She wondered why he was working for the phone company in the first place, but she felt it would be rude to come right out and ask. Rule Number Nineteen, A lady never embarrasses a man with direct questions. That had come from her mother, but Sissy being Sissy had embellished it with an addendum all her own: There are plenty of other ways a smart girl can find out what she wants to know.
She fell back on her teasing ways. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you, Parker Davidson. I know for a fact you’ve been in town over a week. And you haven’t even called.” She tossed her wet hair.
Parker licked a droplet of water that had been whipped off her hair and onto his lips. “I tried. Three, four times.”
She thought he must be lying. Then she remembered the phone had rung several times that week, but when Peewee or one of the boys had picked it up, no one was there.
As if reading her mind he asked, “How is old Peewee?”
“Fine, just fine. He works for the parish.”
“Sounds like a real steady job.”
“It is.”
The freight train rumbled through town. They felt the house tremble. Sissy searched the man for clues of the boy she had known. He had the same strong features, the same dark brown hair and heavy eyebrows, the same dark eyes. But now, their corners were crinkled. She felt an irrational envy. He’d gotten those lines without her. His skin was tanned tight across his high cheekbones. With his athletic grace and dark skin and prominent nose, he looked like an Indian. Not a real Indian with their round faces, flat noses, and slightly oriental eyes. But the movie version: Jeff Chandler playing Cochise. Tall, dark, and Jewish. She caught an earthy smell of musk mixed with the creosote.
The ladies’ choir began to file into the Southern Methodist Church of Gentry on the opposite corner. They wore starched cotton dresses with sleeves and collars so as not to give offense in the House of the Lord. Some of them waved to Sissy, standing barefooted on her porch in her low-cut, yellow sundress. Parker and Sissy parted self-consciously and waved back. She saw Amy Lou Hopper—who always prided herself on dressing appropriately— adjust her pointy blue glasses before entering the church. Poor Amy Lou, Sissy thought.
She took a seat on the far corner of the swing and smoothed her circle skirt demurely over her knees. Underneath, she felt her legs stick together.
Parker took off his heavy tool belt and sat down so hard the swing jumped and whined. They turned to one another, but fourteen years of silence came between them.
Sissy took a Coke off the wicker table and offered it to him. She heard the ice clink and felt the glass sweat. For the first time in fourteen years their hands touched. Sissy was shocked at the sensation that rushed through her body. It was as if he had reached his big, hairy hand down her dress.
“Thanks,” he said and took the glass, leaving Sissy’s hand wet and empty.
She touched the tips of her fingers to her cheek and felt where his hand had touched hers. She started to speak, thought better of it, offered him a cigarette and took one for herself. He cupped his hand and leaned forward to light hers.
A hummingbird fluttered inches from the honeysuckle on the porch post. It hovered in space, lusting for the nectar.
The silence between them became charged and dangerous. Sissy had to fill it, but she didn’t want to sound strained, or worse, stupid. But she felt stupid and he looked strained. And then she remembered Rule Number Eleven. Men find themselves the most fascinating subject of any conversation. When in doubt, let him talk about himself.
“Sammy showed me some of those postcards you sent.” Parker hadn’t sent many, but the ones he’d sent had pictures of golden Buddhas, elephants, Chinese junks. “Did you really see all that stuff?”
He was flattered by her interest, as she knew he would be, and launched into the story of his travels. “You’d love it, Sissy. Temples a thousand years old next to skyscrapers.” He told her how he’d sailed the South China Sea, trekked through the mountains of Thailand on elephants, swum in the Bay of Bengal.
“It must be something to be wild and free,” she said, and there was naked longing in her voice.
“It’s something, all right.”
Sissy flashed back to that last year in high school, when her future was wide open. Anything seemed possible then. Anything, except that she’d spend the rest of her life trapped in the little town she was born in. While Parker roamed the world. Oh well, like her grandmother said, Don’t jump off the roof if you don’t expect to hit the ground. Rule Number Sixty-two.
He asked about old friends. Sissy answered mechanically, but she was listening to the sound of his voice, not his words. The air was breathless, heavy, the way it gets before a storm. She felt they were wrapped together in the late afternoon heat. She rubbed the cold, wet glass against her neck and rolled it over her chest.
Parker watched and stopped talking. He gulped down his icy drink.
The organist across the street played the first chord. Sissy felt anxious. “You want another Coke?” she asked. Her voice was strained.
“If it’s not too much trouble,” he answered softly, still watching her.
“No trouble at all.”
She stood up, threw her cigarette butt on the concrete porch step, and ground it out with her bare foot. She’d read about ballet dancers whose feet were that tough and was proud to find hers were too, after summers of climbing barefooted over the rocks at the creek with her kids. But she hadn’t meant to put out a burning cigarette in front of Parker. She caught him staring at her. She felt like a damn fool. He was going to think she’d turned into some kind of a redneck hick. She practically flew off the porch and into the kitchen.
Sissy had always been a flirt. She’d tried out a lot of rules on how to do it, and discarded most of them, but Rule Number Five was always with her: Boys will squirm and grown men will pull on their collars when a girl tosses her hair and looks at up them through her eyelashes, or even better, over her shoulder. Through the years, she’d learned that this was more than a rule, it was a law of nature, immutable and very reassuring. But Sissy always did it for fun, just fun. She wasn’t going to actually do anything.
When she married Peewee, she’d promised to be a good and faithful wife. And Sissy never went back on her word.
Of course, it hadn’t been so hard to resist temptation. There hadn’t been a lot of it around.
But here was Parker, back after all these years.
The strap of her sundress had slipped down over her shoulder. She hitched it up and reached her long, freckled fingers into the ice bucket. Empty.
She pried a gray metal tray up out of the little freezer section, but the lever was frozen tight. So she picked up the ice tray and smashed it hard against the sink, which gave her some relief, but didn’t help much in getting at the ice. She turned on the tap. Pretty soon the cubes were floating.
What was wrong with her today?
A shadow fell across her body. Parker leaned against the doorway. She didn’t turn. Nothing would make her turn or look at him over her shoulder.
“Anything I can do to help?” he asked. She felt the weight of his shadow on top of her. She shut off the tap.
A calloused hand reached over her shoulder and picked up a dripping cube. He rubbed the ice over her shoulders as she stood paralyzed. He ran it under her hair, under the strap of her sundress and over her chest. His hard calluses scraped gently as they slid across her freckled skin. She started to say something, but he ran the ice cube over her lips. She tried to tell him to stop. He gently pushed the melting cube, hardly more than a wafer now, into her mouth.
He bent down—and without touching her body—kissed her lips, tasting their cold wetness, licking her lips until Sissy shivered. She touched his chest and found heat radiating from it.
“Open my eyes so I may see…” Choir practice had begun and Sissy snapped out of her fantasy. Parker was still leaning in the doorway. “Need any help?” he asked again.
“Here.
” She gave him the Cokes to open. She threw the ice cubes into the glasses and poured the rest, water and all, into the ice bucket.
Parker handed her the opened bottles. She turned and knocked over the bucket with her elbow.
“I don’t know what’s come over me today,” she said as ice and water spilled all over the peeling linoleum with its faded yellow and orange flowers.
Parker bent down as Sissy grabbed a dish towel. “No harm done,” he said, cupping the ice cubes in his big hands and throwing them into the sink.
Sissy was mopping up the water under his work boots, when Parker bent and gave her his hand. The pungent scents of musk and creosote rose around her. She felt disoriented, confused.
Inhaling deeply, she could actually feel the heat radiating from him. It was real. Her lacquered fingernails were shaking. She thought about releasing the buttons on Parker’s work shirt. When the blue denim fabric fell away, would she see the brown hair, just as she remembered it, curling softly over his chest? She wanted to bury her head in it. She imagined his big suntanned hands sliding around her. Those big rough thumbs caressing her small breasts. Rubbing them. Sissy felt her nipples harden. Her body came alive. She wanted to run her hands over those wonderful thighs. She could almost feel the bulge under those metal buttons on his shrink-to-fit jeans. Feel him bunching up her skirt, sliding his hand under her pants. She groaned softly.
“Sissy, are you okay?” he asked, still holding her hand.
Reality returned. But she didn’t want any part of it. Then she realized his hand was trembling, too.
“Place in my hands the wonderful key/That shall unclasp and set me free,” the ladies sang across the street.
The Southern Belle’s Handbook chattered away in her head, reminding her of all the sensible reasons she should stay away from this man. To hell with the Southern Belle’s Handbook. To hell with the creosote. Sissy stood on her tiptoes and raised her lips to his. And with the flash of mutual decision that had gotten them into trouble all those years ago, they were in each other’s arms. He kissed her gently. She closed her eyes and felt the roughness of his sunburned lips and his cold, hard hands play on the wings of her back.
Sissy usually went through her life as through a tunnel, never touching the walls. But today the walls were crashing in on her. For the first time in years she wanted something.
As the sun lit up the stained glass window over the stove, Parker began to bunch up her full skirt. She felt his jeans rub against the bare skin of her thighs. He groaned softly. His right hand stroked her underpants, while his left hand reached into her sundress. She could hear the material rip, but she didn’t care because he was working one breast out of her strapless bra. She sucked in her breath as he touched her nipple. She touched his jeans and felt the material around his buttons strain and pull tight and take on a life of its own. Parker lifted her up and pushed her against the sink. Breathing hard, he hooked her underpants and their lips came together as he slowly slid them off.
“Open my eyes, illumine me…” the choir sang.
“I can’t, Parker,” she said, and they were the hardest words she’d ever had to say. Pushing him away, she opened her eyes and saw the faces of her children pressed against the screen door.
“Oh my God!” she whispered, straightening her dress and pulling up her panties as best she could as the choir echoed, “…Spirit Divine.”
“Sissy…” Parker began, and then he saw the children’s faces, too.
She unlocked the screen door. “What are you all doing here? I thought you were at a baseball game! I said I’d pick you up at six. How’d you get home?” She knew how stupid she sounded, how guilty, but she couldn’t help herself.
“Hickey got mad and took the ball home. So Mr. Fletcher gave us a ride,” Billy Joe, her twelve-year-old, said. He stared up at Parker.
The three children crept in together.
Chip, thirteen and surly, said nothing. His face was shut down, but his eyes cut back and forth between his mother and the stranger. He saw the wine-red lipstick smeared across Parker’s lips and on his work shirt. And smiled.
Sissy pulled up the strap of her sundress and began to babble. “Children, this is Parker Davidson. He was captain of the football team when your mama was a cheerleader. I must have told you about him. Parker, this is Chip, my oldest, and Billy Joe, and Marilee, my baby.” She put her hand on the little girl’s shoulder. The six-year-old wrapped her arms around her mother’s hip and eyed the stranger from the folds of her mother’s skirt.
“Hey there, partners,” Parker said, more coolheaded than she would have imagined possible. And then with a catch in his voice, he asked, “You got any more?”
“This is it,” Sissy said brightly, too brightly.
Chip turned away in disgust. So Parker bent over slightly and held out his hand to Billy Joe. But the children weren’t looking at his hand or their mother’s wet hair, which she was trying to tie up in a prim knot on the back of her head. What they were staring at was closer to Marilee’s eye level. Then Sissy saw it, too.
“Parker, for God’s sake,” she hissed, “turn around!” He did and saw the metal buttons on his jeans were straining to burst free. He tried to adjust his pants and caught the lipstick stain on his shirt. The children took off giggling, slamming the screen door behind them.
The ladies of the Southern Methodist Church of Gentry raised their voices once again. “You have a friend in Jesus,” they trilled.
It’s a good thing, thought Sissy as she ran down the stairs after her children. I’m gonna need all the friends I can get. “Get out of here!” she called back to Parker.
HE WATCHED HER haunches work under her yellow sundress as she ran across the grassy yard, through the laundry hanging out on the line to dry, past the wilderness of white and scarlet oleanders growing along the fence. His heart was keeping time with the choir as they sang and clapped. He tucked in his shirt and tugged on his jeans, but there was nothing he could do about the bulge that had risen again as he watched her. Jesus. He’d had no idea she could still do that to him. He had to wait. He couldn’t risk running into some stray Methodist and ruining Sissy’s reputation once again. That was the last thing he wanted. He already felt terrible about the kids.
He focused his breathing. Pretty soon he was able to head for the door. He glanced into the mirror and spotted the indelible lipstick on his face. He had grabbed a towel and begun to rub his mouth when he heard a truck drive up on the gravel and a door slam.
“Sissy!” a male voice yelled. Peewee LeBlanc had come home.
SISSY RAN AFTER her children. She wasn’t so worried about Marilee. She was still a baby, but the boys were different. She could imagine the smirks and dirty jokes.
“Sissy!” Peewee yelled.
She saw the kids hightail it over a fence and disappear. Maybe it was for the best. It would give her time to figure out what she should say to them. But what could she say? Neither the Southern Belle’s Handbook nor all those books on child rearing she’d read over the years, and she’d read them all, dealt with what to tell adolescent boys who catch their mother kissing a strange man next to the kitchen sink.
Peewee stopped on the top step of the front porch and kicked the mud from his boots. He saw Amy Lou Hopper come out the side door of the Methodist church.
She whisked off her pointy blue glasses and waved a plump white arm.
Peewee turned. “Hey, Amy Lou, you seen Sissy?”
“Why, yes,” she said, and smoothed the stiff wave of blond hair that dipped over one side of her forehead. “Yes, I have.”
Storm clouds hunched together over the house.
THE KITCHEN DOOR faced the church. Parker cracked open the screen and spotted some of the women he’d known as a boy growing up. They were walking along the sidewalk, singing in two-part harmony as they headed for the parking lot. Then he saw Amy Lou Hopper standing on the curb and heard Peewee’s voice coming from the front porch! Parker slowly eased himself b
ack into the kitchen.
Peewee saw Amy Lou hesitate and then walk out into the middle of Hope Street. He felt like a jackass. Of course she wasn’t going to stand out in front of the church and holler. It wouldn’t be ladylike. Peewee knew that, unlike his wife, Amy Lou always acted like a lady. “She was sitting right out here in front of God and everyone,” she said in a pleased voice as she placed a white, pointed-toe linen pump up onto the curb.
Amy Lou waited impatiently for Peewee to ask her what Sissy was doing in front of God and everyone. She prided herself on the fact that she was not a gossip, but of course if Peewee came right out and asked, she’d be bound as a Christian to tell the truth. After all, a man had a right to know what his wife was up to. She was crossing the sidewalk to enlighten him when Peewee spotted the tool belt lying next to the swing on the front porch. He picked it up and saw the name on it, Parker Davidson. And then he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He turned abruptly, leaving Amy Lou striding across the broken concrete.
Parker was checking the window next to the pantry when he heard the front door slam. Would he have time to get the screen off? The only other door led through the dining room, and Peewee was entering it now.
Peewee walked around the old walnut dining table and straight into the kitchen. “Sissy!” He made his voice deep. He was the man of the house, after all. He had a right to know what was going on. “Sissy!” He heard his voice crack on the upswing.
The sun, dying behind the stained glass window, cast its red glow, but the room was empty. Peewee glanced through the pass-through into the pantry. Nothing. The kitchen window was open; its screen securely in place.
“Sissy!” Peewee yelled, not caring if his voice cracked this time, setting the tool belt down on a chair and throwing open the screen door.
The ladies in the parking lot turned to see what the commotion was all about just as Sissy, her mouth full of clothespins, pushed her head through the sheets hanging out to dry in the backyard.
The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc Page 2
