Mark Trainer

    Runkle straightened the skirt and reassessed himself in the bedroom mirror.  Damned respectable.  When he was younger he had hated this nearly hairless body.  He’d felt he should apologize for it in locker rooms, at swimming pools.  But a scoop-neck top was another thing altogether, and in this context it was the jutting jaw and the broadish shoulders that fucked up the effect.  Or maybe not--some guys went for that.
    He remembered Sandy from years ago.  She'd been a swimmer and had a back like a trucker.  And yet Runkle could have told you where she was at any given moment of the office day.  He'd followed her around like a retriever.
    Lipstick.  Apply, pucker, blot.  He wouldn't bother with the eyeliner.  Looked great, but was a bitch to get off.  With Janet back in a couple of hours at most, he'd spend as much time getting the shit off his face as he would enjoying it.  He wiped some lipstick from his front-right tooth.  That pissed him off.  That only happened to old women.  He wasn't going to be one of those over-rouged old hags either.  Better to go with less.
    Janet had been waiting in the driveway when he pulled in.  She gave him a hard stare for forgetting her Audi was in the shop and now she'd be late for her hair appointment.  “Don't expect me to rush home,” she'd said.  “I may do some shopping after.”  Like she was punishing him.
    In the two years Jack had been at college, the entire order of the house, the calculus of Runkle's marriage, had changed.  This threat of Janet's not coming right home was a relic of those eighteen years of Jack.  It used to mean she was leaving him, Runkle, to deal with the household, with anything that came up, with Jack--taking him where he needed to be, picking him up, taking the call from the disapproving headmaster.  But for the last two years, he'd only had to deal with himself, Runkle, in a three bedroom in Oakton.
    From the gym bag on the bed he took out a pendant necklace with the kind of clasp Janet was never able to manage.  It wasn't rocket science.  The gold plate gently rode his collarbones to their meeting point, where the little heart rested.  The wig was sandy blonde, and once he had it on he was all there.  Not bad.
    Jack had known every inch of this house, had spent too many days cooped up here with too little to do.  Janet had said not to worry, that he was just a shy boy.  So against all of Runkle's best judgment, they left him to read his books, play his video games, while outside normal kids pedaled their bikes and threw a football.
    Jack's senior year at high school, they’d argued at the dinner table about gun control.  Jack was writing a paper.  Suddenly Jack outs with how as a nine-year-old he’d found Runkle’s .38 at the back of a high shelf in a bathroom closet.  Jack described for him and Janet how he’d laid out the weapon and the box of ammo on their made bed until he’d gotten bored and put it away.  All these years later.  Janet cried. Runkle wanted to slug the kid.  For the violation, for keeping his mouth shut all this time.  For not keeping it shut longer.  
    But now it was different.  The house was theirs again and Janet could stay away as long as she liked.  He stayed out of her stuff and she stayed out of his.  The shop in the basement was his stuff, and the gym bag stayed behind the bench saw until she was out and about and he felt like bringing out the gear.
    Runkle took a couple of steps back from the mirror and turned his lower half so one stockinged knee bent gently in front of the other.  He pushed inward on the outer edges of the padded cups beneath his top, hard enough to pucker the skin on his chest into something like cleavage.
    “I’m up here, Mr. Runkle,” he said.  Whenever he was in the gear, his voice sounded so different in his head.
    He plumped his lips suggestively.
    The next moments were bent into a shape other than the one to which Runkle’s temporal life generally conformed.  There was first the semi-familiar image of himself, the sultry blonde object of an unnamed observer’s desire: voluptuous and with a sexual generosity that increased in precise variance to that anonymous lust.  The time Runkle spent in this transaction stood entirely outside the more mundane and yet complex hours of work and Janet.  And since Jack's moving away these divisions had become more clearly partitioned, removing the capricious and unknown quantity that was his son.  Work and Janet.  Steady, predictable.  And then the implied comparison of life with Jack.  The tensing sensual pucker of Runkle's cherry red lips turning into a thoughtful pursing, the outward sign of a desire to spend some energy resolving the question of Jack.  
And then Jack himself, reflected framed in the bedroom doorway, absolutely incontrovertible and real.
    “Holy shit, Dad.”
    Runkle turned slowly from the mirror.  Jack still had, at nineteen, many of the qualities Runkle remembered from those first months after they had brought him home.  That scattered sprinkling of his and Janet's respective physical traits--the peculiarly aggressive line of Runkle's jaw, Janet's expression of struggle to understand--like the one Jack wore now--that too closely resembled simpering worry.  They were not the traits the two of them would have chosen to pass on, and because of that Jack had always felt a little like an outward betrayal of parts of themselves they'd just as soon have kept private.  Conversely, from the day they'd brought Jack home from the hospital, he'd been like a stranger in their house, watching them.
    “There he is,” Runkle said.  “Bet you're wondering what the old man's up to this time.”