Free Sidecar by Amy Lane Page A

he used for the bathroom. The couch wasn’t going to smell right for a week.
    “I really appreciate it.”
    “I’m a shitty role model.”
    “No!” Casey shook his head adamantly, and Joe was surprised to see that his eyes were shiny. He stood up abruptly, and the chair behind him went flying backward, and he launched himself at Joe for a long, wordless hug. Joe held him tightly, for once not concerned with propriety or breaking the boundary he’d worked so hard to establish. Suddenly just the warm, nonjudgmental human contact of someone who wasn’t going to hold that half hour of his life against him was really all he could ask for.
    “You’re a great role model,” Casey whispered into his still damp hair. “You’re great.” He got hold of himself after a minute and went and sat down, and Joe missed him. Not in a sexual way—oh God, no!—but in a warm way. Still, he’d been raised to be honest, and he was about to correct Casey—what he’d done was easy. It was true, he wasn’t a fan of rules, but that half an hour had broken a big one—and for no other reason than that Joe didn’t want to deal with all of the other rule makers when what it came down to was that they were butting into how he lived his life in his house. Even more than that, he didn’t want to deal with Casey’s fear or his own ever-present fear that Casey would just turn around and bolt and run.
    “I could have done something different,” Joe muttered, and Casey shook his head.
    “My dad,” he said, and Joe grew very still. Two months—November, December, and now they were into January, and Casey hadn’t so much as breathed a word about his folks.
    “My dad,” Casey repeated, breathing carefully, “snorted coke once a month—used to say it was his reward for being a good little corporate slave. So he voted for Reagan, and even has a picture of Nancy on his wall, and he’s snorting coke once a month, and I’m pretty sure he’s banging the secretary or someone, because Mom’s been drinking an awful lot. And both of them have dinner parties, and they trot me out and talk about my sports and my grades, and the way my dad talks to teachers when I don’t have the grades he wants?” Casey shivered and wiped his face with the back of his hand. “And it’s my fault too. I was a shitty student. If someone didn’t make me, I just didn’t do it. And here—” Casey gestured with his hand. Here. Here it was different. He swallowed and then looked at Joe with an expression so damned grown-up, Joe’s heart poinged a little. “Here what I do or say matters. You talk to me about the books, and they matter to you. You just did something a little wrong so I could stay. I’m so grateful, because the place I was from, that was a lot more wrong, okay?”
    Joe nodded and looked at his hamburger. The kid had used ground beef instead of the frozen patties. He’d cut up little onions and peppers in it, like Joe had shown him. He’d still need that second shower, he thought, picking up the hamburger, but maybe he wouldn’t need the wire brush.
    He took a bite and swallowed and smiled at Casey. “This is really good,” he said, and Casey smiled back a little.
    “Thanks, Joe.”
    “You’re welcome, kid.”
     
     
    I N J ANUARY , not long after Joe soiled his morals and his pecker in Mrs. Kindness-is-Frickin’-Deep Cahill’s patoongie (and consequently broke up with Sharon Rosenthal), Joe took Casey to get his driver’s permit. Two weeks later he took him to get his license, and the truck, such as it was, was Casey’s to drive to school. After two weeks of working his ass off and catching up on his classes, Casey begged super nicely and was allowed to get a job working at the McDonald’s right up at the Foresthill exit. Casey often called it “the place where it all began,” but Joe could never get him to explain that.
    One night Casey was late enough back from his shift—which ended at nine—that Joe began to pace,