My Jack Side

Chapter Six

7:00pm

    I've just kneaded my pillows and snuggled myself into bed long enough to start drifting off when my phone rings, but it's my father. I'm biting my bottom lip to resist the urge to sit the phone out . . . When I answer it, he says, “Why do you sound..? Are you okay?”

    “I'm okay.”

    “Come home, or do I come to you?” he says. “It is seven already.”

    And I know my life is temporarily over.

    It means death as I drop the phone off. Jack has just made himself known. Jack is my father, I think. I came out to whoever Jack is about being gay. My father will remember that.

    I'd once told Jack about my brother's sexual affair with an older woman. Never mind that the woman in question was my mom. There's no repair for that in sight, and I want to ignore the bells going off in my mind, ringing its warnings that I probably shouldn't be alone in a room with my father because he might actually hurt me, but my mind isn't exactly its sharpest right now at providing me any alternative plans.

    Either ways, I am dead. Fuck am I dead. I hadn't fucked with Jack, but Jack— the capricious, wily Jack of a bitch— had fucked with me and my life in return.

    My father is a man of Bic pens, striped jackets, and low sugar beer. He works for a high-tech co-op given to enforcing cyber security. He does not let anything that he thinks needs to be fixed go unfixed. I fear that I might be his latest project.

    His car arrives and for the duration of the car ride, the humming of the engine is the only sound we hear. No one speaks, and my mom is still except when we ride across potholes. Eka, right beside me in the back seat, hands me a towel and whispers “How far?”

    “I'm so sorry about earlier,” I whisper back, “and this crap apology.”

    “Don't give me that look,” she says.

    “What look?”

    “It's the old Deaconess's birthday and clearly Dad cannot wait till later to talk to you. We can meet up in church after you're done with him, whayasay?”

    But I am too distracted looking into the steering wheel, at my father's fidgeting fingers, to say anything. When she catches my line of sight she says rather loudly, “Don't worry, I didn't tell them. No bruises to prove it by anyway. This talk should have to do with something else you did wrong.”

    I don't know what game this is; said parents are an earshot away.

    In fifteen minutes, I have waved off my mother and Eka at the church. My mom stepped out of the car clutching parcels in ankara-printed wrapping paper, dropping them into Eka's extra large bag before she threw her arms around me from my open side of the door. Her withdrawal, slow and tearful as she speared me with a look of worry, one that had nothing to do with my apparent lack of fat.

    My mom and Eka are out of the way before it begins and I am grateful for that.