The Families in Rossford
We wrap up our story, and also list some of the tangled family trees of our favorite Indiana town. Never fear, an epilogue will be posted in a few days as well.
Dylan and Elias were waiting for the Greyhound to pull in, and when Lance got off, gym bags hanging from his shoulders, Dylan took one and Elias the other while Lance, in the middle, chuckled and threw an arm over each of them.
“Elias had been talking crazy,” Dylan said as the three of them went to the car.
Lance squeezed his shoulder and his hand caressed Elias’s back.
“Have you been talking crazy?” he said, indulgently.
Elias looked at both the older and the oldest boy, Dylan a very little taller, Lance nearly taller by a foot.
“I don’t appreciate the two of you talking down to me. I think I’m the only one of us who has any sense half the time.”
Lance and Dylan looked at Elias, who hefted the bag into Lance’s stomach and then said, “I’ll be in the car, and the two of you can look clever and old on your way to meet me.”
“It is crazy!” Lance said, later on in his garage, “when you’re talking about me fucking you and you fucking Dylan and all of us just piling in and having threeways and orgies and what the not.”
“Oh, my God, that’s not what I said!” Elias said.
“Then what did you say?” Dylan jammed his hands in his pockets and looked troubled.
“Both of you have done far more crazy shit than I’ve ever done, so why are you looking at me like I’m the Antichrist for citing the obvious?”
“I don’t do… orgies and all that.”
“But you will sleep with girls to prove you’re straight.”
Lance frowned and corrected, “I did sleep with a couple of girls. And I was younger.”
“You were my age,” Elias returned.
“Exactly,” Lance said, losing patience. “A very foolish age.”
“It’s not the age that was foolish,” Elias muttered.
Dylan opened his mouth, but Elias continued, “And you… let’s not start with you.”
“Don’t,” Dylan said, looking suddenly dangerous. “You are my boyfriend. Don’t you dare fire back at me things I told you in the dark.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” Dylan’s voice was heated.
“Maybe,” Elias allowed, his voice cool. “But the two of you are so hung up on sex—and on convention—that you’re not hearing what I’m saying.”
“What are you saying?” Lance sounded desperate.
“That we should be a family. It’s done all over the world. Polygamy, polyamory. I’m not talking about threeways, though…. If we wanted that, so what? And is it wrong if all three of us sleep in the same bed? We’ve done it before.”
“We weren’t,” Dylan stumbled over his words. Suddenly he understood what it was to be his father, to be someone liberal and uninhibited finally confronted with his limitations. “We weren’t all having sex in one bed, though?”
“But so what if we did?” Elias pled.
“You want that?” Lance looked upset.
“Why wouldn’t I want it?” Elias said. “What would be so bad about it?”
The two older boys turned away.
“But that’s not the point,” Elias continued. “The point is Dylan is mine. You’re mine,” he said to Dylan. “But I want him to be yours, too,” he said to Lance. “I’m giving him to you. I want to go home and be at peace about the two of you being with each other, and me being with you and all of that. I want us to be a family. Not an orgy, not with a fourth member. And I don’t want us lying and sneaking around each other’s backs, hurting each other, leaving one out. I want… A threeway marriage. Not a three way.”
Neither Dylan nor Lance looked at each other, or Elias for that matter. Elias went to Dylan and turned Dylan’s face to look at him.
“I’ve never seen you look afraid,” Elias told him. “Until now.
“And you,” he said to Lance, “shouting at me and twitching every five seconds.”
“No one’s shouting at you—” Lance began, but Elias ignored it, saying, “I think the only reason the two of you are fighting me so much, and acting so shocked, is because you want this too. But… you don’t think you deserve it.”
He let Dylan go and went to the side door of the garage.
“Elias,” Lance said, reaching out for him.
“I’ve said what I have to say,” Elias Anderson told them. “The two of you can work the rest out for yourselves.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Laurel said, and Maia nodded.
From where he sat on the bed, knees pulled up to his chest, and looking for all the world like a blue eyed, well hairstyled grasshopper, Lance said frankly, “Because you’re not crazy.”
Maia nodded.
“If it’s just something secret, then… well, maybe we’re nuts,” Lance went on. “Some sane people, people from the outside, can tell us if this is crazy.”
“Crazy as in sick,” Dylan said miserably, and looked out of the window, fiddling with the curtain.
“You know there’s no way you can tell your father,” Maia told him. “I mean, not everything. This is too much.”
“Yes,” Dylan agreed. “I’ve got that.”
“We know it’s weird,” Lance said with mild impatience. “But is it wrong?”
Maia looked to Laurel.
“It’s wrong for me,” Laurel said, slipping her finger into her shoe to loose an imaginary pebble. “But it seems pretty practical for the three of you.”
“Besides,” Maia added, “if you all didn’t want to do it, you wouldn’t be sitting her talking to us about it.”
In the hallway Dylan said, “You alright?”
“Yeah,” Laurel said.
“Alex was a good guy.”
“He still is a good guy,” she added. “He’s just not my good guy.”
Dylan jammed his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall, “So, when do I get to meet this Moshe?” he over pronounced his name.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’m ready to meet him.”
“Is he hot, at least?”
Laurel shrugged. “I think you’d fuck him.”
Dylan laughed and turned away.
“Since when did that count for anything?” he said.
“Dad, can I stay at Lance’s?”
“Um hum,” Fenn waved him off, and Dylan kissed him on the cheek and went up the back stair. Fenn ashed his cigarette and continued sucking his smoothie through a straw.
“So,” Todd wondered, the very tall man looking up the staircase, “Whaddo you think’s going on with him and Lance? And with Elias and all?”
“I don’t know,” Fenn said, unwrapping his taco, “and tonight I don’t care.”
He reached into the bag at the middle of the table for cups of sauce.
“Ah!” he said with delight, pulling out the plastic cup with the chili sauce.
As Fenn opened the chicken tacos, and he began to pour on chili sauce he said, “They have lives. But we’ve got lives too. We’ve got much more important things to worry about than what our children are doing all the time.”
“Like our love,” Todd said affectionately.
“Well, yes,” Fenn acknowledged, touching Todd’s hand with a brief, impish smile.
“But I was thinking more about these chicken tacos.”
“Are you going to tell me about you and Dylan?” Paul said.
“I wanted to make sure there was something to tell first,” Elias told his father.
Paul’s nose seemed to be getting even larger, sniffing for revelation.
“There is,” Elias said. “There is and, if it’s alright, we’re going to be dating.”
Elias self edited. He certainly would not bring up his suggestion which had nearly thrown the worldly Dylan into shock, and he certainly wasn’t going to let on that he and Dylan had been having sex. He remembered one of the first times, and how sex was sometimes more about love than either pleasure or skill, how they had readjusted and readjusted and fumbled and Elias had lain flat while Dylan fucked him. Dylan came almost immediately, staggering and mumbling an apology through his orgasm. For a while he felt Dylan, still inside of him, thrusting in the aftermath. Dylan came out and turned on his side, looking at Elias like, “So, how bad was it?”
They had been together long enough to have mediocre sex, and that had to say something.
“What’s on your mind?” Paul asked.
Elias shook his head and chuckled.
“Love,” he said.
There was a knock on the back door, and a few moments later, Kirk came up the hall.
“It’s for you, Eli.”
Eli made a face, moved past Paul and past Kirk and went to the kitchen.
Dylan and Lance were in the kitchen, in hoodies, Dylan in a white tee shirt, Lance in a polo shirt.
“Stay with us tonight?” Lance said.
Paul said, “That’s a great idea.”
“Go on upstairs,” said Kirk. “Pack for tomorrow.”
Elias looked to Dylan and Lance who looked unreadable. Lance had never been stupid. He just didn’t have the mercury of Dylan or of Elias. Lance was, in many ways, like Elias’s fathers. He was solid, stalward; deliberate thinking, very much one generation removed from an Indiana farm town. That was the worst thing about him, how you couldn’t tell what was going on behind his eyes. Elias nodded and went upstairs thinking that, if either of his parents had any idea of half of what was going on between the three young men, they would never have let Elias go off with Lance and Dylan.
Lance’s bedroom was bigger than he remembered. Elias sat very quietly between the two people he loved most in the world. Well, no that wasn’t right. But there was a way of loving that only went toward these two. They filled his heart. Had he said something wrong to them? Had he taken them too far? Had he accused them of both being stupid? Yes.
Dylan took his hand, very shyly. Elias looked to him, but Dylan looked down at his lap.
With equal shyness, Lance kissed Elias on the cheek.
Now Dylan turned and kissed him too. It was all very formal, and Elias let himself be kissed by both of them. He moved away from them and brought their faces together. Elias watched the two of them kiss with growing passion, hands in hair, shyness forgotten, and then they both turned to him. It was unbelievable. He felt out of himself. He felt himself growing hard, his cock stretching painfully in his jeans, and he understood that, even though he’d said it didn’t have to be like this, he wanted it like this, Lance on one side, kissing up and down his back, Dylan kissing his eyes, reaching under his shirt, the two of them stopping to fiercely kiss each other, Lance working to pull his belt off. Suddenly no one was nervous anymore, but Elias felt like, should he speak, his spirit would become so light it would fly out of his mouth. Dylan’s mouth went to his throat while, fiercely, Lance tugged down his jeans. The two people he loved most were going to make love to him.
“Dill,” Lance said, businesslike, “Get up and make sure the door’s locked.”
Dylan held Elias’s face and looked into his eyes. Then he kissed him hard, got up from the bed, and shirtless, still in jeans, went to lock the door.
He hopped back on the bed. Elias was in his underwear, Lance in his boxer briefs. Dylan quickly undressed and got on the bed with them.
“So we’re gon do this?” Dylan said.
Lance nodded, suavely as he ran a hand over Elias’s shoulder, down his arm, over his side.
“Alright,” Dylan said, smoothly, running his hand under the band of Elias’s underwear and pulling them down, “then let’s do this.”
THE HOUGHTONS,
THE LAWDENS
AND
THE ALEXANDERS
Marie Madeleine DuFresne[1]
/
Remy DuFresne
/ /
Percy DuFresne Lula DuFresne=Isador Houghton
/ /
Darla Anne=Leroy Houghton[2] =Mary Lou Ward
=Avery Philips ___/____________/________
/_________ / / /
/ / Tom=Fenn=Todd Adele=Hoot=Vanessa
Lee Ava Lee / / /_________
/ / Dylan Houghton Mesda[3] / / /
Danasia=Ron / / / Caroline
/ / William Klasko=Layla Julian=Claire /
/ / / _____/____ Laurel
1. Berg / Liam / / /
2. Hamlin / Riley Houghton Anderson
3. Mitchell /
Meredith + Mathan=Carol Miller
/ /_______
Elijah / /
BernardLucky
THE FAMILY AFFREN
(Simplified)
Clive Affren=Muirne O’Muil
/
Robert Affren Senior=Barbara Telford Affren
_________/__________________________________
John=Tina Maisy George Diane=William=Ellen / / (Nell)
Bree Biggs+Milo=Dena Reardon 1. Barbara
/ / ____________ 2. Wendy
Margaret Biggs / / 3. Meredith
Maggie Rob Cara Max = +Mathan
/ /
Cayla Elijah
THE KLASKOS, THE MILLERS
AND
THE LEWISES
Harold Klasko=Margaret Fagan Klasko Liane=John Miller
___/____________ _____________________/_
/ / / /
Layla =William Sheridan=Brendan Miller Mathan=Carol / /
Liam Lawden Klasko Bernard
Lucky
Lawden
Marian=Advocate Lewis
Naomi Riley ____/_____
/ / /
Noah Riley=James Lewis Ron Lewis=Danasia Burns
/ _____/_________
/ / / /
Chay=Casey Williams Berg Hamlin Mitchell
Next I will post the epilogue, but while waiting for the final end, you might want to get yourselves ready for Nights in White Satin, the conclusion to Geschichte Falls.
[1] This Marie Madeleine is the sister of one Henri DuFresne who is the ancestor of the Fitzgerald family whose story is told in the novel The Hidden Lives of Virgins.
[2] Leroy Houghton is by birth Leroy Meriwether. He was adopted by Isadore’s older sister Ruella. When she died he came to live with Isador and Lula, already having taken the name Houghton. So when Anne married Leroy she went from the maiden name Houghton to the married name Houghton, a reversal of the usual way of things seeing as it was Leroy who was the one who had changed his name previously.
[3] As the natural child of Eileen Wehlan, Dylan also figures on the Callan family tree.