The trip back to Nebraska happened in a kind of fog. After his sleepless night, the hours on the interstate lulled and numbed his senses like some distant cousin of anesthesia, until he finally pulled into a rest stop and they both slept like the dead, Brad in the front seat and Del in the back.

Something like two hours later, he came to with a start, as a driver parked next to the Nova and slammed his door, in a hurry to get to the restrooms. It was dark again, and holding his watch to the glimmer from a light pole across the parking area, he could see that it was almost five o'clock.

Sitting up, he felt his body stiff and complaining. He started the car and waited until the heater had warmed his feet before he backed out of the space and got back on the highway again. In less than twenty-four hours, Del needed to be on a plane to Los Angeles, and from there to his wedding in Hawaii.

He let his thoughts drift back to the restaurant parking lot in Kearney, where he'd sat for a while longer with Craig, wanting to say something more in the last minutes they had together, but not finding the words. Then Craig had left, as suddenly as he'd arrived, hardly saying goodbye. It was as though he'd sensed a hole in the earth about to open under them if he stayed a moment longer.

Sitting next to him and holding hands had triggered the old ache inside Brad, but Craig's abrupt absence hit him even harder. As he drove along now, he had to keep consoling himself with the promise Craig had made to not abandon him completely to his fate--whatever that turned out to be. He would stay there at his side, even if it was only for the length of a 45-minute phone call every month. He could go on living his life now as if Craig were still part of it.

They had passed a long caravan of semis rolling along in the night when he felt a movement behind him, and Del was slipping his arms around his shoulders, one hand finding its way inside his coat and softly rubbing his chest. Then he felt Del's head resting against his, just behind his ear.

"How far'd we get?" Del said with a sleepy voice.

"Just passed the last exit to Brooklyn."

"What?"

"Joke. It was Denver."

"I wouldn't care if it was Brooklyn. I just gotta get to that plane by 3:00 tomorrow."

"We'll get you there."

They talked for a while about New York and how a boy from a ranching family in Texas happened to grow up there. His mother, he said, had come from a town in Connecticut and, as she'd often told Del, made the mistake of letting herself get swept off her feet by an oilman from San Antonio, who she met by chance at Grand Central.

After a whirlwind courtship, the romance in the marriage had lasted long enough to produce Del and a sister who was going to school now at NYU. Del had spent his growing up years between Texas and an apartment on the East Side, which his father with his millions had been able to afford for his ex and their two children.

"Millions?" Brad said.

"That's what he always bragged. Who knows what he's really worth? With him it was easy come, easy go. I think he pissed most of it away."

"How come you didn't go someplace like NYU?" Brad said. The college in Santa Fe wasn't exactly well known outside of New Mexico.

"I'm not like either of my folks--or my sister. Kind of a wild child, I guess. All three thought I was nuts coming here, and that's what clinched it for me." He could be sure he was doing the right thing, he explained, if all of them disapproved. "Anyway, what's wrong with Santa Fe? It's been good to me. I got to meet someone I like, a man like you."

He still had one hand inside Brad's coat, and with the other he patted Brad on the cheek, rubbing his palm against a day's growth of whiskers.

Brad thought Del could have found someone like him just about anywhere and nearly said so. Then he realized it would sound like he felt sorry for himself, and that was not how he wanted anyone to see him. Especially not a young man who seemed so self-assured and undaunted by life's obstacles.

He took Del's hand and held it to his mouth, giving it a tender kiss like he'd done many times with his children to show his affection for them. He'd taken to doing the same thing with Craig. It seemed not a contradiction that for his kids it was a sweet and innocent gesture of his love, while for Craig it was infused with carnal knowledge, a token of his desire.

So the impulse to kiss Del's hand came as a little surprise. Del was neither his kid nor his lover. The wish, he decided, was the same, to show there was a bond between them that went deep as the heart.

"What's this I'm smelling on your hand?" he said, aware of a rich scent under his nose like sweat mixed with something else.

Del took his hand away for a moment and Brad could hear a loud sniffing behind him.

"That's just me," Del said.

"What part of you?"

Del laughed. "The loving part of me, I guess," he said and kissed him lightly on the neck.

"Have you been jerking off back there?"

"Just a little."

Brad laughed now at how he'd been having his thoughts about lofty human emotions while Del was having his own down-to-earth ones. Wasn't life always like this for two people? Close enough to touch and still light years apart.

"I gotta do this a couple times a day or else," Del said, like he needed to explain. His hand was over Brad's mouth again. "I'm goin' a little dry back here. You wanna give me some spit?"

"You are one first-prize corker, you know that?"

"I try," Del said, happy to go along with the joke.

Oh, to expect no more from life than to be simply amused, Brad thought, and he spit out a gob of saliva into Del's hand.

"Nice," Del said after he'd taken his hand back. "Don't go swallowin'. I may need some more."

Brad laughed. The idea of it all struck him now as pretty funny. Then everything he could think of began to seem even funnier. The whole impossible trip, driving 1500 miles almost nonstop, the close calls with utter disappointment, the crazy talk about queer cousins and uncles, Del singing "Your Cheating Heart," now this--life, all of it, was a comedy, even the saddest parts of it.

Del was hugging him harder with his left arm, his mouth open wide against the side of his neck. Then the air in the car abruptly filled with the rich oatmeal smell of his cum. And Brad laughed some more, wiping tears of relief from his eyes.

"Want me to drive again?" Del said after a while, and they pulled off the highway at the next exit.

They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, the shadowy outline of a mountain ridge in the distance, snow along the top dimly reflecting a sky full of stars. They stood together peeing at the side of the road.

"Orion," Del said looking over his shoulder. "Ain't he a beauty?" Then he kicked off his sneakers and pulled down his jeans so he could step out of his underwear. "Shot my load into my jockeys and they're gettin' clammy."

The cold air was bracing, and Brad sucked in deep breaths until his lungs hurt. When they got back into the warm car, he sat in the front seat instead of getting into the back.

"I can ride shotgun," he said. "Help keep you awake."

"Don't know that I need the help. Standin' there bare assed in the freezing cold's got me more awake than I have any right to be."

Before they got back on the highway, Del turned on the radio and looked for some music again. He stopped at a station playing country songs.

"Bob Wills," he said, almost jumping in his seat. "Yee-haw. You know him?"

Brad listened as Del turned up the volume. It sounded like old swing band music, but with a steel guitar.

"Oh my god," Del was saying, shouting over the radio. "My dad loved these guys. Couldn't get enough of 'em. And my mom hated them. Must have been one of their grounds for divorce."

He turned it down when the song was done, put the car in gear, and made a U-turn in the road to head back to the interstate.

"I want to know about something," Brad said. "What was it like for you when your parents divorced?"

"Not exactly a big surprise," Del said and explained that his dad was away a lot anyway. "I probably saw more of him after they split up." He was eight then, and while his mom got custody and wanted to take him and his sister back East with her, the deal with the Texas judge was that he'd get to spend every summer vacation with his father.

"Which was fine with me. I absolutely loved my dad."

Brad sat there thinking of how leaving his wife would become an unwelcome test for each of his own children. Growing up was difficult enough without extra hardships they'd done nothing to deserve.

"I've probably seen 'em all," Del said. The school he'd gone to in New York had as many kids with divorced parents as not. "It was different for everybody. Maybe all of us started out angry and then you reach a point where you either get over it and get on with growin' up--or you don't. What makes a kid decide one way or another? I couldn't tell you."

Del looked over at him. "You're thinkin' about your kids, doc, ain't you," he said.

"Yes."

"Wish I could pull out the old magic wand and make it all work out for them," he sighed. "But I ain't got one."

He started singing along with a song on the radio.

Please help me, I'm fallin' in love with you.

Close the door to temptation, don't let me walk through

"How do you know all these old songs?" Brad said.

"My dad. It's all he listened to, whether I liked 'em or not. And I didn't, but the stuff kinda grows on you."

"You miss your dad, don't you?"

Del thought for a while, or maybe he was just waiting for the song to end. Finally he said, "I swear to you, he's a hard man to love. But I do miss him sometimes."

Brad didn't know whether to ask the next question, but he needed to know the answer. "Does he love you?"

"He'd say it's his job."

"What would you say?"

"That it's been good enough for me."

Brad let this be answer enough. Watching him drive the Nova, one hand on the steering wheel, his eyes steady on the road ahead, Brad wondered if either of his own boys would be talking like this when they were Del's age.

"Can't say whether I'd've been any different if my folks had stayed together," Del said. He knew other boys his age whose parents hadn't divorced, and they always seemed immature.

"Ever thought you might be overly mature for your age?"

Del laughed. "Cause I'm fuckin' one of my teachers?"

"Well, yeah, for one thing." There was such a thing as growing up too fast, he said. "A boy doesn't get to have his boyhood."

"Don't you think sometimes boyhood is a little overrated?"

When Brad thought of some of his own youthful embarrassments and growing pains, he could see Del's point, but he still wouldn't rob his sons of those years.

"Is it the same for girls?" he asked, wondering about his daughters.

"You'd have to ask my sister about that, but I wouldn't exactly expect her to give you an unbiased answer."

His sister, he said, had taken his mother's side in the whole affair and never really recovered. Which was no big surprise to him either, and it seemed to Brad that Del had learned early in life not to be surprised by much of anything.

"She hardly dates. Doesn't trust guys. Has always had what I'd call an unhealthy attachment to her piano," he said almost sadly. "Then again, you should hear her play the damn thing. She can tear hell out of a concerto. I guess that's the price you pay to be an artist." He laughed again. "Which is something I'm not."

In the side window, Brad watched the lights of a town emerge from the darkness.

"Time heals all wounds," Del was saying. "And time wounds all heels. Just try not to be a heel. My daddy would tell you that if he was here, and he's been pretty much right about those things."

Brad kept watching the town passing by in the distance. He thought of the sleeping souls there in darkened bedrooms, those lying awake with their cares, or reaching to the warm body of someone beside them for solace. Even at this late hour, there were no doubt couples making love, lost in passions that swept the rest of the world away and Brad along with it.

Life was bittersweet, all right, and you could either laugh or cry. If he was going to make it through whatever lay ahead, he was sure to be doing some of both. And that wasn't so bad when he thought about it. One evened out the other.

It was after 4:00 in the morning when they got back to Santa Fe. The streets were dark and deserted. At Del's house, they got out of the car and stumbled wearily inside. In his room, they fell into bed without undressing and slept, Del's arm flung across Brad's shoulder after a friendly kiss goodnight.

Later that day, driving Del to the airport, he was wearing a turtleneck Del had given him, to cover up the bite mark on his neck. The sweater smelled of Del, his aftershave and deodorant. It also had the faint smell of the grass he smoked and the incense he burned in his room.

Out on the highway, he thought to ask about the wedding. "Where are you going on your honeymoon?"

"Nobody's supposed to know, but I can tell you, doc. Acapulco. For a week." Then he'd be coming back with his new wife to Santa Fe to finish school. They had an apartment lined up to move into.

It seemed strange to be talking this way to someone who had kissed him earlier the same day--and more than that a few nights before.

"I'll still be wanting to see you," Del said.

"Not for sex, I hope."

"Doesn't have to be for that. We're kinda buddies you know, coupla old married men together."

"Not for long."

"If you ask me, you still have your mind to make up about that. Anything can happen."

When he dropped Del off at the airport, he stood outside the Nova as Del pulled a fat suitcase from the trunk.

"Thanks for everything, doc," he said and shoving his hand into one pocket took out his apartment key. "I've been wantin' to give you this. I figure you might need a place to stay, and the rent's paid up through next month."

He set his suitcase down and threw both arms around Brad, holding him fiercely for a moment and then turning to go.

Brad watched him disappear into the terminal and then slowly got back into the car. He wondered at how he always seemed to be saying goodbye to one man or another. When was there going to be one who was going to stick around for a while? For a lifetime even.

* * *

The rest of the weekend passed and he spent what he could of it with Coretta and the kids. On New Years Day, which fell on a Monday, they sat down to a big meal together, like old times, and in the afternoon he took them all to a Disney movie--all except Coretta who said she wanted to just have the house to herself for a while--buying each of the kids whatever they wanted at the snack bar.

Travis had found him in the garage one morning checking the tires and the oil in Coretta's car. It was his usual routine, and it made him feel like he was still part of the family.

Travis seemed to have something to say, but he wasn't able to find the words, so Brad found himself saying, "If your mom's got a flat, you need to know how to help her change a tire." He offered to show Travis how to do that.

And that was the way he and Travis raised the subject of how things were going to be in the future. His father was not always going to be there to do a man's job when one needed to be done. At fourteen, Travis was torn between anger at all this and pride that now he was learning something that grown up men were responsible for knowing.

"So you're really leaving us," he finally said.

"I'm not leaving. I just won't be living here with the rest of you." And he explained that when he got a place of his own, they'd be able to come see him. As they stood together by the open trunk of the car, Travis let Brad hug him, like he was trying to understand but couldn't quite.

There had been times with each of his other kids. Chris, as usual, seemed unconcerned, as if nothing was going to upset him. He believed Brad--or desperately wanted to believe him--when he said it was all for the best. The girls were less sure, and he felt Kathleen stiffen in his arms as he held her. It may have been in refusing to accept what he was saying or her way of resolving to soldier on no matter what. Lisa, the youngest, seemed troubled only when he said he wouldn't always be there to tuck her in at night and tell her a bedtime story.

It was all hardly good enough for Brad. The more he talked to them, the more he felt his own faith in himself slipping. Coretta, meanwhile, was hard as ever to read. Apparently she'd had her say and made up her mind. That was that.

When New Years Day had wound down to the last goodnight and he was going out the door, Coretta had stepped outside with him for a last word. They stood together in the porch light, and she said, "I'm talking to a lawyer. You need to see one, too. Then they can talk to each other."

She smiled grimly at this. They'd never needed anyone to do their talking for them. Not till now.

If she wanted to know where he was staying the night, she didn't say. Maybe that was something he need only tell his lawyer now. She'd been hugging herself against the cold and then simply opened the door behind her and stepped back inside without looking back.

So this was how it was ending. There were no rituals of separation. No kisses and goodnights and I love yous. These were all something of the past, no longer whatever they had been. And the suddenness with which they ended made them seem never to have been real at all--simply empty formalities.

He had believed all this time that for all his misgivings, they had meant something. How could you give so many years to another person and have it add up to this nothing? This less than nothing.

He was learning things he never knew were there to be learned--least of all about himself and what life was going to mean from now on. This was what it meant to start life over.

The next day he hunted for the slip of paper Elmer had given him, with the lawyer's number on it. When he called, an assistant answered, consulted her boss's calendar and said Brad could come by the next afternoon. "He'll be in court all morning," she said.

So there was another day of waiting. He stopped by the house while the kids were at school to retrieve more of his clothes and books. On the phone, Coretta had said she would be gone for several hours and would he come by then. She added that before too much longer she'd be changing the locks. That had been the advice she'd been given. She didn't say by whom.

After filling the trunk, he was putting boxes into the back seat and found Del's underwear on the floor. It was wadded up and stuck together, and holding it in his hand, he felt that night on the road come back to him--the laughter and the sadness mixed together, the music on the radio, the lights of a town gliding slowly by in the distant darkness--and the young man whose company he now missed.

Del was married now and maybe on his way to Acapulco. He tried to picture him on an airplane with someone beside him, a pretty girl who loved everything about him, his smile, his sense of humor, his jokes and stories, and how he made love to her. For Brad was sure that Del would not have disappointed her. He was so easy about being naked and sexual.

It was a strange wish that night as he lay in Del's bed thinking of this, but he finally yielded to it, getting up to get his turtleneck. He returned to bed with it and held it to his face, breathing in the rich mix of fragrances. For a while he was able to forget that he was alone.

The appointment with the lawyer had him apprehensive as he waited for his hour with the man, but when he said it was Elmer who had recommended him, he quickly understood why Brad was there. And after asking a few questions, he told Brad that he could trust him to do the very best for him that the law and the judge would allow. And he gave him advice that prepared him for the worst but somehow reassured him as well.

When he left, he shook the man's hand and said, "I'm glad I know Elmer."

"Good man, Elmer. I'm glad we both know him."

It was dusk when he left the office. The sidewalks and streets were full of people on their way home from work, and being in no hurry, he decided to step into a cafe, where he could get a cup of coffee and think about what the lawyer had told him.

He found a place by the front window, absently watching the city lights grow brighter as the sky darkened. There was a light rain beginning to fall, and colorful splashes of reflected neon and streetlights glistened on the wet pavement outside.

The coffee when it came was hot and strong. He took a sip and then set the cup into the saucer to let it cool.

"Mind if I join you?" he heard a voice beside him.

He looked up and saw a man with a newspaper and an umbrella. And after a moment he recognized him as the Indian, Rahul, from the pharmacy. They'd spoken once waiting in line at the grocery store, and he'd waved to Brad just the other day going by on his bicycle.

"I think we know each other," he said. He held out his hand and said his name. "You're Brad, right?"

"Yes, sit down."

They talked for a moment about the weather until a waitress came by and he asked for a menu.

"Are you having something to eat?" he asked Brad.

"Hadn't thought that far."

"Would you have dinner with me?" His eyes behind his tinted glasses were not brown in this light but almost black.

Brad thought for a moment and said OK. He realized he was glad for the company.

"You know," Rahul said, "I think we know someone in common."

"We do?"

"Yes. A student at the college. His name is Del."

Brad felt himself break into a smile. "You know him?"

Rahul nodded. "He's told me all about you."

Good old Del, Brad thought. Always looking out for him.

End