Field of Schemes (43 page)

“Home sweet home,” Jason burst out proudly as our car pulled into the driveway. He placed his hand on my leg and looked at me tentatively. “It’ll be good, I promise.” Turning around to the kids, his volume grew. “So what do you guys think?”

“Oh. My. God,” Maya said, dragging out each word to properly express her shock. She really knew how to play her father. There was no way that Maya could possibly be so stunned by the exterior of our home. She had just driven by a few hundred exact duplicates. “We’re like
Real Housewives of the Sticks
!”

“What do you think, Logan?” I asked.

“Nice,” he shrugged. Then Logan flashed the charming crooked smile he inherited from his father and assured us that he liked the new house. “I love colonials.”

“That’s the spirit,” Jason said, not absorbing the fact that, until that moment, even he hadn’t known our home was colonial style. When we were house-hunting, Jason told the realtor he liked these “old school” designs.

Logan smiled. “I guess I can go to that stupid party, too.”

“It sounds pretty gay, but go, suck it up and be polite, and you’ll get the lay of the land. You got nothin’ to lose, buddy,” said Jason. He took the key out of the ignition and opened the door to get out.

Pretty
gay?!
I mouthed.

Jason shrugged and gave me a look as if to say what he’d told me the last time we had this conversation: “The word has different meanings. I mean ‘dorky,’ not ‘homosexual.’ Don’t make a big deal of it.”

The kids were already running up the brick path to our home. “Just say ‘dorky’ next time, okay?”

It wasn’t a bad house. In fact, it would be nice to have so much open space and ceilings that rivaled a planetarium. There were certainly worse places to live than Utopia. We could live in the hood and face gang violence. We could live in an area where the Klan is alive and well. We could live in a country where we weren’t allowed to vote or educate our kids. There were far worse places for our family to live, I thought as I stared at the white lacquered banister that looked as though it was made from a Home Depot kit. I looked up at the equally generic lighting fixture and down at the plush beige carpet and sighed deeply.

Yes, there were worse places to live, but there were better ones too. One of them was the sweet little gingerbread Victorian on the hilly street where we knew our neighbors, I walked to work at the Four Circles Gallery blocks away, and the barista at Tea and Sympathy knew exactly how much milk to put in my chai latte.

After we closed escrow a few weeks earlier, Jason and I drove up for an orientation for new parents at the middle school and met a few of our new neighbors. One of the dads patted Jason on the back and asked if he was “jacked about his sweet new crib.” Jason gave the guy a perfunctory smile, then shot me a look I’d seen before. It wasn’t every white guy who tried to cram as much MTV lingo into one sentence as possible. In fact, it wasn’t even very many. Still, it was enough to remind Jason that there were some people who would see his skin and write his life story in a moment. It was always the same history, too. Poor, black Jason was the first in his family to graduate from college and leave behind his gangsta life thanks to a killer jump shot and affirmative action. They never drew the conclusion that was Jason’s true story: that his choice to pursue firefighting was a huge disappointment to his father, a surgeon at the Johns Hopkins Burn Center. Jason’s family paid full freight at his boarding school and college, and used the same affirmative action program that the rich white kids did, a father who golfed. I was always the one who wanted to set the record straight, and it was always Jason who told me not to bother.

At the school orientation, the Utopian fathers exchanged a round of thinly veiled self-congratulations about living in an upscale community. Their blowup-doll wives agreed dutifully.

Jorge, my Puerto Rican Yoda, once told me that we were most critical of other people’s shortcomings when we saw them in ourselves. In the privacy of my own thoughts, I had to confess that he was right. I might have had an air of self-satisfaction too. Back when I had high hopes for my career, things like chain restaurants and Prada backpacks didn’t bother me in the least. It was only when I realized I’d failed at my own artistic dream that I began rolling my eyes at other people’s lifestyles.

As we crossed the threshold of our new home for the first time as a family, I tried to take my eyes off the assembly-line construction of the house and focus on how much this meant to Jason. Ten years ago, when I was miserable in my job in advertising, Jason suggested I pursue sculpting full time. “This ain’t a dress rehearsal, baby,” he told me. “Chase the dream ’cause it’s not coming after you.” Now it was my turn.

I looked around the empty foyer.
Positive, positive, I can do positive.
“There are four bathrooms so we can all poop at the same time.”

Jason smiled and put his hand across my waist. “I appreciate that, baby.”

When I looked back at him, I silently promised myself I’d really give this place a chance.

Maya shouted hello to see if she could get an echo in the empty foyer. “Where’s my room?”

“Top of the staircase, turn right,” Jason answered, giving my butt a light swat the way he always did when the kids were about to leave us alone. He started doing that at Berkeley when his roommates were on their way out of the house. It still makes me smile. “Yours is up there too, buddy.” Logan and Maya trotted up the stairs to inspect their new digs. I felt a smidge guilty that their first time seeing the new place was the day we moved in, but everything happened so fast. The kids were in San Diego with my mother while we were house-hunting, then flew to Baltimore to visit Jason’s family while we were closing escrow. This didn’t seem to bother them in the least. We heard both kids hoot with satisfaction and high-five each other over the size of their rooms.

“You’ll like it, baby,” Jason said. He kept repeating this promise so many times, I wondered who he was trying to convince.

“I know,” I said, forcing a smile as we walked into the kitchen. I noticed a toy trumpet resting on the unblemished granite countertop. “What’s this?” I picked up a small brass horn with a scroll stuffed inside. Unrolling the parchment, I read aloud, “Hear ye, hear ye! Your presence is requested for games and feasting to celebrate Sir Max’s birthday.”

“Sir Max?”

“Must be the police chief’s boy.”

“Oh right, the sword fighting thing,” Jason said as he leaned against the granite countertop, amused.

“He lucked out with that invitation, right?” I asked. “With all of the years he’s been fencing, I’ll bet he’ll really impress the kids.”

“Who said he was too young to start lessons at six?” Jason asked, moving closer so we could drink in our new surroundings together.

I laughed. “Uh, I believe it was the fencing school.”

“And look how wrong they were,” Jason said. “They thought a little boy and a sword would equal trouble, but he proved them wrong.”

“Well, Logan’s hardly your typical boy, is he?”

“Nope,” Jason said looking past the kitchen counter and into the family room. “Both he and Maya are pretty damn special.”

“Jason,” I said, my tone more serious. “You know what I’m talking about. When are you going to listen to me about him?”

“Baby, let’s not start on that today. This is a day to celebrate.”

Trying to reintroduce the dismissed subject, I joked. “We could make this his coming-out party.”

Jason sighed, annoyed that I wouldn’t let this go. “How many times do I have to tell you, it’s too soon to tell on that sort of thing.”

“I can tell,” I said.

“He’s thirteen. Lots of boys his age are —”

“Gay, Jason,” I interrupted. “Gay, gay, gay. Get used to it already. The kid is gay and the sooner you accept it, the better off we’ll all be.”

“Has he ever told you he’s gay?”

“Don’t you remember the hat he made for Opening Day at the races?” I said, recalling his creation — the wide rim decorated as a horse track complete with plastic model thoroughbreds and jockeys. The center of the hat was made from silk red roses and blue first-place ribbons. It was the height of gaudy chic. He won the award for best hat, and a tight-faced socialite paid him a hundred dollars for it.

“He’s a businessman,” Jason dismissed. “Look, baby, you’re an artist. Of course our kids are going to be creative. There are plenty of straight —”

“Straight male hat makers?”

“I was going to say straight artists,” Jason corrected me.

He pulled me in to lean against him. “He’s not a hat maker. He made one hat, one time.”

“Trust me, Jason, there will be more hats in our future,” I said, laughing.

“Don’t be so quick to slap a label on the kid,” Jason said. “A boy doesn’t need his own mother calling him gay.”

“It’s not an insult, you know.”

“I know that,” Jason snapped. “Come on, today’s a day to celebrate. We got a new life here. A fresh start.”

I imagined Jason starring in a Windex commercial where fathers could wipe away the gay from their sons.

“Since when do you have a problem with gay people?” I asked.

“I don’t,” Jason dismissed. “Some of your best friends are gay.”

I surrendered for the moment, but felt the emptiness that came every time Jason failed to admit the reality of our son’s orientation. I needed the closure of Jason knowing, acknowledging and accepting. I needed him to say, “Of course he’s gay and that’s cool with me.” Jorge once accused me of “shoving Logan out of the closet,” a criticism that stung the way only truth could.

“Okay,” I told Jason, quietly reminding myself to relax and let life unfold on its own.

With that, Maya came running down the stairs as Logan slid down the banister next to her, sitting on the rail with his hands outstretched as if to say,
ta-da!
“Look what we found in your bedroom,” Maya said, handing Jason and me a booklet of swatches entitled “The Fabric of Utopia.”

Jennifer Coburn is a
USA Today
bestselling author who has written six novels and contributed to several literary anthologies.

Over the past two decades, Jennifer has won numerous awards from the San Diego Press Club, and Society for Professional Journalists for articles that appeared in
Mothering
,
Big Apple Baby
,
The Miami Herald
,
The San Diego Union-Tribune
and dozens of national and regional publications. She has also written for
Salon.com
,
Creators News Syndicate
and
The Huffington Post
.

Jennifer lives with her husband William and their daughter Katie in San Diego, California.