The Gift of the Gay Guy

If Minnesota came to life and started buying its jeans at the Big and Tall store, it would be the spitting image of Derrick Halvorson. Blond hair, blue eyes, teeth like a freshly whitewashed picket fence, he looked like nothing so much as twenty pounds of Norway poured into a ten-pound sack. The clerk at the front desk of the Mankato Lamplight Inn paused before replying to his inquiry regarding a room for the night, confident in her assumption that everything that came out of his mouth must surely be followed by a “Yah, sure,” if not a “You betcha.”

Flat as his vowels were still after twenty years in Colorado, Derrick did stop thatshort of cliché, and the clerk rallied before the pause slid into awkward. Clacking away at her computer, she hemmed and hawed, conferred with her co-worker, and eventually unearthed what was surely the last room in southern Minnesota. Derrick’s had not been the only Minneapolis-bound jetliner diverted to Mankato’s speck of a municipal airport, and only the elite traveler status his otherwise crappy job afforded him had gotten him close enough to the front of the rent-a-car line to get him off the airport property in time to snatch up one of the few rooms left in town. It was two days before Christmas, after all, and Mankato wasn’t exactly a bustling conference center bursting with luxury hotel suites on the best of days.

St. Paul wasn’t quite a hundred miles away; his initial plan, after he wrestled with the shame he knew he would feel tooling along the highway in a PT Cruiser, was to bid Mankato a fond farewell and drive up to his mom’s house. He had driven about five feet across the ice rink of the airport parking lot with what might as well have been a white bed sheet pulled tight across the windshield, however, when he deemed it wisest to pull—slide?—over and let Mother Nature handle her business; he’d stay out of it. That the blizzard was reportedly blasting the Twin Cities with even greater fervor seemed beside the point. It was hammering Mankato quite fervently enough, thank you, and as little appeal as a night in the Lamplight Inn held, it was infinitely more enticing than the idea of spending the night upside down in a ditch in a PT Cruiser fifty feet from the Lamplight Inn, which was as far as he was liable to get driving anything other than a Zamboni.

Thus when “Anayansi” at the front desk had offered him the key to the last room in town, he accepted it like it was the Key to the City and slogged up the stairs with his suitcase, grateful for the prospect of a warm bed and nine different channels of ESPN. The key gave Derrick access to a large, clean room with a big bed, a small bathroom, and few frills. But the heater worked, the remote worked, and the shower was plenty hot; half an hour after check-in he was warm, clean, and comfy in his flannel pajama pants when he zipped into his favorite hoodie and padded back to the lobby to investigate the snack situation.

Still trying ease into the whole “being forty” thing at forty-two, he studiously ignored how much better the elastic waist of his jammies felt than that of his unforgiving jeans. He’d had a rough couple of years since Peter had died, to be sure, but he was coming out the other side of the mercifully finite tunnel of grief and depression he’d been flung into, and was ready to stop gaining weight. Soon,he’d been telling himself for months. But his first Christmas in three years with his huge, hungry brothers was not the place to start, he reasoned, and easily justified two frozen pizzas and a thing of Haagen-Dazs from the pantry in the hotel gift shop. For a little roadside hotel, he noticed as he lingered by the humming microwave nuking his pizza, the Lamplight was pretty heavy on the amenities. Free Wi-Fi, the gift shop was well stocked, the lobby bar was contemporary and crowded, and there was talk among the signs in the lobby and the elevator of a continental breakfast and even a pool. Let it snow, indeed, he agreed with the popular carol tinkling over the sound system; he’d be able to make himself plenty comfortable here at the old Lamplight Inn.

Speaking of amenities, he said to himself, I wouldn’t mind having one of those sent up to my room. Roving the lobby, his gaze had snagged on the magnificent rear view of an especially tall drink of water pleading his case to Derrick’s pal Anayansi at the front desk. She was not unsympathetic, she was explaining, but she didn’t have the room to give him. She wasn’t trying to be unhelpful, she was saying, but she had called every other hotel that her internet search had unearthed without finding so much as a rollaway bed between here and St. Paul. She didn’t know what he was supposed to do now.

Derrick thought he recognized the long back and the splayed designer-jean hips from the Denver airport. And from the airplane. And from the Mankato airport. Sure enough, when the long-legged stranger turned around and loped over to collapse forlornly on a lobby couch, Derrick’s belly tingled at the familiar sight of the assertive features of the teak-skinned twink over whom he’d been happy to spend much of this travel misadventure drooling. Deep-set eyes, cartoonish full lips, ears like satellite dishes, and an Adam’s apple that stuck out from his neck like a tortilla chip being sucked through a straw, none of his individual features was anything short of hilarious, but he gathered them together with a confidence that made what otherwise might have been a clownish mug an irresistible mystery. Overgrown feet, comically outsized hands; too-narrow shoulders, too-wide hips; unruly, unevenly cut hair and just a whisper of crows’ feet to betray the difference between his projected age and his real one—the only thing sexy about him was his own insistence that You’re damn right I’m sexy, and Derrick fell for it like a little kid at a birthday party magic act. Who cared how he pulled the trick off, after all, if the Grand Finale made the audience ooh and aah?

Derrick was not excessively flirtatious by nature, but he was open and friendly, and it was generally his instinct to offer help where it was needed. When, after a couple of dings, he’d concluded his business with the microwave, he noticed that Tall ‘n’ Sexy had made no move to vacate either the Lamplight Inn or its couch, and Derrick ventured to approach him. “Hey, man,” he offered.

T.S. didn’t look up from the screen of his mobile phone, but returned Derrick’s “Hey” by reflex.