Still full of breakfast and frankly ready to go back to bed with each other, Mark and Gilead took the inside streets north through Riverview into Breckinridge, and Gilead was surprised by how close he lived to Russell. The only time they saw a main street was when they, in fact, crossed Main. The Breckinridge wasn’t as cozy as Riverview, and it wasn’t as old. The houses were too far apart for affection.
Mark asked, “Do you want me to hang out with you all or come back?”
“You don’t have to do either. You’re not my chauffer.”
“I’d like to do either one,” Mark said.
“I mean, I don’t need you to… What I mean is you don’t have to hang out with my friends.”
“I like hanging with your friends.”
“Then I have to hang with yours,” Gilead said.
“Whaddo you mean?”
“I mean, it’s not fair to suck you up into my life. You have a life. So now you also need to suck me up into yours. Okay?”
“Okay?” Mark looked a little perplexed. “I can do that. But what do you want me to do now?”
“Come back for me?”
“Okay,” Mark said.
“I’m not exactly sure when. Let me—”
Mark placed a hand over Gilead’s.
“Whenever you’re done is when you’re done. Just call me.”
Gilead leaned in and kissed Mark quickly before heading up the walk to the house.
When Mrs. Lewis opened the door she looked strangely distracted. She looked like a grown up, like a white woman. She looked like someone who was covering up something and attempting to be pleasant when all was not well.
“Russell’s upstairs,” she told him. “And you know where the kitchen is,” which was to say, “help yourself to it.”
Upstairs, Russell sprang to answer the door as soon as Gilead knocked on it, and he pulled his friend inside.
“You’re not going to believe this.”
“Okay?” Gilead surveyed him.
“Cody is my brother.”
“What?”
“Cody Barnard is my brother.”
“Explain.”
“Apparently my dad had sex with his mom when he was fifteen and then she moved away and passed Cody off as someone else’s.”
“Mr. Barnard’s.”
“Exactly.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” Russell said. “So Dad tells me this morning, and then all of a sudden I blurt out that I slept with Jason Lorry and I’m having sex with Ralph.”
“You’re having sex with Ralph?”
“You knew that.”
“I sort of knew that. But no. You’re sleeping with Ralph!”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“It’s amazing. I love him.”
“Ralph Balusik?”
“Yes.”
“Is your boyfriend?”
“I don’t know what he is. He’s my friend. He loves me. We make love. It’s… It’s what it is,”
“I feel like that’s a phrase for old people.”
“It’s what it is,” Russell insisted.
“Not making it better,” Gilead said, then: “Have you told Anigel?”
“I haven’t told anyone, and Dad told Mom—not about me and Ralph, but him and Cody’s mom, and she’s…. odd about it, but not angry cause it’s not like he cheated on her. And Anigel…. She ran off in the middle of the night with her friend Ross.”
“Ross Allen.”
“Yeah?” Russell raised an eyebrow.
“We’re cousins,” Gilead said. “I can’t quite remember how.”
“Are all Black people related?”
“In Lothrop County?” Gilead said. “Yes.”
He sat on the bed.
“Oh, and Jason Lorry came by last night and apologized—”
“Hasn’t it been like… a week since you found him fucking some slut?”
“Yeah.”
“And since he had nothing to say and didn’t make any contact with you?”
“Exactly.”
“And then he just shows up.”
“Yes.”
“Damn.”
“Right?”
Gilead looked at his friend.
“That’s not all, is it?”
“Whaddo you mean?”
“You’ve told me a lot,” Gilead said. “But you haven’t told me everything.”
Russell looked at him and said, “How the fuck do you--?”
“Because you’re my friend.”
Russell said, “There is more… But, can it wait?”
“I guess.”
“Anyway,” Russell said, “enough about me. What about you?”
“Uh…. I slept with Mark.”
“What? Are you serious?”
Russell crashed on the bed beside his friend.
“That was on Friday. And then yesterday. And then part of today. I just didn’t get the change to tell you. He had breakfast with us this morning. Mom knows we’re together. He dropped me off here and kissed me on the cheek.”
“See, you have a proper boyfriend. A real handholder. That’s romantic.”
“I just assumed it didn’t matter that your dad or Chayne or whatever would drop me home or even I might walk but he looked like he really wanted to be the one to come and get me. And he wanted to know if he should hang out with us and I was like, well don’t you want to hang out with your friends? Don’t you want me to hang out with your friends? And he looked at me like that was the craziest thing.”
“Is the whole school gay?”
“No,” Gilead said with certainty. “The whole school is most certainly not gay, and Ralph and Jason are still banging chicks. But it would seem that at least three of us are, and that’s three more than I knew.”
“Have you thought that…. Maybe Mark likes you and me and all of our gang better than he likes his friends?”
Gilead bursts out laughing.
“Like,” Russell said, “you’re telling Mark to get back to his life, and he’s probably just hanging around at his house waiting for you to call him back.”
“Don’t you think…. Like… He’s doing important stuff?”
“He’s popular at school and everything, but I don’t know that he has friends the way we’re friends. He’s probably staring at a wall waiting for you to call him.”
“So…. I should call him?”
“Call him.”
Gilead rolled over on the bed and picked up the phone on Russell’s nightstand, plopping it on his lap.
“What are you going to do about Jason?” he asked.
Russell shook his head head.
“I have no idea.”
Whatever Patti Lewis was feeling when she’d let Gilead into the house, she was not feeling shame, and had never been a secret keeper. The three people, four if you counted Patti, who were most involved in this new situation were involved and involved again with interlinked people so that Felice and Chayne were already discussing things in a three way call with Jackie who was nursing her daughter while telling John who was on his way to visit Patti, but stopped by the church to tell Denise who saw no reason not to tell Fathers Geoff and Robert. Geoff, missing his sister, and always glad to have something new to say, went over to the Shusters and told Ann who told Hannah and Will who couldn’t wait to tell Jewell, but by then Jewell knew because Chayne had called her and they had called Shannon.
This all meant that around the same time Russell was telling Gilead, LaVelle was on the phone with Gil’s mother telling Sharonda.
Geschichte Falls was not very big, though the people who lived in it acted as if it was. They were always surprised when they found that neighborhoods that were supposed to be very different from each other were only a spit’s distance away. Colum Street, the hard done, worn out pockmarked road where Cody and Jill lived, if one drove three blocks east and crossed Edison, became genteel Jefferson Park. Jefferson Park was the large public park with gardens and fountains that separated the rougher neighborhood on the east with the blocks on the west and those blocks were together called Jefferson Park too. Nehru Alexander’s family lived there on a prettier part of Colum Street, and he had marched three blocks up to Indragal Road where Marissa kissed him on the cheek when he entered and said, “Brad’s babyproofing the house for me. Well for the baby, I guess,” touching her mostly flat stomach. “He was about to call you.”
Marissa had waited thirty-five years to love something, and in her pregnancy had realized she loved her baby and that she finally loved herself. Brad said he strongly suspected she had met someone.
“Well, it’s a good thing I came.”
“You two share the same brain,” Marissa said.
“I bet we don’t because I bet you all have no idea what I’m about to say.”
“It’s for both of us?” Marissa put a hand to her stomach.
“For all three of you if you like,” Nehru pointed to her tummy.
“I’ll get him. You rest.”
“I’m three months pregnant, Jawarhahal, Relax.”
Brad said he was not sure who had broken up with whom. He felt dumped, but in a good way. Nehru was too pragmatic to feel guilty about the fact that Marissa knew nothing of him sleeping with Brad and glad to know she wouldn’t even think much of them moving in together.
The house was small, so in no time Brad was in the kitchen and Nehru said, “Cody and Russell…”
“Are lovers!”
“Are….” Nehru’s face changed. “I hope not. No,” Nehru said while Marissa frowned at Brad.
“Are brothers.”
“The fuck!” Marissa and Brad said at the same time.
Around then, the phone rang and Brad picked it up.
“Hello. Shane?”
“You’ll never guess—”
“Cody and Russell are brothers.”
“Damn!”
“Since all everyone wants to do is gossip,” Marissa began, “why don’t we just go to the Noble Red and do that.”
Indragal was a winding little road that went back out to Colum, but if from Colum you went only another two blocks east, you ended up on Kirkland, right across Keyworthy and just north of Curtain was Noble Red.
It was from Noble Red the call arrived at 1735 Breckinridge Drive, and Patricia Lewis, her brother and sister loud as fuck in her living room, answered.
“Uh…. Patti.”
“Brad,” Patti said tartly.
“Well…. How are you?”
She could tell by his voice that somehow he must have known too.
“I’m fine, Bradley. I’m sure that’s not the reason you called.”
“Uh.. Yes. No. I mean, I’m glad to hear you’re fine. I….”
“I’ll get Russell.”
“Thanks.”
Russell’s bedroom was surprisingly full. All sitting cross legged on the bed in a circle, talking, were Mark Young, Gilead Story, Ralph Balusik and her son. She could have just bellowed up the stairs, but she preferred to walk today.
“It’s Brad and Nehru,” Patti said.
Russell rolled over and answered the phone.
After a moment of talking, he put the phone to his chest and looked at his friends.
“Noble Red?” he said.
“I’ve never been,” Mark said.
“You’ll love it,” Ralph said with so much seriousness that Russell almost laughed.
“Yeah,” Russell said to the receiver, “we’ll be there. Sooner than later.”
Sooner than later because they would pass Chayne’s house to get there, which meant stopping in Chayne’s house which meant who knew? But even while thinking this, they heard a car screech, and Mark leaned over the west window of Russell’s room looking at the Armstrong’s driveway.
“Is that Dave Armstrong?” he started. Then, “That’s Cameron.”
“She’s so hot,” Ralph said, jumping up, and Gilead decided to not look at Russell. Russell had already said they weren’t boyfriend and boyfried and Ralph’s sexuality was… flexible.
“She’s very pretty,” Mark said noncommittally, leaning on an elbow and looking back at Gilead with a shared understanding.
“And she’s not going in the house. She must be going to her house.”
But just then the doorbell rang and not long after, Russell’s door opened without a knock and Cameron, cheeks red from cold, blond hair frizzled and sticking to her shoulders, said, “What the fuck are we all sitting around her for? I need to get out.”
For a long time she didn’t say anything, and because they knew what this felt like, this not wanting to speak, they let it rest. Suddenly Gilead walking beside Mark understood why Mark wanted to be not only with him, but with them. They were not the cool group, but they were the sad group. They were the group who knew things, and after a while that was what you wanted to be around.
The world is a rough place, Gilead thought to himself. It was not that he was personally sad. As they reached Wexford Avenue and crossed into the little neighborhood of the Curtain, Gilead realized that the world was sad and everyone here had been touched by sadness and that in the end, pretending it was not sad or making oneself so jaded because of the sadness was not the answer. See, here, these last few blocks ought to have been Breckinridge too. Breckinridge should have stretched all the way to Kirkland, but here the streets were brick and they curved a little like that road where Brad Long lived with his girlfriend. The houses were smaller and close together, brightly painted and porched with tiled gables. The Curtain was older than Little Poland or Westhaven. The Curtain was older than downtown. It was from another time when his ancestors who lived lives he could not imagine had fled being called slaves and treated like animals and found refuge here, when after a war that was so civil between white people in blue and white people in grey that it barely changed the lives of people with black skin, even more had come just to find some space to breathe. As they stopped at Chayne’s house, Gilead thought, this very house, the bricks on this road were built in sorrow, and built from the determination to find joy.
“I like how people don’t knock,” Chayne said when they entered. Rob had put on coffee and was coming back to the kitchen table with a cup he set before Chayne, lightly resting his hand on the other man’s head.
“People just assume I want company.”
“I can’t always tell if you’re serious,” Russell said, kissing Chayne almost dutifully, the way one kissed a parent, “or if you’re not.”
“Neither can I,” Chayne said.
“Besides, we’re just stopping by for a second. When you don’t want to be bothered, you lock the door.”
“Like last Wednesday,” Gilead remembered. “In the afternoon.”
“I locked the door,” the handsome Rob said, looking wolfish as he took a sip of his own coffee and reached for Chayne’s cigarettes.
“Because we were having sex.” Rob continued.
“Wow,” Ralph Balusik said.
“Yeah, we got that,” Gilead said.
“If you children can do what you want,” Chayne put a heavy emphasis on the word children, “Why can’t we?”
Next he asked, “Have you talked to Cody?”
“Not since last night,” Russell said. “It didn’t seem like there was much to say. We’re already friends. Now he’s my brother. He’s already part of the family. Dad already feels close to him. I feel like he and Dad need to talk, or maybe him and Mom.”
“How’s Patti taking it?”
As Chayne exhaled smoke, Russell said, “The same way you would if you found out your husband had a twenty three year old son and that son had been hanging out at your house for months.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Cameron spoke for the first time.
“So…. Cody is… what?”
“My Dad was Cody’s mom’s boyfriend when he was younger than us. She moved away from town but not before they had sex. I think they were having lots of sex. She was knocked up with Cody but passed him off as someone else’s.”
“So your dad was like fifteen or fourteen?” Ralph said.
“Probably fifteen.”
“That’s really young,” Ralph said as if he had not been sexually active since his sixteenth birthday, which is what Gilead’s look to Mark said, and Mark turned away before he burst out laughing.
“It’s alarmingly young,” Chayne agreed. “And not just a little bit gross. But there it is.”
“You know what I think,” Rob said, moving the soft pack of cigarettes around the table almost as if it was a toy car, “I think Cody might be more embarrassed than you think, and it’s your job to go over and visit him.”
“Huh?” Rusell said.
“You fuckin’ heard me, Lewis. You’re not deaf. Cody might need you to go over there and tell him it’s alright.”
