At long last, we return to Warm Dark Stone!
SECOND
SCRUTINY
S I X
HOME
“I wonder if I’ll find it…The missing part.”
- DJ Frey
Shortly after Rob had moved into Isaiah Frey’s home, Jason Henley arrived. In fact he arrived in Frey’s room as he and Rob were fucking each other.
Rob, hair tousled, face red, looked unfocusedly at Jason from on top of Frey, and in the darkness really only Frey’s voice could be heard murmuring, “You could knock, Jason.”
“I could go,” Rob looked down at him.
“No. We haven’t finished yet,” Frey said in a mellow, dignified voice. “Close the door, Jason.”
Nonplussed, Jason closed the door.
A little later Rob came out in his Jockeys, gave an insolent bow to Jason, and stepped into the bathroom beside Frey’s bedroom. Frey was dressing as Jason walked in and said, full of sanctimony,
“What is this?”
“This,” Frey said, “is a bedroom.”
Jason Henley, spluttering in an attempt to show his disgust said, “What were you doing?”
“Well, now, Jason, if you don’t know what I was doing,” Frey moved out of the room, past him, past the bathroom where Rob was showering, “you really have forgotten a few important things.”
“DJ’s in the house.”
“DJ has the sense to knock on doors and not walk into places he has no business being.”
“Who… Who is that? How long? He’s… much too young for you.”
Frey gave him a terrible look.
Jason modified, “He is younger than you.”
“And I’m younger than you. Good morning, DJ, get the eggs and the bacon.” He turned to Jason, “Hold your voice down.”
Frey reached into the oven and pulled out the skillet.
“How old is he?” Jason hissed in a stage whisper, still looking comically insensed, though, really, it wasn’t funny to Frey.
“In answer to your first three questions,” Frey said, turning on the oven, and pouring a bit of canola oil into the black skillet, “None of your business. None of your business and, just for variation, none of your damned business.
“But I will answer the last question. He’s twenty-four.”
Jason attempted to make a face and say something, but Frey said, “You just wish you could get a twenty-four year old too. And what’s more, you’re upset because you’re not the only one. You knew that, I’m sure, way down deep in your silly heart. DJ, put the bacon in the microwave will you—but,” he continued to Jason. “It’s something else to see it in person.”
Rob stepped into the kitchen, in a tee shirt and some soccer shorts, drying his hair.
“And there’s the person,” Frey said, pleasantly.
FREY REMEMBERED, IN what seemed like a forever ago, Jason confiding in him that somewhere he had shared the fantasy that the two of them could be DJ’s two dads, make a family of their own with Elle as a very distant memory. Well, Elle was such a distant memory that DJ never asked questions about her, and this was just as well because Frey wouldn’t have really known how to phrase answers about Elle in a response fit for her own child.
But whatever Jason had imagined, in truth, DJ had known a succession of forgettable parents, with Frey emerging as the only constant until he had finally officially adopted his son. Something in Jason had passed to the biological son he barely knew, that strange desire for not a mother and a father, but a father and a father, the certainty that what he really wanted and needed was two dads.
The stir, the itch came upon him. The snow had melted and now the weather had lifted, the first traces of green were in the air, and Isaiah Frey felt himself quickening. Even when he’d been raising children, there was a time when he got up and went away, and the time was on him now, as the sun shone through the clouds and they glowed like pearl, as the water in the river went from brown to green to blue again. Saint Patrick’s drove the serpents out of Ireland, but they were all here now, the river as a twisting snake, the wind too in its turning breezes and Isaiah longed to leave. Not for long, just for a bit.
Today was Robert Dwyer’s birthday, and Frey did not understand why Rob did not take the day off and Rob could not understand why he should. Well, hell, they would celebrate it on his day off, which seemed barbaric to Frey.
Rob left everyday. He was part of the state police. Everyday he watched his man put on the brown uniform with the dark stripe up the sides, tuck in the shirt over his strong chest, pull on the trousers that cupped his firm ass, strap on the gun that excited Frey more than he wanted to admit. Now that it was spring, Rob did not wear the heavy coat. Frey watched him drive from the house in that large energy inefficient brown state car. He loved him, no doubt about that, but he loved this aloneness too.
He called his son.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m not really awake yet.”
DJ was on spring break. He probably expected his foster father to respect that, though on deeper inspection he should have known better.
“The train leaves in forty-five minutes. Come down here so you can take me.”
“Can I go with you?”
This was a surprise. Isaiah Frey had expected his son to grouse and groan about getting up, something he was impervious too. He had not expected him to ask to accompany him. He had not wanted company. But family existed beyond wanting and not wanting and so he said, “Yes. If you can clean yourself and be on time.”
“If I drive,” DJ said, “then we don’t need to hurry.”
This had not occurred to Frey. He had planned on the long train ride, but it was the long train ride that also made him dread traveling to Chicago.
“We can take back roads,” DJ added as if this were an incentive.
“When can you be ready?”
“What time is it now?” DJ asked.
“7:50.”
“I’ll be at your house by nine.”
He had been about to say, “Don’t bring Javon.”
“It wasn’t that he didn’t love Javon. After all, Javon was his sister Sharon’s son, his own blood. But Frey had planned to travel alone, and while he was used to DJ and DJ was used enough to him to know to shut the hell up, Javon was an extra two people. Also, blood or not, Javon was not his child.
He wondered, why DJ had been so keen to want to travel with him or, as it had turned out, to take him to Chicago? Was there something he needed to discuss? But when the semi tall, sturdily built nineteen year old arrived at his house in the SUV Jason Henley had bought him, he seemed in good enough spirits. Still it was a father’s job to look into these things. Not a typical father, but certainly a gay father who stood in the place of a dead mother and a sorry ass dad. It was also the place of a father of a nineteen ear old to not ask too many questions, to not delve as far as, in truth, he would like.
But he was tired anyway. He was just coming out of the long sickness and the long weariness. No matter what, it always happened at the end of winter. Sometiems it took the form of intense depression and this time around, Isaiah Frey was almost glad it had taken the form of a simple real and true cold with sinus infections and an effort in teaching that had him giving the kids movies to watch and then cancelling class the last two days.
“It seems to me,” he told Rob, “that sickness is a large factor of our relationship.”
Almost as soon as he had met Rob Dwyer, Frey had gotten sick, and his new lover had spent days coming home from work to bring him soup and tea. It was one of the ways that Frey knew he’d found someone who loved him at last.
No, that wasn’t fair, not exactly. Adam had loved him, Jason had loved him. They would have brought tea and soup, but they were gone and Rob was here,
“I’m going to look up the quickest way to Chicago,” DJ said.
“The quickest way is the toll road.”
“ “You know what I mean,’ DJ said. “Unless you want to take the toll road?”
“We will get there earlier than the train would by any route, so no,” Frey said. “Besides, I like to see all the sites you wouldn’t if you just took the toll road. Just don’t expect me to talk much. I usually sleep on the train.”
“That’s fine,” DJ said, merrily. “Should we stop for breakfast, though?”
“Yes,” Isaiah said. “We should always stop for breakfast.”
When DJ took out his phone, Frey took it from him and decided to do the computations himself. The idea that his son would drive and look up directions on the phone at the same time was, well, dreadful was the best word Frey could think of.
“Well, I’ll be damned, it just assumes I want the toll road. Oh, no, Here we go. It’s one hour and thirty six minutes on the toll road.”
“And without it?”
“Five minutes more.”
“And still half the length of the train.”
“Imagine that,” Isaiah Frey said. Then he said, “Well we just stay on Western till we get to the ramp. The rest seems pretty easy. We just follow the signs that say To Chicago.”
“Any special sites to see?”
“I imagine only if we get off the road.”
“Do we eat when we get there or eat before?”
“You’ve just made me think of something else entirely.”
“What?” DJ asked.
“Where do we park? I’ve never gone to Chicago in a car. Where do we park?”
When they had passed Merrillville, and were properly on the borders of Chicago, Isaiah said. “I remember the first time I went this way as an adult. Or an almost adult. It was to see your father . You were a toddler at the time and I was your age. It was for your baptism. I went with his friends so I could be at the church and be your godfather.”
But Frey was not a maudlin person, and he did not go into details, and it did not seem as if DJ needed them.
“I remember how Jason used to say he lived in Chicago, and I used to correct him, tell him Annex was not Chicago. It was a suburb of a suburb of Chicago.”
“If we kept driving,” DJ said, “We could be in Annex before long.”
“We could,” Frey agreed.
The idea seemed equally uninteresting to both of them, and DJ drove toward the city and away from the home of the rest of his family.
They sat eating at the waffle house, and Frey had already planned that they go to the beach even though it was late March and the water still cold. They had to pay their respects to the water he said. DJ’s waffles were thick and dusted in confectionary sugar, glossy with the dark red of strawberry syrup. They had briefly spoken of going to the town where DJ’s grandparents were, the ones he knew well enough but seemed indifferert to, with his uncles and aunts. Who looked like him. While the truth was there was no likeness between DJ and Frey at all.
But there was much between them. He had no idea what was between a real father and son, a normal family, blood of blood. But if Isaiah Frey could say anything was between him and DJ he would have to settle on saying sex was between them. Jason, his old lover, as big and tall as DJ, in squareness of jaw and football built so like DJ when he was nineteen as well, when he had come to Frey. Only this year, he had he waken up in a bed with Jason, with the scent of Jason, the man who came back again and again, the voice of Jason uncertain but drowsy saying, “So you’re really going to be with that Rob.”
“Not that Rob. Rob,” and Isaiah had felt foolish for defending his lover, a man who was not in this bed at the moment. Because Jason was in it. This had been the time when Frey had told Jason he needed to buy his son a car and look to his college education, and the only reason DJ was in his life at all, was because of Jason. The thing that, in many ways, united DJ to Frey was Jason and everytime he was linked in love with Jason Henley, his link to Jason’s son was strengthened. In fact, every time he slept with Jason he came to terms with his old lover being a not very good father. This Jason who was here was here temporarily, for both Frey and DJ, a satisfying treat that was quickly gone.
During those first new months when he and Rob were living together, before he had found Rob in bed with Pat Thomas, DJ told him how Pat was coming to stay with them. It seemed like he was seeing Javon, and it seemed like he was bringing Rob’s brother, Josh. Frey was sure Javon was fucking Pat Thomas, sure his handsome, golden skinned and well muscled nephew was not only sleeping with DJ, but sleeping with Pat Thomas. Frey was no innocent. In that first year, every time Jason had come back, Frey had ended up in bed with him. And, then, one afternoon he had taken his clothes off and come into bed with Rob and Pat Thomas. This adventure, far from ending or opening up Frey and Rob’s relationship, had closed it, but it still remained, Frey reflected, that he had slept with a twenty something—Rob’s age—who had been with Rob, Rob’s brother, Frey’s nephew and Frey’s own son. While he wasn’t ashamed, Frey realized after so many experiences, that most people carried a smug assurance prudishness created, the feeling of being above…. Something. Frey didn’t really know how to feel, he only knew that he wasn’t above anything, and anything included fucking the same man who had been in bed with the son who sat across the table from him right now.
On one of those weekends when Pat had come, DJ had brought the curly haired, dusky boy over, and Pat had reddened and looked mildly embarrassed while Frey had served them cake and coffee and asked about medical school. It was clear to Frey that DJ had no idea that Pat had been with his father.
But what did DJ know? Or what did DJ think Frey knew? For if sex was what was between Frey and his adopted son, then it was sex unspoken. DJ had never come to Frey with anything. He had never said anything about Javon. This was only suspicion, suspicion now confirmed by Donovan saying he saw the two of them fucking on the sofa. And certainly DJ hadn’t said anything about Rob’s brother or about Pat Thomas. Still, Frey had said one thing. And this was because Dj had said one thing. When he was thirteen he told Frey he thought he was gay. Frey had replied that too many queers were embarrassed of their wants and their needs and that DJ should always express his. Men shrink and shrivel and are always afraid and a shamed. Don’t you be.
And so, in the way that Frey had not retreated from any desire or any good thing that had presented itself, neither had his son, and here they were.
I love Cade and Donovan but it is good to hear about the other characters too! Great writing and I look forward to more soon!
