I grabbed my two plastic cups and the big bottle of sadly generic dollar-store cola and poured us each a healthy slug. No point in saving it since it’d only go flat. “Cheers.” I sat kitty-corner to him and raised my glass.
“Cheers.” Theo eyed the glass, not drinking.
“I did wash that out,” I told him, slightly stung.
“Oh! No, I was just thinking about how people downstairs would sip pricey local wines, and how much I prefer warm soda.” He took a mouthful.
“Makes you my kind of guy.”
“Right.” Theo took another sip. “Did your folks throw you out for being queer?” Then he choked. “Sorry! Not that you necessarily are. Crap. I mean, that was just a guess on my part and doesn’t imply?—”
I nudged the back of his hand with mine to stop the word-vomit. “I am. But no. I… left. They didn’t throw me out. They popped out a bunch of other kids and according to them, I had nothing better to do with my life than take care of my step-sibs and give them all my earnings, too.” I sometimes wondered how the other kids were doing, but I’d never looked back and it was too late now. “Is that what happened to you?” I was making the same guess, and I wasn’t going to say sorry.
“I left too.” He turned his glass in his hand. “They would’ve hated me being gay, but I don’t think they ever realized. I wasn’t a real person to them, just a sometimes-useful possession, a figurehead and a robot to do as I was told. I was going to wait till I was eighteen, but then… I couldn’t.”
“That sucks. But hey, we survived, and here we are on a sunny January day in a place with awesome weather, drinking better-than-wine soda and shooting the breeze. So fuck ’em.”
Theo raised his glass. “Fuck ’em.” We clinked plastic rims and drank. After a pause, he asked more casually, “What are your plans? Will you stay here for a while?”
“Don’t know.” I rolled a sip of cola on my tongue, enjoying the prickle of the bubbles. “I’ve stayed in some places six months and some places one day. I’ve worked a lot of jobs.”
“Can you get by with just panhandling?”
“Busking,” I said sharply, because for some reason I didn’t like that word from him. “Money for entertainment. But yeah, for a while. Especially when I have somewhere to live like this. All I need is food for the two of us. Might even replace my sneakers soon.” I stuck out one foot to contemplate the duct tape around the toe. “But eventually, a town gets bored of us. There’s only so many places I can set up a show where the cops won’t move us along.”
“You could look for a job, right?”
“Yeah. Arthur said I could come back anytime and he’d have stuff for me to do. But I have a feeling paying me was mostly charity. Dude’s swamped with work, there’s no doubt, but I don’t think he has a lot of ready cash, either. Not with all those critters he’s saving.”
“Maybe I could help him. You think he needs a volunteer?”
“Might,” I said, although that would take away my job. Still, I hadn’t been kidding about Arthur’s budget. “You ever picked up shit?” Theo’s hands had some roughness, like he did real work, but he had a fussy way about him.
“How hard can it be?” Tipping his head back, Theo drained his soda. I watched his throat as he swallowed and a little heat pooled in my groin. He set the glass down. “Maybe I could give you a ride there and you could work and I could volunteer.”
“Give me a ride? You have a car?” My estimate of his finances took a big jump upward, but I wasn’t totally surprised.
“Yeah.” He looked away, peering outside like the sky and dusty weeds were the most interesting thing he’d seen, but his posture was stiff and guarded as if waiting for something bad.
“Maybe sometime,” I said. My instincts might tell me that Theo was a good guy, but it wasn’t like I’d never been wrong. As an excuse, I added, “I won’t leave while Mimsy’s out wandering.”
“Makes sense.” His shoulders relaxed like he was relieved I said no, which seemed odd since he’d offered. Although maybe his own self-preservation made him regret a plan to get in his car with a homeless guy.
“So.” I set my hands flat on the table and decided to address the elephant in the room. “First time I saw you, you were having a fight with a mirror.” I pointed at the wide Band-Aid peeking out from under his sleeve.
His snort held a thread of amusement. “I guess I was.”
At least I hadn’t offended him or scared him off. “Anything I need to worry about?”
Theo shook his head. “I… knew this place when I was a kid. It has some bad memories. I’m not normally a violent guy.”
“Didn’t think you were.” I wondered what kind of kid tagged along to wine tastings, but if he didn’t want to tell me, I wasn’t going to ask.
Lots of times, the way to get a guy to open up was to offer some of my own story. I said, “I worked in a traveling carnival one time. Not a fancy place. The kind of show that opens up in a shopping mall parking lot for a weekend, then moves on. I worked the hot dog stand. A hundred degrees under that roof, lifting the dogs off the hot rollers and stuffing them in buns, and ‘Do you want ketchup or mustard?’ Wasn’t a bad job, though. Carny folk are decent, keep themselves to themselves, but they’ll help a guy out if it ain’t too much trouble.”
“Why didn’t you stay with them?”
“Eh. Got to where the smell of hot dogs made me want to barf. Plus, they didn’t want Mimsy in the food booth and she was always getting in there.”
