Chapter 19
“DO YOU THINK YOUR PARENTS ARE gonna like me?” Ryan asked as they sat in northbound traffic on the Don Valley Parkway.
Simone inched the car forward. The traffic in Toronto was truly abysmal.
“Um, they’re gonna love you. Do you know how happy they’re gonna be that their deviant bisexual daughter is in a ‘normal’ hetero relationship?
They’re probably going to take one look at you and weep with relief.
Oh, wait, just kidding. Weeping with relief would require acknowledging that I’m bi, and we both know that’s not gonna happen. ”
Ryan reached across the center console and caressed Simone’s leg. She knew she was rambling, but she was nervous. It was the first time she’d be seeing her parents in person since coming out.
“Didn’t you say they were surprisingly supportive when they called for your birthday?” he asked.
“I guess so,” she admitted. “My mom randomly said she was proud of me.”
“And she was good when you talked the other day,” he reminded her.
Now that it was April, her parents were back from Florida, and Kathy had called Simone to invite her for family brunch.
When Simone asked if she could bring someone, Kathy hadn’t just sounded okay with it; she’d actually sounded excited—like she’d completely forgotten that “someone” could theoretically be a woman.
“Maybe she got hit in the head on the pickleball court,” Simone reasoned.
“Or maybe,” Ryan said, pausing for emphasis, “she realized she fucked up, and she’s actually coming around.”
Simone sighed. “You just never know.”
“Well, whatever happens, I’ll be with you the whole way.”
“Thanks,” she murmured. It made her feel like a terrible person that she still couldn’t stop thinking about Bree’s text message.
It was still sitting there on Simone’s phone, unanswered—but also undeleted.
It was short enough that Simone had it memorized.
(Okay, fine: She’d also read it more times than she cared to admit.) Bree had opened with a link to Simone’s coming-out post, then said: “Hey, I heard about this at dinner with a few old Sharpe friends tonight. FUCKING FINALLY. For real, though, I’m proud of you, and I hope you’re living your best queer life.
Let me know if you ever wanna hang out. I’d love to catch up :)”
It wasn’t that Simone was still interested in Bree or anything like that.
It was just that she’d come to assume they’d never talk to each other again, and that she’d never have the chance to properly apologize.
A part of her did want to catch up with Bree, but the other part of her knew that after everything that had happened at the vernal equinox party—and in Ryan’s last relationship—it would be a catastrophic mistake to start messaging her ex.
At long last, she steered the car off the DVP and onto York Mills Road.
The street had felt like the universe’s main artery when she was little and she barely left the confines of her insular suburban neighborhood.
Her school, her friends, her family’s country club—even those godforsaken dance classes—had all been within walking distance of her house.
It was no wonder she’d grown up sheltered from the queer, wide world.
She made the familiar turn onto Jacqueline Boulevard.
(“Like ‘Jackie O.,’ ” Kathy always said when she wanted to make sure someone had the spelling right—as if every twenty-first-century Canadian knew how the former American first lady spelled her full Christian name.) The Whitakers lived on a spacious corner lot, where there used to be a cluster of big, shaggy spruce trees in the yard.
When Simone was little, her parents had them cut down so they could plant prim little shrubs in their place.
Kathy, the gardener in chief, said she didn’t like the look of all the spruce cones littering the lawn, but Simone now suspected the perfectly cube-shaped shrubs were also a power move.
If Kathy couldn’t control everything in her personal life, at least she could tell nature exactly what she wanted it to do.
Looming over the lawn was a two-story house made of pinkish brick, its color reminding Simone of raw ground turkey.
It had five bedrooms, a two-car garage, and a picture window.
She pulled into the driveway and put the car in park.
Ryan squeezed her leg. His hand was still there, from before. “Ready?”
“Not really.”
“Kiss me, then.”
She turned to him and smiled. He’d shaved this morning, and he looked so handsome, she could have climbed over the center console and straddled him. Instead, she settled for a kiss. “All right,” she said, taking one last deep inhale of the side of his neck, “let’s do this.”
Simone led the way up the front walk and rang the bell. She could hear it echoing in the spacious foyer on the other side of the door.
“Coming!” Kathy called in an oddly singsong voice.
“At least she sounds happy,” Simone muttered to Ryan, who was standing off to the side, clutching the neck of the wine bottle he’d brought as a gift.
The lock clicked, the door swung open, and there was Kathy Whitaker with her perfectly made-up face—more tanned than when she’d left in November—her platinum-blond blowout, and her diamond earrings.
“There’s my darling daughter!” she cried in that same singsong voice.
Behind her, George sidled into the foyer looking a bit like a lost beagle.
“Hi, guys…”
Simone’s voice trailed off when she noticed their outfits. Kathy, who’d evidently noticed Simone noticing, struck a pose in the fitted white T-shirt she wore tucked into jeans. Emblazoned across her chest, in rainbow block letters, were the words PROUD MOM.
George’s T-shirt said PROUD DAD.
“We couldn’t wait to show you our new shirts,” Kathy announced brightly.
Simone stood on the doorstep, blinking at her parents in shock. She’d imagined so many things that could happen at this brunch, from mind-numbing conversations about Florida humidity to offensive tirades about her sexuality, but never in a million years would Simone have predicted this.
She wondered if she was dreaming. But no, her parents really were wearing those shirts, and her mother really was staring at her with hope in her eyes.
And then Simone was wiping away tears.
“Are those happy tears or sad tears, darling?” her mother ventured.
“Happy,” Simone choked out.
“Oh, darling.” Kathy walked to Simone with open arms and wrapped her in a hug, filling Simone’s nose with the scent of her Chanel perfume. “We may be straight, but we’re not narrow. Right, George?”
“That’s right.”
Simone hugged her father, too.
“Now, who’s this?” Kathy asked, apparently just having noticed Ryan hovering outside on the front walk.
With the shock of her parents’ change of heart, Simone had almost forgotten she had a surprise of her own. She waved Ryan through the door. “Mom, Dad, this is Ryan. My boyfriend.”
Now, Kathy was the one blinking in shock. She turned to Ryan and proceeded to survey him with narrowed eyes that were all-too-familiar to Simone. Ryan, who was still untrained in the art of recognizing Kathy’s disapproval, smiled back at her.
“It’s so nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Whitaker. Thank you for having me.”
While George shook Ryan’s hand, Kathy turned back to Simone as though she hadn’t even heard the greeting. “You brought… a boyfriend?” she asked quietly, so that only Simone could hear. The singsong quality had slipped from her voice.
Panic simmered in Simone’s chest. “You said it was okay for me to bring someone, didn’t you?”
“I did, yes, but I was under the impression…” She trailed off, smoothing her manicured hands down the sides of torso.
Simone’s shoulders drooped as she realized what was happening.
“You thought I was bringing someone else.” A woman, she wanted to say. You thought I was bringing a woman.
“Well,” Kathy said, “when you make such a big announcement on social media…”
Her panic was reaching a boil. She was back in Seth’s building in her baby-shower dress, climbing the steps to the vernal equinox party. Feeling painfully—devastatingly—heterosexual. “I’m bi,” she hissed, but Kathy didn’t hear. George had put a hand on his wife’s shoulder.
“Ryan brought us a very nice bottle of wine.”
“Thank you, dear.” Kathy graciously accepted the bottle. “What’s this, chardonnay?”
“Simone said you’re a fan of white.”
“Usually pinot grigio, but you know what?” She looked up from the label and flashed him what could loosely be described as a smile. “I can handle a surprise.”
Simone winced. Ryan chuckled obliviously. “I’ll remember pinot for next time.”
“I’ll go put this in the wine fridge,” Kathy said. “George, you come with me to the kitchen, and Simone, why don’t you show Ryan to the family room? Your brothers and the girls are there. Can we bring you anything to drink? Coffee? Tea?”
“Coffee would be great, thanks,” Ryan said.
“I’m good with water,” Simone squeaked. As soon as her parents had marched off to the kitchen, she turned to Ryan, who was still smiling, and said, “Well, this is officially a disaster.”
His face fell. “What do you mean? This is amazing. Their shirts…”
“They wore those shirts because they thought I was bringing a girlfriend.”
“Wait… what?”
“Yes.” She repeated exactly what her mother had said to her when Ryan and George were talking. As she did, she wanted to cry again—and not happy tears—because it hit her just how fleeting that magical moment had been, when Kathy had looked at her with eyes full of hope…
“But why would she hope you were specifically bringing home a woman?” asked Ryan, who’d pulled Simone into a hug.
“I don’t know,” she whimpered into his shirt. “I just hate that I disappointed her.”