“That’s Stan?” He walked over and peered closely at the photo. Then he looked over his shoulder at Cade, his upper lip curled in the first grin I’d seen out of him. “Does Dad know you’ve been living with a black guy?”
“What do you think?”
Elias laughed and straightened up again, still looking at the picture. “That’s Stan,” he repeated.
“He’ll be in and out this weekend. You can take the futon and I’ll sleep on the floor. Stan’s got enough blankets in the closet for an army.”
“Nah, I’ll take the floor.”
“No way. You just got back.”
“All the more reason. Floor’s still better than what I’m used to.” He looked at the girlie posters on the walls. “Some black guy, huh?”
“He only dates white women.”
Elias chuckled again. “Dad would shit a brick.”
Cade shrugged. “Back in his glory days. Since the stroke, not much pisses him off.”
“If you say so. Bet that’d still get a rise out of him on a good day.”
I looked quizzically at Cade, but nothing in his expression acknowledged the glance. Elias quit looking around and sat on the edge of the futon, opening up his pack and pulling out a clean T-shirt, socks and boxers. “Don’t bother me none,” he said. Then, almost as if pulled down by sheer fatigue and the comfort of the mattress, he lay back and rubbed his hands against his face, letting out a long, tired groan. “Motherfuck,” he added. “God, it’s good to be back.”
That was the last I saw of him for a long time. For all those months, that was the image I held of him: supine against the futon, his body all muscular and stocky and hard as a nail. The smallest details stuck in my mind. How neatly the waistband of his BDU trousers lay against his stomach and circled his hips. How the bulk of his shoulders seemed barely contained by his shirt’s thin fabric. It was not attraction I felt, exactly, so much as awe. Here was a soldier, honed like the edge of a blade, yet stretched out before me like a cat on a windowsill. His beauty was not like Cade’s, but it was still beauty.
I still try to remember him that way, sometimes. I think he would want me to.
* * *
It had been only a couple of months before that Cade and I had had a similar reunion. On that day—the last Saturday in August, just a few days before the dorms reopened—I had run down the hill in front of the lodgelike main building of the camp where I’d spent the entire summer, racing to meet Cade as his Saturn churned slow clouds of dust along the dirt road. He’d stopped and gotten out of the car, opening his arms to me, and I had thunked against his chest with a force that made him stagger back against the car. “Missed you, too, babe,” he murmured against my hair. We had meant to see each other every other weekend, but he’d gotten so busy working on Bylina’s campaign for Congress, and time had plodded along until it was two months since he had visited me. I understood. With my jeans and stubby, plain fingernails, my total disinterest in ever again living in a city and my sketchy family history, I had little to offer as a partner to someone who wanted to be a congressman one day. But I did possess patience and devotion, and the very reason I loved Cade was that he could find his passion and follow the prize of it like a polestar. I couldn’t very well fault him for being himself.
All summer I had lived at Southridge, the camp I’d attended every year since I was thirteen—although now I was a counselor and teacher, no longer a little camper kicking around in the woods. My mother had first signed me up for the annual retreat for Alateen, the support group for teenagers with alcoholic family members. She was the alcoholic in question, although she had twelve-stepped when I was young enough not to remember it. Still, she thought it would be good for me to spend a couple of weeks in the woods with other kids whose families spoke the peculiar language of recovery, making friends, trying out rustic crafts and learning how not to turn out like any of my close relatives.
Once I outgrew the retreat, I signed on to become a counselor, and for three summers now I had