by C. L. Donley
“The fact that I have to even have these conversations…”
“Yes, I know how taxing it is to have me as a friend,” I couldn’t hold back my impatient tone. “You better leave him with a stranger for a few hours instead. So she can shake the shit out of him.”
“Or I could just… stay home,” she called my bluff.
“Or you could do that, yes.”
Jo sighed.
“Judah would kill to see you. Literally, probably, if I continue to tiptoe around him.”
“You never talked to him?”
“I did, but. Kids have a funny way of hearing it how they want to hear it.”
“That’s everybody,” I replied.
“You’d pick us up or what?”
“Probably works best. But we’ll be stayin’ out late, you know how it is.”
When I got there, Judah played it cool like he’d just seen me yesterday and it was no big deal. I got the impression he was mad at me a little. Jo was wearing a long flowing white skirt that was old soft linen with her cowboy boots. I knew she remembered what I told her about the fuckin’ boots. I didn’t know what she meant by wearing them. Her hair was in a bun and she looked like Little House on the Black Prairie.
“You look nice.”
“Thanks. This skirt was my grandmother’s.”
“Sure you wanna wear it tonight?”
“We’re not mud wrestling are we?”
“No, but there’ll be ketchup. Grass. Sparks.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
It took us about an hour to get to Uncle Charlie’s on the outskirts of Charlotte. Charlie lives high on the hillbilly hog on a giant estate he’s added on about twelve times, surrounded by swamp trees and right on the water. And it’s all his. Has been for decades. He’s the one who inspired me to buy my own patch of North Carolina.
The gang’s already there when we arrive, Gus with his old lady and her kids, Corey with a girl I never seen before in my life. The first thing Jo notices is the pitbulls chained up in the yard, since they start barkin’ up a storm at her. I know what she’s thinkin’. Jo just gives me a tired look and I couldn’t help but giggle at her non-laughter.
“They’ll stay chained up, I promise.”
“You promise a lot, Adam.”
“Do I?”
“More like, you spend a lotta time vouching for people that ain’t you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It sounded like she was accusing Charlie of bein’ racist, but that wasn’t like her. I didn’t know why she would do that before she even met him.
We went around back where Charlie was already grillin’ away. One of Carla’s little boys came right up to Judah, and after a few words, off they went in the direction of the massive Southern oaks on Charlie’s land. I shamelessly stared at Jo, who watched Judah cautiously until Uncle Charlie busted through both our concentration.
“Well, well, well, well, well!” the old man said with both his big hands on his bitch hips. He had on a big black apron that said “I’ll feed ALL you fuckers.”
He looked Jo up and down all dramatic-like and she smiled politely. Aunt Mavis’ little dogs circled around our feet.
“If this ain’t thee Jo Abrams,” he finally said.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Stroud.”
“It’s Uncle Charlie to you.”
“Aren’t you just a doll!” Aunt Mavis gushed on her way out the back door with a big pile of raw meat.
“Your daddy is Spence Abrams, isn’t that right?”
“He is.”
“How is that ol’ bandicoot?”
“We’re not exactly on the best terms right now, but he seems to be doing well.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that. Not the part about not being on the best terms, but you know. I didn’t know him well, but I knew enough to imagine he was a hard man to live with.”
“Actually he wasn’t home much, so it was pretty easy. We didn’t really connect until I was a teenager, he started teaching me the trades.”
“You an only child, Jo?”
“Yep.”
“So are you two…” Aunt Mavis butted in.
“We just work together,” Jo answered. Made me look like a fuckin’ schmuck. Everyone knows I wouldn’t bring just any damn co-worker to Uncle Charlie’s. Besides, the way it got extra quiet let me know they’d already been gossiping ‘fore we got there.
“Well Jo, why don’t you come help us in the kitchen?” Aunt Mavis came to my rescue.
“Keep an eye on Judah?” Jo looked back at me on the way inside. One of those perfect looks I was already tryin’ to memorize.
“The kids’ll be fine,” Aunt Mavis assured her as she closed the door behind them. Charlie, Corey and Gus were quiet a long moment before they finally started razzin’ me. Corey laughed while Gus made plane crash noises. They knew they couldn’t talk too much shit in front a’ Charlie.
“What the hell’d you do, Adam?” Uncle Charlie accused me while he flipped over all the various meats on his massive grill.
“What you think he did, Charlie? He was himself,” Gus scoffed.
“Jo can do better than a jackass like me,” I confessed, crackin’ open a beer can.
“Listen to him, he sounds like a damn puppy that got ran over,” Gus shook his head, tryna catch a beatin’.
Everyone ate standing up, puttin’ sparklers in kids’ hands or chasin’ ‘em around with bang snaps and bottle rockets. Jo was quiet. Friendly with the girls, but didn’t seem like herself. At all. But instead of going off alone or trying to figure out a way to DJ so she didn’t have to socialize, she was doin’ her damndest to start up every conversation topic known to man. Then she shut right up again until there was silence. Like she couldn’t stand it.
“Jo, how many burgers is that?” I ribbed her while she was talking to Carla. She looked over at me like she was caught doin’ something, and sorta like she hated me. It sent my heart beatin’ fast it was enough to freak me out.
“Only the second,” she said nonchalant.
“But she had two hot dogs,” Gus ratted her out. Corey laughed at her, but Jo gave Gus a murderous look. All he did was grin like a big dumb ox, but it nearly sent a shiver through me. What the fuck was that about, I thought?
“Mom! Uncle Charlie’s gonna set off fireworks!”
“I know, baby,” she smiled. She looked at him like it was her last day on Earth. Then she looked at me. Her smile waned.
“I’m going to get more ice. Anyone need anything?”
16
Chapter 16
Well into the festivities, about an hour before the sun was expected to set, a few of the grown-ups retreated inside for dessert. Aunt Mavis disappeared around the corner and came back with a giant book that looked to be made of burlap. The house collectively let out a groan.
“May, leave these poor girls alone,” Charlie pleaded.
“What is that, a photo album?”
Mavis was obsessed with going down memory lane. She’d kept every photo the boys had ever taken, passed to her from Charlie’s mother, their grandmother. It was a good thing too, because their mother got evicted so many times that they just about lost everything they’d ever made memories with.
Mavis took a seat next to Jo and each supported one half of the large album with their laps while Carla and Corey’s date took a seat on the couch and adjacent loveseat. The men roared obscenity-laden conversation from the back porch, the kids dizzying themselves in the distance.
From the first page, it was an early 90’s tour through Adam’s life: lace doilies, fluorescent oranges and neon blues, simple Christmases, blue carpet and rotary phones with long cords on the wall, short shorts in the summer, bouffants and young-looking elders, rocking white and pinstripes with ease, holding cigarettes and beers. Jo couldn’t control her beaming as Aunt Mavis pointed out names and faces she’d never know because they were either dead or long-severed friendships, or leaves of a family tree branch to
o vast to readily conceive.
“There’s Adam’s mom, Carolyn,” she said matter-of-factly. There was no malice in her voice, no pity or nostalgia either. It was a very old picture. She was very young with feathered hair and perfectly preserved in her pristine 80’s makeup and a pouty expression. She looked like if Debbie Harry had a big sister that she grew up idolizing.
“She’s beautiful,” Jo marveled, still cloudy about the young girl’s full trajectory, but she knew enough to know that it was tragic.
She turned the page to reveal the same young girl with a dashing blond, blue-eyed heartbreaker, who stood out even more due to his reluctant air, in no mood for selfies. Jo’s jaw dropped and she slapped the side of her own face, knowing immediately who the man was.
“That’s Adam’s father Dusty, Carolyn, his brother, Charlie and me.”
“Look at you!”
A young Mavis was probably considered homely back then but had clearly been a gorgeous girl, her eyes cut to her now-husband, and full of something bordering mischief. Jo looked back at Adam’s father, a sexier Robert Redford, trying to stare him down, trying to see the hate-filled monster lying beneath. Before she could reconcile it, Aunt Mavis was turning the page again, another nostalgia-filled page full of scenes of the same young faces, clearly a squad, clearly smoking “not-cigarettes” and sipping “not-soda.” Pretty sure that was a line of coke in the corner of that lovely dinner table spread.
“Y’all were lit in this picture,” Corey’s mystery date chimed in.
“In all the pictures,” Mavis giggled.
Finally, the squad appeared to morph in age and appearance. Adam’s father was conspicuously absent. His mother looked more exhausted, smiling seldom. The next page was all babies, starting with an entire section dedicated to Gus, clearly the first child.
“Awwww…” Jo politely fussed over the pictures. They weren’t even halfway through the damn thing. The other girls had retreated to the backyard with the guys. After a while, Adam came back in to rescue her.
“Lord, Auntie, Jo didn’t come here to look at redneck photos all night.”
“It’s alright,” Jo chuckled. They’d finally gotten to pictures of Adam and Corey as babies. Adam blocked the light of the fixture in the ceiling fan with his big body, examining an old picture of all three of the boys sporting blond mops and stove pots on their heads.
“Oh my gosh,” Jo giggled.
“Guess which one is me,” Adam quizzed her.
Jo tried to reconcile the facial features of each man in the beaming faces of the little boys staring back at her. She took a stab in the dark and put her finger on the one on the far right.
“That’s Corey,” he said. He tapped the little boy in the middle with a thick finger.
“That one’s me.”
Jo looked back up at the gruff mountain man towering over her and back down to the smiling boy with the stringy blond, almost white, hair. He had apple cheeks and dainty little evenly spaced chicklets for teeth. Eyes so big and bright, and a dainty innocence so pristine he could’ve easily been mistaken for a girl. That boy was going to be abandoned, traumatized, beaten, loved, addicted. He was going to form unhealthy attachments and claw at his own flesh, and cling to father figures and eventually cut a symbol of hate into his arm. He was going to turn his back on the world. That smiling boy is going to shoulder all those experiences.
“Mom! We’re catching fireflies!” Judah’s piccolo interjection burst the suddenly fragile bubble of her emotions.
“Where’s your bathroom?” Jo asked, trying to seem nonchalant.
“Up the stairs, first door on the right,” Aunt Mavis quickly directed her as Jo flipped the album out of her lap and onto the couch underneath her.
She pushed past Adam and raced up the stairs, her hand over her mouth. She closed the door, locked it and turned on the faucet, hoping the running water would hide the choking sobs radiating through her chest as she balled her eyes out. She ran the water as she cried and cried. She couldn’t seem to stop.
She didn’t know why, but the picture of the little boy with the pot on his head was breaking something inside her. She slid down the bathroom door and gave way to whatever this feeling was as she curled into a ball. Ineffable sadness. She didn’t want to do anything but cry. Not just for Adam, for all three of them. For all little boys everywhere. For little girls who became bad moms. The cycle seemed endless. Did she really have enough tears for every broken family in the whole world? She felt like she could cry for the rest of her life and die of dehydration. What the hell was happening to her?
But then, she already knew the answer to that.
She heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. Great. Someone needed to use the bathroom and she was incapacitated.
“Jo?” Adam’s voice reverberated on the other side of the door.
Jo didn’t move until he was knocking on the door and trying the knob. She lethargically got to her feet with the help of the vanity as Adam continued to call her name.
“Coming,” she weakly responded. She didn’t even know if he heard her over the noise of the sink. She sniffed and examined her puffy eyes in the mirror, wiping them crudely with one hand like a child. Adam’s next knock was more like banging.
“JoAnn, open this door or I’m breakin’ it down.”
Jo fiddled with the lock and the knob turned on the other end with Adam barging in. He looked at her with naked concern, closing the door behind him when she saw that she was upset. She was more than upset. She was shaken up.
“Jo…”
“Is Judah alright?”
“Yeah Judah’s fine, what the hell are you doin’ in here?”
Jo replies with unintelligible sniffles that seemed to mean she was just as baffled as he was.
“You’re scaring me, Josie. What’s going on?”
Jo was in his arms before he even had time to think about it. As unexplainable as it was, her anguish didn’t feel particularly deep as he sheltered her. She just sort of seemed like she needed a hug. Had she missed him? Was it driving her crazy to be away from him? Was she also too shattered to say it, even though it was right on the tongue, hovering just above the surface of the skin?
She soon quieted against his chest, her breath so slow she may have been asleep standing up. She’d kept her arms hugged tightly against her chest rather than around him. He watched her profile in the mirror, rested his chin on top of her head and planted a kiss there, a gesture so painful in its raw adoration that it sent Jo’s heart to warp speed. His touch, his smell, transported her instantly to that weekend, the rightest she’d ever felt. Her body quickened with endorphins. She wriggled out of his grasp and pushed her palms against him as she reached up for a kiss. Her eyes were closed, expecting the pressure of his lips, but when she craned her neck she’d barely grazed him. She opened her eyes to Adam’s steely gaze looking down at the empty space between them, as if embarrassed to meet her gaze.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer. Adam remained stoic as though he wanted to let her down easy about something. She probed his face, seeing the fight. If he was worried about leading her on, then he hadn’t been paying attention.
She watched his eyes, reached up on tiptoes and found his lips herself. Instead of returning her gaze he closed his eyes. It took a few seconds for him to lean into it and kiss back. Instantly the world around them disappeared as it had in that tiny shack nearly two months ago.
His moist, slow-moving lips grazed hers tenderly with no end in sight. It was as though his kiss made her come alive and it shot her right out of her despair like a comet. She threw thankful arms around his wide neck, deepening her kiss as she held him tight. He released her from his embrace to place his hands on her slight hips. Every spot where his fingertips eluded the hem of her shirt and met the skin underneath sent signals to her groin like sparks. A slight moan escaped her lips. Her hands left his neck and hair and found his belt buckle.
“Jo, enough,
” he breathed.
“I miss you,” she whispered. “So much.” The confession hit his ears and caused him to cave. She stole another kiss while he was deciding what to do. Their tongues danced and they swayed as their bodies had a tug of war.
The sounds of kids screaming and running around with sparklers in the yard bled through the bathroom’s closed window. Fireworks could be heard popping off in all directions and mirrored the frantic chemistry coming back to them with a vengeance there in the upstairs bathroom.
“Jo, I can’t fuckin’ do this,” he whispered.
She heard the way his voice caught and something strange came over her. There was a weakness in his voice, a fear. One that told her how hard it had been for him to stay away, and yet it was much harder not to.
Jo tugged at her long white linen skirt and let it fall to the ground.
She should let him be. He was obviously struggling with this. She should respect that. It wasn’t like her to cause trouble.
“Put your hands on me,” she panted.
“No.”
When she grabbed his wrists to place his hands where she wanted them he pulled away. She reached for his belt buckle again and this time he didn’t stop her. He watched the reflection of her black bikini-clad bottom in the mirror. He heard a moan and watched Jo sink to her knees and put her mouth on the sideways indent his erection made in his jeans. Instantly he was slack-jawed and lost at the hot damp feeling of her mouth on him.
“What are you doing?” he whisper-moaned as if it weren’t obvious.
“I fucking need this dick baby,” Jo gasped as if crazed.
“Fuck.”
Adam freed his member from the zipper like it was an emergency. Jo instantly went to work on it and Adam sucked in a long breath through his teeth, not sure how he got here and feeling uneasy about it. But he couldn’t stop what was happening. His hands were shaking, his heart burning. She was too far away from him. He needed to feel her soft skin against his while he gave her the dick she was asking for.
“Get up,” he demanded. He pressed her to him against the bathroom counter and Jo clung to him like he was rescuing her from a burning building. Adam hauled her up in his arms, pushed her bikini briefs to one side and glided himself across her slit, coating his dick with her juices. Slowly, he impaled her as he stood in the middle of the bathroom. He cradled both bottom cheeks in his hands, her limbs tight and tense around him as her teeth sank into his shoulder to stifle her cries.
