Sidecar Page 5

  It took him nearly exactly an hour, but part of that was because he was followed so closely by the security guy that it was a wonder the jerk-off didn’t get an image of Glen “Big Daddy” going up Casey’s tailpipe. It didn’t matter. Casey kept the little basket in plain sight, and security guy had to concede that he bought everything he put there. When Casey was done, he walked up to the guy who was glaring at him in his hospital scrub bottoms and flip-flops, and gave him the sort of expression that adults usually saved for their own kids when they were screwing around.

  “Did I pass inspection, chief?” he asked, and the guy scowled.

  “I didn’t see you steal nothin’.”

  “Bitchin’! Now that I got the tags and a receipt, are you going to give me shit if I go into the bathroom over there by customer service so I can change?”

  The guy grunted again. “Why you want to change here?”

  “Because it’s fucking cold out there, and the scrubs are thin.”

  “What, those the only clothes you got?” The guy was squat, midfifties, with a crew cut. Casey hated him sort of on sight.

  “Yeah. Yeah, they are. I ran away to my uncle’s with the clothes on my back. Those about rotted off, and these are the only fucking clothes I got. Do you know enough about my life now? Can I go get dressed?” He glared at the guy, who held up his hands and backed down, and Casey went into the bathroom, rather amazed at his own chutzpah.

  Who knew that being the guy with nothing to lose made it so much easier to win?

  And God, didn’t he feel human now that he was dressed. He’d spent that hundred dollars about down to the last two bucks, and was proud of that too. He even managed some baseball T-shirts with bands on them, even though one of the bands was Journey, and he thought that was probably more Joe’s speed than his. Besides, hadn’t they broken up? But he was warmer and cleaner and happier when he got back to the car to find Joe shivering under the blanket and trying hard to wake up.

  Casey’s new chutzpah hadn’t all faded. He looked at the truck, saw that it was an automatic transmission, and tried to remember how to get to Joe’s place. He realized that it wasn’t that hard, really. Back to the freeway, off at that really big intersection called the Foresthill Exit, and hang a really big right.

  He could do this.

  “Here, Joe,” he said, getting in on the driver’s side after dumping all his bags on the passenger side. “Move over.”

  “What in the fuck?” Joe shivered hard on the word “fuck,” and Casey patted his shoulder sympathetically, and then jerked back when Joe did. Shit. He’d hit the sore arm. God, he was a moron.

  “Move over. I’m driving.”

  “You’re what?” Joe sat up straight and glared at him, and Casey shrugged.

  “How hard can it be? Every moron in California has a driver’s license. Now scoot over and I’ll take you home.”

  “Do you even know how to get there?”

  “Yeah. Get to the freeway. Turn right at that big intersection exit with the McDonald’s. After that it’s sort of deep in the woods. I’ll wake you up for that part.”

  Joe grunted. “It’s twenty miles after the exit,” he said, and Casey nodded. It had seemed shorter both times he’d been driven on it. Once he got in with Joe, everything was aces.

  “C’mon, Joe. Scoot. Turn the ignition, put it into drive, gas on the right, brake on the left. I can do it. Move.”

  And Joe did, grumbling, “I may still have to call social services” in warning, and Casey nodded.

  “I appreciate you being straight with me and all, but you need to get home to do that, and I don’t see that happening right now. Now move your ass, old man!”

  “’M twenty-seven.”

  Wow. Not thirty? Casey smiled and looked at him again. He’d seen the guy without a shirt, and he was pretty buff. He had a little tummy, yeah, but you could tell he spent his time working on his house or his property or running around saving strays—he was definitely not a sit-on-the-couch-with-a-beer guy, unless he was ready for bed, if his muscles had anything to say about it.

  “Awesome. Maybe we can do that!”

  “Oh Christ, no!”

  Oh. That was disappointing. “Don’t like guys?”

  “Don’t like children. The key’s in the ignition, young’un. Now start the truck and prove to me we’re not gonna die at your hands!”

  Casey did, and he spent a few minutes in the almost-empty parking lot in front of Ross, driving slowly back and forth and getting the hang of things like brake time and acceleration. He decided that driving was okay—but a little overrated. As he eased the truck back onto the road and toward the freeway, he hardly had to step on the accelerator at all to get the car up to speed.

  “God, this thing’s faster than it looks,” he muttered, but they were going up a pretty steep incline, so maybe that power was a good thing.

  He hadn’t counted on the pulse-pounding fear of driving a car on the single lane of the double bridge. There was a wall on either side, yes, but he’d walked on the pedestrian part of the bridge and looked down—he knew what was in store for them if he lost his mind and just drove the truck through the rail and off the side. What had seemed so appealing when he’d been lost and cold and starving didn’t seem like so much fun now that he had a full belly and someplace to sleep without fear.

  “Easy, kid,” Joe said from the other side of the truck, and some of the tension cramping Casey’s hands eased up. “Everyone hates this part.”

  “Yeah?”

  “When all is said and done, we’ve really only got a narrow path to tread.”

  It sounded like crazy hippy shit, so Casey was relieved when Joe closed his eyes and started humming “Only the Young Can Say” under his breath. Casey liked that one. They’d determined on the way to town that the radio had no reception, and Joe didn’t have tapes in the car, so Casey sang with him, and together they made it over the bridge.

  JOE got home and slept until five o’clock. Casey slept too, but he woke up before Joe and raided the refrigerator and the cabinets, settling on some canned soup—he made enough for two, and Joe had some when he emerged from the bedroom to down some pain pills and sit on the couch and veg.

  “Shit,” Joe muttered, digging into the soup. “I was going to do so much today. I gotta get that carport done in the next week, before it starts to snow up here. Can’t have the bike out in the elements, man, that just won’t do.”

  Casey got up and went to the kitchen and pulled bread and butter out of the fridge. (He couldn’t figure out why Joe kept the bread in the refrigerator. Joe told him later it was to keep it from going bad.) He buttered a slice and walked it to Joe, because he liked that in his soup, and Joe took it with an appreciative thanks.

  “I could start clearing the debris out,” Casey said after flopping back down on the couch.

  “Kid—”

  “Look, do you not want me here?”

  Sigh. It shook the couch. “You’ve been damned useful so far.”

  “Then let me be useful. Maybe I can get a job in Foresthill, right? Pay rent—”

  “You’re a kid. No paying rent.”

  “Well, I can work for my keep—”

  “Dammit, kid! The way you get to be a kid is to go to school while someone worries about rent for you! Jesus—you still need raising, Casey. You’re still not grown. Don’t you want to go back home and—”

  “No.” Casey tried to keep the break out of his voice and failed. “I don’t want to go home. They didn’t want me.”

  “Have you thought that maybe they’ve changed their minds now that you’ve been gone for two months?”

  Casey thought about it and felt his throat swell. “No,” he whispered. “Please don’t make me go back and find out.”

  “Kid, no one’s going to let you stay with a single man. They just—”

  “But who’s they? I’ve been on the streets for two months. Just take me to school, let me fill out the paperwork. I’ll tell a
few lies. You’ll be a friend of the family, and I’ll get my transcripts from my old school and—look, Joe, please?”

  Joe slumped back against the couch, and Casey could tell he was about done, period. Odds were, his pain meds had kicked in. He’d been tired the night before and he’d already had one hell of a morning. It was obvious that he just didn’t have the energy for this. “Kid, if I say we don’t have to decide right now, will that be enough?”

  Casey stood up and collected the dishes. Hell yes. It had gotten him from Auburn back to Joe’s house, and his confidence wasn’t shaken. They could do this. He was sure of it.

  BETWEEN the two of them, they managed to clear the carport of refuse and get the frame set before the work party. Casey had wondered, at first, why not use the garage for the vehicles, and then he’d actually seen the garage and realized that Joe had sunk a lot of the spare money from the home loan into home improvement stuff, and although he’d seen some of it waiting to be used in the carport, the bulk of it was in the garage. Lumber, drywall, siding, paint—Joe had himself about four years of home improvement to do, which was awesome, because Casey had at least two years of growing up to do, and he figured he’d be along for the ride.

  He and Joe worked well together. Joe gave concise instructions, and Casey found that when he wasn’t trying to piss off the grown-up he was working with, he was actually pretty good at following orders. He tried to be considerate—he warned Joe when something was about to fall, and asked for help with stuff he didn’t understand. For his part, Joe tried to keep a rein on his unexpected temper.

  The temper was a surprise, but sort of a welcome one. Casey had started to think of Joe as someone all wise and all patient, and a little part of himself was all set to walk over the guy, because Joe would let him do anything, right?

  But no. The first day, Casey was on the roof, throwing broken pieces of plastic down on the ground, and Joe called up to him to stay on the beams so he didn’t fall through the plastic. But that didn’t make sense, because Casey wasn’t tall, and he was certainly not fat, and if he just took a step there—

  He scrambled back and barely made it to the nearest beam before the plastic crumbled beneath his feet.

  “Goddammit, Casey! Do what you’re goddamned told!”

  Casey had actually needed to brace himself against the roof of the house for a moment, because the snapped order made his heart pound like he was a criminal caught in the act. His father used to yell a lot. Goddammit, kid, could you keep the fucking ball out of the house? Jesus, Casey, do you ever fucking think? Maybe if you stopped fucking up in class, I’d give a shit about your fucking ball games. I mean, it’s not like you’re first string or anything. God, the way you run? I’m surprised they let you on the fucking team!

  And for a minute, Casey had flashed back to that and had felt a totally familiar urge to hop off the roof and run into the forest, maybe take his chances on Rufus’s property, now that the dumbass dog was wandering around in a doggy cast, hitting Joe up for food.

  Then Casey looked down and saw Joe’s bad-tempered expression and realized that in the middle of all that pissed off was a whole lot of concern.

  “Yeah, Joe. Sorry ’bout that!”

  “Jesus, kid. Don’t scare me like that.”

  And Casey did his best not to. He did sometimes: banged his thumb with the hammer, accidentally bumped Joe’s sore shoulder, yelled at the dog when the dog started whining for food. Mostly Joe was patient and mild, but that temper? Casey started to cherish it.

  Joe went back to work after the five days, like he’d promised. Casey spent the first day knocking around the property, exploring the nooks and crannies. It was mostly forest land, lots of places to walk, although there were some areas that would have made good places for outbuildings, if Joe ever wanted to build one. When Joe got back, though, he made it clear that he expected Casey to spend his time better.

  “What’s this?” Casey looked curiously at the bakery box on the table.

  “A birthday cake. We can have some after dinner.”

  Casey blinked at him, absurdly moved. “It’s almost Thanksgiving.”

  “Well, like I said. You’re not officially sixteen ’til you have a party.”

  “That’s awesome. Thanks, Joe.”

  “I got you boring grown-up presents. Don’t thank me yet.”

  Casey brightened, some of the hotness behind his eyes easing. “What’d you get me?”

  “Clothes you won’t look at with disdain, for one.”

  Casey really brightened. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Sorry about the clothes—I threw some money at you, told you to stock up. You did real good, but I’m thinkin’ you’d like something shinier.”

  Casey couldn’t contain his grin. Even if the clothes turned out to be not his thing, it was nice to be thought of. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, but you’ll get it after dinner. It’s grown-up shit. Don’t get excited.”

  But “grown-up shit” turned out to be the most exciting thing of all. “Grown-up shit” turned out to be an enrollment packet from the local continuation school, plus some books to read, some packets from the English class for him to fill out, and an algebra two workbook. Casey looked at the stuff with dawning comprehension and pushed his hair back from his face. (It was long and in his eyes now—it had been short and spiky in the front when he’d left home.)

  “Hey…,” he said, grinning up at Joe, the little birthday cake with the blown-out candles completely forgotten. “Does this mean I’m here to stay?”

  Joe grimaced. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, kid. We still have to fill that shit out, and you still have to get your transcripts. If we run into a social worker, this whole thing could be moot.” He crossed his arms in front of him as he said this and stretched moodily at the muscles in his sore arm. Casey noticed he did that a lot, like he was struggling against limitations.

  Casey turned anxious eyes toward him. “You want me to stay, right? I’ve been a good kid this week, right?”

  Joe frowned at him. “You’re a great kid. Never doubt it. Whether or not you stay here, that has nothing to do with what kind of kid you are. I’m a single man, Casey—not exactly father material.”

  “Ew. You are not my father. That’s not why I want to stay.”

  Joe’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not your boyfriend,” he warned, and Casey nodded like he believed it.

  “So, acid-wash jeans? And the jacket over them? Joe… that’s amazing. Thank you!” He turned a shining smile to Joe, who gave a cautious one back, and Casey could have cursed himself, because it looked like Joe wasn’t fooled for a minute.

  THE work party was fun. Joe worked with fun people—orderlies, other nurses, supply people, clerks. At first Casey expected a lot of male doctors and female nurses, with people necking in every corner, but he quickly learned that was just in the television shows. Bitching about doctors was everybody’s favorite hobby, and Casey learned to hate them too, just by proxy.

  Joe introduced Casey as simply a friend who was staying, and no one seemed to think that was odd in the least, and everyone seemed comfortable with Casey being part of the “leadership team” when it came to building the carport. Casey, for his part, had become vested in the project. He’d spent a week on it already!

  People started arriving at eight in the morning. By sunset, it was done: a sturdy three-sided building with a roof that sloped from the roof of the house, and enough space to fit three cars—more than enough to fit the motorcycle and the truck. The fifteen or so people—they were all between twenty-five and forty—who had come to help had gone inside to get warm and were eating Joe’s pizza, drinking his beer, and, if Casey wasn’t mistaken, toking a little weed. He’d seen Joe’s stash box in the drawer under his pajama bottoms that first day when he’d been looking for sweatshirts. It had been a little dusty, but it didn’t surprise Casey that some of Joe’s friends were the type to get high. His own parents had a nice little collection of ro
lled-up dollar bills with white powder on one end, brought out once a month. That was just what people did.

  Joe was sweeping up the last of the stuff on the concrete foundation and putting it in the big dustbin. (Casey had been appalled to find out that there was no trash pickup out here—Joe had to cart it all to a dump site in Roseville once a month, which explained why he was really big on reusing everything, from cardboard boxes to the little tie things on the ends of bread loaves.) He looked up and saw Casey admiring their handiwork, and grinned.

  “Not a bad way to spend a Saturday, is it?”

  Casey smiled at him, liking the way his eyes crinkled and the way the sun caught the red highlights in his otherwise dark-brown hair. It was pulled back in a ponytail today and trimmed evenly on the ends, and Casey had started to fantasize about what it would feel like if he touched it.

  “It was great,” he said after a pause that went on too long, and he could have kicked himself when Joe’s smile turned to a grimace and his eyes went sad.

  “Go inside, kid. Have some pizza. But do me a favor and just pass the joint if someone hands it to you, okay?”

  “I get high!” Didn’t everybody? Just say no? Seriously?

  “Yeah, but not anymore. If I’m going to keep you, I gotta give it up. I gotta give it up, you gotta give it up, okay?”

  Casey blinked. Were adults ever that honest? Well, he hadn’t really been that excited about inhaling the nasty stuff anyway. It had made Dillon smile at him pretty, and that had been fun, but otherwise? Their aborted make-out session had been way better.

  “Yeah. Fine. Whatever”—and he had to laugh when Joe wrinkled his nose.

  “God, cursing used to be honest, you know? When did ‘whatever’ come to mean ‘fuck you’?”

  “You know, for a guy with a ponytail and a soul patch, you sound an awful lot like my grandmother.”

  “You know, for a kid who weighs ninety-eight pounds soaking wet, you sure got a mouth on you.”

  “Yeah, wanna know what I can do with it?”