The ink is still drying on the divorce papers as Walter stands in the doorway of the lawyer's office building to avoid the downpour lashing against the sidewalk. Pulling his coat closer around him, he turns when he hears the door swing open, and watches Mr. Dartmoore embrace Lorraine gently, his face a mask of sympathy. The hot twinge of guilt in the pit of his stomach is brief - they tried, but Dr. Monroe couldn't do anything for them, even with her understanding eyes and soothing voice and years of experience. When the love just isn't there, it's time to let go. They've had a good run - together for fifteen years, married for twelve. Most people who marry their high school sweetheart - especially those who got married while still in high school, and had two children before they even had stable careers - don't spend the rest of their life with them, they've always known that. But, well, they've signed the papers now. It's official, and frightening.
"Lorraine..." The soft word trails into silence as she walks past him, putting up her umbrella as the wind tugs gently at her silky scarf and rustles the hem of her dark dress. She turns to him, face pale in the grey day but eyes hard and set, like steel. "Good luck."
"You too," she says softly, and kisses his cheek gently. Once again, he marvels at how close in height she is to him - he's sure that one day Cooper and Natalie, currently with their Grandpa Blymouth and throwing tantrums over their parents officially divorcing, will be tall teenagers. He watches Lorraine go with a feeling like sadness in the depths of his stomach, a sense of disappointment that they couldn't prove all their critics wrong and make it.
Back in their house, that he'll soon have to leave for a smaller apartment, he fills a tumbler with amber whisky and takes down their photo albums. Their wedding day, both of them so young and naive and full of delusions about love and commitment. Just two teenagers in love, smiling at the camera, Lorraine's plain white dress blowing in the breeze ruffling the petals of the pink roses clutched in one trembling fist. He looks so young, nerves in his eyes, holding her hand as if afraid she might blow away if he lets go. She was so wild and free back then, like a sunbeam flitting from place to place, a balloon lifting him away from the earth, letting him live in a daydream.
He remembers when they first found out she was pregnant, their overwhelming joy, her smiling dreams of filling their tiny apartment - all two college students striving to get away from their parents and start a life together could afford - with feminine touches and the scents of baking and enough toys for a dozen children. But when the baby came, everything stopped making sense, the tapestry slowly unravelling, month by month. By the time Natalie was born, a scarlet, squalling little girl, they were both exhausted. So much sun was gone from Lorraine, she was quiet and simply did what needed to be done for their son, jealous of his baby sister. Their love was already fading - this was inevitable.
Christmas comes and gos, spent alone for the first time in his life. Lorraine took Cooper and Natalie to her sister in Pennsylvania, to get them all away for a Christmas in the snow, with Alice's dogs to distract them. Sitting in front of his tiny Christmas tree, Walter hopes desperately that they won't be teased when they go back to school for their new status as the children of a broken home - this isn't their fault. It shouldn't affect them, turn his sunny children into sullen teenagers. He clings to the hope that it won't, even as Cooper's moods blacken and Natalie becomes withdrawn, refusing to hug him when they visit him.
"They'll come around," Lorraine assures him, but Walter hears Natalie asking, "When are you and Dad gonna get married again?" as they're leaving, and lets his head thud into his hands with a heavy sigh.
It's barely been a month since they signed the final papers - although their marriage has been over for years, they're both completely aware of that - when he meets Pamela. Returning smugly from being offered a promotion that will allow him to buy a much nicer house and travel all over the country - perhaps the world - like he's always wanted, he stops the car outside the Lima Bean and heads in. "What can I get you?" the barista asks, as cheerfully as always, but this time he notices the red rims around her eyes and pauses to look at her. Really look at her.
Her nametag reads Pamela Rourke, and he notices the slight bulge of her belly beneath her uniform. She's pregnant, no more than ten or twelve weeks. But with her wildly curly hair, barely held back by a hairband, and her bright eyes and tiny figure, she's extremely pretty, and too young to look so sad. "What's wrong?" he asks, and she shakes her head. "Please, let me buy you a cup of coffee and we can talk about it. Or we could do this over dinner?"
"Are you asking me out?" she asks, and he shrugs and gives her the smallest smile. "I'm afraid I couldn't, sir. There are strict rules about fraternising with customers," even as she says it, the corner of her mouth twitches with barely suppressed mirth, "and I'm still getting over my last boyfriend. Anyway, aren't you married?"
"Newly divorced, before Christmas, although it was over years ago, we were just determined to prove everyone wrong by gritting our teeth and sticking it through," Walter replies easily, showing her the tan line on his bare ring finger and seeing the flicker in her eyes. "It doesn't have to be a date. We can just go out as friends. But I would like to hear your story, and you've been so kind to me, I'd like to show you a little of that in return."
"Oh fine," Pamela says, but her eyes are shining and she's smiling. "I finish at seven, you can pick me up and sweep me off my feet with a burger." As he takes his coffee, she smiles and says, "And you can call me Pam, Walter."
He goes one step further, taking her out to his favourite Italian restaurant, looking at her tiny, neat figure in her belted wool dress and shiny brown boots, her curls looking a little less wild now she's not forcing them back, falling around her pretty face. "So what's your story?" she asks, sipping at her milkshake. "Oh my God, that's like heaven."
"Not much to tell," Walter says, and smiles when she raises an eyebrow at him. "Lorraine and I started dating sophomore year. We fancied ourselves starcrossed lovers, and we got married right after graduation. Cooper came along when we were only nineteen, and we fell out of love trying to keep a family together. Cooper is eleven now, and Natalie is nine. They're both upset about the divorce, and want us to get married again." Noticing the way Pam pointedly looks away when the waitress comes over to offer them coffee, he asks, "And you?"
"I'm only twenty, in case you hadn't realised," she says softly. "I never went to college, devastating my parents. I had all these dreams about running off to New York or LA and finding fame by being pretty and being able to sing and dance a little, but within a few months I slunk back home and took the job at the Lima Bean. I was meaning to apply to college and have a late start, but I met a guy in the summer, and he ruined me. I found out I'm pregnant, and then he took off back to the Philippines to be with his family. Now my parents want me to give the baby up, when all I want do is keep it and be a mom. Ironic, huh?" Her face twists despite the joke, and his heart goes out to her. She's just a kid, blundering around in the dark looking for a light switch, the way he was when Lorraine was pregnant with Cooper, just a little younger than this tiny, adorable girl sitting across from him.
"Listen, Pam, I might have an idea," he says softly. "I know I'm eleven years older than you, and your parents will be wildly disapproving, but I'm willing to support you. If you want to do it alone, I'll understand completely. But, with the promotion I've just secured, I'm making enough money to support a young woman who's run into trouble and her child. If you want me to."
"My parents will approve very much," Pam says without stopping, and he laughs. "All they've ever wanted is for me to settle for someone stable, always bemoaning my wild boyfriends. And my dad is eight years older than my mom, they wouldn't judge us." She smiles at him across the table, and lays a wistful hand on her belly. "But we won't be too public with it. We don't want people thinking you were cheating on your wife with me, or that the baby is yours."
Standing at her side three months later, the minister happily announcing them man and wife, the baby boy in Pam's swollen belly kicking the hand he lays there as they kiss, Walter can't help but laugh at the thought that what he proposed that day could've led to anything but marriage. As Pamela Rourke becomes Pamela Anderson, her parents look unbearably proud in the front pew, and she waves at the congregation with pure joy bright in her eyes, laughing when her grandmother catches the bouquet and chattering nineteen to the dozen with every guest, showing them the ultrasound pictures and gasping with delight over the presents.
Cooper and Natalie were both reluctant guests, and are united against Pam's cheerful family, sulking in the corner. "Come and watch the cake cutting, you two," Walter says, trying to keep the pleading note out of his voice. "Pam has two lovely nephews around your age, and the gardens are beautiful. You could go and have some fun, it won't get dark for hours."
"April first," Cooper intones dully, staring up at him with all the truculence of a twelve year old hopelessly affected by the divorce, in ways Walter dared to hope he wouldn't be. "We all know the real joke is you marrying some slut that got herself knocked up. It won't last. She just wants money and support, and she'll take off as soon as the baby comes."
"Cooper Lee Anderson!" Walter thunders, attracting the attention of one of Pamela's aunts - her family really is huge, her side of the church wild and colourful and riotous compared to his more sober relatives and friends. "We are all a family now, and we will respect each other! You will not speak about your stepmother like that!"
"She'll never be my mother!" Cooper shouts. "She stole you from my real mom!" He takes off into the church grounds, disappearing among the greenery, and Natalie follows him, the pretty circlet of dark red roses resting on her auburn hair clattering to the ground.
Pam's hand slides into his, and she leans into him with a sigh. "It's an adjustment for all of us," she says gently. "They'll probably never like me, but that's okay. I'm sure that they'll hate any new partner Lorraine finds just as much. Hell hath no fury like two kids who want their parents to get back together and are suddenly faced with the reality that they won't."
"I love you," he says, and she beams up at him, looking so sweet with the circlet of white roses balanced on her blonde-streaked hair, her shiny eyes and soft lips and flushed cheeks. She looks so elegant in her white lace, the hem fluttering around her knees and her belly rounded beneath the material, beckoning his hand sliding across the stretched skin.
"I love you too," she says lightly, and brushes a kiss against his lips. "Now, I want to show my handsome, older, successful husband off to all my high school friends who made snarky comments when I got pregnant." Grinning, he lets himself be dragged off by her, ready to ride the rollercoaster all over again.
Blaine is born that August, in the middle of the night, a tiny red yowling creature that Pam looks at with the most incredible love in her eyes. Walter can't help but smile, watching her with her son, with their baby, and when he sweeps his wife and child home to their new home he almost feels that it's the first day of the rest of his life.
His relationship with Lorraine, which they've been trying hard to keep civil for the sake of Cooper and Natalie, turns extremely sour after his marriage to Pam. She calls him screaming, asking what she really ever meant to him, frostily ignoring his truths that their marriage ended years ago, probably before Natalie was even born. He's not sure if she eggs Cooper and Natalie on to keep being the wicked stepchildren fairytales never warned anyone about, torturing Pam and taking every opportunity to sneak into the nursery and poke Blaine, making him cry.
But, a year after Blaine is born, when he's grown into a toddler so handsome people stop to coo at him in the street, chubby-cheeked and bright-eyed with his mother's curly hair, darker than hers, Walter is trying to keep the smugness out of his smile when Lorraine turns up flushed and starry-eyed on their doorstep, with a tall, lanky red-haired man in tow, who she introduces as Trevor, 'the new light of my life'. "I'm sorry I was such a shit to you after you married Pam," she says over coffee, and Walter knows that Pam is hiding laughter when she turns to gaze out of the window. "I was just jealous. After clinging to us for so long, I didn't know how to be okay with you finding love again. But now I have Trev," she looks at him with slavish adoration, a way she never really looked at him, "I can understand perfectly."
By the time Blaine is two years old, sweet and placid despite all the warnings from their families, talking and toddling around enchanting everyone, Lorraine and Trevor are living together, fully committed and have their own baby, a little girl named Virginia who will be inevitably redheaded. Cooper and Natalie, now fourteen and twelve, are both insane with jealousy. Alternating their time between Lorraine and Trevor and Walter and Pam, they take to torturing Blaine. He desperately wants to keep up with his older stepsiblings - Cooper lanky and brooding, Natalie sulky and short - and chases after them on chubby legs, crying when they won't let him keep up.
In hindsight, Walter knows he should've done more to stop them bullying Blaine. They make his life miserable until the day Natalie turns eighteen, when Blaine is eight, and leaves home - though they both still visit frequently to torture their stepbrother. He knows that Pam hates him for it, and he should be trying harder. It gets a little easier to breathe when his older children move away and into their own lives, and he's just left with Blaine, still a breathtaking child with his big golden eyes and mess of dark curls, enchanted by music and performing. When he takes him to New York for a long weekend after his tenth birthday, they see Wicked on the Broadway stage, and Blaine drifts around in a daydream for days, enchanted by the magic of the theatre.
He's still just a child, barely beginning to grow taller or wider, when he looks at them with guarded eyes over dinner one night and quietly says, "Mom, Dad, I'm gay." Pam looks stricken, and Walter can see the way Blaine's face falls, thinking they're angry. "I'm sorry."
"Oh sweetheart, don't be sorry," Pam says, and her chair scrapes against the stone floor as she scrambles up to hug her son, pressing her face into his hair. Even though Blaine is fourteen, the age when so many teenagers push their parents away, he clings to her, and the tension slowly drains out of him. "Do you like that very sweet boy you brought to dinner last week?"
Shyly, Blaine smiles and says, "I've asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance next weekend."
Pam claps her hands, eyes shining. "My little boy's first date! I'm so proud of you, baby." She looks so young, her face free of lines and her hair still as perfect as it was the day they met - she's learned how to smooth her curls out over the year, elegant waves curling gently over her shoulders - and once again Walter is reminded of their eleven year age difference. She's only thirty-four, while he's fast approaching fifty, feeling all the nostalgia of those who want to cling to youth, thinking of everything he might have missed out on.
They wave Blaine off to the school dance, looking young and scared but handsome in his tuxedo, curls smoothed down with gel. His date, Charlie, is auburn haired and bespectacled, clearly very nervous to meet them, and they hold hands shyly. Walter almost dabs at his eyes, thinking about young love in those dizzying days of adolescence, and Pam is laughing at him, her engagement ring and wedding ring and the gold band he bought her for their tenth anniversary digging into his palm when she digs her fingers into his. "You are so nostalgic for your glory days," she giggles, unpinning her hair with a sigh of relief and leaning into him, so small and compact in his arms. "Just remember, you're the one who decided to get married right out of high school."
She's not laughing when the phone rings at midnight, tears streaming down her cheeks as they drive to the hospital and sit in the waiting room for terrible minutes, her nails biting grooves into his palm as they wait and wait for news, horrible thoughts chasing each other around his head, awful ideations of what could happen to their precious son. The nurse who emerges looks exhausted, but smiles reassuringly at them and lets them see Blaine. Pam sobs brokenly when she sees him, bandaged and sedated, sleeping in his hospital gown with his skin grey against the white sheets. "I'm so sorry, my little dove," she whispers, and Walter cries just to see her so broken, cries for his son who can't find acceptance here. "Oh Blainey, I'm so sorry." She turns her tear-streaked face up to him, eyes rimmed with red, and says, "We can't send him back to that awful school."
He understands perfectly, and emails his father-in-law the very next day. Johnathan and Samantha Rourke dote on their daughter and their handsome grandson, and a week later a cheque arrives, enough money for Blaine to try repeating his freshman year of high school - cut short by his injuries at the dance - at Dalton Academy in Westerville. He loves it there, blossoms in the blazer, and they watch him lead the glee club to victory at Nationals in his junior year, both beaming with pride.
Blaine told them after he joined the Warblers that all he wanted to do was make art and help people. Walter can hear that voice in his mind when he wakes up on what he could consider the first day of the rest of his life - how ironic, to be thinking that the year he turns forty-nine - and approaches Pam with that serious look on his face. "Oh honey, I've known for years," she says, waving him away with a smile. "Let's stay friends and stay living together, you're the best man in my life. And we should call Blaine as soon as possible, this might freak him out."
But Blaine just smiles over the Skype call, and says, "Well, as long as you're both happy and you're going to stay friends, I don't mind. You're still my dad, no matter what. And now maybe Cooper and Natalie won't have so much of a grudge." Waving frantically, he says, "Virginia is calling, we're going out on the town tonight. I'll visit you in a few weeks."
Walter and Pam both turn to each other as Blaine vanishes, and she's the first to laugh. "He always zigs when I think he's about to zag," she says. "Parenthood is such an adventure. I wonder if lightning will strike twice and I'll find another successful, handsome, older husband." She wink, and Walter laughs fondly. She's the true love of his life, but now he has a chance to find a man to share his life with, to be himself after suppressing it for so long.
There are flirtations over the next year, but nothing serious. There's the necessity of letting their families know about their divorce, the fear of horror swept away when Pam's parents just laugh and talk about new additions to their family. Lorraine is thrilled for him, and Trevor shakes his hand and talks vaguely about someone he might know. Virginia, now a ravishing seventeen year old and one of Blaine's best friends, is similarly excited. Cooper and Natalie are all stony silences, and Walter can't help but worry about all the ways he might have screwed up his two eldest, now both with steady careers and relocating across the country, far away from him.
It's February 2015, almost twenty years after his divorce from Lorraine, when he's driving very slowly down the road outside Scandals, the tinny sound of distant music in his ears. Although he hasn't yet been into the club, it's apparently changed ownership and been improved in recent years. Pam is always teasing him about going there, and as he turns into the parking lot he hears her voice in his head like a bell, her giggles.
When he opens his door, the first thing he notices is the man sitting on the kerb, staring down at the road with the most absorbed expression, swaying slightly. Hearing the car door slam, he looks up, and his dazzling smile takes Walter's breath away. He looks around Blaine's age - but he must be older to get into the club - and he's surely the most stunning man he's ever seen, coiffed hair dark with sweat, the top three buttons of his stark black shirt loosened, silvery scarf hanging around his shoulders and legs long in tight jeans and shiny brown boots. "Hello," he says brightly, and waves slightly. "Who are you?"
"I'm Walter," he says, and takes a seat next to the beautiful boy who beams at him, swaying up against him and away again like a slender sapling in the wind. "What are you doing sitting out here?"
"Well, it's my birthday," he hiccups, and then looks at his watch. "No, no it's not, but it was. Valentine's Day is such a shitty day to be born, I don't know what my parents were thinking." Looking over at Walter, slightly cross-eyed but no less beautiful for it with his flushed cheeks and seductive smile, he says, "I seem to have lost my designated driver. Oh please, oh please, take me home." Pitching sideways, hair bouncing with the movement, he beams up and says, "I'm Kurt, by the way. I'm, like, super single."
Swallowing a laugh, Walter sets Kurt upright and says, "We better find your designated driver. Who did you come with?"
"My friends came over from New York for the weekend," Kurt says, a little wistfully. "Rachel and Santana. They're somewhere in there. That's San's car." He waves at a bright red one, standing out even in the gloom. "Devil in a red car."
"Come on, you'll need to show me which ones they are so you can get home safely," Walter says, and puts an arm around Kurt's waist to haul him upright. Giggling, Kurt snuggles into him, breathing warm against his neck, and when they get into the club there's a shriek and two very beautiful women come running, one in a red dress and the other in backless black, both clearly extremely drunk. So much for a designated driver.
He ends up driving all three of them home and giving Santana the money for a taxi back to get her car at a later time. When he pulls up outside Kurt's house, where all three of them are staying, Kurt looks suddenly stricken with misery. "Come on, Kurt, time for sleep," Rachel says, tugging at him.
"No!" Kurt squeals loudly, slapping at her grasping hands. "If we go to sleep it's not my birthday anymore and we'll break the spell." He smiles then, flirtatious and charming, slipping a little further down in his seat. "Do you want to go out some time?"
"I'll give you my number, and you can call me at a later date, when you haven't had quite so much to drink," Walter says gently, and Kurt giggles as he hands his phone over.
"I get a boyfriend for my twenty-first," he says, and sways over to plant a kiss on Walter's cheek before Rachel finally gets him out of the car and they stumble up to the house, tunelessly singing Happy Birthday. Laughing to himself, Walter drives home and falls asleep thinking about shining eyes and laughter.
They're dating less than a week later, a couple to be admired in pictures. Pam unexpectedly adores Kurt, treating him like one of her own children - it helps considerably that Kurt says, "But you can't possibly have been married for nineteen years, you look far too young!' the first time he meets her - and Walter has never been happier, so secure in who he is with this stunning man on his arm. Kurt's father is less enthusiastic, but he can understand that perfectly. A twenty-nine year age difference is a lot more than the eleven years between him and Pam, but Kurt just laughs at the naysayers and curls closer. "Forget them," he says, lying in bed as the dawn stripes the room, so stunningly beautiful that Walter has to pinch himself to be sure he's not dreaming. "I like you and you like me. Nothing else matters."
Kurt is everything he could ever have wanted in a man. He's beautiful, intelligent, talented, charming. He's excited to meet Cooper and Natalie and Blaine, and, despite wrinkling her nose when she sees how young he is, Lorraine thinks he's adorable. When they're alone together, the little gasps and whimpers Kurt lets out are the most erotic thing Walter has ever heard. He could lose hours dreaming of his pleasure-glazed eyes and hot, flushed skin. They're happy, ridiculously so, and...well, he's always been hopelessly, recklessly impulsive. It doesn't take long to begin thinking of Kurt in the context of marriage.