1 Chapter 1

It’s Saturday night, the first time I’ve sat down to dinner with my parents since the day after Christmas the year before, and I’m so nervous, I can’t eat the food on my plate. Pot roast and boiled potatoes, green beans, cornbread stuffing, everything looks so good but I can’t taste it. Dan sits to my right. Beneath the table, his knee rests against mine, a small comfort. Tonight I’ll lie beside him in my childhood bed and tell him how much worse this would’ve been if he hadn’t been there beside me. Already my hands ache to stroke over the bristles along the back of his head, and in the mirror that hangs above the credenza across from me, I admire his buzz cut, the top of his hair sheared dark. The Army keeps it that way. He looks up from something Caitlin is saying to look at my reflection and when our eyes meet, he winks at me.

Caitlin doesn’t catch the gesture. My sister, sixteen going on twenty-nine, wears more makeup than most drag queens. Her hair is dyed so dark, it absorbs the light, and silver earrings run up the length of both her ears. She wears nothing but black—black jeans with a pattern of studs along the cuffs, black shirts with ripped necklines, a black jacket with silver chains draped from one pocket around her back to the other. When I walked in the front door a few hours ago, I stared at the Goth girl who had taken over my little sister’s body, the pierced eyebrow, the pierced tongue that she stuck out at me from behind my mother’s back as I was hugged in greeting. “It’s Cat,” she said, before I could even say hello. She crossed her arms and glared as if daring me to touch her, and with a jerk of her head to indicate Dan, she asked, “Who’s soldier boy?”

It’s the hair, I’m telling you, people see it and just know a cut that bad has to be military-enforced. He didn’t wear anything overt, no ARMYsweatshirt, no fatigues, but he still looks every inch the soldier. It’s his muscular build: nice arms, thick thighs, a tapered waist and barrel chest, tight abs and a tighter ass that his jeans frame nicely. I could see my sister checking him out, despite her disinterested act. My lover,I should’ve said then. Everyone was there, both parents, Caitlin, my older brother Raymond, who for some reason still lives at home. I could’ve just answered her truthfully and gotten it out of the way. This is Daniel Biggs,I could’ve said. My boyfriend. Oh wait, you didn’t know?

Only it didn’t quite come out that way—I stumbled over the word roommateand my sister shrugged like she didn’t care. “Mom thought you were finally bringing home a girl,” she remarked, then turned and left. As she trotted up the steps to her bedroom, she called back over her shoulder, “I told her not to get her hopes up.”

At the time, my mother just laughed in that nervous way she has that is anything but funny. I expect I’ll hear that laugh again tonight, when I finally gather up my courage and spit out the reason why I’ve come home. The reflection I see in the mirror behind my parents bolsters me: it shows the man Dan must see when he looks my way, intelligent eyes behind small wire-thin glasses that give me a professional appearance, blonde highlights streaked through casual, wavy hair that frame my face in a boyishly attractive way. Confident, sure. In love. I can do this.

But when I look around the table, I feel my nerve slip away. My dad is on the other side of Caitlin, Cat, shoveling food into his mouth and glancing past me every few minutes to the television in the other room as if I’m invisible. Twenty-five and somehow when he looks through me like that, I’m all of eight again, racking my brains for a way to get his attention, good or bad, anything to prove that I exist. When he looked up the first time, I gave him a tight grin, sure he would ask about school or the firm, but he didn’t. I watch him closely, taking in his thinning salt-and-pepper hair, the deep lines on his face, his battered hands and dirty nails—he’s a mechanic, self-employed since the layoffs at the plant left him without a job, and already scowling from the few beers in his system. I’m afraid of what he’ll have to say when I tell him.

But to be honest, it’s my mom who scares me the most. She sits beside Dad with a smile plastered to her face, and she’s chattering about a girl she ran into at the grocery the other day, “Mary Margaret what’s-her-face, didn’t you go to school with her?” She nibbles at her food and laughs, pats her dyed orange hair like it might have somehow slipped out of place, then spears the beans on her plate with a vendetta. “She’s grown up pretty, that girl, and she’s unmarried, Michael. I told her you were coming in this weekend and she asked about you—”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Mom,” I mutter. From the sound of it, she has this Mary Margaret waiting in the kitchen with dessert.