“Well, you know that our neighbors, from when we lived in Findlay, were two women, a-a- lesbian couple. And they were real nice, and my parents treated them kindly. Never rude to them, but I mean, you knew grandma and papa. They were religious, so to them, homosexuality-”

“Homosexuality. Hah”

“What? Is that wrong? Should I be saying something else?”

“No, no. It just sounds funny. It sounds so like, formal.”

“Whatever, it was a sin. You know they were neighborly and treated them well but they didn’t think it was right.”

“Oh”. I clicked my phone off and tucked it under my thigh. Through the window on my right, I see miles and miles (and presumably even more miles) of grassland. The occasional billboard for motorcycle accident lawyers flew by, adding an ugly pop of color against the vast plains of the midwest.

“Did Papa,” I dug my fingernails into the tops of my thighs, resisting the urge to drag them down. “Did he still think like that? In these last years?” My eyes are fixed on a stray cracker on the car floor below me, bouncing up and down with the car as we hit a rough patch on the highway.

“I-I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say that he still thought like that. He was still very religious, and I know that isn’t a good reason to be like that. Hell, I’m a catholic Christian too and fully support gay marriage and all that and have been trying to educate myself. But I really don’t know, Zoe.”
“So,” I mull my next words over and over in my head. Reaching down with my foot, I flip the cracked over absentmindedly, as I decide if I ask the question I’ve been dying to know the answer to. “If one of the Grandkids came out, would it be good? Bad?”

“I’m not sure how he would’ve reacted to one of the grandchildren being gay-- or like, trans. Or like-- well-- “

“Someone coming out”

“Yeah. I’m not sure how he would’ve reacted. I hope it would’ve been kind, but we didn’t talk about stuff like that these last years. That just wasn’t-- it wasn’t a topic we discussed.” My mom looked back over her left shoulder for a second and then back to me. Her brown curls bounced around her head like a low-hanging halo. I could feel her eyes burning the side of my head but I couldn’t see her from my spot wedged between my seat and the passenger side car door. “But I would’ve-- I mean, if that had happened. And Papa had a bad reaction, I would’ve protected them. I would do everything I could to protect them.”

She switched lanes again, speeding up to pass a huge semi. I hadn’t blinked in at least 20 seconds, trying to keep my cheeks dry.

“Mhm”

I sniffled once and I’m sure my mom knew I was crying because she didn’t look over now, eyes trained on the road. She suddenly makes a sharp turn, and her empty tumbler falls out from the cup holder and onto the floor below me, crushing the cracker.

“Sorry”

My hand rubbed the inner corner of my left wrist, where I wanted to get a tattoo for my grandpa once I turned 18. I could faintly hear Adele on the radio, at some point my mom had turned it down so she could focus on the road.

My mom didn’t say anything else, and I was left to ponder it on my own. My stomach felt like it was full of lead, and my throat was dry. I don’t think I could’ve gotten a word out without crying if I had wanted to. It was one of those things where you wish you could go back to 20 minutes ago and never have to deal with the knowledge you’ve got now. My Grandpa was dead and would never know my sexuality. It shouldn’t matter. But knowing there was a good chance that my grandparents, my kind grandparents who loved their grandkids so much they took all 11 of them for a week each summer, could think that I was living life sinfully, it stole all my energy from me. The idea that if heaven is real, and the catholic God is real, then my grandparents would see me live my life happily and disapprove, made me sick to my stomach.

“You hungry? I packed some more crackers in the back.”