58
“Well, if it isn’t all my favorites.” Vi beams at Tennyson, Oliver, and me as we stand on her porch.
She throws her arms around us collectively, forcing me and Oliver to touch in a way we haven’t for a few days now. It’s weird, and how weird it is makes me sad.
She lets go of us all, and the boys walk inside.
She puts her hands on my cheeks and searches my face. “You okay?”
I try to give her a smile. “Later,” I tell her, and she nods, a bit intrigued as she walks in after me to her living room.
“So, how’d your little trip go?” She flashes us a smile, the edges of which are nervous.
“Interesting,” Tennyson says, eyeballing her.
Vi’s smile pulls tighter. “How so?” She throws herself down on her big Albany Park pit couch.
“Well.” I sit down across from her. “We met dad’s tri-decade lover, so that was a fun surprise for us all.”
Her eyes widen and she inhales, sharp and quick—shock. “Oh my God,” she says quietly, looking between us all as she sits up straight now.
“Did you know?” Tennyson asks.
Vi considers the question. “I knew he existed.”
Oliver shakes his head, can’t quite believe it. “You knew Dad was gay?”
She folds her hands in her lap, trying to look composed. She swallows. “I knew he had liked men in the past.”
Oliver glares at her now. “And you never said anything?”
“Baby.” She sighs. “It wasn’t mine to say…” She gives him—all of us, I suppose—an apologetic smile. “Are y’all okay though?” She glances from Tennyson to me, then reaches for Oliver. “You, darlin’, specifically?”
Oliver shrugs. “I’ve been better.”
She nods empathically. “I’ll bet.”
“But that might be in large part because while we were there, I found out that Georgia and Sam have been having sex behind my back.” Oliver gives our aunt a curt smile, and she glances at me, gives me an uneasy look.
“Where is Sam?” she asks the group in general, neither Oliver nor me specifically.
“At a coffee shop,” I say. “Around the corner.”
“They’re inseparable now,” Oliver tells her in a voice I don’t like, and I roll my eyes.
“That feels categorically untrue seeing as we are actively…separated.”
“Oh, do you want a medal for that?” Oliver blinks.
“No,” I fire back. “Just a break from your yapping would be—”
“Gige.” Tennyson cuts me off.
Vi sits back, looking between us all.
“So what are you going to do?” she asks.
I glance between my brothers before I carefully say, “I don’t think we should do anything.”
“What?” Oliver stares at me in disbelief. “So we just let him get away with it?”
I shake my head at him. “Away with what, Oliver?”
“That he was cheating on Mom all this time! That he was a fucking fake, living a double life, that him and his high horse are full of shit—” He gestures at me. “After everything he did to us…you’re going to let him get away with it?”
I swallow, then nod. “Yeah.”
Oliver scoffs, shaking his head in true disbelief. “No way.”
“You know…” I look for Oliver’s eyes, which he very reluctantly allows me to have in this moment. “I have thought so much about why he was the way he was with you, trying to make sense of it—I think he was jealous of you.”
Oliver doesn’t buy it, that much is all over his face, but I persist.
“You have been unapologetically yourself since the moment you jazzed-hands out of our mother’s womb.” Oliver rolls his eyes at that, but I can tell he semi-liked it. “You’ve always been who you are, even if it cost you everything, and it has, many times. Can you imagine feeling something, loving someone for decades, but not feeling able to do so out loud? And then you have this kid, and in him you see the freedom you’ve always wanted for yourself but weren’t brave enough to pursue. A better man would have encouraged you, cheered for you down the path they wished they were walking, but”—I turn to Vi specifically—“no offense, he wasn’t a better man. He was a burdened one. Burdened with loving someone he could never fully have, and forced to watch his son be brave in ways he couldn’t be.” I offer Oliver a small shrug. “That could drive a person to cruelty.”
Vi frowns defensively at that part. “ Cruelty is a bit of a harsh word.”
“But an appropriate one,” I tell her, unflinching.
“Right.” Oliver nods. “So, why aren’t we saying anything?”
“Because.” I sigh, half because I’ve already had to have this conversation with Tennyson, and half because I need him to not just hear what I’m saying, but to properly understand it. “As jarring and radical as this news is for us, for all the horrifying, clarifying context it provides for us… for Mom, it just…takes.”
Oliver shakes his head again, frustrated. “Takes what?”
“Everything,” Tennyson says, eyes all heavy.
Oliver looks between Tennyson and me. “So we’re just going to let her think she was happily married for thirty years when she wasn’t?”
“What would telling her do?” I shrug. “Other than tear her whole life apart?”
Oliver stares over at me, brows low, but hearing me.
“It’s already torn,” I tell him. “We don’t need to turn it into tatters.”
Oliver breathes loudly out his nose before he reluctantly asks, “What will we say?”
“That Dad and Alexis were old friends from college. We have to acknowledge his existence,” I tell them all. “To diminish him would discredit our lie entirely. Dad left him a multi-million dollar property. There’s an unavoidable bond between the two men that can’t be entirely ignored, even just for the sake of plausibility.”
“So what’s the story then?” Tennyson asks as Vi puts an arm around Oliver.
“I don’t know. Maybe something about how Dad owed Alexis something—maybe Alexis saved his life? Something that would make Dad feel indebted to him. Leaving someone a property like that is a big deal, so the bond has to be equitable to that.”
“Yeah.” Tennyson nods along, and I think we’ll make a decent liar out of him yet. “Maybe a story about how Dad nearly drowned on a lake or something? If he saved him—then Dad said one day he’d buy him a lake house?”
“Wouldn’t Mom know if Dad nearly drowned in college? They were together,” Oliver points out.
“Maybe that’s the secret part?” I offer. “Dad was proud. Maybe he didn’t want Mom to see him as weak, or something else down that vein of toxic masculinity.”
I look at Tennyson, eyebrows up, asking without asking, and he sort of shrugs. “Yeah—I don’t know, I think that checks out.”
I look between my two brothers and Vi. “We have to swear it though, okay? Never to say anything…”
“Not to anyone,” Tennyson chimes in, “because it could find its way back to Mom.”
Vi zips her mouth shut. “My lips are sealed.”
“Not even to Maryanne,” Tennyson says to Oliver, who rolls his eyes.
Vi throws me a confused look—she’s clearly not been by the house over the last few days. In normal life, in no fathomable world would Oliver voluntarily share anything with Maryanne, but this isn’t normal life anymore.
There’s nothing I can say to give her context, so our eyes just hold as Oliver gives Tennyson a stubborn little shrug.
“He’s her dad too,” he says.
Then Tennyson’s tone changes, and while I would have—until this moment—said his face was serious this entire time, the way it goes now tells me that that wasn’t entirely the case.
“Not even Maryanne,” Tennyson says again, louder and clearer.
“Fine,” Oliver sighs. “Whatever.”