“Don’t let him get away. Come to Boston. Live with me here in Cambridge.”
“You know I can’t do that,” I said through gritted teeth. Her response was the best antidote to my tears and I could feel a defensive tension form in my neck and upper back.
“Your Mama’s fine,” she said, soothingly. “You can come out here, you can go on Darla. You can move on.”
“I don’t wanna talk about that.”
“Well, I do,” she insisted. “And now you have a place to live, you have a guy – ”
“Two guys,” I interrupted – might as well change the subject.
“Two guys? You f**ked them both?”
“No… no,” I protested. Not yet, I thought. Where the hell did that thought come from? “Look, it’s complicated,” I said.
“It’s always complicated,” she said with an acid tone.
“No, actually it’s not,” I replied, puzzled. “My life’s pretty fuckin’ simple Josie. I go to my gas station job, I help Mama with her sugars and I try to find somebody to spend time with who doesn’t think that Killer Karaoke is the height of American culture. Other than that, I don’t have a complicated life and now, suddenly, in twenty-four hours it’s become more twisted and more confusing than anything else in my entire life probably since I was four.”
Something in my words or my tone made her change her entire approach and her voice went soft and gentle. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It sounds like whatever you’re going through, it’s pretty big.”
“Yup…uh, yes ma’am,” I said.
“How can I help?”
“Tell me what to do,” I joked. “I don’t want Trevor to leave – Joe’s about to take him away. Uncle Mike’s gonna fix his car.”
“Joe’s car is broken?”
“Yeah, he got here and then came into my little purple passion place – ”
“Your purple what?”
“Oh, nevermind.” I hadn’t told her about the shed, she had no idea what I was talkin’ about.
“If you’ve got a place on your body that’s turning purple from passion, Darla, then there are medications for that.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Ookaaayyy.” Again, she drew the word out with extreme skepticism. It was getting annoying.
“I don’t want Trevor to leave and Joe’s an a**hole but he’s a really, really, really attractive a**hole and I just,” Ahh, I sighed. “I guess it’s all on me, isn’t it.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s all on you. I can’t really help you. I’m here to listen, I’m here to give you whatever advice I can, and I’m here to caution you to please, please use condoms.”
“We did,” I said. “No worries.”
“OK, good because the last thing you need is to add a baby to this mix.”
“I know. I know, Josie, I’m watching Jane go through it. Trust me, I do not wanna add a baby to anything right now.”
“Good girl. I’m going to start clearing out my guest room just in case you wanted to, you know, visit. Or uproot your entire life and move in.”
I snorted. “Fat chance.”
“Oh, I think the chance is better than you think, Darla,” she said.
I looked up and Joe had stepped outside, the glow of the security lamps illuminating that perfect, wavy tousled hair, his face well rested and neutral, his body moving with a languid grace that made me just want to – “I gotta go, Josie,” I said. “Things are about to get even more complicated.”
“Just remember one thing, Darla,” she said before I hung up.
“What’s that?”
“Whatever you do, it’s your life – not anybody else’s. You get to pick what happens next.”
* * *
The hair at the nape of Joe’s neck was damp and he smelled like industrial soap, the scent you get after spending the night in a hotel, with a hint of bleach. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I mimicked, and as I backed out of the parking lot there was just silence between us until I turned out onto the main road to head home. It was awkward, I won’t deny it, but I wasn’t about to break first. He had been the a**hole and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna play that nicey-nice game where I would pretend that the a**holery was fair and balanced and we were equally responsible. Fuck that. He was the jerk and if anybody was gonna say anything, it had to be him.
That made for three minutes of tense, quiet that was so thick it was like swimming in Davey’s brain. Finally Joe cracked and said, “Look, I’m sorry.”
I let the words hang in the air because I wanted to savor them. How many times are you right in this world and someone actually acknowledges it? If I replied with, “It’s OK,” I’d be lying because the way he was acting wasn’t OK. If I said, “I understand,” that would be a lie too, because I didn’t understand. Snobbery seemed so ridiculous to me because unless you earned the money yourself you were just piggybacking off of someone else’s luck or fortune and looking down on other people. To me, that just made you a douchebag. Finally I settled on a grunt of, “Huh.”
He smiled a little. “Well said.”
“I may not be eloquent, but I get my point across.”
He studied me; I could feel his eyes crawling over my profile as we drove along, the headlights illuminating a possum that barely escaped my tire, the backs of road signs shining in a quick glare as the headlights bounced off them. Just outside the beams, the thin, spindly twigs and branches of trees still mostly bare between their spring buds gave the whole night the suggestion of a horror movie, except I wasn’t creeped out so much as unsure about what the rest of the night held.
“It helps to have gotten a few hours of sleep and a quick shower,” he said, a congenial tone that I had not heard yet in his voice. Relenting a bit, I relaxed and smiled, turning toward him and just nodding.
“I’m gonna imagine that there’s no class at your college for what to do when your best friend disappears and reappears six hundred miles away…naked.”
“If there were such a class,” he said, “that would be at Hampshire College.” He laughed. The puzzled look on my face must have told him that I had no idea what the joke meant and he said, “You guys have Oberlin College around here, right?”
“On the other side of the state, yeah.”
And he said, “Well, Hampshire is similar.”
I got the joke about drugs and nak*dness in general, hedonism, and laughed politely. I may have manners so unpolished that if you brushed up against me you’d bleed from hitting a sharp edge but I knew when to shine somebody on as they extended an olive branch.
“Why are you being so nice to Trevor?” he asked. It wasn’t an accusation; I could hear a genuine questioning in his voice and a little bit of prodding. He was curious and trying to figure out what he could and couldn’t talk to Trevor about. I needed to be guarded but open at the same time. Damn, if these men weren’t stretching me in new ways.
“At first it was just because he was so strange standing there, caught in my headlights, totally nak*d, with those thighs flexing and the guitar covering his nether regions.” I slowed the car down and went an uncharacteristic thirty-five in a thirty-five zone, no need to speed. In fact, I wanted to stretch this conversation out. It was pleasant and I hadn’t done pleasant with Joe. Time to see where that could take us.
“And then?” he asked.
“And then it was hey, here’s this really hot guy and he’s into me so…” I shrugged. “Why not?”
“Why not?” he echoed.
“And then,” I shook my head a little, “he needed a place to stay, some clothes, some food, and once he called you everything sort of snowballed from there and we knew what was happening next. We didn’t do anything special, I didn’t know he was Trevor Connor from Random Acts of Crazy.”
“Would that have changed anything?” Joe asked. “If you had known?”
I bit my lower lip and thought about that for a minute. I frowned and shook my head, my hands firmly planted at ten and two o’clock on my steering wheel as we now went thirty in a thirty-five zone. Nobody was behind me so I didn’t worry about it.
“Uhh… no.” My answer was indecisive at first and then clipped at the end, more a function of needing to think it through than of any actual hesitation about the emotional impact of his question. To the left I had an opportunity to take a road that would extend our journey but not get us unreasonably far from home, so I grabbed the chance. Might as well buy five or ten extra minutes.
“Why do you think Trevor ended up out here?” I asked.
“Because he’s a dumb fuck.”
“Well, there’s that.” I laughed. “But why would he get so f**ked up and then what – hit the road nak*d? I don’t get it. I don’t understand.”
“Me neither,” Joe answered.
“Why did he get so f**ked up in the first place?”
“You mean back home? I don’t know. It’s what we do, it’s what Trevor does especially. Eating that entire bag of peyote though…man,” Joe made a low whistle. “That’s some f**ked up shit. I haven’t seen anyone do that before.”
“Do you think that he was trying to get himself so deeply in trouble that someone would have to rescue him?”
Joe pounded his chest with a flat palm and said, “It worked, didn’t it?”
I smiled and we shared a conspiratorial grin and then I got serious. “No, I don’t mean that way. I mean more…maybe it was a cry for help.”
Joe pulled his chin back, his face shocked. His eyes roamed down over the dashboard to the floor, he stared at his feet and then looked straight ahead at the horizon where my headlamp beams seemed to force the bare trees to part for us. “That’s not Trevor,” he said. “That’s not who he is. He’s never been like that. If he were gonna do something like that he would just do it, he wouldn’t…” He seemed to struggle with his words and then said simply, “No.”
A huge internal sigh of relief whooshed out of me but I couldn’t hint at it. “Good,” I said, nodding slowly.
We drove in a nice sort of companion quiet, neither of us feeling the need to talk until Joe rested a warm hand, for the briefest of seconds, on my shoulder and then pulled back. “I see why he likes you,” Joe said.
Something in my belly tightened and my throat went loose, my heart slamming against my ribcage as Joe’s words triggered a reaction that made me lick my lips and try to quell the butterflies that fluttered down below. This was not how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to be excited to go see Trevor and grab whatever little bit of time we had, wringing it until we squeezed out every last lustful drop. He could go back to Boston and live his life and I could stay here and live mine.