The cheapest tickets had me landing at LAX at two in the afternoon on a Thursday, when neither of my parents could leave work to pick me up. I looked through my phone for other options: My sister was a law student living in New York; Karinger was in the midst of his first tour of duty, and we hadn’t spoken in a year anyway. I resorted to calling Watts, whom I knew to be taking courses at the local community college, training to become a paramedic. Two days before the flight, I went to a poetry reading on Berkeley’s campus, not for the poetry — though Robert Hass read beautifully from work that would go on to win a Pulitzer — but to stock up on wine, which I couldn’t yet legally buy. I stole a bottle of red from Wheeler Hall and drank three-quarters of it in my off-campus bed before having the courage to call someone I’d known, more or less, for six years.
“Kush?” said Watts, sounding genuinely surprised to hear from me. After my fight with Karinger a year earlier, Watts and I had seen each other exactly once, at Christmas, and spoken over text only a handful of times. But when he answered the phone using my nickname, and when I responded with his last name, a kind of fold in the fabric of time occurred. Our conversation was as comfortable and easy as though Karinger, silently, were on a third line somewhere, and we were all fourteen again.
The drive from Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley normally took about as long as the flight in from Oakland, but the traffic, even after leaving the city, was denser than usual, so Watts and I had a couple of hours to catch up. He was driving what used to be his father’s pickup truck, and the confined space of the cab along with the fact that we’d shared this exact seat many times in the past, prompted me to think in terms of contrast. The truck hadn’t changed, as far as I could remember, except for the addition of a rosary hung from the rearview mirror. I’d always vaguely known Watts was Catholic, but the beads surprised me. Watts himself looked more or less like he always had, his signature brown curls coiling to his shoulders. Whereas I — fair and wispy — looked like a scrawny version of my dad, Watts had always been his mother’s son, dark skinned and a bit pudgy. He’d been training for the physical portion of his EMT courses, and he looked as fit as I’d ever seen him. His forearms — one of which flexed every time he adjusted the steering wheel — were full of thick, rootlike veins. During my fight with Karinger a year earlier, Watts discovered I was the kind of man who fell in love with other men. Looking at him so intently now, I didn’t want him to mistake my intentions. I started to explain.
“Kush,” he said on a particularly bogged-down stretch of the 14, “I get it. No need to explain anything to me.” And, as if to prove how seamlessly he’d reconciled the laws of his religion with his friend’s queerness, he asked in his most comfortably warm and scratchy voice if I’d met anyone, you know, special.
I said I hadn’t, not in that way, and turned the question on him. “Any women in the AV you want to tell me about?”
“Just the one,” he said.
I knew he meant Karinger’s younger sister, Roxanne, who was about to become a high school senior. She and Watts had been seeing each other, secretly, for a couple of years. The only reason I knew was because I’d once discovered them half-dressed in a bathroom, and had been asking for periodic updates from Watts in the time since. Last I’d heard, they were still sneaking around together, waiting until she graduated before coming clean. I asked how she was doing.
“That’s the thing,” he said. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked in a while.”
“What happened?”
Watts adjusted his rearview mirror, causing the rosary to sway even more violently than it had over the bumps in the freeway.
“I really have no clue,” Watts said. “She just stopped answering the phone. Won’t text me back. It’s been, like, a month.”
“You guys didn’t have a fight? You didn’t say anything to piss her off?”
“No, man. It’s a serious mystery.”
I told him Roxanne’s issue was probably more about her than about him. “She’s closing in on eighteen,” I said. “She’s probably freaking out about what’s in store for the rest of her life. She just needs space, is my guess.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe it’s not about me.” He passed the speed limit for the first time since I’d come on board. And that was the last we talked about Roxanne.
Then we were at my house, and before I left the truck, he asked if he’d see me again before I left town. I told him the truth, which is that I’d promised my mom I’d spend the whole weekend with her. “It’s the only way she let me come home for such a short amount of time,” I said. I thanked him again for the ride and offered him gas money, which he refused.
“Keep your cash,” he said. “But maybe I’ll call in a favor one of these days.”
“Please do,” I said. I laughed because I thought he was joking. By the time I’d reached the front door, he’d already sped off.
I found the key under the doormat. By the time my parents came home from work, separately but only fifteen minutes apart, I’d been in the backyard pool for almost two hours. The three of us stayed outside talking until sunset, which didn’t happen until nine. My dad complained about the recent surge in traffic—“Remember when ours could be the only car on the road?”—while my mom, every now and then, brought me feta-sprinkled cubes of fresh-cut watermelon, or reapplied sunscreen to the acne-scarred terrain of my back.
“Are you sure they won’t let you stay longer?” she asked more than once. And although a part of me envisioned a full three months of the kind of pampering given by an Armenian mother to her only son — the kind she’d argue was selfish because of how much she enjoyed it — I swallowed the cold bit of melon I’d plucked from the tray she set at poolside and said, “I’m sure.” It sounded, from what Dad was saying about the traffic, that the last thing the Antelope Valley needed was another long-term resident.
* * *
Friday morning I woke remembering a dream in which I was an indignant, nameless worker in a chemical factory, a dream I attributed to the smell of chlorine I’d brought with me to the sheets. My mom entered my bedroom bearing breakfast. She set the French toast and milk in my lap and perched at the foot of my bed to watch me eat. She’d already called her manager at the department store, she explained, to say she was sick and unable to make it to work. Without pausing to signify a change of topic, she asked how the food tasted—“Great,” I got out — and then asked how I wanted to spend the day.
My mother didn’t know I was queer — at least, we’d never spoken about it — and until I met someone worth bringing home, I didn’t see a need to tell her. But I suspected she could feel I was hiding something from her, and began seeing her adoration as a means of getting me to talk. If I turned down her pampering, I’d be giving credence to her suspicion that I had something to hide. So I wiped the syrup and powdered sugar from my lips and said, “I want to do whatever you want to do, Mom.”
What she wanted to do was this: First, she wanted to go to Starbucks, the one by the Target, and then take our coffees to Payless ShoeSource, where she wanted to buy me a pair of flip-flops. (“It’s too hot for socks,” she’d told me the night before, “but it’s not good to go around barefoot.”) Next, she wanted us to meet Dad on his lunch break, somewhere near his furniture store so he didn’t have to waste time in transit. (Here, she reminded me of the traffic.) How did Primo Burgers sound? I hadn’t become a vegetarian like my sister, had I? Lastly, she thought the two of us could spend the rest of the day at home. She had to wash the car in the driveway — I could spend some time reading then; she knew I probably wanted some time alone to read — and then she could make tea and hatz banir bamidor (bread, feta, tomatoes, and salted cucumbers), and we could sit in the backyard and eat and talk and drink tea and relax.