if that was true. Teresa picked up his hand in her own, stroked the back of it. She said, “If you’d come home, I could take care of both of you. I’ve been cooking, you know. And not just soggy British food! Did I tell you I took an Italian cooking class this fall? I have a wonderful meatball recipe now, only Charlie won’t eat beef.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m going to be fine.”
“He made a mistake. It was the first thing he said when he called. He said he’d made a mistake, and he couldn’t fix it.”
“That is true. He cannot fix it.”
“Yale, I’m worried if he’s upset he’ll get sick faster. He’ll wear himself out worrying.”
Yale marveled at this turn of logic, the idea that he was now the one making Charlie sick. He could sit here and explain things about AIDS that would make Teresa’s head spin, or he could say that Charlie hadn’t uttered a word of apology, but what good would it do? He told her he was meeting Charlie at the funeral, and this seemed to appease her. She said, “Be gentle with him, won’t you?”
So that he wouldn’t be seen walking down Halsted with the box, Yale turned east and took the long way around—a route that took him past the house he’d toured. He should have kept walking, but he stopped to look. A masochistic gesture. Because even if he wasn’t sick, even if he got some enormous raise and could afford the house all on his own, he’d never buy a place down the street from Charlie. Even if Charlie were gone, he couldn’t live so close to where they’d been happy together, couldn’t walk past their old apartment on his way to the El.
But did he truly believe Charlie would ever be gone? It was still a hypothetical in his mind, like a tornado hitting the city. Did he believe, as foolishly as Julian used to, that someone was about to announce a cure? He didn’t think that was it. It was all just a rock that hadn’t sunk yet, that was still hitting the surface of the pond.
The “For Sale” sign was still there, the phone number glowing in the late sun, runic writing that no longer held meaning. In the window of the place next door, a cat slept. Someone played the piano.
* * *
—
Yale dodged the people congregating in the church lobby and ducked down a back hallway to find a place for his box. He put it behind a beanbag chair in what must have been a youth group room, a place where the kids had painted the walls with daisies and frogs and Beatles lyrics.
Then he straightened his suit, damped his hair down in the bathroom, found Fiona, and helped her with the flowers she was carrying. He gave her the necklace from Nora, said she mustn’t ever wear it around her cousin Debra, and Fiona held up her curls so Yale could fumble with the clasp behind her neck. “I’ve never done this before,” he said, and Fiona, for some reason, found that hilarious. He helped straighten the chairs in the sanctuary. Yale appreciated the chairs: less ass-numbing than pews, less likely to dredge up negative childhood memories.
By the time Charlie arrived, the front of the place had filled. Charlie was trailed by some of his staffers—Gloria, Dwight, Rafael, Ingrid. They must have changed at the office, then walked here together. They’d be walking back together too, while Yale wandered off alone. Yale caught Charlie’s eye, and a minute later Charlie was there beside him, smelling like aftershave.
The minister spoke about community and friendship and “the family you choose,” tremendously aware of his audience, obviously practiced in this sort of thing. How many of these funerals had he personally overseen? Fiona got up and told a story about the day Nico introduced her to Terrence. “He warned me that Terrence had a sense of humor,” she said. “And so I was terrified. I kept waiting for him to put a whoopee cushion on my chair or something. But he didn’t crack a single joke. At the end of lunch he looked at me and he said, ‘You’ve taken care of your brother your whole life, and I—’” Her voice had run into a wall. She tried again but no sound came out. She said, “It would’ve been easier if he’d said something funny.” They all laughed, just to add their voices to the room,