Power Trio

They pick their clothes off the floor and the furniture, and gather in the living room. Kell and Thekla take the couch, and Evan drags a chair over from the kitchen.

Thekla fidgets. “Why do I feel like I’m about to whiplash into mood number three in one night?”

“Is this some kind of intervention?” Kell asks. “Is there a hidden camera?”

“I’m not trying to prank you. Or scare you.” He sits. “But if we’re touring together, we’re going to get attention. I’m going to get attention. Some people might connect some dots.” His hands are heavy; he folds them in his lap. “And I want you to hear this from me. Before it’s too late, if it isn’t already. If you…”

He takes a breath in for a four count, exhales.

“If this changes things between me and you, I’ll understand. But first…” He forces himself to look both of them in the eye. The vibe has well and truly shifted now. “Kell, Thekla, I love you,” Evan says. “I want to live with you and make music with you for the rest of my life.”

Kell rests her hand on her chest. “Evan. Fuck, dude. I love you too. We both do.”

“We do,” Thekla’s nodding. “We love you, whatever it is you’re going to say.” She laughs nervously. “But you’re kind of freaking me out here.”

“My last name,” Evan says, “is Houper.”

He gives them a few seconds to let it sink in.

“Ev…” Kell looks at him like it’s the first time. “You mean like Mel Houper?”

“That’s right.” Evan points to his gig bag, propped in the living room’s corner. “That bass is the bass that Lyle Garett played in The Rainsticks, and the same one his daughter Melanie Houper played in Thunderhead. My mother.”

“Oh, my God.” Thekla puts a hand over her mouth. “Your tattoo.”

Evan nods.

“Holy shit,” breathes Kell. “Wait. So your dad…”

“Yes.” Evan forces himself to say it. They deserve to know. “I’m the son of Raymond Houper. From the talk shows and the podcasts and the court cases.”

“Evan…” Thekla trails off, at a loss for how to continue.

“My father is a monster,” Evan finishes her thought. “The things he says about fairfolk are evil. His fans are evil. He is evil. And I’m his son. His blood is in my veins. I spent the first two decades of my life in his home.”

“How…” Kell’s struggling. “Is this why you’re cut off? Why you were homeless?”

“Yes,” Evan says. “I’m not gonna tell you a sob story about how he used to be a good man, and it’s nothing you probably don’t already know. Thunderhead ended badly, mom got sick, and he… I don’t say this to excuse him or defend him, only to tell you what I saw. In retrospect, he always had this weakness waiting in him. But he was desperate for answers. And he, uh.” Evan laughs humorlessly. “Like I said. You probably already know.”

“Keep going,” Thekla says, quietly.

“He watched too much TV, I guess,” Evan says. “He always had the TV on. The weird news stations, the local dipshits. I used to mute it or change the channel, tell him this trash was rotting his brain. And then I’d come home and it would be on again. Talking about fairy plagues, and black magic, and deepwood cabals drinking human blood. And mom’s old elf bandmate, Lysander, who he never liked, even before it all went down with the legal shit, my father started making these jokes about him. And then the cancer didn’t respond to anything the doctors tried, and it stopped being so much of a joke. And somewhere he started to actually believe it.

“She never even smoked, not tobacco, not weed, not anything, and she got lung cancer anyway, and he needed a reason. A story to tell himself. By the time my mother died, he was sure that she’d been struck down by a fairfolk curse. Over a nasty band breakup and some album royalties.”

His fists are so tight his nails threaten to cut into his hand. “Mom never played for the spotlight. The press loved her because she was pretty, but she never really meant to be a rockstar. She just wanted to make music with her friends. I watched my father take her estate, and her memory, and turn her into a martyr for the worst people in the world, for these xenophobic ghouls, and it got him his show, until the class action got it cancelled, and now he’s got his podcasts and tours and his fucking iron supplements to protect your blood from the fey menace, and he’s become richer than she ever was. And when people remember Mel Houper, they remember what he made her.”

Kell and Thekla watch him in silence.

“One day, on a Thanksgiving, actually, with the whole extended family, he’s holding court, going on about these bullshit statistics and measuring the size of gnomes’ skulls, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I told him exactly what I thought of him and the Truthseekers, or whatever his fans called themselves at that point. And he told me if that’s how I felt, I could fuck off to New Laytham with the fairfreaks, and I’d never see him or receive his support again. And not a single member of my family said anything. Not a thing, because if he’d cut me off, he’d cut them off.”

He still remembers their faces. Staring blankly up from the table, showing no emotion in front of the patriarch.

“So I told him that Mel wouldn’t recognize the man he’d turned into, and to burn my face out of the photos, and I left. I stayed in Tennessee for a few years, but things dried up. I had to drop out of college, because he runs the estate and I was already in debt. I couldn’t get gigs because the people who like him stonewalled me, and the people who hate him would never hire Ray Houper’s boy. And I became a pretty angry person, and I made a lot of dumb choices, and I ran out of friends or places to stay. I thought I was owed something for standing up to him. Like it changed anything. So I decided I’d do what he said I should do, and I went to New Laytham to play music, like my mother and her father played. And now I’m here. With you.”

He takes a shaky breath. Now that the secret is out of him, he feels the hollow place it left in his chest.

“I should have done it sooner. I stayed too long, until it was impossible to live with him. But I was scared of being alone and without a home, and I wanted to believe that if I loved him, I could change him. But I can’t change him, and I don’t love him.”

Kell rests a hand on his knee, studying his face.

“I don’t want to be Evan Houper anymore,” he says. “When he dies, I want that name to die, too. I want to be Evan H. Evan Houper is his. I want to be yours.” He sits back in the creaking kitchen chair, enervated. “And that’s what I needed to tell you.”

Thekla’s hands are wrapped around his arm, tugging at him. “You get onto this couch with us right now.”

“Guys…”

Kell takes his other arm and forcefully yanks him into her lap. “Shh.” She puts a finger against his mouth. “No spiraling, okay?” She replaces the finger with her lips, but she’s being gentle and tender, with none of her usual force. He’s trembling as she strokes his hair.

“If you want to be Evan H, you’re Evan H,” Thekla says. “This doesn’t change a thing.”

Kell releases the kiss. “Well, it changes one thing. You just said you love us.”

“Evan’s got a cruuush.” Thekla puts on a little playground singsong voice as she crawls into Kell’s lap with him and nuzzles her head against him. “You are not your father’s son. If that’s what he wanted, he screwed up huge. Because you are the kindest, least hateful human I’ve ever met. You’re like a big cinnamon roll.”

“He’s like a small cinnamon roll.” Kell rubs his back. “Seriously, Ev, that’s all? I thought you were gonna tell us you killed a guy with your car in Memphis or something.”

“That’s all?” Evan protests. “That’s my dark backstory.”

“Fugitive was my guess too,” Thekla says. “I was already trying to figure out how we keep the momentum in Mexico.”

“A really smart human boy told me something once,” Kell says. “About the past, and how it’s just like a story. Not something you can reach out and touch. That shithead kral’gvak can’t touch you anymore.” She places her palm against his cheek, brushes the bristles of his beard. “And we can. And that’s all there is to it.”

Evan closes his eyes. He feels Kell’s touch, and the stable muscle of her thigh, and Thekla’s breath on his chest. He breathes with her, and tries to put himself in the present, shove all the unearthed memories back into their graves.

Thekla shifts. He opens his eyes to see his reflection faintly in her glasses as she studies him closely. “I can see her now that you’ve told us,” she says. “Mel, I mean. It’s the big nose.”

Evan exhales a puff of amused air through said appendage. “You really know how to make a guy feel better.”

“I love this nose.” Thekla kisses it. “I love this human. I never really thought I’d say that. Not to be a reverse your dad, but you’re my first human friend. My first real friend, I mean. Like who I’ve let into my apartment. And my hoo-ha.”

“It’s an honor,” he says.

She gives his chin a gentle rap with her knuckle. “That’s right it’s an honor, Evan H.”

“Are you guys worried about him?” Evan says. “He made it pretty clear that we no longer exist to each other. But if you have any concerns about him bringing us up on his podcast, or—”

Kell grins. “He can Streisand Effect us into the national conversation all he wants, if he’s dumb enough to try it. Imagine Ray Houper announcing to the world that his son is banging two fairfolk chicks at the same time. I’d love it. Besides, it ain’t rock if you ain’t pissing off some shithead somewhere.”

“If you’re really that worried about it, Kell was talking about pretending you were an elf and calling you Evandolar,” Thekla says.

Evan laughs. He feels his body lose the last of its anxious stiffness. It’s being replaced by a very different stiffness now that he’s back in the moment, with a goblin in an emo schoolgirl skirt straddling his lap.

“Dude. Don’t mention Evandolar.” Kell flicks her ear. “Oh shit! That reminds me.” She stands, spilling her lovers onto the couch, and yanks Thekla off of Evan. “Before that call, I was just about to top Thekla. I would forget my tusks if they weren’t stuck in my face. I swear to god.”

She fireman carries a giggling Thekla toward their room and looks back over the shoulder that isn’t obscured by round goblin ass. “Coming, Ev?”

“Just one second,” Evan says. “Don’t wait up.”

Kell drags Thekla to bed over her feigned protests. Evan gets off the couch, crouches in front of his gig bag, and unzips his mother’s bass.

He rests his thumb on that spot on the varnish by his pickup, where his predecessors left their mark. He’ll keep carrying this, the legacy of his ancestors’ music, the voice his mother never lost, only passed down. He owes that to her. But what he doesn't need, he won't take with him. Not anymore. He owes that to Kell and Thekla.

He closes his bag and stands up. He hears Thekla from the other room. She sure is loud, his goblin girlfriend.

Evan Houper leaves his past in the sunburst alder wood of his bass, and Evan H walks into the future.