Sidecar (20 page)

Casey put on his clothes thoughtfully, suddenly wondering at his hubris. This whole time he’d been humiliated but angry too, because he thought that Joe was just denying everything he felt because of some stupid mind block about their ages, about Joe’s role in his life.

It suddenly occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, Joe really was this nice to everyone. Maybe Casey had been young, and stupid, and arrogant. Maybe he’d made assumptions based on things he knew about Joe’s sexuality, about Joe’s desire for children—oh Jesus, all of those horrible things he’d said to Joe, and really, how wrong could he have been?

But that didn’t matter, he realized as he came out of his room to where Joe waited. Joe’s hair was back in a braid, and he hadn’t taken off his trench coat. He was standing, quiet and still, in the front room, looking outside the dusty, colorless curtains into another day the color of wet concrete. It didn’t matter, because Joe was here, in whatever capacity, and what he felt for Casey—
whatever
he felt for Casey—hadn’t gone away.

Joe looked up at him as he walked out into the living room, and smiled. “Don’t you look pretty,” he teased, and Casey blushed.

“You clean up pretty good yourself.”

Joe nodded decisively. “Well then, let’s get this show on the road.”

“Whose car is this?” It was a little Ford Escort sedan, and Joe grimaced.

“Lynnie lent hers to me, since the truck just guzzles gas. I hope it’s okay.”

Casey looked at him and rolled his eyes. “You’re the one who’s going to get his legs cramped. It’s fine with me.”

Joe grinned. “Yeah, well, after we stop for lunch, you can drive.”

Casey was suddenly reassured. Whatever it was, however he felt, Joe was still his. Six months of living without had maybe done their job and taught Casey that any Joe was better than none.

Lynnie had a cassette player in her car, so as soon as they passed Sacramento’s range for radio, they put in one of the cassettes from the box Joe had brought. Journey started playing, sounding sentimental and old, and definitely not enough to cover the space between them. They could either actually talk to each other or listen to the car bump over the music. Looking out the window was a whole lot of flat gray-green nothin’ but cows, so they chose to talk. It was pretty easy, especially when Casey broke the ice.

“So, Lynnie’s living in your guest room?”

He heard about it then, about Joe’s breakup, about Lynnie’s shitty choice in rebound guys and Joe taking her in with a split lip, a black eye, and a baby in her belly.

“Is she just gonna stay there?” Casey asked, and Joe looked sad.

“Naw. Her parents live in Oregon. In about two months, she’s going to fly up there and have the baby and get a new start.” Joe sighed, and Casey felt the weight of the thing Joe was giving up.

“You offered to marry her, didn’t you?” he asked, knowing it would hurt but needing to know anyway.

“No,” Joe said quietly, and then he smiled a little anyway. “But I did offer to keep the baby.”

Casey looked at him, surprised. “Why didn’t you marry her? You wouldn’t have cared, would you?”

Joe shook his head. No. Of course not. Not Joe. “No. No, I wouldn’t have. But….” He swallowed. “I didn’t love her enough for forever. You were right about that. You just were.”

Casey looked out the window at the gray expanse of cows, cow shit, and mud, and sighed. For the first time in his life, he felt enough outside of himself to realize that sometimes it sucked to be right, even if it meant you got the thing you most wanted in the world.

“I’m sorry about the baby,” he said quietly, and he meant it.

Joe shrugged. “Yeah, well, so am I. But my life ain’t over yet, is it? Still got time.”

“I’d like to see that,” Casey said softly, thinking about big Joe with a tiny, helpless pink thing in his massive arms. “That baby would feel so safe with you. You’d hold it, and love it, and you’d never hurt it or throw it out on its ass because….” Casey’s voice trailed off, and he looked out into the shitty day.

“I guess I can’t hate him anymore for that,” Casey said, hearing that gunshot again.

“Sure you can,” Joe said grimly. “But it might be better off if you forgave him for it instead.”

“How did he die?”

Joe sighed heavily. “I, uhm, called your mother again after reading the paper,” he said apologetically. “I asked so I could tell you myself.”

“He shot himself, didn’t he?”

Joe’s eyes flickered from the nightmare ruler that was Interstate 5. “How’d you know that?”

Casey shook his head. “Just did. It was quick, it would work, and he wouldn’t be there to clean up the mess. Let’s just say it was sort of how he did things. No time to smoke weed, let’s do blow instead, right?”

Joe grunted. “That right there makes the man a damned fool.”

Casey laughed a little, thinking of the two times he and Joe had floated together. No, weed was not really something you wanted to do a lot of, but if you were going to get all drifty and floaty, wanted to be out of your body and be somebody else, Joe was the person to do it with, because he’d accept you no matter who you were.

“You’ve got to have some good memories of him,” Joe said softly, and Casey reached for them and found only blankness. Something in him got a little desperate then, needy.

“Probably.”

Joe grunted again. “You let me know when it’s time to remember them, okay?”

“Yeah. Joe?”

“Yeah?”

“You said you didn’t love Lynnie in a forever way.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you love me?”

Joe sighed. “Can we talk about this later, Casey? I mean… in a good way, but I don’t want to have this conversation on a trip to a funeral in fucking Bakersfield.”

“In a good way?”

Joe risked another look off the road. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Casey looked down at the little black console of the tiny car. “Yeah. But you’re a good guy. You’d be here for anybody.”

“No. Not just anybody.” There was a pause, and Casey dared to hope, and then Joe gave a sigh. “Oh good, there it is. The turnoff on the map. We’re going to be a little early.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a six-hour drive—early’s better than late.”

“Not if you’re me.”

L
OTS
of pretty people in black. That was Casey’s first impression, and it didn’t go away. The grounds were beautiful—lots of ponds with orange fish inside, surrounded by trees, and flat headstones in neat little rows, flush with the lawn.

Bakersfield town proper had a central city and some extensive suburbs around it. The cemetery was in the central city, with an imposing two-story brick building in the front, as well as a little chapel to the side for funerals. Casey didn’t know what the big brick building was, but Joe said he supposed it was where people stored the ashes of their loved ones in little boxes, like at a bank vault, and Casey blessed him for that. He tuned out the entire service in the chapel, wondering what aliens would say if they landed on earth and saw that great building that held nothing but boxes of ash.

He was at the point in his fantasy where the aliens figured out how to recombine all of the elements that made a human being and resurrected boxloads of zombies when the service in the chapel ended and everybody migrated outside.

Everyone stood there with their black umbrellas in their black trench coats, and even though Joe planned for most things, he seemed to have forgotten the umbrella, so they stood back away from the crowd, under a tree, where the rain wasn’t quite as persistent.

“Do you know anyone?” Joe asked, and Casey finally found himself focusing on the people there.

“The blonde woman in the front who won’t stop blowing her nose is my mother, Vivian.”

“Okay. Who’s the woman next to her?”

“The one with the gray hair that looks like a helmet? That’s my dad’s mom. They hate each other.”

Joe choked back a laugh. “They seem to be leaning on each other now.”

“Yeah, well, look at Grandma Spencer. She’s telling my mom that there aren’t enough people there and they should have had warm snacks at the house and that the mourners aren’t well enough organized by the grave site and she would have done better if she’d gone to another cemetery.”

Joe grimaced. “People shop around for that sort of thing?”

Casey looked with distaste at the woman in the flawless Chanel suit with the perfectly stylish black pumps and even
jewelry
that seemed accessorized for mourning. “If anyone does, my dad’s mom does. My mom would just pick the most expensive and assume that was the best.”

Joe grunted. “What would your dad do?”

Casey didn’t have to think about it to answer, which was probably why he told the bold truth. “It wouldn’t matter—he’d let someone else do it and then bitch about how they fucked up.”

“What would he think about all of this?”

Casey looked around and saw a lot of elegant middle-aged people with sober faces and no real expressions. One woman, very beautiful and about Joe’s age, was distraught, but she was hanging in the back, with no one to comfort her.

“He’d think they were a bunch of phonies,” Casey said roughly, wondering if his father had made any provision for the mistress at all or if he’d just left her there to grieve without even a shoulder to cry on. “He’d say they were just here because they didn’t want the world to know they don’t give a shit. He used to talk such horrible trash behind people’s backs, you know?”

“You don’t do that,” Joe said, and Casey felt his hand, warm and reassuring in the motorcycle glove, at the small of his back. It was a curiously intimate gesture, and Casey felt some warmth and humanity creeping up his spine and toward his chest. It hurt like hell, and Casey kept talking just so he didn’t have to acknowledge the hurt.

“No. No, I don’t. I always wondered what it was he said about me. When I left, I wondered if they ever talked about me or what they told the neighbors—was I at reform school, did they send me away to some sort of place that would cure me?” Casey’s voice was quiet, and something about the dripping of the trees and the patter of the rain made it seem like he was disappearing. “My mom used to come to my room at night and kiss me good night. Maybe she missed me then—we’d talk about school and grades and stuff, you know, like you and me did over dinner. But I never watched movies with them or went out and shit. My dad might have missed me at the dinner table, but I never really talked there. And still, as stupid as it is, I wonder—would he have missed me? I don’t know if I’m going to miss him. I had that same sort of fantasy, you know? That one day I’d see him, and I’d be all college graduate and super successful, and he’d have to respect me or even maybe fear me because he was in real estate, and I don’t think he had a college degree. I wanted to say, ‘See! Here I am! I’m everything you said I couldn’t be, now fuck off!’ And now I don’t even get to do that, I don’t even get to tell him to fuck off, because he told us all to fuck off….”

Casey’s face was hot, even in the icy rain, and his chest was full and hot, and Joe’s hand on the small of his back was his anchor, and suddenly he was adrift in pain without definition. It wasn’t anger or bitterness or mourning; it was just loss, loss for all sorts of things that never really were. He took a deep breath and let it out on a sob, and then another one, and a third, and then Joe’s arm went around his shoulders and he wrapped his arms around Joe’s solid waist and cried honest tears in the rain.

He was still shuddering the tears out when the graveside service ended and the mourners walked to the pathway next to them. Joe put his hand up on Casey’s face to shield him from the strangers, and Casey was grateful until two sets of black-heeled pumps intruded on his vision and he looked up at his mother and grandmother, both of them looking back at him with scowls on their faces.

“You came,” his mother said, and Joe let go of his shoulder and grabbed his hand instead.

“It seemed the decent thing to do,” Casey mumbled, and he was not surprised at his grandmother’s venom.

“If you were going to be decent, you would have come alone.”

“Don’t you mean die alone?” Joe asked, his voice hard. “Because that’s what you left him to do in the first place.”

“We couldn’t let him live in the house,” Vivian Spencer said, her voice tremulous, and Casey looked at his mother without understanding.

“Why not, Mom? I was still the same kid.”

“But what you were doing—”

“Was my business. I didn’t break in on you and dad having sex. I wasn’t going to make you watch.”

Without warning, Casey’s grandmother’s black-gloved hand shot out and smacked Casey’s cheek, hard. “You speak with
respect
of your father, young man.”

Casey blinked at her, not even bothering to rub his cheek. She hadn’t hit hard, but Joe angled his body more protectively. His hand on Casey’s back was vibrating with anger.

“I just paid respects to him, ma’am. That was the last respect I think I have left.” He looked at his mom. “Thanks for telling me. It was almost human of you. Come on, Joe. I want to go home and see the dogs.”

“Wait!”

Casey stopped then and turned to his mother.

“Weren’t you a little bit sad?”

Casey swallowed and huddled more into Joe’s warmth, basking in the physical closeness that Joe had rarely given, because he’d always seemed to respect Casey’s personal boundaries with absolute reverence. Casey appreciated the contact so much now, when those boundaries seemed to have disappeared. “I was, yeah. That’s why I cried.”

“I mean when you left. Weren’t you a little sad to leave us?”

“Yeah, Mom, when I was starving and freezing and willing to get fucked in a bathroom so I could have someplace to sleep, I was a little fucking sad to leave you. But I won’t be sad this time. This time I can take pretty good care of myself, and when I can’t, Joe fills in the gaps. This time, I’ll be just fine, so don’t you worry about me.”

Joe’s arm tightened around his waist, and he leaned his head on Joe’s shoulder. He didn’t care if they thought he and Joe were lovers. He didn’t care what they thought at all.