One day, in the middle of Keisha Darrow’s thirtieth year, as she was drying dishes, she immediately stopped. She stood at the sink for a long while, looking out of the curtained window onto the driveway. She didn’t even focus at first. It was all blurs. It was all vague shapes. She heard nothing. Then she just heard noise, all disconnected from everything else.

            She heard her son. She heard Mason say something. And then she saw, in front of her, the car. She turned around. Mason asked for juice. Keisha went to the refrigerator, took it out and put it down. And then she reached for her keys on the counter, and took them. She left the house, got into her car and, pulling out of the driveway, drove away.

            She went down Owens Street and then cut onto Bancroft and began traveling south from there. She felt that the only thing north was Canada or Michigan and she felt no great desire for either. She drove on, out of the city, over the roads, south and south until the car was running out of gas. She refueled and drove well into the night, not thinking, just driving, eyes bugged out. That night she stayed in a Day’s Inn. She was pushing it. She was so tired. She was in Kentucky by then.

            And then she kept on driving. Keisha drove until she got to Mississippi and she drove all along the Gulf Coast. It was in Texarkana that they found her, and brought her back home, all crazy and shit.

            People always said that Keisha had just left. But people never considered that in order to just leave, that also meant Keisha had been crazy.

Darla was going through the break up of her marriage, so she was there for Sidney when his crazy wife came home. They put her in a good hospital. Saint Francis down on Copeland Street. Sidney was there night and day, but made sure that Mason went to school, had a more or less normal life, and then they brought her home. Darla was good to everyone.

            When Keisha was no longer crazy, or—at least—as sane as she ever would be again, she burst into tears one night and told Sidney and Mason, “I’ll always love you. I always will.” She reached out to touch Dan’s hand and include him in the gesture.

            “But I can’t stay here… I can’t do this. I can’t be a wife. Not really.” Sidney thought she was so beautiful, her peanut colored skin was blotched now, her eyes were red. “I can’t be the wife that I’m supposed to be. I’ve got to go away for a bit.”

            Sidney nodded dumbly. He couldn’t think about this right now. That night Keisha packed up and left. After Dan went out and Mason went to bed. Darla was still there. Sidney was sitting in the chair, face pointed to the ceiling, eyes closed, legs apart. Darla put her hands to his pants and insinuated that she wanted to suck his dick.

            Sidney felt so bad. He didn’t give a shit.

            So he let her.

Keisha had that apartment for about five weeks and one day when Sidney was over there he said, “You’re not coming back, are you?”

            “I might, I mean… I’d like to.”

            “You don’t know?’

            “I don’t.”

            “Well, I don’t know if I can live like this.”

            “Look,” Keisha said, stopping her painting. She was doing more painting than ever. “I don’t want you to divorce me. I don’t want a divorce just yet.”

            “Well, I don’t want to sleep alone.”

            “Well, fine,” Keisha said. “Sleep with whoever you want to. But don’t leave me.”

            That hurt. That really hurt. And it fucked him up.

            He didn’t want Mason to know how screwed up his family was becoming, so he did what he did quietly as possible. That first night after he left Keisha, when Mason was staying with Addison, he fucked Darla. Really, just gave it to her, like in the dirty movies. He was just so goddamned sick of everything. Darla dragged on for six months until it became work, and it seemed like too much work for a relationship that wasn’t much of anything, and that he couldn’t really tell anyone about. And so, for the second time he ended a relationship with the first love of his life.

It was a year later that Mark Powers came to the door. Joel was the one who answered the door.

            “It’s over,” he said, looking so hurt. They just let him into the house. The boys must have been there somewhere, but Sidney can’t remember them. In the last year they had gone through Sidney’s troubles and his weird affair with Darla, the loss of Mark’s wife and his affair with Vanessa and then the end of Joel’s marriage. It was Mark’s affair that had just ended. Why hadn’t Sidney had a little more compassion? What was wrong with him then? Why had he said those things?

            “Why don’t grown men cry?” Mark said, shaking his head. “All we do is get drunk and God knows we have more than enough to cry about. I feel so…”

            “Raw?” Joel said, his hair sticking up, his face ravaged, like he was in his seventies and not his thirties.

            Yeah,” Mark said. “I feel like… I felt like I needed an affair to get me over… the hump, to get me through this and now I feel like I need something to get me over the affair.”

            “Did I tell you guys I’d been messing with Darla?”

            “What?” Joel looked at Sidney.

            “Yes. It was going nowhere. But then again, so was everything else.”

            “You didn’t tell us,” Mark was surprised.

            “It was right before Margot got sick It was something I just decided to go through by myself.”

            “Well, Sid that’s just plain stupid,” Joel said. “There’s not a damn thing you have to go through by yourself. Not when you got us.”

            “Not when you got us,” Mark echoed, But it seemed more like he was repeating a mantra to himself. Discovering something.

            “I think we should raise a toast,” Sidney said, “To guilt free no strings attached sex.”

            “I wish I could find guilt free no strings attached sex,” Mark said.. He laughed and took his hands through his hair. “God, I wish I could. I wish I could just say, fuck it. I thought I could. I wish I could… Something.”

            “Well, maybe if we stopping fucking our exes we can,” Sidney said. “But… I don’t even want that. I just want to be happy again.”

            “Yeah,” Joel said.

            He was getting ready to say something else, and Sidney picked up on it.

            “Martha still stays over sometime.”

            “Are you serious?” Mark said. And then he said, “Of course. It’s not like all of us haven’t been in that situation.”

            “It’s like she makes me forget, or I choose to forget that she betrayed me and... is leaving me. And I think how she’s still my wife and I know what I’m getting into and… I don’t want to be alone tonight. So… It just drags out. It gets so stupid.”

            “Oh, Joel,” Mark said. “You need to use something. I mean… if you all aren’t going to be married you should protect yourself or something.”

            “Or quit fucking her,” Sidney said.

            “Well,” Mark nodded. “That’s always an idea too. But… all three of us know what it’s like to be in a weak place.”

            “Did you ever think?” Sidney said, “when we were kids, that we would be three grown men like we are now?”

            Joel smiled bravely. “We’re not so bad, Sid. We’re really pretty good. We’re just…”

            “A little wounded,” Mark said.

            “Yes,” Joel agreed.

Joel sat around his living room watching what he proudly thought of as “his family.” His wife beside him, Seth, clean and healthy and happy with Becky beside him. Joel had a tremendous amount of pride for the four of them.

            “Guys, I want to thank you for tomorrow,” Becky Angstrom said. “Taking me to Columbus and everything. My parents just weren’t able to. They feel bad about it. You should have heard my mom going on about not being able to move her oldest into her dormitory.” Becky shrugged. “But what can you do? The twins both have a fever.”

            “And in the middle of summer,” Shelley said. “I mean, they call it fall, but if you can drop an egg out of your window and have it land on the first floor fried, then to me it’s summer.”

            Seth grinned and Joel said, “You’re part of the family now. At least to me, and family helps family out. That’s what family means.”

            “Like Mark and that girl.”

            “Mark Powers?” Seth raised an eyebrow. “And a girl?” The two words made no sense.

            “Yes,” Joel said. “Her name is Bonnie.  Addison’s girlfriend. Ex girlfriend, I guess.”

            “I haven’t talked to Addison,” Seth said.

            “Bonnie Metzger is living with Mark Powers?” Becky said, suddenly. “What for?”

            “Oh, her parents threw her out,” said Shelley. “She’s pregnant.”

            “Wha?” Seth began. Then. “Bonnie Metzger is having Addison Cromptley’s baby.”  

            “Yes,” Shelley said. “I saw the girl at the store the other day. The Kroger up near Eastforth. She was looking rad—”

            And just then, Becky Angstrom got up, ran to the bathroom, and began to violently throw up.

It was on the third goodbye that Keisha and Ruth Balliol jointly hooked arms around Swain MacDonald and pulled her away from Mason.

            “I want to get home before dark,” Sidney was saying from the front porch.

            Mason came out to kiss Swain again and to wrap an arm around his father as they looked up and down the porch.

            “A little more work to be done,” he acknowledged. “The crew’ll be in and out of the house for about a week more.”

            Balliol was painting trim around the windows. He even did that in a classy way. Sully came across to him, in overalls and handed him the paint bucket.

            “It’s about that time,” Sidney was saying, as he gave his son one last hug and then Keisha was embracing him and looking out on the lawn. “This place is beautiful, Mase. You may have to set me up for a few days.”

            Ruth Balliol stuck her head in the house and shouted, “Bonnie!”

            “I think Matt’s falling for her,” Swain told them.

            “But she’s pregnant,” Balliol pronounced from the porch floor, where he was finishing the last of the window trim.

            Sully cackled and licked a bead of sweat that was falling down his lip.

            “The heart wants what the heart wants,” Sidney declared as Bonnie came running out followed by Matt. They weren’t holding hands or anything. His eyes were just sparkling. To Balliol he looked like he was in love again.

            “Hey neighbors!” They heard a shout from the street and as Sidney, Keisha and Ruth were heading down the porch steps, Jared and John were coming up them.

            “Wow, Sully!” said John.

            Sully frowned and said, “Hum?”

            “I think,” Jared said diplomatically, hoisting a case of beer, “that John means you really know how to wear overalls.”

            “Yeah,” said Sully. “With no undershirt and no underwear.”

            “On that note,” Ruth Balliol said, “time to go.” She stooped down, kissed her son and then took her niece’s hand.

            “Is that beer?” Sidney investigated as he was climbing into the car.

            “Is there a problem, sir?” Jared asked him.

            Sidney thought about it, pushed up his glasses, and then said, “Not if you give me one.”

For once in my life I have someone who needs me
Someone I've needed so long
For once, unafraid, I can go where life leads me
And somehow I know I'll be strong

For once I can touch what my heart used to dream of
Long before I knew
Someone warm like you
Would make my dreams come true

For once in my life I won't let sorrow hurt me
Not like it's hurt me before
For once, I have something I know won't desert me
I'm not alone anymore

“So,” Balliol lit a cigarette and took a long drag. “Bonnie, Metzger?”

            Beside him, Matt shrugged and turned red. “I just really like her, Lincoln.”

            Balliol nodded and grinned.

            “What?” said Matt. “What, dude?”

            “It’s just I always thought she was… I don’t know. I could never take her seriously when she was with Addison.”

            “You mean as a girlfriend?”

            “I mean period. But… with you it’s different. It’s like she… and this is going to sound all poetic, like a Sullivanism. But like she answers something in you.”

            “I feel like I used to feel about Suzie,” Matt said. “And I never thought I’d say that. She’s just like a best friend that I get super super excited to see. That I’m way, crazy into.”

            “Way crazy into,” Balliol told him, “is not a bad thing.”

            “What about you?”

            “What about me?”

            Matt cracked a beer open. “When are you going to find someone you’re way crazy into?”

            “Does it work like that? Do you just schedule it? I wish you did.”

            “See,” Matt took a swig, and when Balliol signaled, passed him a beer. “I bet you don’t. You just seem kind of cool the way you are.”

            “You mean single?”

            “Yeah.”

Someone who needs me!

            “Well, for now I am. I mean, I’m eighteen. Am I supposed to be pairing off? Show me someone worth pairing off with and I’ll do it. Incidentally, when this baby comes are you and Addison both going to do parental duties?”

            “Easy, Bailey, let’s worry about tomorrow and then we can think about seven months from now.”

            “You’re the one who was getting ready to marry me off.”

            “Well, I repent. I repent, I humbly repent of that,” Matt told him. “But I just get excited you know? When I find someone I want everyone to find someone. And I didn’t even know I had found someone until you pointed it out.”

            “A pregnant chick no less,” Mason said as he walked in, dropping onto another bean bag/ “Instant family!”

            Matt screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue.

“So the girlfriend…” Sully said.

            “Well,” John told him, “it turns out that experiment didn’t work so well.”

            “I never thought of experimenting with something like that.”

            “It wasn’t exactly an experiment. I mean, I thought I might have loved her. You never go through that?”

            “No,” Sully shook his head. “I always know who I love. I don’t have to experiment with it.”

            “You’re very lucky.”

            “You think that’s luck? See, I think that’s a doom,” Sully told him. “Especially because then you know when playing around is just playing around.”

            “So this Chris… this guy you were with before?”

            “That was love. That was the real thing,” Sully said. And then he amended. “At least to me it was the real thing. To him too. For a while.”

            “And now he’s with women?”

            “Well he was with a woman. With a girl.”

            “Is that the real thing for him?”

            “I don’t know,” Sully said. “We don’t really talk. I could ask Matt. They’re best friends and all.”

            “So what’s your philosophy? On love? On the real thing, on romance? I mean, I’d think if you always know and you are only with people you know you love then that’s going to sort of lower your possibilities. I mean the rest of us play on the field and wait for things to happen.”

            Sully shrugged. “I don’t really mind playing on the field and knowing that nothing’s going to happen.”

            John looked at him.

            “What?” Sully blinked.

            “Such jaded words from one so young.”

            “I think you’re joking, but part of me thinks you’re not,” Sully told him.

            “That is actually how I feel.”

            “I mean…” Sully explained. “I have had true love once in my life and it wasn’t that great. So what if it isn’t real? What if it is just an illusion? Sometimes isn’t it just best to take what you can get?

            “Stop talking,” Jared shouted from the front door. And turn down the music.”

            Everyone obeyed the first. Mason, going to the stereo, the second.

            After a bit, Matt whispered, “What are we listening for?”

            “Listening to,” Tommy corrected. And then he answered the question:

            Saint Genevieve’s was telling everyone that it was nine o’clock in Genoa, Ohio.

            “The church bells.”

When Sully came into John’s loft, into his room, the other boy was lying on his side, on the bed, still in the pink shirt and white shorts he’d been wearing all day. He blinked and looked sleepily at Sully, with a smile.

            “You’re twenty, right?”

            “Um hum,” John murmured.

            “You look like you’re my age.”

            “You look like you’re mine.”

            They both chuckled together.

            “Hard life?” John said.

            “Well,” Sully shrugged. He handed John a soda, and then lay back against the wall.

            “Doesn’t everybody have a hard something? And, after all how can I complain? I mean, my scholarship came through and everything. I’m the scholarship boy.”

            John turned over on his back and began to laugh merrily. He was so small and so pretty to Sully. He’d never known that, and he’d seen John over and over again for the last three months.

            “When you say it like that…” John threw his hands up in the air… ‘I’m the scholarship boy—!’”

            Sully spritzed his soda out of his mouth and said, “But I didn’t say it like that! Hold on, I gotta wipe this off.”

            John rolled over on his bed and reached under it.

            “You keep toilet paper under your bed?”

            “Where else would I keep it? “

            Sully just looked at John. Their looks dared each other to find the ludicrous part of that statement, and then they both just burst out laughing.

            Sully wiped his chin and John sang out, “I’m the scholarship boy!”

            “I’m glad I could give you a little entertainment. What else do you want me to do for you?”

            “I want you to fuck me,” John said.

            Sully stared at him.

“ like it if you just sat on the bed with me,” John told him. “To be honest. That would be real nice.”

“It would,” Sully agreed.

Sully came to the bed and lay on his side, John’s side against his.

“All summer I wondered what this would be like.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” John said lightly. “But you and Jared..”

“You and your girlfriend.”

John laughed lightly. “Well, yes… Well, that is over.

“You and Jared are over?”

Sully said, “We could be. If we needed to be. I mean there’s nothing serious in it.”

John put his arms around Sully and squeezed him.

Like that, Sully pushed himself into his chest.

John whispered into Sully’s back, “Could I kiss you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

John did and he murmured, “Look, I’m kissing the scholarship boy.”

Sully kissed him back.

They held each other, trying to fit closer and closer into each other, Sully pressing himself into John, the two of them running their hands over each other until John whispered, “That’s enough for now. We got all year, don’t we?”

“Hell, yeah we do,” Sully said.

“Sleep for now?”

“Yes,” Sully told him, reached up and turned off the light.

“What was it like? Sex with a girl?”

John sat up, considering.

“Nice,” he said. “If you’re straight. If you’re not its kind of pointless.”

They both laughed lightly, and John said, “Unless you’re trying to prove a point.” He shook his head. “I have no idea what point I was trying to prove then.”

“Maybe its good for learning life lessons?” Sully suggested with a whimsical smile.

“The only life lesson I learned is that I’m totally gay.”

“Being with you is so different.”

“Different from?”

“Different from anyone I’ve been with. Different from Chris, or… anyone else.”

“You mean Jared?”

“Definitely different from Jared. But there was someone else.”

John’s face was cute. He looked like he might have been sixteen. He looked like he’d always be a boy, and when he smiled he said, “What was Jared like? I can’t imagine.”

Sully thought a moment and then said, “I don’t know. I know that sounds funny, but I don’t know. Neither one of us was ourselves, and we weren’t trying to be with each other. I think… I’m pretty sure we were both dealing with our demons. I have very little idea of what Jared Parker is really like.”

“That’s too bad,” John said after a while.

“Yeah,” Sully found himself agreeing. “It is, actually.”

Sully went to the table by the door and got the soda which had lost most of its fizz.

“There’s cold water in the fridge,” John told him.

“Oh all right.”

            “And,” he said with a sly smile as he reclined with his hands folded behind his head: “You could bring me back a glass too.”

When Sully came back he said to John, “You weren’t really joking When you said you wanted me to fuck you.”

            “Maybe I wasn’t. But… I don’t want that. Not a fuck. I don’t need that. I want to be loved right now. I want to be loved real slowly.”

            Sully handed John the glass, and he drank out of his own, he put it beside John’s bed and he said, “We could do that. If you want. Something nice. Something not… That’s what Jared was like. It was just fucking. I’m tired of fucking.”

            John sat up and kissed Sully on the cheek.

            “Take off my shirt,” John told him.

            Sully started with the buttons of the pink dress shirt, and then John just made a noise and took the thing off for him. He put it lightly on the bed.

            “You and your overalls,” John murmured.

            He unhooked them and they fell away from Sully’s chest. The two of them looked at each other a long while, and then they embraced.

            “Is this going to be all right for us?” John asked. Sully whispered into his neck:

            “I think for us it’s safe.”

            “That’s what I want right now. A little alrightness. A little safety.”

“You don’t have to hate me anymore,” Jared told him.

            “What?” Balliol looked up from the window.

            “The look you give me whenever I show up. Whenever I was at Mason’s house. Whenever I’m here from now on,” Jared told him. “You can save it for someone else. You don’t have to hate me.”

            “I don’t hate you,” Balliol said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

            “I think you do,” Jared told him. “I think you do a little. Me and Sully are pretty much finished. I’m sure.”

            Balliol looked at him.

            “Of course Sully must have told you that. And told that it wasn’t serious.”

            “He told me he fucked you,” said Balliol said frankly. “Whenever you came into town,”

            “And I take it you don’t go in for such things.”

            “You do?”

            “No, not ordinarily but… Are you possessive?”

            “Come again?”

            “Possessive of Sully?”

            “How can I be possessive Sullivan? He screws the whole world. If I was possessive of him I’d be pretty miserable, wouldn’t I?”

            “It’s just…” Jared said. “If you weren’t possessive of him, why would it matter who he slept with?”

            “It matters when my best friend is running around fucking everyone he sees, jumping from bed to bed and expecting me to say nothing. Then, Jared, it matters. I know outside of morality land where everyone does what the fuck they feel like it doesn’t matter. But it does to me.”

            Jared looked at Balliol for a moment and then he said, “Well, don’t hate me anymore, Lincoln Balliol. I’m not the new man in Sully’s bed.”

            “The new…” Balliol began. “My God, he doesn’t even take off for weekends!”

            Jared just looked at Balliol, seemingly satisfied. Or at least Balliol thought he seemed satisfied.

            “Fine,” Balliol rose to the bait. “Who is the new man?”

            Jared gave an elegant gesture around the living room.

“Do you see John anywhere?”

“Sully… Sully…” John panted.

            “Say my name,” Sully whispered.

            John started to laugh in the dark.

            “No,” Sully said, quietly. “Please. Seriously. Say my name.”

            Sully?” John said it like a question, his hands lose in Sully’s hair. They both stopped, Sully’s face in the crook of John’s shoulder.

            “What’s the matter, Sullivan?”

            Sully didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, “I like… hearing my  name. I like… you acknowledging it’s me.”

            When Sully sensed that wasn’t enough explanation, he gathered his body closer to John’s; and whispered to the other young man, “When I was with Jared… he used to pretend I was someone else. He would call me other names. You know?”

John shuddered a little bit and pushed Sully up so he could look at him.

“Are you serious?” he whispered, sounding hurt. His face was amazed. And Sully was amazed to be looked at that way.

“Yes,” he said, turning away, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s nothing. It’s just...”

“Look, John told him, drawing him down and caressing his back, caressing his neck, his head. “I want Sully, all right? Sully is the person I want you to be. There’s no one else I’d rather have right here. But you. You’re not anyone else but you.”

John kissed him on the side of his head and held him tight, Sully closed his eyes and let himself dissolve, melting and molding his body into John Turner’s.

“Sully, wake up!” John was shaking him the next morning.

“Wha…? uh…” Sullivan Reardon yawned, and knuckled his eyes. John snapped up the drapes, and the sun shot in.

“I woke up late,” John was saying, He was in khaki shorts and a grey tee shirt that read “Genoa College Freshman Leader”.

“Eat. I thought you could sleep a little longer.”

“What time is it?”

“A little less than an hour till freshman orientation,” John told him.

“Oh, crap—” Sully began to scramble out of the bed.

“But don’t worry,” John handed Sully the sheet of paper he was looking over. “I know your freshman leader.”

Sully read the sheet, and then laughed.

“So see,” John smiled, leaned down slowly, and kissed him. “You’re not late until I’m there, and you’re leaving with me. I’ll even let you get out of the car thirty second early.”

John’s smile was merry, and when Sully looked into his dark eyes, when he remembered the tenderness in all of the night before, and their conversations for the three months past he thought, “I could love him. I really could.”

Then he looked at the list again, “Oh, shit,” Sully said.

“What?” John took it back.

“Balliol’s in my freshman group.”

“So what?” John shrugged.

Sully wondered should he explain that Balliol was the last real Anglican and would probably look at John as the biggest child molester for finding Sully and going to bed with him on the first night? Would Sully have to explain Justin and Jared and everything else?

John, innocent and sweet looked at Sully, waiting for an explanation.

“Do you have a few minutes?” Sully said.

John Turner’s brow furrowed.

“I think I’m gonna have to.”