Izzie sat back a bit and blinked. “Oof! This weather is awful! But I’m afraid if we stop, we’ll get stuck!” She looked sidelong at her lover sitting in the car. “And yeah, bringing you home to meet the parental units isn’t exactly relaxing either!”
Lakshmi smiled brightly. “That’ll be fine! Your parents know I’m a girl, right?”
Izzie laughed, remembering the phone call with her mom.
“Hey, ummmm…. mom?”
“Yes, sweetie, what is it?” she could hear her mother’s bright smile on the phone line.
“I… uh… have something to tell you…” her voiced trailed away shyly, twisting away from the truth she wanted to tell.
“You aren’t dropping out of school, are you?”
“No, mom.”
“Pregnant?”
“NO mom!”
“Ok well you aren’t in jail, are you? We can come bail you out.”
“Oh God no! Jeez mom!”
“Well, whatever it is it can’t be that bad then, can it?”
A pause.
Another pause while she listened to her mother’s loving patience on the other end of the phone.
“I’m gay.” There, she blurted it out.
Her mother laughed gently through the speaker. “Is that all? Your dad and I had figured that out last year.”
“What? How?” She’d had a couple of boyfriends in High School. Even been caught blowing one of them in the family room one afternoon when mom came home earlier than expected.
“We noticed how you’re with your friend in the photos you post on Facebook. How you look at her. How she looks at you. It’s pretty obvious that you love her.”
“Yeah, I do, mom.”
“Well then, why don’t you bring her home with you at Christmas?”
And that settled it. So here she was driving through a blizzard in a rental car with her girl friend to spend Christmas with her family.
“Yeah, they know you’re a girl.” Izzie smiled.
“So, what’s the problem?”
“They might not like you. You might not like them.”
“Hey babe, your parents are great. Your dad seemed nice when you moved in last year and your mom is always nice on the phone.”
“Yeah, but my parents are not normal.”
Lakshmi snorted. “No one is ‘normal’.”
“When we were little and if it was hot out dad would fill our wading pool in the back yard and mom would sometimes strip off and join us. She used to sunbathe in the nude too.”
“Really!?” Lakshmi gasped. “What about the neighbours?”
“We’ve got big hedges and she’d lay out in a corner that the neighbour’s upstairs windows couldn’t see into. But I’m pretty sure Mr. Van Housen next door spent a lot of time trimming that section of the hedge.”
Lakshmi laughed. “I bet he did!”
“At Hallowe’en Mom liked to dress up as Elvira to hand out candy at the door.”
“Elvira? The outrageously hot B-Movie host on late night TV?”
“Yup. That’d be her. She’s got the figure to pull it off too. The neighbourhood dads were always pretty happy to bring their kids by. Lot of teenage boys too, in their hockey jerseys. She kept a bowl of condoms to give to the teenagers instead of candy.”
Lakshmi laughed. “Oh my God! She sounds like a howl!”
“We were naked around the house a lot. Mom, my sister, my brother too. Dad was always grabbing her and they’d disappear to their bedroom.”