Sidecar (16 page)

Dev stood up and buttoned his acid-washed 501s, then scurried for Casey’s room. “Sorry, Casey,” he said, but he kept his pretty oval-shaped face turned away.

“Yeah, whatever.”

Joe didn’t say anything for a moment, and Casey watched him numbly as he walked into the kitchen and checked the coffee.

“Oh Jesus,” he muttered. “All that and the guy can’t even make a decent cup of fucking coffee.” A deep, hearty funk sank over the room, and Casey didn’t feel inclined to break it as he set one of the chairs that had been knocked over upright and then fed the cats, who, mindless of all the human fuss, were still fat and spoiled and wanted their morning kibble.

Derrick came thundering down the stairs as Casey opened the door to the garage so he could give the dogs their food and let them out, and Casey paused long enough to hear Joe bark, “Leave the weed!” at him before they both heard the door slam.

“Why leave the weed?” Casey asked, only semicurious. His insides were busy sorting shit out. Pain? Betrayal? Anger? Yeah… but also sort of a curious resignation. He’d seen this coming. Hell, he might have encouraged a little bit of it himself.

“Because we don’t have any beer,” Joe said, like that made sense.

“Why would we want—” Casey stopped, and looked at Joe, and heard the catch in his voice, and wanted to kick himself.

Yeah, sure, Casey might have been on the verge of breaking up with Dev for months. But Joe had
just
opened himself up enough to sleeping with Derrick. God, in two years, that made three lovers for Joe—and one of those was the social worker. Casey had given him shit for not wanting to commit to a man because of what he’d have to say to his mother, and now, looking at the crumpled iron of Joe’s face, Casey realized that Joe had been 100 percent honest. He hadn’t wanted to commit to
anyone
unless he was sure. Joe might have been a player in college, but that was a different Joe. This Joe was looking for somebody, somebody special. This Joe was as earnest in looking for a lover as he was in helping the lost or the needy. This was the Joe that Casey had fallen in love with at sixteen and might possibly love for his entire life.

“I ain’t got nothin’ doin’ today,” Casey drawled past the lump in his chest. Devin came pattering around the corner, pulling on his bright and spiffy leather boots and leather jacket. “Except maybe going to see
Batman
again,” Casey added, and Joe gave him a sour grin.

“It’s a deal.
Then
we’ll come home and get high.”

“Thought you didn’t
get
high, Casey!” Dev sneered, and Casey sneered back.

“I thought you didn’t bottom.”

Dev blushed and ran away. The putt-putt of his little barely street-legal motorcycle echoed through their little valley as he went.

Casey felt an ache then, square in the middle of his chest, that said, in spite of the resignation and the feelings for Joe, in spite of Dev’s snobbery and his condescension, he was still going to leave a hole.

“Joe,” Casey said, then swallowed hard, “you know I was lying about
Batman.
”

Joe’s back shivered for a second as he started rooting through the refrigerator, like he was fighting something down inside that was threatening to let loose. “I hear you, kid. Let me fix breakfast first. We’re going to need more than potato chips to fight the munchies.”

Casey nodded and then went out to feed the dogs. He shuffled to the shower after that and found that he was crying with the release of the hot water. In a way, he sort of wanted Joe to hold him, but as he shuddered out the last of the tears and got himself a towel, he realized that it wasn’t necessary. What mattered in the grand scheme of things was that Joe was there to
catch
him, and for the moment, in spite of the feelings that didn’t seem to be going anywhere, that was more than enough.

Who Will You Run To?

~Joe

1992

J
OE
heard the phone ring and groaned. For a minute he hoped Casey would get it, and then he remembered that Casey didn’t live there anymore, hadn’t lived there for six months, and he groaned again. Aw, goddammit. Goddammit all to fuck. If nothing else, he should get a phone line to the upstairs room just so he wouldn’t have that god-awful realization on mornings like this, when he wasn’t quite awake enough to remember. He couldn’t even think about answering the phone without that horrible sucker punched feeling, that hole in his chest where the kid used to be but was only a vague, awful sort of loneliness now.

The kid didn’t have to leave like that. He really didn’t.

There was a soft voice downstairs, and Joe had a moment of relief. Lynnie had it. He’d forgotten she was staying in the guest bedroom. He rolled and yawned and stretched and tried to wake up. Hospital policy had changed once again, and he’d worked four twelves in a row, because that was his drug now. He would have resorted to weed or beer, and the day after Casey had moved out, he’d tried both. But he was thirty-three now, and he didn’t recover from that like he used to. He still loved his job, and he had the dogs and the cats and the chickens to depend on him, but that wasn’t why he didn’t drink or smoke himself to sleep every night.

He just couldn’t believe that Casey was gone for good. It was so fucking unfair.

“Joe?” Lynnie called from downstairs. “Joe? It’s for Casey.”

“He doesn’t live here anymore,” Joe called down, hauling himself down the stairs groggily. He and Casey had carpeted them in cream-colored short pile carpet the autumn after that horrible debacle with their respective boyfriends, and he was grateful. It felt so much less painful to stumble down carpeted stairs.

“Yeah, but the woman says she’s his mother. She says this is the last number she has for him. She needs to get hold of him!”

“Ask her where the fuck she’s been the last six years!” Joe snarled. God, it really was six years—it was late fall. Casey had left in early summer, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have appreciated the phone call from his mother.

But by now, Joe was at the bottom of the stairs and to the kitchen, and Lynnie was there, wearing a flannel nightgown, clutching the bathrobe to her five-month-along belly, her long brown hair hanging, tangled, down her back. God, his life would have been so much easier if he hadn’t broken up with her right after Casey left. That baby would be his, and he could have married her and started a family, and he could pretend that some of the shit Casey had shouted at him on the way out wasn’t true.

“Yeah?” he snapped into the phone.

Lynnie raised her eyebrows at him, because even when she’d come to him, looking for a place to stay after her replacement-for-Joe had smacked her around, kicked her out, and then refused to admit that the kid was his, Joe hadn’t spoken to her quite so rudely.

“I’m… uhm… are you Josiah Daniels?”

“Yeah, lady, and I just worked four twelve-hour shifts in a row, and I’m sort of pissed off. Can we get to the point?”

“Doesn’t Casey live there anymore?”

“He moved out in May, right after he graduated from Sierra.”

“He graduated?”

“From junior college, yeah. He’s going to Sac State now, not that you care.”

There was a grunt then, and he realized that maybe the woman
did
care, and that he’d just hurt her needlessly. Well then, good for her. This whole interlude in Joe’s life seemed to be hurting needlessly; he was just glad to share.

“He’s doing well, then?”

“Yeah,” Joe muttered roughly. “He’s doing good.” Joe would have liked to say he didn’t know. That Casey had moved out of his house and out of his life, and that was the end of that. But it wasn’t true. Joe had fed him, cared for him, watched over him for five and a half years. You just didn’t quit
caring
after that, even if the guy had shoved a knife in your chest and twisted the handle two, three, six times before he left. No. Joe knew where Casey was staying, and had gone by the place about twice a month since Casey had moved out. A couple of times he’d seen that Casey’s car had been out of the driveway and had stopped to talk—first to Casey’s boyfriend, who had been less than friendly, and then to Casey’s roommate, who had been more than accommodating. It had been hard. Casey was both doing okay and he wasn’t. He was waiting tables and making money, and he was making it to his classes, but it was all so skin of the teeth. His boyfriend had left him in the first two months after promising to be there, and Joe remembered their little pity party when Dev left, and knew that Casey had needed to have one when Robbie took off, and Joe hadn’t been there. But he was still going to school, and he was still not talking to Joe. He hadn’t called, and Joe hadn’t called either, because Casey had been the one who’d told Joe to fuck off, and it was sort of on Casey’s shoulders to take that back. He was apparently eating on occasion, although the roommate did confess that a lot of it was free french fries from the restaurant where Casey worked, and basically, he was doing the starving student thing, which was both fine with Joe and…. Joe refused to think about how that sentence ended.

“He’s doing fine,” Joe repeated now, more to reassure himself than this stranger on the phone. “Why are you trying to contact him now?”

“His….” The woman’s voice broke, and Joe started to feel a little bad. She sounded more wrecked than he did, and he was only occasionally an asshole. “His father died,” she said through her tears. “It… I wanted to tell him when the service would be.”

“Aw, fuck,” Joe muttered. “Fuck. Yeah. Here.” He reached for the pen drawer—every house has one—and sorted through the dead batteries, old key sets, and assorted pairs of scissors for a pen. “Here. Give me the details. Yeah, we’ll find it. Fucking Bakersfield, right?”

It was in Bakersfield, and Joe took down the address and the directions.

“You… you promise he’ll be there?” the woman asked, her voice hesitant, and Joe grunted.

“I promise I’ll tell him,” Joe said with a sigh. “Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. His trip up here wasn’t a picnic; he may not feel like making the trip back.”

“I… is he still… you know…?”

“Gay?” Joe’s disbelief flooded under his new vow of kindness. “Yeah, lady, last I heard, all cures for gay were a hoax. Does it matter?”

“He’s my son. Of course it matters. I want to let him come back home.”

“Well it’s good to want things,” Joe snapped bitterly, knowing he was talking more to himself than to her. “I’ll let him know.”

He hung the phone up on its cradle on the counter and then turned around and slid down his battered cabinets, thrilled that his body didn’t ache when his ass hit the floor. Jordan padded up and shoved her fuzzy orange face up into his and started licking his nose. He forced a smile and set her on his stomach, then petted her dispiritedly while he swallowed hard against the tightness in his throat, his face, behind his eyes.

Lynnie watched him for a moment and then grabbed a chair from the dinette table and moved it to the middle of the kitchen so she could sit on it. She’d put on some weight in the last four months—sitting on the floor was probably not an option for her. “Joe?” she said quietly, and he sighed, wishing he could look at her.

“His dad died. I’m going to have to tell his roommate that his dad died, and then hope he forgives me enough to let me hold him.”

“Forgives you?” she asked, her voice shrilling with attitude. “Forgives you for
what
?”

“For being stupid,” Joe murmured, and Jordan kept up her licking. Nick and Jay were curled up on the couch. Like a rapidly aging Rufus and a depressed Hi, they were probably blaming him for Casey’s absence too.

Joe certainly was blaming himself—although, when things had gone south, he’d thought he was doing the right thing.

T
HE
day they’d gotten stoned on Derrick’s weed, Joe had confessed something to Casey that he thought he should probably regret, but didn’t.

They actually
had
gone to see a movie that night (
Say Anything
—a movie Joe still loved), after the high had worn off, and the high itself had been a temporary thing, soon washed out of their hair and munched away with breakfast. But the melancholy, the betrayal, the nasty, sticky residue of coming out of a night of sex—the good kind, where two people felt connected and caring—only to find out you were another body in bed, that had settled in for the both of them.

“I probably should have known,” Casey said glumly on the way to the movie theater. “I mean… he just always thought he was so much better than me.”

Joe looked at him protectively. “That’s bullshit. Why would he feel like that?”

Casey’s shrug wasn’t a teenager’s shrug anymore. He had his hands in his pockets, and his gray eyes, deep-set and narrow, were mild and introspective. This shrug was an adult’s shrug, a twitch of the shoulders and not too much passion. “Same reason I felt that way when I lived with my folks, I guess. I was spoiled. He was spoiled. He’ll learn.”

Joe looked at him for a long moment as they stood in line then, with the dawning comprehension that Casey really didn’t need him anymore. It was both gratifying and terrifying. If Casey didn’t need him, why would he stick around?

Joe swallowed against that fear, managed to tamp it down in the pit of his stomach for the next two or so years, but it was there, growing, along with an awareness that Casey was as tall as he was ever going to get at five eight, and that his lean face and high cheekbones were pretty, and the deep-set eyes and power brow didn’t change that but only made it deeper.

They talked about the movie on the way home, about the likelihood of finding the love of your life at nineteen. Joe said it was possible, yes, but he didn’t want to bet anyone’s life on it.

“I certainly don’t want to bet yours!” he protested, and Casey snorted.

“That’s just because you don’t want to see me as an adult,” he muttered, and Joe sighed. The tall trees on either side of the highway were outlined against the bright stars, and he looked at that ribbon of stars in front of them and wished them for Casey.