Casey's Home

by Jessica Minier

  We were silent at first, Ben tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, me staring out the window but not seeing anything. The roads were no longer memory-inducing. Unknown houses and shops lined the back streets; a community I had no part in, one I didn’t understand existed here. This place was about money and the perfect coordination of curtains and valances and upholstery. At home I had mini-blinds from the big home store down the street. Lately I’d been hating mini-blinds. They were the representation of all that renting entailed. Generic, interchangeable – I wanted to own something.

  I was not particularly surprised when we slid to a stop at a small gas station. This was the turning point. One road would take me to Lee’s house, the other to Ben’s. He killed the engine and we sat for a moment with the singing of the cicadas.

  “Be right back,” he said, and stepped out of the car. I watched as he walked across the tarmac to the little window where the clerk waited. Ben’s shoulders were hunched as if he were protecting himself from a bitter wind. A sheer curtain of heat rose from the pavement and billowed across the empty lot in front of me. Up on blocks, an old Chevy rusted quietly into the kudzu beneath a collapsing sign: The Kuntry Kitchen. I saw no sign of a restaurant.

  I opened Ben’s glove compartment. He had his car manual, his registration and his insurance card in a neat little black vinyl wallet. A plastic grocery bag was balled up in one corner. Three dollar bills lay tucked beneath the manual. There was nothing else.

  He stood outside the driver’s window, one hand on the gas pump, the other in his pocket. Despite the easy cut of the suit pants, he seemed uncomfortable, as if he’d rather be wearing anything else. I could sympathize. My own dark suit scratched the back of my neck and stuck to the tender skin on the backs of my thighs. I bought it in Seattle, for a conference, and that was how it felt. Briskly efficient, a working woman’s suit. Underneath, I had a cool lavender silk shell. I should have taken the jacket off, but frankly, I was afraid of the color of that shirt. Like liquid evening light, that delicate shade of lilac seemed inappropriate for a funeral. Purple was supposed to be a mourning color, but what was it when it had been diffused with white, watered-down and softened?

  Ben opened the door and slid in stiffly beside me. We both hesitated, creating a sudden unnatural stillness.

  “Do you want to be alone?” he asked at last.

  For propriety’s sake, I should have said yes. I should have sent away this man who was tapping one finger against the stiff woolen fabric of his pants. I found myself staring at that hand, imagining the subtle scratch of fabric against skin. I was tired of mourning. I felt like I’d been mourning my whole damn life, I just was never sure what it was for. And I missed my father. The feeling was so elemental, so essential that it became indescribable.

  “No,” I said. He nodded gratefully, wearily, and we started up the road to his house.

  We paused at a stop sign, watching as an ancient Volkswagen bug chugged reluctantly across the road, each wheel well painted a different color.

  “Do you have anything to drink at your place?” I asked and he cleared his throat as we started again.

  “No,” he said. “Do you want me to stop?”

  I shook my head and we sped up. Ben shifted restlessly beside me, clearly driving too fast in the effort just to get us somewhere. He pulled up with a sudden jerk in the driveway of his house, stopping with a finality that made me want to stare at him, but I didn’t. It occurred to me he might be nervous about having me there.

  It occurred to me that I might be a bit dense, in spite of the strong summer light.

  I stayed outside on the porch while he hunted down two glasses of water from the interior. He had an old fashioned porch swing, but it looked a little suspect, as if no one had sat in it for years. Instead, I leaned over the balcony and watched the road, empty in the mid-day heat. Lizards slipped from stones in the garden to threaten one another, heads jerking skyward. Deep green dragonflies buzzed past the porch on their way out to the swamp. I was astonished, in my Northern-ness, by the tropical decadence of the place. Didn’t Florida understand I was in mourning? If nothing else, the porch was a clear haven for mosquitoes, but netting hung suspended in fat sausage rolls above my head, ready to be deployed like a flak jacket as evening crept in. A jay the color of the sky flitted down and paused in the browned grass of Ben’s lawn, hopping closer and closer to me before screaming and flapping violently off into the trees. I understood the inclination.

  “It’s no cooler in there,” Ben informed me when he returned, sans his suit jacket and tie. “I really ought to fix that air-conditioner.”

  “Only if you’re going to stay,” I said and he nodded, taking a long drink from his glass, sweat glistening on his throat, collecting in the hollows of his collarbone. He sat down on the top step, legs wide, hands hanging loosely between them. The glass refracted a glimmering pattern of light around his feet.

  “Shit,” he said and lowered his head.

  I was still standing at the railing, so I couldn’t see his face. At last he lifted his head and his profile was too sweaty, too peeked for me to tell if he’d been crying.

  “Are you ok?” I asked, without moving. He nodded and took another drink. I hadn’t touched mine. Water seemed too inconsequential, too prone to evaporation.

  “Did you find out anything else?” he asked, and he patted the stair beside him, once. I stared at him until he looked away, then I came to sit next to him.

  “No, but then, I haven’t asked anyone anything. I can’t tell Lee and I don’t think she knows anything anyway.”

  “Probably not,” he replied, and then he carefully slid his hand under my own and lifted it, letting the weight of my fingers intertwine us. His skin was cool from the glass of water, and damp with condensation. “Have you thought about why he wanted you to know?”

  “Selfishness?” I speculated. “Pride? Conscience? Who cares? I only know I didn’t want to know.”

  He slid his fingers over mine, slowly, sending sparks of recognition up my arm. “Why not? It’s the truth, right? And that’s what we all want from one another, isn’t it?”

  I thought he sounded bitter, but couldn’t really hear anything clearly beyond my own throbbing head. Lifting my glass, I took a small sip of water, letting only a little slide past the sour taste of my own mouth.

  “You don’t understand,” I said, which was lame, but I was angry and sad. “You can’t imagine what it’s like, to have this ideal conception of him all my life and then to have it destroyed.”

  I was standing, loosed from him, pacing the paving stones set into the dead lawn.

  He spoke without anger. “Of course I can.” As if this should have been obvious to me, which it probably should have been.

  “I don’t know who I can believe anymore,” I said at last and he nodded.

  “I know, Casey. You keep forgetting that I know.”

  He stretched out his hand to touch mine, to pull me back over to the relative shade of the porch.

  “Sit down,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”

  I was really, really wishing for a beer. I collapsed next to him and he took my hand in his again, hot and sweaty as my own. His voice was slightly nasal, as if he had a head cold.

  “He told me when I was in the hospital for the second surgery. There I was: career over, arm destroyed… and in comes Billy Wells, wearing his Series ring and sitting next to me – crying, wringing his hands and begging for my forgiveness. I was furious and hurt and thought he was the most selfish man I had ever met. I told him he couldn’t have my forgiveness. Ever.”

  He paused to squeeze my hand almost tentatively.

  “What did he say?” I managed, since he was watching me, his face turned slightly away so that I couldn’t look him in the eye.

  Ben shrugged and finished off his water. “He begged a bit. Then he got angry at me, said I didn’t understand what he was going through. When he calmed down enough to realize how ridiculo
us that sounded, he asked me not to tell anyone. He explained that he was in debt.”

  “My God. Must run in the family,” I said, and Ben raised a curious eyebrow. I shrugged. “Never mind. It’s a Lee issue. Go on.”

  “Well, we didn’t make the kind of money then that players do now. I mean, a quarter-million was really something. I guess he wanted to free himself so you and Lee and your mom wouldn’t be burdened. But to his credit, he made a mistake, and he knew it. The great irony, of course, is that he only won the bet for the fourth game by chance. They took him out in the fourth inning and put me in.”

  “Yeah, but he threw the second game, and probably conned Andy or whoever it was into throwing the third. And he would have thrown the fourth. He was trying to throw the fucking World Series, Ben.” I found it impossible to listen to Ben without the anger at my father rising to the surface.

  He nodded. “Did I mention I refused to forgive him? Don’t forget, I was angry, too, Casey, and devastated. Mostly, I wanted to tell. It was so childish and irrational, but I wanted to scream it out, to be sure everyone heard me. I had lost something and I wanted everyone, everywhere, to feel that loss with me. I was about to ask him to leave when your mother came in. I remember, her hair was pulled back from her face. She looked so young and pretty. And she looked at us and I could see that she knew something was wrong. She kept brushing this stray bit of hair out of her eyes and I realized I had never seen her without her hair down. She had such luminous eyes. And I looked over at your father and I was sure from the terrified expression on his face that she didn’t know.”

  “So you didn’t say anything.”

  “I didn’t say anything. I let it go. And eventually, years later, I forgave him.”

  “I’ve already forgiven him,” I told Ben. “It’s not about forgiveness. It’s about disappointment.”

  He stroked his index finger over my own. “Did you really think he was perfect, Case? You lived with the man. You had to have known he wasn’t.”

  “I idolized him.”

  “Maybe we’re getting too old to idolize people anymore,” he said quietly.

  “I also idolized you,” I said. He stared straight ahead, suddenly unable to look at me. Reaching out, I turned his face to mine. His eyes were dark and unreadable, his mouth was compressed to a thin line, the skin of his cheek felt like it had been coated with hot sand. “You knew, all this time, and you never told anyone.”

  “No,” he said at last. “He asked me not to.”

  “Jesus.” I was on my feet again, my whole body tingling. “How could you let him get away with it?”

  “I didn’t intend to, at first,” he said, watching me but making no movement of his own. “I was going to tell someone, I really was. But think about it, Casey. My arm was fried. I had a compound fracture so bad it looked like someone had hit my humerus with a hammer. My career was over. Your father was widely considered to be the greatest pitcher of all time. All the guys on that team were legends. I kept thinking about what it would do to the game, to the fans. And after all, they won. Don’t you see? They won. So no one lost anything, in the end.”

  “Do you honestly believe you didn’t lose anything? How can you sit there and say that to me?”

  Ben winced and looked away. “That’s what I thought at the time, Casey. They won the Series. At the time, that was all that mattered to me. I was like you; I thought the game was the most important thing in the world. It was years before I realized it wasn’t, but I’ve never regretted my decision.”

  He looked up and met my stony glare before looking past me to the street.

  “He said he kept seeing when I went down, over and over in his mind. It wasn’t until he heard the sound, until he saw me fall and realized that I wasn’t going to get up again that it hit him. What he knew then, what he finally understood... and this is what you have to understand, Casey, because it explains everything...” Ben held both hands out, palm up, and I knew this was what he believed. “You have to understand how transitory our great loves are, what a short time we are given to do what we enjoy. They won. I couldn’t let them lose, not after that.”

  What I understood was that I was standing in the middle of Ben’s yard, hugging myself as if it was suddenly as cold as North Dakota. The world had become that unfamiliar.

  “You should tell the truth,” I said. “He’s dead now. Fuck him.”

  “No,” Ben said. “This is what I wanted. Your dad’s in the Hall of Fame. I helped, in my own way, to put him there. That’s the only glory I’m ever going to get.”

  “You could keep your fucking job,” I said. “And then those idiots who idolize my father for all they think he did would see him for who he really was.”

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean they would see me for who I really am.”

  He rose and took two long steps to stand in front of me. It would have taken me four to reach the same point. He slid both hands up my arms and cupped my face, forcing me to look at him. It was arguably the most painful thing I’d done all day. I was both bitterly angry and terribly, inconsolably sad.

  “It’s over,” he said, meeting my gaze. “It’s been over for twenty-two years. What you know of your father, what you know of me; hell, Casey, what you know of yourself, none of that is the truth. It’s just what you believe right now. It’s what gets you through. Who your father was hasn’t changed. It’s only you who changes.”

  His hands were hot against my cheeks and he leaned down, very slowly, and kissed my lips. Not with passion, but with compassion.

  “I don’t want to change,” I said against his mouth, sounding like a two year-old. The space between my shoulders and my neck throbbed as if I’d thrown something over and over.

  “You know they never proved that Pete Rose bet against his own team,” he said, dropping his hands from my face and stepping back. He looked weary. “Something doesn’t have to be the truth to be reality.”

  “Fuck this,” I said. “Fuck you and my father. All of you conspired so beautifully to turn something rotten into some noble act of self-sacrifice. It was, and it always has been, about him.”

  Ben sank back down onto the steps, his face slumped and defeated. “I never thought you would know. He said he would never tell anyone. I don’t understand why he had to tell you.”

  “I guess because it’s the fucking truth,” I said and he looked up.

  “Maybe he thought you deserved that,” he said quietly. “Maybe that was his gift to you.”

  “I’d rather have had the damn house,” I said and he snorted and looked away. “I believed in him. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be the sort of person I thought he was.”

  “Have you succeeded?” he asked sharply. I moved back toward the stairs, to where he sat, waiting. “Are you happy, Casey?”

  “No,” I said, honest through exhaustion. It was so damn hot. The world seemed to pulse, to buzz with heat and motion. I wanted to close my eyes, but that wouldn’t block out the noise. “But then hey, I just came from a fucking funeral.”

  He nodded and seemed to be examining his feet, dusty in a pair of slightly dull wingtips he’d probably had for years. It reminded me of the story my father used to tell me when we’d see a peacock at the zoo. “Do you know why they scream like that?” he would say, “because they’re so beautiful, and then they look down and see their ugly feet.”

  “Well, I’m happy,” Ben said finally, stretching his legs. “I’m selfishly delighted to have told you all of this. I’ve wanted to tell someone, anyone, for years.”

  “I’m so glad I could be of service,” I said. He looked at me with a sort of amused affection, and then he smiled.

  “I might have a bottle of wine somewhere in the house. The faculty gave it to me last year. They haven’t figured out I don’t drink yet. Want to go inside and get drunk?”

  The idea of it made my stomach roll.

  “When was the last time you were drunk?” I asked.

  “Seventeen years
ago,” he answered immediately.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to go inside and get drunk.”

  “Want to just come inside?”

  “Do you have any more root beer? I need something stronger than this,” I told him, gesturing to my water.

  He nodded and helped me to stand up. As we walked inside, I noticed he finished the contents of my glass.

  The kitchen was not hotter than it was outside, merely darker and smaller. The old house and the surrounding swamp kept the air circulating. This place was built in a time before the climate could be regulated; when Southerners were a hardy, scrappy breed, rather than willowy groups of elderly women driving from one artificially cooled building to another in crocheted cotton cardigans.

  Ben handed me a glass and a bottle of root beer, dripping with condensation the moment it left the fridge. A fan rustled in the hallway, blowing interior air in slow circles around the ground floor. I rolled the bottle over my forehead, over my paper-thin eyelids until my eyes were washed in white light. Ben stood at the sink, unbuttoning his shirt and running the faucet until the water was finally coming from somewhere deep in the bottom of the cistern, somewhere cool as earth. Another layer of sweltering cloth dispensed with, and he was left in a plain white t-shirt, a jarring contrast with the rich, dark wool of the suit pants.

  I watched as he filled his cupped hands and brought the water to his face. He scrubbed his skin with his fingers, then patted his face dry with a handful of paper towels. It was a peculiarly masculine ritual. He left the water running and slowly washed his hands, cooling the pulse points of his wrists. “Come here, and take off your jacket” he said, without turning around. Slipping the dark wool off, I laid it carefully over the back of one of the chairs. The heat rushed in to slip around me, disguising itself as air. When I was standing beside him, he took the bottle from me and set it on the counter, then grasped both my hands and pulled them under the water with his own. I could see the fine, white line of the end of his career running up the dark skin of his arm, disappearing into his t-shirt.