36. Pass The Fruit Crisp
PASS THE FRUIT CRISP
“So, Mom.” Connor might not know how to start this conversation, but the kitchen was the right place to try.
Since yesterday’s conversation with Jess, he’d drafted a dozen openings in his head, even written down several and practiced them quietly in the shower. All those words vanished like a high fly ball into the sun.
He knew the thoughts had gone up and were most definitely coming down somewhere, but he had no idea which direction to start running.
It felt like, despite his preparation, everything he was about to say was going to drop five feet out of his reach.
“Here, quarter these.” His mother handed him a mixing bowl filled with fresh apricots from the orchard and pointed at the cutting board and knife on the counter before she returned to measuring oats, brown sugar, and spices into the processor.
He washed his hands and considered what to say next. “Jess said you’re all going to a new church. That’s nice.”
Wait, no, it wouldn’t be nice when people left their church because it had become oppressive and bigoted. That wasn’t actually a nice/not nice type of thing.
“Yep, we are.” His mother kept measuring spices into spoons, so he must not have sounded too weird. “Seems like a good place.” She paused to loudly whirl the oat topping together.
The apricot pits twisted easily out of the fruit. At least he knew how to do something.
“Jessica was right. We shouldn’t have been sitting there letting the pastor say those things. We didn’t agree with half of it, not even half, but we kept setting our butts in those pews and it made it look like we agreed. It’s a lot nicer to worship the Lord and leave the hating out of it.”
“That sounds good. Glad you did that. Well, uhhh,” he dropped more pieces of fruit into the bowl with the other quartered sections. “Guess I could go with you sometime.”
For the last couple years, he’d managed to avoid their old church outside of Christmas. He knew his parents had noticed, but no one had addressed it head on.
His decision had meant a lot of extra-busy Sunday mornings with the herd, some of them very cold and alone, but that wasn’t a hardship compared to worrying about whether he’d have to sit through a condemnation of his own life.
“Connor!” His mom turned to him, smiling and holding out a spoonful of crumbly oat and brown sugar topping. While he popped it in his mouth and added a half an apricot, until his cheeks puffed out with the impromptu unbaked crisp, she asked, “Have you started going to a church over in Eugene then?”
He shrugged and chewed for a moment while she waited. “Not really.”
Even though he missed the idea of church, he didn’t miss the tension of worrying if this week would be one they tried to pray away the gay. Although maybe there would be a place that didn’t preach that bullshit. Somewhere nondenominational or Unitarian? Episcopal like where Jess said they went now?
Somebody had to have a place for him, if he looked. He could ask the softball team chat if anyone went to a friendly church.
All this rumination wasn’t taking him closer to telling his mother the truth.
Take the leap.
“Jess made it sound like your new church might be more for me.” He swallowed again, trying to dislodge the lump in his throat that he knew wasn’t composed of oats and apricots, and failing.
His eyes felt hot. This had been two weeks of tears like he couldn’t remember since, well, never, but he couldn’t stop now.
He wouldn’t. No more lies. “For people like me.”
His mother looked like she was waiting, the spoon forgotten in the air and her head tilted as she watched him.
It was his mom, so she undoubtedly read him well enough to know he was struggling with something big. It felt like he could hear everything in the room. The brush of denim on denim, the creak of the old floor, a crow outside.
But he didn’t hear a word from her.
“I’m gay.”
He hadn’t thought it possible, but the kitchen was even quieter, so she must have heard what he said. At least he didn’t have to repeat himself, especially since he didn’t think he could muster the energy.
Her eyes got really big and her mouth started to open, the same time as his heart started to crack. He turned to the sink and twisted on the water. His hands were sticky.
His eyes were sticky.
He was a car with an empty gas tank and just enough fumes to get to the side of the road, but damn he didn’t even have enough battery for a hazard blinker. He turned off the water, braced his hands on the edge of the sink, and locked his elbows.
“Connor, sweetie.” She was very close, right at his shoulder, close enough to feel her presence even though she hadn’t put a hand on him.
He turned and she wrapped her arms around him, softly, as if she wasn’t sure what he wanted. But he needed her hug, and he raised his wet hands to his mother’s back and pulled her close and squeezed his eyes very tightly shut.
“Is it difficult, honey?” She asked against his shoulder. “I’ve been so worried.”
“Worried?” He didn’t understand what she was saying, and his shoulders stiffened.
“No, no, I’m not worried about you being, ah, gay.
” It took her an extra breath to get the word out, and it came out weirdly loud, like she wasn’t sure whether to emphasize it or not and changed her mind halfway through the single syllable, but she refused to let go of him.
“I guess I meant I’m worried about how other people treat you.
You might be taller than your father, but you’re still my sweet baby. ”
She reached up to stroke his hair off his forehead, awkward in this position, but so very welcome. “I watched a video about the Trevor Project and that made me worried for you. And I read about a teacher in Florida or somewhere getting in trouble for having a wedding picture and—”
“No, Mom, Eugene’s great. It’s a great city for me.”
He might be shaking.
“I have a great life. Everybody at school knows and it’s no big deal. I have friends and it’s all fine.”
He was definitely shaking.
Every time he heard himself use the word fine, he thought of Jonathan.
“I’d been wondering if there was more to your sister kicking things up about church. And there was always your thing with the British Royals. So that’s why I thought maybe.”
“What? What do you mean?” He knew for a fact he had never breathed a word about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex out here around the ranch.
She pulled back to give them enough space that she could look into his face.
Her eyebrows were both raised up her forehead.
“Connor, when I drove you all over the tri-state for baseball tournaments, you wanted every People magazine issue that featured the Royal Family. Except Camilla. You never wanted magazines with Camilla on the cover.”
“Did I?” He had, he remembered now. He’d definitely been that little gay boy, and Jonathan was going to give himself a hernia laughing about it.
“Your box of Princess Diana special editions is still under your bed.”
“I’d totally forgotten about those.” Going off to college, playing Division 1 baseball, and actually being out at school, had driven all the middle-school secret fantasies about life with royal pomp and circumstance right out of his head, until he’d rediscovered his favorite prince had become an adult. “Maybe I’ll take them back with me.”
“Remember when the older one got married, and you woke up real early in the morning to watch and talk about all the horses and uniforms? You were what, eleven?”
Prince William married Kate in April of 2011, so he’d been almost thirteen, but no fucking way was he going to correct his mother, because that would confirm that he knew the month and year of the royal weddings, plural.
He remembered wanting to find the sword and sash he’d played with when he’d been younger, but being enough of a middle-school-aged boy trying to figure himself out to know that dressing up like a British royal on a random non-Halloween morning was not done.
And if Jonathan ever found out, he’d take twenty points off that pretend heteronormative score he kept teasing Connor with.
“While we were watching that Bridgerton show, I was thinking about how much you used to like all that and so I sort of thought more about it?”
They were still hugging. His face was still on the side of his mom’s head, and her T-shirt was a bit stiff from being dried on the line, and they were still hugging.
“And, also, I, umm.” He couldn’t look at his mother’s face. He didn’t think he’d see a problem, but this was unexpectedly hard, especially given how much he teased Jonathan about difficulty saying the word. “I have a boyfriend.”
She pulled out of his arms. “Connor.”
His mother said his name with a breathlessness that he couldn’t really understand, because a lot had happened in a very short time, and he might be shutting down. Like, the fan to cool his brain’s CPU hadn’t quite kicked in and his gray matter was about to fry.
But since the conversation was going well, he threw everything in. “It’s kind of serious.”
“Really? Oh, Connor.”
He finally looked down at her, and her eyes were shining too. “Is Dad going to be okay with this? With me?”
“Of course, he loves you.” Her hands were firm on both sides of his face. She didn’t have soft hands, none of them did, but he didn’t want that. He wanted to be held tight by his mom.
“I don’t know how to tell him.”
She glanced around the kitchen. “We’ll do it together.
All of us. At dinner.” Her gaze stopped on the wall clock that had hung over the door to the mudroom for his whole life.
“I have time to roast a chicken. It’s just a five-pounder.
I won’t wait for Sunday. We’ll do chicken and fixings, and you can tell your father, and then we’ll have apricot crisp. ”
He felt a surge of giddiness, like he was drunk. Weird. “So, like please pass the fruit crisp, and oh, by the way, I’m fruity too?”
“No, not like that.” She squeezed his cheeks hard enough to give him fish lips and didn’t let go until he muttered stop.
This was his life.