Chapter 4
HATCH
It was close to midnight when I slipped through the front door, and for just a moment, I thought I’d gone completely under the radar.
But the back porch light was on, and I could see Dad’s head slumped against the window, where he was clearly waiting for me to come home. He was probably worried—and angry. I could either face this now or face it in the morning.
“Louisa,” he said, shooting forward in his wicker chair when I stepped onto the porch. He cleared his throat like he hadn’t spoken in hours. “Where have you been? You left without saying anything, you didn’t answer your phone, do you know how worried I’ve been?”
It was jarring to be standing in front of him after being at the Frisky Cricket all night. I felt like I had just binge-watched an amazing fantasy show and then turned off the TV to realize it was all a dream.
“Why didn’t you tell me Uncle George was gay?” It was the only thing I could manage to say. My voice cracked in the late night heat.
Dad blinked up at me. He had changed out of his funeral clothes and was now dressed in his usual PFG fishing shirt.
He held a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other, and based on his bleary eyes and tousled hair, I could tell they were hitting him.
“Where were you, Louisa?” he asked again.
I reached into my dress pocket and pulled out a matchbook with the Frisky Cricket’s branding on it. I tossed it roughly to Dad and watched the realization dawn on his face.
“Honey…”
“You never told me,” I said, trying to steady my shaking voice.
“Jellybean,” Dad said tiredly, using the old nickname. “You know how this family is. Nobody ever talked about it, not even Uncle George himself.”
“But this is you and me, Dad, not the rest of the family. You could have told me, especially after I came out to you. You could have told me today.” I paused, hating myself the slightest bit when I realized I was about to echo Grandpa. “Instead, you let Otis Penny do your dirty work.”
Dad hung his head. He had the grace to look ashamed. “I know. And I’m sorry.”
“Didn’t you think—I mean, that day I called you from Connecticut and told you I was gay—didn’t you think it might help me to know about Uncle George? That I wasn’t the first one to navigate this?”
Dad gave me a pained look. Then he patted the empty chair next to him. “Will you sit down for a minute?”
I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My emotions were threatening to spill over for the umpteenth time today, and the thought of sitting next to the source of a lot of those emotions was unbearable. Instead, I slid down to sit on the floor, my back jutting into the screen door.
Dad looked crestfallen, but he didn’t push me on it. He nodded, slouched back in his chair, and took a drag of his Marlboro. “Louisa,” he began, “after that phone call in April, when you told me how your heart worked … I started doing some research.”
It was the last thing I expected to come out of his mouth. I sat completely still, waiting for more.
“I didn’t really know what I was looking for.
I just wanted to understand you better. So I looked some things up online.
I found a couple of parent support groups.
There are lots of good articles, stories, vocabulary guides, that kind of thing.
I even sent your mom a few of ’em. The more I learned, the more I thought to myself, I should have done this years ago.
It could have helped me connect with Uncle George on a whole ’nother level.
” He paused. “See, you’ve got to understand that Uncle George was from a different time. He never talked about his lifestyle—”
I bristled at the word lifestyle, but I didn’t want to interrupt and risk derailing the conversation. I needed the truth too badly.
“—and nobody else did, either,” Dad went on.
“It’s not like your grandparents sat me down and told me, and I knew better than to ask.
I can’t even remember how old I was when I first realized it.
It was something that just … was.” He flicked the ash off his cigarette and screwed up his mouth like he was trying to articulate something.
“When you came out to me, I thought, well, here’s my courageous daughter bringing something into the sunlight.
Maybe it’ll nudge George to speak openly, at least to me.
So I showed him your Instagram and—and he got this look in his eyes, I’ll never forget it… ”
Dad swallowed and blinked very quickly. He was clearly struggling to keep talking, but I could hardly bring myself to feel sympathy.
Why had my “courageous” choice to come out prompted him to worry about Uncle George rather than me?
Why couldn’t he have called me and talked through all the things he’d learned?
And where had this support been last night, when I’d tried talking to my grandparents about my sexuality and Dad had shut me down?
“We still couldn’t bridge that gap,” Dad continued, “but I decided I’d keep researching, keep learning, and someday soon I’d sit him down and get up the guts to ask him about it.” He sniffed, and I knew what the next words would be. “But then he got sick.”
Dad started to cry. I lowered my head, trying to give him a moment. Internally, I was still warring between my hot, pulsing anger and the age-old urge to comfort him. Was I punishing him by withholding sympathy? Was I a terrible person for expecting things from someone who was hurting so deeply?
“Sorry,” Dad said, pawing at his eyes. “Anyway, I … I haven’t known what to do since then.
I wanted to tell you about Uncle George but I just …
I wasn’t sure how to bring it up, or even if I should.
I read all these things about making sure you don’t out somebody, respecting a person’s privacy and timeline, that kind of thing.
I didn’t know what the respectful thing was, especially knowing how private Uncle George could be… ”
“But he’s gone, Dad,” I said, trying to rein in my anger. “He’s gone, and I’m right here.”
Dad gave me an anguished look. “I know, honey, and I’m sorry.
The past couple weeks, just getting out of bed every day has been like scraping the bottom of the barrel.
But I’m gonna do better. I’ll help you navigate this sale, and we’ll get you that money, and you’ll never have to rely on Grandpa again. ”
Navigate this sale. In all my excitement about discovering the Frisky Cricket, I had completely forgotten that Uncle George had been in the process of selling it. That he had hoped I would follow through. It was like a trickle of ice water running down my spine.
“I’m tired,” I said abruptly. Then I got to my feet and left Dad sitting on the porch.
I couldn’t sleep.
After an hour of tossing and turning, I crept out of bed and onto the porch again. The stars were bright and the bullfrogs croaked their steady rhythm. I placed my hands on my stomach, took a deep breath, and tried to exhale the restlessness from my body.
Uncle George was gay.
Breathe.
He built a safe space for queer people.
Breathe.
There’s a place for me in Rustin.
I stopped breathing.
All weekend, I’d been counting down the hours until my return flight to Connecticut.
That countdown had been my port in a storm, but now it caused a wave of anxiety to crash over me.
Was I supposed to just hop on a plane tomorrow and go home to my regular life as if this weekend had never happened?
Sign away the bar without ever setting foot in it again?
Forget Hannah and Baker and the kindness they’d shown me, as if they were mere shadows that had danced across my vision?
Forget Uncle George and his complicated legacy and this precious gift he had left me, which I had only just scratched the surface of understanding?
And what was home, anyway? This stolen nighttime moment with its humid air and summer noises was as much my home as anything.
Long before my parents’ marriage had dissolved, before I’d tamped down my Southern accent to fit in with the kids up north, before I’d realized I was gay …
before any of that, I had been formed by Rustin.
Sprung from the soil, cradled by the tree line.
I had always thought Rustin would be part of my past but never my future.
But now? Now possibilities were opening before me like the blue sky after a cloudy day.
There was a specific place for me here. There were people like me here, in the first home I’d ever had, in the very place where I didn’t think people like me existed.
Something was churning in my gut, and I knew—even if it didn’t make sense—that I was about to do something that scared the hell out of me, and that it was too late to tiptoe back into the summer I’d planned on having.
Can you help me? I found myself asking. It was a prayer, but it took me a second to realize it wasn’t God I was pleading with.
Uncle George, I wish you could have shown me your whole self. Was it terrifying, especially back then? How did you hide it? How did you breathe?
Yesterday I’d thought no one in Rustin cared about me coming out, at least not in a positive way. And yet Uncle George cared. He saw himself in me. He left his legacy in my hands. How could someone have such faith in me? And why did I have to lose him before I even knew him?
“Are you sure this is the right place?” the Uber driver asked.
He was an older man, skinny as a reed with a long, scraggly beard.
Pictures of his grandchildren were clipped to the sun visor.
It had taken almost fifteen minutes for my app to match with him, which probably wasn’t uncommon for small-town Alabama, especially at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.
“Yep, this is it,” I said, already wrenching the door open.
“Are you sure?” He stared suspiciously at the Pride flag. His car hovered on the edge of the parking lot, like he was afraid to get too close.