Fast Lane

by Ashley, Kristen

  Even feeling all I was feeling, which was a lot, I said, “That’s not it because Gramps is proud and that sounds like a handout.”

  “This isn’t about pride. This is about family and getting Julia away from that dickweed and back to hers.”

  Okay, I could see that.

  But…

  “Preacher—”

  He dipped his face close and his voice low. “Baby, before Tommy joined our conversation, I also told him you were a virgin and you were gonna stay that way.”

  I blinked.

  “I told him the way I had to court you, bein’ on tour, might not be conventional, but I’m courtin’ you and I would not disrespect you, or him and who he is to you, what he’s done for you, by bein’ that guy.”

  I kept blinking, just more rapidly.

  “So, I assured him he could trust me. I was gonna sleep on the couch over Christmas and he had no worries I’d try anything, disrespecting him under his own roof. And when you join the tour for spring break and come out to LA in the summer, and for as long as there’s a you and me, he has my word you will never get anything but respect from me.”

  Lyla:

  [Off tape]

  You and McCade had not had sex?

  [Shakes head]

  No.

  Preacher’s growing-up years were far from great, but regardless, something leaked into him down south and he was truly a southern gentleman.

  [Smiles softly]

  He was kind of Rhett and Ashley put together.

  I credit Loretta Williams for that.

  In other words, he did not lie to my grandfather not only because he was actually courting me, and he was the kind of guy who called it that.

  But because Preacher would never lie to a man like my grandfather.

  “We’re not gonna have sex?” I asked.

  “No,” he answered.

  “Ever?” I squeaked.

  Okay, we slept together every night, and on the bus and in the hotel rooms, we cuddled and made out, we did it often, and when we did, there was a lot of groping, but Preacher always stopped it before it got too far.

  I was a virgin, I’d told him that our first night and that didn’t change in the time in between because I’d met Preacher and really, no one had come close to measuring up to him.

  But from the kissing and groping and, well…all that was Preacher, I was ready to go there.

  And when we were kissing and groping, I was really ready.

  He grinned again and replied, “Not under your grandfather’s roof.”

  “Spring break?”

  He took my head in both hands in that way of his I liked a whole lot, tipped it down, kissed the top of my hair, then tipped it back to look into my face again.

  “Cher, it’ll happen when it’s supposed to happen. And it is not supposed to happen now. You’re gonna get what you deserve. A man who has a mind to you and knows you as you before he takes something from you it isn’t his to have until you’re ready to give it.”

  I looked at his ear and mumbled, “I’m feeling ready to give it.”

  He chuckled, and I looked back at him.

  And then he got serious.

  “And I’m ready to have it, Lyla. Absolutely, baby. Best gift I’ll ever get, already know that. But that’s just not gonna happen in the home of the man who raised you.”

  I had to admit, it was the right thing to do.

  And it was super sweet how he said all that.

  But spring break was over three months away.

  And I was already twenty years old!

  I pushed through his hold on me and planted my face in his chest.

  He slid his arms around me again.

  “First things first,” he said, “Christmas and getting Julia back.”

  “And avoiding Gram making her macaroni and cheese.”

  “And that.”

  I smiled against his shirt and wrapped my arms around him.

  He gave me a squeeze.

  “You guys suck!” Amber shouted. “All sweet all the time. That’s not rock ’n’ roll! You jumping his bones in the airport, that was rock ’n’ roll!”

  And I started laughing.

  A couple of days later, we were kissing and groping on my bed in my bedroom.

  Sonia was off with some friends.

  Gram and Gramps were at some holiday cocktail party at the golf course.

  Tom had gone up to Chicago to touch base with his family who he wasn’t really close to, but they got along.

  So, I had Preacher all to myself.

  In my bedroom where, after meeting him, night after night I thought of doing with him all the things I was right then doing with him.

  I felt him hard against my stomach, and I’d felt that before, I wanted to feel it better, like I had wanted before, but had been foiled in getting, and also like I had before, I went for it.

  He caught my wrist, rolled to his back, tucked me to his side then his hand slid up my back to my head and he shoved my face in his neck.

  “Cher, give a guy a break,” he said thickly.

  Shoot.

  “Preacher—”

  “Not gonna happen.”

  Damn.

  I watched down his body as he stretched his legs out, crossed his feet at the ankles, and from that, I knew I could beg or promise the moon and the stars, but it was not going to happen.

  I sighed, relaxed, and that was when Preacher started playing with my hair with the fingers of one hand, also playing with my fingers with his other.

  I let him, and since my arm was trapped under me and I couldn’t return the favor in some way, I pressed closer.

  “You got a pretty room, cher,” he muttered.

  I closed my eyes.

  Tight.

  “We have girls, we’re gonna give ’em rooms just like this,” he said.

  God.

  I opened my eyes and I didn’t want to do it because I never wanted to do it.

  After she was gone, I came undone.

  The ensuing custody battle, and losing it, I didn’t think I’d be able to pull myself back together.

  But then I did, as best I could, so I had to keep a hold on it.

  But Preacher was stretched out on the bed Mom bought me, and she’d like him just as much as Gramps did at first, and just as much as Gram did after he was all Preacher and he earned it.

  “When I was a little girl and we moved here, Gram and Gramps had this old set of bunk beds. My mom and aunt slept in them when they were girls, but they were secondhand when they bought them, so when I say they were old, they were that old. Mom was…she was…you know, we lived with them. We lived with Gram and Gramps, but Mom took care of her kids.”

  Preacher didn’t say anything, just kept playing with my hair and fingers.

  “I don’t know what got into her. Maybe it was that me and Sonia were sleeping in the bed she slept in when she was a kid and she didn’t like that. Maybe she never really liked it that she had to sleep in a secondhand bed, so she liked it less her girls were sleeping in it thirdhand. Maybe it was just a wild hair. But one day, she went out and bought that wallpaper that’s on the walls and one weekend she painted the ceiling and put up that wallpaper, all by herself. Then she took us shopping for new furniture.”

  I drew in a deep breath that went in rough and came out as words.

  “I don’t think she knew, when we went to the store, how much furniture cost there. When we found a bunkbed that we liked, though, I remember how she looked at the price tag and her back got all straight and she got that look on her face she sometimes would get, and I knew she couldn’t afford it.”

  I pressed my forehead closer to his neck and he fisted his hand gently in my hair and held my fingers in his without playing.

  “The salesman saw it too and got all smarmy and told her, in the back they had some stuff that was nicked or scratched that they sold at a discount, and he didn’t know, but maybe there was a bunkbed back there.”

  I pu
lled his hand to my chest, pressed it in and kept talking.

  “She was proud, and he was being a jerk, the way he said it. Not nice. Dismissive. Patronizing. And so, she said, ‘We’ll take it.’”

  “Lyla,” he whispered, and I knew why.

  My voice was getting hoarse.

  I swallowed and went on with the story.

  “She then says, ‘And my daughters need a desk.’” I swallowed again. “That’s the desk, right there.”

  I moved my head on his shoulder to indicate the desk sitting on the wall down from the bed.

  “It still had the full price on it but I found the chunk out of the back and Sonia pulled the flip top down and saw it didn’t sit level, and even though it went with the bunkbeds, I said, ‘It’s all dinged up.’ And the guy said, ‘That desk is meant to sit against the wall. You can’t see that irregularity in the back when it’s against a wall.’ And Sonia said, ‘Well, it can sit against the wall, but if you try to use it for what it’s made for, the papers will slide off. We’ll get another desk somewhere else, Momma. And maybe bunkbeds to match too.’”

  I took a ragged breath and the story continued to come out of me.

  “He offered a deal on the desk, but Mom started to walk away so he offered us a deal on the bunkbeds too, if we took them both, with a dresser. In the end, we got all three for just over the price on that tag of the bunkbeds.”

  “No fool, your momma,” he murmured.

  “Nope,” I said proudly, but huskily.

  “Full a’ sass,” he said.

  “Yep,” I whispered.

  “Gave that to her girl.”

  “Yep,” I repeated, proud again. “Gramps couldn’t fix the hinges on that desk. They were bent. And they were built into the wood so he couldn’t replace them. So, we pulled out the drawer under it to prop up the desk part when we needed to use it and I used it all the time when I was studying.”

  My voice dropped.

  “All the time.”

  That was when I started crying.

  Preacher turned into me and pulled me into his arms.

  “I-I’m sorry,” I hiccoughed.

  “I had a momma like yours, I’d cry she was lost too, cher. I’d cry when she was gone and I’d cry after, thinkin’ about all she gave when I had her. So, give her that. Yeah? And don’t be sorry for givin’ it.”

  I nodded, knowing he had not had that, really had not had that, wishing he did, and missing my mom all the more because I’d had it, I loved it, and I wanted it back.

  He held me until I quit crying and then he fell again to his back, dragging me up on his chest, and he held me some more.

  I was so drained, it felt like I could sleep for a week.

  But now that I’d started it, I couldn’t stop.

  My voice was a lot quieter when I said, “You know, it’s like a desperation, looking for good things. Anything you can hold on to. And I looked, Preacher. I did. I tried to tell myself it was good she wasn’t sick for very long. Or it was good that she wasn’t in pain for very long. But neither of those are good because she was sick and in pain at all. So, there isn’t anything.”

  “’Course not,” he muttered.

  “I wish she’d met you,” I mumbled.

  “Me too, cher.”

  I stared across his chest at that desk and whispered, “Her last words to me were, ‘be sure to follow your star, honey.’”

  “Follow your star,” he whispered back.

  And when he did, it hit me.

  I was.

  I was following my star.

  That’s what took me to Chicago.

  I was following my star.

  So, I started bawling again.

  Preacher tucked me closer and kept holding me.

  When I quit that time, he pulled me out of bed, took me to the bathroom and helped me wash my face.

  And we were in front of the TV, cuddled together in the loveseat, watching It’s A Wonderful Life when my grandparents got home.

  [Interviewer’s Note]

  No tour of the cabin was offered by Lyla upon arrival.

  We sat where she’d indicated, in the room the back door led to, a den with a daybed, where she sat cross-legged, a rolling desk chair patterned in zebra print, where she indicated I sit, a wood burning stove, tables and lamps scattered about.

  And against the wall beside the brick fireplace, a pulldown desk.

  Lyla:

  Tommy was ex-military and no-nonsense, so Gramps liked him from the start.

  Preacher had talked him around.

  So, once Tom got back from Chicago, those three spent a lot of time sitting around the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes, and shooting man shit.

  [Smiles].

  I have pictures of them with their glasses of bourbon and ashtrays they never dumped out, spinning their yarns.

  [Shakes head, still smiling, takes big breath and lets it go]

  I didn’t know it, but Preacher hadn’t won him.

  Not until the night we played euchre.

  [Off tape]

  Euchre?

  It’s a card game. People in the Midwest take it pretty seriously.

  It wasn’t that.

  It wasn’t the euchre or that Preacher knew how to play.

  It was that it was the day after Christmas.

  Julia hadn’t called on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve and we were all upset about it. Sonia and I called and both left messages, but even though we were Dad’s children too, he didn’t call us.

  Sonia was older than me, graduating from Purdue that coming summer.

  When he made his play to kick us when we were down after Mom died, the only one he could get his hands on was Julia.

  Not that he wanted her, and that has nothing to do with Jules.

  It was his way to stick it to Mom, posthumously, and stick it to Gramps, at that time, because, I figure the only other person outside Gram who knew that story about Gramps telling Mom he’d take her to Florida rather than her marrying my dad was Dad.

  But we were sitting around the kitchen table, me and Preacher partners, getting beat by Gramps and Sonia, who were partners, and it was hard to beat Gramps at euchre, doing this while Gram mixed cocktails, poured bourbon and generally flitted about, as was her wont.

  [Nostalgic half-smile]

  The phone rings, Gram gets it, it’s Julia.

  We’re thrilled, maybe me especially because I can’t wait to introduce her over the phone to Preacher.

  Gram chats to her.

  She sits in on the game for Sonia when she chats with her.

  And then Sonia says Julia wants to talk to me and she takes my place as partners with Preacher so I can chat with my baby sister.

  The thing is, when I get on the phone, it isn’t Julia.

  It’s my father.

  And I barely say hello before he’s shouting at me to call off my boyfriend’s attorneys.

  I’ve no doubt it showed on my face, so within seconds, I’m not holding the phone anymore, Preacher is.

  He listens for another second before he says, “You’re not talking to Lyla anymore, you’re talking to Preacher McCade. Put her sister on, please.”

  He said that three times.

  I remember.

  Three times.

  “Put her sister on, please.”

  That was very like and unlike Preacher.

  He could be polite, to people who deserved it.

  But not to people like my father.

  After the third time, I knew by his face he was done.

  He then says, “My manager will be in touch with a number. From this point on, if you want Lyla, or Sonia, you call that number and you request to speak to them. If this is what they want, our people will set up a time for that conversation to happen. Julia is free to call this number at any time, until she’s home and doesn’t need to do that. But you just lost access to your girls unless it comes through me. Do you get me?”

  He stood there a moment listening to the
phone.

  Then he hung up, looked at me and said, “I don’t think he got me.”

  Dad didn’t get him, but my grandfather did.

  And that was it.

  Preacher had Gramps too.

  [Off tape]

  Your father was a turtle.

  [Nods]

  You understand, and in the way of that metaphor, you’re right.

  But actually, my father was a snake.

  Gramps knew it before my mother married him.

  And Preacher knew it and I don’t think he ever one-on-one met the man.

  The rest of that Christmas break…

  [Trails off]

  [Turns head to look out the window]

  I lived a lot of life since then, but even not having Mom there, that two weeks on our little piece of property in Indiana were two of the happiest weeks of my life.

  [Turns head back]

  And Preacher’s.

  Jesse:

  Her grandmother threw a New Years’ Eve party that year. Asked me, Mom and my sisters there. Tim and the girl he was seein’. Dave and his folks.

  Lyla and her sister and Jen and Amber and a few more of Lyla’s friends.

  [Smiles]

  Lynie Campbell smoked one cigarette a year, on New Years’, and I remember her making a big deal of making Preacher light it for her, swanning about with that thing in a long, thin cigarette holder like the old movie stars used to use.

  [Hoots]

  That woman was a stitch.

  She could not cook to save her life, and the macaroni and cheese she made a production of laying out that night proved it.

  Audie could mix a mean dip, though. From scratch. No dumping some packet into sour cream for him. Damn, that shit was tasty. I ate so many potato chips that night, swear to Christ, I didn’t eat another one for years seein’ as I nearly got sick on ’em.

  My mom. Lyla’s grandparents. Dave’s folks sneakin’ outside to grab some tokes every now and then. And the rest of us. Chips and dip. Shrimp cocktail. Cheap champagne. Sonia and Lyla fighting over whether to put on “Cold-Hearted Snake” or “When I Think of You.” Tim tryin’ to push “I Hate Myself for Loving You.” Lynie making us listen to “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” four times in a row until, thank fuck, Audie took control of the turntable.