Sidecar (29 page)

“Yeah—I never saw it. He wouldn’t let me up there until he’d stripped it to the floorboards and we saw how much of it was sound, because he said it was too dangerous—”

“You had to see him when we fixed the carport,” Joe interrupted. “He was fu—” He stopped, because he didn’t swear at his parents’ house. “—frickin’ fearless. Scared the rabbit raisins out of me the whole week we were working on it.”

“He yelled a lot,” Casey affirmed. “First time he ever lost his temper on me, I lost a few raisins myself. Anyway, we’ve repainted the entire place, refurbished the bathrooms, Joe replaced the carpet up the stairs and in our room—”

“You share a room?” Cheryl asked, and Joe raised his eyebrows at her.

“You share a room with your husband, Cheryl, what did you think? Never mind. Forget I said that. Give it a rest, okay?”

“What does Joe’s room look like, Casey?” David asked. He and Paul were barely fourteen months apart, but they were seven and eight years older than Joe. “Does he still have rockets in it?”

“No,” Casey said, and then he remembered something he’d seen after he’d been waking up in Joe’s bed for a few days. The few weeks after that had been so hectic—taking finals, moving out of the duplex, getting ready for the trip. And them. They’d talked about them, as much as Joe would talk about a relationship, but they’d talked. But they hadn’t had a chance to talk about
this.

“But he does have a telescope set up by the window. I wouldn’t be surprised if his next project’s not a stargazing platform on the roof.” He looked at Joe half questioningly. “Are you sure
you’re
not the one who wants to travel?” he asked.

“I traveled,” Joe replied, his voice as mild as it always was. “I traveled, I learned, I expanded my horizons, and then found the exact place I belonged.”

“Well, I may expand my horizons,” Casey said definitively, “but I’ve always known where I belong.”

Paul broke the quiet between them with an “Awwww… God, you two are adorable. I may vomit.”

“Really, Paul? Really?” Cheryl turned on him. “You’re going to bring that up now, right before dessert? God, you’ve got the maturity of a third grader, do you know that?”

Paul smirked. “Big words for a woman with two inches of booger on her ass!”

Cheryl’s shriek silenced the entire room full of people and continued as she turned around, sighted the offending stain, and then charged upstairs to change.

Joe looked at Casey in the ensuing chaos. “Well done!”

Casey preened. “I didn’t do anything. It was all Caleb.”

Paul, David, and even Peter were convulsing with laughter, keeping each other from collapsing on the floor. “Please,” David gasped, “please, Casey, tell us you had something to do with that.”

Casey smirked at him. “Well, it might have been my suggestion. Why?”

“God, Joe, if you ever let him move out, I’m adopting him!”

Joe grimaced. “Thanks, David. That’s good to know.”

“Well,” Casey said, doing the math, “at least
he’s
old enough to be my father.
You
aren’t.”

And that set them off again.

C
ASEY
never did make friends with Cheryl—not that trip, and not the trips they took in all the years that followed. Joe said it was because they had fundamentally different approaches to life, and even though he eventually started writing his sister a little more often, he never forced Casey to like her any more than it took to be civil to the woman.

It was yet another thing that Casey loved Joe for. Like he needed one, but still.

The trip was wonderful as a whole, but they got home and Joe had maybe seven hours of sleep and then had to report to work. Casey barely remembered his good-bye kiss—long, lingering, sweet—before Joe disappeared through the door.

Casey just lay there in bed, letting consciousness come slowly, and thought about shit for a good hour after Joe left.

He had some idea of how Joe worked now, he thought. Casey was starting to understand why Joe did the things he did. He loved his family—warmly and with all his heart—but he seemed to be fully aware that he’d never really belonged there. Casey found himself picturing Joe, a little boy with rockets in his room, dreaming of being somewhere peaceful, somewhere the world didn’t intrude. It wasn’t that he was antisocial—he still had friends, he still had work parties, and he’d dragged Casey to his friends’ houses so they could work as well.

It was just that a part of his soul was solitary, and self-contained, and happy that way, and the one exception—the
only
exception he seemed to have ever made—was Casey.

Casey opened his eyes and looked around the room some more. Joe had taken down the Steve Hanks prints and put up a big photo print, a picture, taken at sunset, of a couple of children playing on a beach. The color caught Casey’s attention first, because it was sunset orange and gold, with the silhouettes of the children standing out in stark relief, but he couldn’t hide from the subject matter, either.

Jeannie had come up a lot over vacation. Josiah’s visit to her grave had been private, but the Daniels family wasn’t the type to whisper the name of the dead as though they had done something shameful. No. Jeannie’s name was brought up as much as Joe’s when the family visited memory lane, and it was always with a sort of reverence and sorrow. Jeannie, everyone seemed to agree, had been the purest heart of them all. She’d been the gentlest, the one with the most instinctive hand in caring for animals and small children, and she had turned much of that gift, that quiet purity, on Joe. Maybe she had recognized the same things in him—the goodness, but the need for privacy too. The desire for intimacy rather than the desire for company. The desire to share what goodness you’d found in the world with your family, but only select members.

Casey sighed. He wasn’t that good a person. He wasn’t horrible, he was pretty sure, but he wasn’t good enough to leave Joe for the sake of Joe’s desire to have children. He wasn’t. But as Casey sat up in bed and contemplated that beautiful, lonely picture, he remembered Joe playing with his nieces and nephews, and the way they’d all seemed to adore him with an unfettered joy.

Suddenly, he wanted this thing for Josiah as badly as Josiah wanted it for himself. It was the thing that filled his soul, the dream he didn’t know he had, the thing he would be seeking for the two of them until, all probability to the contrary, it was something they could have.

H
E
GOT
up eventually, thoughtful and still tired, and wondered how Joe was doing on his shift. He went downstairs to visit Alvin and found Alvin set up on the kitchen table with a big monitor sitting on top of a disc drive, and a cord connecting it to the wall. Casey blinked, thinking he might have seen something like that when he’d walked in the door the night before, but he and Joe had been too busy fending off overjoyed dogs and cats hell-bent on fatally tripping them.

“You got a computer?” Casey asked, squinting at the giant thing on the table.

“No, no!” Alvin said excitedly, tapping on the keyboard. “I’ve got a state-of-the-art IBM 386—man, it’s the be-all end-all of technology! You gotta see it here. Look—I’m connected!”

Casey turned his head. “To what?”

“The Internet. I’ve got a provider and everything! I’ll pay for it—the bill is in my name!”

“A provider for what? Because Joe and I don’t smoke weed anymore.”

“A service provider—I can send electronic mail and everything! Look. Look here!”

Casey drew up a chair and blinked. He looked at the screen at a bunch of clunky white letters on a black background and tried to figure out what the big deal was.

“Watch!” Alvin said. “I’m gonna find me some porn!”

And with that, he clicked a few nonsense letters and numbers with a line under it. There was a pause of about a minute when a bar appeared on the screen, and Alvin bounced eagerly on the chair. His hair looked like he’d cut it himself, his skin had broken out recently, and he didn’t look like he’d slept in
ages
,
but suddenly Casey was getting the feeling that what they were waiting for was the best Christmas
ever!

“
See!
” Alvin burst out, and Casey stood up so fast he knocked the chair over.

“
Oh my God!
Those are tits! And that’s a… a… oh
God!
Oh, Jesus, Alvin, I’m
gay!
I don’t want to see that shit!”

“There’s a guy in that picture too,” Alvin said plaintively, and Casey looked down. Yeah, yeah there was, and he was fairly well endowed too.

“Well, lucky her,” Casey said. “Next time warn a guy before you flash something like that. Jesus, Alvin—how in the hell did you find tits and poontang on a computer! I thought those were for typing up papers and shit!”

Alvin looked up at him and grinned. “Well, we’re getting it through this.”

He pointed to a small box that was plugged into their phone jack, and Casey looked at it curiously. “A modem, right?”

“You were just dicking with me with the other stuff, weren’t you?”

Casey twisted his mouth, annoyed. “No. I’m still stupid tired from the trip. I remember, sort of—I had a computer class at Sierra, but I was fighting a lot with my boyfriend—I blew it off and got a C.”

“So I have to suffer because you were fighting with… God. Who was it?”

Casey grimaced. “Oh, it was Robbie. He wanted me to move in, and I didn’t want to yet because I knew I had unfinished business with Joe.” Casey sat down and shook his head. “Feels stupid now. I don’t think he’s ever going to let me go again.”

Alvin grunted. “He’s going to have to if you’re going to go on that trip.”

Casey glared at him. “It’s a graduation trip, Alvin. What year is it? I’ve got at least another four semesters. You do too. I mean, I know we’re supposed to make it in four years, but I still haven’t gotten some of my lower division.”

Alvin nodded, his eyes still on the monitor screen. He’d pushed another link and was watching the bar in the middle of the computer tell him how long he had before it popped up. “I know. But I talked to my folks. They said that whenever I graduate, they’re ready to send me to Europe. Since I live here, they can send me enough money so I don’t have to work that much, and I want to go.”

Casey thought about it. Two months traveling through Europe—it was everything he thought Joe might want for him. He told himself firmly that he didn’t want it without Joe.

But he really did want to see the world.

He wasn’t sure how Joe had known so accurately. Maybe he’d recognized Casey’s drive when he graduated from high school and wanted so badly to go to college. Maybe it was the way Casey had inhaled every book Joe had ever given him, or his avid attention to the movies they’d watched over the last five years. Maybe it was just that Joe knew him, knew what he talked about, knew what he dreamed about—it didn’t matter how Joe knew, but he knew.

Until Casey had been kicked out of his own home, he’d thought that four walls and a roof were the be-all and end-all of his existence. But it had taken him two months to fuck and blow his way to Foresthill, and he’d gotten this idea that the world was a much bigger place than he’d ever suspected. That moment as he’d been walking across the bridge and had thought of falling, falling through infinite space into the great beyond, the one thing that had really been attractive about that idea had been the great beyond.
Finally
,
he’d get to see the world as maybe it really was.

When Robbie had left and Casey and Alvin had been struggling to find Top Ramen money, the idea of backpacking through Europe had been the Holy Grail. He couldn’t think about Joe then. Thinking about Joe made him want to curl up and not eat and not sleep and just mourn. So he’d thought about a bigger world, maybe one where not having Joe wouldn’t hurt so much.

He couldn’t contemplate that sort of world now. He could want to go off into the great beyond, but he’d always, always need Joe and this home to come back to.

And that picture, that lonely, lovely picture of children playing in a sunset ocean, to ache dully in his heart.

“We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see. I just got back here again. I missed it. I’ve got two years to think about Europe. Hell, I’ve got two weeks before I think about
school.
Right now, I just want to think about home.

So that was what he did.

Joe came home only a couple of hours later, exhausted and a little giddy from it. “Yeah,” he mumbled, “they sent me home. Apparently I wasn’t worth a good goddamn, and that bitch at the NICU was going to write me up, but Janey just broke up with her boyfriend, so she took the rest of my shift.” Joe yawned, and Casey stood up from the computer—because he and Alvin had been playing all day, in spite of the fact that Alvin never did stop calling up poontang and tits—and wrapped his arms around that great tree of a man and hugged him.

“I was going to make dinner,” he apologized. “Since I’m home. Go shower. I’ll have food when you get out. Then I’ll put you to bed.”

Joe yawned and, without even making an innuendo, went up the stairs like a good boy. Casey waited until he heard the water running (because it still made that horrid moan in the pipes) before he pulled out some Top Ramen (because that was what Alvin had bought while they were gone) and started the world’s most basic dinner. He threw in some canned peas and corn and found some tofu that didn’t look too bad in the refrigerator, and threw that in for protein, and then put it in a bowl and grabbed a placemat, and he was walking it up the stairs when Joe got out of the shower.

“I was going to dress,” Joe complained, and Casey rolled his eyes.

“Put on your underwear, big man, and sit and eat. I’ll brush your hair, bore you to death with Alvin’s new toy, and you can fall asleep on your face as soon as you’re done eating.”

“Got things planned, do ya?” Joe grimaced, yawned, and swore. “Fuck.” He eyed Casey glumly. “We haven’t had sex in two weeks.”

Casey nodded. “Well, if that thing wakes up in the middle of the night, feel free to poke me with it, ’kay? I’m still down with that—the novelty ain’t worn off.”