Garage Light After Midnight

The drive to Oakhaven took four hours, and I spent most of them watching Dwayne's hands on the wheel. He had this habit of drumming his fingers at red lights, and he'd been doing it since we got on the highway. Two years together and I still found that interesting, which felt like something worth holding onto.

We'd been circling each other for a couple of months. Not fighting. Nothing you could point at. Just this sense that we were two people sharing a lease instead of sharing a life. I'd tried to bring it up twice and both times he'd said something like "we're fine, Felix," in that calm IT voice he used on people whose printers were broken. Fine. Like a status code.

"You okay over there?" he asked, catching me staring.

"Yeah. Just tired."

"You could nap. It's still two hours."

"I'm good."

He nodded and went back to the road. That was sort of the whole problem in miniature. He offered, I declined, nobody pushed. We were both very polite about the distance.

The wedding was for his friend Lee, who I'd met exactly twice. Dwayne had known him since college. Dwayne had known most of the wedding guests since college, or since high school, or since little league, and I was about to spend a weekend in the middle of all of it like someone who'd wandered into someone else's family reunion.

His parents still lived in the same house on a cul-de-sac in Oakhaven, where every house was the same shade of beige and every lawn looked mowed by the same guy. His mom still called it "the neighborhood" like it was a place with a name.

We pulled in around two on Thursday. Dwayne's mom, Carol, came out to the driveway before he even had the door open. She hugged him hard, both arms, the whole deal. Then she turned to me and said, "Felix. You can grab the blue cooler from the trunk if you want."

That was it. That was my greeting. I grabbed the cooler.

It wasn't new. She'd been doing this for two years, warm to him and just civil to me, and I'd stopped expecting it to change somewhere around month eight. But it landed different this weekend, when I already felt like I was hanging onto the relationship by my fingernails. Standing in her kitchen with a cooler while she asked Dwayne about his cholesterol, I felt about as welcome as a roomba.

His dad was better, or at least quieter about it. Gene shook my hand and asked if the drive was bad and then went back to the TV. Fine. I could work with fine.

We were staying in Dwayne's old room, which still had his high school swim trophies in it. He'd been a swimmer. I learned that from the trophies, not from him, which told you something. He talked about work, and about the wedding logistics, and about whether we should leave early Saturday to beat traffic to the venue. He did not talk about the eighteen years of his life that happened in this house before he met me.

The rehearsal dinner was at an Italian place downtown, the kind with checkered tablecloths and a menu nobody read. I sat at the far end of a long table next to Avi, my coworker, who had somehow gotten himself invited because he knew Lee's fiancée from a gallery thing three years ago. Small world. I was glad of it. Avi was the only person at that table I could name more than two facts about.

"Okay, so who's who," he whispered, scanning the room. "Walk me through it."

"Guy in the green shirt is Lee's brother. The loud one at the head of the table is his mom. The one telling the swimming story is Dwayne."

"The swimming story. I've heard the swimming story."

"Everyone's heard the swimming story. I haven't heard any others."

He looked at me for a beat. "That's a sentence with a lot in it."

Down the table, Dwayne was laughing, head tipped back, the real laugh, the one I got maybe twice a week. He was talking to a guy named Willis and a woman named Tamara, and they were doing that thing old friends do, talking in shorthand, half a story, a word, and everybody's gone. I caught maybe one in four of the references. Habitat for something. The band trip. A substitute teacher everybody hated.

I knew Dwayne's coffee order and his sleep schedule and the way he liked the towels folded. I did not know about the band trip.

When he came up for air I leaned over. "You were in a band?"

"What? Oh. God. Yeah, briefly, in eleventh grade. I was terrible."

"How have I never heard this?"

He shrugged, the shrug he did when a door was closing. "It didn't matter. It was a hundred years ago." And then Willis called his name and he was back down the table and the conversation was over, folded up and put away like it was nothing.

Avi refilled my water glass without being asked. "You good?"

"I don't know, man. It's like he has this whole warehouse of a life in there and I've only ever seen the front room."

"That's not just him, though. Everyone does that."

"He doesn't do it on purpose, that's what gets me. He's not hiding anything. He just never opens the door. And I stopped knocking somewhere along the line because it felt rude."

Avi nodded slowly. "You want my take or my polite take?"

"Since when do you have a polite take?"

"You're at a wedding rehearsal, Felix. I can behave for one weekend."

"Give me the real one."

"Ask him anyway. Knock the door. Worst case it's awkward at his mom's house, which, no offense, already looks pretty awkward." He nodded toward the head of the table, where Carol was telling some story that did not appear to include me or anybody I knew.

Dessert came. Tiramisu. Dwayne reached across the table and squeezed my hand for a second, quick, the way you'd steady a lamp. It was a nice gesture. It was also the kind of gesture you give furniture.

Afterward, in the car, he said, "That went well, right? Everybody liked you."

"Sure. Everybody liked me."

"What's that tone?"

"No tone. I'm tired!"

He let it go, because that's what we did. We let things go until there was a whole landfill of them somewhere outside town that neither of us ever drove to.

Back at the house, Carol had put out towels for us, and by towels I mean one towel for him and a hand towel for me, which I chose to find funny instead of devastating. Dwayne was already half asleep by ten, which was normal for him, and I lay next to him in his twin bed from high school listening to him breathe and staring at the swim trophies.

Regionals, junior year. Second place, two hundred meter freestyle. I knew that now. I knew his best time and his old coach's name and the fact that he'd hated the smell of chlorine and loved it anyway.

I didn't know what he'd wanted to be before he became what he was. I didn't know what his voice sounded like when he talked about something he actually cared about, because I wasn't sure I'd heard it in months.

Somewhere down the hall, the garage door rattled. I heard Gene out there, puttering. I made a note of it, the way you note an exit in a building you might need to leave in a hurry, or maybe a door you might need to walk through.

On Friday morning, Dwayne went to the church with his mom for some thing Lee needed help with. Flowers or chairs or something. I said I'd stay back and rest. He kissed my forehead and left, and the house went quiet in the way big quiet houses do.

I found myself in the garage around noon. Gene had gone out to lunch with some old coworkers, so the space was mine. It wasn't really a garage anymore. It was Gene's workshop, all pegboard and labeled jars, but in the back corner there was an old couch, brown corduroy, with a blanket folded over one arm. I sat down on it and didn't move for a long time.

There was a plastic bin nearby, lid half off. I reached over and looked inside. Swim caps, goggles, a stack of printed photos, the band in front of this very garage door. And a CD case, hand labeled, THE BAND, with a year on it. Four tracks listed in ballpoint pen. Two of them were songs I'd never heard of. Two were covers.

I was still holding it when the garage door opened.

"You're hiding," Dwayne said.

"I'm sitting."

"You're hiding on Gene's couch." He came over and sat down next to me. The couch was small, so his knee pressed against mine. He looked at the CD case in my hands. "Oh, God!"

"You wrote a song called Basement Light."

"Nobody was supposed to find that bin."

"Well, I found it. I want to hear about it sometime. Not tonight. Sometime."

He nodded slowly. He was quiet, and then he said, "You're mad at me."

"I'm not mad."

"You've been something since the rehearsal dinner. Since before that, honestly. Since the drive." He drummed his fingers on his knee, the same rhythm he did at red lights. "Just tell me. I'd rather have it than the something."

I looked at the shelf of labeled jars instead of at him. "I feel invisible, Dwayne. Not with you, even. Just in general, in this, in your whole world. Like I'm a guest at my own life. Carol gives me a hand towel. You say we're fine every time I bring anything up. And I stopped pushing because it felt easier, and now it's been two years and I can name your best time in the two hundred free but you never once opened the band door for me."

He didn't say we're fine. I waited for it and it didn't come.

"I didn't know you kept score," he said finally.

"Everybody keeps score. You just don't check the scoreboard."

"That's fair." He rubbed his jaw. "I don't open doors. My dad's the same way. It's not about you. It's never been about you. But I hear you saying it feels about you, and that's on me."

"Yes. That's it. That's exactly it!"

"Okay." He turned toward me on the couch. "I'm sorry. I mean that. I'm bad at the big sentences so I'm gonna do this instead, and you can stop me."

"Okay," I said.

He kissed me. It was soft and it lasted a while, his hand coming up to the side of my face, and I kissed him back, and something in my chest unlocked that had been locked so long I'd stopped noticing the lock. When we broke apart he kept his forehead against mine.

"Is this okay?" he asked.

"Yeah. Yeah, it's okay. I want this. Do you?"

"I want you. I've been so wrapped up in being home that I forgot to bring you with me." He kissed me again, and this one had heat in it, and I put the CD case down on the floor without looking where it landed.

His hands went to the hem of my shirt. "Can I?"

"Please."

He pulled my shirt off over my head and dropped it on the corduroy, and then I got his off, and we pressed together chest to chest, skin warm, the garage smelling faintly of motor oil and sawdust. His mouth went to my neck and I tipped my head back against the armrest.

"God, I missed this," I said. "We've been right next to each other and I missed this."

"I know. Me too." He pulled back and looked at me. "Bed's too far. This couch is kind of a crime scene but it's right here."

"Gene's couch."

"We'll wash the blanket." He was already pushing his shorts down. I did the same, and he spat in his hand and took us both in his