Ken smiled at the little girl. “Hmm...this is quite a byzantine ruse you’ve constructed here. I bet the whole thing’s exhausting.”
“It is.” Lily didn’t realize how exhausted she was until Ken made that observation. It was only now, while she was relaxing in the company of a person with whom she and Ben could be honest, that she fully realized how strained and tiring their other social interactions were. It was only in the presence of other gay people that she and Ben could relax and be a family — the kind of family they really were.
“Yeah,” Ben said, “in Atlanta I used to bitch all the time about the little dramas going on in the gay community ... all the backbiting and gossip. Now that I’m away from all the gossip, though, it’s like I’m dying for some. I find myself calling all the shallow queens I used to bitch about just so I can find out who’s lusting after whom.”
Ken laughed. “I do the same thing with my friends back in Nashville. I also find myself voraciously reading those glossy fag rags I used to make fun of when I lived in the city.”
Lily drained her Corona. “Where do you get those magazines around here?”
Ken grinned sheepishly. “The mailman delivers them ... in a plain brown wrapper, no less. I save all the back issues. If you like, I could bring over the ones I’ve read.”
“You know, I’m scaring myself, but I think I’d really like that,” Ben said, rising to clear the table.
“Me, too.” Lily was helping Mimi out of her high chair. “I’m starved to death for news about my people ... even if it’s just idle chatter about who’s shtupping who.” A prickle of fear hit her. “Of course, we’d have to be careful not to leave those magazines lying around. God, I hate this! It makes me feel so self-loathing, even though I’m not.”
They settled in the living room. Lily had to coax Mordecai off the couch with a Milk-Bone. Since his injury, he had made the couch his own personal sickbed. He would make room for Lily or Mimi to sit with him, but he growled ill-temperedly at Ben or anyone else who tried to join him there.
“You know,” Ken said, sitting on the couch next to Ben and draping his arm around Ben’s shoulders, “when Ben told me what you were doing, I really objected to it at first. It seemed to me that you were just catering to other people’s prejudices.” He watched Mimi stacking her wooden alphabet blocks. “But then I started thinking: If you fought the custody battle as an open lesbian, you’d lose your daughter. Mimi would lose her mother and be raised as some kind of psycho-Christian. Everybody would lose in that situation. And while I’m uncomfortable with this level of deception ... well, some things are just too precious to lose, even if it is to make a political point.”
Lily nodded in agreement. “Yeah, sometimes I think I’d be a better person if I’d made myself a martyr for the cause of gay rights, but the thing is, I wouldn’t just be sacrificing myself. I’d be sacrificing Mimi, too, and sentencing her to the same miserable, oppressive upbringing her mother had.”
Without warning, the front door swung open, and a female voice drawled, “Knock-knock! Hello?”
Ben and Ken scooted apart just as Lily’s vapid sisters-in-law, Sheila and Tracee, walked into the living room. Each was wearing a pricey-looking pastel warm-up suit and had her platinum curls pulled back in a perky ponytail.
“Hi,” Lily said, finding it difficult to feign friendliness. One of the numerous downsides to this faux marriage was that the McGillys dropped by unexpectedly any time they felt like it.
“Ken,” Ben said, doing an even worse job of masking his irritation than Lily was, “meet Sheila and Tracee, my sisters-in-law. Girls, I don’t know if you remember Ken Woods. He went to high school with us.”
Sheila nodded at Ken. “Your daddy used to work with State Farm Insurance, didn’t he?”
“Sure did.” Ken was doing an admirable job of being cordial.
“So ... Sheila, Tracee, I was just about to make some coffee. Would you like some?” As grating as these drop-in visits were, Lily was determined not to alienate any of the McGillys through her lack of hospitality. After all, her success in the courtroom depended largely on the McGillys’ continued good will.
“No thanks,” Sheila chirped. “Me and Tracee just decided to have a night away from the boys —
let them stay home with the kids for a change.”
“There’s this new aerobics class they’re starting over at the middle school,” Tracee added. “We thought we’d stop by to see if you wanted to come with us.”
The idea of aerobics— let alone the idea of aerobics performed alongside Sheila and Tracee —
filled Lily with the kind of anxiety she hadn’t experienced since junior-high PE class. It wasn’t that she was adverse to exercise. Back in Atlanta, she and Charlotte had taken long walks every evening, talking about the day’s happenings and pushing Mimi in her stroller.
But walking was a natural exercise—it was something human beings were inclined to do anyway.
There was nothing in Lily’s genetic makeup, however, that gave her the inclination to contort her body in rhythm to outdated top-forty music. “Gosh, guys, I’d really love to, but as you can see, we have company.”
“Oh, you go ahead.” Ben smiled with devious benevolence. “Ken and I can hold down the fort here.”
She looked at her ersatz husband with pure spite. She knew what that twinkle in his eyes was all about. He and Ken would be making out on the couch like a couple of teenagers, while she was forced to skip around a middle-school gym like a moron. “Well, I don’t know, hon. Mimi still needs to be put to bed.”