Chapter Text
Eric remembers this from last summer, the weird aimlessness between when he gets back to Madison and when Camp Oconee starts for the first session of the summer. He’ll report for counselor orientation and pre-camp work days starting June 3rd but until then his days are largely unscheduled.
He catches up on sleep and does his laundry and records a few vlog episodes on Georgia foodways to post during camp sessions when his personal time will be more limited. He volunteers to do the grocery shopping and makes dinner for his parents, since Coach is still up at the high school and his mother is putting the finishing touches on her painted-wood wall art and refurbished furniture for the summer craft fair season.
He talks to Jack. He texts Jack. He sends selfies to Jack that flirt with impropriety although he’s a little too shy to do anything, even in private messages, that could get Jack in trouble. Not that Jack’s told him even once to be careful, to censor himself. At this point Jack’s told more people than Eric has about their relationship (Jack: 2, Eric: 0). But Eric worries. He worries about doing the wrong thing and getting Jack in trouble before Jack’s even started his new job.
He lays awake at night and tries to imagine coming out to his parents -- an exercise that’s as exhausting as it is familiar. It’s a conversation he’s had with himself since he’d first begun to suspect he liked boys that way. Around the time that being called “faggot” in the halls at school stopped feeling like generalized homophobia and began feeling more like targeted hate. When being “accidentally” pushed against lockers during passing time stopped feeling like casual harassment (the kind all the smaller boys endured) and more like personalized aggression.
Morgan County High School had not had an official Gay-Straight Alliance, but unofficially there had been a handful of theatre kids and a lesbian couple from the soccer team who’d stuck together and been working against entrenched opposition to establish a GSA chapter. Eric had always admired their fuck-you attitude as he watched them wistfully from across the cafeteria. One of the soccer players was even the daughter of his Chemistry teacher, Mrs. Nelson, and Mrs. Nelson had hosted meetings for the group in her living room the first Monday of every month. Once, during his junior year, Eric had almost attended. He’d memorized the street address from the group’s Facebook page and driven by the house just as the meeting was getting started. But then he had panicked at the thought of someone seeing Coach Bittle’s truck parked outside the Nelson’s on a meeting night and hadn’t been able to put his foot on the brake. He’d driven to WalMart instead and bought ingredients to make lemon chiffon pie.
College, he’d told himself. In college he’d figure out how to be brave.
And here he is nearly three years later, out and proud in Massachusetts, but no more able to say the words “I’m gay” to his parents now as he had been at the age of seventeen.
“Dicky?” his mother calls up the basement stairs, startling Eric out of his despondent Twitter scrolling.
“Yes, Mama?”
“The cornflowers on these baskets are taking longer than I’d calculated,” Suzanne says, emerging from the basement and going to the kitchen sink to refill her water bottle. “And I promised Richie Frederickson over at the Pavilion that I’d replenish the booth for Memorial Day weekend. Would you be willing to --”
“Sure thing!” Eric pockets his phone and looks around for his sandals. Anything to get out of the house at this point -- and he’s always enjoyed poking around the Blue Star Antiques Pavilion looking for old kitchen gadgets and cookbooks. His mother’s been selling with Mr. Frederickson since before they’d moved to Madison and even before she was making her own work she’d take Eric along on her scrounging expeditions around the state. (Suzanne had had to remind him, in the early days, to keep his hands to himself when the shop proprietors were in sight. Not every grownup understood how carefully he handled glass or how deft he was with a knife.) He’d bought his first mixing bowl when he was eight, with the allowance he’d saved from helping Suzanne weed and water the garden and pick the chestnuts out of the grass in the front yard.
The morning sun is already pushing the temperatures in the gravel parking area well above eighty degrees when Eric pulls his parents’ minivan off the county road and up in front of the Pavilion, already starting to fill up with holiday shoppers. He pulls one of the three cardboard boxes filled with smaller pieces - wooden cutting boards, mixing spoons, bowls -- out of the back of the van and locks up before shouldering his way into the cavernous, air conditioned space.
“Hey Mr. Frederickson!” he nods to the man behind the front counter. “Mama sent me to stock up ahead of the long weekend.”
“Eric Bittle?” Mr. Frederickson grins, “Good to see you around again, son! Home for the summer?”
“Yessir.”
“You be working over at Camp Oconee again?”
“Kitchen patrol, sir,” Eric grins, “They put me in charge of the dinner crew this year -- won’t know what hit ‘em.” He’s worked in the kitchen two summers running now, and takes pride in how efficiently he and his team can prepare, serve, and clean up the evening meal for the camp’s 150-200 over-nighters.
“Annie’ll be there again too -- lifeguard duty and counselor in one of the junior girls’ bunkhouses.” Mr. Frederickson nods. “Keep those kiddos out of trouble.”
Eric laughs, “I keep a house full of college hockey players outta trouble now, sir; there’s nothin’ much a fifth grade boy’s gonna get by me.”
“That’s right,” Mr. Frederickson grins, “You’re playing hockey somewhere up north. Suzanne said your team’s pretty good?”
“You could say that,” Eric smiles and shrugs, already transforming this exchange into a story he can relate to Jack when they talk later that evening. “They work us pretty hard but, I mean, it pays the bills so I can’t complain.”
Mr. Frederickson rummages under the counter and pulls out a key that he puts on the counter. “This here’s your mother’s booth,” he points to it on the floor map under the plexiglass of the counter top. “Same’s it’s been for the last two years so I expect you know where you’re going. Suzanne send an inventory and a price list?”
Eric shifts the box to his hip and pulls out the papers for Mr. Frederickson, then grabs the key and heads off down the aisle.
It takes him five trips to bring in the boxes and the several larger pieces -- two chairs and a canoe paddle -- that he and Suzanne had wrestled into the back of the van. He gets everything tastefully arranged in the booth and then tidies away the empty cardboard boxes before treating himself to a wander through the warren of booths.
He’s not looking for anything in particular, but then he never is and he always finds something to add to the box in his parents’ basement where he tucks away odds and ends for his future kitchen. A mixing bowl here and egg cups there, a set of cookie molds, a trivet painted with a rabbit that secretly reminded him of Señor Bun.
It’s on a lower shelf in one of the overcrowded, little-tended booths in the back that he finds a shoe box full of old unidentified snapshots. Sometimes his mother uses old photographs in her art assemblages so he pulls out the box and flips through to see if there’s anything interesting to take home to her. He sets aside a picture of a little girl on a pony, and one of a woman sitting on a stoop with an apron full of kittens.
He almost misses it, the photograph of the two young men standing at what looks like a campsite with their arms slung familiarly around one another, cheek to cheek, gazing boldly at the camera. The man on the right has what almost looks to be a water lily tucked into the placket of his open-necked shirt.
He runs his finger over the top edge of the photograph, then picks it carefully out of the box and flips it over. “Frank and Vince,” it reads, “Oswego - 1923.”
He almost puts the photograph back. But something in the boys’ expressions makes it impossible for him to do so. He suddenly doesn’t want anyone else who might shop here to ever see this image; wants to protect Frank and Vince from the prying eyes of the world. So he tucks the photograph under the kitten and the pony photographs, then quickly selects seven more random landscapes and group scenes to make the pile an even ten (“10 for $5!” reads the label on the front of the box).
He takes the photographs up to the counter and makes small talk about the weather with the woman who’s covering for Mr. Frederickson at the register. He pulls out his wallet and lets her charge the $5.40 to his debit card. He hands the key to his mother’s notions case to the clerk and carries the brown paper-wrapped parcel of photographs out to the car.
Maybe, he thinks, as he flips through the radio stations looking for good music for the drive home, maybe he’ll get the photograph framed and send it to Jack’s new address in Pawtucket as a housewarming present.