The Better Mother

THE WEDDING

1982


Saturday, Danny stands on the bride’s parents’ front lawn, sweating into the collar of his white dress shirt. He hopes he has not soaked through his jacket.

The bride’s mother, with carefully curled blond bangs perched on the top of her head, is hustling a group of people outside and pushing them to a spot in front of a multi-coloured wall of dahlias. The heavy-headed flowers droop in the full sunlight and Danny viciously hopes that the blooms will snap under their own weight and bury the muddled relatives in drifts of orange and purple and yellow. He is shocked at his inner rage but blames it on the heat. He silently promises that he will spend the rest of the day smiling. Overhead, a seagull flies sluggishly, turning and turning in the same circle.

One after the other, groups of people—some red-faced from the heat, others squinting against the sunlight—walk slowly to their designated spots, smile at Danny’s camera and walk off again, their hair glistening, their clothes hanging limply from their bodies.

A woman in her fifties, whose presence in the doorway seems to signal a shift in the atmosphere, steps out into the sunshine. Hair set in glossy brown curls. Red lips to match a red dress. Long, still-shapely legs visible through a modest slit in the skirt. She saunters toward the dahlias, each hip sliding her body forward deliberately so that she seems to be slithering. Hers is a walk that could be described as liquid, languid, effortless. She looks around at the family members shading their eyes with their hands, at the respectable men and women shuffling from one inadequate spot of shade to another, and her body resettles. Swiftly, visibly, she crumples in on herself, pulling the slit in her skirt closed. It seems that she has thrown on a cloak of age, one that suggests respectability, decorum, Sunday dinners with a discreet glass of sherry.

And yet, in her hand, a lit cigarette is burning sweetly and disseminating its smoke through the humid air.

She has changed (it has been twenty-four years, after all, and she is heavier all over, her ample bosom weighed down by its own bulk), but her face still glimmers with mocking humour, and her mouth still blows out little uniform puffs of smoke. Danny feels a surge through his body.

“Auntie Val!” The bride steps out onto the lawn, her white dress like a porcelain doll’s. Danny thinks she is blandly pretty, in her blond, safe and creamy whiteness. He watches as Val gazes at the young bride, at her tiara, her pearls, the sash wrapped around her waist. Val’s smile is turned down at the corners, revealing nothing. Danny thinks he sees her hand reach out, but when he looks again her fingers are resting on the curve of her hip.

“Auntie Val, you have to stand over here, beside Mum. I want a picture of you together.” The bride waves Val over, her ring finger glittering with a high-set diamond.

Val drops her eyelids and smoothes out a wrinkle on her skirt. “I don’t know that your mother wants to stand next to me. She might catch something.”

Three elderly men, standing in a circle on the lawn, guffaw.

The sun begins to burn the tips of Danny’s ears as he waits for the two women to finish arranging themselves so that each is presenting her best side. Finally, Val and her sister are ready for the camera. Both smile, but Val’s lips are closed, her chin down so that the lens can capture the full effect of her direct green eyes. Danny snaps, unable to speak. Val frowns and looks, for the first time, at the red-faced photographer kneeling in the grass.

Danny stands and feels her eyes boring their way into his body, past his grey suit, past his underwear and socks, through his skin and into his organs. What is she seeing? His body’s parts—marrow, blood cells, lymph glands—or something else? Perhaps his real self, like a small, hard kernel hidden under layers of muscle and fat and illusion. Silence stops everything around them. If someone is speaking, he can no longer hear it.

She blows out a smoke ring, contemplating his slightly shorter-than-average frame. Her lips purse and she smoothes down a stray hair that has curled up in the humidity. He shivers and wonders how feeling a chill is even possible.

The air seems to part between them, making a narrow path of clear, damp-free air along which her smell—cedar and lipstick, leather and hairspray—floats toward him. She grins, places a hand on her hip and winks.


Slowly, he hears a low buzz: people’s voices, the hiss of air that follows a car driving down the street, doors opening and closing. Blunt ends of grass prickle his neck. Sunlight illuminates the insides of his closed eyelids.

And he remembers.

He was watching Miss Val; in fact, he was on the verge of speaking to her when a stifling heaviness descended on his shoulders and he felt his spine buckling under the pressure. Before he could look around for help, his neck weakened and his head fell to his chest. He had two thoughts before his body hit the ground.

If I fall backward, I can save the cameras.

What if Miss Val disappears and I never see her again?

He opens his eyes, sees a crowd of faces peering down at him.

“Danny, thank God you’re all right.”

“It must be heatstroke, and you in that dark suit.”

“Come on then, let’s get the boy something to drink.”

He sits up on the lawn and sips a glass of water. The mother of the bride holds an umbrella over his head, shading him from the early afternoon sun. A bridesmaid, holding up her blue skirt with one hand, sets down a plate of crackers beside him. He searches the crowd for Val, for her red dress, for the smirk he would recognize anywhere. Nothing. He sees only a sulky flower girl, wedding guests in tasteful suits and pastel dresses, and the bride, wilting beside the rhododendron, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. He looks down at the grass stains on the palms of his hands, at his tripod lying on its side in the garden, at the limousine waiting blackly by the curb. A mess.

At his eye level, a pair of long legs, encased in seamed, sheer black stockings, walks toward him and stops inches from his nose. A voice, throaty but feminine, says, “All right, folks, let’s all go to the church now. We’re running behind, so why don’t you beefy men over there make yourselves useful and help this poor kid up?”

Danny grabs her hand with both of his as she starts to walk away. She turns and stares in confusion at his flushed face.

“Please, Miss Val, you remember me, don’t you?” His voice cracks.

Val squints, purses her lips. “No, I don’t think so.”

She tries to pull her hand away, but Danny pulls it closer.

“I’m Danny. From the alley in Chinatown, behind the club?”

Val manages to shake off his grip. Her smile is tight, sitting on her skin like a disguise. Her eyes dart left and right, at the family members clustered around them.

“What club, sweetheart? I was never much of a club gal, you know.”

And she walks away, clutching her purse to her stomach, seeming like an old lady as she carefully steps across the uneven lawn.


At the church, Danny stands to the side of the altar, snapping photographs of the bride’s tearful face and the looks of bemusement and resentment on the faces of her bridesmaids. He sees, through his viewfinder, Val standing outside, watching the wedding through the window, her right hand pressed against the glass. His eyes prickle and he blinks hard until the half-formed tears stop brimming and dissipate, until there is no evidence that he might have been crying. He focuses on Val and releases the shutter. She looks directly into the camera, her eyes like sharp pinpoints—assessing, measuring.

The vows are almost over and soon the couple will kiss. If Danny misses this moment because he is staring out the window at the bride’s vaguely embarrassing aunt, the photographs will be ruined. He has no choice but to look away.


The day has been long. One photograph after another. Speech after speech. Nothing makes this wedding any different from the others. Except, of course, Miss Val. Danny has spotted her out of the corner of his eye all day, her tall body wrapped in red, visible one minute and gone the next, never stepping directly in front of him or his lens. Maddeningly elusive.

After finishing the evening with a few shots of the dancing guests, he packs up his camera and light meter and skirts along the edge of the ballroom. Only the bride and groom’s friends are left, dancing in a mob in the middle of the parquet floor. Trampled corsages are scattered throughout the room, brown and flattened and emitting an off-sweet smell, the bruised odour of fruit left too long on the tree. Danny squints, trying to separate real bodies from shadows and strobe lights.

One long arm shoots up from the middle of the crowd. The bridesmaids and groomsmen part and Danny sees that Miss Val, the lone relative still there, is dancing, her right hand above her head, surrounded by men who are thirty years younger than her. But this pulsing light is forgiving and she is, right now, no older than the girls who giggle behind their hands at her shimmying hips. Danny can’t tell if Val sees them. The dance and the men who watch her are all that matter. He laughs to himself. There are some things even the Siamese Kitten cannot hide.

All of a sudden, he realizes how silly he has been. He turns and walks to the coatroom, where he picks up his equipment and jacket. His face begins to flush from the tips of his ears down, skipping whole sections of his neck but fiercely spreading around his Adam’s apple, on either side of his nose and the knob of his chin.

Miss Val will never recognize him. He might look familiar and he can creep around the ballroom all he likes, but it will never happen. He was only a little boy. She was a stripper who saw thousands of faces in theatres and alleys too. “Stupid,” Danny mutters. “You’re just a crazy wedding photographer.”

He bends down to fold and pick up his tripod and swears under his breath when one of the tripod’s legs refuses to retract. He is turning a loose screw with his fingernail when a rush of cool air blows against his ears. He turns around and Miss Val stands in the doorway, a lit cigarette in her hand. He reaches for the wall behind. She looks evenly at Danny, at his camera bags, at his glossy black shoes. “Well, little man, let’s figure this out. Who are you and what do you know about me?”

The moment is here. He could walk away, pretend that he’s never seen her before and perhaps his eight-year-old self will be quiet again, settle back into his childhood. But a howl has started in his head.

Danny straightens, wipes his hands on his pants and looks directly into her eyes. “I saw you once, outside the Shanghai Junk, in the alley. I was a little boy then. My name is Danny.”

“Listen, Danny, I’ve met a lot of people in my time, and a lot of my past has been forgotten. The people here, at this wedding, they know nothing except what I tell them, and I don’t include the Shanghai Junk in too many conversations, if you know what I mean.” Val steps forward, places a wide hand on Danny’s shoulder and smiles, showing all of her small, yellowing teeth. “You can keep your memories to yourself, if you please.”

Danny can see the slight quiver of rage building under her makeup. But the roar in his head is receding and he is now struck with the desire to jump and giggle like a giddy child because Miss Val, the Siamese Kitten, is touching him, holding his shoulder here, in this coatroom, on this sweltering July evening.

“You gave me the belt from your robe. Green silk. I still have it.”

She steps back, flicking the ash from her cigarette toward a pair of leather oxfords on the floor. “Sweet Caps,” she mutters, smoke floating out from between her lips.

Danny steps forward, close enough to smell her again, close enough to stare at the smooth fabric of her dress. “Yes, you gave me a whole pack for my father. I was scared of him.”

“You reminded me of a little boy I knew once,” she says. “Those big eyes.” Smoke surrounds her head, and she peers at him through the swirl. “That was a long time ago.”

He doesn’t know where the words are coming from, but he has to get them out. “A few weeks later, I went back to find you, but you weren’t there. I used to think about you all the time. I guess I must have fallen in love with you, like I was your son, or your best friend. I loved your costumes and your makeup. Everything about you.” He is out of breath, deflated. His thin chest heaves and he bows his head, resting his chin on his shirtfront. “I watched your movie.”

When he looks up, he sees that she has dropped onto a chair and leaned her cheek against the wall. Her profile hasn’t changed. The lines around her nose and lips are unblurred and still sharp. He wonders how it would feel to run his fingers down her jaw, if her skin would be soft, or if the muscles underneath would feel like steel, the hard structure holding up everything else. Her cigarette has burnt down and she is left holding the filter.

“No one talks about the Kitten anymore.”

Danny swallows. “We could leave. We could get a drink somewhere. My car’s outside.”

Val turns to look at him, an unpractised smile on her face. “Well, I haven’t been in a strange man’s vehicle for some time. It’s nice to know I still got it.”


When they are in his small blue car, he is acutely aware of her presence, even when she says nothing, even when his eyes are on the road and he can see her in his peripheral vision. Danny feels that he may never understand this day, that he will stumble through it with his mouth half open in awe. All those years ago, he had hoped that he would be elegant, maybe even a little bit glamorous, when they met again. He had always thought that he would be wearing a pressed tuxedo with tails, smoking a cigarillo, a snifter of cognac in his hand. He would show her what a fine young man he had become, that his glimpse of her all those years ago had pointed him toward a well-dressed life far away from the curio shop or the smell of Chinese cabbage in his parents’ house.

They drive over the Cambie Street Bridge. To the left, English Bay and the barges in the distance, their twinkling lights the only break on the nighttime horizon. To the right, False Creek, its shores dotted with flat, empty lots ringed by chain-link fencing and abandoned shipping containers. Wind whips in through the open windows and Val, her hair whirling around her head, closes her eyes and turns her face into the rushing air. Danny glances at her and sees that she looks both young (with her skin pulled tight from the wind) and old (the white roots of her hair, the low-hanging earlobes pressed flat against her jaw). She holds a hand out the window, pushing against the current.

“A disco,” she says as she turns toward Danny.

“Sorry?”

“A disco. I’ve never been. Can we go to one?”

Danny checks his mirror, turns west. “I guess. Which one?”

“Whichever one you go to. I want to hear some music.” She closes her eyes again and leans her head back against the seat.

At the door to the club, Danny takes Val’s hand. He expects that her grip will be strong and decisive, but she holds his hand like a little girl would, her fingers loosely curled inside his palm, her whole fist weighing practically nothing in his. He leads her in through the dark hallway and past the coat check. Before they step into the main room, she stiffens beside him and peers around the corner, her neck tense and straight.

Lights pulse on and off, swoop around the room so quickly that all Danny can see are flashes of people; their faces illuminated one second and then blanketed by darkness the next. The long bar at the end of the room is lit from below so that the bartenders are like jack-o’-lanterns, their grins malevolent and Joker-like. At tall tables, men stand and drink. On the dance floor, they twist and spin, their drinks held high above their heads, their eyes sometimes closed, sometimes open and locked on someone else. Danny can smell the musk of all these men, and wonders if this odour is singular to the club, or if it changes every time someone new enters, or every time someone, tired of the throb and thump, leaves for the night, his jacket rolled and under his arm. He swears that the floor itself is vibrating to the beat.

He finds them a low table on the edge of the dance floor. A waiter takes their order, a gin and tonic for Danny and a whisky sour for Val. A new song begins with a driving, synthetic rhythm and Val claps her hands.

“This is gorgeous, sweetheart. Look at all these handsome boys. Exactly what an old broad needs.” The waiter hands her a cocktail and she takes a dainty sip. “Now, this is the life.”

Danny sits beside her, watches her eyes as they follow the dancers. She is focused on their moves, on how they dance alone and then with each other, on the give and take between partners whose arms and legs and pelvises are opposite and complementary. Her fingers tap on the tabletop, keeping time. He counts the wrinkles on her neck, wonders if her swollen finger joints make it impossible for her to take off her rings at the end of the day. So many years, so many possibilities for undiluted joy, for tragedy, for lines in the skin.

He closes his eyes briefly and allows himself to sink into the memory of his childhood self, the one who wanted to both dance a tango with Miss Val and be wrapped within her strong arms, the stones in her rings winking as she held him tight. Tonight, breathing in the tang of Val’s smell, he thinks that maybe, just maybe, some parts of the past might not be so bad.

The music changes again; it’s a slower song but one that still pounds the walls with a bass line that gracelessly punches its way into Danny’s chest. Val slams both hands on the table and looks him in the face. “Listen, are we going to dance or what?”

He begins by holding on to her hands, placing one on his shoulder. Looking at her face, he is unsure of how to start, how to apply the waltz he once learned from his mother in their kitchen to this club and this recorded song, sung forcefully and richly by a woman he imagines to be both overweight and fearsomely tough. He hesitates, and then takes one step forward, out of time.

Val shrugs off his hands and punches him lightly on the arm. “This is all wrong, Danny! You’re going to shake your rump if I have to shake it for you. Come on.” She slaps him on the ass and laughs wickedly, wiggling her hips to the beat.

He lets her lead him into a raucous dance. She twirls and bounces, gesturing for him to do the same. Under these lights, his arms and legs appear fluid and refined, not gawky and sinewy. Val smiles at him.

“You’re a natural,” she shouts. “A born dancer.”

Danny dances until he vibrates with the beat of the music. Val’s laugh cuts through the song and he reaches out for her, grasping her arms, holding and releasing her into the pounding, dark room. He hears his own laugh meeting hers. This is the very thing he has been waiting for: this dance in the middle of a club with the woman he dreamed of, whose voice filled his imagination when his own mother’s fell silent. Maybe he and the eight-year-old version of himself have become one—lighter, wiser and leading this dance with the twirling Siamese Kitten.


Danny drives Val home through the quiet streets of the North Shore. This is where voices and cars and the hisses of city life are buffered and absorbed by untouched firs and cedars, by the rushing of unnamed creeks, by the thick walls of small, self-contained houses. She turns to him, reaching across the handbrake to grasp his arm.

“Thank you.”

Danny grins. “Same to you.”

He parks the car in front of a low-rise apartment building with wood siding and sagging balconies. All the windows are dark and he hears a cat crying. He walks Val to the front door and, as she searches in her purse for her keys, he says softly, “I’d like to see you again. Maybe somewhere quiet next time.”

She holds a cough candy up to the light above the door before dropping it back into her small beaded purse. “I don’t know, Danny. That old life doesn’t fit in so well with the one I have now.”

“We don’t have to talk about what happened before. We can do things, go anywhere you want.”

“Anywhere?”

Eagerly, Danny steps forward. “Yes, of course. We could see movies, or go to the beach if the weather’s nice.”

“There’s a particular beach in Kitsilano,” she says with a thin layer of excitement in her voice. “I haven’t been there in a long time. It’s near a boarding house where I used to live.”

“We’ll go. Whenever you want.”

She pulls out a key ring chained to a shiny gold lipstick tube. She nods. “Come by on Wednesday morning around ten.” She reaches up and pats him on the cheek. “Danny, you’re one hell of a good time.”

He watches through the glass doors as she walks slowly to the elevator, one hand on her right hip. A little unsteadily, she steps into the elevator and turns around. As the doors to the elevator close, Val blows him a kiss and he swears he can feel it landing like a moth on his cheek.


In his darkroom two days later, Danny moves and mixes, his hands adjusting the focus on the enlarger one minute, fishing out a wedding print from the developer the next. One by one, he pins the prints from the wedding on the drying line. They sway in the breeze from the ceiling fan, like bedsheets hanging in the sun. His fingers travel over their edges lightly, fondly. Sometimes he even smells them, sniffing that faint residual odour of developer, stop bath, fixer. He thinks of it as a clean smell, the smell of genesis, of birth without the mess.

Other prints sit on the counter in four neat rows. Men and women hurry away, their bodies dark against white buildings, light flooding the frames so that it seems to be consuming the figures, eating up the visual space they tenuously inhabit. A young boy, his ears sticking out like handles on a trophy, cranes his neck so that the very tip of his nose is visible beyond the curve of his cheek. His hair, black and heavy, obscures his right eye. Danny visualizes these prints even when they are out of sight; they feel heavy with their stark blacks and pure whites. They are colourless and bloodless, pictures of featureless people without skin and hair and breath. With their faces turned away, the figures are unknowable. No eyes. No sweat, oil, food. Frank always said that Danny should exhibit his work, and called two galleries and a dealer before Danny stopped him. “They’re just pictures of people retreating,” he said, piling the prints into a box. Maybe they were beautiful, but he knew then as he does now that they’re also empty.

He watches as one wedding print in particular floats in the developer tray, watches as the whites become shapes defined by shadows. A picture of the bride at the altar, her face occupying the right third of the frame. Her eyebrows are knitted and a tear is frozen in place halfway down her cheek. She is the kind of beautiful that men take home to their mothers. The kind of beautiful that, sometimes, is easy to forget.

In the corner of the window, a small black blur.

He drops the next print into the tray. Here it is: a full frame of Val standing in the window, watching the wedding from the outside. As he looks closer, he sees that the corners of her mouth are turned down, that her head is tilted just so. Her eyes droop at the edges and she seems in danger of fading away, her face slightly more distinct than the background or the panes in the window. He sees it clearly now, the look that he has seen hundreds of times before on the faces of bridesmaids, grandparents, mothers. It’s that moment when you are about to lose control, when you know the tears are coming and you are still, fruitlessly, trying to hold them in. He hangs her story on the line, touches the edges gingerly.


The hot sand stings the bottoms of his feet. He has rolled up his jeans as high as they will go, and they are now bunched around his knees, collecting sweat and sand. Val walks ahead of him, gracefully avoiding the splinters from driftwood. She unfolds a Mexican blanket and arranges it in front of a large, bleached-white log. Squinting into the sun, she lights a cigarette.

Danny settles onto the blanket and empties the sand out of his shoes. When he looks up again, Val has taken off her shirt and skirt and is standing in a black swimsuit, the neck cut low, almost to her waist. Her cleavage is tanned brown, with freckles dotting the space between her breasts. She stands straight, one long leg in front of the other, and surveys the beach, challenging the other people to look at her, admire the lines of her body. When an elderly man behind them, dressed in walking shorts and a Panama hat, stares at her and then stumbles on the path, Val smiles brightly and sits down, her back against the log.

“You see?” she says. “I’ve never let myself go.” She smoothes down a wrinkle in her swimsuit. “I’ve been dying to wear this. It just came in at the store.”

Danny nods before closing his eyes. The light glows red through his eyelids. “What store?”

“I didn’t tell you? I work at the big department store downtown. Selling lingerie. I guess you can say I have a lot of experience with underwear.” Her laugh, loud and ringing, spills out into the air around them. Danny wonders if the sound waves will ripple across the ocean and tickle the ears of someone in Japan.

Staring at the sandflies hopping around the blanket, Val says in a matter-of-fact voice, “You’re alone, aren’t you, honey? Why?”

It’s a question that people ask him all the time, but it’s a surprise nonetheless. His body feels jolted and goose-bumped; his spine tingles. He looks out at the beach and ocean, at the buoys bobbing in the distance. Val stretches and digs her red-painted toes into the sand.

“Well? Out with it. I don’t have much patience these days.” Val lets out an exaggerated cough and lightly pounds her chest.

Danny tells her of the evening he first met Frank, how everyone else in the restaurant receded into the dark. The falling-in-love part was quick and complete. No questions. No doubts.

“How long were you together?” Val asks, rubbing tanning lotion on her legs.

“Eight months.”

“And then what?”

After months of spending nights in Frank’s apartment (because Frank couldn’t bring his dog, Barton, over to Danny’s, even though Danny offered to sneak him up in a suitcase), there came a time when things began to descend and spin until Danny seemed to be tripping over his own feet wherever he went.

At first, it was little things. Frank not answering when Danny asked him a question, and looking out the window. On a Friday afternoon, Frank would announce that he was spending the weekend at his parents’ so Barton could romp in their double-wide lot. “I want to leave before traffic gets bad. There’s no time for you to pack your things,” he said, while stuffing a canvas bag with Milk Bones and squeaky toys. “My parents love you, but I think it’s better if I go alone this time.” Once, Danny waited in his apartment for an hour and a half, with a special dinner congealing on the table, before Frank showed up, his face stony and hard, his apologies clipped and monotone.

He tried to convince himself it was his own paranoia, but he knew it wasn’t. Danny wondered if he should ask, sit down with Frank and hold his hand until something—anything—was revealed. Maybe it was the way Danny drooled when he slept, or his habit of saying nothing unless the words were brilliant and awe-inspiring. Because he could fix all that. If only Frank would tell him. If only Danny wasn’t so afraid to ask.

A few weeks later, after a long wedding during which the ring bearer refused to walk down the aisle and was carried, bawling, by his embarrassed mother, and the cake collapsed under the weight of its melting butter cream, Danny went back to Frank’s apartment to find Frank sitting on the sofa with his dog in his arms. He was stroking him slowly, down his unmoving flank.

“He’s dead,” Frank whispered.

Danny rushed over and put his arms around Frank, kissing the side of his head as Frank sat limply, bent over the body. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”

“He seemed sluggish all week and wouldn’t eat, and I thought maybe he was overheated. But then, a few hours ago, he crawled into my lap and began breathing funny. I held up his head, but it didn’t seem to help. When I tried to get up to call the vet, Barton gave me this look, and so I didn’t move and kept patting him. He stared at me the whole time. And then he shuddered and it was over.” He paused and fell back into the cushions. “What am I going to do?”

Danny held Frank’s hand all night, sitting on the couch with the dog between them. He didn’t know what time he fell asleep, but when he woke up, bright sunlight was pouring through the window and Barton was gone. Frank stood in front of him, his hands on his hips.

“I wasn’t sure if we should have this conversation now, but why the f*ck not? Danny, where is this relationship going?”

Danny, confused and groggy, said, “But where’s Barton? I don’t understand.”

“I took him to the vet this morning. They’ll call me when the ashes are ready.”

“Come here and we can talk about it.”

Frank pounded his fist against the wall. “My dog is dead. I want to talk about us.” He swallowed a sob and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“I thought we were happy, just like this.”

“Danny, I’m thirty-five years old. I would like to buy a house someday, have a home with you. My parents are on board. There’s nothing to stop us.”

Danny rubbed his hands together. “You know about my parents. What am I supposed to tell them?”

“That you’re gay, for f*ck’s sake!”

“They’d be so angry. I couldn’t ever see them again. My father—”

“I don’t understand why this is even an issue. You never speak to your father anyway. If you come out to them, the same thing will happen to you that happened to all of us. Your father will rage and shout and then ignore you for months and months. Your mother will cry and try to be brave. Everyone gets over it eventually, and even if they don’t, then at least they know, and we can live our lives without hiding anymore, without being afraid we’re going to run into them on the street. God!” Frank slumped against the wall.

Danny stood up and put his hands on Frank’s shoulders. “Can’t we talk about this later? You’re still upset and maybe this isn’t the right time to have this conversation.”

Frank shook him off. “No, this is the only time. Don’t you see? The longer you hide from your parents, the longer it’ll take you to get on with your life.” Frank waved at a stack of photos on the coffee table. “Those pictures are just sitting there, Danny, waiting for you to do something.”

“I know, I know. I just have to figure out a plan.”

“A plan that does what exactly? Makes your parents disappear? Makes me disappear?” Frank’s face was wet and shiny with tears. When Danny moved to wipe them away, Frank stepped back and turned his head toward the wall. “Did it ever occur to you that while you were trying to avoid being a good Chinese son, you became a gay stereotype instead? Look at you: well-dressed, skinny, afraid of commitment. It’s almost funny.”

“That’s not fair. I want you. I want us,” Danny whispered.

Frank laughed, even while his nose was running. “If that were true, you’d want a different life. Maybe it’s all too domestic. Maybe having happy Christmas dinners with my parents is too weird for you. Not that it matters. We want different things. That’s all there is to say.”

“I can do anything you want. Really. I just need time.”

“Sure, whatever you say. Listen, why don’t you go home and call me later when you’ve thought some more, okay? I need to sleep.” He walked to the front door and opened it. “Why are you so afraid, Danny? When will you stop running away?”

Danny didn’t answer.

The next morning, Frank called to say that unless Danny could come out to his parents, it had to be over. And, just like that, it was done.


Val leans back on the log behind them. “Very sad, honey. Do you think about him much?”

“Every f*cking day,” Danny says, drawing a line in the sand with his fingers.

“Do you ever see him now?”

“No. Although he called me out of the blue and we’re meeting for lunch tomorrow.”

“What do you think he wants?”

Danny looks up at the glittering sky. “I have no idea. Sometimes, I think he wants to get back together. Other times, I think he wants to tell me something totally unexpected, like he’s getting married.”

Val chuckles. “That would be a punch in the gut, wouldn’t it?”

“What if I see him and fall in love all over again?”

“Well, then, I guess you’ll get what you deserve.”

When Danny looks over at her face, he sees his reflection in her oversized black sunglasses. Without her eyes, her expression is unreadable.


Danny drops Val off at her apartment after an early dinner of fish and chips, and he hands her the photograph from the wedding. Val stares at the print for a few minutes before slipping it into the pocket of her jacket. “I don’t photograph so well when I’m not posing,” she quips. “That’s an old lady in that picture, my alter ego.”

“I think you look beautiful. Human.”

Val snorts. “I took some publicity shots when I was younger. Talk about beautiful.”

“You look like you’re going to cry here. What were you thinking?”

She opens the door and steps into the lobby before answering. “Who knows? Maybe I was wondering what my own daughter would look like.” She frowns. “Maybe I was remembering what it was like to be young.”

She props open the glass door with her foot and looks at him, no hint of a smile on her face. “All right, don’t just stand there. Come on up for some tea and maybe I’ll tell you something about it.” She points her finger at his nose. “But only because you took me to the beach. Otherwise, I wouldn’t care about you at all.” She winks and chuckles.

Her hands tremble as she reaches out to press the elevator call button, and he knows that soon he will be sitting on the sofa in her apartment, listening to the fine gravel of her voice as it travels through the years of her childhood and the flash and bang of her youth. He imagined this moment years ago, that moment before the Siamese Kitten would reveal all her secrets because he was the one who could understand. Because he was a child who woke up every other morning expecting that his life had magically transformed overnight into a glittery, musical adventure, and was disappointed when he realized he was in the same old house on the same old street. Danny steps into the elevator beside Val. As it begins to rise, he realizes he is holding his breath.