Casey's Home (17 page)

“No,” he said, touching my hand. “I think
you’ve probably interpreted it correctly.”

So there it was, finally. Blown up and larger
than life in my face, like a cheap poster. I stood up.

“Fuck,” I said, everything welling up and
threatening to spill. “I should go.” I realized I was shaking from the effort
of holding back my own tears. Ben reached out and wrapped his hand around my
wrist, pulling me back down into the chair like a child. And that’s what did
it, sitting back down. I began to cry and quickly realized I wasn’t going to be
able to stop. “I said I wasn’t going to cry about this,” I told him sheepishly.

“To who?” he said and squeezed my arm.
“Look, this has got to be a shock. I’m only sorry he didn’t tell you sooner.”

So was I. In person might have been nice,
you know? But hell, at that point I’d have taken a phone call in the middle of
the night. A deathbed confession. Anything but the feeling that I had lost my
father completely, not just physically, but emotionally as well.

“Hang on,” Ben said and stood up,
disappearing into the hall. He returned a moment later and dropped an entire
roll of toilet paper into my lap. When I looked up, he was smiling at me and I
found that I was laughing, grimly.

“I’m so sorry, Ben,” I told him, after
blowing my nose several times and dabbing at the soft skin beneath my eyes.
They were going to sting, later, burned by days of sudden salt deposits. “I
never meant to come over here and do this.”

He stooped, rooting around under the sink
for a moment, then straightened and handed me a plastic garbage bag. “I’m glad
you did,” he said. “All things considered.”

Ah, honesty. Stuffing wadded tissue into
the sack he handed me, I looked anywhere but him. Certainly, I was not looking
at my own tumbling emotions. In a few days I would be able to take them out,
polished and colorful, like the faux gemstones Lee and I used to make from the
rocks in our driveway.

“The rain’s passed,” he said, and it had.
I could feel the change in pressure even in the interior of the old house.
“Stay for dinner.” He looked like he felt reckless, his face twisted in
anticipation of my refusal. I was caught with my hand hovering full of tissue
half-way to my nose. I watched as he tried to regain control. “I make a mean
hamburger.”

I took pity on him. Did I want to do this?
I didn’t know. I only knew I didn’t want him to look at me with an obviously
sinking sense of his inevitable rejection. Let someone else do the hurting
today, Captain, I’m not up to it. “You don’t add onion soup mix, do you?”

“No.” He smiled back nervously. “Chef’s
special recipe.”

“I’d need to call Lee. I didn’t tell her
where I was going.” He nodded and pointed to the old phone, still nailed to the
wall next to the back door. It was clear he couldn’t quite believe it, that he
had gotten away with something. And what was I doing, exactly? Would it
surprise anyone to know I could never put my dying goldfish out of their
misery, either? I just let them sink to the bottom of the tank and die quietly.
Sometimes I even turned out the light. “I feel like a teenager,” I told him,
picking up the receiver.

I don’t need to go into any depth on the
conversation with Lee. Anyone could imagine it, could conjure up her smug
voice, cool like iced cappuccino. “Ben’s?” she said, syrupy. Oh, she looks
smooth and soothing, but she’ll keep you awake for hours afterward.

Fifteen minutes later I was standing in
front of a dull gray mirror in one of the house’s bathrooms, splashing cool
water over my cracked and aching skin while trying valiantly to explain this
whole thing to my racing mind. It was possible that I was mad with grief. In
three days, or so, I would be getting on a plane and flying as far across the
contiguous US as it was possible to go and Ben would still be here, using the
same white towels with hand-crocheted borders his mother made when he was six.
This was not Mark, the wonder boy of student baseball. This was someone who,
for whatever strange and twisted reasons fate had assigned, I actually cared
about.

You’re just having a burger, my prissy,
Lee-like side said to the manic, red-eyed creature in the mirror. There’s
nothing inherently wrong in that.

But of course there was, if the burger was
a prelude to something more. Or worse, if that was how it felt but nothing came
of it, like flashing a chocolate covered strawberry at your lover then eating
it yourself. While moaning. I bathed my eyes in cool water from the cistern
behind the house. The water was a valuable antique wine, aging in a great steel
barrel until it reached my face, clear and pure and flat.

On the way back out, I stopped and
retrieved two more bottles of root beer from the fridge. Ben had real food in
there, I noted. Salad-like things, green and leafy and inviting. My father’s
fridge probably contained two boxes of baking soda and a moldy jar of mustard.
Safe behind the screen door, I could see Ben out in the back yard. He was
supposed to be grilling our burgers, but instead he leaned against the porch
railing, watching the slow progress of several cattle egrets through the weedy
edge of the property. They raised their white heads and watched me as I stepped
down to join him. Ben, on the other hand, had seen me before, so he nodded
toward the birds.

“Did you know they’re native to Africa?”
he said. “Imported. They love it here. We’ve got more of them now than anywhere
in the world.”

I handed him a root beer, waving it in
front of his chest until he took it from me. The egrets returned to wading in
the mud. Just beyond Ben’s house was a small ranch with a few cows, Brahmins.
They watched the egrets too, their heavy gray heads sagging even as they paid
very close, cow-attention.

“So,” I said, moving around to stand in
front of him, “What happens now?”

Ben swallowed as if I was asking about us,
which for once, I was not. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, now that Billy’s gone, what
happens to you?”

Oh, that. He seemed relieved to be back on
familiar territory. Flipping our dinners, he shrugged. “There’s a hearing. Then
they give the job to someone else.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why have the hearing
then?”

“That,” he said, pointing at me with the
spatula, “is the million dollar question.”

“Preserving the appearance of having
considered you, am I right?”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

“What a load of shit,” I told him,
surprised by my own language. I had always talked more like a boy, the reasons
for that being rather psychologically obvious. Men seemed to find it slightly
shocking and therefore sexy, a cause-and-effect I was not inclined to
investigate. “It’s not like my dad deserved the job any more than you do,
considering.”

“Ah, but they didn’t know that,” he
replied. “They can only act on the things they’ve actually heard about.”

All of this was monumentally unfair, I’d
already decided. It was as if I’d managed to erase Ben’s own culpability in his
life and replaced it with my father’s. How dare they insult this poor man, when
great dragons of evil resided for twenty years in their midst! I realized I was
being silly, as well, but when had realization ever led directly to the truth?

“Well then, if they do let you go, what
will you do?” He was looking at me as if he would like to touch me, but
contented himself with pressing my burger onto the rack with the spatula. “I
mean, if you aren’t infinitely tired of being asked.”

“No. It’s not like everyone’s been coming
‘round to check on my welfare... Sorry, that sounded like whining, which is
probably what it was,” he said and grinned at me. “I mean, I’m just a college
coach. There are other colleges out there.”

“So you’d move?” We both looked around and
took in the house, the field, the history.

He thought about this for a moment, then
crossed his arms and shook his head, the spatula poking out from his armpit
like an arrow.

“Did you know that I’ve never lived away
from this house for more than six days since I came back?” He looked like he
was confessing to still being a virgin. “It might do me good to try somewhere
else for a while.”

I nodded and he just stood there, dripping
hamburger grease into the grass behind him. I felt like a cattle egret, and he
was waiting for me to say I’d stay and ride around with him, on him.

“I should probably confess something to
you right now,” I said, sounding incredibly nervous.

Puzzled, he nodded.

“I suggested... um... I told Jake he ought
to go out for Dad’s spot.”

There was a pause and then: “That’s ok,”
he reassured me, though I was sure it wasn’t, with either of us. “He’d be a
great coach.”

“I’m sorry,” I said anyway. “I wasn’t
thinking when I said it. I was worried about him and Lee and it just didn’t
occur to me... I mean, I hadn’t seen you in years.”

“Seventeen years,” he answered and looked
away, back at the grill. The meat popped and bubbled and he pretended to look
closely at it.

I was dumbstruck. Why? Because the obvious
answers are always the most devastating. The unstoppable was welling up from
inside my gut and I was about to say something I would regret. Not that that
had ever, even for a moment, stopped me before.

“What?” he prompted. No doubt I was
opening and closing my mouth like a fish.

Shrugging, I took the plunge. “There’s
probably a spot open where I am.”

The yard was very quiet, and I was
intensely aware of the sizzle of our food.

“Oh yeah?” he croaked out, and we were
both surprised by his reluctant voice.

“I mean, the team stinks,” I began
backpedaling quickly. “And they’ve just got the history Dean in there doing his
best. So you might not want it. I mean, it’s only Community College. It’s not
like they’d be much of a challenge. Not like here. And besides, there might not
be a position. I haven’t even checked. I could be just blowing smoke up
your...” I paused then, hair hanging over my cheeks, and I knew he knew I was blushing.

“No,” he said gently, “I appreciate it. I
really do. If you want to, you could look into it for me.”

I could nod, but I was unable to look up.
Had I really been talking to other human beings my whole life? Why, I asked
myself angrily, hadn’t I learned anything? “Are those damn things done yet?”

“You said ‘well-done’,” he reminded me,
humor in his voice. “I heard it myself.”

“Well, I’ve reconsidered. Let’s eat now.”
Raising my head I looked him in the eye for what I was startled to know without
question was the first time that day. He had dark gray eyes, and for a moment,
I couldn’t think about anything else. Then he was slapping two open hamburger
buns on the grill as if nothing had passed between us. And perhaps nothing had.
Where was my proof?

“Let me toast these and we’re there,” he
said.

We sat, companionable, on top of the
picnic table in the back yard, our feet on the bench, and watched the yard
creep into dusk.

“This is actually very good,” I informed
him, gesturing to the burger.

“Thanks,” he said and smiled. He was
making me crazy, as if someone was whipping my innards with a whisk. The meal
was making me vaguely sick.

“So, what have you been up to, these last
seventeen years? Dad told me a bit about you, but you know...” I drifted off
and took another bite, passing the conversation to him before it became
awkward. He did know, exactly.

“Um...” He leaned back.  “I was married,”
he said at last. “For a little while.”

“Really?” That I was so surprised seemed
to offend him, mildly.

“Really, for two years. To an accountant
from St. Pete named Claire.”

“Jesus.” I thought about that and I
couldn’t picture it. An accountant named Claire. It seemed so unreal. I was,
after all, the first person in human history to want this man, or at least that
was the assumption I had been operating under. “An accountant. That’s wild.”

“That’s not the word I would have used to
describe it,” he said, grinning. “But it was all right, for the first year,
year-and-a-half. Then she started a new job and met someone else, someone more
‘career-oriented’, as she put it. And that was that.”

“Well, don’t expect me to top that.” He
finished his burger and was nibbling at the potato chips he had set in a bowl
between us. I felt bloated, and I’d barely eaten two-thirds of my sandwich.
There was nothing wrong with the food, you understand.

“You haven’t been married?”

I realized he was just as surprised that I
hadn’t been, as I was that he had. What did that say?

“Nope,” I told him, snarfing down the rest
of the burger just to have it gone. I wiped my hands on my thighs and shrugged.
“Got close once. But I called it off.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because he was an asshole,” I said,
laughing. “I guess I’m glad now.”

“You guess?”

“Well, doesn’t everyone want to be
married, at least once?” And it was true, I did want it. I just didn’t want to
have to stick it out, through what was obviously going to be more sickness than
health. How nice it would have been to say now, as I leaned back and felt the
last of the burger settle like a rock in my churning stomach, that I had been
married. Someone, somewhere, wanted me. “It’s like a seal of approval. You’re
ok.”