Sidecar

by Amy Lane

  “Are we going to get to go there?” Casey asked, looking at Joe with shining eyes, and Joe smiled back a little.

  “Yeah—my mom got us tickets to go see The Nutcracker at Rockefeller Center. We’ll probably spend a day or two in The City.” (Funny how The City changed shape on the West Coast. Joe had always thought San Francisco was a lot more intimate than New York, but that didn’t mean he wanted to drive there a lot now either.)

  “Ballet?” Casey’s wrinkled nose was very adolescent, and Joe chuckled a little and then swallowed again because they’d started their descent. He really hated air travel—he’d forgotten how the cabin’s pressurization made your skin feel horrible and tight and your feet swell and just caused general discomfort. He was glad they’d abolished smoking on the plane—when he’d flown out to school in ’78, the smell had almost made him sick, but not much else had changed in the intervening fourteen years. Besides, the airline had just gone smoke-free, and the smell still lingered.

  “Don’t knock it,” Joe said, smiling a little. “The Nutcracker is the one ballet you’ve heard all the music to—you’ll enjoy it.”

  “Will you?” Casey turned to him curiously, and Joe summoned a smile.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll love it. Jeannie always loved it. It’s sort of a sentimental favorite.”

  Casey’s eyebrows—really dark, in spite of the sandy gold of his hair—furrowed, and he looked at Joe curiously. He and Alvin had moved all their stuff in the week before the plane took off, and Casey had been sleeping in Joe’s bed for a week straight. It wasn’t long enough to ease that deep terror Joe still harbored that he wasn’t in the house, that somehow, Joe had lost him again when he hadn’t been looking. Alvin was there now, enjoying having the place to himself, and watching the dogs, which was a plus. Joe had planned to have one of the neighbor kids—one of the ones he could hear playing basketball at night—come watch the animals, but Alvin was a hell of a lot more convenient.

  “When was the last time you went home?” Casey asked, like it had just dawned on him.

  “Nineteen eighty-six,” Joe said promptly.

  Casey frowned again. “So, the Christmas right before….”

  “Right before we met, yes.”

  “Why haven’t you gone back? I mean, if you didn’t want to take me, I was old enough to stay alone?”

  Joe looked at him and shook his head. “Like I was ever going to leave you alone,” he muttered.

  “I was a good kid!” Casey protested, and Joe nodded.

  “You were! But you didn’t deserve to be left alone. And I wasn’t going to subject you to my family, either.”

  “Your mom sounds nice.”

  Joe sighed and tried to unpop his ears again. “My mom is nice. She could be one of the nicest, kindest, most tolerant human beings on the face of the planet.”

  “Then the problem is?”

  “Kid, just look at the view, okay? You’ll meet them soon enough.”

  Casey sighed. “Are you ever going to stop calling me ‘kid’?”

  Joe looked at him sideways and smiled. “Give it fifty years. Maybe.”

  Casey shrugged and watched that skyline grow nearer and nearer, and Joe watched Casey light up with the adventure of it all.

  JOE’S brothers were there at the airport, all three of them. Peter, David, and Paul. They were all clean-cut men in their forties and late thirties, with Christmas sweaters and parkas and leather gloves, who shook Joe manfully by the hand and helped him pick up his luggage. Joe introduced Casey as his roommate, and Peter—the oldest—frowned a little, David rolled his eyes, and Paul winked. Paul was the youngest—apparently someone had filled him in on the roommate code of gay men, and he didn’t give a ripe shit. Joe decided right then and there that he’d always loved Paul best.

  Casey insisted on carrying his own suitcase—it was hard to miss. Joe had taken him out shopping for luggage right after finals, and he’d come back with purple.

  “Really? Purple luggage, mustard trim?”

  “I want people to know who I am.”

  “I know who you are, and who you are is not purple. Lime green on a black T-shirt, maybe, but not purple.”

  Casey had scowled at him. “They don’t have lime green with black, Joe. I want your family to know us. For all I know, this is the last time you’ll take me to see them!”

  Joe looked at him in horror. “For shit’s sake, why would you think that?”

  Casey blushed, there in the luggage department of Montgomery Ward. “I’m assuming they’re not going to want me back.”

  “Oh, fat chance. My mother’s going to want to adopt you.”

  But Casey’s blush didn’t go away. “As long as no one assumes that’s what you’re doing. And that’s why I want the purple luggage.”

  “Awesome, Casey. Seriously, seriously awesome. Bitchin’. Rad.” And then Joe went and plunked down four hundred dollars on what he would forever think of as “I’m having sex with Joe” luggage.

  And now Casey clutched his purple luggage suspiciously and waited for Joe’s family to say something heinous, like his own family had. Joe could forgive him for that. Being called an abomination for bringing your boyfriend to your father’s funeral wasn’t going to fade fast, was it?

  But Joe’s family was who they always had been. Joe sent them letters, took their phone calls, sent them baby gifts—they may have never thought about the gay thing, and, well, it looked like Peter was going to have the grim big-brother talk with Joe when they were in private, but in spite of Joe’s personal disappointment in God, his family continued to use their lives and their treatment of other people as an example of God’s plan for the world.

  Joe had never been so proud of them.

  His brothers talked about kids and family and work. Peter was a cardiologist, David was a pediatrician, and Paul was a history teacher. They updated Joe on Mom and Dad, both of whom were aging nicely and staying incredibly active. They complained about their kids (Peter had four; David and Paul each had three) and praised their wives. (This, Joe thought, was why they were all still married.) They cracked the occasional dirty joke (and didn’t look at Casey to blush even once) and picked on Cheryl unmercifully. The only thing that would have made that funnier was if she had actually been in the car.

  “No, no, no!” Paul said enthusiastically, turning to Joe, Casey, and David in the backseat. “No. You had to hear her, little bro. So her kid has his finger up his nose—like, you know, every kid in the history of kids in the history of fucking history, and she turns to me and says, ‘He’s very tactile. We think he’s gifted.’”

  Casey, who had been enjoying their banter for most of the trip, hid his face in Joe’s shoulder and guffawed, and Joe choked back a snicker.

  “No!” David said on the other side of Casey. “That’s not the best part! The best part is, Caleb pulls out like… like… I swear, I see sick kids every freakin’ day, and I’ve never seen a booger this size. It was epic! It was the great wall of booger on this kid’s finger—”

  “David!” Peter winced, pained. “Do you talk to your patients like this?”

  “Yes, Peter, yes I do, and they love me. So anyway, Joe, this kid pulls out this booger and Paul says, ‘Oh my word, Cheryl. Is that a gift too?’”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Paul affirmed, keeping his body twisted around in the car. “And right at that moment, Cheryl pulls out a Kleenex, because, I don’t know, she keeps them in her sleeve like Nana used to, and she goes after the thing, and suddenly Caleb realizes what she’s doing, and lets out a shriek and says, ‘It’s mine!’ and takes off through the house, the great wall of booger just dangling from his finger. Cheryl goes tearing after him, and by then, David and I are—”

  “Oh God… Lisa too—that’s Paul’s wife, Casey—she was laughing so hard she literally sat down on the floor, and David sat down with her, and the whole time, we can hear Cheryl pounding around in the upstairs of Mom and Dad’s house, screaming—”

  And Paul and
David chimed in for the finale, “Caleb, you come back here with that thing before you lose it!”

  Joe lost it completely, and so did Casey, laughing until they couldn’t breathe as Peter made his way—soberly and responsibly—through the snow-clogged roads.

  They’d cleared La Guardia and The City by now and were up near Harriman State Park, and when they finally calmed down, Casey looked around him and gasped.

  “Joe—Joe, there’s no city. It’s… it’s all hills. And there’s snow—I mean, not that shitty stuff they had on the ground at La Guardia but—”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, happy. It was pretty country here. The towns were crowded, but they were also intimate, and the country between them was often rural and rolling. “It’s pretty.”

  “Not as pretty as Foresthill,” Casey said loyally, and Joe put his hand on Casey’s knee.

  “No,” he said quietly and squeezed. He felt it then, the thing he’d known when he’d given in to Casey so young. Casey would want to see the rest of the world. Joe might want to go sometimes, but Casey… Casey wanted to see it all. Joe had listened that night after he’d put Sunshine in Casey’s care, and he’d heard Casey talk about the things he wanted to do or see. Being locked up in Foresthill with Joe was not part of those things.

  “Hey,” Peter said like he hadn’t noticed they were having a moment, “since we’re getting close, we actually do need to talk about Cheryl.”

  “What about her?” Paul rolled his eyes a lot when he talked. Joe wondered if it was a symptom of working with teenagers.

  “You know!” Peter was shaking his head in the mirror and looking at Casey significantly, and it was David who let out the exasperated snort.

  “Yeah, Joe? You know how Mom was all excited because Cheryl’s husband is actually a Quaker too? Well it seems he’s been going to the meetings of that branch with the stick up their asses, and she wants to talk you into screwing women instead of Casey.”

  Paul laughed and put his hand over his mouth, and Peter got that long-suffering look he used to get when he had to be in charge and the two of them wouldn’t stop fighting—or putting things that moved in Cheryl’s bed.

  “Nice, David. Real nice. I can’t believe people let you around children.”

  “I can’t believe people let you have children,” David sassed—as much as a thirty-eight-year-old man could sass. “There should be a law against being too boring for words.”

  “In high school it’s called Social Darwinism.” Paul snickered, and then, like they shared the same brain (which Joe had always suspected growing up), Paul and David stopped laughing and sobered.

  “Just remember, Joe, we’ve got your back. Mom and Dad got your back. Cheryl and Chris, they’re just two small voices, nattering away in a cave.”

  “Jesus, Paul,” David said with admiration, “that was almost poetry.”

  “Well,” Paul said, trying to look humble, “I do like to read.”

  The brothers busted up again, and the atmosphere in the car lightened, but Joe remembered Cheryl. They should have been best friends—she was only a few years older than he was—but Jeannie had loved him best, and Cheryl? Well, as an adult, he could figure that she’d probably felt left out, but that wasn’t how she’d been as a kid. As a kid, she’d been an insufferable tattletale, like the entire focus of her identity was on being “the good one.” He’d never really thought Cheryl was that good, but she sure did seem to know a lot about following rules. Joe had developed an antipathy toward rules after Jeannie died, and so whatever relationship he might have had with his remaining sister seemed to have been doomed from the time he turned seven.

  But he put her out of his mind for the rest of the three-hour trip to their little suburb outside of Bethel. He wanted to hear from his brothers, share in their families, and reconnect. He wanted Casey to meet them, and know where he came from, and see that families didn’t always have to mean pain.

  And Casey was with him, hanging on their every word, especially when they told stories about their childhood. Joe squirmed a lot because the way his brothers remembered it, he was a hell-raiser, when it hadn’t seemed that way at all.

  “It was a perfectly logical thing to do,” Joe said, blushing, and Casey leaned forward so he could look up into Joe’s face.

  “Oh my God, you’re blushing!” Casey brought wondering fingertips to Joe’s cheeks, and Joe snatched his hand—but not roughly.

  “It wasn’t the way they tell it at all,” Joe protested, and even Peter egged him on.

  “Yeah, Josiah, tell us how it really happened?”

  “Okay, for starters, I did not steal Dad’s car.”

  “No?” Paul arched his eyebrows, and Joe soldiered on.

  “I told him Cheryl wanted to use it, and he said yes, so that’s why I took it.”

  “You were twelve,” Peter said grimly, and Joe turned to Casey a little desperately.

  “This wasn’t that big a deal back then—not out in the country,” he said. “We knew kids who were driving all the time—it’s not like California right now, okay?”

  Casey laughed a little, indulgently. “I’m not going to go out and commit a crime, Joe. Finish the story!”

  “Okay, what you didn’t know was that they were going to use those rabbits for food—”

  “Those rabbits belonged to the Wilsons!” Paul protested. “They could have used them for underwear! That still doesn’t explain—”

  “But their son, Barry—you remember him?”

  “Yeah.” Paul nodded. “I remember.”

  “Well, he’d raised them from hand. He’d bottle-fed them. So he comes to me, all upset about how his pet bunnies are going to end up on a spit that night, and I… well, I did lie to Dad, but I got use of the car, and that’s why I stole the rabbits.”

  Casey looked at him curiously. “Okay, I get that. But the rest of it?”

  Joe shrugged. “Well, I managed to get the hutch into the car and even managed to clean out the car, but I couldn’t keep the hutch next to the house, because it was filthy. So I pulled the rabbits out and put them in the bathtub so I could hose off the hutch and put it down in the basement, where it’s nice and warm, right?”

  “And you put the rabbits in the bathtub,” Casey giggled, “about ten minutes before—”

  They finished together. “Cheryl took a bath.”

  Joe nodded. “The dumb thing was, she thought I’d done it on purpose—because that bathroom led straight to her room, and suddenly the little fuckers were everywhere, eating her clothes, shitting on her bed, eating her homework… oh God. She was not going to forgive me for that!”

  Paul and David were still laughing, but they did sober enough for Paul to say, “She had it out for you from the very beginning. I swear, if Jeannie hadn’t been there when you were born, she would have smothered you with a pillow.”

  Joe shrugged. “She was jealous. I mean, I loved that Jeannie loved me, but… it must have been pretty lonely, you know?”

  “Not with a bed full of rabbits,” Casey cracked gently, and the conversation went on.

  When they finally arrived at the three-story, two-wing house that had been Joe’s childhood home, Casey seemed… incredibly permanent, somehow. He was so very attached to Joe’s family now. He knew their stories, he knew some of their secrets—Joe could almost believe that Casey would keep him forever and ever.

  For the remainder of the trip, Joe managed to persuade himself that he could trust in this, trust in Casey, trust in the two of them. It was sort of a Christmas gift to himself.

  JOE’S mother and father seemed to have shrunk in the last six years. They’d grown smaller and grayer, and Joe tried not to be dismayed when he had to hunch over to hug Celia Daniels. Her hair was cut short—had been since he was small—and very practically, above her ears, and it had grown a little sparser in the intervening years. But her arms were still strong around his shoulders, and her smile when she turned to Casey was nothing short of luminous.

 
His mother always glowed like that. He was relieved to see that, at least, hadn’t changed. Griffin Daniels was a little shorter as well, but his chest was still broad; his shoulders might have hunched a little, but his eyes were still fine and brown and sharp under frightening eyebrows, ready to attack like vultures. Joe hugged him, and didn’t feel any difference from his usual hug. There were no uncomfortable looks at Casey or back to Joe again. There was only the same steady, honest affection Joe had grown up with, and Casey’s hand snaked into Joe’s and clenched tight as Joe made introductions.

  “Was your drive in all right?” Mom asked, and Casey suddenly spoke up.

  “It was beautiful,” he said reverently. “I can see why Joe sort of hides up in the hills in California. If he grew up used to all this, he probably needs it!”

  Celia laughed, and Joe blushed a little. “I’m glad you love it,” she said softly. “We were really sorry to see Josiah move, but it’s nice that he’s found something not too far from his roots.”

  “I like roots,” Joe mumbled, and Casey slid that arm around his waist and squeezed.

  “Good,” Casey said dryly. “Because they seem to have grown you into a hella big tree!”

  There was general laughter all around, and then Joe and Casey got to put their luggage in their room.

  “We get our own room?” Casey asked excitedly as they tromped up the stairway.

  Joe’s expression grew pained. “Don’t expect to be having sex in it,” he warned. “My parents’ house. I mean, uhm….”

  Casey grimaced. “No, wasn’t planning on it. I’m just glad we got it—it’s like, official grown-up stuff!”

  “Good. I’m glad you’re feeling like an official grown-up, because Cheryl and her family should be back after dinner, and we’re going to have to have our big boy panties on if we’re going to make it through that without strangling her.”

  Casey raised his eyebrows. “Ooh… big boy panties. I didn’t know that was your kink!”