Sprout

the other, she looked a little like Linda Blair in The Exorcist .
    “Are you aware … ?” she began, then trailed off, as if she’d forgotten how to say the word yet again.
    “Gay,” I called from the shadow of the stump. That’s me, always eager to help.
    Before my dad trashed the computer, I’d read a few stories online about what happened when kids my age told their parents they were gay. It wasn’t all bad. We were well into the new millennium, after all. Will and Grace had been in syndication for almost a decade. There’d been Brokeback Mountain and Queer Eye , and it was more or less a requirement since the second season of The Real World that every reality show had to have at least one gay guy in it. Even the governor of New Jersey turned out to be gay, and it seemed like some senator or rock star was getting caught in flagrante delicto every six months or so. But those were all adults. Things were different for kids, and they were especially different for kids in places like Kansas. There were still groundings-for-life, trips to shrinks, cult deprogrammers, and Christian re-education camps, not to mention a surprising number of beatings and, in some ways the worst of it all, simple rejection. Teenagers kicked out, locks changed, phone numbers too. Refusals to acknowledge the son or daughter when the rest of the family passed him or her on the street. Given the alternatives, I thought my dad and I handled it pretty well.
    That didn’t mean he liked talking about it.
    That didn’t mean I liked talking about it either.
    My dad looked down at the drinks in his hands, as if they might have the answer he was looking for (he often looked at drinks this way, so that’s not saying much). Finally he poured one drink into the other, set the empty glass on the table beside the front door (which table was really the seat of a chair, but whatever) and put his newly freed hand on Mrs. Miller’s shoulder.
    “Before I get too drunk to walk,” he said, “I’d like to show you my collection.”
    And, steering her rather more effectively than either Mrs. Miller or myself could steer a car, he led her into his stumps.
    Mrs. Miller’s hair fell down her back like a frothy blonde waterfall. As I watched, my dad’s hand disappeared beneath it, as if Mrs. Miller was a puppet he was taking over—as if, instead of talking to her, he was going to make her say the things that couldn’t come out of his own mouth. Of course, I hoped he would say something like, “I support my son no matter what his lifestyle is,” but I was afraid it was going to be more like “Maybe you and I can figure out how to fix him together,” so I went in the house instead. I kept my eye on them though. Watched through one window, then another, just as I’d watched my dad the day we first moved here. Living room, my bedroom, bathroom (I had to climb into the shower stall to keep them in my line of vision) then my dad’s room, where I kind of got distracted from what was going on outside by what was inside. The bed was unmade, the carpet hidden beneath a trampled layer of old clothes. Books and glasses in a roughly 1:3 ratio covered the dresser, and flies staggered drunkenly between the sticky bottoms of the latter.
    As I looked around the mess, I found myself wondering what Mrs. M. would think if she saw it. Take his pegboard. It covered one whole wall of the room. It was that nice dark-brown pegboard color, its soft, fuzzy-edged holes advancing left, right, diagonally from floor to ceiling and corner to corner. On this wall hung a tortoise-shell shoehorn with the address and phone number of
    ick’s
arber
hop
    printed in letters that had been worn away by who knows how many heels; a white rabbit’s foot keychain; an uninflated former helium balloon, yellow and wrinkled like a scrotum, that said
    HAPPY
BIRTHDAY
IRENE!
    when it was blown up; a burgundy graduation tassel (not my dad’s); six keys (three brass, two silver, one translucent green plastic); a sand dollar with a hole in the center; the top half of a crow’s skull; a plastic American flag about the size of a Dairy Queen napkin; a Dairy Queen napkin; three feathers (one is definitely a peacock’s and one is probly a crow’s, and I think the last one’s from the ostrich farm on 69th); a policeman’s badge (#26703) from one of the Greenvilles in one of the states in this great nation of ours; a SIM card with

BOB
    magic-markered onto it; a coupon for $5 off an oil change