My Busboy

by John Inman

  Anyway, back to real life. It was Saturday. Dario had the weekend free. He had even made it a point to tell me he had the weekend free. All I had to do was take that information and run with it. I’d have to get my car out of storage. I’d have to buy some groceries on the way up to the cabin. Maybe some beer. Maybe some condoms.

  That last thought sent my blood pressure soaring. My fingers started to shake before I ever touched the keyboard.

  I typed, Spend the weekend with me at my cabin. I’ll pick you up.

  He typed back, I don’t know what to say.

  I answered, Say yes.

  Nothing happened. No answer. I stared at my computer screen. I stared at it some more. I refreshed the page. I glanced over at my AT&T connection to make sure all the little green lights were on. I refreshed the page again. I chewed my thumbnail down to the quick and growled at the cat.

  Just as I was considering hurling myself off the balcony for overstepping my bounds and scaring the poor guy to death, he typed back one word.

  Yes.

  CHAZ ACCEPTED my explanation that I was heading to the cabin to wrap my head around the new book. When you’re a writer, that lie always works. Don’t want to go to dinner? Blame the book. Don’t want to go to church? Blame the book. Don’t want to be bothered by anybody ever again? Blame the book. Works like a charm.

  Chaz asked if I would like some company, and I told him no, I’d rather be alone. He didn’t like it, but he accepted it. Only the jubilation of knowing Dario would actually be going with me kept me from feeling guilty about turning Chaz’s overture down. Poor Chaz. He really needed to fall in love with somebody else. He was starting to get on my nerves.

  I threw a few clothes in a suitcase, along with a dozen pens, a stack of legal pads, and a bag of Friskies. The minute Clutch saw me drag the cat carrier out of the closet, he dove under the bed and stayed there until I fished him out with a broom. He should have known he couldn’t escape.

  I locked up the condo and lugged the suitcase and cat carrier three blocks north to the parking structure where I kept my car, with Clutch wailing and screaming all the way. I hadn’t driven my car in almost two weeks, so I held my breath as I turned the key in the ignition, wondering if it would start at all.

  It did. I blew out a sigh of relief and headed out.

  Since I’m a terrible driver with absolutely no sense of direction, I was elated to find Dario’s dormitory building on the San Diego State campus, right where he said it would be. I didn’t even get lost. Not once.

  He stood on the curb with a backpack over his shoulder, a laptop in one hand, and a bakery bag in the other. He wore blue jeans, a T-shirt with the San Diego Padres logo on the front, the holey sneakers he had worn the night before, and a Chargers baseball cap on his head, pulled low. If the hat was meant to disguise his injuries, it was doing a lousy job of it. Before I had even stopped the car, I could see Dario’s lip was swollen even more than it had been the night before, and his eye wasn’t looking much better either. The bruise from his shiner had spread to encompass half his cheek. My temper flared just looking at it. Fighting with your boyfriend because he has to work is one thing. But inflicting injuries like this was nothing short of criminal.

  I didn’t give the guy as much credit as Dario apparently did. I still thought he was the one who’d decked me on the street. Why in the world would anybody else punch out a swell guy like me?

  I spread a smile across my face so Dario wouldn’t know what I was thinking. No sense getting our weekend off to a bad start by throwing a hissy fit because of the stupid actions of his ex-boyfriend. I should be happy enough he was ex. And I was. I really was.

  I pulled to the curb and leaned over the seat to pop the passenger door open.

  Dario climbed in.

  “You brought your computer,” I said.

  “Yeah. Thought maybe I might do some studying. Did you bring yours?”

  “I don’t have a laptop,” I explained, suddenly feeling inadequate.

  “How about an iPad?”

  My inadequacy ratcheted up a notch. “Nope.”

  He looked at me like I’d sprouted a dandelion off the top of my head. “What if you get the urge to write?”

  “Ever hear of paper and pen?”

  He checked his watch. “Holy shit. Did I fall through a wormhole? What year is this?”

  “Very funny.” I eyed the bakery bag in his hand with a hungry leer. “Ooh. You brought breakfast! What’d you get? Donuts? I wouldn’t mind chewing on a few donuts.”

  He gazed down at the bag in confusion, then gazed back at me. He crumpled the bag open so I could peek inside. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s my underwear.”

  For one horrible moment I came this close to saying I wouldn’t mind chewing on those either, but I stopped myself in time. Even my social ineptitude didn’t ascend to those heights.

  We chuckled about the misunderstanding. He gazed around the interior of my six-year-old Toyota sedan. “Thought you’d be driving a Lamborghini.”

  “It’s in the shop with the Lotus.”

  “I should have known.” His black eye was on my side, which was a little disconcerting. Unless he stared at me head on, I couldn’t see if he had his eyes open at all. I could see the muted smile on his face, however. It was muted because he was obviously trying not to tear open the scab that had formed to hold his lip together.

  A plaintive wail came from behind us. Dario struggled inside his seat belt to turn around far enough to see Clutch, sitting on the backseat, imprisoned inside his cat carrier.

  Dario’s one workable eye lit up. “You brought the cat!”

  I stretched my neck until I could see Clutch in the rearview mirror. I half expected to see him shoot me the finger through the mesh. Clutch hated the cat carrier. He probably connected the dots all the way back to the day he’d had his nuts removed at the vet’s.

  “I couldn’t very well inflict him on anyone else,” I said. “Clutch and I are sort of a package deal. It’s almost biblical. Wherever I goest, he goest.”

  Dario stared at me. His face sobered. His tongue came out with a little flick to moisten the scab on his lip. The smile that had been there a moment before had slipped away entirely.

  “Thank you for doing this,” he said. “Lee’s been calling every five minutes. It’ll be good to get away.”

  “You have a cell phone, right? No matter where you go, he’ll still be calling every five minutes.”

  “No, he won’t. I left the phone back in my room. I told my roommate if Lee shows up to tell him I moved to Jupiter. My only contact to the world for the next two days is you. And your screaming cat.”

  I couldn’t sit this close to the man another moment without making some sort of bodily contact. I just couldn’t. So I reached over and gave him a grandfatherly pat on the knee.

  “I’m glad you accepted my invitation,” I said.

  He gave me a hesitant look. Almost embarrassed. “I’m not sure how much—”

  “Hush,” I said, squeezing his knee. “I’m not asking anything of you. We’ll spend some quiet time together. Get to know each other. That okay?”

  He nodded. “If that’s what you want.”

  I tore my eyes from the road and studied him watching me. I smiled my best smile. At least I hoped it was my best smile. “It’s what you need, I think. A little downtime. A little time to heal. Inside and out. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  “Yeah. Being with you sounds good too.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. I simply redirected my attention to the road before I wrapped us around a palm tree.

  “Being with you sounds good too,” he had said. I felt another prayer coming on. Sweet Jesus, please don’t let me die until I run that through my memory banks a few more times to suck every last ounce of goodness out of it.

  The smile never left my face for the next five miles. Nor did my hand leave his knee. It couldn’t because he held it there with his own. />
  I was beginning to think my invitation to take Dario out of the city for the weekend was turning out to be one of my best decisions ever.

  His thumb moved across the back of my hand, and I tried not to swerve the car into an oncoming semi.

  We stopped at a grocery store on our way out of town and picked up some staples. Beer, scotch, wine. Then I thought I’d better buy some actual food, so I picked up an assortment of chips, candy bars, and frozen TV dinners.

  “Health food nut,” Dario said.

  “Thanks. It’s a way of life.”

  He eyed me suspiciously when I picked up a bag of preformed hamburgers. “I hope you brought along your one and only skillet.”

  “Hmm,” I said, doubtful. I had no idea if there was a skillet at the cabin or not. Taking Dario by the hand, I dragged him toward an aisle where an assortment of overpriced kitchen equipment was on display. There I happened across a skillet that cost almost as much as a lawn mower and dropped it in the cart with a clang. Then I picked up a spatula and threw that in the cart too.

  “I need ketchup,” Dario said. “Can’t have hamburgers without ketchup. And an onion. We need an onion.” A man of few demands and simple tastes. How refreshing. So we toddled off in search of ketchup and onions.

  “Need anything else?” I asked.

  Dario gave me a sweet wounded smile. With his injured face, a wounded smile was pretty much the only kind he had to offer. “Just you,” he said.

  My pulse thundered behind my eyes like a symphonic flurry of kettledrums. I wondered if I should have my blood pressure checked.

  “R-right answer,” I said, and he gave me a knowing grin.

  Chapter Seven

  “OH, WOW!” Dario exclaimed. “Your cabin’s great!”

  It was. Perched atop a rocky promontory overlooking a lunar landscape of boulders, chaparral, and endless rolling hillsides, my cabin sat at the end of a long bumpy lane with so many potholes in it I was surprised the engine hadn’t tumbled out of the car. The potholes were knee-deep in water from the recent storm, which didn’t make navigating them any easier. By the time we reached our destination, the car was dripping with mud from the bumpers to the tip of the antenna.

  A stand of pepper trees surrounded the unpainted cabin. In the daylight hours and in the proper season, those trees afforded some much-needed shade from a relentlessly beaming desert sun. But in early spring, as it was now, the air was cooler here than in the city. The elevation, about three thousand feet, made for some cold nights as well, but to my eyes that was all part of the charm of spending time here away from the bustle of downtown.

  As the car sloshed to a stop by the leaf-strewn front porch, I made it a point to check out the stock of firewood stacked at the side of the house. I had electric heaters in the cabin, but I also had a beautiful fireplace in the main room, which I looked forward to sharing with Dario as we sipped drinks and got to know each other. Happily, the cache of firewood stood against the cabin wall to almost window height, so we had plenty of fuel to get us through the weekend.

  With our arms filled with groceries and bags and Clutch’s cat carrier and cat box and a six-ton container of cat litter and Dario’s laptop and God knows what else, we stumbled and grunted our way through the front door and then dumped everything in the middle of the room.

  “Are we prepared, or what?” Dario grinned, making me grin back. “You’d think we were staying a month.”

  Don’t I wish, I thought.

  He gazed around. The place was sort of depressing at the moment, what with all the white sheets covering the furniture and the cast-iron chandelier above the scarred dining room table in the corner wrapped up in a black garbage bag so it wouldn’t get all cobwebby in my absence.

  I moved to the kitchen and plugged in the open fridge, closing the door so the cold would collect. I lit a kitchen match and bent down to light the pilot light on the stove, then proceeded to make sure the oven and burners worked.

  The A-frame’s bedroom was at the top of a staircase leading up from the kitchen. My heart did a tiny kerfuffle inside my chest at the thought of leading Dario up those stairs when it came time for bed, but I told myself I’d deal with that later. For now, I wanted us to settle in.

  Dario held the cat carrier up and peered through the mesh door. “Can I let Clutch out?” he asked. “He looks like he’s plotting a double homicide.”

  “Yeah, let him out. I’ll get the cat box ready.” I pointed to the back door where a tiny pet door opened up at the bottom, sealed now with a cover on the inside to keep out varmints. “He comes and goes as he pleases here. Last time we were here, I woke up to find a dead foot-long alligator lizard in bed with me. He was happily gnawing away at the poor thing’s tail on the pillow beside my head.”

  Dario made a face. “Yuck.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  I popped the cover off the pet door while Dario unlatched the cat carrier and set Clutch free. With a rumble in his chest, Clutch growled his way around the cabin like a grumpy old man, checking everything out before he finally found the pet door and squeaked his way outside, flashing his ass at us in contempt as he went.

  Amused, Dario watched him go. “What a charmer.”

  “He’ll be back when he gets lonely,” I said.

  To my surprise, Dario walked up to stand directly before me. He reached out and laid both hands on the sides of my arms, gazing up at me. His face was no longer shadowed beneath the Charger’s cap because he had turned the brim around to point toward the back, offering me the first unhindered view of his injuries I had had for a while. His black eye was still pretty much closed up tight, with only a teeny strip of white eyeball showing through. It was puffed up and purple underneath where the blood had collected. The bruise spreading out along his cheek had already gone to yellowish-green. I ached looking at it. His fat lip seemed a little better, but that disconcerting slash of a scab still sat there, threatening to tear open at any second.

  “Thank you for bringing me here,” he said. “I really needed to get away for a while.”

  I nodded. “I thought you might. I’m glad you accepted.”

  Taking me by surprise, he stepped closer, and folding me in his arms, he pressed his forehead to my chest. “I mean it. Thanks,” he muttered into my shirt.

  I answered by cupping the back of his head, feeling the softness of his too-long hair beneath the brim of his baseball hat. The top of his head came to just under my chin. With my other arm, I wrapped him tight and pulled him close.

  “You’re welcome,” I mumbled into the top of his hat.

  He lay against my chest for a minute, and when he finally pulled away, he plucked the hat from his head freeing his hair. Looking a little embarrassed, he gazed down at the hat in his hand, blushing sweetly. Tossing the hat onto the dining room table, he stepped back and rubbed his hands together like it was time to go to work. After taking stock of everything we had to do, he snatched up one of the grocery bags and started stocking the fridge with this and that and stuffing the TV dinners in the freezer above.

  With my heart still pounding faster than it should have been, I set up Clutch’s cat box and placed it on the porch. Then I filled a bowl with water and another bowl with dry cat food and put them on the kitchen floor by the wall, where we wouldn’t trip over them in the dark.

  As soon as our supplies were taken care of, we uncovered all the furniture, unwrapped the chandelier, and I took a rag around, dusting the surfaces, while Dario headed up the stairs to explore. I found him in the bedroom loft, standing by the stripped bed staring out at the surrounding landscape through the triangle window that rose from the head of the bed to the cabin’s A-frame roofline.

  “Looks like the best view in the house is from the bed,” he said.

  I moved to his side and stared out at the boulder-strewn hillside stretching off into the distance below. The recent rains had greened the chaparral and made the wildflowers bloom. Great sweeps of color splashed down
the slope among the green of the brush and the intermittent jagged spurs of brown rock poking up.

  “That’s why I bought the cabin,” I said, waving my arms at the panorama below. “For the privilege of waking up in the morning and looking out at all that.”

  He eyed me with a sardonic expression. “Now I’m afraid you’ll be waking up to look at this,” he said and pointed to his shiner.

  “It’s a small price to pay for having the rest of you to wake up to.”

  He gingerly touched his black eye. He seemed embarrassed by it. “Thanks, but… this doesn’t bother you?”

  “It only bothers me that it was inflicted on you to begin with. If I want something pretty to look at, I’ll concentrate on the other eye,” I said.

  A blush of red returned to his cheeks even while he gave me an incredulous look. “I really am sorry I look the way I do, but I’m glad you think half of me is still pretty.”

  “More like 95 percent. And don’t be sorry,” I said. “Just let me enjoy the view.”

  “All right,” he said softly.

  Our eyes held for a moment, before we once again stared out the window, both of us more than a little embarrassed by the guileless turn the conversation had taken. With our shoulders brushing, he slid his hand into mine, like maybe it was easier to make contact when we weren’t watching each other.

  “I’m glad we can spend some time together,” he said, his voice mellow, the rhythmic tone of it almost musical in the silence of the cabin. “I’ve been thinking about you ever since I woke up this morning. About what you did for me.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  He cocked his head and regarded me. Again, the tip of his tongue slid out from between his snowy teeth to moisten the scab on his lip. I could see it was bothering him. To my surprise, he reached up and brushed a wayward strand of hair off my forehead. For a split second, when his fingers touched me, I felt a shock, as if my skin had brushed an electric fence. Damn.