Salvation (33 page)

I tried to ignore it and focus on the
task at hand. “Thank you for this opportunity, Dmitri,” I said, turning my
attention to the prep counter.

“You deserve it. You were completely
underemployed as a busboy,” he said. “Just remember though, when Dante’s new
chef comes back to the U.S. in a few weeks, I fully expect him to steal you
away from me. You seem like the kind of person that would let loyalty get in
the way of an opportunity like that, and I’m not going to let that happen. I’ll
fire you before I let you pass up that job!”

I had to grin a little. “Thanks, I
appreciate your willingness to fire me. Nothing’s going to come of that
interview, though.”

“Based on what?” he asked. I just
shrugged, looking down at the counter. Dmitri put his hand on my shoulder and
said gently, “I know you’re used to life disappointing you Trevor, and I’m so
sorry that you’ve had every reason to expect that. But don’t sabotage yourself,
okay? That job’s as good as yours, according to Dante. And if you can’t get
your hopes up, I guess I’ll just have to get mine up for you.”

I leaned in and gave him a quick hug. “I
really would miss this place, you know.”

“So, come visit a lot!”

I grinned at that and said, “If by some
miracle I got that job, I promise I would visit. Now stop distracting me, I
have work to do.”

He winked at me and said, “You got it.
Have fun,” before leaving the kitchen.

Lunchtime at Nolan’s was more popular
than ever, and I barely stopped moving for three hours. There was a bit of a
learning curve, but I’d observed enough over the past several weeks to be able
to pick things up quickly. It felt great to be busy, it pushed everything from
my mind but the tasks at hand.

*****

When the lunch rush finally ended, I
thoroughly cleaned my station before saying goodbye to the rest of the kitchen
staff and depositing my soiled apron in a laundry bin. Jamie intercepted me on
the way to the locker room, and said, “Could you come into my office for a
minute, Trevor?” He seemed concerned about something, and I asked him what was
wrong. “Nothing. Just...um...someone’s coming to see you. Vincent asked us to
have you wait.”

“That’s weird. Why would someone be
coming to see me here?” I asked as I followed him to the office.

“Well, I guess Vincent didn’t want to
bring this person to your apartment. He thought someplace semi-public would be
good.”

“I’m thoroughly confused. Who’s he
bringing? He didn’t tell me anything about this,” I said as I sank onto the
long sofa along the wall of the office.

“I know. I guess it all just sort of
came together this afternoon,” Jamie said.

Dmitri came into the office and sat
right beside me, so close our legs were touching, and picked up one of my
hands, holding it between both of his. I said, “Oh man, Dmitri is in full moral
support mode, this must be bad. What’s going on?”

He tried to make light of the situation,
grinning as he said, “Me? No. Can’t a friend just randomly cuddle with you and
hold your hand?”

Before I could inundate them with a
million questions, Vincent appeared in the doorway to the office and said,
“Hey. Um, I brought someone to see you, Trevor.” He looked even more nervous
than Jamie and Dmitri as he stepped into the office, then off to the side.

A pale, slender man with dark brown hair
and blue-green eyes came into the room, wringing his hands nervously as he
looked from face to face. Finally, his gaze landed on me, and he said softly,
“Oh God, Trevor.”

“Who are you?” I asked, my voice barely
a whisper. The man looked so much like me, but he also looked way too young to
be who I thought he was.

“I’m TJ.” He took a deep breath and
said, his voice shaking a little, “I’m your dad, Trevor. God, look at you.
You’re all grown up.”

I felt like the room had just been
tipped on its axis. It took a moment to get my bearings, and then all I could
do was mutter, “Yeah, funny how that happens when a couple decades go by.”

“Do you want us to leave you alone?”
Dmitri asked, still holding my hand. I shook my head no.

Jamie pulled a chair up for TJ, who
perched on it with a murmured, “Thank you.”

I shot Vincent a look and said, “You
didn’t think it’d be an idea to tell me about this beforehand?”

“It just happened this afternoon,” Vincent
told me. “Remember when I asked you what your father’s name was a couple days
ago? Right after that, I hired a private detective to track him down, but I had
no idea if he’d be successful. You’ve suffered enough disappointment lately,
and I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

Anger welled up in me as I stared into a
pair of eyes eerily like my own. To Vincent I said, “Why did you think I’d want
this? Why would I want to see him?”

“You came to San Francisco specifically
to find him, when you and Melody needed help,” Vincent said. “I thought this is
what you wanted.”

“Maybe I did at the time, since I was
feeling pretty desperate. But having just had an all-too-fleeting taste of
parenthood, I have to say, about the last thing I want right now is to see the
man who abandoned me.”

“Abandoned you!” TJ exclaimed, his eyes
going wide. God he looked like me. Or, I looked like him.... “No! Trevor,
that’s not what happened! Didn’t your mom tell you?”

My voice was almost a growl as I said,
“She never told me anything, not when you left, and not later, after she shot
me and went to jail.”

He looked so distraught that for a
moment I almost felt sorry for him. He stammered, “She...what?” as he tried to
make sense of what I’d just told him.

“Shot me. In the stomach. I’d show you
the scar, but I don’t really feel like sharing.”

“Oh God, Trevor. I didn’t know! When did
this happen?”

“When I was six, and of course you
didn’t know. You’d already left me three years before that.”

“How could she do that?”

“Technically, she was aiming for someone
else and I got in the way of the bullet. Beyond that, I assume she was trying
to shoot another person because she spent every minute of her life totally
messed up on drugs.”

“But she’d been clean for over seven
months the last time I saw you. I thought she’d gotten her act together.”

“She relapsed. You left me with a
hardcore drug addict.”

He slid forward in his chair and said,
“Trevor, I didn’t leave, not on purpose. I was arrested. I served four years
for making and selling meth. When I got out, I couldn’t find you. I wrote to
you from prison, didn’t your mom read you any of my letters?”

“No, and you must not have looked very
hard for me once you got out. I was sent to live with my mom’s brother in
Sacramento. It’s not like I vanished.”

“Your mom has a brother?” he asked.

I stared at him for a long moment. “Do
you honestly expect me to believe you didn’t know that?”

“I didn’t. She hated her family, she
never talked about them. When I first met her in high school, she’d been living
with a friend’s family for almost two years.”

“It also didn’t occur to you to check
with social services? They kept a record of me.”

“I thought you were with your mom. I had
no reason to believe you were in the system.”

I stared at him for several long moments
as I took this all in. He really seemed like he was telling the truth, but I
couldn’t just blindly accept everything he was telling me. How did I know if I
could trust him?

This was all more than a little
overwhelming. I muttered, “I need some air,” and got up and left the office
abruptly. I went out the back door and doubled over with my hands on my knees,
breathing deeply.

TJ followed me, and he said softly,
“Trevor, I’m really sorry. I messed up so bad when I got myself sent to jail. I
was an addict, not that that’s any excuse. But I’ve gotten clean. I don’t sell
or use drugs anymore, I haven’t since I went to prison. I changed. I got my
G.E.D. and learned a trade. I do electronics repair. I have my own apartment,
and I’ve managed to build up some savings. Do you need money, or a place to
stay? I could help you out.”

I whirled around to face him and yelled,
“
I don’t want your damn money!
I just wanted
you
! All those
years, that’s all I wanted! Just you!”

His voice shook as he said, “I’m so
sorry I didn’t try harder to find you. I thought your mom had gotten clean, I
thought she was taking care of you and that you didn’t need me. I didn’t know,
Trevor. I had no idea.”

“I don’t know if I can believe you. How
can I even be sure that you’re really my dad? Maybe that detective found the
wrong guy. I mean, you look a hell of a lot like me, but at the same time, you
also look way too young. How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-seven.”

 “You can’t be.”

“I was sixteen when I got your mom
pregnant. She was seventeen when she had you. Your birthday is June
twenty-ninth, I remember the day you were born like it was yesterday. I’d never
been so terrified in my entire life. Or so happy.” He smiled shyly and looked
at the ground.

I was completely floored. “My God, you
were a kid! I mean, I knew my parents were young, but I never realized you were
that
young.”

He looked up at me and said, “I made a
million mistakes in my life, Trevor, but you were never one of them. I loved
you from the moment I saw you and every moment since then.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and
said quietly, “I thought you didn’t want me. All this time, I was so hurt and
angry. I thought you’d abandoned me.”

He pushed his hair out of his eyes and
said, “Maybe I did abandon you in some sense, because I didn’t try hard enough
to find you. I thought I was doing you a favor, though. After I got out of jail
and discovered you’d moved, I tried for months to find out where you’d gone.
But I let myself give up after a while, because part of me really believed you
were better off without me. I mean, why would you need a loser ex-con with no
job and a tenth grade education in your life? I still thought about you every
single day though. I wondered a million times how you were, what you were
doing.”

He took out his wallet and gingerly
removed an old photo, holding it by the edges as he turned it to face me. I’d
never seen a picture of me as a baby, and the fact that he’d been carrying it
all these years was heartbreaking. “I look at this every day. I always wished I
had more pictures of you, but I’ve only ever had this one.” TJ put the picture
and his wallet away, and said, “I’m so sorry I stopped looking. I swear, if I’d
had any idea about your mother, about what she’d done to you, I would have
never stopped trying to find you.
Never
.”

I really didn’t know what to say to all
of that, so I just told him, “I wouldn’t have thought you were a loser. I doubt
anyone ever thinks that about their dad.”

He smiled sadly and said, “You never met
my father, and for good reason. He was a mean drunk who used to beat the shit
out of me and my mom. I think I figured out he was a loser by the time I was
about seven years old.”

“Man,” I murmured. “Is anyone in our
family not messed up?”

“Yeah,” TJ said, “you. Vincent had a
long talk with me before bringing me here. I think he wanted to make sure I
wasn’t some total mental case before letting me anywhere near you. Anyway, he
told me a bit about your life, about how you’d tried to help your cousin, and
about what a kind, decent, loving person you are.” He smiled at me and added,
“He also threatened to kill me if I hurt you. When most people say that, you
assume it’s just a figure of speech. But in this case, I kind of believed him.
He’s a pretty intense guy. He obviously loves and protects you though, and that
makes me happy.”

“I love him too, and I plan to marry him
someday. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Why would I?”

I shrugged and said, “Some parents can’t
accept the fact that their kids are gay.”

“Yeah, but not gay parents.”

“What?”

“I’m gay, Trevor. When I was a stupid
teenager, I thought I could fight it. Sleeping with your mother was a failed
attempt at trying to be straight. Thank God I was that stupid though, because
otherwise I never would have had you.”

“Wow. Okay, I didn’t see that one
coming.”

He frowned and said, “Maybe I should
have held off on that revelation. You already have a lot to take in.”

“No, it’s okay. Actually, it’s nice to
know we have that in common.”

There was a lull in the conversation.
After a few moments, TJ asked, “I was curious about something. How did you know
to look for me in San Francisco when your cousin got pregnant and you tried to
come to me for help?”

“Four years ago, I got a letter from my
mother. It was the only letter she ever sent me, not that she even wanted to
send that one. She said in it that the prison psychologist was making her write
to me as part of a treatment plan. It was really short, but she did say, ‘I
know my brother’s a real son of a bitch, so if you get sick of living with him,
maybe go find your dad. He’s probably living in San Francisco. He always said
he was going to move there.’ Turns out she was right.”