The mid-40s are that time in a gay man's life when his major paradigm shifts from sexy to Sansabelts. But when Barry Grooms's partner of twenty years is killed on Barry's forty-fifth birthday, his world doesn't so much evolve as it does explode.<br><br>After navigating through the surreal conveyor belt of friends and family, he can't eat another casserole or swallow much more advice on what constitutes grief. Still numb, he leaves his homestore and design business in the care of others as he escapes to Key West, then New York. There he gets a thankless new job working for a crazy lady in a poncho, then has too many drinks with a narcissistic Broadway actor. Next it's a nude exercise class that redefines flop sweat, and from there he's on to a relationship with a man twenty years his junior.<br><br>Yet no matter how great the retreat from the man he used to be, life's gravity spins Barry back to the small town where he grew up for one more ironic twist that teaches him how to say goodbye with grace.

The Cool Part of His Pillow

“I wouldn’t get too close, if I was you.”


By stepping back, I acknowledge the stocky worker in garden clogs, sipping ice water on a stoop by the Mexican restaurant. My mother would have called him “Pedro,” but she calls everyone in a Mexican restaurant that, even if their badge clearly reads “Charlie.”


“Shit’s still falling,” he warns. “We hear stuff moving in there. Rats, maybe.”


“Were you working the day it happened?”


Clearly, he’s answered the question before and basks in it. “I sure was. I was starring in a commercial. In my mind, anyway. They filmed me holding a skillet in the window. Then boom! Things started hitting the roof. I thought it was a freak hailstorm.”


What I want to know is if he noticed three souls ascending toward heaven.


Chapter 25