Sidecar (25 page)

Casey swallowed hard. All those years of loving him, of caring for him—that didn’t just go away because Casey got pissed off and moved out. Even if Casey and Robbie had stuck, it hadn’t been right, just yanking himself out of Joe’s life.

“I’m sorry.” He mouthed the words, but his throat was so tight that he wasn’t sure if Joe heard him.

“I mean, one fight and you just disappeared.” Joe finally faced him, the one thing still unspoken between them making him as bare and as naked as a baby’s powdered bottom. “God, Casey. I’d always thought that at the very first, you and me, we’d at least be friends. I—I want you home with me because if I leave you here, I’m not sure who we are.”

“Friends,” Casey said, swallowing hard. “We’re friends. If I never go back home, if this weekend just disappears and never happened, I swear, Joe. I swear it. We’ll still be friends.”

Joe nodded. “Good,” he said, and some of that nakedness disappeared. “Although it’s probably pretty good we’re gonna keep fucking—because that’s sort of what we told my mother, right?”

Casey nodded. He was still a little blown away by that. A mother who still loved her son, because that was what mothers were supposed to do. He’d seen it work with Dev, but that had been different somehow. That had been Dev; Dev was spoiled in almost every way. Nothing about Joe had ever screamed “entitlement,” but apparently that wasn’t what you needed when you came out of the closet. Apparently all you really needed was someone who just loved you because that was who you were.

Someone like Joe.

“Either way,” Casey said into the rainy darkness. Their breath was starting to steam up the windows of the pickup truck, and Casey sighed. His car’s defroster had gone out two weeks ago. Joe was going to start the engine and all this fog was going to disappear. Tomorrow Casey would be driving to school and Alvin would be in constant motion, wiping the moisture off the windows as they went.

“Either way what?”

That pause had gone on a little long.

“Either way—friends or lovers. I won’t just bail on you again, Joe. You’ll always know I’m coming back, okay?”

Joe nodded, and then he looked up and smiled, a sudden heat in his eyes and the fullness of his mouth. “C’mere, kid, and prove it.”

The words were all bravado, but the kiss? Was all sweetness, all tender touches of skin, gentle, tentative sweeps of tongue. It was a kiss that begged, and that said good-bye for now and not forever, and Casey sighed when Joe pulled back.

“I work a twelve tomorrow. Are you two going to be home in the evening?” he asked, and Casey shook his head no.

“I work tomorrow night.”

“Spaghetti Factory?”

“Yeah.”

“’Kay. I’ll be by to switch keys with you. I have Tuesday off, and I’m going to work on your car.”

Casey flushed. “I don’t need you to fix my—”

“Casey, what do I do for a living?”

Trick question? “You’re a nurse.”

“Who do I see every day?”

“Are you still working in the NICU?”

“Sometimes. But sometimes I pick up shifts in the ER. Would you like to know who I see?”

Okay, so he knew where this had been going in the first place. “Crash victims,” he sighed. “Yeah, Joe. Go ahead and fix my car. Alvin will be thrilled.”

Joe pulled Casey close again and gave him a kiss on the cheek, a sweet, intimate gesture between two people who would see each other again. Casey turned to him and kissed him on the lips quickly and then wiggled out of the car before they ended up having sex on the first date. “Joe?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you. Drive safe.”

“I love you too. You too.”

Joe waited until Casey got to the foyer, and then roared off into the night, and Casey opened the door to their duplex without any ceremony at all.

“Hey, Alvin!” he cried, waiting for Alvin’s muffled “Yeah?” from his room. Casey stayed outside and talked through the door. It was best not to go into Alvin’s room without a lengthy introduction. They had no television, no computer, and very few books. Alvin had one diversion, and he was apparently going for some sort of world record in it, and although he was hung like a hippo, Casey didn’t want to see it. Unfortunately,
that
ship had sailed. At least three times. “Alvin, how do you feel about living rent-free in Foresthill?”

Alvin’s voice was strained and breathless. “Will there be free cable?”

“Yeah—all the Skinemax you can ask for.”

There was a grunt and a faint groan, and when Alvin spoke through the door next, he was panting like a sprinter at the line. “Sounds… great! How’re we getting to school?”

Casey smiled a little. “Give Joe time. He’ll take care of that too.”

And he would. Joe didn’t talk about God a lot, but Casey was pretty sure he was out there, or Casey would never have met Joe.

I Still Haven’t Found
What I’m Looking For

~Joe

T
HE
look on Casey’s face as the plane circled La Guardia was worth the cost of the plane ticket alone.

“Joe, look! That’s New York! That’s New York
City
!”

“Yeah, Casey, I know. It’s been there for a while.”

Joe looked over Casey’s shoulder and tried not to shudder. Everyone knew that skyline. His parents had taken them into the city a lot when he’d been a kid—Statue of Liberty, with her close little double helix stairwell? Yeah, Joe had done that. Top of the Empire State Building? Joe had done that too. He’d stood at the base of the Twin Towers and looked breathlessly up, and, the summer he was thirteen, his mom had taken him into town to see a production of
Jesus Christ Superstar
. He’d come away with a greater appreciation of rock and roll but had still quietly refused to participate in the Sunday meetings.

“Are we going to get to go there?” Casey asked, looking at Joe with shining eyes, and Joe smiled back a little.

“Yeah—my mom got us tickets to go see
The Nutcracker
at Rockefeller Center. We’ll probably spend a day or two in The City.” (Funny how The City changed shape on the West Coast. Joe had always thought San Francisco was a lot more intimate than New York, but that didn’t mean he wanted to drive there a lot now either.)

“Ballet?” Casey’s wrinkled nose was very adolescent, and Joe chuckled a little and then swallowed again because they’d started their descent. He
really
hated air travel—he’d forgotten how the cabin’s pressurization made your skin feel horrible and tight and your feet swell and just caused general discomfort. He was glad they’d abolished smoking on the plane—when he’d flown out to school in ’78, the smell had almost made him sick, but not much else had changed in the intervening fourteen years. Besides, the airline had
just
gone smoke-free, and the smell still lingered.

“Don’t knock it,” Joe said, smiling a little. “
The Nutcracker
is the one ballet you’ve heard all the music to—you’ll enjoy it.”

“Will you?” Casey turned to him curiously, and Joe summoned a smile.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll love it. Jeannie always loved it. It’s sort of a sentimental favorite.”

Casey’s eyebrows—really dark, in spite of the sandy gold of his hair—furrowed, and he looked at Joe curiously. He and Alvin had moved all their stuff in the week before the plane took off, and Casey had been sleeping in Joe’s bed for a week straight. It wasn’t long enough to ease that deep terror Joe still harbored that he wasn’t in the house, that somehow, Joe had lost him again when he hadn’t been looking. Alvin was there now, enjoying having the place to himself, and watching the dogs, which was a plus. Joe had planned to have one of the neighbor kids—one of the ones he could hear playing basketball at night—come watch the animals, but Alvin was a hell of a lot more convenient.

“When was the last time you went home?” Casey asked, like it had just dawned on him.

“Nineteen eighty-six,” Joe said promptly.

Casey frowned again. “So, the Christmas right before….”

“Right before we met, yes.”

“Why haven’t you gone back? I mean, if you didn’t want to take me, I was old enough to stay alone?”

Joe looked at him and shook his head. “Like I was ever going to leave you alone,” he muttered.

“I was a good kid!” Casey protested, and Joe nodded.

“You were! But you didn’t deserve to be left alone. And I wasn’t going to subject you to my family, either.”

“Your mom sounds nice.”

Joe sighed and tried to unpop his ears again. “My mom
is
nice. She could be one of the nicest, kindest, most tolerant human beings on the face of the planet.”

“Then the problem is?”

“Kid, just look at the view, okay? You’ll meet them soon enough.”

Casey sighed. “Are you ever going to stop calling me ‘kid’?”

Joe looked at him sideways and smiled. “Give it fifty years. Maybe.”

Casey shrugged and watched that skyline grow nearer and nearer, and Joe watched Casey light up with the adventure of it all.

J
OE
’
S
brothers were there at the airport, all three of them. Peter, David, and Paul. They were all clean-cut men in their forties and late thirties, with Christmas sweaters and parkas and leather gloves, who shook Joe manfully by the hand and helped him pick up his luggage. Joe introduced Casey as his roommate, and Peter—the oldest—frowned a little, David rolled his eyes, and Paul winked. Paul was the youngest—apparently someone had filled him in on the roommate code of gay men, and he didn’t give a ripe shit. Joe decided right then and there that he’d always loved Paul best.

Casey insisted on carrying his own suitcase—it was hard to miss. Joe had taken him out shopping for luggage right after finals, and he’d come back with purple.

“Really? Purple luggage, mustard trim?”

“I want people to know who I am.”

“I know who you are, and who you are is not purple. Lime green on a black T-shirt, maybe, but not purple.”

Casey had scowled at him. “They don’t have lime green with black, Joe. I want your family to know us. For all I know, this is the last time you’ll take me to see them!”

Joe looked at him in horror. “For shit’s sake, why would you think that?”

Casey blushed, there in the luggage department of Montgomery Ward. “I’m assuming they’re not going to want me back.”

“Oh, fat chance. My mother’s going to want to adopt you.”

But Casey’s blush didn’t go away. “As long as no one assumes that’s what
you’re
doing. And that’s why I want the purple luggage.”

“Awesome, Casey. Seriously, seriously awesome. Bitchin’. Rad.” And then Joe went and plunked down four hundred dollars on what he would forever think of as “I’m having sex with Joe” luggage.

And now Casey clutched his purple luggage suspiciously and waited for Joe’s family to say something heinous, like his own family had. Joe could forgive him for that. Being called an abomination for bringing your boyfriend to your father’s funeral wasn’t going to fade fast, was it?

But Joe’s family was who they always had been. Joe sent them letters, took their phone calls, sent them baby gifts—they may have never
thought
about the gay thing, and, well, it looked like Peter was going to have the grim big-brother talk with Joe when they were in
private
,
but in spite of Joe’s
personal
disappointment in God, his family continued to use their lives and their treatment of other people as an example of God’s plan for the world.

Joe had never been so proud of them.

His brothers talked about kids and family and work. Peter was a cardiologist, David was a pediatrician, and Paul was a history teacher. They updated Joe on Mom and Dad, both of whom were aging nicely and staying incredibly active. They complained about their kids (Peter had four; David and Paul each had three) and praised their wives. (This, Joe thought, was why they were all still married.) They cracked the occasional dirty joke (and didn’t look at Casey to blush even once) and picked on Cheryl unmercifully. The only thing that would have made that funnier was if she had actually been in the car.

“No, no, no!” Paul said enthusiastically, turning to Joe, Casey, and David in the backseat. “No. You had to hear her, little bro. So her kid has his finger up his nose—like, you know, every kid in the history of kids in the history of fucking history, and she turns to me and says, ‘He’s very tactile. We think he’s gifted.’”

Casey, who had been enjoying their banter for most of the trip, hid his face in Joe’s shoulder and guffawed, and Joe choked back a snicker.

“No!” David said on the other side of Casey. “That’s not the best part! The
best
part is, Caleb pulls out like… like… I swear, I see sick kids every freakin’ day, and I’ve never
seen
a booger this size. It was epic! It was the great wall of booger on this kid’s finger—”

“David!” Peter winced, pained. “Do you talk to your patients like this?”

“Yes, Peter, yes I do, and they love me. So anyway, Joe, this kid pulls out this booger and Paul says, ‘Oh my word, Cheryl. Is
that
a gift too?’”

“Yeah, yeah,” Paul affirmed, keeping his body twisted around in the car. “And right at that moment, Cheryl pulls out a Kleenex, because, I don’t know, she keeps them in her sleeve like Nana used to, and she goes after the thing, and suddenly Caleb realizes what she’s doing, and lets out a shriek and says, ‘It’s
mine
!’ and takes off through the house, the great wall of booger just dangling from his finger. Cheryl goes tearing after him, and by then, David and I are—”

“Oh God… Lisa too—that’s Paul’s wife, Casey—she was laughing so hard she literally sat down on the floor, and David sat down with her, and the whole time, we can hear Cheryl pounding around in the upstairs of Mom and Dad’s house, screaming—”

And Paul and David chimed in for the finale, “Caleb, you come back here with that thing before you lose it!”

Joe lost it completely, and so did Casey, laughing until they couldn’t breathe as Peter made his way—soberly and responsibly—through the snow-clogged roads.