I coughed as I took a step back. His hand dropped from my face. “Yes. No. Uh. Thanks.” I looked through the sliding door over his shoulder. Sandy and Paul were standing with the others at the grill. They had abandoned me, the traitors.
“Your makeup is a little smudged,” Jeremy said, squinting at my face.
Great. Fantastic. Between my bloodshot eye and smeared mascara, I probably looked like I’d been crying. Wonderful. This was going so well.
“I’ll fix it later,” I muttered as I turned back toward the sink.
Instead of being an asshole like the others, he stood next to me, holding up the hand towel. “You wash, I’ll dry?”
“That’s what the dishwasher is for. I’m just scrubbing the gunk off before putting them in.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, but there’s something about doing the dishes that’s… I don’t know. Calming, I guess. I used to do it with my mom.”
That… was unexpected. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought about that. Of course Jeremy had a mother, but given Charlie’s relationship with Robert, it hadn’t crossed my mind. I didn’t know if Robert was bisexual or pan or what, but something had to have happened. “You would think chores are calming.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I suppose I would.”
Was it my place to ask? We were friends, right? I put another plate into the soapy water as I tried to figure out how to broach the subject. I needed to be polite. I needed to be empathetic. I could do this. “You have a mom?”
Goddammit.
“I did,” he said as if I hadn’t just asked the most ridiculous question. “She was pretty great. She was a teacher. Middle school.”
Past tense. She was pretty great. She was a teacher. Made sense, since she didn’t seem to be around. “Oh. I’m… sorry.”
“For what?” he asked.
I scrubbed the plate, refusing to look at him. “She’s not here anymore, right?”
“She’s not. She died when I was eight. Aneurysm. Here one moment, gone the next. It was fast, and she didn’t suffer. Or so I was told. Like a light burning out.”
“That… sucks.” Jesus Christ, how the hell did I forget how to be human? “I mean, you were so young and all.”
“I was,” he agreed. “And it did suck for a long time. But I had Dad, and he took care of me after.”
I hesitated. “I didn’t know he was married. Did he come out after, or…?”
Jeremy snorted. “No. Dad’s always been… Dad. And they weren’t married. He was her best friend. He’s not my real father.”
I looked over at him, shocked. “What?”
He took the plate from my hands, running it under the tap before starting to dry it. “I didn’t tell you this?”
“No,” I said slowly. “I think I would have remembered.”
“Oh,” he said. “It’s not… I don’t know. I guess it’s been so long that I don’t really think about it. My mom, I do. I think about her all the time. She was this light.” He smiled as he set the plate on the stack I started on the counter. “Fierce and bright and funny. I was an accident, and her boyfriend wanted her to get an abortion. She didn’t. He left. She used to tell me that I couldn’t be mad at him for that. He made his choice. They were young. She was angry, but she never let it transfer to me. I met him once.” He shook his head. “It was enough.”
“Robert adopted you?” I glanced out the window and saw Charlie standing next to Robert, who was still seated. Charlie had a hand on his shoulder, and Robert had reached up to entwine their fingers.
Jeremy nodded. “Right away. Mom made it clear in her will that she wanted him to be my guardian in the event something happened to her. He’d… always been there. I knew he wasn’t my father. I wished all the time that he could be. I asked them why they didn’t get married. Why they couldn’t be together. He lived with us, and we were happiest when it was the three of us. Mom told me that they couldn’t get married, that she and Robert didn’t love each other like that. That it was more than romantic love and she’d explain when I got older.”
“And you were okay with it?”
He looked chagrined. “Not at first. I thought they were being stupid. It would be so easy. It wasn’t until Robert sat me down when I was eleven that I understood.” He sighed. “There wasn’t any question of who I’d be with after she died. We stayed in the same house. It was hard at first, because she was everywhere. In the walls, in the kitchen. I was convinced for years that she was a ghost and that she was watching over the both of us. It made things easier. Dumb, right?”
“I don’t think it is,” I said quietly. “Maybe she was.”
He glanced at me before looking back down at the sink. “Maybe. But Robert never let me drown in my grief. Looking back, I could see how his own grief was sharp and loud, but he fought it back so he could focus on me.” He splashed his hands in the water. “A couple of years after she died, I told him since he’d adopted me, he was my dad, and I was going to call him that.”