Slightly Single. Wendy Markham
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beer? Now?” Surprised, I look up at him. Then I check my watch—as if it matters. As if there’s a cutoff time for beer on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Manhattan.
“Or…do you have to be someplace?”
“No!” I say too quickly. Because I really want that beer. It beats the hell out of taking the subway back to my lonely apartment while thinking of Will uptown, packing his boxes.
“Great. So let’s get a beer.”
I pull on my rain slicker. It’s one of those doofy shiny yellow touristy ones, and it makes me look as wide as a big old school bus from behind. I’d worry about that if I were with Will—in fact, I was doing just that earlier, when he and I left the restaurant—but naturally, I don’t have to worry with Buckley. That’s the nice thing about having gay guys as friends. You get male companionship without the female competitive PMS angle and without the whole messy sexual attraction issue.
“Where should we go?” Buckley asks.
“I know a good pub a block from here,” I tell him. “I spend a lot of time in this neighborhood.”
“So do I.”
“You do?”
“Actually, I live here.”
“Really? Where?”
“Fifty-fourth off Broadway.”
“No kidding.”
“You live here, too?”
“No, I live in the East Village.”
“Really? Then why’d you want to meet way up here?”
I don’t want to get into the whole Will thing, so I just say, “I had an errand to run up here earlier, so I thought it made sense. So do you have someplace you want to go? Since this is your neighborhood…”
“No, let’s try your place. I’m always up for something new. Hey, I’m spontaneous, remember?”
I grin at him, and note that he’s wearing another crewneck sweater with his jeans. “I see you went with the beige today.”
“What can I say? It was a beige kind of day. Apparently, you beg to differ. Do you always wear black?” he asks, eyeing my outfit.
Black jeans. A black long-sleeved tunic-jersey-type shirt that camouflages my thighs—or so I like to think.
“Always,” I tell him.
“Any particular reason?”
“It’s slimming,” I say promptly, and he grins.
“And here I thought you were trying to make some kind of political or artistic or spiritual statement.”
“Me? Nope, I’m just a full-figured gal trying to pass for a waif.”
We splash out into the rain and cross the street against the light. Two minutes later, we’re sitting on barstools at Frieda’s, this semi-cool dive Will and I come to sometimes. They have awesome potato skins with cheddar and bacon, a fact I mention to Buckley pretty much the moment we sit down.
“You want to order some?” he asks.
“After all that popcorn?”
“You’re too full?”
“See, Buckley, that’s the thing. I’m never full. I could eat all day long. I’m always up for some potato skins. Hence the flab.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Tracey. It’s not like you’re obese.”
“You’re sweet.” Too bad he’s gay. “So tell me about your failed relationship.”
“Do I have to?”
“Nah. Not if you don’t want to. We can talk about something more upbeat. Like…where are you from?”
“Long Island.”
“You’re from Long Island?”
He nods. “Why do you look so surprised?”
“You just don’t have that Lo-awn Guyland thing going on. You know…the accent. You don’t have one.”
“You do,” he says with a grin. “Upstate, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“The flat a gives you away. You said ay-ack-sent. So where are you from?”
“You never heard of it. Brookside.”
“I’ve heard of it. There’s a state college there, right?”
“Right.”
“I thought about going there.”
“You’re kidding. Why?”
“Because it was as far away from Long Island as I could go and still be at a state school. My parents couldn’t afford private college tuition and I didn’t get any scholarships.”
“Really?”
“Why are you surprised?”
“Because…I don’t know. You just seem like the studious type.”
He grins. “Trust me, I wasn’t. With my grades, I barely made it into a state school.”
That really is surprising, for some reason. He just seems like the type of person who would do everything well. I like knowing he was just an average student, like I was. It doesn’t mean he isn’t smart, because I can tell that he is.
“So where’d you end up going to college?” I ask him.
“SUNY Stony Brook. I wound up staying on the island and living at home.”
“Why?”
I catch a fleeting glimpse of unexpected emotion in his expression. When he speaks, I understand why, but his face is carefully neutral. “My dad died the summer after I graduated from high school. I couldn’t go away and leave my mom and my sister and brother on their own. So I stayed home.” He says it like it’s no big deal, but I can tell that it is. Or was.
“I’m really sorry about your dad.”
“It was a long time ago.” He bends over and ties his shoe, his foot propped on the bottom rung of his barstool. I wonder if the lace was untied, or if he just needed a distraction.
“Yeah,” I say, “but that’s not something that goes away, is it?”
He straightens and looks me in the eye. “Not really. Sometimes it’s still hard when I let myself dwell on it. Which I usually don’t do.”
“I didn’t mean to bring it up.”
“You didn’t know. And anyway, it’s okay. I don’t mind talking about it.”
I don’t know what else to say, so I ask, “What happened? To your dad, I mean.”
“He had been having stomach pains, and when he finally went to the doctor, they found out it was pancreatic cancer. By the time they found it, it was too late—it had spread everywhere. They gave him six weeks. He died five weeks and five days later.”
“God.” I see tears in his eyes and feel a lump rising in my throat. Here I am, wanting to burst into tears for the loss of somebody I never even met—the father of this guy I barely know.
“I know. It was horrible,” Buckley says. He takes a deep breath, then sighs. “But like I said, it was a long time ago. My mom is finally getting over it. She even went out on a date a few weeks ago.”
“Her first date?”
“Yeah.”
I try to imagine my mother going on a date, and it’s all I can do not to shudder. But then, maybe Buckley’s mother isn’t a