Fall through Spring Page 10

  “You’re fine,” Carpenter soothed. “But you only really crank on yourself when your chemicals are offline. You’ll take some when you get home, okay? I’ll call you up and remind you.”

  Dane nodded, his eyes going wide and limpid, and his whole body seemed to sag. He’d been a bundle of energy with the kids, throwing the ball for the dog, making up dumb games to play. Carpenter had needed to sit on one of the creaky patio chairs not made for someone his size and watch them after an hour because his feet hurt and his back hurt and he could only do so much random running before his oversized body asked what the point was.

  “I’m sorry,” Dane said, sounding tearful now. “I’m sorry. I should just go. I probably fucked everything up with your friend and—”

  Carpenter wrapped an arm around Dane’s shoulders and squeezed. “Don’t go,” he begged softly. “Not yet. Come on. We’re almost up, and we can kick everyone’s ass at this game. Don’t you want to issue a righteous ass-kicking? I mean, I’m stuck with the kids tomorrow, so no game for me—”

  “And why is that again?” Dane snapped, recrimination in his voice.

  Carpenter sighed. “Man, those kids are a year away from competition soccer. Sabrina is going to have to hire someone to haul them up and down the state every weekend for half the year so they can play this game. Do you think I want them to see me lugging my fat ass around the goalie box and getting destroyed by Young Accountants in Love?”

  “Is that who you’re playing tomorrow?” Dane sounded confused.

  “No, their name is the Starbursts, but I know this team. There’s the art student team, the team that’s all nurses, and this one started at an accounting firm. So seventy percent of them are accountants, and they all usually run off after the game to be with their girlfriends.”

  Dane giggled manically. “Young Accountants in Love—much better than the Starbursts, I get it.”

  Oh boy. “Yeah, it’s hilarious. Anyway, I’d just as soon the kids respect me in the morning. So we’ll be doing something like going to the zoo and then maybe a Chuck E. Cheese, because I’m betting good money neither of them has seen fake pizza or fake giant rats before.”

  Dane snickered, and then Richie called out that they were up, and the conversation was dropped. Dane left about an hour later, after the two of them did, indeed, issue a righteous ass-kicking, and Carpenter thought it was all good. He took the kids to his apartment, so grateful for Dane’s help cleaning it, because to his niece and nephew, he looked like a responsible, if boring, adult.

  “Why are your walls all blank?” Holly asked, her light body hardly making a creak on the hide-a-bed couch that would have buckled under Carpenter’s weight. Carpenter smiled weakly at her and resisted the urge to smooth her mouse-brown hair off her forehead. She was going to grow up to be a stunning woman, with an elegant face and long, lithe body like her mother. But like Sabrina, she was a plain, average child. Jason was the same, but his head was ginormous. It grew more and more proportional the older he got, but Clay had actually looked at his own childhood pictures to make sure he hadn’t been wandering around with a noggin like that and nobody had told him.

  And he had, sort of. It would be great if that gave Jason hope, but unless Clay could get his shit together, the only hope Jason would have was to be a fat bastard with no cat, no boy—er, girlfriend, and no shit on his wall.

  “Maybe we can go out and get something tomorrow,” he promised. “I was going to do the zoo—”

  “Sacramento’s zoo is dumb,” Jason said, and it was funny. Clay heard Dane’s entitlement in that pronouncement. “San Francisco’s is better, San Jose’s is better, San Diego’s is better….” He yawned. “I’d rather go shopping.”

  Clay closed his eyes for a second and wondered if his sister would mind just forking over her credit card. “Sure,” he said, not sure where pride ended and practicality began. “We’ve got the Galleria nearby. Let’s see what we can do.”

  He got them settled, then showered and crawled into his own bed, looking around his blank walls with a stunning realization—his apartment sucked.

  Not because it was a bad place. It was an average apartment in an average neighborhood in an average Sacramento suburb. Apartments like his were everywhere, and this one changed the carpet with every long-term resident and repainted the walls.

  But he’d bought his bedding and his bed right out of school, and his couch had been a secondhand freebie from a friend of his last girlfriend.

  And his walls were blank.

  It was like he’d gone through college, and postcollege rebellion, and then this weird phase where he worked in the IT department and pretended this was the end of his ambition in life… and had forgotten to establish an identity.

  Which was a lie, sort of. He knew who he was now, right?

  He was Skip’s friend and Dane’s friend. He was a guy who tried to do the right thing. He was a guy who hadn’t given up on himself or the world. He just failed a lot and kept trying until he succeeded.

  He loved video games and he was starting to like soccer, and he had friends and his family didn’t suck too much, and he would go out of his way to help his sister with her kids. He brought food to all the job functions, and he worked out with Skipper so he didn’t let the soccer guys down, and he was really, really worried about his friend Dane, who had amazing brown eyes and sort of a goofy, pure smile.

  He was bummed they weren’t going to the zoo—he liked seeing animals. He could put animals on the wall. He loved anime; everything from Mob Psycho 100 to My Hero Academia to Castlevania could go up on his wall. He even loved Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks movies. He was the Kung-Fu Panda, right down to that thing the panda did when he pulled up his pants from the back because his fat ass kept jiggling them down.

  He could have this place in wall-to-wall posters, prints, and tchotchkes, things he loved to look at, loved to identify with, in one shopping trip.

  Hell, he was paying off his student loans in leaps and bounds. His credit was pristine.

  He could actually afford to… to treat himself with something besides chocolate chip cookies. He thought wistfully of the game he was missing tomorrow. He could have grabbed Dane right afterward and taken him along. Dane had been so… so happy playing with the kids. Well, happy and a bit manic, as though on an upswing, which worried Carpenter because he understood how mental illness worked. He knew that messing with medication the way Dane had been doing had consequences.

  Dane hadn’t been worried about whether what he said was right or not today. He hadn’t been concerned with status, with what he should like or what he should be. Dane’s world had been narrowed to the ball, the dog, and the two kids running around shouting, “Here, dragon, go get the fair maiden now!”

  Maybe he’d text Dane in the morning and ask if they could hang out after the game.

  His chest actually hurt with the thought of bringing Dane along to help him decorate his place. He yearned for Dane’s approval and feedback.

  How weird was that?

  The last thing he expected was Mason’s frantic phone call in the morning begging him to come play.

  “NICE SAVE!” Skipper called from across the field, and Carpenter gave him a wave. Of course, it was a nice save. Carpenter had let three in already, so any save was a nice save.

  “No, seriously,” Menendez said as they took their position—close to the goal box because fucking Jefferson wasn’t playing the ball like he should. Goddammit, he had three forwards. Could he not pass the ball to one of them before the other side stole it? “You’re getting really good.”

  Aw, that was sweet. “Thanks,” Carpenter grunted. “We really miss Mason today, though.”

  Mason was sitting, ankle elevated, on a camp chair next to Dane and the kids. Dane’s eyes were shadowed, and when they weren’t cheering, his face fell into pensive, saturnine lines. Carpenter would have called it resting bitch face, but on Dane, it looked more like he was in pain.

  Menendez drew in
a deep breath and nodded. There were no defender subs without Mason. Having Carpenter there gave them just enough guys to have Richie sub in for the midfielders and forwards. All the defenders were just flat-out gassed.

  “If you could maybe keep the big goombah healthy so he could play with us, I think we might actually start winning. Shit—heads up!”

  Oh my God. All the young accountants were charging forward! Hadn’t they left any players for defense, or were they all convinced that Jefferson would tie up the ball again so they’d have time to set up? Shit!

  Carpenter dove for the ball and caught it in the chest, then scrambled up in a haze of kicking cleats and shin guards to charge forward and dropkick it. It was a risky move—three months earlier, just getting to his feet without help would have been an adrenaline-fueled feat of strength. But he was pissed, and he was worried about Dane. And his sister’s kids were watching him play, and dammit, he’d better not screw this up!

  The ball went sailing across the field, past Jefferson, thank God, and straight to Richie, who turned like a rocket and took it in for their second and last goal. The Scorpions all hooted and hollered and the young accountants glared, and for a moment, Carpenter felt like maybe, just maybe, the day wouldn’t end as badly as it started.

  Because Mason had been begging him to come out to the game. He’d called Carpenter Dane’s “carrot” to get him out of bed and past his death spiral. And then, in his agitation, and probably because he was Mason and he just couldn’t manage a conversation without putting his foot in his mouth, he’d said, “And stop complaining about being fat! He loves you, and it hurts him to hear you beat on yourself!”

  And Carpenter had simply frozen.

  Because for a moment, he heard, “My brother loves you and wants to be with you, and maybe you could have a relationship with someone who doesn’t have somewhere better to be!” And then he remembered that there were all sorts of love, and Mason and Dane seemed to be all about emotional health, so he’d said, “Of course, I love him too.”

  Because you loved your friends, right?

  You loved your friends and wanted to impress your friends and dreamed about your friends and their slightly crooked teeth and their dreamy brown eyes and the way, sometimes, when they stood really close, it felt like their chests were made of magnets and the world had no air.

  So yes, Carpenter could say he loved Dane.

  Because that covered all manner of sins, didn’t it?

  But the thing was, however he loved Dane, he really did love him. And the idea of him curled up in bed, unable to even get up because he wasn’t going to see Carpenter that day, hurt in myriad, unexpected ways.

  Dane was the friend and companion Carpenter had always dreamed about. He was like Rebecca or Trisha, but he didn’t make secret plans to burn Carpenter’s gaming system or wait for Carpenter’s lack of décor to dawn on Carpenter before making it an issue.

  And Dane was fragile. Carpenter had to make sure Dane didn’t death spiral in his own head. But he had to do that while he made sure he didn’t eat a dozen donuts a day because he was stressing about Dane’s internal death spiral, and dammit, he wasn’t strong enough to do this and he really wanted some fucking donuts!

  He looked over to where Dane was whistling for the team, both index fingers in his mouth like a New Yorker hailing a cab.

  “Heads up!” Menendez shouted, and Clay put his head back in the game. Fuck donuts—he’d had a protein bar, and he really did need to get over himself and grow up.

  One more goal got through—in what felt like a thousand tries. Carpenter would have been embarrassed by how sore he was, but the entire defense line was out of breath and peevish with the beating they’d just received.

  Thank God the Young Accountants all had girlfriends or wives or something to get to, because they didn’t even hang around to gloat—or console, as the Young Artists in Angst often did. Their team name was The Picassos, but Young Artists in Angst was such a better summary of that group of assholes.

  The best part of the game was the huddling around Mason’s car, drinking hot coffee and explaining to Jefferson that he needed to see an actual soccer game so he knew how he was fucking up.

  “So what’s the plan?” Dane asked quietly, as Holly and Jason took one of Skipper’s practice balls and passed it back and forth, remarking in awe at how much heavier a size five was than a size three.

  “Well, first I go shower, because dude!”

  “Oh yeah. So rank.” Dane nodded enthusiastically, and Carpenter stuck out his tongue.

  “Anyway, after that, I need to check my phone. I told the kids we’d visit the mall, but my mom’s feeling better, and my sister thinks I’m teaching her children how to sacrifice live chickens and small people, so maybe we should hit the Galleria and then go visit my folks. My mom will feed you healthy stuff, my sister will make you feel bad about your life and your career goal just by being so far beyond perfect, it would take a million years for the light from perfection to so much as give her a freckle. It’ll be great.”

  “You’re perfect,” Dane said passionately. “If they don’t like you, they can kiss my scrawny crazy ass!”

  Carpenter forced a chuckle. “As much as I’d like to see that, maybe we just concentrate on occupying the rug rats and….” He swallowed and wished for donuts. “Making sure you stay on your meds.”

  Dane closed his eyes for a moment, raising his face to the sun. “Yeah. Sure,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much it sucks to be forced to do something every day? Other people don’t have to regulate their brain chemistry with an entire fucking pharmacy. But if I stray so much as a centimeter away from the pill bottle, I’m fucked!”

  “Yeah, but you don’t have to remember not to eat donuts by the dozen, Dane, so I think we’re gonna call it a draw.”

  Dane blinked, and Carpenter glared back at him, and someone on the team—Thomas, maybe?—was asking Mason if he could really get them tickets to a Republic game.

  Dane let out a breath and apparently decided to call it a truce. “So, should we all go in the spring?” he called out, and Mason nodded happily, the hero of the entire soccer team. And as far as Carpenter was concerned, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

  Later they loaded themselves into his old Ford SUV, and Carpenter ignored Holly and Jason’s whines about why he couldn’t own a car that had an entertainment system and a charging station on every armrest, while Dane asked them who could win the most games of Simon’s Cat between the field and Uncle Clay’s house.

  That did it—the competitive instinct gene that Carpenter could have sworn had skipped his body entirely kicked in, and the kids were silent and locked into their own game, and he and Dane could talk.

  “Thanks for coming with me today,” he said, meaning it. “You and the kids get along so well. I was going to text you about getting together after the game anyway—” Shit. How much did Dane know?

  “But my brother called you first.” Dane sighed, tilting his head back with his eyes closed. “It’s funny how people think he’s so bad socially, but he sure did have my number, didn’t he?”

  “What happened?” Clay asked quietly.

  “You were right, you know,” Dane murmured. “About Skipper? About telling him that when he went to a ‘real’ school, he’d see how tough things are. I was being an asshole—”

  “A snob,” Clay corrected. “And not on purpose.”

  “A bitchy, whiny, entitled white guy—”

  “No, because that guy wouldn’t be in my car right now for an exciting day of babysitting and visiting my parents. Look, man, we’re all works in progress. It rolled right off Skip’s back, and you’re obviously thinking about things differently. You have worked on yourself and made progress. Ding! You get some time off the hook. Okay?”

  Dane let out a small sound. “You know what? You need to meet my parents. It’s frightening how much you’re like them. They do that too.”

  “Do what?”

/>   “Make me feel like… like I was human. Not a freak. Not even a screwup. Just a person who made a mistake.”

  Carpenter breathed out carefully. “Well, I’m glad,” he said, after a moment. “I’m… that’s a good talent. That’s…. My parents—maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s not them. Maybe I just take everything the wrong way, you know? But they mean well. And if I turned out okay enough to make you feel better, then they didn’t screw up entirely.”

  “They did really good,” Dane said, and he set his hand on Carpenter’s knee and squeezed. Carpenter’s breath stopped entirely, and he was lucky he didn’t wreck the car.

  That hand on his knee was everything. It was lightning and thunder. It was heavy breathing and promises in the dark. It was a dozen donuts and steak and potatoes and that proud feeling that went with knowing you hadn’t eaten any bad things and you felt just fine.

  It was Dane trusting him to do what was best and his complete fear that what was best for Dane wasn’t going to be a whole lot of fun for Clay Alexander Carpenter.

  But when Dane shifted to move his hand, Clay put his hand on top of it and squeezed back.

  To Touch a Star

  “BUT WHY can’t I get a new system?” Jason complained, and Dane rolled his eyes.

  “Nice try, kid. But I’m pretty sure your mother would throttle your uncle Clay if he sprang for that much green.”

  Jason and Holly had been fun—kid fun, “Oooh, let’s ride the carousel and look at the stuffed animals” fun—but they were tired and hungry, and Clay was up at the front of the store buying them both a giant jigsaw puzzle, of all things, because he’d loved them as a kid and thought it would be fun for them all to put one together.

  Dane was looking forward to spending an afternoon at Clay’s parents’ house, doing just that, but first Clay had to wade through the line with the bored-looking salesgirl who was taking her sweet-ass time, and Dane had to entertain Jason and Holly for just five to ten more minutes without losing his shit.