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son’s shoulder. “Please, Joe.”
    He let out a quick breath. “It’s no big deal. I’m just being oversensitive because I’m tired since I don’t sleep well in a strange place.”
    At home, even though he didn’t like to, Joe slept fine without me. He could wake up in the night, know exactly where he was, where everything was, and what had not moved. In a new place alone, if a noise woke him, he had no one to shake awake and ask what the noise was. He slept lightly when he wasn’t home. At home, the man slept like the dead.
    “Honey?” Deb prodded him.
    His exhale of air was sharp, exasperated. “It was just a prank, but when I was fourteen we came here, out to Uncle Glenn’s farm in Irvine, and I went swimming with him that time. Remember?”
    “Do I remember,” Deb snapped at him. “Yes, Joseph, I think I remember you getting lost and staying out all night and taking ten years off my life. It rings a bell.”
    “Well, the reason I was out there at all was because Kurt said that he was going to show me this great spot where we could swim that wasn’t deep, that I would love.”
    “Kurt said you wandered off.”
    “He lied because he lost me, Mom.”
    “Are you kidding?”
    “No, but who cares. It was like a million years ago, right?”
    “I’m gonna kill him,” she said, whirling toward the front door.
    “Dad,” Joe said fast.
    Elliot caught his wife, who promptly fell apart in his arms. And even though, as Joe said, it had been a million years ago, for his mother the scare was still very real and well remembered. And he had only told her a very small piece of it.
    Kurt had told Joe that he had a friend who thought Joe was cute. He had then lured my boyfriend down to a creek and introduced him to this friend. What Joe did not know was that there was not just the three of them. There had been six, counting Joe and Kurt. Joe was young and trusting and horny at fourteen and so had dropped his pants because the other boy was going to as well. And he had gone to his knees, but once he heard another voice tell him he was pretty, he got scared. He didn’t know who was there, and when someone tried to shove a cock in his mouth, he tried to get up, only to have his shoulders held. The laughter unglued him, and when he fought to be released, they all took turns hitting him, calling him a faggot, before pushing him into the water.
    At that point Kurt’s brain had apparently kicked in, but the water was higher than it should have been that time of year because of the rain, and there was just enough current to suck Joe under and pull him into a connecting stream that was swollen from a rise in the river. He lost his pants as he tumbled around and swallowed enough water to drown him. But he made it to the bank, and there he stayed all night, freezing, with only a T-shirt to keep himself warm. They found him the following morning, bruised, scratched up, with a mild case of hypothermia. He had never offered a good explanation as to why his clothes were off, but everyone had figured the poor kid was out of his head at the time. The bruises were credited to his ordeal, and while Kurt had been in trouble for not looking out better for his cousin, nothing more had come of it.
    “I’m gonna drop him in a well and see how he likes being cold and wet all night long,” I promised, my voice low.
    “No, you’re not.” Joe smiled and turned toward me, sliding his arm under my suit jacket and curling it around my waist, his head notched under my chin. “You’re gonna leave him alone. But make sure he doesn’t come near me so I don’t have to make a scene and tell him off.”
    As always, Joe worried about making other people uncomfortable.
    I clutched him to me, because just thinking about the fact that the dear, sweet man I held in my arms could have died at fourteen, and therefore never been at the club the night I met him, and not have been able to love me dearly and desperately for the last six years hurt my