Chapter 37

"It's so ugly,it's adorable!" Hailey exclaimed.

Joel beamed at her image on his laptop screen as he held a male septendecim up to the camera. He'd been so nervous to meet her this afternoon, but she had turned out to be (almost) as good at setting him at ease as her father.

Maybe Daniel had told her to ask about cicadas, to break the ice and make Joel look cool and competent. In any case, it was working—the butterflies in his stomach had returned to their roost and gone (mostly) to sleep.

Hailey's face loomed closer, her tiny silver nose stud catching the light. "The little guy's not scared of you?"

"They're super chill." Daniel scooted his dining room chair closer and put his finger beside Joel's to let the cicada walk onto it. "They usually squawk when you pick them up or hold them in place, but if you let them just hang out, they calm down."

The cicada rambled over onto Daniel's finger, as if to illustrate his point.

"I was checking out pictures of them online." Hailey's voice held a lilting tone Joel had never heard in Daniel's. Maybe it was a Colorado vs Wyoming distinction, or maybe just a generational thing. "They look so different when they first come out of their shells, all white and gooey."

"We call that teneral," Joel said. "It comes from the same root as the word tender—tender as in young, not tender as in, ‘awwww.'"

"Still." Hailey tilted her head, her bright blue and yellow baby braids framing her face. "Awwww." She was much better at feigning interest in the etymology of entomology than his students.

"Ooh, Joel, do the snap thing." Daniel looked at Hailey. "This is amazing."

"So if you snap your fingers," Joel told her, "it sounds like a female flicking her wings, and the males will respond."

He held up his hand near Daniel's and snapped his fingers. The cicada stopped in its tracks, turned around, and headed back toward Joel's hand.

"Whoa," Hailey said.

Joel did it again.

Weeeee-ooo.The courtship call, a slightly abbreviated version of the chorus, echoed against the dining room ceiling.

Hailey clapped her hands. "Do it again!" Joel obeyed, and the cicada repeated its hey-baby query. From their beds in the living room, Florey let out a sharp bark, while Archie started baying.

"Okay, we've teased this guy long enough." Daniel got up from the table and headed toward the deck door.

As the door slid shut, Joel turned back to Hailey. "Thanks for letting me geek out. Hope that wasn't too weird."

"I love weird. One thing, though?" Hailey narrowed her eyes and stared straight into the camera. "My dad is hardcore in love with you."

Joel froze. The next word he said could determine everything. "Okay." That was the wrong word. "I mean, uh, yeah." Even worse words. He put a hand to his throat as he cleared it. "I haven't told him yet, but…same. Hardcore."

"Uh-huh." She pointed a blunt, midnight-blue fingernail at him. "You should tell him, because he won't say it first. Not with you. Maybe not with anyone ever again."

"Okay." There was that feeble word again. "I'll tell him soon."

"Good. Because if you ever hurt him the way that Corey motherfucker did, I will chop you into little pieces and feed them to your tarantulas—while you're still alive, so you can watch."

"Oh…kay."

Hailey gave an imperious, queen-bee smile. "Don't worry, I'll make sure your dogs find a good home after your untimely demise."

The back door slid open again. "I put him back on that mulberry tree where we found him." Daniel strode back to the table. "Did you two talk about me while I was out?"

Joel swallowed. "Little bit."

"All good things." Hailey shone a supernova-bright smile upon Daniel. "Dad, don't forget the Nuggets are on tonight at eight-thirty."

"Oh." Daniel gave Joel a panicky look. Clearly he had forgotten. "We've always watched playoff games as a family, the three of us. Even long-distance." He turned back to Hailey. "Thing is, I made birthday dinner reservations at seven, and it's a half hour away."

There was a beat that might've been Zoom lag—or, more likely, Hailey processing yet another change in her dad's life. "No problem," she said. "Mom and I'll watch it." Her smile went stiff and her glance darted offscreen.

"Hold on," Joel said. "Eight-thirty our time or yours?"

Hailey's eyes flickered with what looked like hope. "Mountain time. So ten-thirty eastern?"

"Well, there you go. We'll be back here in plenty of time." Joel pressed his palms together. "Can I watch the game with you guys?"

"Yes, of course!" She gave a mock scowl and shook her finger. "As long as you don't root for Portland."

"I will definitely not root for Portland." An easy promise to make, since he was just now learning Portland had a team.

Daniel nudged him. "Sure that's how you want to spend the last few hours of your birthday?" he murmured.

"Absolutely," Joel said. "Hockey players are hot."

Hailey's laughter rang out. "The Denver Nuggets are a basketball team."

"Oh thank God." Joel swept an exaggerated whew gesture over his forehead. "I hate hockey. It's so violent."

This time, Daniel joined Hailey's laughter. "Stanley Cup playoffs are happening too. The Avalanche are hopefully sweeping St. Louis tomorrow afternoon."

Did hockey involve sweeping? Or was that curling?

"But I don't need to watch it," Daniel said. "Hockey's not as big in our family as basketball. Did I tell you Hailey played varsity?"

Roughly a million times, but seeing Daniel gush over his daughter would never get old. "That's fantastic."

"Oh!" Hailey glanced to the side of the camera. "Speaking of which, I gotta bolt to play with my friends." She held up a hand. "Yes, Dad, it's totally outside, and we're all vaxxed."

"Good girl," Daniel said. "Go have fun, and we'll see you tonight."

"Bye!" Hailey grinned at Joel. "Remember what I told you." She mimed wielding a knife. "Chop chop!"

The meeting ended with a bloop. Joel closed the Zoom app.

"That went well." Daniel turned to him. "What did she mean by ‘chop chop'?"

"Um. That you love Japanese steakhouses?" An educated guess.

"I do! Is there a good one around here?"

"There's a great one, really close." Probably. "It was supposed to be a surprise, but I guess she got excited."

"I think she liked you."

"I hope so. I liked her." If anything, he liked her because of her explicit threat to his life, not despite it. Their love for Daniel gave them something in common.

Love. For Daniel. Joel consisted of this the way he consisted of molecules. Love for Daniel filled all his vast atomic spaces.

Daniel leaned his head on his hand and regarded him with amusement. "I can't believe you want to watch sportsball with me."

Joel shrugged. "You put up with my bug stuff, so it's only fair."

"It's not the same. I love your bug stuff. You hate sports."

"Maybe I'll learn to love them if you show me why I should. No pressure or anything."

Daniel laughed. "Sure, I can explain all the rules and formations if you want to get into the weeds."

"Normally I love weeds, but I think ‘Scoring a basket equals good, not scoring a basket equals bad' is pretty much the limit of my interest."

"We'll see about that." Daniel kissed him, once and gently, then twice and not so gently.

Joel reached out and shut his laptop, in case the camera was still on and some corporation was gathering data on their make-out methods. "I think the dogs are tired again."

"Huh?" Daniel glanced behind him into the living room. "Oh! Yes, they look exhausted. We should let them sleep."

Joel took his hand and led him up to the bedroom, where they shed their shirts before they even hit the bed.

They kissed and touched with the sort of thorough, unhurried exploration made possible by their early-morning escapade. Time could be devoted to peripheral body parts, all of which demanded attention.

Through the window, the cicadas' song was swelling to its midday peak. The sound, heard while lying in this man's arms, made Joel's heart feel like it was unfolding, as though it had been crumpled like a mistake-strewn sheet of paper.

His phone rang in the back pocket of his shorts, which he was somehow still wearing. "Sorry, I know it's been ringing off the hook today."

"It's your birthday," Daniel said. "I like seeing direct evidence that so many people love you."

"Good to know my scheme of paying strangers to pretend to be my family and friends has paid off." He pulled out his phone. The screen read, Dad. "Promise this is the last call I answer." He put the phone to his ear, "Hey there!"

"Happy Birthday!" Dad said. "Am I interrupting ?"

"Your timing was fine." Technically true, because fifteen minutes later would've been way worse. "Hang on." He spoke to Daniel as he rolled out of bed. "I'm going to turn down the thermostat and get some water. You want some?"

Daniel gave him a thumbs up.

On his way down the stairs, Joel said, "The cicadas finally started singing today. Mostly septendecim. What about you?"

"Mostly cassini, which makes sense with the pond right here. How's your boyfriend settling in?"

"He's…really great." Uh-oh, did he have sex voice right now? He cleared his throat as he opened the fridge. "How are your girlfriends?"

Dad chuckled. "I told you, we're all just friend-friends."

"Do they know that?" He pulled out the water pitcher to fill a pair of glasses. "Because Mary Frances texted me last week, and she definitely has suspicions about you and Rosemary."

"How did Mary Frances get your number?"

"Maybe you left your phone in her boudoir? And since you won't take my advice on electronic security?—"

"What did you tell her?"

"The truth: that you'd never mentioned a Rosemary to me."

"I haven't told you about her?"

"So she is your girlfriend," Joel said as he went into the living room to lower the thermostat. "You know, you're a walking advertisement for taking care of one's health in middle age. Being the fittest eighty-something dude in your assisted living facility gets you all the babes by default."

Dad was silent for a moment. "Accurate."

Hmm, Archie and Florey weren't in their beds. Maybe on the couch downstairs? He went to see.

"Dad, please be safe. With Covid, I mean, not—never mind." Yeesh, they'd nearly had a sex talk.

"No worries. We're all double-vaxxed, plus we're in each other's bubbles."

"Is that what the kids are calling it these days?" Crap, the dogs were also not on the couch. "Gotta go, Dad. See you tomorrow night for dinner."

They signed off, and Joel took the water glasses upstairs.

"I better not find what I think I'm about to find," he said as he stalked down the hall.

Sure enough, both pups were on the bed, Archie with his dopey brown head on Daniel's bare belly and Florey stretched out beside him like the world's fluffiest sentry. Out of the three of them, only Florey looked guilty.

"This"—Joel gestured to the tableau in front of him—"cannot happen."

Daniel gave a pouty look. "How come they can be on the basement couch but not on the bed?"

"Because I said so, and what's the point of having authority if you don't use it to make arbitrary rules?"

Daniel just raised his eyebrows.

Joel sat on the edge of the mattress. "Ever since I got this bed two years ago, I've never let them on it, even though I wanted them here with me. I wanted them here so much. But I said no, because I hoped that one day I'd share this bed with another human being, and the last thing I wanted was for the dogs to resent that human for taking their place."

Daniel nodded, then looked at Florey and flicked his hand toward the door. "Off."

Florey leaped to her feet and yapped at Archie, who slouched off the bed and let her herd him out of the room.

"Good dogs!" Joel shut the door behind them.

"Sorry," Daniel said, "but I think Archie may be my true soulmate."

"You are both criminally irresistible. But he's an absolute dumbass, and you're not." He handed Daniel a glass of water. "I assumed you were when we first met, though. I didn't think anyone who was so hot could also be smart, but I was wrong."

"When I met you, I didn't think anyone so smart could also be hot, but I was also wrong."

Joel climbed onto the bed and lounged against the headboard. "So you weren't instantly aroused by my seventeen-year-old physique?"

"Don't take this the wrong way?—"

"Uh-oh."

"—but I think your physique is better now than I've ever seen it."

A surprising end to a sentence starting with don't take this the wrong way.

"That's because this time, I had a few months' warning before seeing you. In 2004, I was too swamped with my dissertation to work out. Plus I was overdue for a chest waxing."

Daniel winced. "Did you really wax your chest?"

"Yes, and yes, it was painful. Gave that up when I turned forty."

"Really?" Daniel drew his fingertips down Joel's breastbone. "It's pretty smooth in the middle here."

"That's from the radiation therapy."

Daniel's hand stopped but didn't move away. "Huh."

"That's also why my skin is a bit swarthier there. All those beams gave me a free permanent tan."

Daniel touched the center of the darkened area. "This is where the tumor was? Close to your heart?"

"Only literally. I wasn't sad when they killed the tiny bastard."

"How tiny?"

"Marble tiny."

"Shooter marble or regular marble?"

"Shooter." Joel couldn't take his eyes off Daniel's palm pressed to his chest, like it could singlehandedly (ha) ward off any future ills. "Too small to give me trouble breathing, which was very considerate. But it was an adventurous little sucker. Started visiting other places even before it got big."

"Adventurous is probably the cutest description I've ever heard of a mestastiza-metasatizing?—"

"Metastasizing."

"Yeah, that."

"Speaking of adventures…" Joel slid down to lie next to him. "Where were we?"

"Can't remember exactly." Daniel pressed his lips to Joel's neck and pulled him close with one strong arm. "But I think we can find our way back."

Daniel rolleddown the passenger window and tilted his head outside. Even with the noise of road and wind, the cicadas made a deafening collective howl from the trees alongside the Baltimore Beltway.

"I'll never get used to that." He rolled the window back up, then set Joel's wrapped birthday gift on the floor to keep himself from fidgeting with it. "So what's this cool thing you wanted to show me?"

"You'll know it when you see it," Joel said. "It's on I-70, so you can relax for now."

Daniel let his head fall back against the head rest and closed his eyes. He still wasn't caught up on sleep despite spending half the day in bed. Funny, that.

"Goddamit," Joel said under his breath. "The fuck is wrong with him?"

Daniel opened his eyes and looked over. The radio was tuned to a news channel saying something about a Russian pipeline in Germany (or maybe to Germany?). But why would that upset Joel? Because he was part Russian? No, Ukrainian, on his mom's side, Czech on his dad's. Or was it the other way around? Was it too late to clarify without looking like an asshole for forgetting?

"Can we listen to music instead?"

"Go for it." Joel gestured to the satellite radio console. "Sorry, I've tuned out the news for almost two days, so I guess I was jonesing for my next hit."

Daniel pressed the preset buttons. The first three featured people yakking about current events, but the fourth was playing a song off the latest Lana Del Rey album, so he left it there. "Have you ever considered tuning out the news for longer?"

"That would be nice." Joel softly sang a line along with Lana. "But it's important to stay informed."

"Informed or angry?"

Joel chuckled. "Hard to be one without the other."

Exactly. "So what good does it do to be pissed off all the time unless it makes you take action?"

"What's the alternative? Switching off?"

"I highly recommend it."

"Just because we have a new Administration doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about."

"But isn't that the whole point of electing Democrats—to have a government that worries about things so we don't have to?"

Joel laughed again. "That would make a great campaign slogan."

"Just saying, I have so much more free time now that I'm not monitoring news feeds to see what got broken in the last hour."

"The people who broke stuff could come back."

"Joel." Daniel turned in his seat to face him. "This may stun you, but most people are like me. We don't enjoy politics. We don't follow elections like they're sporting events, because we have actual sports to scratch that itch. And all of us? We're happy to have a competent, boring government that doesn't keep us in a constant state of fear."

Joel opened his mouth, then shut it again and fell silent. He put on his blinker and drifted over into the far left lane of I-70. Finally he said, "I wanted to be like that too. I wanted to just breathe for a while and stop being afraid. But then I saw the T-shirts."

He picked up Joel's present. "How did you know?—"

"In the photos from January sixth and from the Proud Boys rally before that. The T-shirts that said, ‘Camp Auschwitz' and ‘6 Million Wasn't Enough.'"

Daniel's stomach went cold. Mom had never owned anything that blatantly antisemitic, but she'd used plenty of code words and conspiracy lingo to make her prejudices clear.

"That's the kind of people we're up against," Joel continued. "So forgive me if I'm a little hypervigilant. Politics is never boring when some of your opponents' supporters want you dead."

"I'm sorry. You're right. I can never truly understand what that's like, but?—"

"You'll understand soon enough, because they'll come for us next. And by us, I mean like you and me. Us like queer people."

"You really think so?"

"They've got all they need on the Supreme Court already. They'll try to take back our right to marry, our right to adopt, maybe even our right to fuck. So this is your fight too. The days of being blissfully apolitical are over."

Daniel hugged Joel's gift to his chest, as if it could protect him from this dark maybe-future.

Joel let out a long sigh. "I'm sorry. You're right about taking all that anger and fear and doing something constructive with it. Like you did, campaigning in Nebraska."

"It was one measly electoral vote."

"It could've decided the election. Daniel, you should be damn proud of what you did out there."

"I am. It felt good."

"I bet it did." Joel shifted in his seat. "Probably felt a lot better than hanging out on Twitter feeling cranky and helpless."

"I wouldn't know."

Joel looked at him, and Daniel winked.

"Oh man, I deserved that." Joel ran a hand over his head and let out a soft guffaw. "Sorry for being a buzzkill. Unfortunately, this is what life with me is like sometimes. It's not all cute doggos and stellar blowjobs."

"Well, I'm not all blue eyes and stellar hand jobs."

Joel's lips twitched. "But maybe occasionally?"

"Under the right circum?—"

"Look, there it is! Up ahead!"

Daniel peered through the windshield, which showed nothing but the highway and cars. "What am I looking at?"

"The sign! The green one with the miles." Joel checked his rearview mirror. "Nobody behind me. I'll slow down so you can read it."

The sign came closer, its white letters and numbers becoming clear:

Columbus 420

St. Louis 845

Denver 1700

Cove Fort 2200

"I don't get it," Daniel said as they swept past. "Why show the distance to cities so far away?"

"The highway department wanted to test a new font for readability, and one guy working there was like, ‘Let's have some fun with it.'" Joel flapped a hand against the steering wheel. "Of course this happened in July 2004. About six weeks after we saw each other."

Shit. Another way the world had folded in on itself to nudge them together.

"True story." Joel sighed. "Three times a week I drove past that sign to get between jobs, from the university to the community college. Three times a week I was reminded how far this highway goes, that if I just kept driving, sooner or later it would take me to you."

A tremor skipped across Daniel's nape. He'd been so sure that Joel had forgotten about him, even though he'd thought about Joel every time he saw signs for I-70 near Mom's house, or I-80 near Laramie. But of course those roads went both ways.

"What was that last city on the list?" Daniel asked.

"Cove Fort, Utah. It's where I-70 ends—and shockingly, they do not have a corresponding sign saying 2200 miles to Baltimore."

"I've never heard of Cove Fort."

"Then we should totally go there."

"Now?"

"No. We have dinner reservations." Joel gave him a smile full of promise. "But someday, for sure."

"It's a date." Daniel reached for his hand, and Joel took it, interlacing their fingers. With his other hand Daniel pulled his phone from the car's cup holder. It was time.

"Checking email?" Joel asked.

He shook his head. "I told everyone I'd be offline until Monday morning. Sorry I have a bit of work to do during the week."

"No biggie. I'm just happy your company is still afloat."

"Me, too." He brought up his contacts list, tapped Mom, then Details. The screen showed her phone number, address, and the last six messages he'd sent, with no reply from her.

He touched the screen twice, quickly.

Block number? You won't receive any calls or messages from this number from now on.

Daniel confirmed it, then turned off his phone.

For a third of his life, maybe longer, he'd thought he'd lost her. But maybe, all along, it was Mom who'd lost him.