You Can’t Stay Here in South Dakota

Mark was the first son Aunt Barb had with her husband, Larry, in Rapid City, SD. The year-1964. I was born 7 years later in 1971

My memory of him begins with him sitting in a button down and cardigan at the kitchen table with Aunt Barb and Grandma Jane. His hands on his flushed cheeks, immersed in the stories those ladies told in between drags of their Pall Malls. I’d watch him through the sliding glass door where his brothers, my brother and me played soccer with the kids next door.

Mark- always more mature than the rest of us. Precocious — a word some may use; however, for me, precocious cast a shadow on another one of Mark’s traits- kindness. Something so gentle about him that we never felt his lack of involvement with the rest of us was due to arrogance.

My Aunt Barb sat him down at the kitchen table, alone,when he was seventeen. The year- 1981. She searched for words to ask her question.

“Yes, mother, I’m gay,” Mark answered what she feared to ask.

Barb got up from her chair and walked behind Mark and embraced him as only mothers do. She’d known this in her bones since he was two. She smelled his hair as she whispered,

“I love you no matter what.”

She walked back to her chair, lit a cigarette and looked around as Mark rested his rosy cheeks on his hands.

“But there is one thing, dear…” Barb’s voice floating off into the silence of the prairie not far outside Rapid City, SD.

“You can’t stay here when you graduate…South Dakota is not safe for someone like you.”

She reached over the table and grabbed her first born son’s hand and held it tight.

The beginning of a ride…