Chapter 81

I loved him dearly, but he had a tendency to get stuck in his ways. So it was my job to keep him on track. When we’d met last year at a dinner party that included Chester and his boyfriend—and my cousin—Dre,it had been friction from the start.

I’d never been the kind of person to pull punches, and I called things as I saw them. Carl, back then, was decidedly behind the times in everything, and afraid of change. It wasn’t that the way he did things, or viewed life, was bad. I simply saw that he was hiding behind both his son and the humdrum of routine because of fear.

I’d challenged his worldview, and that didn’t go down well—at all. Thankfully, we made it through that period, and Carl made changes in his life for the better. I was proud of him and the strides he still took, daily, to be the man he truly wanted to be. But the Hawaiian shirts…