The Favour Of A Reply
By Stinson Carter

The invitation came engraved on the finest gilded cardstock. I tried to tuck it away in the pile of bills on my desk, but after ten years of tucking her away, I realized I could no longer keep our past in unopened envelopes and unreturned phone calls.

I was an awkward ex-pat Southerner trying to find my place at a new school in a foreign corner of the country with a grownup secret in my teenage head. And Audrey was the first person I ever told.

After my parents’ divorce in Louisiana, we stopped going to church, I stopped going to private school, and the bank took back the house of my tree forts and Christmas mornings. My father lost his business, my mother lost her fairytale, and I lost any ideas I still had that the grownups can make anything better. My dad ran off to Seattle to build a new life, and my mom and I started over in a Transcendental Meditation community in Iowa. I was twelve. At fourteen, I left my mother and my mantra and moved to Seattle. Six months into living with my father, I found out why our Southern life had fallen apart. He sat me down one afternoon in our apartment, hesitated in putting his hand on my shoulder, and said, “I need to talk to you about the fact that your father is gay.”
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