We’d been together for eighteen months, and Yolanda had spent plenty of lazy afternoons in my apartment on Jackdaw Street, but she had only come out to her parents a year before and had wanted to give them some time to adjust to the idea before she officially moved in with me. She was right, they did need some time to adjust: about five minutes, maybe ten. I don’t know how in life she ever imagined her parents could do anything but love her. The shock was how quickly they decided they were going to love me, too.
Dr. and Mrs. Rusted were from the British Virgin Islands; Dr. Rusted, Yolanda’s father, was an Episcopal minister and a Ph.D. in psychology. Her mother owned an art gallery in Denver. All you had to see was the bumper sticker on their Prius—VOTING IS LIKE DRIVING: R GOES BACKWARD, D GOES FORWARD—to know we were going to be all right. The day after his daughter came out to them, Dr. Rusted took down the flag of the British Virgin Islands that hung from the pole on their porch and replaced it with a rainbow-colored pennant. Mrs. Rusted got a new bumper sticker for the hybrid, a pink triangle with the words LOVE IS LOVE superimposed over it. I think they were secretly proud when someone egged their house, although they pretended to be steamed by the bigotry of their neighbors.
“I cannot understand how they coo’ be so intolerant,” Dr. Rusted announced in his big, booming voice. “Yolanda babysit halve the children on the street! Change their diapers, sing them to sleep. And then they stick an anonymous note onder the windshield wiper to say our child is a deviant and we should pay back oll the parents of children she babysit.” He shook his head as if disgusted, but his eyes glittered with amusement. All good preachers have a little of the devil in them.
Yolanda and her parents had spent the summer in the BVI visiting the extended family and leaving me on my lonesome: Honeysuckle Speck, the only twenty-three-year-old Joe Strummer lesbian look-alike on my whole block, student of law at the University of Colorado Boulder, fiscal conservative, lover of horses, and reformed user of dipping tobacco (the girlfriend made me quit). I hadn’t had her in my arms in six weeks, and I was so caffeinated waiting for her and her mother to turn up this morning that I had the jitters.
It was lucky for me I had the little vampire to fool with. There was a steel rack in the rear of the garage, a place to hang bicycles, and Templeton liked me to lift him up and turn him upside down so he could dangle from it by his knees like a bat. He said he went flying as a bat every night, looking for fresh victims. He could get down—I had positioned a mattress under the rack, and when he was ready, he would drop with an uncharacteristically athletic flip, landing on his feet. But he couldn’t get back up without someone to lift him. By the time I heard the first crash of thunder, my arms were rubber from scooping him up and hanging him so many times.
That first bang of thunder caught me off guard. I thought a couple cars had collided out in the road, and I hurried to the open garage door, my nervous imagination already sketching a picture of Yolanda and her mother in a head-on. It is odd how much we want to be in love when you think about how much anxiety comes with it, like a tax on money you won in the lottery.
But there weren’t any wrecks in the road, and the sky was just as brilliant and blue as ever, at least from my vantage point. The wind was gusting strong, though. Across the street, over where the comet-cult people lived, the breeze snatched at a stack of paper plates and scattered them across the grass and into the road. I could smell rain in that wind—or something like rain anyway. It was the fragrance of a quarry, the odor of pulverized rock. When I leaned my head out and looked at the peaks, I saw it, a great black thunderhead the size of an aircraft carrier, coming up fast over the Flatirons like they sometimes did. It was so black it startled me—black with bruised highlights of pink in it, a soft, dreamy pink like a color you’d see at sunset.
I didn’t stare at it long, because at that very moment Yolanda and her mother turned onto Jackdaw Street in their bright yellow Prius, a velvet easy chair strapped to the top. They pulled up across the street in front of my house, and I started to walk over. Yolanda leapt from the passenger seat with a big scream: a gangly black girl with hips so round they were almost a parody of female sexuality, stacked on top of storklike, skinny legs. Yolanda was prone to screaming when things made her happy and also doing this funny stomping dance around and around a person when she was glad to see them. She did it around me a couple times before I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to me and . . . well, and patted her back in an awkward sort of hug. How I would regret that later: that I didn’t snatch her around the waist and squeeze her against me and put my mouth on hers. But I was raised country. Anyone who so much as glanced at me would know me for what I was. One look at the strappy white muscle shirt and the trucker haircut and you’d spot me for a bull dyke. On a public stage, though, I lost all my don’t-give-a-fuck spirit, was embarrassed to touch or to kiss, not wanting to draw stares or to offend. The sight of her made my heart swell so full my chest hurt, but I hugged her mother more firmly than I squeezed my beloved. No last embrace. No final kiss. I’ll live with that shame the rest of my life.
We small-talked for a minute about the flight back from the British Virgin Islands, and I teased the girl about how much she’d packed for the big move. “You sure you remembered everything? I hope you didn’t forget the trampoline. What about the canoe? You get that jammed in there somewhere?”
But we didn’t talk long. There was another reverberating boom of thunder, and Yolanda jumped and screamed again. That girl did love a good thunderstorm.
“Yo-lan-da!” Martina called from her lawn chair. Martina was the Russian stripper who lived downstairs with Andropov. She had a teasing, flirty relationship with Yolanda that I didn’t much appreciate, not because I was jealous but because I thought she liked to play friendly with the lesbians upstairs to rile her boyfriend. Andropov was sulky and overweight, a former chemist who’d been reduced to scrambling for driving gigs on Uber. “Yo-lan-da, your lovely thing is going to get wet.”
“What’d you say, Martina?” Yolanda asked, just as blithe and innocent as a child listening to a teacher.
“Yeah, you want to try that one again?” I said.
Martina gave me a sly look and said, “Your chair, it get rained on. Big cloud make it all wet. Better hurry. You want to have nice place to put your fanny.” And she winked at me and picked her cell phone out of the grass. A moment later she was chattering at someone in light, laughing Russian.
It nettled me, listening to her lewd talk and putting on an act like she didn’t know what she was saying because English was her second language. But I didn’t have time to stew over it. The next instant someone was tugging at my sleeve, and when I looked around, I saw that Little Dracula had joined us in the street. Templeton had his cape flapped up over his head to protect his face from the sun, and he peered out at me from beneath its sleek black folds. He liked Yolanda, too, and didn’t want to be left out of our unpacking party.