11. Chapter 11 Liam
We were halfway to the store before I said it.
My mom was driving along the lakeside drive, coffee in the cupholder, radio low, the lake on the left, and trees on the right.
"Mom."
"Mm."
"When Alex comes. For Christmas Eve." I watched the trees go by. "What are we gonna tell everyone?"
"What do you mean, what are we gonna tell everyone?"
"I mean — who he is. To me."
She glanced at me. Quick. Back to the road.
"He's your boyfriend, Liam."
"I know that. But does everyone else know that? Because I told you, but I didn't tell anyone else that I'm bi."
It was starting to feel normal saying that word out loud. She was quiet a second. The turn signal clicked.
"I spoke to your grandmother."
The bottom of my stomach dropped about six inches. "You told Grandma Jean?"
"I told your grandmother, yes."
"Mom, when?"
"About a month ago. On the phone. After you told me."
"And you didn't think to mention that?"
"I'm mentioning it now."
"You've been sitting on this for — "
"Liam." She said it steady, the way she says everything when I'm spiraling and she's not. "Your grandmother is fine."
"Fine?"
"Fine. Her exact words were, 'Well, that explains a few things,' and then she asked me what you wanted for Christmas."
I stared at her.
"That's — that's what she said?"
"That's what she said. And your grandfather was sitting right there — you know she puts me on speaker whether I want to be on speaker or not — and his exact contribution was 'hm.' That's it."
I sat with that for a quarter-mile.
"What did she mean, 'explains a few things'?"
"I didn't ask."
"And Grandpa just — 'hm.'"
"That's an endorsement, baby. You know that."
I knew that. A full sentence from my grandfather was a parade. "Hm" was practically a standing ovation.
"What about everyone else?" I said.
She took the turn toward town. The grocery store parking lot was already visible, half-full.
"I didn't say anything to anyone else," she said.
"That's your business to share, not mine.
But you know how things get around in this family.
Your grandmother talks to your Aunt Sheryl every Sunday, and Sheryl talks to Deb, and Deb tells Russ everything eventually, and Russ…
well it stops there because he forgets everything…
So." She pulled into a spot and killed the engine. "I wouldn't assume it's a secret."
"Great."
"Nobody's said a word to me about it. That might mean they don't know, or it might mean they're waiting to see you and him in person before they form an opinion. That's how this family works."
"So awkward… and annoying."
"That's family." She grabbed her purse and the coupon wallet. "Come on. We've got two hours before the good hams are gone."
The grocery store the week before Christmas was a full-contact sport.
Carts bumping in every aisle. A kid having a meltdown in produce. Two women arguing over the last bag of cranberries as if it were the last helicopter out of a war zone. My mom moved through all of it the way she moved through everything. Fast, focused, list in her head, no browsing.
"Ham," she said, weighing one in each hand in the meat section.
"How much do we need?"
"Well, let's count." She set one ham in the cart and picked up another. "Us three. Your grandmother and grandfather. Russ and Deb and the kids — that's four more. Sheryl and Danny."
"Danny's coming?"
"Yes. His girlfriend is doing her family this year, so he's solo.
He'll show up late with beer and leave early, same as always.
" She squeezed a ham. Put it back. Picked up a different one.
"That's eleven. But your uncle… and Cody's fifteen now…
and your boyfriend is a Division I athlete who I'm guessing didn't get there on salads. "
"You don't have to buy a second ham."
She put a second ham in the cart.
"Mom."
"I'm not running out of ham on Christmas Eve."
We moved through the aisles. Rolls — the big bag, not two small ones, because it's the same bread for less money.
"So how's Uncle Russ doing?" I said, following my mom into the baking aisle.
"I talked to Deb last week. She says Russ has been on a tear about the Bills' draft picks. Apparently, he got into it with the guy at the hardware store about whether they should've traded up."
"I'm not surprised."
"It was Jerry Alderman's son. Deb had to go in and get him because he had been in there for 30 minutes."
"Of course she did."
"She said he's making a PowerPoint for the next game. Cody is showing him how to use it."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. Uncle Russ making a PowerPoint about the Buffalo Bills' draft strategy was the most Uncle Russ thing that had ever happened.
My mom picked up name-brand vanilla, looked at the price, put it back, and grabbed the store brand.
"And Maddie's doing some kind of gymnastics showcase in January," my mom continued, checking prices on brown sugar. "She won't stop talking about it. Deb says she's been practicing in the living room and broke a lamp."
"Which lamp?"
"The one Russ's mother gave them. The one with the birds."
"The bird lamp. That thing was ugly anyway."
My mom turned to me, "That's your gay side honey," she whispered with a smile.
"Mom." I shook my head.
"Anyway, Deb said she wasn't even mad. She said, and I quote, 'It was the best thing that child has ever broken.'"
She moved through the store the way she moved through the family, with full inventory. She knew everything about everyone, not because she gossiped but because she listened.
"Your Aunt Sheryl called me Tuesday," she said, loading cans of condensed milk into the cart. "She wanted to know what to bring. I said a salad. She's bringing a casserole instead. She never listens."
"What kind of casserole?"
"Some recipe she found in a magazine and it's 'actually very easy.' It's never very easy and it takes four hours and she'll tell you about every one of them."
She was smiling now. The small one, the one that came out when she was talking about her family and forgot to be tired.
"And Danny?"
"Danny's Danny. Working. He's got a renovation job out past Greenfield that's been going since October."
"Does Danny know?" I said. "About me."
She paused. Put a bag of flour in the cart slowly.
"I don't know what Danny knows. Sheryl might've told him. He's thirty years old, and he's been through enough of his own stuff that he won't make yours into a thing."
We hit the checkout. She handed me the coupon wallet.
"There's a dollar fifty off the second ham in there somewhere, the blue one.
" I found it and handed it to the cashier, and the total came to sixty-eight dollars, and she paid in cash from the jar, and we loaded the bags into the trunk in the cold.
She slammed the trunk and looked at me across the car roof.
"Alright," she said. "Gift time."
***
Gift time was a disaster.
We drove to Art-Mart. The old warehouse past the fire station, which runs as an indoor flea market year-round.
Fifty-some stalls under one roof: local vendors selling candles and soaps and jewelry, a guy who makes cutting boards out of reclaimed barn wood, a woman with hand-knit everything, a vintage booth stuffed with records and old signs, a stall that's just hot sauce.
The whole place smelled like dust and the space heaters that every vendor ran under their tables.
My mom loved Art-Mart. I usually lasted about fifteen minutes before the browsing made me want to walk into traffic.
Today I lasted less.
I moved through the stalls, picking things up and putting them down.
A leather journal — he owns nicer ones. A wool hat — he has a hat.
A framed photo of the lake in winter — pretty, generic, the kind of thing you'd hang in a bathroom.
A vintage compass that was actually cool, but the glass was cracked, and eighty dollars felt like a lot for cracked glass. Not that I had it.
My mom held up a handmade coffee mug: blue glaze, nice weight.
"What about this?"
"It's a mug."
"It's a nice mug. Handmade."
"I can't give him a mug, Mom. He grew up drinking out of china from China that probably has his family crest on it."
She put the mug down.
We kept going. Past the soap stall, past the hot sauce guy, past a table of secondhand books and a rack of vintage flannel shirts. Nothing. Everything was something he already had a better version of, or it was a thing you'd buy for someone you didn't know well enough to try harder.
"This isn't about the gift," she said, watching me put down a leather keychain for the third time.
"It's about the gift."
"It's about the fact that you think anything you can afford won't be good enough."
I didn't answer because she was right.
"Liam," She put her hand on my arm. "He cares about you."
"For now. Until — "
"Until what?"
"Until he realizes what it's really going to be like to have a poor boyfriend."
The word landed wrong the second it left my mouth. Poor. I heard it hit the air, and I heard what it actually said — not about Alex, not about me, about her. I called her life poor.
Shit.
Her face changed. A mix of anger and disappointment, as if I had hit her in the stomach.
"Mom. I didn't mean — "
"I know what you meant." She was quiet for a beat. Her hand was still on my arm. She didn't take it off, which was how I knew I'd hurt her, and how I knew she was going to forgive me in the same breath. "But I want you to hear something."
She looked at me.
"I work hard. You work hard. We have a roof, and we have food, and we have each other, and there is nothing poor about any of that.
I have never once been ashamed of what I can provide for you, Liam.
Not once. And if the thing that scares you about bringing that boy into our house is that he'll see what I've built and think it's not enough — " She stopped.
Took a breath. "Then you're not seeing what I built. "
My eyes burned. I looked at the floor.
"I'm sorry," I said. "That's not what I — I'm sorry, Mom."
"Thank you." She squeezed my arm. "I know you didn't mean it like that. You're scared and you're saying scared things. But don't make my life small just because you're afraid someone else will."
She let go. Patted my arm twice and picked up her purse.
"Come on," she said. "Let's go."
We walked out with nothing. I sat in the passenger seat on the drive back, looking at the lake through the windshield with two hams and sixty-eight dollars of Christmas food in the trunk and no gift. My mom started the car, and neither of us said anything for a minute.
Then, my phone rang.
Alex's name on the screen, and I knew before I picked up that something was wrong.
"Hey."
"Liam."
His voice was wrong.
"What's going on?"
"I told him." A breath. "I told him everything. It's done."
"What do you mean it's done?"
"I'm done." Another breath, shorter. "The trust, the tuition. He said I'm not — that I'm no longer — "
His voice broke.
"Where are you right now?"
"Outside. The front steps. I have my bag."
"Stay there."
I looked at my mom. She was already looking at me. She'd heard my tone and shifted into crisis-fix-it-mom-mode.
"Mom."
"Which way?"
"The Point."
I put the phone back to my ear.
"Liam?" Small. "Are you still there?"
"I'm here. We're coming. My mom and me. Fifteen minutes."
"You don't have to — "
"Alex. We're coming."
"Thank you."
"It's going to be okay."
I hung up. My mom drove. Neither of us spoke for a full minute. The lake road ran flat along the water, the Point growing larger through the windshield.
"His father?" she said finally.
"Yeah."
"How bad?"
"He kicked him out because he's with me."
Her hands tightened on the wheel.
"That man," she said, low and even and absolutely final, "is going to have to answer for that someday. And I hope I'm in the room."
That was all she said. She didn't say that's terrible or I'm so sorry.
***
Peninsula Point looked different from the driveway.
The house was big and stone and cold, wreaths on the gates, a path shoveled to the same width all the way to a front door that looked like it had never been opened in a hurry.
Alex was sitting on the steps with his duffel beside him and my hoodie on.
His face was red from the cold or from crying or both, and when our car pulled into the driveway, he stood up.
My mom's twelve-year-old car in front of a house with a three-car garage.
He stood there looking at us as if he wasn't sure we were real.
The look on his face was one that would live in me for the rest of my life. Empty and hopeless.
I was out of the car before it stopped.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey."
I didn't ask what happened. I didn't ask if he was okay.
I put my arms around him and he dropped the duffel and put his face into my neck and his shoulders started shaking, and I held him on the front steps of his father's house while the stone and the glass watched, and my mom sat in the car with the engine running and let us have it.
A minute. Maybe two. His breath going ragged against my collar. His hands fisted in the back of my jacket. And the cold didn't exist, and the house didn't exist, and the man inside it didn't exist. Just him shaking and me holding.
"Come on," I said. "Let's go home."
He pulled back. Wiped his face with the heel of his hand. Nodded.
I picked up the duffel bag and put it in the trunk. He got in the back seat. I got in the front. My mom looked at him in the rearview, and what she said was:
"Are you hungry?"
He almost laughed. It came out closer to a breath. "Yeah. Actually."
"Good. There's chili at home. And I bought enough ham to feed a small army for the holiday." She put the car in reverse. "Seatbelt."
He put on the seatbelt.
She drove towards our side of the lake.