“Have I met him?” Sana said.
“I don’t remember,” Scott said. “Fifty-something black guy, wears glasses, easy-going…?”
“I think he waved to me from the porch once, when we came to pick you up,” Sana said. “So it’s just you two?”
“Yeah, me and George,” Scott said. “We hang out, watch baseball.”
He wondered, belatedly, if Carver’s interest was because he thought the buddy in question was a sex partner. But again, was that delusional? It was hard to see the situation from Carver’s perspective. From Scott’s perspective, George was a paternal figure, like the uncle he’d never had or the type of dad he’d wished for. The idea of them having sex was hilarious. George loved only women; he kept a satin pillowcase in his nightstand in case of overnight visitors.
“We should buy a fixer-upper,” Sana said to Letty. “We like to DIY.”
“Oh God,” Letty said, stubbing the end of the joint out in the ramekin.
“Didn’t your mom inherit that weird little property Grandma owned near Massapequa?” Carver said. “The skinny L-shaped house?”
Letty glanced up at him in seeming surprise. “That got sold, like, eight years ago.”
“Really? Damn.”
“Yeah, sorry. You know how my parents are. Easy come easy go. I’m sure you could buy it back off the new owners, if you want it.”
Carver let out a dry laugh. His canines were sharp, and sometimes he gave a flash of fang. Scott had always found this endearing and sexy. “Just show up with a sack of cash.”
“Exactly.”
“Nah, I’m good.”
The conversation continued to meander and return to certain refrains — shared memories, and the wedding. When Carver went inside to refresh his drink, Scott glanced at his phone and was surprised to see it was 11:03. It didn’t feel that late. The warm air was still alive with promise.
“We should probably all get to bed,” he said. “Especially you guys.”
“Or,” Letty said, “how about the two of us go to bed, and the two of you keep talking?”
Scott, who was folding up a beer label he’d found in his pocket, glanced up at her. “Why?”
Sana sat up a little, resting her chin on her fist and looking at Letty in curiosity.
“‘Cause you’ve said before that there’s shit you’d like to clear the air about,” Letty said, shrugging.
“Yeah, well, ideally,” Scott said. “In a perfect world.” He felt Sana’s gaze shift from Letty to him, and he wondered what look he had on his face. “I already asked him if he wanted to talk at all, and he said no. Apparently we’re chill. So it’s all good.” He ripped the beer label in half and tossed the two pieces onto the table.
Letty looked at his litter, then back at him. “You sure?”
“Yeah. What does it matter? It’s been eighteen years, I shouldn’t dwell on this kind of shit. I don’t know why I do.”
Letty and Sana exchanged a glance. Scott wished they wouldn’t do that.
“First cut is the deepest,” Sana said, and Scott half-laughed, half-scoffed.
He was embarrassed to think about what he wanted from Carver, because he didn’t fully know and what he did know didn’t quite make sense. It was like he wanted to go back in time and win their argument about California, though he knew he couldn’t. He just wanted Carver to finally see what he had meant, and say that he saw it. Scott didn’t want to still feel like he was crazy for ever even asking.
He knew he wasn’t crazy. He knew how intimate they’d been as teenagers, and effortlessly so, even before they started hooking up. They would lie in Scott’s bed for hours just listeningto music and talking shit, then go get in Carver’s hand-me-down Volvo so they could drive around while they listened to music and talked shit. Inside the confessional of the car, Carver was honest: he hated his fascist parents and his blackshirt brother, he hated Bitterfeld, he couldn’t wait to get out. He would open up about the way he tiptoed around his house only to be blamed for things he hadn’t done anyway, the awkward pauses from his parents after he made perfectly innocuous comments, the way they didn’t look at him as often as his siblings, and then he would get embarrassed and stare through the windshield and say, “It doesn’t even sound like anything out loud.”
But Scott knew what he meant and told him so. It was true that it sounded like less than it was, but he’d seen it for himself when he went over there. Carver’s parents might love him, but they didn’t like him, and their bodies and voices made this clear. After his football injury, Carver became even more embittered toward his family, and Scott encouraged him to come over as much as he liked, which soon resulted in their first thrilling makeouts and over-the-clothes handjobs. Before long they were feverishly infatuated with each other, and Carver ended up being far more game to sneak around and break the rules and lie to his parents bald-faced than Scott ever expected him to be, as if something in his brain had snapped along with his rotator cuff.
Again and again, Carver said he was desperate to get out. He would rather be a hobo riding the rails than be here, he said. He claimed to think Scott was brave and cool for wanting to go out west.
Scott — who was sometimes still quite naivenow, let alone as a teenager — heard all this and thought they had a shot at making things work. He could see how hard Carver worked at school, how obsessed he was with performance, but he was dumb enough to think this passion could switch targets. He erroneously thought Carver wanted to be happy, or erroneouslythought he made Carver happy, and then their relationship hit a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour and he couldn’t help coming back sometimes to pick over the wreckage.
