“Which is?” Trevor asked quietly.
“That you love them unconditionally but want them to be exactly what you imagine in your mind. That when they stray from your own set viewpoint of how the world should work, it’s like you’ve failed. You’re a little bit like God when you have a child, and when the child doesn’t do what you want, it’s easy to think it’s a reflection on the job you’ve done. Like it’s all about you.”
Joe nodded slowly, mesmerized. Dylan leaned in, wishing he could make Mike’s very real pain and Joe’s imagined future pain disappear.
“You told your mom and dad?” Joe asked, blinking hard but otherwise immutable. “I take it that didn’t go well?”
Dylan and Mike exchanged a look that gave Mike permission to sigh, the slow hiss of release making Dylan glad he was here. Laura was of great comfort to Mike as they’d navigated time and family. She hadn’t understood how his parents could choose not only to shun him but also baby Jillian, but Dylan got it. All too well. Not because he agreed, for f**k’s sake.
Because he’d been there. Right there when it had all gone down.
His heart raged for Mike, and already just a little for Joe, if that was what Joe was afraid he might face.
“It was the biggest mistake of my life.” Mike’s words echoed through a lull in the restaurant’s busy background noise, giving them a dramatic weight that shook Dylan a bit. Laura looked over at them with an expression of unease and mouthed, You okay?
Dylan just shrugged. She closed her eyes, nodded, then looked away, huddling once again with Josie and Darla. Whatever conversation they were having looked leaps and bounds better than this.
“The threesome?” Trevor asked in surprise, his voice up half an octave.
“The telling. The threesome was the best f**king thing of my life up to that point. I felt whole. Full. Complete.” Mike swallowed hard. “Real.”
“And your parents…” Joe said, obviously not wanting to the know the answer, but Dylan saw he had to ask. Had to.
“My dad nearly beat the shit out of me. Dylan had to stop him.”
“You’re the size of a f**king redwood out of Muir Woods. How could your dad—?”
Mike’s sad grin made him look so forlorn it caught Laura’s attention again. Dylan reached up and scratched an eyebrow, finding the skin of his brow knitted so tightly it hurt.
“You think I’m tall? You should see Big Mike. I’m Little Mike.”
“It’s like Sam.” Trevor’s voice trembled just enough to make them all turn and stare at him. Alex had stayed quiet during all this.
“Sam? Your drummer?” Dylan had been to one of their concerts a few months ago with Laura and Mike.
Trevor nodded. Joe just gave him a thousand-mile stare and looked at Mike. “Sam’s not in a threesome or anything. I just mean he has a dad who rejected him. Beat him up. Sent him away.”
“Ouch,” was all Dylan could think to say.
“What about Laura’s parents?” Joe asked.
“Dead,” Mike said. “She just has this one crazy uncle left, and no one’s heard from him since her mother died.”
“And yours?” Joe’s eyes lasered on Dylan.
The question gave Dylan a chance to shake his shoulders, to unburden the tension that lingered there like the weight of a human on his back in a fire, like the responsibility of a person’s life.
“Mine? Mine tolerate it. I think my mom doesn’t know what it means, and Dad just pretends Mike’s my roommate. They create their own false sense of reality and go with it.” Shrug. He wasn’t about to get touchy-feely with these two. For so long the only lifeboat they had were Dylan’s parents and Jill’s mom. Her dad had tried to have her disinherited after her death, but her mom had put a full stop to that.
And now he and Mike were the beneficiaries of $2.2 billion that Jill’s dad had tried to deny them. Couldn’t blame the guy, really.
Would Dylan or Mike have done the same?
“They accept Laura and Mike?” Trevor asked.
“They love Laura.” Dylan smiled as Mike groaned. “And they really like Mike. They just don’t know what to do with Mike and Laura. They’re binary. They think relationships are in serial. Not parallel.”
Joe barked out a laugh that made the table chuckle. “But…” His voice held a pleading tone, as if begging for the answer he wanted. Dylan steeled himself. He doubted he could give that. “But did they freak on you when you told them? Kick you out? Cut you off?”
“Cut me off from what?”
“Money.”
Dylan made a dismissive noise. “What money? I had a paper route at twelve. A part-time job unloading trucks at fifteen. Mom and Dad did fine, but we weren’t rolling in it. It’s not like I got a shiny new BMW in the driveway with a ribbon on it for my sixteenth birthday.”
As the last sentence came out of his mouth Dylan realized it was the worst thing he could have said in that moment, because apparently that was the life Joe did live. And he’d just alienated him by making fun of it.
Too bad. His own truth wasn’t worth sacrificing so he could help some entitled kid.
“It works that way with your parents? They still give you money? Paying for law school?” he asked.
Joe didn’t respond, but Trevor jumped in. “They do. Different worlds.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “And when you’re used to all that, you don’t know what to do.”
“You go out and hustle and get a job,” Dylan muttered.
“It’s not that simple,” Joe said. “The money isn’t just love.”
Mike startled, touching Dylan’s forearm. “They’re right. It’s not just about the money. The money is love, though, in its own way.”
“Bullshit. Just because you don’t have money doesn’t mean you love your kids any less,” Dylan snapped.
“No, not like that,” Mike said, shaking his head. “It’s more like cutting off money for not choosing a life someone else told you to live.”
Joe just blinked.
And then Madge got up from her spot at the booth with Laura, Darla, and Josie and began clearing plates.
“Want more?”
“Whatcha got?” Trevor asked.
“Fried green tomatoes covered in parmesan with sauce?”
“Sure.”
She sized up the table. “I’ll bring three orders.”