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This story was first published on April 19th, 2011, and was last updated onApril 19th, 2011.

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Summary

Seventeen years of-fearing, admiring, failing, loving-raising a gentleman.Kurt/Blaine, Blaine's father narrates. One-shot.

- 3 -

All the White Horses

A/N: Not every parent can be a Burt Hummel.

Warning for some discussions of mature themes and profanity. Characters'opinions are not necessarily my own.

This is your son, eight years old and making the sweet, sweet discovery that ahumming dashboard holds rhythm better than anything else ever has or will.Blaine's got his backpack on the floor between his feet and his hands open-palmedrapping out syncopation on the dash in front of him, singing 'cause every littlethingis gonna be all rightand you're listening and tapping along on the handbrake, not quite able to catch the beat or make eye contact but nodding nonetheless.You've never had much to say to one another, but you have an unspoken playlist thatbreaks the silence of the eleven-minute ride to school.

so don't worryabout a thing

When the handle clicks open the spell breaks, inevitably; this is difficult groundbecause from there on you'll both deal in words, not music: Blaine in third-grademinutiae, you in the white-collar vernacular that sometimes seems about as tiredlypointless, but most of all in the strained goodbye or see you later and the knowledgethat from then on whatever happens in the other's day will be somethinguntranslatable and incomprehensible. Still as he dashes towards the buildingsomething soft under your breastbone hopes he'll stay filled with the quiet energyemanating from that dashboard, the off-tempo nodding; the sense that thateleven-minute suspension in music will make it possible to persevere through therest of his day, as it's done for you.

Your own father never said any of this. Even if you wanted the words, youwouldn't know where to find them. By the time the window goes up all you havetime to do is call, "Study hard," which he pretends is Have a good day, and he smilesand replies "Yes, Daddy" which you pretend is I love you.

This is your son bored out of his mind at his sister's twelfth birthday party, kickinghis feet against the rungs of his chair and muttering lovingly to an airplane made ofa High School Musical napkin and some unfortunate girl's earrings. Valerie with herbirthday-girl tiara keeps shooting him glares, but he ignores her, instead eating his

- 4 -

cake with methodical neatness and testing the aerodynamics of his plane bylaunching it into a bowl of punch.

"This plane is called The Val," he tells you when you approach him. "Because it'sher birthday, that's whyit got a bit drowned, so it's a good thing it's secretly asubmarine."

"You may as well help your sister, as long as you're here," you say, ignoring thesoggy plane-submersible. You hand him a full glass of punch and pick randomsprinkles out of his hair and point to one of Valerie's friends at the far end of thetable, surrepitiously dozing off as the girls around her engage in a pizza-eatingcontest. "She isn't having a good time. Do you think you can change that?"

"What do I do?"

"Pay attention to her. You'll know."

When you next seek him out he's chatting away quite the thing with a now utterlycharmed preteen; as you pass them you see him glance bewilderedly at one of theHigh School Musical napkins and splutter on bravely ("think he's kind of orange,but his hair is maybe shiny. Is he the one you like?") By the end of the party he willknow to use her name more often than she uses his, to remain attentive to her plateand glass, and most of all, to enjoy himself so that she will know she is with someonewho appreciates her. In his elementary-school world of gum under desks and boyswho spit on the parking lot, the protective, loving mantle of charm must seem likenothing so much as undiluted magicthe promise of a lovelier world that he,suddenly an adept magician, can for seconds at least make real.

The birthday party with its raucous children and unchewed gobs of cake seemssuddenly like a premonition. Here is an entire generation that will grow updisdaining courtesy as a matter of tiresome rules, and in the midst of it, your son:nine years old and already firm in the knowledge that to be a gentleman is to beifonly for momentssomeone's hero.

This is your son watching you polish his dress shoes. You jerk them away from hishands with an involuntarily tense motion that escapes like gunfire; his eyes dim, buthe apologizes before you can and then your own apology seems frivolous, so youhold it quiet inside your mouth.

The lack of conversation is nothing unusual. You have an Ivy League education, an

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immaculately maintained 401-K, a wife who wears pearls of the proper size andcolor to your office dinners; with all of this, somehow, the world has come to expectthat you have automatically acquired the ability to socialize with your children.

In the car before going inside you look at your tired eyes in the rearview and tellyourself: today will be the day you toss words back and forth with him as easily asLydia and Valerie do, today will be the day. Inside, you palm his curls as he locksarms around your legs. You close your eyes and apologize with the movement ofyour hand in his hair, you think that you are a coward, but tomorrowtomorrow.

Tomorrow you will tell him you love him. In the meanwhile, his dress shoes willalways be the neatest in his class.

This is your son upstairs doing his homework, or so you think until you catch thetail end of, "Mom, I think you should come upstairs" from your daughter pulling onLydia's skirt. You set down your pen.

"Valerie."

She turns toward you, biting her lip. High school has brought with ituncomfortable jeans, a North Face jacket, and a straight-with-side-bangs haircutidentical to every other girl's, but she's never been able to hide that expression,vintage Valerie when she was just fat baby Val.

"Is there a problem?"

"I sort ofI mean, Blaine's in our bathroom, I think he's crying, and I just...I don'tthink he should be, you know, alone"

Upstairs the three of you lean against the cream-colored wall next to the door andyou hear your son's voice tremulously forming sentences and breaking them apartlike building blocks.

"I read about on this website, it's really helpful, lots of kiteenagers are confusedabout this and it said it's really nice to be able to be honest with your family, and soI thought"

Lydia and Valerie look at one another first. Stunned and flutterybirdlike. No onelooks at you. You direct your gaze to the floor. The world is suddenly too bright,unmanageablethis, you think, this was why you chose neutral pastels for the

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rooms, so that nothing would hurt your family's eyes.

Blaine's voice picks up again with its brave inflections. "Now that I'm thirteen andmy s-s-sexuality is beginning to come to light"

His debate coach would make him say it again. His sexuality, not a word he caneven say, sounds like some kind of unfocused creature emerging from the deep.Before Lydia can reach for your hand you flatten your palm against the wallpaper,like an insect.

Blaine is silent again. Then:

"You coward," he blurts. Unprofessional, but this is rehearsal and he can affordthe moment. "You coward," his voice wavers, "can't even tell them"

You imagine him then. How it must have been: spending the last few eveningsclicking dutifully from Suggested Reading to Suggested Reading and clearing thebrowser history on the computer he shares with his sister. You wonder if he foundthe right way to tell you and then you're angry with yourself, so angrybecausewhen your son navigates the world as easily as Blaine does it's so easy to assumethat he will never be hurt, that you will never be called upon to assuage that hurt.

So easy to place responsibility for your well-being on his shoulders, instead of theway it should be.

"Can't even tell them you're gay," Blaine hollers behind the bathroom door like thegangly thirteen-year-old he is, and a sudden smattering of tears blinds you; not atthe declaration but at the pain in his voice. You blink and blink, you don't know howthere's so much moisture still in your body when your throat is so dry. "Gayyou'regayI'm gay. I can say it. I'm Blaine Anderson and I'm gay"

He's crying now in earnest, his sobs the backshifted echo of your own teenageones, sounding like he's being torn in two. So hard there's no face to be felt, just aparalysis of fear and saltiness. Your wife rattles the doorknob now with an air ofdesperation; she's already found the words; she never has to think about it the wayyou do"Blaine, my love, my baby, open the door"

When the door opens you don't hear it, but you can see from the corner of youreye how the women claim him in their embrace, even Valerie who professes dislikefor him on every other occasioneven she grows up in moments, clutching herbrother in a firm seatbelt of a hug. Blaine is clinging to his mother's soft white armswith a drowning child's grip, but his eyes are looking for yours.

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Move, you tell yourself. Move, you damned fool.

But you are a frozen man, all you can think is that hugs will do nothing; you are afather and your mind seizes up in logistics firstfrom here there will be trips toschool, legal action against high-school viciousness, a hopeless tender lonelinessthat you will not know how to answer from a son who will keep looking to you as ifyou should.

It's with this last that the anger finally comes, with perfect glacial slowness, untilat last you are encased in ice and the pain of what your son will now face doesn'treach you. It isn't directed at him, but at something unseen and uncomprehendingthat he will now fight against for the rest of his life; as his father you find yourselfconscripted into a war you never wanted and will never be able to avoid.

And you are not your sonyou are no one's hero. You were never prepared forwar.

Move, your own dark eyes plead from your son's face, and without your consentyour cowardly feet movetowards the hall, down the stairs, out of the house, intothe cul-de-sac outside that leads you nowhere at all but back to your own door.

This is your son who is exactly the same and tells you that, because he is the onlyboy in the world who would think of someone other than himself in a situation likethis.

"It's still me, Dad," he says, paused at the doorway of your study; he looks like achangeling caught between one world and another. Not your child, except that hefixes his collar before he speaks the same way you do before a difficultmeetingthis, you think, has always been one of the grave joys of being his father,the small ways in which your own soul shines out from behind his features and looksthe more beautiful for it.

I know, you try, I would know you anywhere but your throat seizes up. As Blainewill one day freeze as a football player grabs his collar, you feel yourself haltednowknowing desperately that you need to speak to save your own life, notknowing in which direction to go.

Ultimately, as you have always done, you choose the safe route. Whatever youwanted to say or could have said comes out "Finish your homework."

- 8 -

Something in Blaine's gaze ratchets shut like a drawbridge.

When he replies, "Yes, Dad," you know you've forfeited your right to the lexicon ofone another, the unspoken understanding of love that had undercut yourconversations. From here onwards you will speak to each other as always, polite ordeferentially jovial; whatever you lost in that moment is so quiet and so devastatingthat it will go without expressiona great pain must be borne in silence or screams,and the latter was never an option for you or for Blaine.

A gentleman, after all, does not make a mess of his mourning.

He slides the door shut and you turn back to your work. The yellow highlighterburns in your vision with its cheeriness. A steady drone continues from the desklamp. Life goes on; you have done your part in propping up your generation's farceof masculinity. You wonder why the quiet thing in your chest keeps aching, andaching, and aching.

This is your son whom you've taught, with savings accounts and his ownmonogrammed checkbook, that a gentleman expects back exactly what he puts in.Blaine has always accepted the credo with delighted understanding: in theblack-and-white movies he adores, the kind, loving men receive exactly what kind,loving men should, which seems to be something along the lines of gleaminglyvarnished happiness in whatever form they desire it. This all makes exactmathematical sense to your honor student slip of a child, and you have known sincehe was small that if he were to paint a motto above his life he'd write in sloppy butcertain letters something to the effect of tie your shoelaces and you won't fall.

("That's incredibly navewhat about rocks, or street curbs, or someone sticking afoot in your" Valerie would probably say to this, and Blaine would reply withcheery pragmatism, "'Well, at least you won't have your own shoelaces to blame;"you have never joined in these conversations, bewildered by the back-and-forthrepartee, but you know exactly how they go.)

So although over the phone Lydia tells you in near-hysterics that he must havebeen terrified when he opened his history book in third period and a shower ofshredded pages fell out (nothing is as violent as a destroyed book, to you, to yourson) you listen only halfheartedly, knowing that in reality Blaine probably hadn'treacted at all, because he would know there had obviously been a mistake. He'dhave put the poor mutilated cover of the book into his backpack with the air ofsomeone sealing evidence with caution tape. When he takes the book out to show

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you at home you can see that he feels, somehow, that the book is the victim, not him.

In the principal's office Mrs. Lewin, the secretary, looks upset but strangelyunsurprised to see him. The stories he's read (Honors English or not, he did, in theend, have to look up the word homophobia) will not register in his mind at all,because he is Blaine Anderson, he appreciates his classmates and recycles anddoesn't tell on the sophomores when they need his help with algebra; he's paid forhis happiness with kindness, and this is not the way the world works.

What your wife will never knowwhat your son will never knowis that this is thefirst time you wish he were different. Not when you first see him blush over anotherboy, not when you understand that he will never have his own small childrenwhenyou realize, here, in this dingy office, that from now on the world will constantlywork to disabuse him of the principle of fairness you have worked hard for him tolearn.

It's an ugly thought, but his safety ishas always beenmore important to youthan anything else. Even, as you have learned now, his happiness.

Your thirteen-year-old looks simultaneously thirty and three as he gathers up thebook and hugs it to his chest, crossing his feet and watching the adults through theglass. There's a little bit of gum smashed into the ground next to his shoe. In a fewhours, when he shudders in your passenger seat, tears drying on his cheeks, you willsay the world can be ugly not knowing what else to say, and that's the first thingyou'll think of: used gum in the principal's coatroom where there should bemahogany wood and cleanliness, like a judge's bench. Order. Reassurance. The nexttime a book of his is shredded it will be math, and across an illustration ofmulticolored prime numbers will be a word you would have docked Blaine'sallowance for for at least four months, had it come out of his mouth.

You have taught him not to make the same mistake twice. That time, he will knownot to go to the principal's office. Instead, he will go to the guidance counselor andfill out applications to six different private schools all over the country, until he isaccepted in a city called Westerville, sixty miles from home. Lydia will sit next tohim and hold his hand. Valerie will punch a snide classmate in the throat andreceive suspension.

The therapist Lydia hires will purse her lips and say important now that you spendtime with your son. Your daughter and wife will avert their eyes, embarassed at thetired bogeyman you've becomerepressed father avoiding his family, the stupid stiffworkaholic who brings convenient villainy to a thousand teenage dramas and emotesin numbersand you will twist your wedding ring on your finger and pay them no

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mind, because you will be calculating how much overtime is left until you receiveyour pay raise and the zeroes on either side of the Dalton Academy bill balance oneanother out and your son is safe.

But you know none of this yet. Here in the principal's coatroom, waiting for histurn to explain what's happened, Blaine is completely sure of receiving theunderstanding that is his due, because this is how you have taught him a gentlemanfaces the world.

The door opens; Mrs. Lewin's eyes are a little red. You catch the tail end of thewords school policy from the principal, who silences them when he catches yourstare. Blaine gets up and smiles, walks past the gum, the florescents pooling on hisshoulders like stage lights. The book is illegible and useless against its chest, itsarguments and reasons all torn up by hate, but your son walks with confidence.

And you will remember for the rest of your life: the small gentleman you raisedhas tied his shoelaces, and this is the last time he will believe with all his heart thatthere's no wayno way at allthat the loving world will let him fall.

This is your son, asking, "Do you wish I were straight?"

Several answers.

No. You're the same.

Yes. Your faith in the world will die by the time you're twenty.

And:

No. You're strong.

Yes. You shouldn't have to be strong.

And:

No. I'll protect you.

Yes. I can't protect you.

Your daughter describes you as a mindless drone in a machine; only you know that

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you grew up fighting. Fighting to stay awake studying, to get into Yale, to pay theway through it, to grovel and beg and bludgeon yourself up a corporate hierarchyyou would live to see your children jeer at, to give happiness into those children'shands like a torn-away heart. An endless, brutal fight, its wounds measured only inthe florescent-lit nine-to-five indignities of love. Traffic lights and overtime and dirtylooks at the office to be home for dinner. Remembering to shine a small son's dressshoes. You've fought all your life and clawed your way to where you are onlybecause you have bent yourself to the will of the world, changed yourself when itwould not change for you.

It no longer occurs to you whether this is wrong or right, only that it isand thathe, perhaps, is strong, but you are not brave enough to see him broken.

You tell him: "I do."

This is your son waving goodbye from the ivy-covered facade of Albert J. HofstaderSophomore Dormitory. Neither your wife nor your daughter is speaking to you;they're holding one another's hands and looking nowhere with their red-rimmedeyes. Blaine's hand is more like a salute than a wave. You don't turn back to look athim because it would be a useless motion. Outpourings of emotion are likeoutpourings of anything else: messes, to be mopped up leaving the world neat andmanageable again.

Later you will wonder why it is, then, that you can think back on it and rememberhim so clearly: a small upright figure with a grave expression, braced against theslate-blue cold of fall. Wrought-iron and ivy and cigarette smoke off marble,boarding-school sensations dappling the skin in an entire constellation ofluxurybut his raised hand, stilled, its whiteness austere as a flag of surrender.

This is your son singing lead for the Dalton Academy Warblers whom you Googledfor thirty-seven minutes, at work, after learning the name from your wife ("didn'teven congratulate him or ask him anything about it, don't you think he would haveliked that?" she chides quietly as you drive, and you think about a downloaded backissue of the Dalton Academy Clarion explaining something about hazing rituals andwonder who 'Pavarotti' is). When you pull up to the gate Blaine hugs Lydia andValerie briefly and shakes your hand.

"I hope you had a safe trip," he says, exactly what a father would want to hearfrom a well-mannered son. "You can chill in my room before the show. I'm glad you

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could make it."

Every degree of it perfect, down to the mindful colloquialisms mixed in to distractpeople from the fact that he's working from a template.

"That's very considerate."

You know the template as well as he does.

He pulls his hand back from yours with quick courtesy; you have never given anyoutward indication of your hesitance in touching him now that he is grown, but hecan tell. It occurs to you only as you are following him up to his room that perhapshe has simply come to assume that people will be bothered by his touchyou'veseen his best friends and his teachers shrink back after his announcement. Anotherchild might have reacted with anger or determined resentment, but Blaine, wholives in constant awareness of how he affects others, has simply incorporated theprovision into his mode of conduct. If he is bitter at all, he has never provided anyindication of it. Yet as Valerie wraps an arm around his shoulders you see him bitehis lip. He closes his eyes, as if the fact of that basic human contact is too intense tobear, drowning, shaking for the fear that when her arm is lifted he will again floataway into the unanchored, touchless space he inhabits.

Your years have taught you: a child's sadness is a messy thing, all his longings andmiseries hanging out like untucked shirttails. You turn your eyes away. Line yourshoes up next to his.

He serves you all tea in an assortment of mismatched but clean mugs and asksafter Lydia's gardenias, Valerie's college acceptances, and your promotion. It's allvery correct with exactly the right amount of mirth stirred in. It would fool astranger, if you were one.

And then you see him step out in front of a wall of boys in blue blazers, andeverything changes.

All at once he is eight years old again, bobbing and tapping his feet andresonating like a tuning fork struck to a new and vibrant key. He jumps, he twirls,he dances (terribly), he wraps the world relentlessly in the easy joy that emanatesfrom him in spades, and once again he is the tiny boy singing absently in your car,full to bursting with an unbreakable energy.

You excuse yourself from the auditorium, knowing Lydia will give you certain hellfor leaving, and you lean over the sink in the men's restroom and push the shaking

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heel of your hand against your eye. It comes away wet.

"I'm so glad he's happy there," chatters Valerie afterwards, on the ride back.

You think of his preternatural stillness in his dorm room against the bounding,exuberant creature onstage, and you wonder if not being able to talk to Blaine hasgiven you twice the ability to listen to him. To know, as surely as if he has given it toyou, the weight and shape of his pain.

This is your son, white T-shirt and shaded eyes in a summer that's been thehottest in sixteen years. Montgomery goes a terrible sort of golden as the grass diesin unfurled acres all around you. When you and Blaine go out on the drivewaywithout shoes the gravel is like oil frying on a pan; coming back inside the soles ofyour feet are as numb as if you've walked a mile in deep snow.

The heat works itself down your throat like wet cotton. Everything soaked withthe sun and dust flavor of August. Between the two of you the silence is likesomething grown hard and tall and bright with the years, so that the physicalbarrier of the newly-restored Chevy and its impersonal metal is nothing at all but amanifestation of that silence. You know nothing about cars and neither does Blaine,but the both of you know how to follow a script.

Sweat pours down the open collar of your shirt and you can feel the back of yourneck go a painful red, just as Blaine's has done. You think: even if he doesn't think ofyou, he'll carry that reminder back into the cool house with him, a badge: you werehere, you did what you knew how to do for this being given into your charge. Howcould you have known that you would succeed, that it would not be enough for himto be happy and safe, and that youwith your lifetime of decorously closed doorsand best-laid plans stretching uselessly behind youwould be able to think ofnothing to do except try to make him fit back into a world that couldn't hold him?

He speaks unprompted only once, testing the ignition in the new car. The key isflat and bronze-colored in the slats of sunlight sliding closed in a Venetian blindpattern, as if someone's drawn curtains over the summer. Blaine's eyes are soemotive that you're surprised to hear words in the still dusty space. You hear thequestion before he asks it.

"Did you really think this would" change me, you think, "change me?"

In that moment it reels into you like the entire unfathomable weight of summer

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pressing cloudy and wet against your skin, the enormity of your son's love for you.You know that if he were so inclined he could be filled with righteous anger, hecould rail, he could go silent, he could chafe against you, he could cut you out of hislife like a tumor as efficiently as his sister has (you don't need him, Blaine, you don't)but all he does is ask and wait for your answer, knowing you cannot possibly bestupid enough to believe this would change him, giving you the benefit of the doubtyou do not deserve. In his patience you read what he hasn't said: he knows, and heforgives you.

The sunburn twinges at the back of your neck. A sharp antiseptic tang like shame.Before you can answer, the car's ignition roars to life.

It's against either of your expectations, and the flicker of disappointment in hiseyes is replaced immediately by curiosity. The dashboard hums. You place yourpalms flat against it and for one wild moment wonder if he'll sing, as he did when hewas small, but instead he takes his hand off the brake and shrugs off his worksmock.

"Gonna show Mom and Val," he says, throwing you a terse, sad smile, and thenhe's gone.

You stay in the car for a long time, warming your fingers against the vibration ofthe old engine. Dead things resurrected, given new life. The promise of forwardmovement. You don't know what you hoped to accomplish; you know, however, thatit is best you didn't succeed.

It will later seem to you like karmic justice that exactly one month after the carincident, Blaine meets a young mechanic, and things that are broken begin, at last,to be fixed.

This is your son who is, for the first time in his life, defensive of his phone bills.It's unusual enoughthe sort of behavior you'd expect from Valerie, who careenedthrough high school speaking to you only when she felt her privacy was beingviolatedthat you ask her if she's heard from her brother and everything's all right.

"You don't need to control every aspect of his life," she says, voice icy.

Just pay for it? you want to snap back, but instead you duck your head like thedumb beast of burden she thinks you are and go back to your study. EventuallyBlaine sends you the bills himself; he still subscribes to his antiquated system of

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fairness that no one in the world understands except you and any actor ever pairedwith Audrey Hepburn. He believes you have the right to see, so you notice rightaway what he was shy about. The list of calls is populated almost exclusively with asingle number prefaced with a Lima area code.

It's your wife who makes the insinuations and chummy phone calls and yourdaughter who teases him when he's home. All you do is switch him to a plan thatallows unlimited texting and hope like any other parent that he will tell you in hisown time, knowing he won't, and knowing it's what you deserve.

This is your son having a conversation with you about money, not for his sake butfor ("Kurt, actually, his name's Kurt"). For the first time you're thankful for thespreadsheets and your accepted role in your family of regurgitating out money,because you know that if not for this you would never have found out anything asbasic as the name. So you clear off your desk and open up your Dalton spreadsheetsand the forms for the music scholarship Blaine received after his freshman year, andyou show him how the tuition divides up. Blaine frowns and takes notes in a smallmoleskine notebook.

As all of this is going on you note the real tension in Blaine's eyes, a seriousnessverging on panic, and you swallow the old knot in your throat and say, between a taxaudit and a family income form, "Is Kurtis everything all right with him?Financially?" You curse yourself for adding the last word.

With his head swimming in numbers Blaine is too preoccupied to be on his guard,so he is tricked, for the moment, into talking to you as if you're one of hisconfidantes. He scratches out a figure and sets his pen to his lips. "I think so," hemurmurs. "I'm trying to short-list a few scholarships for him, I know he'll beoffended, but it's worth a try, anyway."

"Offended?"

"Well, his father's a mechanic, and"

Without thinking of what you're doing you reach out and close the moleskinenotebook as Blaine's scribbling away. He looks up as if he's been slapped.

"Dad?"

"It isn't your place to presume what you're presuming."

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Reprimanding him is familiar ground; he's always been an easy child in thatregard. Speaking to him this way is perhaps the only fluency you've retained of hischildhood.

You're surprised, then, that his eyes, for a moment, narrow. In the next momenthe's straightening his lapels and regaining control of himself, but the motion andwhat it implies fills the space between you and ignites it, electric.

"I'm not presuming anything," he says. "Tuition at Dalton is expensive, and"

"And no one wants to be told he can't handle things on his own."

You steel yourself for the inevitable ungainly confession, but instead he looksaway. This is an expression you understand, the downward-quirked side of hismouth and eyes turned glassy with self-recrimination; this is how you see yourselfwhenever you fail him in some small way: a coward in a gentleman's skin, animposter in your gilded life. For the first time your boy is a man, and it's anunattractive thing.

You look down at the spreadsheets and highlighters scattered across the desk likeso many toys. So he, too, is trying to make amends in the same way you have.

Blaine toys with a cufflink, fixing it. The complicated physicality of the Daltonuniform is something he takes more and more comfort in these days; the machineryof it: tie, cufflinks, lapels, pocket square. Levers to pull and buttons to press to makehimself something more collected than what he is. Neither of you react to thestatement, but you know, without hearing, that Kurt isn't the one who can't handlethings on his own. To be a father is to hear these things.

Whether or not your child chooses to say them is not relevant.

This is your son who doesn't tell you about the Kurt-and-Karofsky issue, but youhear anyway, through a combination of the tail ends of phone calls, offhandreferences on the few weekends he's home, and finally an announcement or two inthe Dalton Clarion. It's the same with the transfer. The tie at Sectionals. The party atsome Rachel Berry's house. The Regionals performance. The Warblers' year-endannual showcase that takes place after it.

What he does tell you, as you're calling to inform him of the hotel you've booked tostay overnight for the performance, is "Dad, actuallyKurt's family's been wanting

- 17 -

to meet you. Mr. Hummel says you're welcome to stay at their place for theweekend."

"Why is that?"

You both know what isn't being said. You know.

All you want is to see if he'll say it to you.

There's a shaky breath on the other end of the linethe most you'll ever get, interms of a clue, that Blaine is nervous. But in the next second the stage light goeson, the curtains pull open, he pulls calm on like a suit jacket.

"Well," he says, and his voice is yours, faking enthusiasm at office mixers, "I don'tknow if I told you but, wewe're going out."

This is your son whose boyfriend is as tall as you are, crane-boned with eyes thatare, for the moment, dimmed to a relentless slate-grey. Individual parts of him areaesthetically pleasing, you conclude, but on the whole he is an entirely nonsexualpresence. When you shake his hand with its manicured nails the palm is callused.

"It's lovely to finally meet you," he says. "I'm Kurt."

Blaine's hand is at your elbow and you can tell from the tension in his fingertipsthat he's scared. For a moment you want to confirm all their expectations of you andmake some loud, brashly stupid remark, bray like an animal and pretend you don'tknow what's going on, embarrass them both. You expect to feel vindictive, butinstead all you feel is a sort of sick, tired anger at the fact that there are parents likethis, and that they've made your son expect that you, too, will behave this way.

"It's a pleasure," you say.

Burt Hummel grunts when he is introduced to you and says nothing at all. You seehim raise a disdainful eyebrow at your thick camel-colored overcoat when he takes itand know abruptly that he's heard somethingyou just don't know what.

The Warblers showcase is on Sunday night. You have two nights and one day ofawkwardness to go, and you are preemptively exhausted at the thought of it.

The first dinner is a disaster. Not the messy, blowout disaster family dramas are

- 18 -

made of, but a dully uneventful one instead. Kurt's huge stepbrother keeps adefensive arm around him as if expecting that at any moment you might lungeacross the table and throttle him. Everyone looks at you with guarded eyes, so yousay nothing at all and listen to Burt and Carole Hummel and your wife keep up asteady beat of awkward-but-sustained conversation.

Blaine himself has turned his charm up and is measuring the room like abarometer, all quick compass-pointing eyes and little exhalations as if adjusting forpressure. He calibrates the table to his own mood. Through the salad course heleads the singers in an impromptu game of lyric tag, sparing anyone from having toactually converse with each other, and by the spaghetti all three teenagers are infine form kicking glee stories to one another like soccer balls. At this point you seehim finally relax, lean back, and start on his spaghetti.

You pick up your own fork, feeling suddenly as if a great weight has been removedfrom your shoulders. Midway through the motion you see Kurt pick up his as well,and when his eyes meet yours, you're stunned to see that their expression somehowechoes what you feel.

This is your son who seems wholly content to spend his Saturday morning at thetable, watching Kurt share the comics with his stepbrother. They read the way youand your sister shared books when you were young: holding one page up straight inthe middle between them and reading either side. It's a system that gets hammeredout through intense and debilitating battles over the amount of centimeters eachperson gets, so you can tell they're close, because relationships don't survivereading that way unless both parties are willing to concede valuable page leverageand acquire serious cricks in the neck.

The famous Kurt Hummel is both exactly what you expected and nothing like it.He directs most of his conversation towards Blaine's mother, who loves him as wasexpected. Lydia embodies in voice and dress and worldview the word lady and boyslike Kurt, for whatever reason, always fall hopelessly, platonically in love withwomen like this. He's absently helpful in a way Blaine and Valerie, who have grownup with two parents, can't quite replicatehe snatches up dishes on his way to thekitchen and knows without having to ask how his father might want his eggs. In theearly morning you saw him standing in the darkened hallway in front of thethermostat, dialing the heat down. The corridor was grey and his eyes, clear andeerie, had seemed somehow feline.

The thing that stands out to you is that he talks a great deal like someone who's in

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the habit of saying very little, something you recognize only because since middleschool, Blaine has done the same thing. You can see what he's like most clearly inthe moments when he isn't saying anything at all: placing a satchet of potpourri inthe guest bedroom or changing your towels to fluffier ones. The night before he'dspoken to you only once, to say, "Mr. Anderson, I hope you'll be comfortable, and ifnot, my bedroom's right down the hall" with the quietly vituperative courtesy ofsomeone naturally suspicious.

The other thing that stands out to you is that he has not, in one afternoon and onenight, truly smiled once.

"Are you done," he says now, to his stepbrother. "I want to read Dilbert."

"I never get Dilbert, though," says Finn.

"I'll explain it to you."

"Without laughing?"

"Quite honestly, I can't promise that."

"Well" Finn flips the page and true to form, Kurt reads Dilbert, smirks, andlaunches into, "So you know how globalization is supposed to be this"

All the while Blaine's fingers stay unmoving over his own pageprobably thefinancial section, which he reads religiously every morning although you know hehates itand he doesn't look away from Kurt, doesn't look away at all. When Kurtfinally finishes and Finn has even cracked a sort of surprised grin, Blaine smiles aswell. Kurt looks up and sees him, and his eyes widen.

It's so shockingly intimate your throat closes up: the sunlight suffusing thenewsprint with a cottony, haloed glow, the brightness of the comics delineated inbrilliant colors and those same colors refracted in the mismatched tumblers oforange juice turning crystalline. For the entire visit you've been expecting a clutchof hands or a kiss or some moment in which everyone's eyes would turn to you,waiting for you to embody the textbook homophobe, but this is something youweren't prepared for: the touchless, detached moment of intimacy.

Coronated with early Saturday morning your son and his boyfriend stare at oneanother, both looking equally stunned to find themselves facing each other acrossbreakfast. The newspaper and half-eaten danishes so ordinary in front of them, butthis isn't the reality they're seeing. You feel as if you've stumbled upon something

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intensely private.

And thenfinallyKurt smiles.

Abruptly and for no reason you remember watching Blaine from your study whenhe was five years old, kicking wildly at the spongy grass in the back lawn, playingsoccer against himself and whooping when he scored. When you had gone to thewindow to close the blinds, you noticed he had no ball at all; he hadn't been playingwith any particular goal or rules but just running, full like a fruit with the suggestionof sunlight and pure energy and joy, joy, joy that had slanted onto your desk, goldenand glowing, even through the slats of your drawn blinds. The rawness in your chesttwinging and twinging, even then, with an ungainly unrehearsed happiness that feltlike spring.

When you look away your cheeks are flaming. You glance up at your mug of coffeeand startle badly: Burt Hummel is looking straight at you. Then, for the first timesince you arrived, he speaks to you directly.

"Game's on," he says. "Want to take that into the living room?"

You don't even know what game he's talking about.

"Yes," you hear yourself saying. "I'd like that."

This is your son whose boyfriend has a father and a family, which is something younever particularly thought about: when you considered Blaine's hypothetical futureboyfriend it was as a smooth catty man with slicked-back hair and speech thatconsisted entirely of clothes labels: you didn't expect someone considerate of thethermostat, or someone whose father was so large and solidly built, with the sameeerie assessing gaze and habit of self-containedness. Burt Hummel slides you a beeralthough it's only eleven AM and there's lunch, reservations, decencyall kinds ofthings, but you take the beer and snap the tab anyway.

It's a basketball game.

"You like basketball?" asks Burt.

You hate basketball. "Of course."

There's silence, broken only by the clinks of your cans. The couch looks worn and

- 21 -

loved the way yours isn't. You can't remember the last time someone sat on yourcouch, which is white leather that doesn't do well with drinks or crumbs or people.

"Blaine told me you restored a '59 Chevy together a few years back."

You're suddenly, turbulently glad of the beer and take a sip, feeling the alcoholtaut on your tongue like something you shouldn't be saying.

"That's right."

"Think I could take a look at it?"

"We drove it here, actuallyI could show you right now, if you'd...just while thechildren are deciding what to do for the day..."

One doesn't offer empty courtesy with a man like this. You trail off. Burt puts hisbeer down, clear eyes narrowing, and finally nods. You feel ungainly in front of him.In high school, you with your numbers and math books and college applicationswere mocked relentlessly by boys like this, and you know that your son at somepoint probably was as well. The differences are so evident: your crisp white dressshirt on a Saturday morning, his denim work clothes. In a feeble attempt to appearcomfortable, you've rolled up your sleeves to the forearms.

The Hummels' lawn is saturated with a dull heat that reminds you of that summerand the grease under your fingernails. Burt doesn't seem to notice at all. You placeyour beers on the stoop and kneel next to the car. Under the hood his hands movelike fish in a schoolthe ease of movement and familiarity and knowing exactlywhere to go, just the way Kurt's did over the breakfast table, squeezing lemon intohis tea. A long deliberation built of knowing hardship, of wearing expertise into thebones as a matter of necessity.

"You did a good job," says Burt. "Blaine was telling me you didn't know cars muchbefore starting on it."

This seems to be a question, so you shrug. "I find that on the internet you canlearn about anything these days."

"Huh." He reaches under the hood.

"Can I, ah, offer you a hand?"

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"I'm just looking. Wouldn't want you to get that shirt dirty, anyway."

"It's just Brooks Brothers, I don't" Stupid, stupid. You cringe and take a hugeswig of your beer, furious with yourself. Burt notes the motionandunexpectedlybreaks into a grin. It looks as incongruous on his face as it didon his son's, although their features couldn't be more different. Cautiously you findyourself returning the smile.

"Looks great," he says, and slams the hood down. "I'll have to have Kurt take alook at it laterhe could stand to learn a thing or two about doing a reboot on anolder engine."

"Kurt is interested in cars?"

"Kurt's great with 'em." A surge of pride animates his face and you feel warmed,at that; this man will not judge you, this man feels the same way you do when youtell someone your son sings lead for his glee club at school. You hand him his beerand he toasts you lightly with the half-empty can.

"He seems...multitalented" you start and Burt interrupts you suddenly.

"Can I be straight with you?"

Your stomach clenches. "Iof course."

"After Blaine told me about you, I didn't want you in my house."

The beer slips in your hands and before you understand what's happened the canfalls, makes a clatter on the concrete like something fracturing and the ground atyour feet is saturated with amber liquid soaking dark as blood. Ineffectually youbrush at your khakis. He watches quiet and observant and insolent as his son, notoffering you assistance in the least.

"I apologize if I've given offense," you say finally.

Burt cocks his head to the side, considering the spreading beer stain. Then:

"You probably don't get it. When you have a kid likelike Kurtyou have to becareful of what kind of people you let into youryour life, I guess. It's not like thatwith Blaine. He likes football and looks like a movie star, you know, guys can respectthat. A kid like Kurtnot everyone can respect that."

- 23 -

From just outside the flatlands of middle Ohio the wind picks up, and you get itlike an echo here, just a breeze stirring the hairs at the back of your neck that'sgone warm with shame. You sit on the edge of the steps to the front door and look atthe lopsided tulips, the cheerily painted blue mailbox, and you think: even here,even with half a family, this man and his son tried to make a life to come home to.

"Blaine told me you wished he were straight."

The bright blue of the mailbox. You stare at it until the shade dances behind youreyes, like a camera flash.

"I expected"

"You expected an asshole," you say, and you can't keep the bitterness out of yourvoiceit just comes in, grey and dully aching, like the back of your eyelids after longnights at the office. Highlighters, spreadsheets, seventeen years of pushing yourselffrom one day to the next solely with the thought of that bright-eyed boy at home andthe way he made a music-box lightshow of your entire mediocre world. You put yourhead in your hands and press at your temples, where throbs of pain rear and recede.

"I did," says Burt. "And I wasn't wrongjust wasn't right in the way I expected."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"That kid is a goddamn copy of you," he says. "That kidwho is, by the way, thebest damn thing that's ever happened to my sonis your little clone, he's polite, hedoesn't care about getting those fancy clothes of his dirty, he has no idea what thehell he's doing."

"I beg your"

"You know why he doesn't, Anderson? It's because you don't."

You're on your feet in an instant. The anger prickling under your skin feels good;you want to go into the fight all swinging fists and pinwheeling arms, but that's notwhat you do in your world; you narrow your eyes instead, you let the air around yougo cold.

"I have no idea," you say icily, "what you're talking about."

It's a lie. Some part of you knows. Some part of you is still caught forever turningaway from your son, his hands grimy and slick with black oil as if plunged up to the

- 24 -

elbows in blood, and knowing then that you had never been able to talk to him, evenbefore he became an adult. You have never known how to be fun or interesting oranything else that children want of their fathers; you've drawn your lines and givenhim what you knew how: food-clothing-shelter and a catalogue of old-fashionedbehavior, a gilt-and-mahogany worldview, your longings and your wishes. Love assomething utilitarian. No one could have told you when he was given into your armsthat fatherhood was a thing of so much grey labor, so that Blaine with foodpoisoning in second grade would remember that his mother had sponged warmwater onto his forehead; he would not remember that you spent the night scrubbingvomit out of the carpet downstairs. You have lost your fluency in one another andthis man: this man whose son knows how he likes his eggs, who hugs his father goodmorning before he hugs his boyfriendwhat could this man know of it, of any of it?

"If there's one thing I've learned with Kurt," Burt Hummel is saying, "it's that yourkid needs you. Our kidsespecially oursthey need us."

"Not everyone can be a perfect sitcom father," you hiss. "It's none of your businesswhat I talk or do not talk to my son about."

"He's dating my"

"Then confine it to their relationship," you snap. "Stay out of ours."

You spin on the heel of the leather dress shoe and go back into the house. Its cooldarkness envelops you, smelling faintly of lightning like something electric, and yousink to your knees in the foyer suddenly overcome. The tile between your shoetipsand your own heart beating in your old man's body, unfathomable and tired as adirge.

This is your son button-mashing with his boyfriend's stepbrother while Kurt curlsin the armchair behind them, lips pursed as he consults an AP review book. Fromtime to time he raises his eyes, glances at the Mario vehicles toppling over on thescreen, and returns to his differential equations with a delicate shudder. From thekitchen you can hear Burt, Carole, and Lydia commiserating over gas prices. Youturn your attention to your laptop and survey a pie chart.

Later you pass Kurt's bedroom on the way to the guestroom and blush when youhear both their voices, but when you dare to glance up from the desk at the opendoor it turns out they're just sitting on Kurt's bed dressing up Coke-bottlemannequins in what look like elaborate handmade outfits.

- 25 -

"Velvet Goldmine confirmed my sexuality," Kurt's saying confidently as he holdsup what looks like an immaculately-maintained purple unitard. "I made these when Iwas in seventh grade."

"This is completely lame," says Blaine. "This is possibly the lamest thing we'veever done. I'm judging you so hard right now, and by the way, you're hogging theBeDazzler."

"I think that's the downside of dating your best friend, because frankly, my dear, Idon't give a damn."

"Don't quote Gone With the Wind at me in this context. Just don't."

"Shut up. Everybody needs to be lame sometimes, evenespeciallyyou."

Your chest feels somehow light when your son looks up, birdlike, and sayswonderingly, "You know what's weird? You're right."

Kurt grabs his hand, switching one of the little color swatches, and lays a kiss onthe tender skin at the inside of his wrist like a signature. The sequins andsparkle-glue have made a mess of Kurt's bedsheets, so that when Blaine pulls himclose both of them are all glittering hair and glistening lips themselves, star-studdedglam rockers in jeans and weekender t-shirts. The ordinariness and the pure familiarreassurance of the gesture weakens you like a blow. Blaine leans towards Kurt,cupping his jaw with ease and reverence, and you know exactly what he sees. Youcan feel as surely as if it's your own the love that swells and thrums in his veins likean orchestral arrangement.

You realize as you're going back down the stairs with the files you needed underyour arm thatfor the first time in yearsyou're not afraid: not for your son, not foryourself.

This is your son whose boyfriend barrels downstairs in a clatter of teenage-boyfrenetic energy, startled, and cries, "Oh my god, I don't have black socks!"

From their vantage points scattered around the downstairs people look up,looking either puzzled (Finn) or devastated (Carole) or indifferent (Burt). Kurt leapsto his feet and snatches his wallet from the table.

"Kiddo, that's"

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"Dad, I cannot turn up at the showcase in white socks. I might kill myself. Finn'sfeet are about the size of tectonic plates, and I don't think you own a pair ofI justcan't."

"It's only seven," Blaine soothes. "Stores are open."

"Of course they are, or I mightI'm just going to take the Nav and be back in aflash. You, meanwhile, can be a gentleman and buy the eTickets for the movie."

Blaine salutes. Kurt's eyes scan the room, clear and incriminating, andunexpectedly light on you.

"Mr. Anderson," he says. "Would you like to come with me?"

Blaine's shoulders tense under his t-shirt. You eye the defenseless curls at thenape of his neck and feel your stomach churning, nervous; you know what you'll doin this moment will make or break so much. You want to refuse: you have work, youhave

"Sure," you say, and rise, like a man about to walk onstage.

This is your son whose boyfriend drives so smoothly you can tell he loves cars andthe road, loves them instinctively and bone-deep the way your boy loves music. Theunexpectedness of his overture seems to embarrass him as much as it embarassedyou at first; he's not a charmer the way your own son is and the tips of his ears arered. He keeps worrying his lip and glancing over at you and fiddling with the radiostation. Finally, in a fit of nervous energy, he jabs at his CD drive and SomeEnchanted Evening fills the car.

"Blaine used to like this," you say immediately, trying to put him at easeadoomed endeavor, when you yourself barely know what you're doing, but you're theadult, and this boy for all his bravado and ten-thousand dollar vocabulary is only achild.

He lights on the proffered subject and beams as he flips his indicator for a rightturn.

"Oh, I know! He sang it to me at practice one day, and I just swooned" Alarmed,he looks over at you. "Isorry, TMI?"

- 27 -

"I beg your pardon?"

"Too much information?"

"...I don't mind."

"I see." He swallows. The tilt of his chin turns superlicious; his brow furrows, as ifhe's trying to reconcile something. You look out the window at Lima passingin thedarkening lights its sidewalks and unkept lawns indistinguishable fromMontgomery. You think to yourself that the only difference between the towns mightbe the property taxes and then you chuckle, just slightly. The sound seems tosimultaneously frighten and embolden Kurt, who looks at you with an incisive,chisel-clean gaze.

"Mr. Anderson, if I may..."

"Go ahead."

"I understand this is none of my business," his coolly disrespectful tone conveysexactly the opposite, "but I'd like to know honestly: do you have a problem withBlaine"

"No."

He brakes too sharply in the parking lot of a Marshall's. You look at the building infaint surprise; he catches your sideways glance and smiles, wry.

Suddenly something in the car dissipatessome unspoken tension, the fear youdidn't know you were still holding under your breastbone like a candle, all thepent-up anxiety of years: in this boy's eyes and hands your son is absolved of all thecruelty of the last seventeen years. Where his life and Kurt's intersect you see theempty floodplain of relief: of an expanse of lighted space where your son can laydown his burdens one after another, lay down the principal's office with its promiseof justice that wasn't fulfilled, lay down the emotionless perfection of his dorm room,lay them all down, lay them all down and stand straight, proud, free. In all the yearsof forging your son into a gentleman you forgot he needed to be a boy first, but thisboythis boy knew, gave him a BeDazzler and stayed in with him on a Saturdaybeing lame, as they called it; this boy has accomplished the miracle you prayedforthe reason you sent Blaine to Dalton, restored the car, paid the billsthis boyhas brought you back the joyful eight-year-old who used to sing to you, and youyoupay your debts. You have to tell him exactly that.

- 28 -

"I'm grateful," you say abruptly, before you can stop yourself, "that my son is whathe is, and that hethat he found you."

Kurt's eyes are bright, too bright.

"I'm going to go get my socks," is what he says. "Iwould you do me a favor? I'dlike to play something for you. If I may?"

"You may."

He shuffles through a CD case and removes a disc with something lovinglyMagic-Markered across it. "I wanted to hate you," he says. "I had this diatribeplanned to give you. A really good one too. But you knowBlaine gets quietwhenever he hears this. It makes it hard to hate you, knowing you made him whathe is."

The door slams and his fragile, buoyant form sets off across the parking lot. In theblue-and-gold shimmer of twilight he looks radiant, the only true thing in theexpanse of concrete. All the light in the sky seems to catch and glitter in his shininghair and the sharp tips of his shoes.

A muted piano starts up. A woman's clear, high voice put my hand in my father'sglove

You set your hand on the thrumming dashboard and you listen to all the whitehorses have gone ahead and as Tori Amos' voice soars up into its aching, vibrantode to what you've felt for the last seventeen years, you wrench your eyes shut, andyou say, out loud, "I'm sorryI'm sorryI'm sorry" as if your son can hear you, theway you've always, always heard him.

This is your son upstairs doing runs in an easy, confident voice in preparation forthe showcase. You're left alone with the Hummels, and for whatever reason you endup with Burt Hummel up to your elbows in suds from the lunch dishes and talkingstupidly about something that's not anybody's business at all because this isapparently how you apologize.

"paid off my loans when I was twenty-nine," you're saying, "and Valerie wasborn the following year."

"Me and Katiethat was Kurt's mom, she was an artist, you knowwe waited too.

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I was busy with the shop then, so we kind of winged it. I was shit at the parentingthing. Once I put him down in an empty hood and let him sleep there, and youshould've seen the fireworks! Katie was furious."

You smile at this and dry the bread plate. From the living room a high crystallineburst of laughter comes from Carole and Lydia, both excited for the show. The wateris warm and your toes are cold on the linoleum and it's normal, home and its glow,the yellow light like honey slanting under the dining table and the low-hanginglamps.

"We never tell them," says Burt, squeezing more soap than is strictly necessaryonto a sponge. "You know. It's likeyou grow up, and you're never supposed to tellanyone anything, because that's what it's supposed to be to be a man or something.And then before you know it you're left with these kids who need to hear what youthink, and you can't do it. It's a shame that I couldn't do it until Kurt's mom passedaway."

The soap suds turn soft as cotton. You sluice the plate, feel the water absolve yourshaking fingers.

"Maybe you haven't done right by him, but you have to try, you know?"

You know.

This is your son startling when you say, "Ride with me."

"Is Mom"

"Mom's going with the Hummels. Come on, I'll drive you to Dalton."

He doesn't argue. Never has.

The road below your wheels vibrates like a nervous heart. Concrete turning to agrey smear and Blaine looks so small in his blazer and the tie that's just the slightestbit crooked. He fidgets and dries his hands on his pants and you reach out and lay ahand over one of his wrists, stilling his motions. He looks respectful and absolutelyterrified.

The old fear is squeezing your Adam's apple; you don't quite know what to say orhow to say it. For a moment you know you're going to fail him againsink back into

- 30 -

what you always doand then you think of the door slamming behind Kurt, theabsolute faith in his voice as he put the song on.

"Do you remember," you say, "when I used to drive you to elementary school?"

Blaine looks up, stunned. His eyes are bright and wide and childlike; you don'tknow how anyone could find him an adult, he's so small.

"You used to sing," you say, and it's taken more than it ever has out of you, but ina voice crumpled and worn with disuse you croak out, "every little thing"

"is gonna be all right," he finishes, still looking like he quite can't believe it.

Below you, suddenly the road flares, widens, drops awaysome bridge over someriver and there's so much endless water under you, the fragile silver line of thesuspension wires nearly invisible so it's as if you've been flung over empty air. Andthen Blaine's voice rises full and warm and real, singing, singing a moment beforehis hands hit the dashboard and he begins to tap out a syncopated rhythm youhaven't heard for years.

"I didn't think you remembered," he says.

The sky and the water beneath you turn to blurred light. You swipe at your eyes.

"I've never forgotten," you say.

And your son, a perfect gentleman at all times, picks up his song right where heleft off, and the seventeen years of sadness behind you are ended. The car and thehumming dashboard and the two of you soar out over the bridge, caught betweenearth and sky like arms upflung, exulting in the sun.

This is your son who invites you backstage with him ("because it's the best view,no really, it is, I promise") and chatters away until his group calls him away.

Seconds before they go on Kurt's hand finds Blaine's like an answer, a soundless of course, and in the darkness the mouth-wetting intimacy of another person's moistpalm and questing fingertips are intimate enough that you walk away, standing at arespectful distance behind a stage light. At your feet the ground glitters with cast-offsequins and glitter from show dresses, all the debris of glamour you know will clingto their shoes when they make the walk to center stage. Backstage in the loving

- 31 -

dark they clutch one another's fingers; you are quietly dizzy with the rarity ofknowing that for once in their lives, what they sing will not be a performance but theabsolute truth, the only truth that matters. The curtain rises. Soaked like a dyedcloth with pride your son goes forward with Kurt matching him step for step.

On the soles of their shoes the sequins and glitter and beads glisten, as if the twoof them have walked from miles beyond the stars and finally ended up here, at thetwenty square feet of boards where, facing one another, they were always meant tobe.

end

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Title PageCopyright PageSummary1. All the White Horses