by Amy Lane
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.
HE 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 mone
y, 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.”
Joe reached into his drawers and pulled out a pair of flannel boxer shorts. He sighed as he pulled them on. “God, we haven’t even done laundry,” he muttered, looking at the stack of luggage in the corner. “I’m going to be living in scrubs for a week!”
“I’ll do laundry when you go to sleep. Did I mention you took me by surprise?”
Joe eyed him suspiciously. “You know, kid, I just left my mother’s house. I don’t expect you to take over.”
Casey grunted. “Sit down. Are you sitting down? Good. Awesome. Glad to see it. Here’s your soup, now eat it like a good boy.”
Joe glared at him and took a bite.
Casey smiled evilly. “You are a good boy. Awesome, kid, keep it up and I’ll buy you some ice cream. I’m going to brush your hair now, and—”
“Are you enjoying yourself?”
Casey pursed his lips, pretending to think. “Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s safe to say I am enjoying myself.” He went to the bathroom and came out with a brush, the kind with the hard individual bristles, and then he clambered up on the bed behind Joe and began to work carefully on that long hair.
Joe grunted and Casey said, “Don’t pay any attention to me. Just eat, okay? Did you see that thing on the table? Alvin got that as a present, and at first I thought it sort of sucked.”
“Why’s that?” Joe asked through a full mouth.
“Because the first thing he did with it was show me a picture of a girl with her whositz stretched about six miles wide.”
Joe struggled with his food for a minute, and it was touch and go whether he was going to spew it back into the bowl. Finally he swallowed it, and Casey sat and let him and then resumed combing out that long, straight hair. He found a strand of gray there at the temple and thought about plucking it out, but he decided to let Joe keep it. He deserved it for spending two weeks with his family and not once bitchslapping his annoying sister.
“So how do you feel about it now?” Joe asked gruffly, wiping at his streaming eyes.
“I like it,” Casey said as he took another section of hair and worked it gently. “I think I’m going to take a programming class next semester—I sign up for classes next week.”
Joe grunted and took another bite of food. “I’ll tinker with your car some more.” Joe had actually given up on Casey’s car in those few frantic weeks between reconciliation and leaving for New York. Casey and Alvin had gone to school in the pickup truck, and Joe had come to visit on the motorcycle. A couple of times Joe had driven Casey back and forth to Roseville on the back of it again, and Casey had clutched his waist and shivered in the cold December sleet. It would be nice to get the car back—and Casey had a moment to privately wonder how far he would have gotten without Joe. He didn’t want to think that way—plenty of other working students managed—but still. Family was good. Support was good. He shouldn’t have needed two weeks in New York to figure that out, but there you go.
“Well, that’s nice of you and I appreciate it,” Casey said, working on the last section of hair. It was drying a little in his hands, straight and coarse but smooth from the crown to the ends. Joe kept it meticulously trimmed. It never got ratty or split; he never let it get greasy or hang in his face. He was maybe a little vain about it, but in a quiet way, a way that told Casey that, for all it made him look like a nonconforming hippie, he was actually deeply rooted in his family’s spiritual past.
It was funny that Joe had worried that Casey was too young to fall in love with him, because every day Casey knew him seemed to be another day to find a reason to fall deeper in love.
“Not a problem,” Joe mumbled, and Casey laughed a little. Joe’s hair was all done, and his mostly finished bowl of noodles was tipping dangerously. Casey rescued the bowl and set it on the end table, then laid Joe down on the bed and started rubbing his back—just skin on skin, no kneading—and Joe was asleep in moments.
Casey went back downstairs to get laundry started and pet the dogs and send Alvin to the grocery store, and the whole time he felt a sort of deep contentment in his bones. He really was home. He could leave and come back, and home was still here. Every time he went back up into their room, he bent and kissed a sleeping Joe on his temple or his lips. Joe was far too tired to respond, but Casey knew he’d done it.
“Welcome home, Joe,” he whispered once, and he could swear the man smiled in his sleep.
Don’t You Want Me
~Joe
1995
THE baby was only three pounds, but that was a damned sight better than the two and a half it had been two weeks ago at birth, and Joe sat in the rocking chair next to the Isolette and held the child to his chest, talking softly.
“Hullo, Levi, how you doin’? Yeah, me too. Kinda sleepy. Yeah, I know—I was gone for a couple of days. Sorry about that—two days off. Casey and I went down to Santa Cruz and played on the beach. It’s pretty down there, my man. I don’t know what to tell you. Just is. Yeah, I know, I should tell him I bought him the tickets. Stop grunting at me like that—you’re three pounds, I don’t think you get to be my conscience just yet. He’s going to take it wrong. You know he is. I just don’t want him to take it wrong. And, you know. I want him to come back.”
There was a tiny sound next to him, and Joe figured he’d spent about enough time with Levi—it was Seth’s turn now.
He stood up carefully, because Levi was still attached to the respirator, the heart monitor, the
shunt that let them give him antibiotics, the feeding tube, and the pulse-ox monitor. It was a whole lot of tiny insults to a much tinier body, and the volunteer baby rockers who came to hold the drug-addicted bodies with the horrible knife-edged screams often stayed away from the preemies. It was too frightening, and there was too much chance of doing something wrong.
But Joe had been there when Seth and Levi had been born, and he felt a sense of ownership where they were concerned. He’d been spending his lunch hours and time after work coming in to talk to them, to hold them, to give them the sort of human contact that they needed to thrive.
It was hard to thrive when the person who should have loved you most didn’t want a fucking thing to do with you.
Joe had been there when the mother had given birth—pediatric nurses were always present during a birth, and this was no exception, but there was also a pediatric doc who specialized in preemies there, and that was Joe’s second clue that this was going to be a fucking circus.
His third clue was the social worker standing grimly by the fifteen-year-old girl with the yellow complexion and dirty brown and cracked lips, screaming that somebody had better get this fucking thing out of her because she needed another fucking hit.
Yeah. She’d been his first clue.
She’d shrieked so loud that the social worker consented to gag her—she was freaking out the other birthing mothers, and that was a bad thing. She was too violent to sit still for an epidural—the anesthesiologist would have shoved a needle through her spine and crippled her for life—and she was too hyped up on God knows what to put anything in her IV but fluids.
Joe remembered when Casey had first showed up on his doorstep, and smoking a little weed was no big deal, and only the rich kids snorted coke, and then, hey, it wasn’t addictive, right?
God, the country had embraced one hell of a learning curve as far as drugs were concerned, and all the lessons were hard, and the cost of that education…
