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“It’s like you don’t even know me at all!” Normally David would try to contain his voice and his gestures better than this when Patrick’s ringing up a customer, but it’s only Roland. He doesn’t count. “I don’t understand children.”
“He really doesn’t,” Roland chimes in. David’s caught between feeling annoyed at this intrusion into a clearly private conversation and feeling vindicated about being agreed with. “Last week he advised Rollie to switch his signature color from blue to green.”
Annoyed, then. Definitely. What David had actually told Roland’s offspring was that he should avoid jewel tones, and sue him for noticing that the kid’s parents were forcing an Autumn to wear the hand-me-downs of his Winter older brother and trying to help.
“Okay, thanks so much,” David says because he can’t get into it again; it was bad enough the first time. He turns back to Patrick. “Congratulations, Roland knows your husband better than you do. Roland.”
Maddeningly, Patrick doesn’t react to this observation at all, just slips a receipt into Roland’s Rose Apothecary tote and hands it back to him like this is a defeat he’s willing to take in stride. David feels himself winding up toward exasperation about this, until he stops to consider that maybe that’s what Patrick’s aiming for with this non-reaction. David scrambles to fling himself in the direction of a different emotion so as not to give his husband the satisfaction. What do un-exasperated hands look like again? Something about the fingers being–
“You may not understand kids, but Jayson understands you,” Patrick says, and oh, he’s not playing whatever five-dimensional troll chess David had assumed he was. He just wants to stay on the topic at hand. That’s fair. “David, he looks up to you. He imitates everything you do. It would mean a lot to him if his Christmas gift came from you.”
“Can’t we just say the gift came from me, though? Isn’t this whole holiday about lying to children?”
“When I tried that last year, you got very upset that I signed your name to something you didn’t pick out.”
“Well, maybe if you’d given him something other than Horrifying Reptilian Oral Surgery: The Game–”
“Crocodile Dentist is a classic.”
“It bites.”
A smile flashes across Patrick’s face like lightning, which means the thunder of some dirty joke is close behind.
“Wait, catch me up. Who’s Jayson?”
Unfortunately, Roland never seems to leave the store until he’s forced out, so whatever Patrick had been about to say about biting will have to be revisited later.
“Jayson’s my godson,” replies Patrick, always proud to talk about his cousin Jay’s son. (David will never not hate what they did there.) “We’re spending Christmas with his family this year. The rest of my relatives are flying to Newfoundland to be with my great aunt, but we couldn’t get away from the store that long and Jayson’s mom Rebecca is grounded for her third trimester–”
Roland, who’d obviously stopped listening after the word “godson,” launches into a truly terrible Marlon Brando impression, then lies when they guess that the movie he’s quoting is The Godfather, which doesn’t make any goddamn sense. David pretends to listen to the reprimand about how he and his father really ought to familiarize themselves with Brando’s filmography just long enough to lead Roland to the door and shut it behind him. He reaches for the deadbolt, too, but Patrick reminds him it’s only ten in the morning.
“So…” David spins on one heel, already plotting the conversational path back to biting.
“So if you don’t think you’re up for getting Jayson a gift, that’s fine,” Patrick says with a shrug. “But I guess you’ll have to forfeit your title of Ultimate Gift Giver.”
David’s jaw drops even as his husband’s expression stays precisely neutral, and nope. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Patrick is the one with the exploitable competitive streak. An objection to this line of attack twists and turns in David’s throat before it dead ends in surrender.
“Fine,” he says.
“Great!” Patrick grins. “I know of a toy store a couple of towns over where you’ll be able to find something. We can head there after close today.”
“Fine,” David says again, really hitting the F this time.
***
“You know what I want to give Jayson for Christmas?” David says when they’ve been on the road for about twenty minutes.
“Hmm?”
“Some white-out. For his birth certificate.”
“David.”
“No, okay? I tried to keep this opinion to myself, but then at Thanksgiving your Uncle Gary told me he named Jay after a baseball team. A baseball team, Patrick. Your family needs a naming intervention.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is this a genetic failing, do you think? You’re very lucky I saved you from the embarrassment of naming kids. Your firstborn would probably have been Maple Leaf Brewer or something.”
“Come on, Maple Leaf is a ridiculous name for a child. It’d have to be two children. Twins. Maple for the girl, and Leafs for the boy.”
“I’m sorry, Leafssss? With an S?”
“Have to respect the brand, David.”
“Would his middle name be Typo?”
“No, but now I’m saving that one for our dog.”
“Oh my god, you’re a nightmare. Why are you laughing?”
“I’m just thinking about what Ted would say if we brought him a puppy named Typo to fix.”
“If you start making puns I will turn this car right around,” David says, even though he’s not the one driving. He can tell Patrick knows he means it.
***
Main Street in Elm Ridge (where are all these elm trees he’s been promised, David would like to know) is quick and quaint. With its full block of glass-fronted shops and what appears to be two whole restaurants, it looks like what Schitt’s Creek wants to be when it grows up.
Patrick parks and leads them across the street to a door with “Playcraft” stenciled on it in a surprisingly grown-up font. The wooden sign hanging above their heads has the same word carved into it, possibly by hand. Why anyone would go to so much trouble to class up a toy store is beyond David. He tugs the door open and braces his ears for the inevitable onslaught of battery-powered noises, Kidz Bop Christmas music, and general shrieking.
But the first thing he hears is a harp. It’s playing “The Holly and The Ivy,” which is the favorite Christmas carol David always claims not to have. A quick scan of the surrounding shelves reveals a silent assortment of books, wooden animals, stuffed dolls with yarn hair and soft expressions. Nothing with an obvious power switch. Not to mention it smells incredible, like cloves and orange.
“Oh,” David says, and he feels the brag of Patrick’s hand at the small of his back.
The children are somehow the last thing David notices, even though they’re making noise, too. Two girls sprawled on pillows by the books are using their respective finger puppet armies to wage some kind of battle. It’s—and this is not something David’s used to thinking about non-silent non-adults or simulated warfare—sweet.
He traces the sound of the music back to a woman in a wooden rocker by the checkout counter. She’s young like him but with striking, prematurely salt-and-pepper hair. (David once dated a painter in New York who spent three hours and $300 a month in a Williamsburg salon to imitate this look; nothing compares to the real deal.) The harp she’s playing is stretched across her lap, not standing up, and he wonders if it’s still called a harp.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” she says, touching her fingers to the strings to still them. “Can I help you find something?”
Patrick’s hand becomes more insistent against David’s lower back, pushing him one step forward, then another. Part of David wonders what the hand will do if he refuses to take the hint, but he figures if the girls with their finger puppets can manage not to be brats, he probably should too.
“Um. We’re looking for a gift for uh…” David struggles to find the most succinct way of describing who Jayson is to him. “My husband’s godson?”
If this is an unusual person to be shopping for, her smile doesn’t give it away. “How old?”
“Oh, I don’t… I’m not…” David flounders. He reaches back toward Patrick as if his husband is going to literally hand over this information.
“David. You know how old Jayson is.”
David really doesn’t. Age is a concept he doesn’t like thinking about, for himself or anyone else. Most people consider it a kindness.
“Twelve?” he guesses.
“David,” Patrick says again, giving it an entirely different flavor. “We got married four years ago. Did Jayson seem eight years old at our wedding?”
Jayson had been walking at their wedding, but unable to grasp basic concepts like “look at the camera” without a lot of coaching and bribing. Whatever age that was, he’s now plus four, so...
“Okay, this is starting to feel like math? And I didn’t sign up for that.” David flutters a hand down onto Patrick’s shoulder and turns back to the gray-haired woman. “He’s the numbers guy in this marriage.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize a marriage needed one of those.” The woman sets her harp on the counter and stands up. “I’ll have to start saving up to send my husband to night school.”
It’s the way she says this—entirely for herself, not at all interested in whether or how they’ll react to it—that makes David want to say something like, I think you’re funny. He fights the impulse, because the last time he said it he ended up with a best friend he’s also gotten naked with, and that kind of complicated relationship dynamic is a young man’s game. A younger man’s game.
Anyway. What were they just talking about?
“Jayson turned seven in October,” Patrick says, and right. You could always count on him to remember.
“Such a fun age,” the woman says, and unlike every other person David has heard say this, she actually backs up her argument with proof. “So many opportunities for open-ended play. Here, look.”
They follow her to a table set against the opposite wall, which holds several towers of wooden blocks in all the colors of the rainbow.
“A lot of people think these are baby toys,” she says, “but creative building with modular materials is great for any age. I think of them like handcrafted LEGO that won’t kill my feet or my vacuum.”
David picks up one of the purple cubes and it settles against his palm like it knows it was made for holding. He wants to put another block beside it, but can’t decide on a color; they would all look so good. Everything looks so good beside everything in this store—the felted woodland creatures beside the knotted jump ropes beside the watercolor paint sets beside the solid-wood dollhouse furniture.
Somehow, David has never really missed having a childhood until this moment, when he realizes it could’ve had an aesthetic.
“David,” Patrick says, gently this time. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what…” David falters, unable to even articulate what he doesn’t know, such is the depth of his not-knowing. He feels Patrick grasp his shoulder with one hand, grasp the other shoulder with the other hand, and then they’re face-to-face, looking at each other.
“What did you like playing with when you were seven? I think Jayson might like that.”
Sometimes it takes a while for David to really hear what Patrick is saying, and this is one of those times. The thing he’d said earlier—he looks up to you; he imitates everything you do—was a single point, and this is another. Drawing a line between them, David starts to see the shape of Patrick’s thinking. “You think he might be–?”
Patrick cuts him off with a shake of his head, but what he says next still sounds like agreement. “I think he might like whatever you liked when you were his age.”
David fights the grimace sliding across his face and probably fails. It suddenly feels like there’s a lot riding on his ability to recall being a kid, and those memories weren’t built to carry any kind of weight. He closes his eyes. In the movies, that always seems to help.
He can’t see much, but it’s enough: feathers, sequins, the one room in the big empty house that always felt full, even when he was alone in it.
“My mother’s event closet.” David opens his eyes to a pair of blank stares and remembers, right, most people don’t have mothers whose favorite season is awards. “Where she kept all of her red carpet and gala looks. I used to play dress-up in there whenever she was—I was in there a lot.”
If he admits that he was forbidden from entering this room that he was in all the time and his mother was never around to know, how is that helpful? How is any of this helpful?
“I don’t suppose you have any Bob Mackie capes in stock?” he asks.
The gray-haired woman is already bending beneath the next table over. When she straightens up, she’s holding a briefcase-sized basket containing rolls of brightly colored fabrics.
“Play silks,” she says. “Perfect for dress-up, but also for creating backdrops, landscapes, forts, home decor. Anything, really. They’re modular, like the blocks. I dye them myself with plants from my garden—turmeric, hibiscus, indigo.”
She touches her hand to a yellow, pink, and dark blue roll in turn. The rest of the rainbow is there in the basket, too, including one roll that seems to be striped with all of the colors. David unfurls this one, and the way the rectangle of silk drapes between his hands draws a gasp from him. He rubs the fabric between his fingers and feels it slide against itself.
“I’m pretty proud of that one,” the woman says. “It was a lot of trial and error to keep the colors from bleeding.”
David’s fingers dive back in to grab another color, then another, and then the gray-haired woman tells him the price for the full basket and he snatches it from her arms. Patrick is right there with him as a laugh in his ear, a hand at his waist, a kiss against his neck, and the choice is made.
“Do you make anything else in here by hand?” David asks as the woman rings them up at the counter.
“I knit the finger puppets,” she replies, gesturing toward the girls who are now arranging their erstwhile armies into an elaborately choreographed, apparently peace-making dance. “My husband carves the wooden animals and I paint them. A few other things.”
“Mmm,” David hums.
Patrick has been petitioning for years for them to carry gifts for kids in the store, to make Rose Apothecary a true one-stop holiday shopping destination. David always resisted, but that was before he found out toys didn’t have to be plastic or blinking or loud. He’ll think it over.
The woman hands over their bag and they thank her. Happy holidays are wished all around.
Patrick’s unlocking the car when he asks innocently, “Neat place, don’t you think?”
“Don’t gloat. It’s unbecoming.”
***
“Oooooh,” Jayson squeals as he rips the metallic paper from the basket on Christmas morning. “Colors!”
The hand-dyed silks are instantly the most beautiful objects in Jay and Rebecca’s living room. By a mile. They clash with everything—the stuffed deer head with tiny Santa hats on each of its antler points, the nativity scene of Peanuts characters on the shelf under the TV, the scraggly fir tree that’s more tinsel than needles. But—and David can’t believe he’s actually thinking this—there are some things more important than aesthetics.
This hideous teal recliner, for instance, is so weathered that it looks like it spent its formative years on the side of the road (or possibly riding the rails), but it’s the most comfortable thing David’s ever lain on in his life. He’s going to start a whisper campaign to get it moved into the guest room so he can sleep in it. Patrick will have to fend for himself against the whack-a-mole spring mattress.
Jayson dives into the rolls of fabric with both hands. From over on the couch, Patrick raises a pale eyebrow at David as if to say, See, he even imitates the things he’s never seen you do.
“Uncle David picked those out for you,” Patrick says.
Rebecca and Jay say, “Oh,” in unison and it sounds the way it usually does when Patrick’s family encounters one of David’s decisions. Polite and perplexed.
David would probably squirm, but the recliner has him too swallowed up. “They’re, ah, called play silks. You–”
But Jayson has already figured out what you do with them.
“I’m gonna dress up like a princess,” he announces, starting to knot a length of fabric around his shoulders like a cape, which, no, incorrect.
“Let me help you,” David says, definitely more a command than an offer. He lowers the lever on the recliner and does beckoning hands.
Jayson trots over, the pale blue silk still around his shoulders and the white one cascading from his left hand.
“Nice color choice,” David says, twisting the blue so it drapes on the bias and knotting it over Jayson‘s shoulder. “I’m getting a very Elsa vibe.”
Jayson’s blue eyes go wide and his voice goes reverent. “You know Frozen ?”
“Mm-hm.” David tries a few different placements for the white skirt before deciding on a drop-waist. “I got invited to Idina Menzel’s New Year’s Eve party one year and she had it playing on a loop in her home theater all night. Talk about needing to let it go.” He finishes the final knot and floofs out the fabric of the skirt. “There. This is definitely your silhouette.”
Jayson goes twirling away from the recliner, a spray of white silk arcing all around him. He careens into the side of the couch and staggers one dizzy step sideways, coming to rest in front of his mother.
“Mommy, I’m a princess!”
That’s when David notices that Jay and Patrick have left the room.
Rebecca’s eyes are welling up as she opens her arms to her son. “Come here, baby.”
“I’m not a baby,” Jayson objects, but leans in to hug her just the same. She keeps squeezing and tugging and grasping until he’s sitting in her lap. His small body curves around her pregnant belly naturally, like it knows exactly where it belongs.
Rebecca has her eyes closed, her lips pressed to her child’s scalp, and the air is choked with so much maternal feeling that David can’t breathe around it. His lungs never learned how to pull oxygen from this.
He slinks off in search of his husband and finds him in the kitchen. Patrick has one hand on his cousin’s shoulder as Jay braces himself over the sink. When he looks up, the apprehension in his eyes makes David’s blood run cold.
Of course, fuck, of course. Why didn’t he see it? Jay’s the kind of guy whose Christmas morning pajamas involve sports logos and camouflage. He cheers for the fights during hockey games as loudly as the goals. And—David’s just now piecing this together—only the tiny Santa hats in the other room are part of the Christmas decorations. The deer and its antlers are real, an animal Jay feels proud enough about killing that he displays it year round. David brought silk dress-up clothes into this man’s house, for this man’s son. What was he thinking?
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” Jay is saying down into the sink. “I don’t have what it takes for this. I’ll screw it up.”
Oh.
Good.
This is not what David thought. Patrick’s apprehension is not what he thought.
David breathes again, loudly enough that Jay turns to look at him, and he wishes he wouldn’t. All David can think of to say is, Yeah, you probably will, which helps precisely no one.
“Small bites, Jay,” Patrick says. It’s what he tells David whenever he’s catastrophizing over some problem, usually to do with the store. It’s the Patrick of advice—compact, practical, clever. Slightly annoying. Very effective. “Right now you just have a kid who wants to dress up like a princess. You don’t have to navigate more than that yet.”
“But what if there is more than that? I don’t want to leave things unsaid. I don’t want it to be like–” Jay cuts himself off, but can’t seem to find another way to end his sentence. “Like with you.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says after a beat. “I don’t want it to be like that either.”
“Don’t get ahead of him, though?” David had planned on saying nothing in this conversation between dad-type people, but he’s pretty sure this is good advice. “There are more options than you think.”
Jay looks terrified by this, but Patrick nods. He knows how much backtracking and recalibrating it took for David to convince his father of who he is. It shouldn’t be like that, either. There are a lot of ways it shouldn’t be but could.
You’re going to screw this up, David wants to say again. Luckily, Patrick’s the one who keeps talking.
“It’s not your job to solve this for him. Today, your one job is to show him that this one thing he wants–” Patrick’s voice wavers and he swallows. “That it’s okay.”
“All right,” Jay says, breathing easier.
“Keep doing that, and he’s more likely to show you the next thing he wants.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Now.” Patrick’s grin twists. There’s a joke coming. “Clear eyes, full hearts.”
Jay’s laugh is booming and bone-deep and David had forgotten that, earlier, when he’d been cataloging camouflage pajamas and hockey fights and dead deer sculptures. That counts for something.
“Sure, Coach, sure,” Jay says over his shoulder as he heads toward the living room. “I’m getting back out there.”
After he’s gone, Patrick shrugs, still joking. “What can I say? I know how to motivate straight guys.”
“Well, I mean, same? But we have very different methods.” David leaves his husband to roll his eyes to an empty room.
By the time he’s settled back in his naturally reclining habitat, Jay’s circling the room with the green play silk stretched across his shoulders like wings, pretending to breathe fire.
“Dad! There are no dragons in Arendelle!”
“Oh, no?” Jay exchanges the green for the purple, which he drapes over his head like a hood. “I guess I’ll have to be Anna, then. Do you want to build a snowman? ”
The singing gene clearly skipped past whichever branch of the Brewer family tree this is, but Jayson giggles in delight anyway.
“Come on, let's go and play,” Jay starts chasing his son across the room, over the couch, around the tree, singing all the lyrics insistently and increasingly off-key. David has to drop the foot of the recliner to avoid taking out anyone’s knees.
It’s all fun and games until a stray step lands Jay’s foot on the hem of Jayson’s skirt and almost pulls apart the knot at his waist.
“Okay, no, this is couture!” Jayson shrieks, suddenly serious.
There’s a split second of quiet as all the eyes in the room snap to David. Then there’s Jay’s booming laugh, and Rebecca’s lilting one, and Jayson’s giggle. Once they start they don’t stop; they keep each other going.
David buries his face in his hands because yes, he heard it too. His voice coming out of Jayson’s mouth. He groans, but it’s just for show. It feels good, somehow, for this room full of people to recognize his voice. It feels like family. David knows, by now, what that feels like.
Then there’s something buttery soft against the back of his neck and he looks up. Patrick has come to kneel in front of the recliner and is using the rainbow-striped silk, David’s favorite, to reel him in. David goes, far enough to lean their foreheads together. He can feel the kiss forming between them like a magnetic field, but they’re both laughing too hard to go for it, and that’s almost better.
There was a time when David would’ve only appreciated a moment like this one for the photo of it—just one more image to feed to Instagram, right next to his penthouse view and his yacht vacation, to say, “Look what I get to have that you don’t.” Then there was a time when he would’ve wanted a photo of this moment to remember it by, to bring up on his phone late at night and say, “Look what I got to have once.” And then there was a time when he would’ve wanted a photo to show how far he’s come, to hold up to his memories of himself and say, “Look what you get to have.”
Now, he doesn’t think of this moment as a photo at all. He just lets himself have it and doesn’t worry about keeping it.
***
As soon as they close the door of the guest bedroom that night, Patrick turns and backs him up against it. David’s confused for a second, because Patrick hasn’t had enough to drink to try testing their rule about relatives’ houses.
But then Patrick just puts his forehead down on David’s shoulder and leans into him, breathing hard. He’s not crying, but there’s some ragged emotion dragging through him, something familiar that David can almost place. He rubs slow circles into his husband’s back as they ride it out together.
“Thank you,” Patrick finally says, and god, his gratitude hasn’t been this raw in years.
“For what?”
“For all the days that I would never have had without you.” Patrick lifts his head so they can look at each other. “Like today. I wouldn’t have had today without you.”
David’s not entirely sure the math of this statement checks out, but then he’s not the numbers guy of this marriage. He splits the difference.
“I’m glad you got to have today.”
“Being here for my family like this is so…” Patrick can’t seem to find an adequate adjective. “It means…”
“I know,” David says, because he does.
“Jayson’s lucky to have you.”
“Jayson’s lucky to have us. But let’s be honest, the luckiest to have us is Jay.”
Patrick chuckles. “Rebecca would probably be fine without us.”
“Oh, we’re lucky to have Rebecca.” David’s tone is joking, but part of him is still thinking about what he saw today. A mother’s face in a little boy’s hair. “Come on, time for sleep.”
And he’s not going to say the other thing he’s thinking about. He really isn’t. He almost doesn’t. He makes it all the way through his nighttime regimen, and he’s pulling back the covers on the bed (shit, he forgot to start the whisper campaign) before it busts out of him.
“Okay, I know we both meant what we said today about following Jayson’s lead. But can I just say? I’m really hoping our nephew is trans. If ever a name deserved to be dead…”