Tales of the City 06 - Sure of You

him.
    “Why don’t you run a hot tub and relax?”

    Michael did so for half an hour. He was changing into his nightshirt when the phone rang.
    “Hello.”
    “It’s me, Mikey.”
    “Oh…hey, Mama.” He collapsed on the bed and slipped into his mother mode.
    “I hadn’t heard for a while, so…” She stopped there, as she always did. He had never known her to finish this sentence.
    “I’ve been really busy. I’m sorry.”
    “I left a message on your machine.”
    “I know,” he said.
    “Didn’t Thack tell you…?”
    “Yeah. I just forgot. I’ve had a lot on my mind. How are you?”
    “Oh…can’t complain.”
    “Well, that’s good.”
    “How are you feeling?”
    “O.K. I seem to be responding to the AZT. My T-cells are holding steady.”
    She was quiet for a moment. “Now which are they?”
    He’d expected this, but he was still annoyed. “Mama, did you get the pamphlet I sent you?”
    “I got it. It’s mighty confusing, though.”
    “Right.”
    A long silence. “You haven’t got it, though, have you?”
    “No, Mama,” he explained one more time. “I have the virus. I’m O.K. now, but I could get it eventually. I probably will.” God, how he hated this “it” talk. How could he ever explain to her that he had had “it”—or it had had him—from the very moment he learned of Jon’s diagnosis, over seven years earlier? Most people thought you got this thing and died. In truth, you got this thing and waited.
    “Well…I think you should be positive about it.”
    How like her not to know that she’d made a pun. “I am, Mama.”
    “Your daddy’s worrying killed him, sure as I’m sitting here. More than that cancer ever did.”
    “I know,” he said. “I know you think that.”
    “I just can’t help thinking if you found yourself a nice church, with a pastor you liked…”
    It never took her long to get back to this. “Mama.”
    “O.K. Never mind. I’ve had my say.”
    “Good.”
    Thack passed through the room naked, bound for the tub with a bottle of Crabtree & Evelyn bath gel. “Is that Alice?” he asked.
    Michael nodded.
    “Tell her I said hey.”
    “Thack says hey,” Michael told his mother.
    “Well, tell him hey back.”
    “Hey back,” he told Thack.
    Thack leaned over the bed and sucked Michael’s big toe. Michael yanked his foot away and tried to slap Thack’s butt, but his lover dodged the blow and gamboled off to the bathtub, laughing under his breath.
    “So what have you been up to?” he asked his mother.
    “Well…me and Etta Norris went to the new multiplex and saw that movie with Bette Midler you told me about.”
    “Oh, yeah? What did you think?”
    “I liked her.”
    “I told you.”
    “I guess I didn’t like her near as much as Etta. She like to laughed herself silly.”
    “Michael hollered into the bathroom, where Thack was splashing about like some creature at Marine World. “She likes Bette Midler.”
    Thack laughed.
    “What was that?”
    “Nothing, Mama. I just told Thack you like Bette Midler.”
    Thack yelled back. “I knew this would happen when they fucked up the ozone layer.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Nothing important, Mama.”
    “Listen, Mikey, they finally put in Papa’s tombstone last week. It looks real nice.”
    “Well…good.”
    “I took some pictures of it, so you can see.”
    For a moment all he could picture was the floral arrangement that had stopped him short at his father’s funeral the year before. Some doting, Bible-toting aunt from Pensacola had sent it, and his mother had displayed it proudly—and conspicuously—at the funeral chapel.
    A bed of white carnations formed the backdrop for a child’s toy telephone, also white. JESUS CALLED was written across the top in fat, glittered letters. Down below, it said: AND HERB ANSWERED . To Michael’s dismay, no one else there that day—not even his younger cousins—had found the slightest humor in this. He had ended up calling Thack from a neighboring Taco Bell, just to laugh with someone about it.
    He tried, and failed, to picture his mother’s idea of a “nice” tombstone. “I’m glad it turned out,” he told her.
    “It’s so pretty there.”
    Apparently she meant the cemetery.
    “Your papa was a smart man to buy that plot. You know they’re so expensive now you can’t hardly afford ’em at all.”
    “That’s what I hear.”
    “And he made sure there was room enough for the whole family.”
    For her, this was subtlety. Not to