Autumn: A Crow City Side Story

by Cole McCade

  God, he had to be dreaming.

  And he must have dreamed the greasy Italian dive Joseph had taken him to. Mama Nina’s, with its red checkered tablecloths and dirty stained-glass hanging lampshades and the pervasive odor of slightly burnt tomato sauce. Joseph had tugged him inside by the hand while Wally had dug his feet in and refused; the place looked filthy, but when he’d seen the way Joseph’s face had lit up he couldn’t resist. And he relented when he tried the focaccia; the bread nearly melted in his mouth, and made him a little less wary of the tortellini in white wine sauce. And when Joseph had grinned around his cannoli and said I told you so, Wally had barely hesitated before leaning across the table and kissing the taste of marinara sauce from his lips just to shut him up.

  And Joseph had let him.

  Nearly twenty years of hate and recrimination and guilt and buried resentment, and yet tonight Joseph had kissed him back and looked at him so dazedly, as if wondering what spell Wally had cast to light the darkness between them.

  It’s not me, dearest boy.

  It’s us.

  It’s a spell we’ve cast on each other, and I only hope after the first giddy shock wears off, the darkness shan’t sweep in to drown us again.

  Joseph was giving him that look right now, as they walked down the sidewalk beneath the canopy of late evening—their hands barely clasped, loosely laced fingertips, light brushes each time their arms swung with every lazy stride. They’d left the crowd exiting the movie theatre behind, the streams of people thinning out until only a few others strolled along the street ahead and behind them, the occasional headlights sweeping past. Under the street lamps, dark brown eyes gleamed thoughtfully, and Wally struggled not to fidget, not to duck his head to hide his face. He lifted his free hand and tucked his hair behind his ear, glancing away.

  “So…” he started.

  “So…?”

  “Really? Bruce Willis films? He’s aging even more than we are.”

  “Don’t you dare.” Joseph glowered at him. “Don’t you dare knock the Bruce.”

  “Oh, pardon me. The Bruce.” Wally fluttered a hand to his chest, then laughed. “I had no idea you were such a man about such things.”

  “Oh what, now you’re going to tell me you didn’t enjoy the movie?”

  “It had its charms.”

  One of them being the arm that Joseph had slipped around his shoulders, halfway through the film. Tentative, warm, heavy, settling firmer when Wally had shifted to lean into the crook of Joseph’s body—and then lifted the arm rest between them so they sat hip to hip, thigh to thigh, shared body heat molded together and now and then a glance stolen, a promise in the parting of lips, a whisper in Wally’s heartbeat that said if not now, then soon. That whisper spoke in the depths of his heart even now, and he had to look away from Joseph before he lost all breath and ability to think.

  “It’s only fair,” he announced, “if next time, I pick the film.”

  Joseph groaned. “You’re going to make me watch a Disney film. Or more forties black-and-white musicals.”

  “You’re bloody right I am.”

  “And then you’re going to sing all the songs for a fucking week.”

  Wally grinned. “You’re bloody right I am.” At the sour, resigned look Joseph gave him, he laughed, tangling his fingers with Joseph’s until they pressed palm to palm. “Am I really such a child?”

  “You’re such a Wally. You might not be a child, but you’re filled with childlike wonder.”

  Something akin to wonder suffused Wally now, as he studied the sharp, angular planes of Joseph’s face, drinking him in now that he was allowed. No more furtive, stolen glances; no more careful avoidances; no more pretense, forced diffidence, careful distance, and for all that he had treasured every memory he’d captured over the years, they paled in comparison to being able to look into Joseph’s eyes and see something there other than hatred.

  “How do you know me so well,” he asked, “and yet I am only now learning these little things? That you love action films. That you would rather die than tolerate a mushroom in your pasta.”

  Joseph chuckled. “Mushrooms are for heathens and deeply warped people.”

  “I like mushrooms.”

  “Then you’re a heathen, and a deeply warped person.”

  “You’re such a charmer.”

  “I can be when I’m buying time to think of the right answer.” Joseph swung their hands lightly, then tilted his head back, looking up at the star-strewn sky. “I think that…I shut you out,” he mused. “Kept you at a distance. But you never shut me out. Even when I came at you with spikes and sharp edges, you were always so…open. I guess I absorbed some things through osmosis even when I tried to ignore you. Knowing you without knowing you.” He grimaced. “I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

  “Mm. It makes sense, though. Even if it’s only surface, that surface is still part of who we are. All the little things.” Wally sighed, looking up at the sky as well. In the older neighborhoods, where the streetlamps had faded and dimmed, the stars still shone bright and clearly visible in a stream of light, motes tumbling across the sky as if some god, long ago, had spilled a box of precious things and never bothered to pick them up again. “I love you, and yet you know all my little things better than I know yours. Strange, isn’t it?”

  “Our family has never done anything the normal way. Besides, I’m sure there are things I don’t know about you.”

  “Far fewer pages left blank, I would think, waiting to be filled in.”

  Joseph nudged him with his elbow. “What do you need me to fill in, then?”

  “Hmm…” Wally tapped his fingertip against his lower lip. “Favorite color.”

  “…seriously?”

  “Indulge me.”

  “Mother of pearl,” Joseph declared firmly, and Wally laughed.

  “That’s not a color. It’s a material. A substance.”

  “A substance of a particular color. There’s nothing else in the world that’s the same color.” Joseph leaned into him, pushing him with his shoulder until Wally stumbled, laughed, and leaned back, listening while Joseph continued, his voice softening but an utterly captivating smile lingering about the corners of his mouth. “My mother had a thing with collecting spoons. You know, those tiny ones you put in a display case? The kind you find at rest stops in different states? Her favorites had mother of pearl inlay on the handles. I was always fascinated by the shimmer and layers of shifting color. It’s my favorite, and that’s what you’re getting out of me.”

  “I think I can very well accept that answer.” And Wally took that answer and curled it up inside him to tuck into the chambers of his heart and keep, because rather than something Wally had taken with the mere invasiveness of his presence, it was something Joseph had given him. “Favorite food,” he pressed.

  “Omelet loaded with bacon and cheese,” Joseph countered immediately, then laughed. “I’m a simple guy. But I bet I know your favorite food without even asking.”

  “You do not.”

  “I do.” Joseph nodded decisively, a wicked glitter in his eyes. “Blueberry muffins with sugar sprinkles.”

  Wally’s ears burned. “How—?!”

  “Willow brought them home every week. You might have made them for her, but don’t tell me you didn’t make them for yourself, too.”

  “Hmph.” He stuck his tongue out at Joseph. “You don’t know my favorite color.”

  “Purple.”

  “Shut up.” Bloody hell, he hadn’t even had to pause to think. Wally snorted, looking down—and catching on their linked hands. How casual, how easy it was, the steady warmth of touch and how they walked together as if they’d been matching stride to stride for years. “This…it makes me feel strange, you know.”

  “What does?”

  “To have you finally…finally look at me. I never thought it would happen, and the circumstances are so bizarre that I hardly know what to do with them. And so I flutter and fu
ss, and ask the sort of silly questions an adolescent would ask at their first ice cream social. Favorite color. Favorite food. Astrological sign.”

  “Taurus.”

  “That was rhetorical, you facetious nit. I know when your birthday is.”

  Joseph chuckled, shoulders shaking, more relaxed than Wally had seen him in decades. “You make teasing you too easy.”

  “You seem to like doing that.”

  “I seem to like a lot of things I hadn’t expected to like about this.” Joseph trailed off, exhaling, then turned his head to meet Wally’s eyes. “I’ve known a lot of different kinds of happiness, Walford. I won’t act like my life has been nothing but misery just because my wife jilted me, my daughter disappeared, and my body’s failing me. I’ve known the happiness of loving parents. The triumph of pursuing a career I’d always wanted. The simple pleasure of hours working on a problem only I could solve, and creating something new no one had ever seen before. The exhilaration of falling in love for the first time. The stunning, overwhelming joy of seeing my daughter born, and watching her grow up.” He stroked his thumb over Wally’s knuckles. “But every kind of happiness is different. None of them can be compared to each other, but I’m too old to play the young, fickle thing and not grasp on to happiness where I find it. This…this is something new. Strange and unusual and unique. And I don’t know where it’s going to go, how long it will last, if it will last, if tomorrow we’ll be shouting at each other and calling this the worst idea we’ve ever had. Or if, one day, this could turn into something, given time.”

  He smiled—a small thing, but it warmed his eyes in a way that took Wally back twenty years. To that night when Miriam had singled Joseph out from the crowd and dragged him over to meet Wally, her eyes bright and her cheeks flushed with the thrill of conquest, her hair disarrayed and her breaths coming fast. She’d wanted to show off her new toy, and she’d nearly pushed Joseph—young and handsome with a clean, sharp jaw and a wild thatch of boyishly disarrayed hair, his shoulders broad and his forearms tight and his touch firm and capable—forward to shake Wally’s hand. He’d grinned with youthful innocence, so unaware of the crushing pressure, the pain, the heartbreak the years would bring, and said Hey. I’m Joseph, never Joe. Nice to meet you. Great show.

  And Wally had slipped his hand into Joseph’s and ignored the spark that lit through him, tingling through his bloodstream, when he already knew this boy, this lovely boy barely a man, looked at him and saw only a caricature, a formality, an accessory to the bright flame at his side. Joseph had looked at Miriam as if he would gladly let her consume him and burn him to pieces, and Wally had sighed inside and wondered why, this time, it ached so deeply.

  Yet now, it was Wally Joseph looked at that way. Wally on the receiving end of that dark, penetrating gaze that took him in as if Joseph would fling himself into the welling waters of Wally’s trembling emotions and gladly drown, and Wally couldn’t breathe for the intensity of it, rocking through him and shaking him until he felt unmoored from the earth and moved with the turn and spin of the world, threatening to shake him loose and send him into the sky.

  “But I know I like it,” Joseph finished. “I like feeling this way. With you.”

  “I…” Wally could hardly find his voice, his throat knotting up, and he swallowed roughly. “You’re going to bloody well make me come over all faint. Stop it.”

  Joseph ducked his head with another laugh. “Gracious as always.”

  “Hmph.”

  The silence that settled carried with it, for once, a sense of contentment. So different from the shrill and heavy silences of before, so often rife with brimming anger—and Wally was happy to let that sense of contentment carry him forward on drifting strides, his thoughts wandering in winding paths that led them closer and closer to Joseph’s house. Many of those thoughts wandered around curiosities, questions, and he tried to hold them in but a part of him needed to fill in so many gaps—not only in his knowledge of Joseph, but in himself.

  “Joseph…?” he asked tentatively.

  Joseph lifted his head, eyes focusing and fixing on Wally. “Hm?”

  “What was it like, having a family? What were your parents like?”

  Joseph blinked, surprise briefly crossing his features, before they relaxed into thoughtfulness. “Kind,” he said after a few long moments. “I’m not sure what else to say. You might not have thought it to look at them at first, when they were dour and stolid and practical, but…they were kind. My parents were industry people. West Virginia coal miners, at first, and then my mother got pregnant and told my father he was quitting the job for something safer. That she wasn’t raising their first child alone when he got crushed in a mine collapse.” He laughed, low and fond at the edges with memories that made Wally jealous, when he had never known anything remotely close. “My mom was a force to be reckoned with. She said something happened, and it did. So they followed the coal to Crow City, and those old refineries. They’re closed down now, but back then…” He shook his head. “Dad came home every day with his cheeks smudged black, and my mother would wipe them every day. Always handkerchiefs, too, even if they’d get so stained, sooner or later they’d never wash clean. Paper towels were too scratchy, she said. She once told me—real quiet, you know, like it was a secret between Mama and her baby boy—that that was how she told him she loved him. She wasn’t the sort to say it out loud. She didn’t want to hurt him with a scratchy paper towel, so she used and washed and mended and replaced those handkerchiefs because she loved him enough to want something soft on his skin.” With a sheepish laugh, Joseph rubbed his hand to the back of his neck. “Sounds silly when you say it out loud as an adult.”

  “Sounds like love.” The kind of love Wally understood all too well, when sometimes he didn’t know what to do other than to do. To do everything possible, because he didn’t know how else to give that emotion to the people he cared for. “Sometimes love is in the little intimacies. The small things you do without fanfare, without proclamations. Love isn’t all grand gestures, pomp, and circumstance.”

  “Weird to hear that from you.”

  “Love of performance is not a performance of love.” Wally drifted to walk a little closer to Joseph, just to feel his warmth—their warmth, mingling and melding until they walked in the bubble of heat they made together. “Where are your parents now?”

  “Passed on.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s…one of those things that happens. Most people have to face it sooner or later.” Joseph shrugged, his head bowed, as he kicked a few steps, sending loose bits of pavement skittering. “Dad didn’t get out of the coal mines fast enough. Black lung. Lung cancer. For mom it was a car crash, a few years after. She was stubborn about things; she was starting to get cataracts, but you’d think I’d wanted to put her in a home, when I suggested she shouldn’t drive anymore and recommended cataract surgery.” A bitter sound that wasn’t quite a laugh, humorless and dark. “I did want to put her in a home, when I realized how bad her eyes were getting. My home. It wasn’t long after Willow was born, and it would’ve been nice to have my family all together where I could take care of everyone. Mom was bumping into things all the time, bruising and cutting herself up. But every time I pushed at her, she would put her foot down and tell me to mind my own business, because she wasn’t helpless.”

  “Seems as though I know her son,” Wally murmured, and squeezed Joseph’s hand. He remembered, then, the dark shadows under Joseph’s eyes all those years ago, the red lining of tears, and yet Wally hadn’t known, ever and always on the outside. It was strange to connect those dots so much later, to fill in the blanks of a life he’d only been allowed to observe from outside the window. “Do you blame yourself?”

  “Sometimes. If I’d pushed her a little harder…” Joseph sighed. “…it wouldn’t have done a damned bit of good. Mom always made her own decisions, and always believed in living with the consequences. Or dying with them.” But after a shor
t hesitation, Joseph returned that squeeze, his hand enveloping Wally’s fingers. “Miss her, though.”

  “We both spend a great deal of our lives missing people.”

  “Yeah. We do.” Joseph offered a faint smile. “But we’re here.”

  “That we are.” Wally glanced up as they rounded a familiar corner, letting his strides slow. “And it seems we are here, too.” Standing in front of the gate outside Joseph’s house, the windows dark and the weathered eaves casting shadows with the night. “I suppose I must let you go. No more sleeping on your floor.”

  Joseph laughed, leaning against the fence. “You need a bed, Wally. Your bed.”

  “Such practicality.” Wally leaned against the fence as well, looking down at Joseph. Under the street lamps he looked decades younger, and even if Wally admired the strength and dignity that years had chiseled into Joseph’s features…in this moment, he could pretend that that time had never passed. That this was still those breathless days of late summer, when the circus fluttered through Crow City on the breeze like an early autumn leaf and for a few foolish beats of his heart he’d hoped to salvage something pure before his sister left this man as bitter and shattered as all the others.

  “So…” he said, and Joseph chuckled, tilting his head back to look up at him.

  “So.”

  “Would a goodnight kiss be too untoward?”

  “It might be a little scandalous.” Joseph leaned closer with a conspiratorial whisper, arching both brows. “Just don’t ask to come in. I’m a cad, you know. A very wise man told me so.”

  “Did he, now.” God, Wally couldn’t resist when Joseph looked at him that way, leaned into him, drawing him to sway closer as if hooked and reeled and played on a line. “Should I fear for my virtue?”

  “Maybe.” Joseph smirked. “But not tonight. I don’t put out on the first date.”

  Wally sighed. “Oh really, Joseph. Must you be so crass? You’re ruining the—”