Poor little guy\u2019s the product of a one-night stand after an AA meeting, Boss Lady told me during the job interview. Said a second cousin up in Eureka Springs had called out of the blue, half-drunk and totally pregnant, blubbering and begging her to adopt. Why\u2019d she say yes? Status symbol? Loneliness? Hell, why does anybody have kids? I just know she was a forever-single middle-aged corporate attorney who worked whenever she was awake. It bought her a half-empty mansion on Swiss Avenue with the windows painted shut, and a six-figure SUV in the three-car garage\u2026 and me, the forever-single manny. Next best thing to a wife.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve had a few gals who didn\u2019t stick, she said, and my son could probably use a positive male role model.<\/p>\n
I held my violet fingernails up to my stubble and rhinestone stud earrings and said, I\u2019m not exactly what most people have in mind when they hear that term.<\/p>\n
Boss Lady expelled a horselaugh, told me I\u2019d aced the background check, said my last family said they would\u2019ve kept me forever if their daughters hadn\u2019t grown up. Now if you can just get Tom to put on some weight, she continued, he\u2019s in one of the lowest percentiles, he rarely wants to eat anything besides fruit.<\/p>\n
I lived with them for more than a year, shopping and cooking, going to the playground and the pediatrician, reading bedtime stories. Drove him to and from the half-day Christian preschool, even did a parent-teacher conference. Tom tells the other children you\u2019re his dad, a twitchy young woman said during that meeting. I faked a grimace. While glowing inside.<\/p>\n
He understood, of course, that I was just a manny. But still didn\u2019t know, as his fifth birthday approached, that his mom had adopted him. And neither of us knew he had an 18-year-old half-brother. Everything started coming unglued on a September evening, when we were gorging on watermelon instead of the high-protein organic vegan stuff I was supposed to be feeding him. I recall looking over at the landline right before the ring. It was the brother, who\u2019d discovered the family tie while farting around on Fakebook. His name was Tom, too\u2014not quite as queer as it sounds, since he\u2019d also been adopted at birth. He was itching to meet. Do you know where Dinosaur Valley is? he asked. Or the nuclear plant? I\u2019m caretaking a ranchette out here. It\u2019s just a couple hours from Dallas, if you don\u2019t hit traffic.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll get back to you, I said when the call was ending. When Tom asked who I\u2019d been talking to, I lied. Claimed it was an old sweetheart of mine.<\/p>\n
He has the same name as me?<\/p>\n
Stranger things have happened, my friend. Now it\u2019s time for your bath.<\/p>\n
Once he was asleep, I got on that infernal Fakebook myself and figured out Boss Lady knew about Big Tom. So I punched in his number. All gut, no deliberation. A terrible idea that I don\u2019t regret.<\/p>\n
The following Saturday morning, as soon as she took off for a law firm retreat in Hawaii, I leveled with the boy. We were in the kitchen. He started shivering, jumped into my arms. Wouldn\u2019t even touch the blueberry muffins that I was pulling out of the oven. So we hit the road.<\/p>\n
Coming up the ranch drive I saw a familiar-looking towhead across the way, cradling something in his right arm, reaching into a small tree with his left. Stop, Little Tom screamed, and I did, and he bolted from his booster seat. Big Tom turned out to be holding a tiny pink porker, and the two of them fed it from that tree\u2014Mexican persimmons, purplish-black balls about the size of cherry tomatoes. Runt of the litter, the young man explained when greeting me. I\u2019m a congenital smart-ass and replied, Gonna take an awful long time to fatten him up that way. Big Tom\u2019s face blossomed as he squeezed the critter. Sir, he said, don\u2019t you know time ain\u2019t nothin\u2019 to a hog?<\/p>\n
I had to come clean with Boss Lady, of course. It wasn\u2019t like I could tell either boy to keep the trip secret. Twelve years it\u2019s been since she fired me. Since that last Little Tom hug broke me, turned me into a long-haul truck driver. She did let him call every once in a while, and got him his own phone before he was out of grade school. I heard from him just the other day. Said he was living on the ranch now with Big Tom and Big Tom\u2019s wife, who were expecting a baby. Said he was heading out to the persimmon tree. Said he was gonna make some jam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I held my violet fingernails up to my stubble and rhinestone stud earrings and said, I\u2019m not exactly what most people have in mind when they hear positive male role model.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":25218,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[3879,4663,247,4666,3927,4667,4668,4665,4664,1218,1000,1409,877],"class_list":["post-24211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","tag-adoption","tag-childcare","tag-children","tag-dallas","tag-facebook","tag-gender-bending","tag-hog","tag-manny","tag-nanny","tag-parenthood","tag-pig","tag-queer","tag-texas","writer-brooks-egerton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24211"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25220,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24211\/revisions\/25220"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}