Alan Baxter barely scrapes by working as a deejay in suburban Detroit. To make ends meet, he takes a job as an automobile repossession agent, and discovers his very first assignment is a car owned by his drug dealer ex-boyfriend. On top of that, a body is discovered in the trunk…by a cop.
Soon Alan’s life is completely upturned as he is pulled into a mystery involving more bodies, a highly lethal new street drug, a mysterious man with a top hat and cane, raging dwarves, a house fire, a cranky police detective, and his even crankier cat!
Now, I follow my dad up and down aisles until he has moved all his coupons for this store from one mysterious section of his binder to another. We get in line behind a group of old men wearing three-piece suits, and my father strikes up a conversation with them, introducing me. I shake hands with each of the men, careful not to squeeze too hard and grind their arthritic joints together.
“What a good son you are,” one of them says. “What does your wife think of you taking your father shopping?”
“Oh, he’s not married,” my father jumps in, and I feel my cheeks start to burn.
“Dad …” I say in a low, warning tone.
“Alan isn’t allowed to marry whom he wishes to, because he’s gay.”
The men in their suits blink at him for a moment then blink at me before they turn their backs on us and murmur to each other in thick, wet whispers.
I sigh and glare at him. “Why do you insist on doing that?”
READ MORE“What? I should be ashamed of you and hide it? Love is love.”
“Not that, the fact that you have to blurt it out every time you introduce me,” I reply. “It’s embarrassing.”
He points a finger at me, his expression suddenly so serious I pull back my head as if about to be struck. “Don’t ever be embarrassed about who you are. You are a great man, and I want everyone to know that.”
“Bully for you,” the woman in the next lane snarls. “Nobody cares.”
My father waves her off and smiles at me. It is an unnerving smile, a shark’s smile. “You should never be ashamed to be who you want to be. The hell with the rest of them.”
“Yeah, that’s nice and all, but you don’t have to shove it in people’s faces, Dad,” I say as we shuffle forward in line. The men in front of us fumble their goods onto the conveyor belt, and my father watches their antics with a smile.
“Ah, the more they hear about it and see it, the more accepted it becomes,” he replies.
“I don’t want to see none of that gay sex,” one of the suited men says. “It’s not natural. Marriage is one man and one woman.”
“Oh God,” I moan and rest my forehead on the cart handle, wishing I could fade away.
“Tell that to the Mormons,” my father snaps. He continues to pontificate to the men who pontificate back, and soon seniors from other checkout lanes join in the debate until the manager comes up and asks my father to please keep quiet. I shrug at the manager, someone we now know by first name as this has happened several times before, and he shakes his head as he walks off, leaving the chastised senior shoppers grumbling quietly behind him.
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