Foreign Love

IX - Lemons

Chapter nine: Lemons

I left Dad and  Andrew behind to watch soccer and went to the kitchen to see if Mom needed any help with dinner.

I really don't get the point of watching men running after a ball if they're not naked, but I'm apparently one in two billion that like/watch soccer, so I'll just keep this opinion to myself.

"Hey, Mom," I said, but she was too distracted with the fish to notice my presence at first.

"Oh, Tom! You scared me," she said, laughing. The only person I know who laughs when scared. "Oh, since you're here, can you help me? I'll be making fish for tonight, but I can't clean it and squeeze lemons at the same time, so, please?" I nodded.

"I was going to ask if you needed me to help you, anyway," I said, opening the fridge to get the lemons.

"Well, you know what they say, great minds think alike," she said as I grabbed the squeezer. "A squeezer? Why don't you just use a blender? It's much faster."

"It's less tiring to wash later." She rolled her eyes, probably thinking how lazy her son was. She muttered a Do as you want and continued gutting the fish.

I cut the lemon, almost surgically, making sure to leave both halves as symmetrical as possible (I hate uneven things), then proceeded to squeeze it.

"So, Andrew, huh?" She asked.

Oh, no, another conversation that'll probably lead to me almost pushing myself out of the closet.

"Yeah, that's his name. What about him?"

"Nothing, he seems very nice. It's hard to see you with a guy friend. You usually spend more time with girls."

"I have more common subjects with girls to talk about. " Oh, Lord, did you even notice what you just said, Tom? "But that changed with Andrew."

"I'm glad it did," she said, smiling.

A few seconds passed and the only sounds that could be heard were the wet noise the lemon made while I rubbed it up and down through the squeezer and the knife hitting the wooden board when my mother brutally cut the fish's head off.

"He's good-looking too, isn't he?" Shit.

"He is. I mean, th-that's what I've heard the girls saying. C-cuz how would I know, right?" I answered, not convincingly enough.

"Ok, it was just a question. No need to get all defensive."

I nervously pressed the other half of the lemon too hard against the squeezer and a thick jet of lemon juice squirted towards me, ruining my shirt. "Dammit"

"Oh, God, I told you to use the blender, didn't I?" She exclaimed as I ran to get a rag to clean this up. "NO! The dishcloth is new!"

"Then how am I supposed to clean it?"

"Just throw your shirt in the basket with the other ones and go change. I'll finish your lemons," she said, kicking me out of the kitchen before I could drip more lemon juice on the freshly waxed kitchen floor.

Mom's not dumb; she'd got it all figured by then, so I was just postponing the obvious. I'd come out to her that night after Andrew left home.

To Dad too? Maybe...

No! If I am to come out, then it better be to both of them and at the same time.

They always stay up late watching anything on Netflix, so I'll use this as my opportunity to grab them both together to tell the news. Not good news, I know, but let's hope they aren't that bad either.