When I was 10, my parents walked me to the end of a dock on a lake by a cabin we used to go to, not far from the Texas border, to tell me they were getting separated. And yet it was also a fear I’d been avoiding and sweeping under the rug ever since the happy “normal” life we once had fell apart without adequate explanation. It seemed both impossible and inevitable a fact that, to my mind at the time, seemed like it should have negated my existence. I can still remember being struck by the strangeness of him telling me in the third person. “I need to talk to you about the fact that your father is gay,” he said. He spoke abruptly, as if what he had to say was both overdue and over-rehearsed. But my attention was on my father’s weighty glance. Behind the loveseat was a bay window which, if you leaned into it and craned your head to the right, offered a glimpse of the Space Needle. It was a grey and drizzly Seattle day, the kind that reminded me how far we were from the last place where life felt normal: Shreveport, Louisiana. That was the year he bought it to furnish the carriage house he rented after he and my mother separated.
He was sitting on an off-white loveseat with pink and turquoise brush strokes that looked like 1987 threw up on a couch.
