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Yep, my family is all about the emotions. Yeah, not.
“To be fair, he never mentioned—” I began.
My father whipped his glass against the far wall, the shatter of fine crystal startling me so badly that I squeaked. Wine coated the oil painting of a Tuscan village overlooking a small blue lake. One of our many farms in Italy, I assumed. The red liquid ran down the wall onto the stone mantle over the fireplace, dripping onto the hardwood floor. I stared at that puddle of wine in shock, jerking madly when my father took me by the shoulders and shook me. Not hard enough to cause whiplash but soundly enough to get my attention.
“What is wrong with you?” he asked once more, his usually light accent growing thicker as he grew angrier. “Why do you do these things?!”
“He had a nice dick,” I parried with, unable to register this passionate man with the automaton that I had known for the past fourteen years.
His fingers bit into my shoulders. Then he released me, giving me a sharp push away. My shoulders thumped into the upholstered armchair, my held breath rushing out.
“That is disgusting,” he spat and then spun on his heel, his hands raking through his hair as he began to pace the office. “Why do you say such things? I do not understand you, Arlo. I have given you everything a boy could have wanted.” He went to the bar, stared at the wine, and then fell back into stalking me like a tiger. “You had the best clothes, the best toys, the best nannies, the best cars, and the best homes. I made sure you went to the best college money could buy here in the States since you refused to attend LUISS in Rome as I did. You spent six months at Harvard, dropped out, came home, and drove your car into a lake. Why?! Why do you do such things? What is wrong with you? I do not understand why you seek to humiliate this family as you do. I was accepting of you as a homosexual when you announced you wished to be one.”
“It’s not a thing you want to be, Dad. You’re born gay.” I had to say it because if I heard that line once, I’d heard it a thousand times. And the fact that he was still saying it showed me that he cared nothing about learning anything about my queerness, or me.
His nostrils flared. “Whatever the case, Arlo, I have done all that I could to try to gently lead you along in life as your mother asked. Now this is what I get for being giving?” He waved a shaking hand at the pile of newspapers on his desk. “A Supreme Court justice is calling me and demanding I do something. His robe’s in a knot as if I had any control over his son or mine.”
“We’re all adults. It’s not like I was molesting kids like all those—”
He raised a finger and jabbed it at me. “Do not bring the church into this, Arlo, you know better.”
I bit back something snide. My father, for all his faults, had drawn back from attending mass after learning that all men of the cloth weren’t paragons. He inhaled so deeply that his shirt stretched over his chest. Where the hell was Maria with my vodka and Red Bull? If ever I needed something to refill my courage vats and give me a rush, it was now. I could sense something dark on the horizon…
“It’s not all that bad, really. That justice’s son is now out and able to live his true life,” I said, hoping it would shift some of the man’s rage from me. And it was true. “In a way, what’s his face and his father should be thanking me for getting him out of the closet.” My father gaped at me. “What?”
“It’s not that bad he says,” Dad murmured to the portrait of my mother resting on the wall above the bar. I hated it when he spoke to that oil painting. It made me feel little and stupid, unfitting of my mother’s soft smile or the kindness in her toffee eyes. “Lynette, forgive me for what I am about to do.”
I ripped my gaze from the portrait of Mom in healthier times, her skin pale as a swan’s plumage, her light brown hair glowing with natural baby highlights pulled up atop her head as she sat in her flower garden, her hands on her lap.
I leapt to my feet, sure that my father was about to throw me out the window. His sight veered from Mom to me, his face now calm, the fire in his umber eyes gone. Tommaso the ice lord had returned. Hands fisted at my sides, heart thumping under my corset, I watched him return to his seat and gently push the tabloids and weekly papers aside. Okay, cool. Being flung into the flowering crab trees down below wasn’t going to happen. A shaky breath passed over my dry lips.
Dad nodded to himself, looked up, and speared me with that emotionless stare. “You are one year away from being able to manage the trust fund your mother and I have set up for you.”
I knew that. Hell, I lived for that birthday. No more having to kowtow to my father or Henry Lancaster, the bank trustee that my parents had given far too much power to for my liking. One more year. July fourth. Then I could dive into an Olympic-sized pool of cash. I planned to drain our pool out back and fill it with crisp hundred dollar bills and tons of gold coins, then belly flop into it ala Scrooge McDuck. Yep, just three hundred sixty-four days.
“I know,” I replied as I dreamed of the yoke being lifted from my shoulders. Oh the parties I could throw. No one to say shit to me about what I did or how I squandered. Bliss. “I’ve got Independence Day written on next year’s calendar, so I don’t get too drunk to forget that on that glorious day I shall finally be free of your tyranny.”
The flash of pain on his face felt good. For a second. I began humming “Raise a Glass to Freedom” from Hamilton to ease the guilt.
“I never saw myself as a tyrant, only a father trying to connect with his son,” Dad replied so softly the slide of the sheers on the window nearly covered his words. I winced internally, all humming stopped. “But I can see that you do. That is a shame, Arlo, but it changes nothing. I vowed to your mother as she moved from this realm that I would do what was right by you and so to that end, I am sending you to your great-aunts for a year.”
My mouth fell open. Like, literally, my jaw unhinged like an anaconda. Sadly, no lyrics from Nicki Minaj accompanied my gape.
“What? You can’t make me go to Italy or spend time with that old bitch!” I shouted down at him. He blinked once. That was the extent of his response to my outburst. If not for the wine soaking into the imported Positano area rug in front of the hearth, I would swear I was conversing with a robot.
“Your great-aunt is not a bitch. She is a regal woman, a pious soul who is a scion of her community. She knows more about our holdings in Italy than anyone other than me, and she is firm but fair. She raised me when your grandparents and my sister were killed in that accident. I think she did a good job of training me to take over the company as well as ensuring that I was a fit man to carry on her family name in a manner that she could be proud of.”
“Unlike me who is a flouncy little faggot,” I flung at him.
“I did not use that word, you did, and I wish you would not. I find it offensive.”
“Yeah, well, tough. We’re reclaiming it. Also, Aunt Ginerva is a wicked old twat and I am not going to spend a day in fucking Italy listening to her tell me to toughen up and stop crying. My fucking mother had just died!”
Dad stared at me openly as if hearing this for the first time. Though he probably was, for I had never mentioned that graveside bullshit to anyone and I highly doubted old Ginerva would have mentioned it.
“That was many years ago, Arlo. You were a child and misunderstood her meaning, I am sure.”
“Nope, no misunderstanding from hearing someone tell you to stop crying as they lower the only person on this planet who really understood you into a muddy pit.”
