“Hey, Joey.” JC’s voice was quiet, his expression the mellowest Joey had seen in ages.

“What are you doing here?” The words were out of Joey’s mouth before he could stop them, and came out just a trifle sharper than he meant them to.

“To see you.”

“Do the other guys know you’re here?”

“No. I followed you here in my own car and sat at my own table.”

“So you saw and heard everything?”

“I saw and heard enough.”

A long, awkward pause lingered between the two men, with Joey at a complete loss of what to say or do. He wanted to hug JC about as badly as he wanted to cream him, wanted to tell him how much he missed him and hated being estranged from him even as the verbal attack of a lifetime hovered on his tongue.

JC ended up speaking first, and he said as softly as ever, “Can I talk to you in private for a minute?”

“Okay.” Joey might not have been as inclined were he not already feeling so sentimental from Sheri’s gig, or had he not already patched things up with Chris and Justin. 

“Mind if we take this outside? I don’t want Sheri to see me yet, and I definitely don’t want to take the chance of the other guys seeing me. No telling what Lance or Chris would do if they got their hands on me.”

Joey’s legs carried him outside virtually of their own accord. He followed JC to one of the outdoor tables; luckily for them, the outdoor section was deserted, and they were far enough away from the busy street so that they could hear each other with little trouble. Joey sat across from JC, but even after they were both seated, at least five minutes went by before JC spoke. “That was an outstanding performance Sheri gave tonight.” 

“It sure was.”

“I never knew the girl could sing like that.” 

Joey almost had to bite his tongue to keep from saying, “There’s so much you don’t know about the girl. You don’t know anything about her at all.” Instead, he said, “Frank Sinatra would be glowing green with envy.”

JC drummed his fingers on the white Formica, then asked, somewhat apprehensively, “Are you…um…doing all right?” 

“As all right as can be expected.”

JC closed his eyes, took a slow breath and just as slowly let it out before going on, “I know what you must think of me, Joey, and I know I owe you a long overdue explanation.” 

Again, Joey had to hold back a malicious retort. “Explain,” he said coolly as he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I’m all ears.”

JC ran both hands upward over his face and all the way through his sleek brown hair. Joey thought of what Chris had said earlier, about JC needing surgery to get whatever what was inside him out of him. However tongue-in-cheek that comment might have been at the time, Joey sensed Chris hadn’t been far off the mark. JC began with, “First of all, man, you’ll want to know why I steered clear of you in the hospital, especially when you were getting your treatment.” 

“Is it because you despise hospitals and you view needles as an unearthly abomination?”

“Well…yeah, that much is true enough.” JC paused, and then added in a voice almost too soft for Joey’s ears, “But mostly it was you.” 

“Me?” This caught Joey off his guard. “What do you mean by that?”

JC’s head and shoulders drooped. His handsome face screwed up tight for a moment before relaxing into the most woeful expression Joey had ever seen. The man’s voice matched his face to a tee when he said, “To see you go through that hell…to stand by all that time, wondering what torture was next and knowing there was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do about it…” He shook his head, and Joey thought he might dissolve into a sticky puddle where he sat. “I couldn’t bear it. I simply could not stand by and watch those people hurt you.” 

Moved to no small degree at this disclosure, Joey replied gently, “It didn’t hurt that much, JC. At least, the chemo itself didn’t hurt, only made me sick as a dog. Even then, all that stuff was meant to help me in the long run. And those people never did any worse than what their jobs called for.”

“I know that.” JC shook his head again and pinched the bridge of his nose. “But I swear, if I’d been there, if I’d seen those guys stick anything into you, I’d have taken them out with my bare hands in a heartbeat. I’d have taken the whole place apart, piece by piece.” 

Even hearing it with his own ears, Joey could hardly believe it—and yet, recalling all the times JC demonstrated the signs of pure fury, he believed it.

“I hate your cancer, Joey,” JC went on fervently. “I’m telling you, I hate it. Just the word by itself leaves the most awful taste in my mouth.” 

So does the word “dying.”

“I always expected such a thing to happen to other people, but not you. It’s screwed up everything for you, for all of us.” 

I’m sorry I screwed up everything for you, JC.

“I never felt so helpless in all my life, and I hated every single minute of it.”

So did I.

“Then Sheri came into the picture…which brings me to the second explanation I owe you.”

“Yeah, I wondered about that, too,” said Joey, unable to help sounding a bit snide. “I wondered for the longest time what Sheri could have possibly done to make you hate her guts.”

That brought JC’s head up with a snap. “I never hated her,” he protested, sounding truly astonished and hurt at the accusation.

With a faint snort, Joey shot back, “Well, you never went out of your way to be friendly, either, did you? You even told me to my face that she could be a phony, for all the world knew.”

JC flinched, and it was another minute or two before he could speak again. “I know what I said. I said a lot of things I didn’t mean—and even if I did mean them, I regret them all the same.”

Joey sensed JC’s regret was genuine, but he wasn’t about to let him off the hook just like that. “So, what was your beef with the girl? Besides her dropping in on us unannounced?”

“I was jealous, okay?” Now JC’s eyes glittered with unmistakable tears, marking one of the precious few times Joey saw him cry.

“Jealous?” Joey furrowed his brow in disbelief. “Why?”

Wiping at his eyes, JC responded thickly, “I didn’t think that a girl who knew you for only a few weeks could know you half as well as we did, or know what was good for you. Even if she was a devoted fan, I didn’t see how she could truly understand you or how you could have hit it off with her in such a short period of time.”

“Well, she has cancer, too,” Joey said after another uncomfortable pause, “and that was something not even you or the other guys could relate to or understand.”

“I know that, too. Still, it came as a very personal blow.” JC sighed. “And I guess I also saw your interactions with her as an implication that you’d soon end up in the same position as her. That you’d leave us in the same way.”

Taken even further aback at this, were such a thing possible, Joey whispered, “I’m not Sheri, JC.”

“I know you’re not. In my head, I know I can’t judge your situation by hers. But in my heart…” JC trailed off, as if he didn’t have the words, or else he couldn’t properly express them.

Either way, Joey understood what JC meant to say, and he felt his grudge toward his brother and business partner begin to thaw, in spite of himself. “I had no idea you were feeling those things, man,” he said at length. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

With another deep sigh, JC murmured, “There was never a good time to tell you. I didn’t really know how to go about it the right way anyway, and what would have been the point? But as long as I’m in confession mode right now, I might as well tell you everything else.”

“There’s more?”

“I never mentioned this to anyone, but seeing you with Sheri brought back some pretty painful memories for me.”

“How so?”

JC was silent for such a long time that Joey thought he would never answer. Then JC did speak, summoning the words from what must have been a truly deep, dark place inside him. “Years back, before I met you and the guys, I had a cousin named Lisa.”

“Lisa?”

“One of my most favorite cousins at that.” JC’s voice took on a special warmth. “She and I were inseparable as kids; I came to think of her more as my sister. We did everything together. We went to the same school, all the way up to junior high. We even had our birthdays on the same day.”

Knowing where this story was going, Joey was afraid to ask, “What happened to her?”

“Just before high school, she got very sick. Not cancer, but a bad enough illness in its own way.” JC closed his eyes as he fought to keep his emotions in check. “It was a rough time for her, for me, for all of our family and friends, to say the least. Most of her girlfriends went cold turkey on her, and the boys had next to nothing to do with her. All except one.”

“Who was that?”

Once again, JC took his sweet time to dole out details while his index finger drew abstract designs on the table. “His name was Jake. Nice kid, or so he appeared. Good looks, good student, good standing amongst his peers—”

“Every girl’s dream boy,” Joey said with a slight nod.

“Everything a girl could want, and more besides. You’d think Lisa would be the last girl he’d look toward, but to the amazement of all, he went after her and stuck to her like glue. For about a year, everything was great. Lisa’s folks weren’t too thrilled, nor were mine. I had a few misgivings of my own, of course, but seeing how happy Lisa was with Jake—the happiest she had been in a long time—I went along with it.”

Again detecting an unpleasant turn of events, Joey asked slowly, “So…what came of it?”

JC’s face darkened, and his tone turned acidic. “Then one day, without warning, Jake simply went AWOL. The visits, the phone calls, everything stopped altogether. Jake never showed a shred of interest in Lisa again; he didn’t even acknowledge her when she was right in front of him. Turned out he was only using her all along.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I learned the facts for myself. And I don’t need to tell you the effect this had on Lisa, but you can figure it out.”

Hearing about Jake reminded Joey of the story of Sheri’s dad, and he found himself saying, “That was cold, man.”

“You think?” One of JC’s hands balled into a rock-rigid fist, which he slammed against the table with considerable force. “Taking advantage of any girl is bad enough, but to take advantage of a sick girl, a sick, lonely girl led to believe that he actually cared about her—I can’t even begin to tell you the things I wanted to do to that jerk, no matter what the legal consequences.”

Joey waited until JC had calmed down a little before asking him, “So what became of Lisa in the long run?”

“Eventually she got better—from her sickness, that is—for a while.”

“Just for a while?”

“She died about a month before she was to have graduated. Almost our entire school turned up for her funeral. Jake knew about the funeral, I know he did. Even then, that little dirtbag didn’t have the decency to show his face. There was nothing from him at all—no calls, no handwritten messages, not even a flower.”

It was as if an iron claw had caught hold of Joey’s heart and wouldn’t let go. “That’s awful,” he could barely whisper.

“Downright sickening, that’s what it is. You can bet your bottom dollar I never forgot it, or forgave it. Even after all these years, I have a tough time thinking about it.”

So that explains JC’s judgmental attitude toward Sheri. Aloud, Joey said, “So you assumed Sheri would hurt me in the same way?”

Even in the dimming light, the sorrow and shame on JC’s face was striking. In an exceptionally small voice, he rejoined, “I didn’t mean to. Not at first, anyway.” He bent his head to his chest. “I suppose a part of me took it out on her because I couldn’t get even with Jake. I had no way of knowing how trustworthy this girl was, and as much as I hate to say it, I wasn’t too inclined to find out. It seemed we already had enough on our plates without having to deal with someone else. You were already suffering enough, and with Sheri, from the way I saw it, you were only setting yourself up to get hurt even more.”

“Oh, I see,” was the only rational response Joey could find.

“Then, of course, I had a great deal of time to think these days. I thought about what you and the other guys said about Sheri, about your sheer dedication to her, and I saw her tonight for myself.” JC paused to draw a rattling breath before continuing. “And now I realize that I’ve made a huge mistake, possibly the worst mistake I could ever make in my life.”

Yes, you have, Joey wanted to say, but couldn’t.

JC closed his eyes, wiped them again, and swallowed what must have been an excruciating lump in his throat before looking up once more. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, Joey. I don’t expect Sheri to want anything to do with me. All I want is for you to see things from my perspective…and at least try to understand.”

Joey said nothing.

“Believe me, Joe, I know I’ve acted like a total blockhead these last few months, and if there was some way I could take it all back, I would. I really would.”

Just when Joey was opening his mouth, he heard Chris and Lance’s voices, calling anxiously for him. That was all it took for JC to jump to his feet, and he left Joey at the table with a distracted, “I’ll see you later.”

Joey watched his companion head down the street at a brisk pace, as if a ghost were trailing him.

“Joey!” Chris’s voice cried again.

“Joey, where are you?” Lance hollered.

Without moving from that spot, Joey called back, “I’m here.”

In a flash, the two were at his side, looking scared, relieved, and peeved at the same time. “Joey—there you are!” said Chris with an enormous sigh. “You had us looking all over the place for you!”

“What are you doing out here?” asked Lance.

“Just felt the need for some fresh air,” Joey mumbled.

“Well, next time, would you please tell us you’re going out before you sneak out?” Chris demanded. “Don’t scare us like that!” 

“Sorry.”

The guys must have sensed that something weighed very much on Joey’s mind and heart, because their expressions quickly softened and Chris asked more gently, “Hey, you all right, man?”

“What’s up?” Lance queried.

“Oh, the usual,” Joey told them, thinking at the same time, Just my whole world crashing down on every side of me.