Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [38]
17
FRANK SCHUYLER TOOK up most of the bed, so that his feet were sort of stranded over the edge of it, as if they hadn’t been able to find anything big enough to fit him. Even lying down he was obviously over six feet. But the cancer had left him almost nothing but the height. The strong bones of his face that had shown in Roberta’s face were prominent in the way that skeletons are. His eyes were deep sunken brown caves. He still had a head full of black hair and a mustache just as dark. Apparently, either he’d refused chemo or they hadn’t found the cancer in time for it to be worthwhile.
He was hooked up to tubes in his arms and nose. The smell of death was heavy, but not worse than the corridor. Whatever was killing him hadn’t taken all his dignity with it, not yet at least.
“Jason’s come to visit, and he brought his girlfriend, isn’t that nice?” Iris tried for happy, but it came out strained.
“Hi, Dad,” Jason said in a flat voice.
“Why did you come?” his father asked.
Jason took a stronger grip on my hand. “Mom asked me to come.” His voice was still careful.
“You don’t have to hold the girl so tight,” the man in the bed said, in a voice that was so deep it was almost painful to hear. “You don’t have to pretend for me, Jason.” His voice was a lot less hostile than his eyes. Maybe he just couldn’t help the eyes.
Jason let go of my hand and put his arm around my waist, one hand on my hip below the gun. I played my hand back and forth on his side underneath his jacket, trying to give what comfort I could.
“I’ll hold Anita any way I like.”
“Roberta’s right, boy, you can touch the girl all you want in public. It’s what you do in private that matters.”
“What do you think I’ll be doing in private that I don’t do in public…Dad?” Jason asked, softly.
“Your mother told you to bring a girl home so I could die happy thinking my only son wasn’t a—” He stopped as if he wasn’t sure what word to end the sentence with.
“A what?” Jason said, still soft, but with an edge of anger to it. His otherworldly energy was beginning to creep along my skin where I touched him. Not good.
“A fruit,” Frank said.
“A fruit,” I said, and fought not to laugh. It was just one of those moments when the tension gets too high and you want to laugh.
He looked at me as if I’d just appeared. “Sorry,” I said.
“You think it’s funny that my wife told him to bring you and lie to me. To lie to me on my deathbed, you think that’s funny?”
I bumped my head against Jason. “What do you want me to do?”
“Be yourself.”
I moved away enough to look at him. “You sure?”
He smiled. “Positive.”
I shrugged, still with my arm around him. I looked back to the man in the bed. I tried to think of a polite way to begin. “I think it’s funny that you think Jason is gay.”
“You hanging all over him doesn’t change that he’s a homo.”
“Fruit, homo, can’t you even say homosexual?”
“You like that word better, girlie, fine. He’s a homosexual.”
His mother had moved closer to the bed, but not to it. She was hovering somewhere between her husband and her son. I got the feeling that she’d spent a lot of Jason’s life caught like that.
“I think I’m in a better position to know what Jason’s sexual preferences are than you are, Mr. Schuyler.” There, that had been polite.
“Dad,” Julia said from near the door, “Jason brought Anita here to meet you, doesn’t that say something?”
“It says she’ll lie for him.”
Jason moved away enough to just have my hand. He drew me toward the door. “Let’s go, Anita.”
“No,” Iris said, grabbing his other hand.
“Dad,” Julia said, “he came all this way. Both of them left work and everything to come here. Be nice.”
“I’m dying, Julia, I don’t have time to be nice. I want my son to be a man, and he’s not going to be.”
Jason’s shoulders rounded as if he’d been struck a blow. That was it, the last straw. This camel wasn’t taking any more crap from anyone, not even the dying.
I kept Jason’s hand, but turned toward the bed. “Jason is a better man than you are, Mr. Schuyler.”
Those cavernous eyes glared at