“Your kid’s a faggot, that’s what happened,” said Nick Calcutti Sr.
Rosie turned on her heels and started back down the walk. She simply did not need to have this conversation with this man. He had managed, in one short sentence, to tell her everything she needed to know. But when she got back to Poppy and took him in her arms, he whispered, “He has a gun,” and then she could not in good conscience leave Nicky there.
“Everyone in the car,” she said, and turned to face down Nick Calcutti Sr. with her husband.
Nicky peeked out from behind his father’s legs. “Daddy says I’m not allowed to play with faggots, Mrs. Walsh. And I don’t want to anyway.”
Nick spit between his teeth. “What you do with your kid is your own damn business, but it’s disgusting, and you better keep it far away from my son. Seems to me what you’re doing is child abuse, and you should go to jail, but what do I know? Don’t make no difference to me as long as you keep far away from Nicky. See, this is what I keep telling Cindy. She needs a man around the house to prevent bullshit like this from going down.”
“Why does Poppy think you have a gun?” said Penn.
“’Cause I do.”
“How does he know that?”
“’Cause I don’t keep it hidden. Two things a man should have: this”— here, he cupped his crotch in his hand and shoved it in Rosie’s general direction—“and this”—at which he pulled back his flannel shirt to reveal a gun in a holster behind his right hip.
“Did you threaten him?” said Penn.
“Who?”
“Poppy.”
“Ain’t a him, friend.”
“Did you threaten our child?” Rosie did not want to get diverted into semantics and pronoun battles. There was something more at stake here.
“I told him we don’t play with faggots, we don’t play with girls, we don’t play with boys dressed as girls, and he was no longer welcome in our home or anywhere near my kid—not at the park, not at school, not on the playground, nowhere.”
Penn felt his brain flood with one desire only: to beat the shit out of this guy. That Penn was a lover not a fighter, a writer not a wrestler, seemed not to matter. Nor that he’d never been in a fistfight in his life. Nor that it was probably a bad idea to punch in the face a man whose face he couldn’t quite reach, its being several inches over his head, a face surrounded by forty extra pounds that Penn had not, a face backed up—as he’d been pointedly shown—by an actual gun. He tried to replace the vision of Nick’s bloody face with his own, Rosie looking down at it. He made himself imagine what Rosie would look like looking at him bleeding from a stomach wound in front of this asshole’s house.
In contrast, Rosie had seen men with guns before. She’d cleaned up their messes in the ER. She’d treated them around the handcuffs with which they were locked to their gurneys. She’d saved their lives so they could be transferred from hospital to jail, patient to prisoner. She was afraid of men with guns. But she was not cowed by them.
She dropped to a knee and peeked behind Nick Calcutti to his son. “Nicky, sweetie, are you okay?”
“Yeah?”
“When’s your mom getting home?”
“She said eleven thirty, but she doesn’t like to drive when her nails are wet.”
“Jesus Christ.” Nick Sr. was on to other complaints now. Forget his son’s transgender playmate, his wife’s manicure habit could not be more annoying. Then he came back to Penn, who remained an uncomfortably small number of inches from his chest. “I’ll thank you to get the hell off my property.”
Penn opened his mouth to reply, but Rosie beat him to it. “We’d like nothing more. But we’ll stay with Nicky until Cindy gets home.”
“You think I can’t take care of my own son?” Nick cut the few inches between his chest and Penn’s in half. “Coming from you, I take that as a compliment.”
“As you wish,” said Rosie.
“If you don’t get the fuck off my lawn,” Nick replied, “I’m calling the cops.”
“Please,” said Penn. “Please call the cops.”
Nick reached out with both hands and shoved Penn hard enough to knock him down. Maybe not hard enough. Maybe Penn was just surprised. Maybe Penn was just incredulous to find himself in a low-budget action film all of a sudden. Nick closed the gap he’d made between them by stepping up between Penn’s legs and standing over him. Rosie had taken out her phone and dialed the nine and the one in which tiny, tiny blink of time, Cindy pulled up, got out of her car, and came to understand what had transpired in an instant. It was not, unfortunately, her first time.