“At least take the flight information,” Felix persisted. She’d never met him and knew only that he was a lawyer and that his parents would be at the wedding.
She jotted the flight number down on the border of the crossword puzzle she was doing in the News & Observer, and then hung up and closed her eyes. She longed to see Peter and she understood the clear overture he’d made by inviting her. But he wanted her there only under the condition that she be genuinely happy for him. That would never happen and she couldn’t pretend otherwise. The kindest thing she could do was stay home and keep her mouth shut. It was all too much to think about. The inevitable fight. Her health. Ronny’s reaction.
Months earlier, she’d gotten as far as checking ticket prices and visiting the website of the hotel where the ceremony would take place and where out-of-town guests were encouraged to stay. But the rates at the W Hotel were more than the monthly payment on Ronny’s new truck. The Hampton Inn in Asheville, where they vacationed each August, was more her style. Although she hadn’t seen Peter in almost thirteen years she could tell, from his tone in their conversations, from the wedding invitation, that he’d become a snob.
There was a man at their church who used to be that way. The Sunday after Easter, he’d given a testimonial and had called his fiancée up to the altar, where they stood hand in hand. “We’re all sinners,” he had said through his tears. “And the great miracle is that Jesus loves us anyway.” She thought that if Peter could just hear this story, it might move him the way it had her.
Janet knew all about it and had been urging her to go. I know I ’m not a mother, Janet would say, choosing her words carefully, but it seems like all he wants is to know you love him. Ruth had confided in no one else. Who would she tell? Her mother thought it was 1963 and cried about JFK’s assassination every night over another nursing home dinner of canned green beans, boiled chicken and cherry jello. She had her Women’s Group at North Baptist, and the girls at work, but it wasn’t the kind of subject you bring up casually.
Peter didn’t know she was sick and she preferred it that way. She didn’t want him visiting out of guilt or pity. He needed to choose to return home. He hadn’t set foot in the house since the Christmas of his junior year of college. They’d gotten back from the Christmas Eve service and were about to open presents when Peter made his announcement. They were sitting in front of the fire, eggnog poured, Bing Crosby playing, wrapped presents spilling out from under the tree. Don’t ever come back here, Ronny had spat out, and thirty minutes later Peter was slipping into the passenger seat of Alex’s idling car. As they’d pulled away, Ruth had realized that Alex—Peter’s best friend since childhood and high school girlfriend—had been waiting for Peter’s call, that it had all been staged in a sense. She had imagined Alex’s family taking him in like a wounded stray. She had been humiliated and bereft. How could she have known that both father and son would act like those stupid words uttered by Ronny were a blood oath? She didn’t like it anymore than Ronny did, but she held onto a hope that Peter would change. Once, she’d found Ronny thumbing through baby pictures of Peter in the garage, his eyes dark. But he refused to talk about their son, and until recently, she’d felt that she couldn’t go behind his back.
Over the years, she’d followed Peter’s career online, reading his articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and in the magazines he freelanced for. They’d been back in touch for two years now, after she’d emailed him in response to a birthday card he’d sent. It was a compromise position, one that she’d consulted with her pastor over. He had given his blessing and this mattered to her.
When she’d last seen him at age twenty, Peter had looked just like Ronny. They had the same lanky body and square jaw, the same slow grin. There was a picture of Peter and Felix on the wedding invitation, standing on an empty Pacific beach. Peter had filled out and his hair brushed his collar. His eyebrows looked waxed and his body leaned easily into Felix’s. They were both dressed in white linen pants and collared shirts.
In one of their calls, she’d asked him if he ever wore dresses. “Yes,” he’d said after a pause. “But it doesn’t mean I want to be a woman.”
“I’ve never known it to mean anything else,” she had replied.
“It’s about performance,” Peter had shot back and she had let it stop there.
It was late—she usually called him after Ronny went to bed—and she had been sipping a glass of chardonnay in the family room, the lights off, the moon casting a bright beam onto the wooden floor. In the dark, she felt like she could say anything to him. She asked questions and in response, he often surprised her with his candor. He rarely had questions for her though, and she couldn’t quite explain why she held her tongue when it came to describing her life. She would murmur vaguely in response to Peter’s various, odd confessions: the affairs that weren’t really affairs because no one objected; the possibility that he and Felix would somehow have a child.
They maneuvered through these calls as if they were dismantling a bomb. One wrong move and it would be over. But she pushed on. She had to. Nothing could be worse than his absence, as pure and aching a wound as she’d known.
Later, she had tried to imagine him in a dress, something black and more expensive than anything she owned. She could see the padded bra, his hips canted, a sly satisfaction on his face. It bothered her that he insisted on calling it performance. Over the years, the pediatrician she worked for had seen a handful of kids with this problem, and it inevitably led to a diagnosis and a referral to a psychiatrist. You could always spot them in the waiting room, boys with big delicate eyes and movements like a young deer’s, girls with round little biceps and wide stances. And quiet, always quiet, sticking close to their parents as the other kids played in the waiting room.
A few times, she had found Peter in her negligees and heels when he was a boy. It had scared her. Those first few years of school, he’d come home crying on a handful of afternoons. How do you tell your six-year-old boy he’s going to get himself killed if he doesn’t watch it? But he’d figured this out on his own and by the time he was eight or nine, he had asked to join Alex’s Pop Warner football team, and soon enough he had become a bookish teenager and joined the school newspaper. She had breathed a sigh of relief as she helped him with his boutonniere the night of Senior Prom. When he left to pick up Alex, he had seemed genuinely happy and she’d felt like she’d done a major part of her work as his mother. The next morning, she’d made him waffles and had listened, delighted, as he re-enacted the break up that had occurred on the dance floor between the Prom Queen and the school’s All-American quarterback. If Peter was as tortured as he later claimed to have been during those years, she had missed it, and knowing this now was just a further injury.
A friend of hers at church had a son who was a heroin addict, and Ruth thought of theirs as different paths in the same woods. Her friend had once confided that she hated to answer the phone late at night because she was certain it would bring word that her son had overdosed. Ruth could relate. There’d been years where she thought any day might deliver the news that Peter was dead from AIDS. She still didn’t believe him entirely when he insisted that he was healthy. Healthy and lucky, was how he put it.
During her last chemo session, their pastor had sat with her for a few hours in the treatment room of Duke’s Cancer Center, which seemed to her like Hell’s version of a salon with its banks of salmon-colored recliners, its hovering, smocked volunteers offering reiki treatments and lemon water, and its bags of relentlessly bright drugs emptying drop by drop into her veins. “God’s with you even when you’re puking,” he had told her. “Especially when you’re puking,” he’d corrected himself earnestly and she could tell he was pleased with himself for using such an earthy term as puking. Young, handsome and brimming with ambition to double the membership of North Baptist, he had a touch of the golden boy about him. But he wasn’t quite prepared for the underbelly of the congregation’s life. Reverend Doctor Good Boy, Ruth called him to