Track 11 Delilah
Delilah
Missed call from: Alex Stewart
Missed call from: Alex Stewart
Missed call from: Alex Stewart
“Delilah, why do I have seven requests for comment on you having a fuck-my-ex jam session in Cleveland? That is not keeping a low profile! And Jesus Christ, I shouldn’t have to say this, but stop ignoring my fucking texts!”
It’s a five-hour drive from the Hall of Fame to their next overnight spot, a gay campground on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan. Delilah spends the entire trip coasting on a musical high that’s as good as some of the highs she’s had on actual drugs.
Her body is buzzing, not with the kind of rising waves that threaten to drag her into the riptide of mania, but with something hot and tingling, like the muscle aches after a good workout or a particularly fantastic round of sex.
She gives Emmett the keys and curls up in the passenger seat and writes until her fingers start to cramp—it’s shameless, stream-of-consciousness writing, the radio turned up loud enough that she can’t hear herself think, her inner editor temporarily handcuffed.
By the time they pull into the campground, there’s a shiny bulbous new pen callus on the edge of her finger and she’s started to settle into herself again, the flood of energy burning itself out.
Delilah shakes out her hands and closes her journal with a triumphant snap, shoves it into her backpack, and straightens up in her seat to peer out the window.
“Good navigating,” she says, a little impressed despite herself as Emmett pulls them over to stop in front of the office, then turns Roscoe off and passes Delilah the keys. “You’re almost as good with a map as I am.”
“I have a good memory,” Emmett says. “And I didn’t want to interrupt you when it seemed like you were in a good place.”
“I really, really was,” Delilah says. “Thank you.”
Emmett shrugs, opening their door. “It wasn’t hard,” they said. “Pretty much a straight line across the state.”
Before she can stop herself, Delilah reaches over and catches their sleeve. “That’s not what I meant,” she says. “And you know it.”
Emmett’s face softens. “I do know it,” they agree. “But I thought I’d give you the chance not to talk about it.”
“And that,” she says, “is why you’re my favorite person I’ve ever road-tripped with.” She lets go of their arm. “C’mon, let’s go talk to some gays.”
The desk is helmed by a cheerful woman in a pink-and-orange flannel, her short hair swept up in a pompadour.
She waggles her eyebrows at Delilah when Emmett’s back is turned before plucking one of the campground maps from a display box and showing them the route to their campsite.
“You’re right between a couple groups of regulars, actually,” she says, passing it over, along with a printed schedule of the evening’s activities and events.
“We’re in the off-season, so there’s not as much going on, but there are a few things to do if you’re looking for options. ”
“Honestly, we’ve been driving since Cleveland, so I think we’ll be good with a bit of a crash,” Delilah says, flashing the camera-ready smile Alex used to make her practice for hours at a time. “But we’ll keep an eye out.”
The regulars, it turns out, are an older lesbian couple in a vintage RV and a group of four people of various genders gathered around a picnic table next to a clearly well-loved blue Subaru hitched to a large camper.
They all wave cheerfully when Emmett and Delilah pull in, and they barely make it out of the van before they’re swarmed.
“Oh, you’ve got first-timers written all over your baby faces,” the taller of the two older women says, grinning broadly as she shakes Delilah’s hand.
Her fingers are blocky but smooth, her salt-and-pepper hair cropped shorter than that of her wife, a small, plump woman currently greeting Emmett with a handshake of her own.
“I’m Joyce, and this is Megan. We’ve been coming out here since the place opened—consider us your campsite moms for the night. ”
“I’ve always wanted a campsite mom,” Delilah says brightly, trying to match her cheerful warmth. Emmett looks more than a little overwhelmed, and nothing activates Delilah’s friendliness function overdrive like someone else’s visible panic. “What does that come with? Bedtime stories? Packed lunch?”
“Aggressive affection and public embarrassment,” one of the younger people says cheerfully, leaning against Joyce’s shoulder. He’s Emmett’s height, with deep brown skin and a beaded bracelet in pinks, purples, and blues dangling from one wrist. “I’m Derek.”
“Delilah.” She takes the hand he offers. “This is Emmett.” She looks around at the three people clustered close to Derek, two of whom look decidedly femme, the third even more androgynous than Emmett. “I probably shouldn’t try to guess at the relationship dynamics here, right?”
“We come as a set,” one of the two women says, looping her arm through Derek’s. “I’m Willa.”
The other two introduce themselves as Libby and Ames—she/her and they/them pronouns, respectively—and before Delilah knows what’s happening, they’re being corralled into eating dinner at Joyce and Megan’s campsite.
“I went a little out of control at the local market this morning,” Megan says, a bit sheepishly, as Delilah takes in the impressive spread of pasta dishes. “And then there was all this cheese, and fancy balsamic, and…” She waves a hand at the crowded picnic table. “Ta-da?”
“She can’t resist a good cheese display,” Joyce says with immense fondness, putting an arm around her wife’s waist and pulling her in for a kiss on the cheek. “Not that I’d want you to.”
“It’s a win-win for everyone,” Ames says, enthusiastically scooping a generous helping of a caprese-style dish onto a paper plate. “Megan gets to buy as much cheese as she wants, and we get to eat what she turns it into. Oooh, pass the mac-and-brie, please!”
“Oh my God,” Libby says with a skyward glance. “Willa, can you go get the Lactaid out of the glove compartment before Ames makes us all regret every decision we’ve ever made in our lives?”
Over the course of an unexpected but shockingly good dinner, Delilah learns that Joyce and Megan are former lawyers who have been RV-ing around the country since they retired four years ago. Before that, they’d spent thirty-five years as legal observers practicing international humanitarian law.
“Which is, I probably don’t have to tell you,” Joyce says, “a fucking bummer most of the time.”
Joyce and Megan met Ames, Libby, Willa, and Derek during a bingo night at the campground three years ago, and, against all odds, they all hit it off well enough to decide to make the rendezvous an annual thing.
“They’re like the gay moms I never had,” Willa says a little wistfully, putting her head on Megan’s shoulder.
“Speak for yourself,” Derek says from his seat next to Joyce.
“Derek has actual gay moms,” Ames confides to Delilah, with an almost conspiratorial wink. “So he’s too cool for the rest of us descendants of heterosexuals.”
“It’s okay,” Derek says. “They freaked out about the polyamory thing since they couldn’t freak out about the queer thing.
” Delilah makes a sound she hopes is sympathetic and not nosy, and he waves her off.
“Nah, it’s okay. I think it made them feel better, honestly.
I always thought maybe they were too focused on being the cool moms. It was probably a relief when I came home from college with two girlfriends and a gender-friend—”
“That’s me!” Ames pipes up cheerfully.
“—and they had to start looking things up online like all the other parents. I think I did them a favor.”
“I bet they were delighted,” Joyce drawls. “Eat your greens, kid, I didn’t spend all that time slaving over a hot steamer basket just for you to only eat pasta. I’m not sending you back on the road without making sure you eat a nutrient.”
Tucked up between Emmett and Ames, Delilah finds herself captivated watching the dynamics unfold between the six of them.
It’s like seeing the life she might have had if she had gotten married after all sharing a table with the kind of life her mom had built with her friends—a steady, beautifully comfortable life, like the safety of a favorite sweater worn to softness, sitting side by side with something unconventional, intentional.
Different, but so full of love it never mattered.
“Oh, those kids are cute as hell,” Joyce says after dinner, while she and Delilah do the dishes in the tiny kitchen of Joyce and Megan’s RV. “I mean, do I get it? No. I’m a one-woman woman, personally. But they love the heck out of each other.”
“And it works?” Delilah leans against the counter, paying less attention to the dish she’s supposed to be drying than to the campsite outside the window, where Derek, Ames, and Libby have corralled Emmett into a game that seems to exist at a strange nexus of hopscotch and hacky sack.
Emmett is bright-eyed and red-cheeked and grinning, laughing at whatever Ames is clearly shrieking at them, and Delilah wonders if they’ve ever had real friends before.
Joyce shrugs. “It seems to,” she says. She shuts off the sink and mirror’s Delilah’s posture.
“Why? You and that sweetheart of yours thinking of opening things up?” Delilah makes a face at her, and the older woman chuckles.
“Right, right, just friends, I heard your spiel. I’m just saying, Meg and I were just friends once too.
” She waggles her eyebrows. “It didn’t stick. ”
No one can spend that much time in a cramped van with eyes as pretty as Emmett’s and not at least think about it, but Delilah can only justify so many bad decisions in a row before her mom pulls the power-of-attorney card and stages an intervention. “I’m not really in a position to start dating.”
“So you said.” Joyce crosses her arms, blowing a few strands of graying blond hair off her forehead.
“You know, Meg and I aren’t heading out west for a few more weeks, but we’ve got some friends in the San Francisco chapter of Dykes on Bikes.
They don’t technically break out the lesbian mafia schtick anymore, but we could ask a few of them to go pay your ex-girl a visit or two, if you wanted. ”
Joyce’s exaggerated wink abruptly reminds Delilah so much of her mother that she almost tears up. “I’ll keep that in mind,” Delilah says, going for exaggerated cheer so that she doesn’t sniffle. “Don’t you have your hands full enough with the four of them?”
Joyce snorts a laugh. “Well, there’s those four here, informally,” she says, gesturing at the group outside.
“Plus we’ve got two of our own, grown and out in the world, one of them with her own little one on the way.
Then a couple of quasi-orphans—a handful running a youth shelter out in Omaha, another one from the tail end of our UN days.
He’s in the Peace Corps now. I’m sure Meg’ll come in with a case for why we should make sure to keep tabs on your Emmett out there, so there’s another one. Oh, and Stuart.”
Delilah blinks. “Stuart?”
There’s a low yowl from under the little table in the corner of the kitchen.
Delilah nearly jumps out of her skin, then ducks down to see a thin brown cat with a nocked ear flicking his tail at her, as if to say, Yes, obviously Stuart, and who the fuck are you?
She wriggles her fingers at him, and he gives her the most dismissive look she’s ever seen.
“Stuart,” Joyce confirms, clearly holding back more laughter. She nudges the cat with her foot so that she has enough room to scoot the nearest chair into place. “So what I’m saying, kiddo, is that once you’re at our level, you barely notice one more.”
“I’m not sure if I should say thank you or not,” Delilah says, straightening up again. “But also, please don’t send bikers to threaten my ex.” Joyce looks almost disappointed. “The timing was horrible, obviously, but I’m sure I did something for her to be that miserable.”
Joyce’s expression gets, if at all possible, even more skeptical.
Delilah quickly goes on, “Look, leaving me a note was obviously a dick move. I’m not giving her a pass on it.
But…I don’t know. I’m not an easy person to be with.
I’m bipolar, I’m high-maintenance, I’m insecure…
” She shakes her head. “It’s probably not easy at the best of times, and it’s not like I was always at my best. And maybe it would have been better if she’d just broken up with me, but we had the band together, and maybe—maybe she thought she was doing the best thing for both of us, or—”
“That is the devil talking, kid.” Joyce bends down and scoops Stuart into her arms. The cat allows it with the dignified grace of a very small king indulging the people carrying his palanquin through a town square.
“I’ve known you two and a half hours, and I’d already bet money that you didn’t deserve to be left like that.
” She purses her lips, considering. “I mean, you’ve clearly got all the sense God gave a goose—”
“Hey,” Delilah protests, but Joyce looks pointedly from her, to Emmett, to Roscoe, and then back at Delilah, and Delilah deflates. “Yeah, all right.”
“—but you’re not a bad person,” Joyce concludes.
“If nothing else, that gentle soul you picked up in Brooklyn wouldn’t have stayed with you this far if you were.
” She looks back out the window again, her face softening.
“They look like someone who’s seen some cruelty.
Familiarity is easy, but I can’t imagine they’d be looking for more.
” She glances at Delilah, catches the question that must be written on her face, and gives her a crooked smile.
“In my line of work, you get the sense for picking out the people who’ve been hurt, and the people interested in doing the hurting.
You, I’m pretty sure, aren’t the latter. ”
Delilah tugs her cardigan more tightly around her. “They’ve only told me a little,” she admits. “But no. I don’t think people have been kind.” She rubs her upper arms, feeling suddenly cold. “I don’t know. Maybe they do think I’m an asshole, but they’re just too nice to say it.”
Joyce shakes her head, giving Stuart a last scratch between the ears and then setting him back down on the floor.
He rubs once against her leg and then trots away out of sight.
“If I thought you actually believed that, honey, I’d get Stuart back here to eat you,” she says.
“But I think you need a drink more than you need a pep talk.”
Delilah considers that for about half a second.
“I,” she says, “would love a drink.”