Disclaimer: I'm just playing in the Glee sandbox. If you recognize it from elsewhere, I don't own it.
"There is probably no more terrible instant of
enlightenment than the one in which you discover
your father is a man – with human flesh."
–Frank Herbert, Dune
DISHWATER
When conversation lulled over dinner, Blaine told his parents Kurt had started a PFLAG chapter at McKinley. He meant to fill the empty space between voices; he expected to hear platitudes about how wonderful it was that Kurt's school was safe and nothing else. His parents were good people, but they worked long hours to keep their family in this comfortable life with the new cars, big house, nice vacations, and private school education. They cared, but they had more on their minds than the extracurricular activities of Blaine's boyfriend.
"PFLAG," Gerry Anderson said thoughtfully. "Tell me again, Blaine. Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays?"
Blaine paused with a forkful of chicken pot pie halfway between his plate and mouth. Both of his parents gazed at him expectantly. His mom in her red skirt suit and pearls, home for only an hour before going back to work to meet a client, smiled encouragingly as she took another bite. His dad, dressed down today because his flight from Munich had gotten in just two hours ago, had laid down his fork entirely.
"Yes. It was part of the deal he made with Dave Karofsky when he transferred back."
Jane's smiled slipped just a little. Her dark eyes filled with sadness, and she reached out to brush a thumb along her only son's cheek. Blaine recoiled just a bit on principle. Teenage boys didn't like being coddled by their mothers.
"Good. That's good Kurt's bully is willing to educate himself," she said. "But you miss him having him at Dalton, don't you?"
Blaine nodded and dropped his gaze to his lap. He couldn't talk about this right now. These past three days at school had been torture for Blaine. The Warblers tried to keep his spirits up, but there was a Kurt-shaped hole at Dalton. He still found himself searching for Kurt in the hallways during passing periods or seeking out his gaze during a Warblers number before remembering Kurt was at McKinley again. It was ridiculous and melodramatic, he knew, but knowing something couldn't change the way he felt about it.
"You're still together, right?" Gerry asked slowly. "Distance is a challenge to a relationship, but it doesn't have to be a barrier. You can still see each other after school and on the weekends."
Blaine's head snapped up to stare across the table at his father. Kurt had met his parents as a friend at Sectionals and again as his boyfriend at Regionals. Blaine had the impression they liked him as well as any of the Warblers, but had no special affection for him.
"Yes, he's still my boyfriend."
Jane petted her son's cheek and he pulled away again. Gerry nodded twice and smiled a little before picking up his fork again. Blaine felt adrift in his conversation, so he took the bite of chicken pot pie hanging in front of his mouth.
"So this PFLAG chapter," Gerry said. "When are they meeting?"
"Tomorrow at 7:30."
The Andersons froze for a moment, and then in unison violated their no cell phones at the table rule. Gerry made a few swipes with his finger before nodding, and Jane used the keypad to type a note to herself.
"I'm in a meeting with Marketing until at least six," Gerry commented. "Jane?"
"I should be out of court by five, but with meetings after … We should just meet you over there, Blaine. Is that all right, honey?"
Blaine stared for a moment, but nodded. "Yeah. Fine. I planned on going to McKinley early anyway to help Kurt set up."
The conversation turned from there to other topics. Gerry would be working all weekend to finalize the new social media marketing strategy, which meant he couldn't go out boating after all. Jane suggested they offer the boat to her brother then. Blaine listened as if from a great distance while he mulled over in his head what had just happened.
"Blaine? … Blaine?"
He started when he realized his dad was calling his name. His mom kissed his cheek and headed out the door with her briefcase to go back to the office.
"Sorry. What were you saying?"
"I asked if you had homework or if you could help me with the dishes."
"Not that much homework."
Blaine cleared off the table and stored the leftovers in Tupperware while Gerry started the dishwater and nudged Brooke out of the kitchen with his toe. Jane's lapdog howled abuse at the Anderson men who never indulged her insatiable desire for table scraps.
"Wash or rinse and dry?" Gerry asked.
"I'd better wash since you don't have your glasses on. Mom will throw another fit if there's even a spot left on the plates again."
Gerry nodded agreeably, grinning just a little mischievously, as if he wanted to suggest leaving a single dish dirty just to get a rise out of his admittedly perfectionist wife. He didn't, though. He switched places at the sink and picked up a clean dish towel while Blaine put his hands in the warm water up to his wrists and scrubbed at the glasses.
"You look like you have something on your mind."
Blaine hesitated, questioning the wisdom of having this conversation while doing domestic chores. He wouldn't have another opening, though, before tomorrow night.
"I'm just wondering … I didn't expect you to go to the PFLAG meeting."
Gerry turned on the cold water tap and swirled water around inside the sudsy glasses before turning them over and setting them down gently in the drainer. He weighed the dish towel in his palm like it was a paperweight and not a piece of cloth.
"You want to go alone? You're obviously planning on going if you're helping Kurt set up. Is there any reason you don't want your mother and I to go with you?"
"It's not that I don't want you to go," Blaine rushed to say. "I just didn't think you'd want to."
Gerry rubbed the dish cloth lightly over the outside of the blue-tinted glass thoughtfully. A little frown marred his lips, and a furrow knit his triangular eyebrows.
"I know we're not around as often as you'd like, Blaine, but we do try to be there for things that are important to you. One of us has been at every Warblers competition, and we go to your talent showcases at Dalton. If we're not there, son, it's not because we don't want to be."
"No, I know. I just … PFLAG is different than Warblers."
"That's surprising, to say the least. Haven't you always said Dalton should have a GSA? And now McKinley has a PFLAG, but it's not as important as Warblers?"
"That's not what I'm saying."
"Then I'm afraid I don't understand, son."
Blaine's hands stilled around the rim of the white china plate and a flow of soap bubbles slid down the smooth surface back into the lightly steaming dishwater. Gerry rolled another glass around the towel in his hands.
"I'm part of PFLAG because I'm gay."
Gerry waited for Blaine to say more, but there was nothing more to add so he went back to drying off the last of the three glasses while Blaine scrubbed at the plates again.
"Didn't you just tell me the P in that acronym stands for parents?" Blaine nodded. "Then I'm afraid I still don't understand why your mother and I wouldn't want to be part of the group. I feel like we're dancing around something here, Blaine. I don't know what that is. I need you to just tell me."
Blaine sucked in a deep breath through his nose. The last plate clinked against the other two in the empty side of the sink, and Gerry turned the cold water tap again. Blaine didn't speak as he lowered the utensils into the water.
"I didn't think you would want to be part of any GLBT group because I think you'd rather not have a gay son," he said quietly.
Blaine saw from the corner of his eye the towel still in his dad's hands. The plate hovered for a moment wrapped in a blue-and-white check embrace before Gerry resumed drying the china. Father and son worked silently at their conjoined tasks for several moments.
"This is about the car."
Blaine nodded, and Gerry took a deep breath.
"I'm a businessman, Blaine. My mind works likes a good business plan. There's the bottom line and all the incremental steps needed to get there. I wish I could magically flip a switch and teleport from Point A to Point B, but I can't. I have to take change one step at a time."
"And the car was phase one of making me straight?" Blaine asked with a note of bitterness in his voice.
He didn't look up from the dishwater and the forks he scrubbed, but he felt his dad's eyes boring into him for several long, tense moments. The silence grew uncomfortable, and Blaine resisted the urge to fill it with babbled thoughts he would regret later.
"The car … the car is what happens when a VP walks into a board meeting during the fourth quarter and announces the company is still in the red. The directors are a bunch of suits who think they know what's best for the company because they used to be in the business, but now they're clueless about daily realities. When they hear something they don't understand, they panic and demand the company make changes that aren't actually good for business."
Blaine's eyes darted sidelong until he could make out the dish towel wrapped around his dad's hands and the dripping plates sitting in the drainer.
"I wish I could have flipped a switch in my brain and gone from a forty-four year old man who has never had a gay friend in his life to an accepting father in a single moment. But I didn't. I couldn't because that's not how I work. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a man who grew up when I did, where I did who could manage to do that."
Blaine's hands moved mindlessly over the stainless steel utensils beneath the surface of the cooling dishwater. His mind worked over the words, rehashing and rethinking until he could piece together some semblance of objectivity.
"It hurt so much knowing that you didn't want me to be the way I was born," he said quietly.
"I've tried to make it up to you, Blaine. How many Buckeyes games have we gone to? How many meetings have I cancelled to hear you sing? I've tried to show you how sorry I am by giving you the one thing I have the least of: time. But you can't look past the car."
Blaine looked up suddenly from the dying soap bubbles on the water's surface. He met his father's hazel green gaze for the first time and saw identical hurt there. His fingers released the waterlogged dishrag, and it sank to the bottom of the porcelain tub.
"That's what …? But I thought you …. I didn't know you were sorry. I didn't know spending time with me was an apology. I thought you were trying to be a strong influence on me to keep me masculine while you tried to convince me to date girls."
Gerry let out a gasping sigh, like he'd been punched in the gut, and his chin dropped to his chest. He pulled one hand out of the folds of the dish towel and rubbed at his eyes. Blaine felt his world spinning, and he gripped the countertop to keep himself upright.
"Why would I do that to you, Blaine?" Gerry asked with a rough voice. "Why do you think your mom and I work ourselves ragged to pay Dalton tuition and build up your college fund? We're scared for you. I don't care how much progress the media says we're making, it's a dangerous world out there for you. We're doing everything we can to send you to safer places where you can be happy exactly as you are."
Blaine blinked and moisture caught in his thick eyelashes.
"I know that my way of loving you isn't as obvious as your mother's, and I haven't always been the best father, but I have tried my best. I hope you can forgive me one day."
Gerry laid the towel across the draining board and squeezed his son's shoulder as he left the kitchen with his head ducked. Blaine stood over the sink, his hands submerged to the wrist in tepid water, for several minutes while he replayed the conversation and snippets of memory from the last three years beginning with the day he came out to his parents until dinner this evening.
At last, his fingers found the drain stopper and he pulled. He watched the water form a maelstrom as it swirled down the drain leaving behind a layer of soapy residue. His hands worked on autopilot to turn on the water and spray away the residual soap. Flecks of water flipped up onto his face and dotted his t-shirt.
"What are you going to do with the tiara?" Blaine asked.
He had his arms wrapped around Kurt's waist and his chin on his boyfriend's shoulder. The kilt he'd been so opposed to Kurt wearing felt nice swishing against his legs in the slight breeze. The sparklingly crown twirled in Kurt's deft fingers in front of their eyes.
"Put it with my others."
Kurt's little smile flickered into a frown as he told Blaine a story about having his car taken away when a wonderful father succumbed to a moment of panic.
Blaine rubbed at his wet cheeks with the back of his hand. He turned the water tap off and let the sprayer retract into the holder. The wet dishes in the drainer he finished drying and put away so his mom wouldn't have a spike in blood pressure when she came home late that night.
Everything he'd ever wanted had been right there in front of him for three years, but he'd been too caught up in the past to see it. He almost wanted to laugh, because wasn't this becoming a pattern for him? Except there wasn't anything funny about three years of love lost to miscommunication.
Blaine's feet carried him into the living room, and he settled onto the couch cushion opposite his dad's armchair. Gerry looked up from the game playing on the television and muted it without request. Both men scratched at the back of their necks. The identical nervous tick made identical smiles twitch the corners of their mouths, and the beginnings of humor ignited identical mirth in their identical hazel green eyes.
"I know you're working this weekend – " Blaine began.
"I've been thinking about that, and it's probably not worth it. Nobody is going to be around Sunday, and I can't move forward without Michael, Chad, and Louise at least," Gerry said hurriedly.
"Oh. Well … then maybe we could go boating on Sunday?"
"Yeah. I wouldn't want to waste the weather. We haven't gotten into the water this early in at least four years. Do the Hummels like boating?"
"I don't know. Kurt would complain about being in the sun all day, but I'm sure he'd love it once we got out on the water. We could ask them tomorrow at the PFLAG meeting."
Gerry nodded, and his finger pressed the mute button again. The game commentary flared back to life as the outfielder snatched the baseball from over the top of the wall and the crowd went wild.