CREATIVE NONFICTION 69
When Kate and I didn’t know how to find the jobs we really wanted and didn’t
have enough money to rent a place in Charleston, we moved into the studio apart-
ment above my mom’s photography studio in my hometown, thirty miles inland, and
started waitressing at a barbeque restaurant in my hometown. Come lick our bones, the
rib joint’s T-shirts said.
after we moved into the studio apartment, I told Kate about Sarah, even though
Sarah didn’t want me to tell anyone what was going on between us. She was scared
about what it all meant. She’d never kissed a girl before. She didn’t know if it was
right, if she could reconcile her feelings for me with her religious beliefs. Sarah’s
family and her church taught her that being gay was a sin, something you might be
tempted to think about but should never act on. They believed being gay could be
cured with prayer, the same way some people prayed for a parking spot at Walmart.
But I knew I couldn’t live with Kate for the next year without telling her. I wanted
things to get better between us.
I eased into the words. “Sarah and I.. .” I let the sentence out slowly, as if carefully
unloosening the cap on a carbonated drink that had rolled around for months in the
trunk of a car. “... we’re together.”
“How long has it been going on?” Kate asked, a tinge of anger surfacing in her voice.
The ceiling fan above the bed spun and spun, its blades inches away from the sloping
walls. The window air-conditioning unit rattled the glass panes.
“Nobody knows about it,” I said. “She asked me not to tell anyone.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Like the bubbles rising in that shaken bottle of soda, I started to feel unstable, unable to
control the situation. “Since February,” I said, thinking she’d already guessed as much.
“February. You’ve been lying to me for six months?” she asked, the question of it
half-lodged in her throat. “I asked you outright months ago, and you lied to me.”
When I tried to tell her how it wasn’t actually a lie but a refusal to tell her, how
Sarah had asked me not to tell anyone, Kate lost it. She left the room, slamming the
door behind her.
Before I had time to breathe, to process her reaction, the door swung back open,
leaving a doorknob-size hole in the wall. “I hate you!” she yelled. “I hate you!”
meat is most tender closest to the bone. At the rib joint, the smell of pork fat
and hickory smoke seeped into the walls, the wooden booths, the framed posters of B.
B. King, the green terry cloth napkins, the dingy hardwood floors, the metal vats of
sweet tea.
It was impossible to get the smell of smoked pork out of our clothes, our shoes, our
long hair pulled back in ponytails. When I dropped by my parents’ house after lunch
shifts, my mom started asking me to take off my work shoes before I came inside, a
request she’d never made of anyone before.