Sipping a beer on my parents’ pool steps, I lean back on my elbows, taking in the sight of Joe swimming laps like an Olympic champ.
“I forgot how much I love to swim in the dark. When are you coming in?” he says, stopping in front of me to catch his breath.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
“What, the crawl?”
“I always wanted to swim like that.”
“But you can swim,” he says.
“Of course I can swim, but it’s an ugly swim. Nothing special.”
“I think you’re something special,” he says, crawling up a couple of steps and planting his face in the crotch of my swimsuit.
“Whoa. I don’t think this is acceptable behavior in the bylaws of the official games.”
Joe sticks his face up the leg of my shorts and sniffs.
“What’s going on down there?” I say, gasping and laughing as he tickles the inside of my thigh with his tongue.
He pulls back, looks up. “Put down the beer.”
“I will in a second. So, when did your folks learn you liked guys?”
“Oh. Well.” Joe grabs a beach ball and floats on it. “My mother found a magazine under my bed when she was cleaning. It was the worst magazine she could have found. Orgies, flying body fluids, you name it.”
“So what did she do?”
“She left it on my bed with a pamphlet on AIDS and a box of condoms.”
“No way,” I say.
“Jewish mothers, you gotta love ’em.”
“Indeed.”
Joe tosses the ball into the deep end. “So, are you gonna put down the beer now?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, taking one last slug.
He shimmies out of his trunks and tosses them on the side of the pool. “Now you.”
“You’re certainly giving out the instructions this evening.” I peel off my trunks. “Anything else I can do for you?”
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Here we go.” Grabbing me by the waist, Joe pulls me off the steps into the water. He sits cross-legged on the bottom of the shallow end of the pool and situates me on top of him. He places my hands around the back of his neck. “Do you like me?”
“Of course I like you. Can’t you tell?” I say, placing his hand on my cock.
“Well, I know you like me like that,” Joe says with a grin. “I mean, who wouldn’t?”
Who wouldn’t, indeed, I think, laughing out loud.
“Shh. We don’t wanna wake your folks.”
“Right, no.”
“Thank you for inviting me over,” Joe says, taking in the surroundings. “I like it back here. Do y’all not have a pool light?”
“It doesn’t work.”
“Just as well for tonight, I guess. It feels like we’re in high school,” he says, running his fingernails lightly down my back. “Fooling around in the parents’ pool. With beer.”
“It does,” I say, feeling not a day over sixteen.
“So, I’m gonna ask you again.”
“What’s that?”
Joe whispers softly in my ear. “Do you like me?”
“We’ve already covered this.”
“Not like that,” he says, resting his head on my shoulder like a child.
The vulnerability in his voice startles me. It takes me a moment to find my bearings. I can hear the water gurgling through the skimmer behind us. “I like you,” I whisper.
After a moment, Joe pulls away from me and looks into my eyes with a face of relief and contentment. It’s such a switch from the sexy, gregarious man I’ve come to know, it brings to mind Sis’s stories about his supposed mental issues. But in the same moment, I’m wondering why it is that he has to be crazy just because he attempted to express his true feelings for me.
In an effort to take us back to where we were, I reach between Joe’s legs and take his now-soft penis in my hand. I realize the events of the last few minutes had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a handsome carpenter who has come to depend on me. Glancing down at Joe’s head, still on my shoulder, I kiss him lightly on the cheek. “You okay?” I ask.
“I’m good,” he says quietly. I’m thinking of that first night when I fell off the stepladder at his place, and he watched over me until I was able to go home.
This time, I’m thinking, was his time to fall.
* * *
Things couldn’t have been going better. I was giddy with pride and gratitude. I began to pace, and I didn’t know why. I’m not talking ten or fifteen minutes of minor league pacing, I’m talking feverish pacing. Most nights I’d pace two, three hours or more from the sunroom, to the kitchen, to the living room, to the den. I felt like I was on coke. Justin and Marsala said the pacing was a discharge from all those years of eating dairy and sugar, and that it would take a while to release it from my nervous system.
“That’s not the only discharge,” Justin warned. “Since the carboplatin is so tough on the kidneys, the macrobiotic diet will begin to discharge the chemo from a place on the back of Tina’s right leg.”
And it did. Kid you not. Big, itchy red splotch on the back of her right leg.
Marsala weighed in as well. “The seemingly incurable fungus Tina’s had on her toenail for the past thirty years will soon be a thing of the past.”
Gone. In weeks. Feet like a Miss American contestant.
And that’s not all. Justin and Marsala pooh-poohed the taking of vitamins. Your healing was meant to take place solely from the foods you eat, not from something with the potential to throw your body out of balance. And the foods Justin and Marsala were prescribing left Tina practically free of any side effects from the chemo. No fatigue or hair loss, and her white blood count remained high, something virtually unheard of with this drug. Tina looked twenty years younger, and she was swimming over a hundred laps mornings after treatments. Her cough was gone and, eventually, so were the splotches.
Our road to success would be paved with the residue of any negative energy I could put behind us. When Tina, an avid reader, had a particularly unpleasant experience with a soul-killing Book of the Month choice, I decided to take control of all literature that came into the house. Anything she put on her list, I found, read the book jackets and grilled the librarians, making sure I read at least two chapters myself, just in case there was a passage about someone dying a gruesome death from cancer.
I pushed Emerson and Thoreau over Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. I scavenged for nightly devotionals about people who scaled heights of insurmountable obstacles and read them aloud at my parents’ bedside. But when it came to pure entertainment, nothing could beat the weekly headlines in the local paper. The widespread panic attributed the continuing Great Southeastern Drought was bringing out the truly bizarre in Clarke County.