Divisions (Dev and Lee) (5 page)

Maybe that’s another angle for the story. New ways, new thoughts, new traditions. The team accepting the gay teammate beating the team that, well, it’s not really fair to cast the Pilots as standing in the way of progress or anything. They were all professionals there. None of them spit on him or anything, not that we could see.

Times are changing, that’s the angle. And changing for Lee, too, I think as I follow father and son down the hall. He’s going to be moving in with Miski, and that’ll be—well, I don’t know how that’ll be. Can’t ever predict those kind of things ’til they happen.

I hope it goes well for them, I really do. The odds are stacked against ’em, but I hope they beat the natural order. Hell, if the Firebirds can be leading the division in the middle of November, anything’s possible.

From the other side of the menu, Father says, “I filed for divorce.”

I lower the laminated page slowly. He looks gravely over the tops of his glasses at me, his paws resting on his own face-down menu. His ears are flat, but not down. “I asked if you want wine,” I say.

He nods. “Yesterday. I thought you should know.”

“So,” I say. “That’s a ‘yes.’”

This has been coming for a while. A month or so ago, Father told me he and Mother weren’t spending so much time together any more. She has new friends, a Mrs. Hedley and a poisonous anti-gay religious group called Families United. Mother was never a churchgoer, but she is a crusader. My aunt Carolyn has told me enough about their strict upbringing that if I look at her as a fictional character in an Edith Wharton novel, church sort of fits, if not hateful propaganda.

But I still want to know how they got to this point. Did he suggest it? Did she? I think it makes a difference. But I’m not quite sure how to ask that, so I keep quiet and flick my ears to the bland Christmas music, looking around the big dining room.

I’m spending Thanksgiving afternoon in a country club a few hours north of Hilltown, about midway between where my parents live and where I live until Saturday. Thanksgiving dinner is just me and my father instead of with both parents, instead of with my boyfriend, who is at his own family’s place thirty minutes away in the small town of Lake Handerson. Father and I are going over there for leftovers tomorrow, not dinner tonight, but even though my activist brain reflexively yells at being shuffled to the side, really, it’s fine with me. It’s an enormous leap forward just to be invited there around a holiday, and it’s hard enough for me to handle three tigers when just his parents are home. I don’t need to confront ten.

Now, though, that would seem like a relief. I wouldn’t have thought that the word “divorce” would hit me as hard as it has, but I can’t focus on the menu at all. Fortunately, the Thanksgiving menu is much less about choice and more about what you’re going to get, like it or not. When the waiter comes, I just say “two” to whatever my father orders.

Then the menus are gone, and I can’t escape his gaze. “Nothing really changes for you,” he says.

Nothing? I flare my nostrils, taking in the scent of fifty-year-old people and decorations under the bland kitchen smells of a Thanksgiving cooked to appeal to every species, rather than some of our fox-specific dishes. There’s no sweet scent in the air from Mother’s raspberry sauce, just the barely-sour cranberry. There’ll be nothing crunchy in the stuffing, I’m sure; I’ve had bland stuffing before. It’s not that the food won’t be good. It just won’t be what I’m used to.

When I look back at Father, ending my exaggerated sniff, he takes my meaning. “Holidays aren’t about where we have them. They’re about being together. So we come here instead of going home.”

“Where’s home?” I say, as he reaches for his drink.

The glass of water was halfway to the end of his muzzle. He lowers it and takes his glasses off, rubbing them on his napkin. “There’s an apartment building close to work. I signed a lease yesterday. Anyway, you have your own home now.”

The warmth of that remark doesn’t stop my tail from curling under the chair. “You know, they always tell us gay boys not to come out to the families at dinner. Don’t you have like a troubled marriage forum that tells you not to announce a divorce at Thanksgiving?”

“It seemed more logical than going through the holiday with it hanging over our heads.” He replaces the glasses and drinks the water. “This isn’t easy for me.”

“No, I know.” The tablecloth’s fabric is rough under my paw pads, bunching as I rub it. My whiskers twitch as someone walks behind me: a mouse, from the scent. I look around at the other tables, seeking a distraction. “Hey, you think that whole family there just didn’t feel like cooking? Or are they having their kitchen redone?”

“Wiley, I don’t want you to look at this as something that’s about you.”

My ears fold down. “Well, I
hadn’t
been.”

He leans forward, with his elbows on the table. “When your mother and I met, we were both ambitious. She wanted to get away from her family, I wanted to go somewhere different. For a while, we were pretty happy. But we…sometimes when people think they want the same thing, it’s only because you can’t see how different the things you want really are.”

“Did you read that in ‘Chicken Soup for the Estranged Soul’?” I snap my mouth shut. “Sorry. It just sounds like…” Like someone else talking out of my father’s mouth. “Like one of those things that doesn’t mean anything. What about ‘Sometimes the things you want change’?”

“That too.” He taps the side of his muzzle. “How’s your football player? Devlin?”

“He’s with his family.” I say it without intending the comparison, but of course we both make it, and both cringe in different ways. “They’ve got the whole clan together.”

“So you’re not going to meet the extended family?”

“God, no.” I laugh. “Even his brother didn’t want to meet me. His parents were the ones who insisted.”

“Sounds like Mikhail, what little I know of him. How’s he doing?”

“Fine,” I say. “I don’t bring up the head wound.”

“You talk to him that much?”

“Well.” I look down. “No. But I don’t bring it up, when I do.”

Apart from getting to see Dev again—funny how we’d spend weeks apart, and now that I’m going to be living at his place, two days seems like forever—that’s what is most on my mind about tomorrow’s dinner. Mikhail ostensibly forgave me at the hospital, and Dev says he hasn’t said anything bad about me, but that just makes me think that he probably hasn’t said anything about me, period. But then, they did insist I come meet his brother. Maybe Mikhail is hoping Gregory can beat me up.

I’d hoped this dinner would be relaxing preparation for that meeting. Instead I’m trying not to think about my parents’ marriage ending, which of course means that’s all I can think about.

At least I’m distracting Father, if not myself. The corners of his mouth curve up. “That was one of the more surreal days of my life.”

“Look at it this way,” I say. “How many people can say they met their son’s boyfriend’s parents in the hospital after their son won a fight?”

“Oh, it’s ‘won’ now, is it?” He raises an eyebrow.

“I didn’t
lose
,” I say. “And he ended up in the hospital. So.”

The waiter brings our glasses of white wine, stalling the conversation. It’s a good wine, but nothing special; about right for a country club full of middle-aged midwesterners. I barely taste it anyway.

“How are you doing?” I ask, unguardedly as I can allow myself.

He looks off to the side. “Change,” he says finally, “even when it’s only a change in the label you give something…it’s still a change. It’ll take some getting used to. I remember.” He sips the wine. “I remember when we were first married, how strange it was to be called ‘husband,’ and ‘wife.’ How we laughed about it.”

Even the activist in me knows this isn’t the time to bring up gay marriage issues. I keep my mouth shut and nod. Now he’s an ex-husband, a divorcé, single—a lot of labels that are new, or that haven’t been applied in twenty-some years. And I have to learn to get to know him this way, too.

I had friends in high school and college who had three or four parents. Heck, Misha had six: an adoptive mother and father, a biological mother and step-father, and a biological father and step-mother. Through grade school and middle school, I’d been proud of having only two parents. By college, I’d come to view it as a curiosity, a relic, almost.

“Have you told anyone else? Aunt Carolyn didn’t mention anything.”

He shakes his head. “You had to be first. We both agreed on that. We didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else. Of course, it is Thanksgiving. So I suspect it’ll make the rounds of the family by tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.”

That makes it sound like it was a mutual thing, but of course someone had to be first to suggest it. It was nice of Mother to agree, though. I imagine her saying that she doesn’t think I would care one way or another, with that hurt tone that lurked behind her words every time she asked if I’d met a vixen in college, knowing what my answer would be. As if being gay were something I’d done to offend her. But divorce—that seems like a big step, and I see what Father means when he says it’s not all about me. There has to be other stuff going on. Still, I can’t help but feel that I’m a big part of it.

Even if the last time I talked to her was months ago, the image of Mother in my head telling Father she doesn’t want to be with him is hard to summon up. It just doesn’t work, somehow. They’ve always been together, unified even in their disapproval of me, up until…well, until I started dating Dev. Father talked more to me then, saw what I was going through and sympathized. I barely talked to Mother through all of the stuff with Dev’s family over the last couple months. I’m not even sure she knows about it.

“I appreciate you telling me first,” I say finally. “I’d hate to get a call from grandma telling me you were breaking up.”

“She wouldn’t call you,” Father says.

“I know.”

It’s hard to make small talk with that leaden capital “D” dragging down the conversation, but I figure the best way to deal with it is to acknowledge it and move on. I don’t know if it’d be proper to flaunt my relationship in his face, so I don’t talk about moving in with Dev, although preparing for that has occupied most of the last month of my life. “There’s this guy Emmanuel at Yerba, and Morty—my old boss, at the Dragons—gave me a good recommendation. He says they might have an opening and Emmanuel wants to talk to me.”

“Sounds promising.”

“I think so. I mean, I didn’t play football, and that’s a strike against me. But that whole thing about me and Dev came out now.”

“I saw it.”

“So Morty thinks that might work in my favor. Yerba, well, you know.” I made him and Mother watch the Yerba Pride Parade when I was home one summer. Rather, I turned it on and watched, and Father stayed for some of it. Mother didn’t. The next year, my at-the-time best friend Brian and I watched it at the FLAG (Forester U. Lesbians and Gays) club and swore we would go the following summer. But things…didn’t work out that way.

He nods. “Why didn’t you go to college there?”

I swirl my wine, staring at the patterns of the light on the surface. “After high school? I couldn’t have. I knew I was gay, but I didn’t know if I would like other gay people. Yerba might as well have been Oz. At Forester, I was close to home, so I had a safety net. Or something.”

A smile touches his lips. There are a lot of things he could say there, to be honest, but he doesn’t say any of them. Instead, he takes another sip of wine and asks, “So you’re just going to wait for the end of the season?”

It feels like an indictment. My “yes” is hesitant and weak, so I follow it up. “Dev’s got money, of course, and I’ll…I guess I’ll keep doing work, watching the games, breaking down players. The guys at Yerba aren’t going to tell me what to look for, but I’ll watch their players particularly. I’ll try to figure out their weaknesses, and then see what players elsewhere might match them. College, too. Just…whatever I can do.”

What I don’t tell him is the other thing that’s been nagging at my mind, that Brian called me when the article my reporter friend Hal wrote about me was published. It was just a profile, went into our relationship a little, but Brian’s voicemail made it sound momentous. “Good to see the closet door open,” he said, because when I’d been working for the Dragons, I’d had to keep my relationship with Dev a secret. And then he said, “I’m getting back into activism. If you remember what that’s like, give me a call.” The lure of activism wasn’t strong when I was scouting, my life consumed with football and Dev, but with day after idle day stretching out in front of me, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m going to spend my time, and those words keep coming back. Brian always knew how to get under my fur that way. Not that I’d call
him
, but I feel like I want to call someone.

“Still going to travel?”

My father breaks my reverie. I shake my head. “Not to the college games. No point in going if it’s not for business. There’s a bowl game in Chevali, so maybe I’ll go to that one.”

“When do you head down there?”

“I’ll head down after we leave Dev’s place,” I say. “Dev has to fly back Friday afternoon for practice, so I’ll see him off and then hit the road. He plays Monday and I’ll be moved in by Tuesday. I hope.”

“Good luck.” He sits back as the waiter brings the first course, a butternut squash soup that smells thickly of sage. It’s only a few leaves, but for canids, a little goes a long way.

“I saw Aunt Carolyn last week,” I say. She’s Mother’s sister, but actually talks more to Father. She didn’t think much of Mother’s attitude toward me; I can only imagine what she’s thinking now.

My father picks sage leaves out of his soup delicately and places them to the side of his plate. “You mentioned. She doing well?”

“She’s seeing some wolf from the gym down the street. I told her if he’s under twenty-five, she’s officially considered a cradle-robber.”

“And?” He takes a spoonful of the soup, blows on it, sniffs it, and holds it.

“She laughed and wouldn’t answer.” I do the same with mine. It smells okay. I test it with my tongue. Squash seems fresh, anyway.

Father smiles and tips the spoon to his muzzle. “Long as she’s happy.”

Right. Relationships: not a great topic. “Um, and Dev won his game.”

“I saw.” He starts in on the soup now.

“He didn’t do much. Not like the Hellentown game. But he didn’t need to. Port City is terrible this year, even with Lightning Strike. They didn’t even get him the ball.”

“Isn’t that because Chevali’s defense is that good?”

“Not to hear Strike tell it. He said they needed to bench the quarterback because he was making bad decisions.”

Father snorts. “Did you get to go to the game?”

“Oh yeah. I still have some connections from my time at the Dragons. They weren’t great seats, but I got to see the game and get beer spilled on me.”