I nodded, like I knew.
“You know your dad,” Dom continued. “This town is everything to him. Friends with everybody. So it’s been rough, watching everybody suffer. Businesses closing. Folks getting evicted, struggling to pay their rising rents.”
“Sounds like Brooklyn,” I said. “I didn’t realize it had gotten so bad.”
“Some folks say your dad is the only thing standing between this town and total destruction,” Dom said.
“How’s that?”
“Refuses to sell the butcher shop building. Rents it, but won’t sell. And it’s the last piece they need, for this big proposed real estate development project. Pequod Arms, they’re calling it. A bunch of big condo and rental developments that would fuck us all the way up.”
“I’m glad to hear that he’s holding out,” I said, and wondered idly what kind of money was on the table. Like, buy a Brooklyn apartment money? Never have to worry about rent again money?
“But, yeah. It’s messed him up a lot, the way this town has changed lately. My wife is the same way.”
“Your wife,” I said, and, yeah, I was vaguely aware he’d gotten married—had seen it on Facebook, maybe, or gotten an email?—to a classmate of ours, Attalah, a brilliant illustrator, in all my art classes, the only other person besides me who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” he said, with a chuckle. “Been ten years now. Have we really not seen each other in that long?”
“Been busy,” I said. The streets went by slow, outside his window. The five-and-dime was gone; the family-owned restaurant. The toy store where my father got me a big plastic magenta allosaurus the day eight-year-old me crashed his bike and broke his wrist. Replaced by antique store after antique store. Each one throbbed like the socket of a long-gone tooth.
“Busy being a big-deal photographer,” he said. “Your father is super proud.”
“Thanks,” I said, disturbed, to think of my father seeing my dirty sexy pictures. Somehow I imagined he’d be too squeamish to Google me, go to my website, follow the links I posted to new spreads and covers as they came out.
“You look exactly the same,” he said. “How is that?”
“I’m a gay man, Dom. We’re neurotic and obsessed with our appearance.”
“Unlike straight guys like me who really let ourselves go, you mean.”
I laughed. He laughed. It was a joke.
I mean, he had let himself go. But he was still every bit as beautiful as he had been in eleventh grade.
I started to say, So now you’re straight? But there was no need. Because of course he’d always been straight. Even when he was my first boyfriend, his big secret, I’d known what was up. Why we could never be.
This was bad, that I’d been back such a short time and already I was feeling so many emotions. I had to get the fuck out of here. But first: I had to steer the conversation onto less raw ground.
“Stubb still around?” I asked, mock-nonchalant, like the boy I feared most was a matter of no importance to me at all. The most vicious of my high school bullies; the horriblest homophobe, the one who would punch me in the arm again and again in math class while the teacher pretended not to notice; the one who, one Saturday night while I was at the movie theater with my mom and dad, hollered from the back row, Ronan Szepessy is a faggot!
“Course he is,” Dom said, shaking his head. “Where else is he gonna go? Nobody’d put up with his shit anywhere else, but here he’s got his daddy the mayor to keep on shielding him from the consequences of his actions.”
“His dad is still the mayor? How is that possible?”
“No term limits in Hudson. He’s not running for reelection, though. Jark Trowse is running, and that’s his handpicked successor.”
“The internet guy?”
“Yup. Word is, mayor’s stepping down ’cause his son’s a liability. Sick in the head, or maybe an addict. Whatever it is, people say it’s just a matter of time before he does something really cataclysmically bad, and Daddy Coffin doesn’t want to have to be in the public eye when it happens.”
“It’s a little on the nose,” I said, “the last name. Coffin.”
“Historic,” Dom said. “One of the founders of the town was named that. Also a whaling ship captain.” At the next stoplight, he turned to me and smiled. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, because it’s just gossip, but you remember Rich Trappan?”
“Of course,” I said, “Stubb’s little henchman and partner in crime. The two of them were practically joined at the hip.” I grinned, excited for the gossip, but also—grateful to Dom, because of course he knew how feigned my nonchalance was, how much hate and fear I still had in my heart for Steve “Stubby” Coffin. Funny how I probably haven’t talked to this guy in like fifteen years and he still knows me better than anyone.
“Well, word is—they actually did join at the hip on a couple of occasions. Buddy of mine who was on the baseball team said he saw them going at it in the gym showers once.”
“No fucking way,” I said.
“Fucking way.”
“Those fucking hypocrites.”
“Thought you’d like that.”
“Thanks, Dom,” I said.
“Anytime, Ro.”
My knees throbbed, hearing my name in his mouth, his sweet deep voice.
“I always thought you were like the Prince of Hudson,” he said, pulling up in front of my father’s house. “The castle at the very top of Warren Street, looking down on all of us.”
It was a great location. I’d always felt like somebody, perched where the main street became a dead end. “The place is a shithole,” I said, and that was true, too.
“We know real shitholes downstreet,” he said.
“Dom,” I said, and put my hand on his. He pulled it away. So I didn’t say what I’d been about to say. Which was good, because I didn’t know what it was. And I was afraid of what could have come out of my mouth.
“Great to see you, Ronan,” he said, and scribbled something on a piece of paper. “Here’s my number. Call me up, if you’re around for a little while. I know Attalah would love to see you, too.”
“I’d like to see her, too,” I said, and I meant it. I liked her a lot, even if I also harbored an abundance of impure thoughts about her husband. “Thanks for the ride, Dom.”
“You need a hand with your dad?”
I did, but how could I ask anything further of him? So I smiled and said, “Nah, I got it,” and went around to let my father out. I had to lean in close, to unbuckle his seat belt. I had to smell him. Cigarettes, Stetson cologne, stale linen, the faintest whiff of body odor.
Dom drove off. Left us standing there.
“Let’s go inside, Dad,” I said, and Dad came with me, up the steep steps—a docile child—my child.
I paused a moment at the front door. Let the wind sough through me. Pulled out the key that I’d never taken off my key ring.
It still fit. This was home, no matter how hard I had been hiding from it.
Back inside, safe in familiar surroundings, Dad seemed to come back to some semblance of life. Bolted the door behind us; pulled the blinds; went to the bathroom and started brushing his teeth.