Beggar of Love by Lee Lynch

at the ground until her mother reached the car. Like Jarvy, Jefferson would not show her fear. She would not cry. She would not breathe. Fear could eat you alive. Look at Mrs. Jefferson, too scared to admit something was wrong in her marriage, scared she would lose her husband every minute she was in it, no idea of what had happened to destroy the bubble of love that had sustained her. The heritage of her mother’s, and father’s, fears could eat Jefferson alive too.
    The car pulled away and Jefferson waved. In a minute she would breathe. In a minute she would cry. Soon she wouldn’t feel the fear. It would leave with those who’d taught it to her, who’d depended on it to keep her in line, keep her from disrupting their lives. As the car turned the corner her father honked, twice, cheerfully free to head toward a drink. He must, she thought, drink to blot out the knowledge that he was gay and the guilt of his betrayals. Her mother, she knew, was smothering tears, riding back toward life alone with her alcoholic, leaving behind Jefferson, their strange failure, afraid that if she cried Mr. Jefferson would only stop sooner for dinner to shut her up.
    Jefferson felt as if the scream she’d muffled before was slipping from her body. A scream of protest at the life they’d go on living and that, in growing up with them, had become part of her. A scream of abandonment. They had taught her to live in the world only as they had. How could they leave her with so little? She hadn’t been able to keep things together for Angela, who was rooted in Dutchess, while Jefferson had discovered that Dutchess and Angela were too small for her.
    But she didn’t scream. Or cry or breathe much differently or lose the fear. She felt a flash of excitement, sheer triumph that she was free of them at last. She tried to give herself to it. She stood tall and moved to shrug off the fear and silence, but both had been with her much too long, and once more her shoulders sagged. The city roared around her like a lion after her blood. The only sounds here were of dogs barking, mothers calling. It didn’t smell like fall here; there weren’t enough trees. It smelled like busses and perfumes and the nearby trash basket. Angela wasn’t home waiting for her like a devoted puppy. That life was gone and she needed to learn the new rules. She was glad to be away from the moldy riverside apartment where one thing or another was always on the fritz. She’d yearned for the adventures she imagined the city would supply. Here it was okay to be herself, to be gay. She knew she’d be good at both. She lunged up the stairs to her room.
    The dorm was two blocks from what would become her favorite coffee shop, the Lunchbox. She got in the habit of having lunch there, sometimes crunching along the packed-snow sidewalks, partly to avoid dining-hall food, but more because she could soak up the affectionate informality of the crew.
    “Another adopted daughter,” Sam the cook and owner said one day not long after she moved into the dorm. He was smiling down at Gladys. At six-foot-six, he had all the appliances in the Lunchbox kitchen built to accommodate him. “What would you do, Glad, without your educated orphans?”
    “Get a job someplace decent.”
    Jefferson felt special, privileged to be Glad’s new orphan and a part of this cheerful semi-family. Gladys was lavish with praise and admiration. Her banter with Sam would have made a good comedy routine at one of the local night spots.
    College began to acquire the comfort of routine. Sports brightened her days. She had found the bars where, instead of fighting off her monster depression alone at the dorm, or calling Angela up and apologizing for hours for not being what she wanted to be for her, she could drink with gays at night. The morning after, Glad was usually there with that smile.
    One of those mornings, Jefferson stumbled in with a very black eye.
    Glad raised an eyebrow. Her youngest, Gus, in a