Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

drunken seal, the waning sun was copper-plating the surface of the bay. It was easy to forget that this sleepy inlet marked the exact location of the San Andreas Fault. Many eons earlier (as Anna had once explained to me) the earth had ripped open here, leaving only this shimmering, seductive scar.
    Shawna turned to me: “So…was my real mom a ho or what?”
    My jaw must have hit the sand. “Jesus, Shawna, what sort of question is that?”
    She shrugged her delicate nut-brown shoulders. “Just a regular one.”
    I felt like one of those big-bosomed matrons in The Three Stooges movies who were always huffing “Well, I never!” so I softened my tone to keep from losing the girl completely. “Let’s put it this way,” I told her. “If she was a ho, then I was one, too. And so was your dad, for that matter. Back in those days we were all a bit…”
    “Ho-ish,” she said, filling in the silence.
    I flicked sand at her blue-jeaned legs. “You just watch it.”
    “No, you do!” she said, flicking back and giggling. She could still be a little girl sometimes, and it never failed to melt my heart.
    The conversation ended when Brian came in from his swim, swaddling himself in an ancient Grateful Dead beach towel. Shawna offered him a sandwich from the picnic basket, then leaned against him as he ate it, commenting on the gulls that were wheeling above the bay. I envied them both at that moment, but mostly Shawna, for having a father with such a boundless capacity for love. What must that feel like? I wondered.

    There were footsteps in the hospital corridor, so I wrapped up as succinctly as possible.
    “Don’t worry about Shawna,” I said. “She’s yours for life.”
    “You think so, huh?”
    “I know so, Mr. Man.”
    “Okay, fine, but what if—”
    The curtains parted with a sudden swoosh to reveal a young male doctor of South Asian descent. He looked a lot like M. Night Shyamalan, I thought. “Okay,” he said as he consulted his clipboard. “What have we here?”
    I turned to Brian. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
    Brian chuckled.
    The doctor frowned in confusion. “I’m sorry, I—”
    “You must be straight,” I said, grinning.
    The doctor smiled sweetly. “Is that relevant?”
    “No, I was just…never mind…I’m sorry.”
    The doctor studied Brian’s foot for a moment, then asked him how it happened. “He fell into an abyss,” I explained.
    “Is this your partner?” the doctor asked Brian.
    Brian glanced at me and smirked. “Close enough,” he said.

19
    The Burning Question
    I t was almost dark and Ben and I were crammed into our galley kitchen, trying out a new recipe for brussels sprouts that a checkout guy at Trader Joe’s had shared with me. Neither one of us is a serious foodie—by anyone’s measure—so we tend to approach cooking with the peppy unprofessionalism of fifth-graders assigned a science project.
    “I’ll fry the pancetta,” said Ben, squeezing past me to the stove in a minuet we’d already perfected. “Do you know how to blanch?”
    That’s a wonderful setup line for a queer of my generation, but I squelched my inner Baby Jane for fear of wearing out her welcome. “It’s the same as steaming, right?”
    “Yeah…I think so.”
    I grabbed a saucepan and began to fill it under the tap. “This is gonna be so fucking good.”
    “I dunno,” said Ben, snipping the pancetta with the kitchen shears. “I’m not sure about the maple syrup.”
    “Why not?”
    “With brussels sprouts?”
    I’ve never been a fan of vegetables. To my way of thinking, there are very few of them that would not be hugely improved by the addition of bacon and syrup. Ben, on the other hand, likes his greens unadulterated. He munches them raw like a giraffe.
    “Don’t you think,” he said judiciously, “that the syrup might overwhelm the sprouts?”
    “I certainly hope so.”
    He grinned at me sideways, benignly disapproving, as he dropped the pancetta into a hot skillet. “How long do we bake it then?”
    “Ten or fifteen minutes, at least. Long enough for ’em to get all tender and syrupy.” I waggled my eyebrows in lascivious appreciation.
    That was when my cell phone rang. Rang off the hook, as they used to say, back when telephones sounded like my cell phone—noisy and demanding.
    I checked the readout and saw my brother’s name.
    “It’s Irwin,” I said, looking up at Ben. It was a sobering moment, to say the least, since we both knew