Casey's Home

by Jessica Minier

  The mood of mild euphoria that had swept over him after Baton Rouge had fled, sometime in the deep South. Perhaps it was the muggy air, rolling through the Datsun and smelling like a jungle, like a thick, dirty jungle; or perhaps it was merely the inevitable return of reality. The little blue-eyed waitress didn’t feel real anymore, more like some strange masturbatory fantasy he’d had in high school.

  Somehow, he had expected to feel happier. This was his home, after all. The place where he had lived before everything had fallen apart. He wanted the past to grip him and rub him clean, the way his mother used to hold his grandmother’s tarnished silver candlesticks and polish them with the force of her hand and the rough, abrasive silver cream.

  A diner rose out of the darkness, garish with its neon and bright, polished sheets of glass. He thought about the taste of the cool strawberry milkshake Lacey had made him and his mouth began to water. With only a trace of guilt, he prolonged his homecoming by pulling into the parking lot. Why rush headlong into pain, when pleasure was such a short distance away?

  Inside, it was dark and smoky, run-down with cracked vinyl seats that looked fine until you tried to sit in one. Though there were few customers, a dense layer of smoke hung near the ceiling, drifting down to dull the red-checked aprons of the waitresses, the yellow neon surrounding the opening to the kitchen. He couldn’t see anyone actually smoking, and wondered if it were simply always there, like smog. Ben ordered his milkshake to go, standing at the dull chrome bar and watching as the waitress poured the thick pink drink into a styrofoam cup. It tasted like heaven, despite its origins, cool and sharp with an acidic bite that spoke of real fruit. Perhaps he could learn to take his pleasure from the small things, he thought, walking out into the steamy air and staring up at a sky filled with stars. Then he paused in the dark parking lot, his eye caught by movement near the ground.

  A woman was sitting on the curb, a few spaces down from his car, her hands hanging limply between her knees. Even in the fluffy haze of a gauze dress, she looked miserable. At first, he didn’t recognize her – with her hair swept back and the make-up, she seemed his age. But up close, as he passed around the back of his car and she looked up, it was obvious who she was: Billy’s daughter.

  “Casey?” he asked, surprised with his find. When she squinted up at him, he squatted beside her and grinned. He had not expected to see anyone he knew tonight. It sometimes seemed to him that in the last five years, the earth had simply opened up and swallowed his former life. “That you?”

  She nodded, her face sinking even more until she looked like she was about to attend a funeral, dressed for a party.

  “Hi Ben,” she said weakly.

  “Well, my God,” he said, smiling at her. “I can’t believe it. Look at you.”

  Sometime in the last few years, between the gangly length of adolescence and today, she had certainly matured, filling out in the dirty-old-man sense of the words. Not lovely, exactly, but solid and yet exotic. Familiar and strange.

  “Yeah,” she said, effectively killing his compliment.

  It was then he realized she’d been crying. In the dull light he hadn’t seen it before, but she shifted and he picked out the silvery trace of tears down her cheeks. Who had made her cry, he wondered, and where the hell was he?

  “You want a ride home?” he asked, and she looked at him as if trying to figure him out. Which, after the events of the last five years, she probably was.

  “Sure,” she said, blinking as a car pulled into the space next to them and idled there. Her face was the stark white of a geisha in the headlights. “I sure would.”

  “Well, come on,” Ben said, and helped her to her feet. She slid awkwardly into the low passenger seat, rearranging the flounces of her dress around her legs as he scrambled in beside her and started the engine.

  She was silent. He had remembered her as a fairly open kid, but his memories had become so deceiving in the last few years, drained away in alcohol. Casey rolled down her window and slipped one arm out into the night air. He watched as she teased up the limp hairs at the base of her neck, letting the rush of wind dry them until they sat in sweet wispy waves that made him want to look away quickly. She was slightly less pretty than he would have expected, with her strong face and ever-present gravity.

  The moon, not quite full but definitely fat, lit the flat pasture around the car a rabbit-soft gray. Ben glanced up through the windshield and was, as always, left breathless. The sky still glistened with stars and he knew that he would be just as amazed the next time he checked.

  “So,” he said finally, after they had turned out onto the main road and the silence was far too thick. “You want to tell me what you were doing at that place, by yourself?” He sounded like an older brother, he realized, a role he had never been comfortable playing. Strange as his small family had been, it was his own and he’d had no wish to artificially expand it.

  Casey pressed back into the seat and shrugged, a series of dark curls tumbling forward to hide her from him.

  “Date gone bad?” he asked quietly.

  “You could say that,” she agreed at last, and her voice was so far from the pouty teenager she appeared to be that he was startled. “Thanks for the ride, Ben, I really appreciate it.”

  It was his turn to shrug. “You looked like you wanted to go home.”

  Smiling weakly, she nodded and turned back to the window.

  “Beautiful night,” Ben said, conversationally.

  “Yes,” she admitted. He felt as if he were a snake charmer, drawing her forward against her will. The car shuddered as he was finally able to shift into fifth, skimming across the black tarmac like a fallen piece of summer sky.

  “You ever study astronomy?” he asked and she turned to look at him as if he were a little crazy. “I always found space fascinating,” he said then, too embarrassed to quit. “Too bad I didn’t go into that instead of playing ball.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I guess it’s too bad.”

  He was saddened, despite himself. He could feel the disappointment in her voice, in the way she leaned over toward her door.

  He tapped out a rhythm with his fingers on the steering wheel. The road was rough here and in the low-slung Japanese car, it sounded like the distant rumble of thunder.

  “So,” she said. “What have you been doing?”

  He’d lied so often lately, sometimes just by not telling anyone the truth.

  “Drinking,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. She didn’t sound particularly surprised or shocked.

  “I just quit,” he told her. “Just last week. But I’m done with it. For good.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Genuinely surprised, he turned to her. “Didn’t your father tell you?”

  Her eyes narrowed and she shook her head.

  “I’m going to be the new assistant coach,” he explained.

  “I see,” she said. “No, he didn’t tell me. No one seems to feel it necessary to tell me anything at all.” She looked away, arms crossed, examining the windshield as if it would reveal sudden news as well. It was frustrating, he understood, to be kept away from the truth of things and yet to be expected to react as if you knew, as if it all made sense.

  “Casey?” Ben said quietly, glancing over as she steamed. “Are you ok?”

  “Where did you go?” she said, her voice muffled. “All those years… where were you? What were you doing?”

  He sat quietly for a moment, listening to the hiss of the tires against the road, trying to create a better answer than repeating the part about the drinking.

  “I’ve been sitting on my ass in California,” he said at last. “I didn’t think anyone would want to see me, with the state I was in after the injury.” When she didn’t respond, he continued, his voice taking on a tinge of anger. God, he wanted the numbing comfort of beer. “You don’t know what it’s been like, this last five years. I couldn’t find a job, I couldn’t go a day without drinking mys
elf stupid and all I wanted was to just make it stop long enough to figure out what the hell I was going to do...” He paused and took a deep breath. She was still. “I just wanted to find something that would take the place of baseball and nothing did.”

  “Did you really believe something else could?” she said, cutting through his self-pity.

  He sighed and rolled his window down all the way. “No, I know that, now. That’s why I’m so glad to be here.”

  And he was glad, sort of. Glad for the heat and the familiar road and the knowledge that something he knew, something he could predict, lay just ahead of him in the night.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, after a moment of quiet. She said it in a clear, sincere voice that made him think she understood, at least to some degree. “I’ve just had a long night. I never expected to see you again. My father said... he said you were gone and to just forget about you, but I didn’t.”

  He said nothing, just concentrated on driving, driving, and never disappointing anyone again.

  When she sat up, she was looking away from him, out the window at the moon-frosted pasture. “I’ve thought so much about you over the years, even though I wasn’t supposed to miss you and seeing you now... I suppose I expected to know what to say, but I don’t. It just pisses me off that my dad let you go and now… now, he brings you back and doesn’t even tell me. I’ll be eighteen in a few months and he acts like I’m five.”

  They rolled ahead for another mile or so in silence before he heard it: the deadened thump of a flat tire, growing rapidly louder as he pulled the car to the side of the road. “Hang on, I’ve got a spare in the trunk,” he told Casey, who leaned back and shut her eyes.

  As he stepped out of the car and shut the door, he was struck by the thick, sticky silence. Nights in California were lighter, fresh with cool air from the Pacific. This was like rolling himself up in a blanket; a familiar, wet blanket that smelled like earth.

  Before he’d left for this trip, he’d had the dealer put in a full-size spare, picturing the blistering deserts of Texas and New Mexico, the backwoods bayous of Louisiana – the long, empty stretches of road where he would be completely alone and helpless. It was typical, then, that he hadn’t needed it until he was less than two miles from his home.

  Unlocking the trunk, he pried up the carpet and pulled out the tire, lug wrench and jack, dumping them beside the rear wheel. He hadn’t had to change a tire since he’d learned how to drive, nearly twelve years before. Reluctantly, he realized he was going to have to fish out the manual from the glove compartment, or risk doing it wrong.

  Casey rolled down her window when he tapped on the door.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I just need the manual.”

  She shook her head and opened the car door, forcing him to step back. “I can change a tire,” she said. “I’ll just tell you what to do.”

  The absurdity of the situation hit him as she shook out the skirt of her ridiculously fluffy dress. “Great,” he said, chuckling grimly as he followed her.

  Squatting, she ran her fingertips under the body of the car, just in front of the wheel. Stopping about a foot from the tire, she stood and brushed the dirt off her fingers with her other hand. “This is where you’ll put the jack,” she said. “But first, you need to pry off the hubcap and loosen the lug nuts. Don’t take them off yet, though.”

  She was an efficient task-master, he found, giving him just the right amount of instruction. Half-way through, either his prior training or simple common sense took over and he was able to finish without much help. She leaned lightly against the front of the car, her hands bracing her body as she looked up at the night sky.

  He was just replacing the jack in the trunk when she spoke.

  “I never knew you were interested in astronomy,” she said. When he peered around the back of the car, she turned. “Don’t you think I should have known that?”

  Shrugging, he shut the trunk and walked over to join her. The car was hot against the back of his legs. “I don’t know, I never saw any reason to tell you.”

  “Do you know the constellations?” she asked.

  “Yeah, most of them,” he said. “There’s Orion, there, and Cassiopia, the Big Dipper and Little Dipper, but you know those.” She nodded.

  “When I was in earth science, we had this crazy teacher... Mr. Sundahl. He was incredibly difficult, one of those teachers who always assigns things it’s impossible to actually do, you know?” He nodded and she continued. “Every week, we were supposed to go out in our backyard and map the night sky. I never understood that. I mean, it’s not as if it changes.”

  “Did you do it?”

  She shook her head. “Never. And you know what? I got an ‘A’.”

  “Maybe he knew how hard it was,” he said. “Maybe he didn’t really expect you to actually do it, but thought it would just be great if you tried.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” She looked away from the stars toward her feet, tapping her toes lightly against the road. “But I always felt like I had disappointed him anyway.”

  They were quiet for a moment, both watching her feet. He had never seen shoes that color, and wondered if she’d had them dyed to match her dress. It was something he could remember girls doing when he was in school.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it, how easily we set ourselves up to be disappointed?”

  She hadn’t looked at him, but he felt as if he’d been kicked with one of her sharp shoes. It wasn’t until she continued that he realized she wasn’t talking about him.

  “I was supposed to go to the prom, tonight.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. First time ever.” She crossed her arms and shook her head. “I was supposed to have this fabulous time, like the girls in magazines always have, like Lee always had. I set myself up with all these expectations of how wonderful it would be, how much fun I would have, and of course, nothing happened. I was supposed to remember this night for the rest of my life.”

  He hadn’t meant to let her catch him smiling, so when she did, he tried to placate her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That is disappointing. I know it is.”

  “You think I’m being silly,” she said.

  “Not at all,” he reassured her, though really, he did think she was silly. “I know it feels bad now, but believe me, you’ll get over it.” When he bumped her shoulder gently with his own, she rolled her eyes and looked away. “So what happened?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then said: “I guess my date was more interested in seducing my father than he was in seducing me.”

  “Well, he must have been a stupid guy,” he said, “because Billy would look terrible in that dress.” That made her smile, so he continued. “So you gave him the boot?”

  “It was sort of a mutual booting, I think.”

  “Any guy who’d dump his date at that diner must be an idiot anyway,” he told her. “Particularly when she looks as pretty as you do, tonight.”

  She smiled at her toes and he chuckled, pleased to have made her happy. It was such a small thing, but right now, he would take whatever he could get.

  “You know, I used to have the most terrible crush on you,” she said and he was stilled. “I thought you were the most beautiful person playing the most wonderful game on earth.”

  “Yeah?” he sighed, the happiness gone in a rush. “I’m sorry I disappointed you.”

  With his eyes closed, he felt the soft brush of her shoulder as she nudged him. “I was a kid,” she said and he opened his eyes. She was watching him, looking sly. “I think I’ll get over it.”

  Letting his breath out in a slow sigh, he smiled at her. “I’m glad,” he said.

  “You remember what I said, about not thinking you’d come back?”

  That wasn’t quite how he remembered it, but he nodded anyway.

  “That’s not true at all,” she said. “I always thought you’d come back. Always. Even before you left.”


  She was looking at him, not at the sky or her feet. His mouth was dry.

  “I should get you home,” he said. Pushing herself away from the car, she rubbed at oil he could just see caught in the whirls of her fingerprint. “Don’t get that on your dress.”

  Shrugging, she rubbed the edge of one fluttering sleeve between the fingers of her clean hand. “Doesn’t much matter, now, does it? I certainly don’t have anything to save it for.”

  Reaching for her hand, he brushed her fingers against his hip, against the dark fabric of his jeans until only a faint gray smudge remained on her skin. “There,” he said. “Save it because it’s pretty and you look nice in it. Save it because tonight you told some guy to get lost and he actually did.” She tugged at his hand lightly and he realized he hadn’t released her wrist. As he let go, she stepped forward until he could feel the fabric of her skirt push against his knees. He said nothing as she rose onto the toes of her bright blue shoes and pressed her lips against the side of his mouth. Slowly lowering herself back onto her heels, she watched him, waiting for a reaction with a slightly concerned face.

  He placed one hand on her cheek and dipped his head to kiss her, firmly and with tenderness. For a few moments, everything in his world was concentrated on the feel of her mouth against his. When he straightened up again, she made a small sound that seemed like “Oh,” or maybe “Ah.” He badly wanted to keep kissing her. Common sense kicked in when she drew her lips away again to take a breath.

  “Come on,” he said quickly. “Let’s get you home.”

  “Yeah,” she said, but he could feel the edge of her left hip, pressed against his own.

  “Casey,” he said slowly, to be sure she heard him, “your dad just hired me. This is the first chance I’ve had to play a little ball again. I think... I think I need to take you home now.”

  She took a step back and tilted her head, examining him. He waited, sure she would be angry. Finally, she licked her lips once and then slipped past him toward the passenger side of the car, her hand clasping and releasing his arm as she passed. Blinking away the humming in his head, he listened to the click of her heels until they stopped. He turned to find her standing at her open door, waiting for him.