"Oh I do! I want to put it by the bed!"
By the bed? This thing is going by my bed? ÎBreathe,â I told myself. It's our bed now. I put the lamp in a box with Andrew's college yearbook. I picked the yearbook up and found the swim team picture -- post-pubescent, hormone-filled specimens of...aah, there he was. "Andrew.....and Mark Fitzgerald. State champs. IM relay team."
It's never enough, is it? Never quite enough. I spend my whole life moving towards the kind of person I want to be, the kind of man I know I can be and when it comes right down to it, who am I? Med school, speech therapy, personal trainers, fancy clothes -- I'm still just the geeky son of a poor fisherman.
I looked at Andrew packing stuff away. My Southern gentleman. God, I love him. He's the best thing that's ever happened to me, and I don't want ever want to lose him. But does he really have to take the ãFor the Boysä poster, too? Where the hell am I gonna hide that?
"Eric, look," Andrew yelped, holding some bizarre-looking object. "I found my dreamcatcher!" His what?
"It looks like a net with a dead animal attached, Drew." I don't like animal skins -- makes me queasy, MD or no.
"My dad gave it to me when I was a kid and said my granddad got it from some Indian chief. This is real fox tail."
I knew that I shouldn't. I was going to sound like the three-headed green monster. But how could I not?
"So, tell me about Mark Fitzgerald...." I muttered out loud.
THUD. I wondered what he dropped when I mentioned the name?
When Andrew came out, he was sucking his thumb. "I hammered my finger, dammit. What do you think, doc, amputate?" He held it toward me and I kissed it better. Then the phone rang.
"Hello? Hey, Greg! Fran got what? Aw, man, that's awful! She okay? Okay." To me, he mouthed that Fran's girlfriend had left her.
Calm down, Eric. He's not avoiding the question. He's talking on the phone. I went back and leafed through his yearbook.
