“Would you let me apologize?” Clara blurted before lowering her hackles. “I liked Joe.”
Patrick opted for silence again; he reached for the butter brickle before remembering he hated it. He pushed it away from him so hard it tipped over. “I did, too.”
Clara looked out the window, but since it was pitch-black she only saw her own tired reflection staring back at her. “I’m almost fifty years old. Can you believe it?” Her voice was pinched, thin, sad.
Patrick covered the ice cream with its lid, pushing until he was certain it was on tight. It was one of those practical tasks you do when you don’t know to do anything else. “You think I’m selfish. You think everything’s about me. Me, me, me. Always have. But you know what? Self-love for gay people can be an act of survival. You think it made me unserious, while you toiled away in the nonprofit world, or raised money for any number of causes. But when the whole world is designed to point out that you’re different, it can be a way to endure.”
Clara looked down at the counter and flipped through a stack of Patrick’s mail.
“I’m teaching these kids. I have something to offer that others—frankly, you—don’t.” He hoped this would close the door on this ridiculous notion of them leaving with her.
Clara held up a letter. “Who is Jack Curtis?”
Patrick sighed. Once again, she wasn’t listening. “I am.”
Skeptically she replied, “You are.”
Patrick smiled and held out his hand in the way he remembered Jean Seberg doing once in a movie. “Enchanté.”
“See? I don’t know who you are. You preach self-love, but I doubt you really know, either.” Clara pushed the mail aside as if it were toxic and reached for her purse. She dug through the bag before giving up and emptying the contents on the counter until she found some lip balm. Patrick caught the tickets out of the corner of his eye. He reached out, grabbing them before she could stop him. “Give those back.”
“These are airline tickets. Three return tickets.” Patrick was dumbfounded. “This has nothing to do with parties or my drinking or YouTube. You were planning this all along.”
“Patrick. I came prepared. You want to put me on trial? That’s the markings of a good parental guardian. Preparation. Frankly, the fact that you weren’t prepared for someone else stepping in, the way you’ve been carrying on? It just goes to show how unqualified you are.”
“Oh, god. And you make a show of asking my permission, pretending I had some say!”
“Calm down, Patrick. We can talk about it again in the morning.”
Patrick seethed. “We’re done talking.” He flipped through the airline tickets until he found the one in Clara’s name. He handed it back to her while tucking the other two tickets in the pocket of his shorts. “You’re not taking the kids. One more word about it, and I’ll show you exactly who I am.”
He turned off the kitchen light, leaving his sister alone in the dark.
SEVENTEEN
They rose up, the three of them, in the rotating cable car, suspended far above Chino Canyon. The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway on the north edge of town was a tourist destination, a point of interest in the Coachella Valley, taking visitors to the peak of Mount San Jacinto; Mountain Station, their destination, was more than ten thousand feet above the valley floor （at least according to the pamphlet that was imposed upon Patrick when he purchased their ride tickets）。 It was also thirty degrees cooler—relief they all needed in the wake of Clara’s rocky departure. Patrick’s insides were jagged like the craggy cliffs, and they were only a few thousand feet into their ascent. Hadn’t he just lectured Maisie and Grant on the importance of siblings? Didn’t he promise to demonstrate that by example? Instead, Clara snuck in to say goodbye to the kids before he was even up, the creak of the front door and the sound of her cab driving away down his quiet road is what woke him.
“Why did Aunt Clara leave so early?”
“Why?”
“Yeah,” Grant added. “Why?”
“Work emergency.” Patrick ushered the two of them in front of his perch at the tram window. “Can you see my house?” The cables above them were suspended from towers; they were approaching the third tower of five and they were in the perfect spot in the car’s rotation to see the valley floor. The view below was incredible, brown, mountainous, and then endless dusty flats; it was like looking across the arid moonscape of distant, orbiting rock.