How To Be Straight

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CHAPTER 30

      [ Calvin ]

The last time I saw my father was on a Sunday and I still remembered the day's events like it was just yesterday.

My dad was the huge God freak in the family. My mother was religious, but not overly so, and I was only religious because he wanted me to be. Don't get me wrong, I believed there was a higher power of some sort, but how could I believe in a God that found me disgusting and abominable?

That Sunday afternoon, we had just gotten home from church and it had been a whole week since I came out to my parents. Granted, my father wasn't too fond of the idea of me being gay but my mom tried to talk him out of it. I thought it worked, but clearly it hadn't, because he hung his coat on the rack and announced, "I want to get a divorce."

We weren't expecting him to say something like that, but he wore a stone hard facial expression that told us he was beyond serious. After that, my parents told me to go to my room so they could "talk it out."

But they didn't. They only ended up arguing the whole day, and I sat behind the closed door with my ear pressed against it, listening to every insult they threw at each other. My father said he was going to sleep at his brother's house and that he would be back in the morning, but he never came back.

Two weeks later, the divorce papers came in the mail.

He made it very clear that he wanted nothing to do with us, so I found it ridiculously hard to believe that he was standing there right in front of me with a somewhat half-smile on his face. How could he look me in the eyes and smile after what he'd done to us?

"What are you doing here," I demanded. I figured if I laced my words with anger, he might realize how much of a jerk he was.

He scoffed. "I can't drop by to say hello?"

"No," I spat back at him. I could feel my body temperature starting to rise but there was no way I was going to break down now. Not in front of Derek. Not right after we did what we did.

He looked past me at Derek, who had conveniently taken a step away from me just so my father wouldn't get any ideas. "Derek? Wow! Look at you. You've grown up so much." His smile grew wider at the sight of him, which was probably because he would rather talk to Derek than to me.

Derek seemed reluctant to answer. He snuck a quick glance at me, hoping I would provide him with the answers.

"You can't do that," I snapped, bringing his attention back to mine. "You can't just walk out of our lives, get remarried and then decide to come back to say hello. You can't do that."

His pale grey eyes fixed on me and it felt as though he was looking at me for the first time, like he was really seeing me. I wasn't sure if my words had any effect on him, because he just kept staring at me with glazed over eyes. "Your grandmother told me what happened to Claire. Thought I'd come over to talk."

"No, she doesn't want to talk to you."

"Where is she?" he asked, anyway, despite what I had told him.

"She's not here."

"Oh." His gaze pulled away from mine and fell to the floor. "Well, I'll come back another time, then. Tell her I stopped by?" He raised an expectant brow at me and that only made my heart clench so tight that I thought it would burst.

"Are you serious?" My voice rose to a level that I hadn't even heard from myself before. "You divorced her. Why do you care all of a sudden?"