Casey's Home (13 page)

“You aren’t going to State?” he
asked, surprised.

“No,” I said. “Lee and Dad are
there. I guess I wanted to go somewhere different.”

“Oh,” he said, and there was
something unplaceable in his face.

Jake pulled down a darkened road
I recognized as the road to the lake.

“What are we doing here?” I
whispered.

“Just stopping for a minute,” he
said, and pulled to a complete, deadened stop in the parking lot.

“Oh,” I squeaked.

And for a moment, it really
seemed like that was all we were there for. Jake and I sat and stared out at
the black surface of the water, his hand still and warm on my thigh. I would
have given anything at that time to have been just slightly more experienced.
Just slightly.

In the end, I didn’t need it. He
leaned over, very slowly, like he was listing, until he was a few inches from
my face.

“You sure look nice,” he whispered.

“Thanks,” I whispered back, my
tongue feeling huge in my own mouth. “So do you.”

“Mmm,” he murmured and pressed
forward.

I had been kissed, as I’ve said,
before. But that had been mostly fumbling around in a darkened closet with a
boy I liked only enough to have agreed to it in the first place. It was not
like this. Jake’s mouth was warm and slick and his tongue felt hot as it
scraped against my own. I wasn’t overcome, exactly, but it was nice. We kissed
for a few minutes, Jake’s hand never straying somewhere on the list of
off-limit places, but skirting them carefully.

This is the most erotic thing
I’ve ever done, I thought, and it seemed profoundly true, at the time.

He pulled away at last, his lips
moist and very, very red. I was stunned for a moment by how lovely he was in
the limited light from the fading sun.

“You want something to drink?” he
asked.

“Ok,” I replied, butterflies
still churning my stomach.

“Great,” he said, sliding back
into his seat and gunning the engine. “I know a great little diner near here.
We can grab something and then go to the dance, ok?”

“Ok,” I repeated.

The diner was just that, a little
roadside place with a few cars out in front and a neon “open” sign in the
window by the door. It wasn’t so bad, but entering in our fancy clothes, I felt
like a socialite at a biker bar. Jake seemed to know a couple people there, the
sort of older boys who looked like they’d never been to high school, much less
a dance. They slapped his hand as he passed and leered at me in a way that made
me want to cover myself with one of the big plastic-laminated menus stacked in
trays at the end of each booth.

Jake selected a booth and we sat
opposite one another. Drumming his fingers on the table, he was shifting and
grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“Isn’t this place great?” he
asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s great.” Not
what I pictured for my damn prom night, but then, until the day he asked me
out, I hadn’t pictured a prom night at all, so what the hell.

Jake ordered a beer and I got a
strawberry shake from the waitress, which seemed to disappoint him for a
moment. I began to think that perhaps I was supposed to get drunk now, but that
seemed totally ludicrous, since I still wanted to go to the dance.

“So Casey,” he said, leaning
across the table a bit and taking my hands. “It must be cool to have such a
famous dad.”

“It’s all right,” I hedged. I
hadn’t gone out tonight to talk about him.

“Just all right? Damn, I would
give anything to have him for a father. I swear, the man is a legend, you
know?”

“So they tell me,” I said,
withdrawing one hand to get a sip of water.

“So they tell you? Jesus...” He
leaned back, releasing me completely. “You must follow the games.”

“I don’t really anymore.”

“Right,” he said, seeing right
through me. “I bet you watch baseball every night, especially if your dad’s
playing.”

I shrugged, wanting to talk about
anything other than this. A terrible realization had begun to dawn on me, but I
pushed it back and smothered it thoroughly with the strawberry milkshake, which
arrived at that moment.

“When I get to State next year,”
Jake said. “I’m going to be in the starting line-up. I know it.”

“Freshman never get to be in the
starting line-up.”

“Well,” he said, grinning and
waving his beer, “you’re looking at the first exception to the rule.”

“We’ll see,” I said primly,
sipping my shake and wishing we could just get somewhere, anywhere, and start
kissing again.

“Yep, you will.” He pointed the
bottle in my direction and downed it in one long drink. “When I get to State,
you can come watch the games, cheer me on. You can say to everyone: ‘See,
that’s Jake Munsey, and he’s the first freshman to get out of the dugout since
my dad started coaching.’”

“Jake,” I said, feeling that same
realization work its slick way up past my shake, “How come you never, you know,
talked to me before?” I had just quickly examined the last four years for even
a moment when Jake had shown the slightest interest in me, and damn, there
wasn’t one.

“Well...” he paused, looking at
me closely. “I guess I just never had the courage to.”

“What?” I said. “Jake, I’m not
exactly the most popular girl in school.”

He smiled. “I’ve never understood
that, you know? I mean, with your dad, you should be.”

Damnit, damnit, damnit, I
thought. Never in my life had I wanted so badly to put my head down on the
table and just cry. Not because Jake had done anything horrible, since he
hadn’t, not really. Nothing more horrible than asking me out to get in good
with my father.

Live with it, part of me
screamed. This is your chance! Look at him! He’s gorgeous, he’s rich, he’s
talented (sort of), he’s sexy, and he’s fully prepared to date you. You! He
kissed you, and you liked it. So did he. Isn’t that enough?

I knew my brain was lying to me.
I tried to picture Jake, years from now, looking at this with anything other
than a greedy eye, and I couldn’t. But then, I reminded myself, what did I
know? So this wasn’t what I had pictured. Was it any worse than Jake asking me
out simply because he liked my body, or the way I wore my hair? Did he have to
love me for my mind right now, or should I take his attraction at face value
and see where it led? You don’t date, my head shouted, so you don’t know. Maybe
it isn’t always wine and roses. Maybe it never is.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” I
whispered, and stood up. He smiled up at me, lounging against the vinyl booth,
all big hands and strong, lean muscles. It would help, I thought frantically,
if my hormones weren’t firing like bottle rockets in my head.

The bathrooms at the diner were
prefaced by a small hall, complete with the requisite pay phone and
graffiti-strewn wall. Inside was not much better, a single stall with a
questionable door and a small, dark mirror over the grimy sink. Looking at my
reflection, I saw that Jake had kissed off all my lipstick, in addition to
pawing at my hair. I examined one wayward tendril and decided that maybe once
my hair was all back in place, this would turn out ok.

My heart was pounding. It wasn’t
that I didn’t want him, or even that I resented Jake for taking this chance. He
was not, after all, the brightest bulb in the pack. It was myself that I was
reserving the most righteous ire for, the girl now reapplying just the right
shade of berry-red lipstick and a layer of clear gloss. Perhaps I was my
father’s daughter, and this was a small chance to prove it. Final inning, ahead
by three, two outs, bases loaded and power hitter on deck. All you have to do,
I told myself, is keep him from knocking it out of the park.

By the time I slipped out of the
restroom and back into the booth opposite Jake, I had made up my mind about
many things. The least of which was my own faltering identity.

“There you are,” Jake said
cheerfully. “I thought you had wandered off into the night.”

“I want to go home,” I said.

Jake, much to his credit, barely
blinked. “What? Why?”

“I’m not a connection to my dad,”
I told him. “If you’re very nice and take me home right now, I won’t even
mention to him that you did this.”

“Woah now, Casey... don’t get
overheated,” Jake said, looking genuinely panicked and for a moment I thought
maybe I was being too hard on him. “I’m sorry you feel like that, but that’s
not the whole story.”

“Whatever,” I replied, steeling
myself. “Take me home.”

“Casey,” he said, leaning
forward. “Be fair. If I take you home now, your Dad’s gonna know you didn’t
have a nice time. Just come with me, we’ll go right to the Prom, we’ll dance,
we’ll have our picture taken, and it’ll be fine.”

 “It won’t be fine,” I said.
“Because it won’t be true.”

“I like you,” Jake said, palms up
on the table, “I really do. You’re funny and pretty and I like you.”

“I don’t care,” I put my foot
down. “Now, take me home.”

“Jesus,” Jake said, leaning back
and staring at me. “Don’t be a bitch, Casey.”

Maybe, just maybe, if Jake hadn’t
said that single, bitter little word, I would have gotten in the car with him
and at the very least, allowed him to drive me home.

But he did, so I didn’t. We
didn’t argue, actually, that much more. I simply stopped looking at him and in
the end, he simply got up and left. That was the way it was, and until the
moment when he actually pulled out of the parking lot, I thought I was okay
with it. Like, all right, it’s not perfect, but at least I came out ahead. I
won the game, right?

The funny thing is, when you’re
sitting on the curb outside an all-night diner in your prom dress, sniffling
and trying to decide whether or not to risk calling home and getting your
sister, it no longer feels like you’re ahead of anything. I only knew, as the
warm night air swirled around my shoulders and lifted the ruffles to caress the
tender skin of my bare back, that I wasn’t at the fucking prom. Again. I had a
long moment of self-pity, of “why me”s and flailing against fate. But in the
end, I don’t believe in fate. I do believe in coincidence.

“Casey?” I heard a voice say, and
then a man was walking over and sitting down beside me without waiting for a
greeting. It was only as he got close that I recognized who he was. Or perhaps
that my brain acknowledged that he was here. “Is that you?” he asked.

An understandable question. We
hadn’t seen each other in five years, and from twelve to seventeen is a bit of
stretch.

“Hi Ben,” I said weakly, thinking
the night couldn’t possibly be any more bleak.

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

I had been, and had decided I was
some sort of pariah, in a morose teenage fashion. Morals, while pretty in
practice, make for a terribly lonely reality.

“Yeah,” was all I could muster.

“You want a ride home?” he asked,
and his voice was as warm and friendly as I remembered.

“Sure,” I said, just as Jake
pulled back into the parking lot. “I sure would.”

“Well come on,” Ben said, and
helped me to my feet. I could see Jake staring at us through the tinted glass
of the Camaro and I knew exactly what he was thinking, because I was thinking
it myself.

Well, I’ll be damned, if that
isn’t Ben McDunnough.

1981

It had been such a long trip. Ben was bone-weary, worn
through as surely as the furry cover he’d put on the cracking vinyl driver’s
seat of the Datsun. And it was hot, Florida hot, spreading ink-thick over his
body in the black evening, drawing him down until he was slouched and panting
like a dog. Ahead, somewhere at the brief end of this road, was his mother.
Waiting up, hoping tonight would be the night he arrived, twisting the edge of
an afghan in her hands until it stayed that way, creased with sweat. It was
odd, he thought, how everyone else found it so easy to tell him what they
thought of him now, but his own mother, the only person he had ever trusted
with the truth, was too devastated to bring it up. It hung between them, two
thousand miles and still it hung there during every phone conversation, in
every letter; like a piano in a cartoon, ready to flatten him.

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 myself 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?”