Bun in Her Oven Read online

  To be honest, I’m a little bummed that they didn’t ask me about the Hocus Pocus costume idea. I get why, but still, I felt a little left out.

  That’s quickly erased when my mom, who Sam has taken to calling Jo instead of Joanne, comes into the apartment wearing an equally ridiculous costume with pillows padding out her svelte frame. In counterpoint to Jemma, she has on a black wig.

  I note the irony that my sister - a natural brunette - is the one with the blonde hair and my mother - a natural blonde - has the black wig.

  It hits me hard then. These people are my family. There is absolutely no reason to feel left out because they didn’t ask me. They explained the reason, and we all knew I would have turned down the offer.

  Besides, how could I be mad? They look so friggin’ cute! It makes my heart swell with joy to see the three of them so close that they plan and organize a collaborative costume effort.

  Note to self: Get Hocus Pocus and watch it tonight with Thomas.

  “Hello, Claire.” Mom placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Hi, Mom.” I had been making a concerted effort to call her mom ever since Thomas and I got back together. I want her to feel welcome around here and though it was strange at first, it was astonishing how quickly it became normal.

  I think she was having a much harder time than me adjusting to it. She still used my name in an affectionate but not quite endearing manner. No pet names yet, not that I particularly cared. I liked my name. But sometimes it would be nice if she called me dear or honey.

  Like other moms did.

  The power of forgiveness was an amazing thing. I had no idea how angry I had been over it. How much pent up toxicity I kept bottled up for twenty-plus years.

  “So, what’re we doing here?” asked Sam twirling her finger in the direction of the dress.

  “Thomas gave me a hint,” I said with a weak shrug. “And I’m trying to match it. I don’t know if I’m going to be accurate or not but he said ‘Greek’ as the hint. I mean he could be turning himself into a giant baklava or some other pastry for all I know.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him. Dude’s a huge dork for puns,” said Sam.

  Mom sat down and set her purse on the side of the round table away from my dress. She looked like she was about to say something but kept it to herself. Her green eyes slightly misted.

  I knew what she was thinking about: Dad.

  Dad had a massive love - one that probably rivaled Thomas’ - for puns and wordplay. He always wanted to be a writer but life and family had gotten in the way.

  Mom had explained that the reason he was so adventurous was that he believed he needed to experience life in order to be a writer. He had to go out and see the world. Become more than the person he was if he was going to impart worldliness to a character.

  There were stories out there that he could never get staying in his apartment back home so he went out. His adventures were merely a means to an end, which sounded a lot more like the father I knew.

  For some reason, it comforted me and at the same time filled me with a pang of great sadness.

  As far as I knew, he had never written a single word.

  That he had gone through so much effort, so many pains in order to be able to be the writer he wanted only to end up never doing anything with it felt…wrong.

  It was an injustice that I could do nothing about. No matter how badly I wished things were different.

  What it did do, however, was teach me an incredibly valuable lesson. Anything that was worth doing, was worth doing right then.

  When I told Thomas this, he - as usual - had some sage advice that I suspect he borrowed from my dad. Perhaps it was something he learned only when it was too late?

  He’d told me, “Oh, that’s the Toolbox Fallacy!”

  Me, having no idea what that was asked him to elaborate because sweet Thomas would never presume I didn’t know something.

  “The Toolbox Fallacy,” he said, “is when you think you need a specific tool in order to do something. It tricks us into thinking that we need ‘x’ to do ‘y’ or else we can’t do it. The thing is, you rarely need a specific tool.

  “Epic films have been done by college kids with shitty camcorders. Hell, most phones now are better resolution and quality than the things studios used to use a long time ago. A poet might think they need to learn about heartbreak and angst to write a good poem, but they’re fooling themselves.

  “A writer writes. Be it with a typewriter, keyboard, pen, pencil, quill, or even just a stick and some dirt. A singer will sing, whether they have a band or proper acoustics or not. The point is, the Toolbox Fallacy makes us believe we need something to accomplish what we want.

  “Let me put it like this: In order to be a singer, you need proper acoustics and a good backup band. So you put off getting singing lessons or singing entirely on your own to put out flyers and ads for bandmates.

  “Eventually you get people, but now they’re not just right and you look for others or try to change them. Now you need money for equipment, a rental space, proper acoustic padding, and maybe even a place that is specifically tuned to give you the best acoustics.

  “Then you need recording time in a studio, coaches, a method of ferrying your shit back and forth, the list keeps growing. So you get a dead-end job working somewhere because ‘this isn’t who I am, I’m a singer, this job is only temporary.’ Except it isn’t. Years pass and you still try to sing now and then, but you also are juggling schedules.

  “You wake up one day and realize that you went from ‘I’m a singer,’ to, ‘I used to sing.’ It’s heartbreaking. You are what you do, regardless of the tools at hand. If you strip away the rationalizations, you’ll often find that what you set out to do can work if you try hard enough.”

  It had been a surprisingly thoughtful and sweet thing to hear him talk about so passionately. On second thought, it was probably something he came up with wholly on his own.

  Dad had been a lot of things but I don’t think he would have been that self-aware. I loved the man with all my heart but he definitely had a blind spot for that sort of thing.

  Judging by what my mom had said about him, that painfully rang true. He had never realized that he didn’t need to go out of his apartment, hell out of his own head, to have an adventure.

  Thoughts of Thomas and Dad flitted about my head while Jemma, Sam, and my mom talked about how they could alter the costume and style my hair to make me into the goddess of my choice: Aphrodite.

  Hey, if you’re going to be a goddess, you better be the best one, right?

  2

  Thomas

  With the apartment to myself, I dressed back into my costume. I could finally get a good look in the mirror.

  It was harder than I thought to put pins in the outfit so that I could alter it properly to fit my body.

  I had a weird shape.

  At six-foot-two I was a little on the tall side and my shoulders - which had always been broad for my size - were even wider with all the added muscle. I rarely said anything to Claire about it, or anybody else for that matter, because it always felt like humble bragging.

  Oh, woe is me. I’m just too fucking ripped to get normal clothes.

  Yeah, that’s not me.

  Which made buying clothes a nightmare. Most of my outfits had to be specifically ordered and any suits under a grand were simply impossible to find.

  That was hardly a problem now that A Game of Scones was doing so damn well, but it had been an issue for a long time. My mom always got me two sizes larger so the clothes fit me about as well as if she draped a bedsheet over me.

  That being said, any costume I could get would need to be modified. Thankfully being poor taught me the value of sewing and taking care of my own modifications.

  There was no way in Hell I could ever make an outfit from scratch but I could take it in at the waist so that double XL which naturally fit at the shoulders wouldn’t look like somebody stuffed me in a pillowc
ase.

  With Claire finally out of the apartment, I was confident she was not about to double back to get a sneak peek, I went to our bedroom and opened the closet door to look at myself.

  Perfect.

  I was far from a vain person. Claire never did understand where my low self-esteem came from. She couldn’t see it. I could hardly blame her. Aside from the horrible stuff that happened with her mom, she grew up in a loving and supportive home.

  With an abusive father and a mother who looked the other way, my home was anything but. Years of therapy and a strict workout regime had helped me to claw my way back to some level of normalcy.

  At least I was not constantly beating myself up for something awkward or embarrassing that happened to me ten years ago.

  But even when I looked at the mirror I could see imperfections. One deltoid was slightly larger than the other. My left pec was a bit too round and looked weird to me.

  Claire didn’t care. She loved the way I looked. She loved me, regardless of how much muscle I had or did not have.

  I had made a great deal of progress by myself but with Claire’s help, I was able to get closer to normal than I ever thought possible. Everybody has their own burdens. Their own issue with body image.

  Everybody needs love and compassion.

  The reflection that stared back at me grinned. My smile had always been a little bit lopsided. Something I thought was ugly and tried to hide by smiling as little as possible.

  Since Claire loved it so much, I found excuses to smile all the time.

  It was such an amazing difference being loved and accepted for who I was. For how I was. It was truly transformative.

  The outfit looked good. I was going as Adonis the Greek god of beauty and desire. Not my usual motif but I figured everybody expected some shitty pun from me this year and I wanted to surprise them.

  The idea I originally had was pretty awesome though. I was going to go as Pan, the satyr god of nature. Except since pan also means bread in Spanish, I was going to be the god of bread.

  My pan flute was going to be made out of incredibly small baguettes.

  But this was better. It was worth it to be a little different. If I couldn’t be somebody completely else for Halloween, then when could I?

  Besides, Claire would love the outfit. The soft white fabric draped across my frame, golden olive leaves adorned here and there and I wore a crown of golden laurel leaves. A lot of bare, tanned muscle was exposed. My whole right chest was bare and I was glad the party was indoors.

  Halloween night in Sunrise Valley got cold enough to frost windows.

  Granted, I was mixing motifs a little bit. I still looked good. And that’s largely what I was going for. Something that I knew would get Claire’s jaw to drop.

  I rarely went out of my way to be sexy in public. I was not the type of person to wear muscle shirts or go nearly shirtless even when the situation deemed it appropriate.

  Claire made me feel comfortable enough in my own skin to do that.

  I fixed a few last-minute issues. Stitched up a few loose places that I had missed the past few weeks when I was modifying the outfit. I briefly wondered what Claire’s outfit was and pushed it out of my mind.

  I would find out what Claire had chosen soon enough. It would be hypocritical to want to know what she was wearing when I was so stubborn about my own outfit.

  That did not stop me from thinking about it though.

  The next couple of hours I spent doing random chores around the apartment that I’d been letting lapse. Sam was supposed to come over anytime now to pick me up. Whenever she was done helping Claire with her outfit.

  Richard’s car - which I suppose I should think of as my car now since Claire signed it over to me - had been out of the shop for a little while now. It was an old 1967 Caprice painted the most hideous turquoise I’d ever seen.

  The car itself was a beauty. The sort of thing I would see on black and white sitcoms when I was a kid. Painting it was among my top priorities once Halloween was over.

  Sam was as big a Halloween nerd as I was. For the past few years, she always managed to come back to town just before Halloween and we would go to the party together.

  We never did that couples costume thing but we went as friends and it was somewhat of a tradition. Even with my own car now, I had asked Sam to pick me up in her beat-up VW Kombi.

  Which, I guess I couldn’t really call beat up anymore.

  With her very first paycheck, Sam had taken it to a detailer and then to a mechanic, which happened to be the same guy. Alfonse Perkins was a jack-of-all-trades.

  Every kid in school looked up to him. He was the coolest guy around and when he graduated a few years ahead of us he took over the local garage. The guy totally revamped the entire thing to be a one-stop station for anything you might want to do.

  He could work on new cars and old cars alike. Didn’t matter if it had a chip in it or was using an ancient carburetor, the man knew his shit inside and out. It didn’t hurt that he was about the nicest guy you ever met.

  When Claire took in her dad’s Caprice, the way Al’s face lit up was priceless.

  There was nothing more he loved than working on a classic. That much was painfully evident in the deal he cut us.

  Claire, however, wasn’t about to take advantage of him and what followed was one of the most bizarre haggling scenes I had ever seen.

  Claire and Al went back and forth, except Claire was trying to get Al to accept a higher payment than he was proposing. They went back and forth until finally, they settled on something they both could live with.

  Part of that, Claire had told me later, was because of the good rate he gave Sam for her Kombi. There was no way she could have been able to get it restored for anything less than a couple grand. Al did it for less than eight hundred.

  Generous didn’t begin to cover the size of Al’s heart.

  With Sam’s Kombi fully restored and operational, the small parking lot behind the bakery was filled with more cars than I’d ever seen it.

  More importantly, our home was filled with more people than ever. The weekly family dinners were something I looked forward to all week. I loved that Claire and I had so much time to ourselves but I had always secretly wanted a big family.

  The days when the apartment was filled with laughter, arguing, and talking were more valuable than all the money in the world to me. They were a clear counterpoint to the blissfully quiet days where it was only Claire and me. I loved both dearly.

  And I loved cooking for both just as much. It was the only time Claire permitted me to pamper her with elaborate five-course dinners. Normally she would object to such opulence and preferred to keep it casual.

  Which she argued would give us more time for personal activities. She could be very persuasive.

  There was a soft three-tap knock at the door and a moment later Sam let herself in. She had her own set of keys.

  “What’s up butt,” she said by way of greeting.

  I was sitting on the couch watching the start of an old Halloween cartoon classic. I hit pause, turned around and immediately burst out laughing.

  “What are you wearing?” I asked between outbursts.

  Sam had this puff of ginger hair on her head, garish makeup, fake buckteeth, and a surprisingly elaborate (but completely hideous) emerald crushed velvet robe on. Her broom was clutched in one fake fingernailed hand. She looked ridiculous.

  “Don’t you know who I am?” she asked, stalking towards me and brandishing that black witch’s broom like she was going to smack me over the head with it.

  I would not put it past her.

  Of course, I knew who she was. Hocus Pocus was one of my favorite Halloween films from my childhood. I loved it. And Sam made sure we watched it every year.

  “Sure I do.” I turned back to the TV and motioned for her to sit on the couch.

  When she sat down she let out a strangled sound of surprise. There were two plates on the coffee tab
le and two mugs. She picked up the mug experimentally. Her soft blue eyes widened a fraction.

  “It’s still hot,” she mumbled.

  I unpaused the TV and shook my head. Why did people find small, simple acts of kindness so strange or hard to understand?

  Sam had a streak of forgetting to grab herself something to eat when she was preoccupied and I figured even though the Halloween Bash was going to have food it probably didn’t compare to a good sandwich.

  I should know, A Game of Scones had supplied quite a lot of pastries for the party.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a weird dude, you know that?”

  “Your gratitude is getting better.”

  “I know, I hardly cussed you out that time. Jemma’s helping me be more ‘socially acceptable,’ whatever the fuck that means.”

  The thought of anybody trying to smooth out Sam’s rough edges was beyond ridiculous. They were part of her charm. Might as well try to catch the breeze or lasso the moon.

  “How’s that going?” I asked, taking a sip of my tea.

  “About as well as you’d expect, I guess,” said Sam around a mouthful of roast beef sandwich. “My use of obscenities has gone down quite a bit…”

  “But?”

  “But Jemma’s have gone up considerably.” She couldn’t help but smile like a kid. “So I say it’s a net-fucking-positive.”

  We watched a few cartoons in silence while she finished her food and we both sipped our tea. The Halloween Bash didn’t start for another thirty minutes and I was all ready to go.

  “You haven’t said anything about my costume,” I pointed out.

  “Oh yeah.” She cleared her throat. Then proceeded to whistle and cat-call me with all the vulgarity of a New York construction worker. Gender equality at its finest, ladies and gents.

  “Good enough for you and your precious little ego? Come on, let’s go man-whore,” said Sam levering herself up from the couch and marching towards the door.