Promise Rock 03 - Living Promises (MM) Read Online Free PDF Page A

longer in med school, and that his career goals had changed, and sometimes, he would even have to remind her that he was gay, and he wasn't going to be looking for a nice girl to settle down with. Lillian would always laugh then (as Archie, her husband, had not) and say, “You know, Jeffy, you think your father and I would have figured that out, right?”
    But not today. Today, she asked him how he was feeling and if the doctors were sure he was going to be okay, and then she asked him about Constantine, the big sloth, and today, she even remembered Katherine the Great, the Maine Coon cat that his friend Shane had given him for his birthday this year, only about a month late because Shane had been recovering from broken ribs (big dumbfuck ex-cop) and hadn't been able to get Jeff what he'd had in mind all along. Jeff had tried to protest that he didn't need another cat-mountain in his condo, but Shane knew his cats. This one was large, even as a kitten, drooled a lot, and went completely limp as soon as you picked it up. It was even calico, and all that long calico hair was just so pretty , and Jeff had been charmed immediately.
    “Katy and Con are fine, Mama,” Jeff told her now. “Katy still hasn't stopped drooling when she sleeps—it's just so sad! She lays there with her head sideways and her tongue lolling out! I mean, if I'd wanted a cat who did that, I would have bought a boxer, right?”
    Mama laughed, and Jeff counted that as a score for his side. Anytime Lillian Beachum laughed, that was one for the angels.
And then the angels wept.
“So, Jeff, when are you going to visit me? I don't see anyone anymore! Your father was here this weekend, but Barry's always so busy with his job, and I haven't seen you since… well, I can't remember when!”
Jeff took a careful breath in and out of his nose. “I'll try to make some time next week, Mama,” he lied. He would—if his father wasn't standing guard over her like a pit bull, afraid he was going to spread the gay. Like gay was any worse than Alzheimer's, right?
“Are you still worried about your father?” she asked innocuously. “Oh, honey, he'll get over it. You can't be as proud as he was of you and think a little thing like who you kiss is going to get in the way!”
Except he had. Jeff's father had let a little thing like that get in the way. And then he'd gotten in the way of Jeff and his entire family. Jeff's older brother, his mother, aunts, uncles, cousins—he'd been part of a collective in Coloma, dammit! He'd been surrounded by Beachums and Porters and Martels and Beauforts, and then, the summer before his freshman year in school, before his free ride thanks to a swim-team scholarship and top-notch grades, Jeff thought he'd tell his family, the closest, inner core of his family, who he really was.
And he'd lost all of them, inner family, outer family, just plain family , forever. His mother's phone calls had started getting vague about six months after that. Not long into Jeff's junior year in college, he'd had to do some quick talking around nurses who had been coming to take care of her. One of them had taken pity on him and arranged the talks he had now.
And some days Mom remembered that her youngest wasn't invited home, and some days she didn't.
“Well, Mom, as long as you know that I wish I was kissing you on the cheek right now, okay? Now give the phone to Becky—I want to get a picture of you.”
He did this every so often—and he sent Becky one of himself. Sometimes his mother was stunned at how old he looked. Sometimes she remembered that he was in his thirties. Either way, he made prints of the pictures he got back and kept a progression of his mother, almost as if he'd been allowed to visit her for the last eleven, twelve years.
“Bye, sweetheart,” his mother's voice quavered over the phone. “I love you.”
“Bye, Mama,” he said back, locking that steel cage around his heart so it wouldn't break. “I love you too.”
His mother