Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

this?”
    “Mama told me last week. Right after you left.”
    “Papa and Lenore ?”
    “Don’t make me say it again.” He reached for his scotch and drank half of it, then pushed the other glass toward me. “Keep me company.”
    I picked up the glass, took a swig, and set it down again.
    “Jesus,” I murmured.
    “Mikey—”
    “Sorry.” I hardly knew where to start. “When did this happen?”
    “Just before Papa died. Mama drove up to Deltona to spend the day at that big outlet store, but it was closed for some holiday…Martin Luther King or something…so she came back. She couldn’t find Papa at the house, so she went down to our place. They didn’t even lock the door. She found ’em in the family room.”
    “In flagrante?”
    Irwin flinched violently. “I don’t know how they were doing it.”
    I did my best not to smile. “I mean…they were actually in the midst of…?”
    “Yes sir. Yes they were.” Irwin just rocked for a while, his hands between his knees, like one of those plastic birds bobbing into a glass of water.
    “All righty,” I said, always ready with the brotherly wisdom.
    “Mama said they were buck naked.”
    I wanted to be the unhysterical one. I wanted to guide my brother rationally through the labyrinth of sex like enlightened queers are supposed to do. But I screwed up my face as if I’d just caught a whiff of a flaming cow pie.
    “Papa just hit the ceiling,” Irwin went on. “Throwin’ stuff all over the place. Like Mama was the one who’d done something wrong.”
    Wouldn’t he just? I thought.
    Irwin polished off the rest of his scotch. “And then he died.”
    “What?”
    “He had a heart attack. Right there in front of them.”
    “But he died of cancer.”
    “Cancer can cause heart attacks. The coroner just considered it…a complication.”
    “I’ll say. Was Papa still naked when the coroner arrived?”
    Irwin shook his head. “They got his clothes back on and put him on the sofa with the clicker.”
    “The clicker?”
    “Like he was watching TV when it happened.”
    “Jesus…sorry, sorry!”
    Irwin offered me a weary smile. “You’re entitled.”
    “In that case, Jesus H. Christ! How the hell did Mama make it through the funeral? She looked so…composed.”
    “I guess she was kinda in shock. She said she prayed a lot.”
    “Did that help?”
    Irwin scowled at my sacrilege.
    “It’s people who have to be good to us, Irwin. Not God.”
    “You think I don’t know that?”
    I apologized for the preachiness—the last thing he needed right now. Still, I couldn’t help thinking how biblical the whole thing sounded. All that begetting and begatting among kinfolk. Not to mention those wailing women dressing the dead patriarch.
    “Where were you?” I asked.
    “Out showin’ a house. By the time I got home, Papa was already at the funeral parlor.”
    “And Mama and Lenore had worked out their story.”
    “Yep.”
    We just sat there for a moment, silent as men, working out our own story, each in his own way. “It’s just so…pathetic,” I said finally.
    “What?”
    “That Mama just buried it all these years. She never had closure of any kind.”
    “She didn’t want folks to know. She didn’t want me to know. And Lenore sure as hell didn’t want me to know. Mama was pretty much stuck, I reckon. So they drove up to Georgia after the funeral and got born again where nobody would know ’em.”
    “I’m sorry… who did?”
    “Mama and Lenore. The preacher baptized ’em both. One after the other. Little church on the highway. One o’ those aboveground pools.”
    “Did you know about this at the time?”
    “Sure.”
    “And that didn’t strike you as strange?”
    Irwin shrugged. “Mama said the womenfolk had to grieve on their own. And Lenore was a Presbyterian, so she’d never been born again. I just reckoned Mama was killin’ two birds with one stone. So I stayed home and took Kimberly to Disney World.”
    Poor Mama, I thought, living with this gothic shit for almost twenty years, protecting Irwin’s heart at any cost, while Papa got off scot-free and Lenore grew more and more sanctimonious with guilt. No wonder Lenore had been so solicitous of Mama. And no wonder my unapologetic homosexuality became their mutual obsession; it was something they could fix together, a sin that, unlike Papa’s, could still be eradicated.
    “So why did she change her mind?”
    “Who?”
    “Mama. Why did she spill the beans now?”
    “Her