Steamroller

In my bedroom, you opened the door and had a foot of room to walk between my bed, the hamper, and the stacked baskets that held my clothes. There was a small closet that brooms would have fit in, but it made sense in the postage-stamp-sized apartment. One day I wanted a kitchen table and some chairs, but that was for when I had a real place while I was saving the world.

When I got back, Barbara had moved and was standing in the doorway of the second bedroom, tears rolling down her cheeks. She had not bothered to close the front door.

I walked over and swung it shut, then turned to face her. “So, what’s wrong?”

“He said he was going home!” she explained loudly.

“And you thought that was with me?”

“Of course!” came the plaintive wail.

“Why?”

“He always talks about you like he’s your brother!”

Of course he did, or had.

When I was seventeen, getting ready to start my senior year of high school, I had come out to my mother and stepfather. It had not gone well. They had told me to leave and I had called Matt. I always called Matt.

He arrived at my front door with his mother and father and his younger sister, Jaci, in tow. They were all ready to carry things.

My mother was hysterical. Gary, my stepfather, was incensed, and when he explained that he was taking a position in Chicago that had just come up, Mr. and Mrs. Cooksey pretended to believe that he was thinking of me having to change schools in my senior year and how hard that would be, instead of running away from the taint of a gay child in his household.

“It’s for the best,” my mother apprised them.

“Oh, I agree.” Mrs. Cooksey smiled at her, patting her hand.

My stepfather was a nice man, kind to my mother when she’d never had that before. His first wife had died of cancer very young, and he really tried to like me—before he knew I was gay—because it was the Christian thing to do, even though I was born out of wedlock.

My parents never married, so I was basically a bastard, a fact Gary made certain to mention to both me and my mother on many occasions. So it was strained from the get-go, but what made it bad, before that final straw, was that I was different from his two sons: quieter, a loner, more opinionated, more political, and, as it turned out, smarter. He was surprised at my straight As, and since I didn’t seem to need him for anything, that made everything worse. He had nothing to offer me, and after they had their child together, my half sister, Gina, their family was complete. They didn’t like me around, underfoot, and with the big reveal, they didn’t want me either. My mom was sad but resolved. If I could recant the gay thing, she would fight to take me along. But as I told her, it was fine.

At the Cooksey house, I got the attic, which I was scared about when they offered it to me—not that you would have ever been able to tell from my expression—but it turned out to be huge and fully renovated and had a great space for my desk under a skylight. There was also one of those window seats to read in that I just adored. My mother had been worried about what amount of money she would have to give the Cookseys for basically giving me room and board, but Mrs. Cooksey told Gary and my mom that they didn’t have to pay her and her husband a dime. All my mother had to do was sign a power of attorney form and she could wash her hands of me.

“What?”

“What did I say?” Maureen Cooksey pretended innocence as she looked at my mother with wide eyes.

“Wash my hands of him?”

“Well, dear, you were going to put him out on the street,” she reminded my mother.

“Sign here,” Mr. Cooksey said, passing her a pen. The man was not a lawyer—he owned a general contracting business—but his older brother was, and apparently they had run by his house and grabbed some paperwork on the way over. They had come prepared.

Mrs. Cooksey was very thorough. “I might need to take him to the doctor, and we wouldn’t want to bother you.”

“How can you—” Matt began.

“Quiet,” his father cut him off, smiling at my mother as she finished signing. “Thank you.”

“Where’s your room, love?” Mrs. Cooksey asked me, as she had never been over to my house and so had no idea where she was supposed to go.

“I’ll show you,” Matt muttered, walking toward the stairs.

“I should go through whatever you take out,” Gary told them.

But Mr. Cooksey did a sort of slow pan, and his eyes were hard and cold, and even though Gary was bigger, Mr. Cooksey was way more muscular, and so my stepfather said, “Never mind,” went into his den, and shut the door.