Chapter 13 Lee
Lee
Longest. Day. Ever.
I’d taken a number of my regulars out and about today, which always made me feel good. While I’d really rather have stayed home, I hadn’t been ready to face Mason this morning when my alarm went off, so I figured I might as well get some work done.
I’d just dropped a couple of my regulars, Vivian and Sarah, off at their house. They were teenagers who attended a charter school for kids on the autism spectrum. Both of them were smart as whips, but had struggled in the public school system.
Their current school had much smaller classes and teachers specially trained in helping kids learn to manage their education.
The state paid for the charter school, but didn’t provide busing, when the kids lived in a different county.
Their parents needed someone to pick them up most days, and that person had become me.
Vivian, as always, had her nose buried in her phone. Sarah, the much more outgoing of the two, kept up a constant chatter about school all the way home.
I'd just dropped them off when my phone beeped with an incoming message.
KAINE: Hey slacker! Whatcha’ up to?
ME: Just dropping off some kids. Why?
KAINE: You want lunch?
ME: Dude, it’s 3 o’clock!
KAINE: So? I just got up. Be glad I didn’t call it breakfast.
I laughed. Kaine was going to school days and working nights at a gay bar downtown called The Belt.
ME: I could do coffee, if nothing else.
KAINE: Swing by the ‘rents?
ME: See you in 10.
I pulled up outside my parents’ house a few minutes later.
Kaine was sitting on the front steps. The crackle of the gravel under the Jeep’s tires caught his attention and a big grin lit his face.
I couldn’t help but grin back. Kaine was one of those people that, when they smiled, everyone around them did, too.
His whole face just lit up like a Christmas tree.
He ran around to the passenger’s side and opened the door.
“Is this seat taken?” he asked, with a suspiciously low voice.
“Are you on ‘roids again?” I laughed.
“Fuck no! You know I don’t do that shit. This body is one-hundred percent au naturel!” he said, dramatically waving his hands over his fit body as he fastened his seatbelt.
“Pity the same can’t be said for your hair…” I quipped, pulling us into a three-point turn.
“Hey!” he said, the mock outrage raising his voice back up into its normal range. “No fair! Lay off the locks!” He patted his hair affectionately.
Kaine’s first boyfriend, Vinnie Avery, had dumped him right after school started in ninth grade, telling him he wasn’t good enough for him, that he never cared about his appearance, and he couldn’t figure out how someone so gay could be so ugly.
He’d provided Kaine with a complete critique of the supposed flaws in his appearance, from his weight to his “shit brown” hair, and the list had devastated my brother.
I know, sounded like first world problems, right? But Kaine had struggled with feeling unwanted since he was a kid. His parents had abandoned him when he was only ten. Like, literally, he woke up one morning alone in a rental house.
No one knew how long he was alone in the house, not even Kaine, I thought. One of the neighbors had finally called the police, because she’d noticed there hadn’t been any adults around in a few weeks, and she’d spotted Kaine stealing a box of stale cereal out of her trash.
Kaine had told me he thought maybe she had known he was alone a long time before she called the police, because he remembered finding food conveniently cleanly packaged and placed on top of the trash bin.
They were always things it was easy for a young kid to eat and keep fresh, even after the electricity to the house had been turned off.
The cops had turned him over to Child Protective Services and he’d bounced around a couple of foster homes until my moms had taken him in. They’d adopted him once the legal wrangling had terminated his parents’ rights.
To be rejected by someone he loved again, in addition to his biological parents had left Kaine feeling like there was something wrong with him that made him unlovable.
I couldn’t stand how devastated Kaine had been afterward.
He’d refused to go to school for over a week and just hid in his bedroom.
His devastation had my moms at their wits’ end.
They both thought he should just brush it off and move on, not really understanding why he would care so much about the opinion of someone who was obviously shallow.
Kaine and I were close in age and had been close growing up, and his devastation had hit me hard. After waking up in the middle of the night to sounds of him sobbing in his bedroom, I knew I'd to do something.
That next morning I’d skipped school and walked the three miles to the nearest drug store, then spent most of my allowance on a home highlighting kit.
I snuck back to the house and had proceeded to thoroughly fry his hair with it.
By the time we were done, he probably would have been better off to just shave it off, but it did look fantastic, if I did say so myself.
He walked into school the following Monday with more than just a new hair color - he had a whole new attitude.
When his douche of an ex had tried to suck up to him and get back into his good graces, Kaine had pretended like he couldn’t even see the guy.
Within a few weeks he had a new boyfriend, Nicki, a kid who had been his best friend before Vinnie came along.
The kid had come out of the closet because of his feelings for Kaine, and they’d been together until Nicki’s parents had moved away their junior year.
A move that reopened all his feelings of abandonment.
By that point I'd finished basic training and been deployed overseas and so hadn’t been around for the fallout from Nicki’s departure, but I knew it had hit Kaine hard.
“So where to?” I asked as we pulled to the end of the driveway.
“How about Wally Waffle?” he asked. “They just opened their new place on Tallmadge Circle,” he finished.
I groaned.
“You just want to get me killed on the Circle,” I said.
Tallmadge Circle was a historic area in a nearby suburb.
There was literally a circle of land that had an old church on it and some old school house historical spot.
It was a tiny bit of green space, and on its own wasn’t an issue, it was the traffic around it.
There were at least eight streets that led on and off and navigating them all safely was a challenge.
You took your life in your own hands when you drove there.
“Dude, you have lived here your whole life,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “How could you not know how to drive the Circle?”
“I know how to drive it,” I said a bit peevishly. “It’s all the other idiots in the world who don’t know how to drive it. Did you hear they have so many accidents there they’ve turned it into a ‘no fault’ area? You get in an accident there and the cops won’t even ticket you.”
“Is that what you and all your Uber driver friends talk about? What areas you can have an accident and not get in trouble for?” he teased.
“No, we sit around and talk about our asshole passengers,” I said, eyeing him pointedly as he sat in my passenger seat.
“Fucker,” he laughed. “Good thing you’re driving. Otherwise I might have to hurt you for that.”
“As if you could,” I snorted.
He eyed me and grinned. “You really think you could take me, old man?”
We were stopped at a red light that I knew was extremely long, so I slipped into park and my arm flew around my brother’s neck, pulling him into a headlock. He struggled for a minute, but there was no way he was getting free.
“Uncle! Uncle!” he cried finally, tapping the armrest in surrender.
I laughed, releasing him.
“Guess you’re buying lunch,” I said.
“Joke’s on you,” he grumbled. “I was planning to, anyway.”
“Yeah, right…” I said in disbelief. My brother was a notorious cheapskate – always had been. “I can’t remember the last time you paid when we went out.”
“That’s different,” he said, one hand running through his hair as he checked his reflection in the sunshade mirror. “I act as your wingman when we go out. Can’t have our nation’s veterans go too long without getting laid.”
“I so don’t need your help in that department,” I growled, as we pulled up to the Circle.
“Really? Then when was the last time you got laid?” he smirked at me.
“None of your goddamn business,” I said, merging into traffic.
“That long, huh?” He said, pityingly. “Poor baby.”
“Fuck you,” I said, but without much conviction.
“Nah, even if I wasn’t your brother, you’re not my type,” he teased, looking me up and down appraisingly. “Though you are in pretty good shape for an old guy.”
“Again, fuck you.” I growled as I turned on my blinker.
We parked at the restaurant and walked in. There wasn’t much business at this time of day. They were primarily a breakfast place, so were at their busiest first thing in the morning. The hostess seated us, took our drink orders and gave us menus, then told us our server would be with us shortly.
Kaine studied me as I looked over the menu.
“So, how are you doing?” he asked. “For real, I mean,” he added.
“I’m fine,” I said. “How have you been doing?”
“Uh uh. This talk isn’t about me, it’s about you,” he said.
“This ‘talk’?” I asked. “Who said we were having a ‘talk’?”
“Um, well…” He squirmed a little uncomfortably in his seat. “Mama D might or might not have asked me to get in touch with you today…” he said sheepishly.
“Uh oh,” I said and sighed. “What now?”
He eyed me from across the table, his normally laughing grey eyes serious for once.
“Mom’s worried about you. She thinks you aren’t sleeping,” he said.
I sighed. I loved my parents, but they were a little too perceptive at times.
“…And she wanted me to ask you what’s going on with this guy, Mason,” he added.