Brownie Points Read online

  BROWNIE POINTS

  a novel by

  Jennifer Coburn

  Copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Coburn

  Copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Coburn

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author or publisher except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

  Book interior layout by Lisa DeSpain

  Cover image licensed through Shutterstock

  Cover design by Suzette Durazo

  Also by Jennifer Coburn

  The Wife of Reilly

  The Second Wife of Reilly

  (part of This Christmas, a three-novella collection)

  Reinventing Mona

  Tales from the Crib

  The Queen Gene

  Coming Soon

  Field of Schemes

  (read a sample chapter by clicking here)

  For Katie O’Nell,

  the greatest gift I was ever given

  Acknowledgements

  The idea for Brownie Points came about from a misunderstanding between my daughter Katie and her lifelong friend Lindsay. Our family had stopped to grab a bite to eat at a fast food restaurant en route to a soccer tournament when about sixty Boy Scouts soon walked in. This reminded Katie of the conversation she and her friend had earlier that day at their Girl Scout meeting. Lindsay shared that her brother Ryan wanted to become a Girl Scout, but was turned away by the troop leader. I immediately called Lindsay and Ryan’s mother to confirm the story, but was told that the girls were mistaken. It got me thinking, though: What if a boy really did want to join the Girl Scouts? How would a mother react? How would it affect the whole family?

  I am grateful to Katie and Lindsay – and the well-timed entrance of those Boy Scouts – for giving me the idea for a story I felt compelled to write.

  My daughter belongs to an amazing Girl Scout troop and I am so grateful that their leaders Julie Quinn and Marti Brower have volunteered countless hours over the past ten years. They rock. As do the Girl Scout of America, an organization that consistently stands up for the rights of LBGT youth.

  The most devoted friends are the ones who are willing to read rough drafts and offer candid feedback. The rare gems will read a manuscript multiple times. Thank you to my trusted early readers: Joan Isaacson, Edit Zelkind, Marg Stark, Deborah Shaul and Milo Shapiro. I am also so grateful to the parents of LGBT youth who shared their deepest fears, regrets and relief when they learned their children were gay. I also appreciate the many gay men who shared their childhood stories to help me gain a better sense of what it feels like to be different, to be bullied and to be emotionally betrayed by one’s own family.

  Christopher Schelling was a great friend throughout the process of writing Brownie Points and I appreciate all he did to shape the story. I am also deeply indebted to Phil Lauder for his eagle eye and to Suzette Durazo for her artistic one. Much thanks to Lisa DeSpain for patiently answering my countless inquiries about independent publishing.

  My husband William has my eternal gratitude for his support, patience, sense of humor and indulgence. No one has read this manuscript more times than William. No one has given me greater encouragement in my writing—and in life. I feel lucky to have found him.

  Chapter One

  August

  “Damn, this place is sweet!” Maya exclaimed, her face pressed against the back window of our car. “Gucci, Hermes, Chanel, Juicy!” Continuing her inventory, she gasped, “Look how cute! That bakery is called the Cookie Cutter.”

  “Wait till you see the school you and Logan are starting at next week,” Jason said, pleased that Maya approved of her first sight of Los Corderos. “The field is bigger than Golden Gate Park.” Glancing in the rearview mirror, he asked Logan, “What do you think, buddy?”

  “It’s very clean,” he answered. I had to suppress a laugh because that was my first thought when Jason and I first came to look at Los Corderos last month. Logan’s delivery was neutral, so I couldn’t tell if he was pleased by or aghast at the immaculate appearance of the town. My son then shuddered as he saw a shiny white Nissan Armada pass our car. “I can smell that guy’s cologne from here,” Logan said of the driver, a young Turk conducting a seemingly very important cell phone conversation.

  “The windows are closed,” Jason scolded with thinning jocularity.

  The sidewalks of El Camino Real looked as if they were made from sand-colored granite; the roads were paved with virgin tar. A pristine mega-mall anchored the community with hundreds of high-end shops and chain restaurants. The only hint of regional flavor was the neat row of thirty-foot palm trees that lined the main drag.

  Logan perked up. “Look, they’ve got a Williams-Sonoma here!” This wasn’t the first hint that our son would very likely return to San Francisco in his adult life. We didn’t think much of it when Logan was three years old and referred to the evening skyline as “jewels.” A few years later, my friend Jorge raised an eyebrow after Logan told him that he was making canapés in his sister’s Easy-Bake Oven. When the twins were eight, there was no getting around the fact that our son was as queer as folk. Maya finished a make-up application on Barbie’s Dream Head in which Mattel’s trophy blonde wound up looking like Tammy Faye Bakker after a week-long bender. Logan shook his head in disgust, lightly shoved aside his sister and worked with a team of imaginary assistants. Twenty minutes later, the parakeet blue eye shadow was replaced with a nude shimmer directly above smoky liner smudged to perfection. Barbie’s disembodied head had what my third grader labeled a perfect day-to-night look, a term he must have picked up from one of my friends.

  As the retail landscape of Los Corderos scrolled by us, my eyes welled with tears at the sight of a road sign letting us know we were 98 miles from San Francisco. Moments later, another sign informed us that this stretch of El Camino Real was kept tidy by Dolce and Gabbana. I imagined the store’s well-heeled staff strutting down the sidewalk disdainfully jabbing candy wrappers with sterling litter sticks. No doubt they’d do something kicky with the trash bags.

  I know our culture has become more consumer-oriented and that this trend is nationwide, but Los Corderos seemed Bed Bath and way Beyond the norm. Silently I assured myself that there had to be more to the community than the commercial strip with its army of SUVs and late-model tanks. I inhaled deeply and reminded myself to give Los Corderos a chance. Who was I to be so judgmental anyway? I was just another failed artist exiled from the city because her career couldn’t pay the mortgage. If Jason had the opportunity to serve as the first African-American fire captain in Los Corderos, the least I could do was go in with a decent attitude.

  My feeling of optimism lasted all of thirty seconds. It quickly deflated when I saw one of the new boutiques inspired by the mega bestseller, The Answer. In these orange-blossom scented Answer shops, youthful bindi-wearing salesgirls languished on bamboo counters, providing their expert opinion on healing elixirs, body oils and inspirational tea. They wore organic cotton tank tops with the word “Bliss” in Hindi. Answer stores sold these in several colors, with various spiritual aspirations like Forgiveness, Truth and Balance. Inner peace didn’t come cheap either. The rhinestone encrusted “Namaste” ribbed tank was $98 on the clearance rack.

  “Almost home, kids,” Jason said through the rear view mirror, his chest slightly puffed. My husband agreed that he would have liked to buy a place with more individuality than what the 600-home Utopia luxury housing development offered, but long held a philosophy that environment was internal. Home was where we made it, he said. At least one of us was centered. Maybe I needed a t-shirt that said “Bitter” in a different language, preferably Hebrew so no one around here
could read it.

  When we were house-hunting earlier this summer, we asked the realtor where the Black-Jewish neighborhood was. She smiled sweetly and told us, “Wherever you two buy a home.” Jason laughed, but a nervous giggle escaped my lips. Sensing my discomfort, the realtor gave us a warm honey smile and assured me that Utopia was a veritable United Nations. There was a Pakistani anesthesiologist, a Japanese-American landscape architect, and “one of those strict Jewish families.” I later learned that the only reason Anna Stein wore a wig was that she was undergoing chemo.

  When we signed the papers to purchase our home the month before, Jason placed his arm around my waist and said that he couldn’t wait till his parents saw our new place. I nodded, and a tear fell on the papers, smudging my signature.

  As much as I loved our life in San Francisco, I loved my husband more, and could never deny him this opportunity. Jason rose quickly through the ranks of the fire department, but there was no way he’d become a captain for at least another ten years. We needed to move to a small, growing community where there weren’t a dozen senior firefighters standing in line ahead of him. Plus, Jason had already made so many sacrifices for me that I couldn’t say no to the move. Loving him more than my home didn’t make leaving San Francisco any easier, though. I’d convinced myself that it would ease the pain, but as we pulled into Los Corderos that first day, I realized I was sadly mistaken.

  ™˜

  “Welcome to Utopia,” Logan said as we approached the gates of our new home.

  “We can all read the sign,” Maya told him. “Are those gates real gold?”

  Jason pointed to the gate posts. “Check out the angels up top there.”

  “Maybe we’re in one of those freaky movies where the family’s actually dead, but they don’t know it yet, and we’re really driving into heaven,” Logan suggested.

  Or hell, I thought but did not say.

  “The gates of heaven are pearly, duh,” Maya corrected her brother.

  He snorted. “Yeah, sorry to get my facts wrong on the oh-so-realistic scenario of us driving into the great beyond, Glamour Don’t.” Logan then pointed to the guard at the booth. “Oh, look! St. Peter’s got a stun gun.” He shook his wavy hair in a brief, unconscious gesture that he always did when he’d beaten his sister in the battle of wits.

  I suppose all kids are a blend of their parents, not quite a copy of one or the other. But it is strikingly so with mixed race kids. Their mocha skin is neither like Jason’s chocolate brown hue nor my pale tone. Twins, Logan and Maya both have my build and their dad’s intense brown eyes, which are so dark they can swallow you whole. By the grace of God, they have Jason’s full lips and not the measly licorice shoelaces that frame my mouth. Everyone says that the kids look Latino, though their preschool teacher insisted they looked Korean. This only made sense when one considered that she was Korean and adored my children.

  As we drove through the gates, Jason wanted feedback from the kids on every square inch of Utopia. He’d already gotten mine, and he was eager to hear something positive about our new residence. “These are some fancy houses,” Maya commented. “Pretty fresh grass,” she said of the lawns that bore a suspicious resemblance to Astroturf. The labyrinthine streets of Utopia were rimmed with uniformly manicured square bushes, and the sky looked as if someone had stirred in a bit of blue food coloring. At one point, I swore I saw a formation of doves circling a bicycling child the way they might accompany Snow White at the wishing well.

  “Were these houses all done by the same architect or something?” Logan asked.

  “Yeah, they all totally match,” Maya noted.

  It was bad enough that there were only three models of brick McMansion behind the gates of Utopia, but the Homeowners Association had a book of Codes, Covenants and Restrictions so oppressive, it not only dictated the accent paint colors we could use on the outside of our home, it actually had a short list of shades we could use on the inside. We were informed that there was a CC&R Enforcement Committee that restricted the number and type of flowers we were allowed to plant in our front and back yards.

  Jason and I bought a home in Utopia because it was the only place to live in Los Corderos except for a mobile home park or a few houses that looked like dilapidated red barns or mint green shoe boxes. Our little Victorian three-bedroom in the city sold for more than twice what we needed for a ridiculously large Model-A sitting on a full acre in Utopia. We made enough from the sale of the place in San Francisco to retire our debt to Jason’s parents and buy the place in Utopia outright. For the first time in my life I had a decorating budget.

  When money got tight for us last year, I suggested we sell the house and rent an apartment, but we’d been priced out of that market too. Moving to Los Corderos made too much sense.

  Jason wanted the promotion more than the move, but he wasn’t heartbroken about leaving the city either. He had lived in Baltimore for most of his childhood, then the Bay Area for his adult life, and said that some time in the country might be a nice change. The reality was twofold. First and foremost, my husband was eager to finally put to rest the lingering assumption that dropping out of medical school meant he would never have real earning power, as his father predicted. Second, Jason was a more adventurous person than I. San Francisco was our home, so I saw no reason to ever live anywhere else. My childhood was transient, with an artist mother who moved us from city to city whenever the moon was in the seventh house or Jupiter aligned with Mars. My father vanished for months, sometimes years, at a time. I was only in three schools long enough to ever see how the class photo turned out. While this upbringing might make some people adaptable and free-spirited, it made me crave stability and community. The life Jason and I had created in San Francisco was the happily-ever-after I’d been waiting for since I was Logan and Maya’s age.

  It wasn’t just Jason and I who would miss the city. The kids’ school took field trips to opera dress rehearsals, fringe theatre and the Exploratorium. Maya studied karate with two-time kata champion Rob Kanazawa, whose father brought Shotokan to the United States in the seventies. Logan’s best friend Josh went trick-or-treating dressed as René Magritte’s headless man in a bowler with a green apple. After a cursory search for a fencing academy for Logan, I came up with nothing in Los Corderos. Maya would continue her karate lessons with a guy named Dave Anderson, who ran a martial arts studio called Chop Kix.

  As we rounded our street, Jason turned to me. “I got an email from the Los Corderos police chief.”

  “Let me guess, you fit the profile of a suspect they’re hunting,” I said.

  “You are a funny one, baby. Listen, he’s got a kid around Logan’s age and they’re having a birthday party this weekend. He’s invited. They thought it would be a good way to meet some of the guys before school starts up next week.” Glancing in the rear view mirror again, Jason added, “It’s a sword fighting party. What d’ya think of that, bud?”

  “A sword fighting party?” I asked, incredulous. “For thirteen-year-old boys?”

  “Not real swords, I’m sure,” Jason said, squinting his eyes to read the road sign. The need for reading glasses was his only sign of aging so far, something I simultaneously loved and envied. Gravity had not taken its toll on his body as it had mine. Driving into Los Corderos, he wore a gray cotton t-shirt with our alma mater stretching across his broad chest. Gripping the steering wheel showed off his defined arms and protective hands.

  “What are they going to do, have plastic swords?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jason replied with a shrug. “I didn’t quiz him. He said his wife was gonna drop off an invite at the house and there’d be kids from Los Corderos Middle. Said they were gonna do some sort of sword fighting theme. Knights of the Round Table or something.”

  “Isn’t thirteen a little old for a theme party?” I whispered.

  “Whatever,” Jason dismissed. Looking back at Logan through the rearview mirror, he said. “You wanna go meet some of the g
uys from school?”

  “Nah,” Logan said, shrugging.

  “What do you mean, ‘nah’?” Jason asked.

  Logan corrected himself. “I’m sorry, I mean, no thank you.”

  “Am I talking to the youth champion of the City by the Blade tournament?” Jason asked. “Come on, it’ll be a good chance for you to meet some of the guys from school.”

  This seemed to push Logan further in the opposite direction. “I thought I’d help Mom with the—”

  “Your mother will be fine,” Jason interrupted. “Tell him, Lisa.”

  “Your father’s right,” I said. “Meet some of the boys from school so it’s not all new faces when you start classes.”

  “It’ll be new faces at the party,” Logan said.

  “If he’s not going, I will,” Maya chimed in.

  “It’ll be all boys,” I explained.

  “Awesome.”

  “Not happening, Maya,” said Jason.

  ™˜

  “Home sweet home,” Jason burst out proudly as our car pulled into the driveway. He placed his hand on my leg and looked at me tentatively. “It’ll be good, I promise.” Turning around to the kids, his volume grew. “So what do you guys think?”

  “Oh. My. God,” Maya said, dragging out each word to properly express her shock. She really knew how to play her father. There was no way that Maya could possibly be so stunned by the exterior of our home. She had just driven by a few hundred exact duplicates. “We’re like Real Housewives of the Sticks!”

  “What do you think, Logan?” I asked.

  “Nice,” he shrugged. Then Logan flashed the charming crooked smile he inherited from his father and assured us that he liked the new house. “I love colonials.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Jason said, not absorbing the fact that, until that moment, even he hadn’t known our home was colonial style. When we were house-hunting, Jason told the realtor he liked these “old school” designs.