shades of orange and yellow, purple cosmos swaying on tall stems, black-eyed Susans that seem to multiply every year.
She's always been the one to make this place beautiful while Dad focused on making it profitable.
The combination has worked throughout their marriage.
I park beside Dad's pickup truck, its bed loaded with feed bags and farming supplies. My heart is hammering hard and fast. This is it. The moment where my lie either works or explodes in my face, taking my family relationships with it.
Before I can even turn off the engine, the front door flies open and both my parents appear on the porch.
Mom is wiping her hands on a dish towel, her face bright with excitement.
She's wearing her favorite blue sundress, the one she saves for special occasions, and her graying hair is styled in a way that tells me she spent extra time getting ready.
Dad follows more slowly, but I can see the curiosity in his expression as he gets his first look at ‘Sailor’.
"Well," I say, glancing at my pretend girlfriend. "Here we go. Be good, Sailor."
She catches my eyes and holds my gaze for a moment. "Hey," she says softly. "It's going to be okay."
I climb out of the car and barely have time to smooth my hair before Mom is hurrying down the porch steps, her arms already outstretched. She's practically vibrating.
"Livvy!" She pulls me into a fierce hug. "Oh, sweetheart, you look so beautiful. But so thin—are you eating enough?"
"I'm fine, Mom," I laugh, accepting the familiar criticism that comes with every homecoming. "I eat plenty."
"Take-out doesn't count," she says. "All that sushi nonsense. You need home cooking. Real food."
Dad appears beside her. His hair has gone completely gray since my last visit, but his smile is the same.
"There's my city girl," he says, wrapping me in a hug that lifts me off my feet. "Good to have you home, kiddo."
By the time I extract myself from their embraces, Blair has come around the car and is standing a respectful distance away, letting us have our family moment.
"Mom, Dad," I say, reaching for Blair's hand. It's warm and solid as she intertwines our fingers. "I'd like you to meet Sailor."