River Junction (Kirk/McCoy, NC-17), 2/2
It’s half past eight by the time they get Sam discharged and hit the road, Winona driving Sam and leaving Leonard and Jim alone for what must be an unpleasantly symbolic drive south to Riverside. The road is featureless, Jim silent and aggrieved, until the interior pressure gets to be so great that Leonard feels like he’s back on the little jet again, struggling to catch his breath against an imagined shortage of oxygen.
“Tell me,” Leonard pleads at last, as the night wraps around them and cold stars appear above the shiny hood of the SUV. “At least give me a hint. Was it the usual family crap, or something worse?”
“How bad would it have to be to justify the way I’m acting?” Jim keeps his eyes on the road, though it’s pin-straight. “Everybody likes Sam, and you’re going to love my mom regardless, because she’s a mom and you feel guilty about Jocelyn.”
“Hey. This isn’t about me, but since you brought me into this, I think I have a right to know. If you want me to be pissed off at somebody on your behalf, you have to give me a reason.”
Jim maintains a tight-jawed silence and exits off the divided highway where the sign says Riverside, but then makes a left onto a dark rural road under the overpass.
“I thought the house was in Riverside?”
Jim sighs, putting his shoulders into it. “Technically, it’s River Junction. My grandparents owned the place, but by the ‘80s hardly anyone lived there except this old lady who’d shoot trespassers on sight. I went to high school in Riverside, and it makes a better story--that I was raised on sunshine and Pop-Tarts and played Sky Masterson in the senior production of Guys and Dolls. No one cares; it gets me through the first two minutes on talk shows, and then they just want to know what hot actress I’m fucking.”
“I care.” Leonard tries to keep his tone light and fails miserably.
“Why? The official story is close enough to the truth. That I left here as soon as I got a driver’s license because it was boring as fuck and never looked back. That I got rich and famous and sent my mom money so she wouldn’t have to keep working as a bank teller when she should be retired or writing novels, and that my brother probably would have gone off on his own to be some caribou-chasing asshole even if my father hadn’t--”
“If he hadn’t--what?”
“If he hadn’t died.”
“Oh.” Leonard swallows. “Uh. When was that, Jim? How old were you”
“Less than a day”
“Oh, Lord.”
“There you go--paydirt. My defining childhood trauma, even though it happened before I remember. They sent me to this therapist in high school and she nearly cried with joy when I told her; that’s why I’ll never go to one of those idiots. So are you happy now? Everything wrapped up in a neat, little Freudian package.” Jim shoots Leonard a hard look, his eyes narrowed to slits.
“Of course I’m not happy. I just--” Leonard’s on the verge of confession, of admitting that since he walked into the hospital room he wanted nothing more than to broker peace between Jim and his family, even though he knows nothing about the situation and is probably the worst person on earth to do it. “How did happen? Your dad, I mean. If you don’t mind telling me.”
“Funny story,” Jim says without smiling. “After years of working as an A.D. on shitty TV shows, he finally got his big directing break, a medium-budget cop movie with a lot of car chases. And on the third day of shooting, one of those cars flipped over and landed on him. When she got the news, Mom went into labor.”
“Good God.”
“Don’t. Please. It’s a thing that happened. It wouldn’t have been any different if my dad had left for any other reason. For me, anyway. You know what’s weird, though? No one’s ever put two and two together, even though my dad’s name is on those lists of people who died in Hollywood accidents. That’s what’s great about Riverside; you say that name, you say ‘Iowa’, and everybody can fill in the details. Everybody knows exactly what my childhood was like.”
“I don’t,” Leonard says. “I wouldn’t presume.”
“Yeah, well, It was fine. Pretty good, actually. I wasn’t feral or anything; we had TV and Super Nintendo, even though we lived out here in the ass end of nowhere. One year we drove to Yellowstone in a neighbor’s RV, and whole months went by where I didn’t set anything on fire. It could have been worse.” There’s a pause, and then Jim gives a painful little bark of laughter that makes Leonard want to put a hand on Jim’s shoulder, but he’s wound Jack-in-the-Box tight, eyes shiny but unblinking on the unbending road.
It’s pitch black and the houses have thinned out to no more than a few per mile, lonely islands outlined with colored lights and inflatable Santas floodlit and forlorn in acre-wide front yards. The eerie darkness does odd things to Leonard’s imagination, makes him wish he could reach out and pluck it out of Jim, the thing that makes him hate this place, or if not to remove it, then to at least put it into his own mind so that Jim wouldn’t have to tell him, he’d just know.
A sign says they’re crossing the Iowa River but Leonard can see nothing, not even inky water down below. Then Jim turns off the blacktop onto a gravel road, noise drowning out any hypothetical conversation. A mile or so later they turn into a driveway lined with trees, Jim apparently navigating from memory, and crunch to a stop.
“Last chance,” Jim says, throwing the gear into park. “You want to drive back to Iowa City, the truck’s all yours.”
The thought that Jim might be serious arrests Leonard’s grip on the door handle, but then Jim gives a mock evil laugh and leaps out, grabbing both their duffel bags from the back. It’s at least 10 degrees colder than it was in Iowa City; Leonard can see his breath in the moonlight that also illuminates a bank of dark clouds moving in from the north.
The Kirk house is not, as Leonard imagined, a looming Children of the Corn Victorian, but a sprawling mid-century split-level with a two-car garage, a cluster of outbuildings, and a little tree picked out in white lights in the front yard.
“Looks like we beat them home,” Leonard says, but Jim lifts the doormat and finds a key. Inside, Jim drops their bags with a thud and gropes around for the lights.
The interior is comfortable middle American, thick oatmeal carpet and overstuffed sofas, a ceiling fan and a fireplace, amateur oil paintings of riverbanks and sunflowers, and in the corner, a live Christmas tree.
Jim’s eyes are scanning, mapping the room to his interior memory. “She got rid of the old furniture. Thank fuck for that.”
Leonard, doubly uneasy at being an essentially uninvited guest in Jim’s childhood home, shoves his hands in his pockets and wanders over to a table full of framed family photos. It’s easy to pick out Jim in various stages of blazing youth: a kid with a bowlcut holding a tiny baseball bat, a skinny teen with wheat-blond hair and mile-long limbs. Sam is equally unmistakable, burly and cheerfully thuggish even as a kid. On the end is a gilt-framed wedding photo, Winona and Jim’s dad--a handsome man with Sam’s eyes but Jim’s build--wearing white, barefoot on a beach that Leonard finds strangely familiar.
“Is that Malibu? Did your family live there?”
Jim snorts. “You kidding me? It was insanely expensive, even back then. Mom and Dad had a little Spanish style rancher in Culver City. They were planning to move after I came along and Dad got his big break, because, y’know, that’s how those things happen.”
There’s another photo of Winona with a different man, older and huskier, sitting side-by-side in a booth at a restaurant with old farm equipment on the walls. Leonard lifts it gingerly to get a better look.
“Who’s that? An uncle?”
“Nope,” Jim says with a sudden burst of false brightness, slides it from Leonard’s hands,
places it on the carpet and crushes the glass under the heavy heel of his boot.
“Jim, what the hell?”
At that moment, there’s a sound of scuffling from the kitchen, of a key turning in the lock.
“Jim!” Winona yells. “Can you give me a hand?”
Rather than being left with the smashed photo like a guilty dog, Leonard follows Jim through the kitchen door and into the garage, where Winona is unloading Sam and groceries.
“We stopped at Casey’s,” she says, handing Leonard a bag. “I had to get some broth and rice and soft bread. I hope you boys like fruitcake; nobody on the planet seems to except Sam. I make it just for him and now he can’t eat it.”
“And it’s a damn shame,” Sam says, levering himself out of the car. “You know how great mom’s cakes are.” Leonard scoops the remaining bags out of the trunk while shooing Jim in the direction of his brother, because Sam could easily have vertigo and the situation is far from stress-free. Jim supports his brother with a reluctant hand under the elbow while Sam looks deeply amused by the whole situation.
“Right there, if you don’t mind,” Winona says, pointing to the kitchen table as Leonard brings the bags in. “Jim, Sam’s staying in his old room, can you help him up there?” And then, to Leonard, “Give me a minute to unpack and I’ll fix you something to eat; you must be starving. I don’t know what possessed me, but I cooked a whole turkey the day before yesterday, even though it’s just me and Sam, but you know how it is when you’ve got company.” She starts banging around cabinets, pouring chicken stock into a pot. “I got the idea to make Sam some congee, but that’s going to take hours; is it alright for him to have yogurt? He says that’s what he wants, but it isn’t on the sheet the doctor gave us.”
“It should be fine; beneficial, even, to restore the intestinal flora,” Leonard says, trying to stay out of Winona’s way, since she’s produced a turkey bigger than her head from the fridge and is going at it with a huge carving knife.
“Oh, good. It really is wonderful having you here; I was worried about how I was going to get Sam home, and now I don’t have to worry about him having a relapse during the night. You’re not from California, are you, Len?”
“No, ma’am, I’m from Georgia.”
“Georgia.” Winona stops her whirlwind motion long enough to give a little sigh. “That’s lovely. And how long have you and Jim been seeing each other?”
Leonard feels the shock cold-water shock of discovery, but it’s followed by an unsettling mental replay of the events preceding, the what did I do, what did I say? of hindsight. Leonard’s felt it in bars when men catch his eye from across the room, in airports when they sit next to him and not in any of a dozen other empty seats, and now, in Jim’s mother’s kitchen, somewhere east of the Iowa River.
“I’m sorry,” she says kindly. “Was I not supposed to know? It’s just that he’s never brought anyone home, not even when he was in high school, and this isn’t the kind of situation you bring a friend into, even a very good one. It’s all right, really,” she adds, when Leonard supposes his face hasn’t quite recomposed itself. “I was around Hollywood in the ‘70s; there’s not much you can do to shock me. I just wish Sam could find someone, but the pickings are pretty slim up there in moose country. It is beautiful, though; maybe you and Jim can visit some time. Do you like sauerkraut with turkey? I don’t know if they do that in the South but it tastes better than you’d think.”
With that, Leonard is lost; Jim’s right that he can’t help being charmed by Winona Kirk, but in his own defense he hasn’t sat in any mother’s kitchen since his mother-in-law’s, which might as well be North Korea for the likelihood he’ll ever go back.
“Well, now, I’ve never heard of that, but I’m willing to give it a try.”
He’s in that compromising position when Jim finds him in the kitchen, fork deep in a plateful of turkey while Winona slices bananas into yogurt.
“He says he wants orange juice,” Jim says, saving most of his glare for his mother. “Is there any orange juice?”
“Too acidic,” Leonard says, swallowing fast. “Your mom got some of those sports drinks. Just make sure there’s no caffeine in them.”
“I’ll bring him one along with his food,” Winona says.
“No, I’ll do it.”
“Then I’ll bring his medicine. And I fixed a plate of turkey for you, Jim, it’s in the microwave.”
There’s a minute of huffy impasse and then Jim grabs a Gatorade out of the fridge and follows his mother out. It’s only then that Leonard remembers the smashed picture in the living room. Leonard’s ears strain unwillingly.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Winona says quietly.
“Doesn’t matter. That shouldn’t be in the house.” Jim’s voice is distant, wintry.
“You don’t understand. It helps me to remember that there were good times, too.”
“You love to rewrite history, don’t you? Put it in a silver picture frame and you can pretend the bad stuff never happened.”
“You want to talk about this? Then let’s talk. Later. You came here to see your brother, so go see him.”
There’s a pause, and then Leonard hears heavy stomping up wooden stairs. Winona enter the kitchen in search of a dustpan and broom, lines more visible in her face than they were before.
“Let me give you a hand with that,” Leonard says. “I’ll get the big pieces, but you’ll probably want a vacuum cleaner for the rest.”
Leonard sweeps up the shards and Winona slides the photo, only slightly damaged, from the wreckage.
“How much did he tell you?”
“Nothing at all,” Leonard says truthfully. “I don’t know who that is, in the picture.”
Winona gives a quick, forced smile. “Could you wrap the glass in newspaper and put it in the garbage? Then please finish your food; I don’t want it to get cold.”
Ten minutes later she’s offering Leonard fruitcake and coffee (“Shall I put a little brandy in that for you, Len?”), sedating him with food the way his own mother used to, tryptophan and carbohydrates damping his myriad questions. But then she pours herself some black coffee and sits down with him at the kitchen table, wrapping her hands around the steaming mug and leaning on her elbows, an almost primal gesture that in Leonard’s familial experience that means we need to talk.
The photo is tucked, half-visible, behind a milk glass bud vase on the table. “That man?” she says, pointing to it. “It’s Frank, my second husband.”
“Ah.” Leonard feels a door of memory opening, and something like a cold draft.
“Jim told you about George? How he died?” Leonard nods. “Mm. I got a modest settlement from the studio, and a good bit less from his life insurance. It wasn’t enough to stay in L.A.. I was a TV writer, and work was unpredictable at the best of times, even without two small children to take care of. So I did the ‘sensible’ thing and moved back here, with my parents. I got my real estate license and started working for a brokerage in Iowa City. That’s where I met Frank; he was an Iowa State football player who spent a season in the pros, had some money, and decided he wanted to be a gentleman farmer. River Junction was going through a bad period--a lot of people were selling off, their kids moving away--and he got the Dean place just down the road for a song. And I started dating him. I didn’t feel guilty; it was eight years since George died. Frank was a nice, cheerful guy, and he was strong, and it isn’t very feminist to say so, but it was so good to have a man around to lift and fix things and drive back from Iowa City late at night after we’d seen a movie. And to throw a football around with the boys.” The way Winona sips her coffee makes Leonard see the ghost of a cigarette, a worldly young woman living in L.A. in the era of huge cars and Kodachrome-blue skies, and then someone older and lonelier, settling for what made sense.
“I understand. It’s not easy being a single parent.” That much Leonard knows to be true, whatever Winona is about to tell him. “So, you got married?”
“Mm-hmm. My parents were getting to the point that they didn’t want to farm any more. We decided to rent this place from them so they could move to Arizona. Frank moved into this house, hired a couple of guys to work the farm, and then opened a little barbecue place in town. That’s the restaurant, in the photo. He called it ‘Buddy’s,’ and it did pretty good business for first few years, until the chain restaurants started moving in.”
“And Sam and Jim? I guess it’s obvious they didn’t get along. Jim, anyway.”
“Not exactly.” Winona tucks a loose strand of white-blonde hair behind her ear. “I mean, the boys weren’t crazy about him at first but I didn’t expect them to be--it’s hard for stepparents, and Jim idolized his father, even though he never knew him. Frank was a bit of an alpha male, very much about laying down rules. But I thought it would be good for the boys in the long-run; they were running wild around here and Sam was almost a teenager.”
“Seems like a reasonable assumption,” Leonard says, feeling rising jitters composed of caffeine and sugar and foreboding.
“Yes, well.” Winona’s face, bright with the engagement of telling a story, seems to sink. “One day, out of the blue, I got a call from my old writing partner. She’d sold a pilot about a divorced woman with kids who moves to a small town, and she was single with no kids and needed help. I’d pretty much given up on having a career--I was working on the farms and helping Frank with his restaurant business--and I didn’t realize until that call how much I missed it. Frank and I came up with a plan where I’d spend a few months at a time in L.A., he’d build up his business, and then when we had enough money, we’d move out there and he’d franchise his restaurants.” She looks at him from under her lashes with a paler version of the Kirk eyes. “And now you think I’m a terrible mother, because I’d move away from my children.”
“No, not at all.” Leonard shifts uncomfortably in his chair.
“The show ran for four seasons--Hope Rising, maybe you’ve heard of it? No, you’re not in the demographic. Anyway, I travelled back and forth to L.A., and I got involved in the business again. I knew things were strained here--Frank and the boys fought all the time--but I thought, just one more year. We’ll move and once we’re there in the sunshine, once the boys can go to the beach every day, everything will be fine. Then Sam ran away, a month before he was supposed to graduate from high school. I came home to deal with it and opened a letter I wasn’t meant to open. It was a loan application, using the farm as security. Frank’s business was on the rocks and he’d been planning to forge my signature. We were practically bankrupt and he’d started drinking to deal with the stress, which made his temper worse. It had gotten physical between him and Sam; they didn’t do any real damage to each other, but Jim saw everything.”
“Oh, Lord.” Leonard can’t help wincing, heart contracting in anger and empathy at the thought of how helpless Jim--a lanky teenager, probably more inclined to use his brain than his fists--must have felt.
“I know. He wouldn’t talk to me about it, but I saw what it did to him. His grades dropped, he was getting in trouble, and Frank hid it from me because he didn’t want me coming home. My sweet, sunny boy was cutting school to hang out with druggies in the city, and he’d barely talk to me. He blamed me for everything--Frank, Sam leaving, all the financial problems we had after the divorce. We had to move into an apartment for a while and rent the farm out while I tried to get back on my feet. And then Jim ran off, too, all the way to Los Angeles--the last place I’d thought he’d ever go. But I suppose it made sense, after all. Maybe it was his way of feeling close to George.”
Winona lays her hands flat on the kitchen table like a card player who’s played her last hand. “So there it is, Len. All my sins, and they are legion. And Jim turned out to be a spectacular success--in spite of it? Because of it? I’ll never know. But he hasn’t forgiven me--” Winona glances at the trash can. “As you can see.”
Leonard, aching with the urge to give absolution that isn’t his to give, says nothing, and then Jim comes stomping into the kitchen.
“Sam says he’ll take that chicken soup now.” With a passing glance at Leonard and his Judas slice of cake, Jim punches some numbers into the microwave and Winona takes the hint, putting a bowl of clear broth on a tray and gliding from the room.
“You two looked pretty cozy,” Jim says. Leonard shrugs and doesn’t point out that the kitchen smells of coffee and ginger and the Christmas tree, now plugged in, glows in the still-dark living room.
Jim shovels turkey and dressing into his mouth with his elbows out and Leonard has to blink to clear the image of a teenaged Jim sitting at this very table doing the same thing. “Maybe we shouldn’t mention this thing--” he does the you and me gesture with his fork--”you know, us, or whatever, to Sam. He’s cool but I’m not sure about those human grizzly bears he works with. Also, he’d give me shit for it and I’m not in the mood.”
Leonard accepts the logic of it more willingly than the manner. “It’s all right; we can flip a coin for the couch. Your mom already figured it out, by the way.”
Jim nods, chewing. “You’re every mother’s dream. God, I don’t know what happened to her--she never used to be into cooking and decorating and shit. You know she did those paintings in the living room? Do you know how long that must take, and they’re not even good.”
“She’s not a young woman, Jim; maybe she’s just tired. Anyway, why didn’t she move back to L.A. after--” Leonard pauses.
“After what?”
“After the divorce.”
Jim drops his fork onto his plate with a clank. “Oh, good, you must have gotten the whole apologia about how she was just a poor, single mom with a farm and no help raising her wild boys except, oh wait, her parents and the three guys they hired and it’s not like we were out here on the plains surrounded by wolves. Maybe I was being unrealistic because you’re, like, putty in the hands of any sweet-talking woman who can make you feel guilty, but I was hoping for a little more support. Like maybe possibly considering there’s another side to the story.”
“And I’d be happy to hear it, anytime you want to tell me.”
“That’s the thing; I really don’t. I’ve devoted a shit ton of effort to making sure I’m not the Boy with the Sad Story, or some bitter adult who gets drunk and punches walls. I made a life for myself, an amazing life, and yet here I am in Iowa drinking Gatorade from my mom’s jelly glass.” Jim wipes his hands with his napkin, as if cleaning off Iowa, and throws it on his plate.
“Because she is your mom, and you’re a decent person, even if you’re acting like a petulant three-year-old right now.” Jim pegs him with a blue glare, but Leonard holds firm. “I’m not trying to minimize a single thing that happened to you, but since you bothered to come here, you might as well deal with it. Say what you need to say to your mom, or suck it up and give your mom a decent Christmas.”
“Okay,” Jim says, fists clenching and unclenching, as if he’s still not sure. “Okay, okay. Fine, you’re right, I just--I hate this. And there’s no fucking way I can stay through Christmas. If it was just one of them it might be okay, but Sam and Mom together--”
“So what are you going to do? On Christmas, I mean?” Leonard says, a little embarrassed that he hasn’t been brave enough to ask before.
“I don’t know--the usual. Surf on Christmas Day; that’s always cool. Go out. Maybe see what Rob and Stella are up to. They’ve scheduled a kid for early next year, so I’ve got to hang out with them while I still can.”
“You’re spending Christmas with your agent and your lawyer?”
“Oh, please. Rob’s Jewish and I’m pretty sure Stella is an atheist, okay? Christmas is a religious holiday, not some fucking national mandate to discover the true meaning of family.”
“It’s not about Christmas per se, it’s about having somewhere to go--somewhere that’s home.”
“That’s coming from the guy whose ‘family’ makes him about as welcome as the flu.”
In deference to Jim’s stress level, Leonard abstains from his own napkin-throwing. “All right, then. You brought me here to make sure Sam’s okay, so I better do that.”
“Sure, if it would make you feel useful. He’s in his old bedroom.” Jim points vaguely toward the living room. “Upstairs.”
The second floor of the Kirk residence is full of those parallel-universe features that must be in every middle-class house in America: worn wall-to-wall carpeting, varnished wood railings, a globe on top of a bookcase full of old magazines. Leonard finds Sam in bed, half-raised on a stack of pillows, and Winona in the chair next to him, feet propped up on the edge of the bed. He waves his little medical kit and Winona jumps to her feet, giving Leonard a confidential little smile and a squeeze of the arm on the way out.
Sam seems larger in this room than he did in the hospital; his broad chest fills out his thin T-shirt, lungs taking deep breaths as if they’re used to purer air.
“I don’t know how you feel, but you look better,” Leonard says, getting out his blood pressure cuff.
“Getting out of the hospital, plus Mom’s home cooking. Did you try the fruitcake?”
“Uh, yeah. It tasted fine.”
“She gets it from the store; we’re not supposed to know.”
“I won’t breathe a word.” Leonard’s grateful to have a topic for safe banter, because there’s a degree of consanguinity that makes him uncomfortable, even though he’s just checking the guy’s vitals.
“Did he put up a struggle?”
“Excuse me?”
“Jim. He wouldn’t have visited without a struggle, ‘cause the last time was a big, flaming disaster. Did he tell you about it? He came here with a writer and a photographer to do some stupid-ass magazine article, and they made him put on his old tux and dance with the girl who was his prom date, and then he came home and got into a big fight with Mom and put his fist through the wall in the kitchen. Tried, anyway; this old house is pretty well made. So unless he had a change of heart--which I don’t think he did because he’s still acting like a moody asshole--I guess you talked him into coming here.”
Sam finishes, unfortunately, just as Leonard’s about to take his temperature, which leaves him with a good 45 seconds of silence, and Sam’s eyes bright and curious above the thermometer.
“Well, now, I don’t know that I talked him into it, exactly,” Leonard begins, realizing that he’s already tacitly admitted to knowing Jim well enough that it’s a possibility. “It was mostly his idea. But I did tell him I see a lot of this in my line of work, and God knows I saw enough of it in my family, all this damned Anglo-Saxon grudge-holding and silence.” Sam nods, mutely, familiar heavy eyebrows raised in what seems to be agreement, and Leonard is emboldened to continue.
“See, the thing is, I can’t tell him what to do because I don’t know how bad it was, and even I did that would be my judgement, not his, and I don’t have a right to tell him what to feel about it. But I feel like he thinks money and success solved the problem, and I don’t want to see him end up like some god-damned Charles Foster Kane, muttering River Junction on his deathbed.” Feeling himself flush red, as if from the fever that Sam probably doesn’t have, he pulls the thermometer from Sam’s mouth. “Ninety-nine point five. And I’m sorry, I don’t know where that came from.”
“No worries; it’s hard to get a word in edgewise around Mom. Or Jim for that matter.” He shifts, rearranging his huge limbs in the small bed and pulling up the covers. “I can tell you that it was bad, bad enough that I stayed away for years. But the guys I work around, they made me realize that it wasn’t any worse than the normal shit people go through, and not as bad as some. I want to have kids someday, and I want my kids to know their grandmother. I don’t know what Jim wants,” Sam says, and for a terrible moment Leonard’s afraid he’s going to wink, but then he just gives Leonard a friendly pat on the arm. “But whatever it is, I hope he finds it. He’s my little brother, after all.”
In lieu of gratitude he can’t express, Leonard feeds Sam some more Gatorade and Tylenol. Jim’s waiting for him at the foot of the stairs, holding his duffel bag.
“After an incredible amount of pointless discussion, it’s been determined that you’re going to sleep in my old room and I’m going to take the fold-out sofa in the den so our gayness doesn’t give my brother a relapse. Now I’m supposed to help you find towels and shit.”
Jim’s old room is not, as Leonard feared, a shrine or time capsule, but has been scrubbed to generic guest-room style with a queen-sized bed-in-a-bag and a framed print of a mill. The sloping roof seems to make Jim’s shoulders hunch in response, and he shoves his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, a youthful gesture that punches at Leonard’s heart.
“Hey,” Jim says. “Welcome to the inside of my head. I dream about this place all the time, so it’s not weird at all that you’re sleeping here. So, uh, good night. Thanks for taking care of Sam. Don’t worry about setting an alarm; I’ll wake you up and I’ll take you to the airport in the morning.”
“Jim, wait.” Leonard has no idea what he’s doing, but the thought of Jim alone with his thoughts in self-exile on a foldout sofa is more than he can bear. “Sit down a minute.”
Leonard pats the bed next to him, and Jim sits down, the springs only shifting a little as Jim doesn’t quite commit his weight. “I’m sorry if you feel like I haven’t been supporting you. What you went through sounds terrible, the parts I know about, anyway. And I don’t blame you for staying angry, how can I? But I have to tell you this--if you’re angry at your mother for the choices she made, then you have to be angry at me, too, because I did the same damn thing.”
“No. No, you didn’t,” Jim says, with touching indignation. “You’re completely involved in Jo’s life. You wouldn’t leave her alone for a second with that guy--Clay?--if you thought he’d hurt her.”
“Of course I wouldn’t, but do I know for sure? She’s quiet as a church mouse, and God love her, she tries to protect me. So maybe I’m missing something important because I’m 3000 miles away most of the time. Maybe someday she’ll be in my house telling me how upset that made her. You want to go earlier than that? Back to when I gave her mother every good reason to divorce me? Or even before--when I helped bring her into this world because Joce wanted it so much, and I felt like I owed her that, at least. Do you hear me? I had a kid because I felt guilty about marrying her mother in the first place.”
“You didn’t--” Jim begins, and then stops, looking everywhere but at Leonard. “You can’t-”
“Right. I can’t wish any of it away because then I’d be wishing Jo away, and the point is--you make the best decision you can and then you live with the consequences. If your mom hadn’t remarried you might have stayed here and become an aircraft mechanic and that might have been fine. Or if your dad hadn’t died, you might have stayed in Hollywood and turned into some snotty kid who hangs out at The Grove all day. Or maybe you would have done the same thing that you did anyway, because it was in you all along, written there in your DNA at the second you were conceived.”
Leonard’s thoughts skitter to a halt and he’s breathless, boggled at his own recklessness but determined, this time, not to build a relationship on an untruth. Jim shifts, and runs his hand over the back of his neck, and at least doesn’t deck Leonard or run away.
“Wow,” he says after a little while, corners of his mouth edging up. “You’re not usually much of a talker, but once you get going--wow. Why do you care so much, how I feel about my mom?”
“Because I want you to be happy.”
The little smile breaks into a grin. “I know you do. Otherwise there’s no way you’d be in Iowa dealing with my fucking family.”
“They’re nice people, Jim. I like them.”
“You like everybody,” Jim says, throwing an arm around Leonard’s shoulders. “You put on this big misanthropic carnival show because you’re afraid of getting hurt, but you’ll give it up for anybody who’s nice to you. I don’t mean sex,” he says, when Leonard opens his mouth to object. “I mean the other thing.”
Leonard doesn’t argue, because he can’t.
“I want to make you happy, too,” Jim says. “What would that take? I’ll tell you right now, I don’t think I can give up women.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Leonard says, stunned.
“Then what else?”
The weight of Jim’s arm is like the weight of the world, a million little voices telling him don’t fuck this up. “Okay, then. I want--I want to be the person you spend holidays with. Not the only person, but I want to be there. I want you to tell me things if they’re bothering you, like this thing with your mom. And I don’t want you to feel like you have to be perfect for me, even though I know that takes some courage.”
“My assholish behavior in the last 24 hours should be a good start.”
“Yeah. I mean, I want you to feel you can be that way around me. Real. Not ‘Jim Kirk’, but this guy from Iowa.”
“This guy from Iowa would never have met you, let alone invited himself to your house to jump your bones. But I get what you’re saying, and I think I can do that. As long as you can admit that the beach house and the sports car don’t hurt.”
Leonard parts his lips to answer and Jim, not expecting one, kisses him instead. They’re all the luxury Leonard has ever wanted, soft and warm, bringing their own sunshine when the prairie wind is blowing against the windowpanes. Jim drops his arm to Leonard’s waist and puts a hand on his knee, and there’s something so chaste and boyish about it that Leonard gets tears in his eyes, because Jim’s right, he’s helpless against this, but it turns out there’s no need to worry.
Jim’s kisses his way up Leonard’s jaw, tender lips scratching against his beard stubble, and says in his ear, “No fucking way I’m sleeping on the foldout sofa tonight.”
“But what about--” Leonard begins, eyes on the half-open door.
“Their problem.” He leans Leonard back onto the bed--he’s a metaphorical and actual pushover--and begins to unbutton his shirt, leer getting more pronounced with each button.
“God damn,” he says, opening Leonard’s shirt. “If I was still 14 I’d have shot by now. But when I was 14, I had no idea there were guys like you in the world.” He cups Leonard’s jeans, affably, and Leonard would appreciate the assist, except--
“You’re not planning to do anything, are you?” He squirms under Jim’s gently probing hands. “I mean, it’s weird, in your old bedroom--”
“Oh, no,” Jim mocks, eyebrows raised and lips forming an O. “What if Mom finds out I’ve got a boy in my room? She’ll ground me for sure.”
He unbuckles Leonard’s jeans and shucks them, deigning to kick the door closed before he goes for Leonard’s underwear. Leonard lies flat on his back, feet still planted on the floor, caught in the fantasy of an adolescent daydream coming true. He has no idea if it’s Jim’s dream or his own and doesn’t especially care, especially when Jim kneels on the little shag rug by the bed and begins to stroke his thighs. It’s taken Leonard a long time to enjoy the feeling of exposure, to feel trust for Jim instead of the uncomfortable sexual thrill of near-humiliation, and he should really be more nervous with Jim’s mom and and his gigantic and possibly homophobic brother within shouting distance, but he doesn’t. He’s in a bubble universe of Jim’s creation, a righting of the world, one that happens to involve Jim’s mouth coming home to wrap around his cock.
Jim’s mouth is hot and always so wet, and it makes Leonard feel a tenderness he can’t express, to think that Jim loves the taste of him. Pleasure rises like floodwaters, and he stares at the faint outlines of tape squares on the ceiling, half-illuminated by a circle of light from the bedside lamp. He wonders what Jim taped over his bed to dream about at night--chiseled boys or bikini-clad girls, fast cars or faraway beaches.
It doesn’t matter. Jim’s hands are gently pressing his thighs further apart, brushing fingers against the sensitive undersides of his cheeks, cupping him while he takes him in deeper. Jim is doing this because he likes to make Leonard happy, and if he takes pride in it, loves making Leonard curl his fingers in the flowered bedspread so that he doesn’t accidentally pull Jim’s hair, it’s with good reason. It’s a gift that Jim is giving him, and for once in his life Leonard is content simply to receive.
A few things happen, along with Leonard’s heart filling enough to burst. He comes with the squeaky beginning of a cry and claps his hand over his mouth, which makes Jim laugh, even though he’s still got Leonard’s cock between his lips and is trying to deal with things. Jim stretches a leg out and pretends to crack the door open, and Leonard mouths no, no, no, in part because he’s pins-and-needles sensitive at this stage and Jim’s tongue is still working him like delicate sandpaper. When he finishes and stands up, Leonard’s eyes seek out the familiar and notable bulge in his jeans.
“Want me to help you with that?” he whispers.
“What I want is to nail you to that bed, but I didn’t bring any condoms, do you believe it?” Jim says, a few decibels louder than Leonard would like. “Maybe I should check the dresser; there may still be one wedged between the drawers.”
Instead they go about their little pre-bed rituals, washing up in the hall bathroom, stacking their electronic devices on the bedside table, and finally, getting in bed and turning out the light.
Jim lets Leonard curl around him, something his restive semi-sleep usually doesn’t allow. The night is silent; when the heat turns off, there’s nothing audible but the creaking of wind in trees, and the cold seems to press in on the windows. Jim, with the sunshine of Africa and California a memory, shivers and shifts back in Leonard’s arms, cold feet against his shins, and Leonard holds him tighter. Perhaps for that, or perhaps for something else, Jim mutters, “Thank you.”
+++++
Leonard wakes to an empty bed and a full cup of coffee on the nightstand, and a few minutes later Jim walks in, full flannel farm boy with the tails of a plaid shirt hanging over his jeans.
“C’mon,” he says, swatting Leonard’s blanketed foot. “Mom’s going to make us a big breakfast and she wants us to get the eggs.”
“How’s Sam this morning?”
“Good. Hungry. I can tell you right now the broth thing is going to last about two more hours.”
Leonard pulls on his clothes and jacket and staggers after Jim into an iron-grey morning; the temperature’s dropped at least 10 degrees overnight, and the clouds are pregnant with snow.
“There’s a bad storm headed our way,” Jim says, hands in his jacket pockets and his head craned toward the north.
“Can you tell that by the clouds?”
“Nope, Weather Channel. Six to twelve inches by late tonight. My kind of forecast,” he says, nudging Leonard with his hip.
“Oh, Lord. Are the flight conditions okay? Should we be leaving now?”
“It’s fine; the wind’s not going to pick up until the afternoon, and we’ll be long gone by then.”
When his eyes stop tearing from the cold, Leonard gets a good look at the Kirk farm--not one of those precious semi-urban toylands favored by Atlanta gentry, but a working farm with bleached white outbuildings, silos, and brown stubs of corn rotting in the field. Jim opens the door to a little barn, hands Leonard a basket, and shoves him into a dim hell of chickens.
“Get a dozen,” he says. “The good ones are the ones with less chicken shit on them.”
Leonard picks his way around complaining chickens for Jim’s amusement. The eggs are pale shades of brown and admittedly lovely except for the proximity of the creatures who laid them. A black cat brushes by his legs and moves along on its rounds.
“Fun, huh?” Jim says. “Now imagine doing this twice a day for the rest of your life.”
Winona’s breakfast does honor to the cholesterol-hiking reputation of the region, with piles of sausage and fresh scrambled eggs and gallons of coffee. Sam, his wattage turned up considerably after a good night’s sleep, feels well enough to sit at the dining room table and is reasonably gracious about his breakfast of yogurt and dry toast. Jim isn’t exactly cordial but he’s civil, ferrying things to and from the kitchen and doing the minimum to keep the conversational ball in play.
“You really can’t stay, Len?” Winona asks. “We’d love to have you both for Christmas. Sam brought venison from Alaska for Christmas dinner.”
“I’d love to, but I have to get back to Atlanta. My daughter’s expecting me.” Leonard catches a lightning glance of significance pass from Sam to Winona. “But I truly appreciate the--venison?” He looks at Sam. “Did you shoot it yourself?”
“Sure did. Me and the boys went to the island two weekends ago. Bagged my limit before mid-December; that’s a first.”
“And did you eat some of the meat then?”
“Hell yes. You should taste it when it’s fresh.” He frowns at his dry toast. “Cooked over the fire, nothing better.”
“Well, that’s probably where the E. coli came from. I saw more than a few cases in the E.R. in Georgia.”
“Oh, no,” Winona says, looking with concern toward the kitchen. “Sam brought it packed in ice, and now it’s in the freezer. What should I do?”
“Just cook it through; it’ll be fine.”
Winona grimaces. “Oh, I couldn’t. Maybe I’ll just pick up a spiral ham from Casey’s.”
By mid-morning Leonard is itchy to leave, thanks to the darkening sky and a couple of anxious texts from Jo. Jim and Sam exchange back thumps and vague promises to Skype, and Winona stands at the door, wistful, arms folded against the cold, as Jim throws their bags into the back of the SUV.
“I really wish you could stay, Jim,” she says. “You too, Len.”
“I can’t, Mom. Not now.” Jim says, and Leonard holds his breath as Jim, halfway down the front steps, turns to meet his mother’s eyes. “Maybe sometime you can come to California.” Winona’s smile is worth the piercing wind and first flakes of snow swirling in the air. She leans over--Jim is two steps below her--and kisses her son on the cheek.
“Bye, Len, come back soon,” she calls, giving him a little wave and retreating behind the storm door. “I hope it’s warm in Georgia.”
“Yes, ma’am, thanks for everything. And if you do come to California--well, I know some TV writers, if you’re interested. I mean, in getting back into the business.”
“You know people,” Jim says, turning over the ignition and turning the heat on full blast. “Well, look at you.”
“I just thought--I mean, it’s not a real stimulating environment here for someone like her, and I doubt she’s going to be able to take care of that house on her own forever.”
“She’s got a maid and a handyman and she buys that fruitcake at the store. But you should definitely try to talk her into moving to California, because that always works out so well.”
“Well, it does, you know,” Leonard mutters, buckling up. “Sometimes.”
Like any good Georgia boy, Leonard is convinced that a half-dozen snowflakes are enough to make you skid off the road, but Jim’s hand on the wheel is sure, and they make it to the airport before the snow is thick enough to fill Leonard’s head with visions of a Buddy Holly disaster. The plane they pull up to is twice the size of the one they left in, and for a moment, Leonard thinks that Jim has booked him on a commercial flight, until the pilot disembarks and begins the welcome aboard bowing and scraping.
“My family, followed by your family, with a plane ride in between; I figured I could at least do something about the plane.” Jim says. “Merry Christmas.”
Leonard feels ashamed and ungrateful in light of his earlier complaining, but Jim waves his objections away.
“Stop calculating how many orphans you could feed with the money and enjoy it, okay? It’s a part of the economy. Good jobs for aircraft mechanics, plus Captain Tad or Brad or whoever. Enjoy the flowers and the cheese plate, and tell Jo I said hi.”
Leonard can’t kiss or possibly even hug Jim in range of telephoto lenses, so all he can do is stare at him as snowflakes collect in his hair, cheeks pink in the bitter wind, everything Leonard has ever wanted or ever could want, his daughter excepted. He thinks of Jim taking the next magic carpet out of here and spending Christmas poolside, drinking pastel cocktails with other beautiful enigmas. He thinks of his own holiday: borrowing Jo for an evening here, a few hours there, glimpsing other lives through windows and open doors when he picks her up, maybe being invited in (if his mother-in-law is feeling benevolent) for a cup of punch.
Leonard redraws the scene in his mind, this time with Jim at his side, his penumbra of charisma, fame and oblivious bisexuality acting like an extra liter of Old Forester in the egg nog. There’d be curiosity, questions to which he’s sure he won’t have the answers, inquisitions into his private life of the kind Leonard has always dreaded, and above all, the need to explain things to Jo that he’d hoped would wait until she was 16 at least.
In the end, Leonard determines to act bravely out of cowardice as usual, because out of all of that, the only thing that really scares him is the idea of making the flight alone.
“You should come with me. Give the necklace and earrings to Jo yourself.”
“What?” Jim’s eyes narrow like he’s being put on, and it makes Leonard want to laugh and cry.
“You’ve got your bag in the car--come with me. To Georgia.”
Jim’s expression is pure, shocked surprise, and it feels wonderful--giddy, as if the snow isn’t going to ice up the wings and send the plane hurtling to Earth, but turn to joyful winter abstraction, like the inside of a snow globe, the fade-to-white at the end of an old Christmas movie.
Up above the clouds, the sun is shining and he and Jim can be in it for a few hours, and whatever waits for them when they land, they’ll still have that.
“You’re crazy,” Jim says, but his eyes give him away, as if the sun’s already here.
Two hours later, when they arrive to chilly rain, his little girl running toward his arms, and Jim at his side, he still feels it, warm and everlasting.
“Tell me,” Leonard pleads at last, as the night wraps around them and cold stars appear above the shiny hood of the SUV. “At least give me a hint. Was it the usual family crap, or something worse?”
“How bad would it have to be to justify the way I’m acting?” Jim keeps his eyes on the road, though it’s pin-straight. “Everybody likes Sam, and you’re going to love my mom regardless, because she’s a mom and you feel guilty about Jocelyn.”
“Hey. This isn’t about me, but since you brought me into this, I think I have a right to know. If you want me to be pissed off at somebody on your behalf, you have to give me a reason.”
Jim maintains a tight-jawed silence and exits off the divided highway where the sign says Riverside, but then makes a left onto a dark rural road under the overpass.
“I thought the house was in Riverside?”
Jim sighs, putting his shoulders into it. “Technically, it’s River Junction. My grandparents owned the place, but by the ‘80s hardly anyone lived there except this old lady who’d shoot trespassers on sight. I went to high school in Riverside, and it makes a better story--that I was raised on sunshine and Pop-Tarts and played Sky Masterson in the senior production of Guys and Dolls. No one cares; it gets me through the first two minutes on talk shows, and then they just want to know what hot actress I’m fucking.”
“I care.” Leonard tries to keep his tone light and fails miserably.
“Why? The official story is close enough to the truth. That I left here as soon as I got a driver’s license because it was boring as fuck and never looked back. That I got rich and famous and sent my mom money so she wouldn’t have to keep working as a bank teller when she should be retired or writing novels, and that my brother probably would have gone off on his own to be some caribou-chasing asshole even if my father hadn’t--”
“If he hadn’t--what?”
“If he hadn’t died.”
“Oh.” Leonard swallows. “Uh. When was that, Jim? How old were you”
“Less than a day”
“Oh, Lord.”
“There you go--paydirt. My defining childhood trauma, even though it happened before I remember. They sent me to this therapist in high school and she nearly cried with joy when I told her; that’s why I’ll never go to one of those idiots. So are you happy now? Everything wrapped up in a neat, little Freudian package.” Jim shoots Leonard a hard look, his eyes narrowed to slits.
“Of course I’m not happy. I just--” Leonard’s on the verge of confession, of admitting that since he walked into the hospital room he wanted nothing more than to broker peace between Jim and his family, even though he knows nothing about the situation and is probably the worst person on earth to do it. “How did happen? Your dad, I mean. If you don’t mind telling me.”
“Funny story,” Jim says without smiling. “After years of working as an A.D. on shitty TV shows, he finally got his big directing break, a medium-budget cop movie with a lot of car chases. And on the third day of shooting, one of those cars flipped over and landed on him. When she got the news, Mom went into labor.”
“Good God.”
“Don’t. Please. It’s a thing that happened. It wouldn’t have been any different if my dad had left for any other reason. For me, anyway. You know what’s weird, though? No one’s ever put two and two together, even though my dad’s name is on those lists of people who died in Hollywood accidents. That’s what’s great about Riverside; you say that name, you say ‘Iowa’, and everybody can fill in the details. Everybody knows exactly what my childhood was like.”
“I don’t,” Leonard says. “I wouldn’t presume.”
“Yeah, well, It was fine. Pretty good, actually. I wasn’t feral or anything; we had TV and Super Nintendo, even though we lived out here in the ass end of nowhere. One year we drove to Yellowstone in a neighbor’s RV, and whole months went by where I didn’t set anything on fire. It could have been worse.” There’s a pause, and then Jim gives a painful little bark of laughter that makes Leonard want to put a hand on Jim’s shoulder, but he’s wound Jack-in-the-Box tight, eyes shiny but unblinking on the unbending road.
It’s pitch black and the houses have thinned out to no more than a few per mile, lonely islands outlined with colored lights and inflatable Santas floodlit and forlorn in acre-wide front yards. The eerie darkness does odd things to Leonard’s imagination, makes him wish he could reach out and pluck it out of Jim, the thing that makes him hate this place, or if not to remove it, then to at least put it into his own mind so that Jim wouldn’t have to tell him, he’d just know.
A sign says they’re crossing the Iowa River but Leonard can see nothing, not even inky water down below. Then Jim turns off the blacktop onto a gravel road, noise drowning out any hypothetical conversation. A mile or so later they turn into a driveway lined with trees, Jim apparently navigating from memory, and crunch to a stop.
“Last chance,” Jim says, throwing the gear into park. “You want to drive back to Iowa City, the truck’s all yours.”
The thought that Jim might be serious arrests Leonard’s grip on the door handle, but then Jim gives a mock evil laugh and leaps out, grabbing both their duffel bags from the back. It’s at least 10 degrees colder than it was in Iowa City; Leonard can see his breath in the moonlight that also illuminates a bank of dark clouds moving in from the north.
The Kirk house is not, as Leonard imagined, a looming Children of the Corn Victorian, but a sprawling mid-century split-level with a two-car garage, a cluster of outbuildings, and a little tree picked out in white lights in the front yard.
“Looks like we beat them home,” Leonard says, but Jim lifts the doormat and finds a key. Inside, Jim drops their bags with a thud and gropes around for the lights.
The interior is comfortable middle American, thick oatmeal carpet and overstuffed sofas, a ceiling fan and a fireplace, amateur oil paintings of riverbanks and sunflowers, and in the corner, a live Christmas tree.
Jim’s eyes are scanning, mapping the room to his interior memory. “She got rid of the old furniture. Thank fuck for that.”
Leonard, doubly uneasy at being an essentially uninvited guest in Jim’s childhood home, shoves his hands in his pockets and wanders over to a table full of framed family photos. It’s easy to pick out Jim in various stages of blazing youth: a kid with a bowlcut holding a tiny baseball bat, a skinny teen with wheat-blond hair and mile-long limbs. Sam is equally unmistakable, burly and cheerfully thuggish even as a kid. On the end is a gilt-framed wedding photo, Winona and Jim’s dad--a handsome man with Sam’s eyes but Jim’s build--wearing white, barefoot on a beach that Leonard finds strangely familiar.
“Is that Malibu? Did your family live there?”
Jim snorts. “You kidding me? It was insanely expensive, even back then. Mom and Dad had a little Spanish style rancher in Culver City. They were planning to move after I came along and Dad got his big break, because, y’know, that’s how those things happen.”
There’s another photo of Winona with a different man, older and huskier, sitting side-by-side in a booth at a restaurant with old farm equipment on the walls. Leonard lifts it gingerly to get a better look.
“Who’s that? An uncle?”
“Nope,” Jim says with a sudden burst of false brightness, slides it from Leonard’s hands,
places it on the carpet and crushes the glass under the heavy heel of his boot.
“Jim, what the hell?”
At that moment, there’s a sound of scuffling from the kitchen, of a key turning in the lock.
“Jim!” Winona yells. “Can you give me a hand?”
Rather than being left with the smashed photo like a guilty dog, Leonard follows Jim through the kitchen door and into the garage, where Winona is unloading Sam and groceries.
“We stopped at Casey’s,” she says, handing Leonard a bag. “I had to get some broth and rice and soft bread. I hope you boys like fruitcake; nobody on the planet seems to except Sam. I make it just for him and now he can’t eat it.”
“And it’s a damn shame,” Sam says, levering himself out of the car. “You know how great mom’s cakes are.” Leonard scoops the remaining bags out of the trunk while shooing Jim in the direction of his brother, because Sam could easily have vertigo and the situation is far from stress-free. Jim supports his brother with a reluctant hand under the elbow while Sam looks deeply amused by the whole situation.
“Right there, if you don’t mind,” Winona says, pointing to the kitchen table as Leonard brings the bags in. “Jim, Sam’s staying in his old room, can you help him up there?” And then, to Leonard, “Give me a minute to unpack and I’ll fix you something to eat; you must be starving. I don’t know what possessed me, but I cooked a whole turkey the day before yesterday, even though it’s just me and Sam, but you know how it is when you’ve got company.” She starts banging around cabinets, pouring chicken stock into a pot. “I got the idea to make Sam some congee, but that’s going to take hours; is it alright for him to have yogurt? He says that’s what he wants, but it isn’t on the sheet the doctor gave us.”
“It should be fine; beneficial, even, to restore the intestinal flora,” Leonard says, trying to stay out of Winona’s way, since she’s produced a turkey bigger than her head from the fridge and is going at it with a huge carving knife.
“Oh, good. It really is wonderful having you here; I was worried about how I was going to get Sam home, and now I don’t have to worry about him having a relapse during the night. You’re not from California, are you, Len?”
“No, ma’am, I’m from Georgia.”
“Georgia.” Winona stops her whirlwind motion long enough to give a little sigh. “That’s lovely. And how long have you and Jim been seeing each other?”
Leonard feels the shock cold-water shock of discovery, but it’s followed by an unsettling mental replay of the events preceding, the what did I do, what did I say? of hindsight. Leonard’s felt it in bars when men catch his eye from across the room, in airports when they sit next to him and not in any of a dozen other empty seats, and now, in Jim’s mother’s kitchen, somewhere east of the Iowa River.
“I’m sorry,” she says kindly. “Was I not supposed to know? It’s just that he’s never brought anyone home, not even when he was in high school, and this isn’t the kind of situation you bring a friend into, even a very good one. It’s all right, really,” she adds, when Leonard supposes his face hasn’t quite recomposed itself. “I was around Hollywood in the ‘70s; there’s not much you can do to shock me. I just wish Sam could find someone, but the pickings are pretty slim up there in moose country. It is beautiful, though; maybe you and Jim can visit some time. Do you like sauerkraut with turkey? I don’t know if they do that in the South but it tastes better than you’d think.”
With that, Leonard is lost; Jim’s right that he can’t help being charmed by Winona Kirk, but in his own defense he hasn’t sat in any mother’s kitchen since his mother-in-law’s, which might as well be North Korea for the likelihood he’ll ever go back.
“Well, now, I’ve never heard of that, but I’m willing to give it a try.”
He’s in that compromising position when Jim finds him in the kitchen, fork deep in a plateful of turkey while Winona slices bananas into yogurt.
“He says he wants orange juice,” Jim says, saving most of his glare for his mother. “Is there any orange juice?”
“Too acidic,” Leonard says, swallowing fast. “Your mom got some of those sports drinks. Just make sure there’s no caffeine in them.”
“I’ll bring him one along with his food,” Winona says.
“No, I’ll do it.”
“Then I’ll bring his medicine. And I fixed a plate of turkey for you, Jim, it’s in the microwave.”
There’s a minute of huffy impasse and then Jim grabs a Gatorade out of the fridge and follows his mother out. It’s only then that Leonard remembers the smashed picture in the living room. Leonard’s ears strain unwillingly.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Winona says quietly.
“Doesn’t matter. That shouldn’t be in the house.” Jim’s voice is distant, wintry.
“You don’t understand. It helps me to remember that there were good times, too.”
“You love to rewrite history, don’t you? Put it in a silver picture frame and you can pretend the bad stuff never happened.”
“You want to talk about this? Then let’s talk. Later. You came here to see your brother, so go see him.”
There’s a pause, and then Leonard hears heavy stomping up wooden stairs. Winona enter the kitchen in search of a dustpan and broom, lines more visible in her face than they were before.
“Let me give you a hand with that,” Leonard says. “I’ll get the big pieces, but you’ll probably want a vacuum cleaner for the rest.”
Leonard sweeps up the shards and Winona slides the photo, only slightly damaged, from the wreckage.
“How much did he tell you?”
“Nothing at all,” Leonard says truthfully. “I don’t know who that is, in the picture.”
Winona gives a quick, forced smile. “Could you wrap the glass in newspaper and put it in the garbage? Then please finish your food; I don’t want it to get cold.”
Ten minutes later she’s offering Leonard fruitcake and coffee (“Shall I put a little brandy in that for you, Len?”), sedating him with food the way his own mother used to, tryptophan and carbohydrates damping his myriad questions. But then she pours herself some black coffee and sits down with him at the kitchen table, wrapping her hands around the steaming mug and leaning on her elbows, an almost primal gesture that in Leonard’s familial experience that means we need to talk.
The photo is tucked, half-visible, behind a milk glass bud vase on the table. “That man?” she says, pointing to it. “It’s Frank, my second husband.”
“Ah.” Leonard feels a door of memory opening, and something like a cold draft.
“Jim told you about George? How he died?” Leonard nods. “Mm. I got a modest settlement from the studio, and a good bit less from his life insurance. It wasn’t enough to stay in L.A.. I was a TV writer, and work was unpredictable at the best of times, even without two small children to take care of. So I did the ‘sensible’ thing and moved back here, with my parents. I got my real estate license and started working for a brokerage in Iowa City. That’s where I met Frank; he was an Iowa State football player who spent a season in the pros, had some money, and decided he wanted to be a gentleman farmer. River Junction was going through a bad period--a lot of people were selling off, their kids moving away--and he got the Dean place just down the road for a song. And I started dating him. I didn’t feel guilty; it was eight years since George died. Frank was a nice, cheerful guy, and he was strong, and it isn’t very feminist to say so, but it was so good to have a man around to lift and fix things and drive back from Iowa City late at night after we’d seen a movie. And to throw a football around with the boys.” The way Winona sips her coffee makes Leonard see the ghost of a cigarette, a worldly young woman living in L.A. in the era of huge cars and Kodachrome-blue skies, and then someone older and lonelier, settling for what made sense.
“I understand. It’s not easy being a single parent.” That much Leonard knows to be true, whatever Winona is about to tell him. “So, you got married?”
“Mm-hmm. My parents were getting to the point that they didn’t want to farm any more. We decided to rent this place from them so they could move to Arizona. Frank moved into this house, hired a couple of guys to work the farm, and then opened a little barbecue place in town. That’s the restaurant, in the photo. He called it ‘Buddy’s,’ and it did pretty good business for first few years, until the chain restaurants started moving in.”
“And Sam and Jim? I guess it’s obvious they didn’t get along. Jim, anyway.”
“Not exactly.” Winona tucks a loose strand of white-blonde hair behind her ear. “I mean, the boys weren’t crazy about him at first but I didn’t expect them to be--it’s hard for stepparents, and Jim idolized his father, even though he never knew him. Frank was a bit of an alpha male, very much about laying down rules. But I thought it would be good for the boys in the long-run; they were running wild around here and Sam was almost a teenager.”
“Seems like a reasonable assumption,” Leonard says, feeling rising jitters composed of caffeine and sugar and foreboding.
“Yes, well.” Winona’s face, bright with the engagement of telling a story, seems to sink. “One day, out of the blue, I got a call from my old writing partner. She’d sold a pilot about a divorced woman with kids who moves to a small town, and she was single with no kids and needed help. I’d pretty much given up on having a career--I was working on the farms and helping Frank with his restaurant business--and I didn’t realize until that call how much I missed it. Frank and I came up with a plan where I’d spend a few months at a time in L.A., he’d build up his business, and then when we had enough money, we’d move out there and he’d franchise his restaurants.” She looks at him from under her lashes with a paler version of the Kirk eyes. “And now you think I’m a terrible mother, because I’d move away from my children.”
“No, not at all.” Leonard shifts uncomfortably in his chair.
“The show ran for four seasons--Hope Rising, maybe you’ve heard of it? No, you’re not in the demographic. Anyway, I travelled back and forth to L.A., and I got involved in the business again. I knew things were strained here--Frank and the boys fought all the time--but I thought, just one more year. We’ll move and once we’re there in the sunshine, once the boys can go to the beach every day, everything will be fine. Then Sam ran away, a month before he was supposed to graduate from high school. I came home to deal with it and opened a letter I wasn’t meant to open. It was a loan application, using the farm as security. Frank’s business was on the rocks and he’d been planning to forge my signature. We were practically bankrupt and he’d started drinking to deal with the stress, which made his temper worse. It had gotten physical between him and Sam; they didn’t do any real damage to each other, but Jim saw everything.”
“Oh, Lord.” Leonard can’t help wincing, heart contracting in anger and empathy at the thought of how helpless Jim--a lanky teenager, probably more inclined to use his brain than his fists--must have felt.
“I know. He wouldn’t talk to me about it, but I saw what it did to him. His grades dropped, he was getting in trouble, and Frank hid it from me because he didn’t want me coming home. My sweet, sunny boy was cutting school to hang out with druggies in the city, and he’d barely talk to me. He blamed me for everything--Frank, Sam leaving, all the financial problems we had after the divorce. We had to move into an apartment for a while and rent the farm out while I tried to get back on my feet. And then Jim ran off, too, all the way to Los Angeles--the last place I’d thought he’d ever go. But I suppose it made sense, after all. Maybe it was his way of feeling close to George.”
Winona lays her hands flat on the kitchen table like a card player who’s played her last hand. “So there it is, Len. All my sins, and they are legion. And Jim turned out to be a spectacular success--in spite of it? Because of it? I’ll never know. But he hasn’t forgiven me--” Winona glances at the trash can. “As you can see.”
Leonard, aching with the urge to give absolution that isn’t his to give, says nothing, and then Jim comes stomping into the kitchen.
“Sam says he’ll take that chicken soup now.” With a passing glance at Leonard and his Judas slice of cake, Jim punches some numbers into the microwave and Winona takes the hint, putting a bowl of clear broth on a tray and gliding from the room.
“You two looked pretty cozy,” Jim says. Leonard shrugs and doesn’t point out that the kitchen smells of coffee and ginger and the Christmas tree, now plugged in, glows in the still-dark living room.
Jim shovels turkey and dressing into his mouth with his elbows out and Leonard has to blink to clear the image of a teenaged Jim sitting at this very table doing the same thing. “Maybe we shouldn’t mention this thing--” he does the you and me gesture with his fork--”you know, us, or whatever, to Sam. He’s cool but I’m not sure about those human grizzly bears he works with. Also, he’d give me shit for it and I’m not in the mood.”
Leonard accepts the logic of it more willingly than the manner. “It’s all right; we can flip a coin for the couch. Your mom already figured it out, by the way.”
Jim nods, chewing. “You’re every mother’s dream. God, I don’t know what happened to her--she never used to be into cooking and decorating and shit. You know she did those paintings in the living room? Do you know how long that must take, and they’re not even good.”
“She’s not a young woman, Jim; maybe she’s just tired. Anyway, why didn’t she move back to L.A. after--” Leonard pauses.
“After what?”
“After the divorce.”
Jim drops his fork onto his plate with a clank. “Oh, good, you must have gotten the whole apologia about how she was just a poor, single mom with a farm and no help raising her wild boys except, oh wait, her parents and the three guys they hired and it’s not like we were out here on the plains surrounded by wolves. Maybe I was being unrealistic because you’re, like, putty in the hands of any sweet-talking woman who can make you feel guilty, but I was hoping for a little more support. Like maybe possibly considering there’s another side to the story.”
“And I’d be happy to hear it, anytime you want to tell me.”
“That’s the thing; I really don’t. I’ve devoted a shit ton of effort to making sure I’m not the Boy with the Sad Story, or some bitter adult who gets drunk and punches walls. I made a life for myself, an amazing life, and yet here I am in Iowa drinking Gatorade from my mom’s jelly glass.” Jim wipes his hands with his napkin, as if cleaning off Iowa, and throws it on his plate.
“Because she is your mom, and you’re a decent person, even if you’re acting like a petulant three-year-old right now.” Jim pegs him with a blue glare, but Leonard holds firm. “I’m not trying to minimize a single thing that happened to you, but since you bothered to come here, you might as well deal with it. Say what you need to say to your mom, or suck it up and give your mom a decent Christmas.”
“Okay,” Jim says, fists clenching and unclenching, as if he’s still not sure. “Okay, okay. Fine, you’re right, I just--I hate this. And there’s no fucking way I can stay through Christmas. If it was just one of them it might be okay, but Sam and Mom together--”
“So what are you going to do? On Christmas, I mean?” Leonard says, a little embarrassed that he hasn’t been brave enough to ask before.
“I don’t know--the usual. Surf on Christmas Day; that’s always cool. Go out. Maybe see what Rob and Stella are up to. They’ve scheduled a kid for early next year, so I’ve got to hang out with them while I still can.”
“You’re spending Christmas with your agent and your lawyer?”
“Oh, please. Rob’s Jewish and I’m pretty sure Stella is an atheist, okay? Christmas is a religious holiday, not some fucking national mandate to discover the true meaning of family.”
“It’s not about Christmas per se, it’s about having somewhere to go--somewhere that’s home.”
“That’s coming from the guy whose ‘family’ makes him about as welcome as the flu.”
In deference to Jim’s stress level, Leonard abstains from his own napkin-throwing. “All right, then. You brought me here to make sure Sam’s okay, so I better do that.”
“Sure, if it would make you feel useful. He’s in his old bedroom.” Jim points vaguely toward the living room. “Upstairs.”
The second floor of the Kirk residence is full of those parallel-universe features that must be in every middle-class house in America: worn wall-to-wall carpeting, varnished wood railings, a globe on top of a bookcase full of old magazines. Leonard finds Sam in bed, half-raised on a stack of pillows, and Winona in the chair next to him, feet propped up on the edge of the bed. He waves his little medical kit and Winona jumps to her feet, giving Leonard a confidential little smile and a squeeze of the arm on the way out.
Sam seems larger in this room than he did in the hospital; his broad chest fills out his thin T-shirt, lungs taking deep breaths as if they’re used to purer air.
“I don’t know how you feel, but you look better,” Leonard says, getting out his blood pressure cuff.
“Getting out of the hospital, plus Mom’s home cooking. Did you try the fruitcake?”
“Uh, yeah. It tasted fine.”
“She gets it from the store; we’re not supposed to know.”
“I won’t breathe a word.” Leonard’s grateful to have a topic for safe banter, because there’s a degree of consanguinity that makes him uncomfortable, even though he’s just checking the guy’s vitals.
“Did he put up a struggle?”
“Excuse me?”
“Jim. He wouldn’t have visited without a struggle, ‘cause the last time was a big, flaming disaster. Did he tell you about it? He came here with a writer and a photographer to do some stupid-ass magazine article, and they made him put on his old tux and dance with the girl who was his prom date, and then he came home and got into a big fight with Mom and put his fist through the wall in the kitchen. Tried, anyway; this old house is pretty well made. So unless he had a change of heart--which I don’t think he did because he’s still acting like a moody asshole--I guess you talked him into coming here.”
Sam finishes, unfortunately, just as Leonard’s about to take his temperature, which leaves him with a good 45 seconds of silence, and Sam’s eyes bright and curious above the thermometer.
“Well, now, I don’t know that I talked him into it, exactly,” Leonard begins, realizing that he’s already tacitly admitted to knowing Jim well enough that it’s a possibility. “It was mostly his idea. But I did tell him I see a lot of this in my line of work, and God knows I saw enough of it in my family, all this damned Anglo-Saxon grudge-holding and silence.” Sam nods, mutely, familiar heavy eyebrows raised in what seems to be agreement, and Leonard is emboldened to continue.
“See, the thing is, I can’t tell him what to do because I don’t know how bad it was, and even I did that would be my judgement, not his, and I don’t have a right to tell him what to feel about it. But I feel like he thinks money and success solved the problem, and I don’t want to see him end up like some god-damned Charles Foster Kane, muttering River Junction on his deathbed.” Feeling himself flush red, as if from the fever that Sam probably doesn’t have, he pulls the thermometer from Sam’s mouth. “Ninety-nine point five. And I’m sorry, I don’t know where that came from.”
“No worries; it’s hard to get a word in edgewise around Mom. Or Jim for that matter.” He shifts, rearranging his huge limbs in the small bed and pulling up the covers. “I can tell you that it was bad, bad enough that I stayed away for years. But the guys I work around, they made me realize that it wasn’t any worse than the normal shit people go through, and not as bad as some. I want to have kids someday, and I want my kids to know their grandmother. I don’t know what Jim wants,” Sam says, and for a terrible moment Leonard’s afraid he’s going to wink, but then he just gives Leonard a friendly pat on the arm. “But whatever it is, I hope he finds it. He’s my little brother, after all.”
In lieu of gratitude he can’t express, Leonard feeds Sam some more Gatorade and Tylenol. Jim’s waiting for him at the foot of the stairs, holding his duffel bag.
“After an incredible amount of pointless discussion, it’s been determined that you’re going to sleep in my old room and I’m going to take the fold-out sofa in the den so our gayness doesn’t give my brother a relapse. Now I’m supposed to help you find towels and shit.”
Jim’s old room is not, as Leonard feared, a shrine or time capsule, but has been scrubbed to generic guest-room style with a queen-sized bed-in-a-bag and a framed print of a mill. The sloping roof seems to make Jim’s shoulders hunch in response, and he shoves his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, a youthful gesture that punches at Leonard’s heart.
“Hey,” Jim says. “Welcome to the inside of my head. I dream about this place all the time, so it’s not weird at all that you’re sleeping here. So, uh, good night. Thanks for taking care of Sam. Don’t worry about setting an alarm; I’ll wake you up and I’ll take you to the airport in the morning.”
“Jim, wait.” Leonard has no idea what he’s doing, but the thought of Jim alone with his thoughts in self-exile on a foldout sofa is more than he can bear. “Sit down a minute.”
Leonard pats the bed next to him, and Jim sits down, the springs only shifting a little as Jim doesn’t quite commit his weight. “I’m sorry if you feel like I haven’t been supporting you. What you went through sounds terrible, the parts I know about, anyway. And I don’t blame you for staying angry, how can I? But I have to tell you this--if you’re angry at your mother for the choices she made, then you have to be angry at me, too, because I did the same damn thing.”
“No. No, you didn’t,” Jim says, with touching indignation. “You’re completely involved in Jo’s life. You wouldn’t leave her alone for a second with that guy--Clay?--if you thought he’d hurt her.”
“Of course I wouldn’t, but do I know for sure? She’s quiet as a church mouse, and God love her, she tries to protect me. So maybe I’m missing something important because I’m 3000 miles away most of the time. Maybe someday she’ll be in my house telling me how upset that made her. You want to go earlier than that? Back to when I gave her mother every good reason to divorce me? Or even before--when I helped bring her into this world because Joce wanted it so much, and I felt like I owed her that, at least. Do you hear me? I had a kid because I felt guilty about marrying her mother in the first place.”
“You didn’t--” Jim begins, and then stops, looking everywhere but at Leonard. “You can’t-”
“Right. I can’t wish any of it away because then I’d be wishing Jo away, and the point is--you make the best decision you can and then you live with the consequences. If your mom hadn’t remarried you might have stayed here and become an aircraft mechanic and that might have been fine. Or if your dad hadn’t died, you might have stayed in Hollywood and turned into some snotty kid who hangs out at The Grove all day. Or maybe you would have done the same thing that you did anyway, because it was in you all along, written there in your DNA at the second you were conceived.”
Leonard’s thoughts skitter to a halt and he’s breathless, boggled at his own recklessness but determined, this time, not to build a relationship on an untruth. Jim shifts, and runs his hand over the back of his neck, and at least doesn’t deck Leonard or run away.
“Wow,” he says after a little while, corners of his mouth edging up. “You’re not usually much of a talker, but once you get going--wow. Why do you care so much, how I feel about my mom?”
“Because I want you to be happy.”
The little smile breaks into a grin. “I know you do. Otherwise there’s no way you’d be in Iowa dealing with my fucking family.”
“They’re nice people, Jim. I like them.”
“You like everybody,” Jim says, throwing an arm around Leonard’s shoulders. “You put on this big misanthropic carnival show because you’re afraid of getting hurt, but you’ll give it up for anybody who’s nice to you. I don’t mean sex,” he says, when Leonard opens his mouth to object. “I mean the other thing.”
Leonard doesn’t argue, because he can’t.
“I want to make you happy, too,” Jim says. “What would that take? I’ll tell you right now, I don’t think I can give up women.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Leonard says, stunned.
“Then what else?”
The weight of Jim’s arm is like the weight of the world, a million little voices telling him don’t fuck this up. “Okay, then. I want--I want to be the person you spend holidays with. Not the only person, but I want to be there. I want you to tell me things if they’re bothering you, like this thing with your mom. And I don’t want you to feel like you have to be perfect for me, even though I know that takes some courage.”
“My assholish behavior in the last 24 hours should be a good start.”
“Yeah. I mean, I want you to feel you can be that way around me. Real. Not ‘Jim Kirk’, but this guy from Iowa.”
“This guy from Iowa would never have met you, let alone invited himself to your house to jump your bones. But I get what you’re saying, and I think I can do that. As long as you can admit that the beach house and the sports car don’t hurt.”
Leonard parts his lips to answer and Jim, not expecting one, kisses him instead. They’re all the luxury Leonard has ever wanted, soft and warm, bringing their own sunshine when the prairie wind is blowing against the windowpanes. Jim drops his arm to Leonard’s waist and puts a hand on his knee, and there’s something so chaste and boyish about it that Leonard gets tears in his eyes, because Jim’s right, he’s helpless against this, but it turns out there’s no need to worry.
Jim’s kisses his way up Leonard’s jaw, tender lips scratching against his beard stubble, and says in his ear, “No fucking way I’m sleeping on the foldout sofa tonight.”
“But what about--” Leonard begins, eyes on the half-open door.
“Their problem.” He leans Leonard back onto the bed--he’s a metaphorical and actual pushover--and begins to unbutton his shirt, leer getting more pronounced with each button.
“God damn,” he says, opening Leonard’s shirt. “If I was still 14 I’d have shot by now. But when I was 14, I had no idea there were guys like you in the world.” He cups Leonard’s jeans, affably, and Leonard would appreciate the assist, except--
“You’re not planning to do anything, are you?” He squirms under Jim’s gently probing hands. “I mean, it’s weird, in your old bedroom--”
“Oh, no,” Jim mocks, eyebrows raised and lips forming an O. “What if Mom finds out I’ve got a boy in my room? She’ll ground me for sure.”
He unbuckles Leonard’s jeans and shucks them, deigning to kick the door closed before he goes for Leonard’s underwear. Leonard lies flat on his back, feet still planted on the floor, caught in the fantasy of an adolescent daydream coming true. He has no idea if it’s Jim’s dream or his own and doesn’t especially care, especially when Jim kneels on the little shag rug by the bed and begins to stroke his thighs. It’s taken Leonard a long time to enjoy the feeling of exposure, to feel trust for Jim instead of the uncomfortable sexual thrill of near-humiliation, and he should really be more nervous with Jim’s mom and and his gigantic and possibly homophobic brother within shouting distance, but he doesn’t. He’s in a bubble universe of Jim’s creation, a righting of the world, one that happens to involve Jim’s mouth coming home to wrap around his cock.
Jim’s mouth is hot and always so wet, and it makes Leonard feel a tenderness he can’t express, to think that Jim loves the taste of him. Pleasure rises like floodwaters, and he stares at the faint outlines of tape squares on the ceiling, half-illuminated by a circle of light from the bedside lamp. He wonders what Jim taped over his bed to dream about at night--chiseled boys or bikini-clad girls, fast cars or faraway beaches.
It doesn’t matter. Jim’s hands are gently pressing his thighs further apart, brushing fingers against the sensitive undersides of his cheeks, cupping him while he takes him in deeper. Jim is doing this because he likes to make Leonard happy, and if he takes pride in it, loves making Leonard curl his fingers in the flowered bedspread so that he doesn’t accidentally pull Jim’s hair, it’s with good reason. It’s a gift that Jim is giving him, and for once in his life Leonard is content simply to receive.
A few things happen, along with Leonard’s heart filling enough to burst. He comes with the squeaky beginning of a cry and claps his hand over his mouth, which makes Jim laugh, even though he’s still got Leonard’s cock between his lips and is trying to deal with things. Jim stretches a leg out and pretends to crack the door open, and Leonard mouths no, no, no, in part because he’s pins-and-needles sensitive at this stage and Jim’s tongue is still working him like delicate sandpaper. When he finishes and stands up, Leonard’s eyes seek out the familiar and notable bulge in his jeans.
“Want me to help you with that?” he whispers.
“What I want is to nail you to that bed, but I didn’t bring any condoms, do you believe it?” Jim says, a few decibels louder than Leonard would like. “Maybe I should check the dresser; there may still be one wedged between the drawers.”
Instead they go about their little pre-bed rituals, washing up in the hall bathroom, stacking their electronic devices on the bedside table, and finally, getting in bed and turning out the light.
Jim lets Leonard curl around him, something his restive semi-sleep usually doesn’t allow. The night is silent; when the heat turns off, there’s nothing audible but the creaking of wind in trees, and the cold seems to press in on the windows. Jim, with the sunshine of Africa and California a memory, shivers and shifts back in Leonard’s arms, cold feet against his shins, and Leonard holds him tighter. Perhaps for that, or perhaps for something else, Jim mutters, “Thank you.”
+++++
Leonard wakes to an empty bed and a full cup of coffee on the nightstand, and a few minutes later Jim walks in, full flannel farm boy with the tails of a plaid shirt hanging over his jeans.
“C’mon,” he says, swatting Leonard’s blanketed foot. “Mom’s going to make us a big breakfast and she wants us to get the eggs.”
“How’s Sam this morning?”
“Good. Hungry. I can tell you right now the broth thing is going to last about two more hours.”
Leonard pulls on his clothes and jacket and staggers after Jim into an iron-grey morning; the temperature’s dropped at least 10 degrees overnight, and the clouds are pregnant with snow.
“There’s a bad storm headed our way,” Jim says, hands in his jacket pockets and his head craned toward the north.
“Can you tell that by the clouds?”
“Nope, Weather Channel. Six to twelve inches by late tonight. My kind of forecast,” he says, nudging Leonard with his hip.
“Oh, Lord. Are the flight conditions okay? Should we be leaving now?”
“It’s fine; the wind’s not going to pick up until the afternoon, and we’ll be long gone by then.”
When his eyes stop tearing from the cold, Leonard gets a good look at the Kirk farm--not one of those precious semi-urban toylands favored by Atlanta gentry, but a working farm with bleached white outbuildings, silos, and brown stubs of corn rotting in the field. Jim opens the door to a little barn, hands Leonard a basket, and shoves him into a dim hell of chickens.
“Get a dozen,” he says. “The good ones are the ones with less chicken shit on them.”
Leonard picks his way around complaining chickens for Jim’s amusement. The eggs are pale shades of brown and admittedly lovely except for the proximity of the creatures who laid them. A black cat brushes by his legs and moves along on its rounds.
“Fun, huh?” Jim says. “Now imagine doing this twice a day for the rest of your life.”
Winona’s breakfast does honor to the cholesterol-hiking reputation of the region, with piles of sausage and fresh scrambled eggs and gallons of coffee. Sam, his wattage turned up considerably after a good night’s sleep, feels well enough to sit at the dining room table and is reasonably gracious about his breakfast of yogurt and dry toast. Jim isn’t exactly cordial but he’s civil, ferrying things to and from the kitchen and doing the minimum to keep the conversational ball in play.
“You really can’t stay, Len?” Winona asks. “We’d love to have you both for Christmas. Sam brought venison from Alaska for Christmas dinner.”
“I’d love to, but I have to get back to Atlanta. My daughter’s expecting me.” Leonard catches a lightning glance of significance pass from Sam to Winona. “But I truly appreciate the--venison?” He looks at Sam. “Did you shoot it yourself?”
“Sure did. Me and the boys went to the island two weekends ago. Bagged my limit before mid-December; that’s a first.”
“And did you eat some of the meat then?”
“Hell yes. You should taste it when it’s fresh.” He frowns at his dry toast. “Cooked over the fire, nothing better.”
“Well, that’s probably where the E. coli came from. I saw more than a few cases in the E.R. in Georgia.”
“Oh, no,” Winona says, looking with concern toward the kitchen. “Sam brought it packed in ice, and now it’s in the freezer. What should I do?”
“Just cook it through; it’ll be fine.”
Winona grimaces. “Oh, I couldn’t. Maybe I’ll just pick up a spiral ham from Casey’s.”
By mid-morning Leonard is itchy to leave, thanks to the darkening sky and a couple of anxious texts from Jo. Jim and Sam exchange back thumps and vague promises to Skype, and Winona stands at the door, wistful, arms folded against the cold, as Jim throws their bags into the back of the SUV.
“I really wish you could stay, Jim,” she says. “You too, Len.”
“I can’t, Mom. Not now.” Jim says, and Leonard holds his breath as Jim, halfway down the front steps, turns to meet his mother’s eyes. “Maybe sometime you can come to California.” Winona’s smile is worth the piercing wind and first flakes of snow swirling in the air. She leans over--Jim is two steps below her--and kisses her son on the cheek.
“Bye, Len, come back soon,” she calls, giving him a little wave and retreating behind the storm door. “I hope it’s warm in Georgia.”
“Yes, ma’am, thanks for everything. And if you do come to California--well, I know some TV writers, if you’re interested. I mean, in getting back into the business.”
“You know people,” Jim says, turning over the ignition and turning the heat on full blast. “Well, look at you.”
“I just thought--I mean, it’s not a real stimulating environment here for someone like her, and I doubt she’s going to be able to take care of that house on her own forever.”
“She’s got a maid and a handyman and she buys that fruitcake at the store. But you should definitely try to talk her into moving to California, because that always works out so well.”
“Well, it does, you know,” Leonard mutters, buckling up. “Sometimes.”
Like any good Georgia boy, Leonard is convinced that a half-dozen snowflakes are enough to make you skid off the road, but Jim’s hand on the wheel is sure, and they make it to the airport before the snow is thick enough to fill Leonard’s head with visions of a Buddy Holly disaster. The plane they pull up to is twice the size of the one they left in, and for a moment, Leonard thinks that Jim has booked him on a commercial flight, until the pilot disembarks and begins the welcome aboard bowing and scraping.
“My family, followed by your family, with a plane ride in between; I figured I could at least do something about the plane.” Jim says. “Merry Christmas.”
Leonard feels ashamed and ungrateful in light of his earlier complaining, but Jim waves his objections away.
“Stop calculating how many orphans you could feed with the money and enjoy it, okay? It’s a part of the economy. Good jobs for aircraft mechanics, plus Captain Tad or Brad or whoever. Enjoy the flowers and the cheese plate, and tell Jo I said hi.”
Leonard can’t kiss or possibly even hug Jim in range of telephoto lenses, so all he can do is stare at him as snowflakes collect in his hair, cheeks pink in the bitter wind, everything Leonard has ever wanted or ever could want, his daughter excepted. He thinks of Jim taking the next magic carpet out of here and spending Christmas poolside, drinking pastel cocktails with other beautiful enigmas. He thinks of his own holiday: borrowing Jo for an evening here, a few hours there, glimpsing other lives through windows and open doors when he picks her up, maybe being invited in (if his mother-in-law is feeling benevolent) for a cup of punch.
Leonard redraws the scene in his mind, this time with Jim at his side, his penumbra of charisma, fame and oblivious bisexuality acting like an extra liter of Old Forester in the egg nog. There’d be curiosity, questions to which he’s sure he won’t have the answers, inquisitions into his private life of the kind Leonard has always dreaded, and above all, the need to explain things to Jo that he’d hoped would wait until she was 16 at least.
In the end, Leonard determines to act bravely out of cowardice as usual, because out of all of that, the only thing that really scares him is the idea of making the flight alone.
“You should come with me. Give the necklace and earrings to Jo yourself.”
“What?” Jim’s eyes narrow like he’s being put on, and it makes Leonard want to laugh and cry.
“You’ve got your bag in the car--come with me. To Georgia.”
Jim’s expression is pure, shocked surprise, and it feels wonderful--giddy, as if the snow isn’t going to ice up the wings and send the plane hurtling to Earth, but turn to joyful winter abstraction, like the inside of a snow globe, the fade-to-white at the end of an old Christmas movie.
Up above the clouds, the sun is shining and he and Jim can be in it for a few hours, and whatever waits for them when they land, they’ll still have that.
“You’re crazy,” Jim says, but his eyes give him away, as if the sun’s already here.
Two hours later, when they arrive to chilly rain, his little girl running toward his arms, and Jim at his side, he still feels it, warm and everlasting.