February

02

WE WERE SILENT ON the train. Not the kind of silence that makes you want to scream, or the kind you want to punch through with your fists. The kind of silence that you sink into, that you're placed into like a kid in a car seat. Deacon asked that I not ask any questions, and to me that meant that I was to be silent. I was silent.

Deacon wasn't gay. And by that I mean I didn't know that he was gay. I knew plenty of gay people, Tanya was gay, but Deacon was never one. And now he might be. He could be. He had sex with a guy, so what? People have sex with people. It doesn't make him gay, it doesn't make him anything except my brother who had sex with a guy, but usually has sex with girls. And I knew that he'd only told me because he knew that I'd think this way about him.

My parents were a different story. My mother was very particular about what we did, anything that pushed a barrier was frowned upon. She found out about Deacons hookups and told him that if he kept them up he couldn't stay at her house. And without her house he was homeless, but without sex he wasn't Deacon. If she found out about this, about sex with a man while he was a man, who knows what she would do. My father was distant both emotionally and physically, and knew next to nothing about us besides the fact that we were his children and that we were the ones who came to get him whenever he disappeared. So what he would have to say was completely up in the air.

"Harvey." I blinked, turning to him as we walked out of the subway station. He turned to me too, lips in a small smile and eyes strangely hopeful. It was as if he was waiting for something, like he wanted to ask for candy but wasn't sure if I'd say yes or not. "His name is Harvey."

I nodded, a smile growing on my face, and then we stopped walking. "His name is Harvey." I shrugged my shoulders. "His name is Harvey and you had sex with him."

Deacon's features relaxed then, his dark eyes maturing and his smile attaching itself with more dignity. He nodded with me, no longer anxious and unsteady, but reforming back into the confident man that I knew him to be. "His name is Harvey and I had sex with him."

We continued down the street for a couple of blocks before reaching the apartment building that my dad had grown up in and now owned. His parents weren't home and neither was he, and I didn't want to waste any extra time there than I had to. My grandparents hated my mother, and in turn hated us, because of how she was raised and how much they thought he had changed since meeting her. Of course I never knew my dad before me, so everything that he was now was my normal. But when someones normal alters before your eyes, I can only imagine how painful that can be. So I never really come here unless it's to find him, and since he wasn't there, I knew that the only other place he'd wander off to was an old bar around the corner.

Sure enough he was there, strewn sloppily over the bartenders counter and murmuring to himself. When we walked up to him he gave us one glance, took a sip from the bottle he was loosely holding, and sighed. "My chariot awaits me, I suppose." He groaned, resting his head back on the counter.

"Dad, mom wants you home." I smiled politely at Curtis, the bartender who owned the place, "Hi Curt."

A warm smile graced his face, "Hi twins." He knew us well, from all of the times that my dad would escape here for a break from the upper east side and all of the times that I would come and get him. My dad told me that Curt had owned this place since he was born, and had never turned down his company.

Dad stirred, sitting up slowly and running a hand over his tired face. "Your mom wants a lot of things." He was still in a suit but it was now crumpled and had a dark stain around the collar. I guess this weeks theme was Sloppy Hudsons, since all three of us had managed to wake up on the wrong side of town.

"Dad you have that litigator meeting today, remember?" Deacon stepped forward, gently grabbing my dads arm and slinging it around his broad shoulders. "This is really important for the company, not just mom." He looked at me, nodding his head towards Dad, and I stepped in and put his other arm around me. "For us."