There I was, blue stretchy pants, belly out to here, pizza stains on my shirt.
Jackson gazed at me over the frame. “It’s okay really,” he said. “I went from being average height to being the tallest kid in the class. My pants were all too short, and I heard the jokes. Of course, Texas jokes are of a different sort.”
“How so?” This was interesting, me having never left the state.
“They all have a drawl to them.” He wriggled his jaw and adopted a prolonged tone. “‘Ain’t never seen no pants that short. You could wade the crik and not get wet.’”
I giggled. “Did they really say that?”
“Yes, and worse.” He handed my mother back the photo. “Seems like you turned out well to me.” His eyes were roving again, which was more than mite uncomfortable given my mother and my brother’s presence.
I ducked my head.
“What’s the matter, sis?” Travis asked. “Can’t look at your new beau? You kissed him yesterday.”
We were back to that. Back to the kiss. And in front of my mother.
“You kissed him yesterday?” she asked.
“It was … it was all a joke,” I said. “I did it for Esther.”
Saying that was the most awful thing ever because Jackson was sitting there looking at me, and I’d just belittled it and by extension, him. No girl almost-dating a fellow should do that.
Trust him to save me.
“It’s okay,” he said, “The next time’s mine, and that won’t be a joke.”
CHAPTER 7
Lucy came out from her room wearing a cornflower blue dress, the perfect shade for her pale complexion and sun-kissed hair. Jackson stood in place, entranced.
“What do you think?” she asked.
He stirred himself, forcing thoughts through the sieve of his brain. “You look beautiful.”
She smiled, then in true Lucy fashion, raised her right leg and propped it on the bottom rung of the kitchen stool. Her skirt rode up to her thigh. “You like the boots?”
Boots. Yeah, and your legs, too. He concentrated on her feet. The boots were chocolate brown hand-tooled leather.
“They’re nice,” he said. “The girls in Texas had boots like that.”
She lowered her foot. “So you were looking at the feet of Texas girls?”
Well, he hadn’t meant it like that. More, if you live in Texas, you wore boots. Except for him. He refused.
“No. But I’m not blind,” he said.
This must have satisfied her because she dropped the subject. “Did your dad say you could take the car?”
His dad. His dad had blown up at him over it. “The car? Why? So you can show off for the girl next door?”
Jackson shook his head. “Sorry. He was sore at me for asking.”
She frowned. “Well, it’s okay. You can ride with us.”
They wedged into her mom’s car – Travis in the front passenger seat, she and Jackson in the back – and made the drive. He started at sight of the church.
Sometime in the last three years, the members had erected a modern building beside the tiny square chapel he remembered from his youth. Sprawling across what was once a wasteland, it sported huge paned-glass windows and an enormous drive-through porte cochere.
A kink formed in his neck as he gazed at the entrance.
Lucy grabbed his hand. “C’mon, we’ll go find everybody.”
Everybody, at first, consisted solely of Owen. At sight of him, Owen’s face lit up. He raised his hand, and Jackson clasped it, pounding his back.
“Man, never thought I’d see you again,” Owen said.
Famous last words.
“Never thought I’d be back.”
Lucy released his fingers to hug some lady’s neck.
Owen followed her movements. “So, you and her serious?” he asked.
Jackson studied him. Owen had become stocky in the last three years. He looked more like a football player now than someone on the basketball team.
“Pretty much,” he said.
“Cool. She’s great. A bit headstrong though.” Owen’s head swiveled as Lucy zipped across the lobby.
Jackson stuffed his hands in his pockets. Apparently, Owen’s feelings for her were still there. Why had she never noticed? And why hadn’t he pursued it?
He laughed it off. “Don’t I know it.”
Owen returned his gaze to Jackson’s face. “Coach will be glad to see you,” he said. “You are going to play next year, aren’t you?”
Basketball. The one thing that had saved his sanity in Texas and given him any clout at school. Basketball he could play and play well, and no one made fun of him for that.
“If he wants me.”
Owen leaned backwards, flailing his arms as if he was going to fall over with the effort. “Well, you’ll have the height advantage. Gees, you got tall.”
Jackson grinned.
And at that moment, a voice whistled into his ear. “Hey, Jackson …”
Esther. Emitting a squeal, she ran up and tossed an arm around his neck. She smelled like grapes.
“I cannot believe you are here,” she said. “I cannot believe you live next to Lucy, and I cannot believe you kissed her.”
Owen’s eyes pierced into Jackson’s skull.
“You live next door?” he asked.
And you kissed her. Those words were implied. He didn’t say them, but he might as well have.
“Of course he does, and of course he did. Have you been under a rock?”
“Apparently.”
But they had it wrong. She’d kissed him, not the other way around.
“So they’re like together all the time, day and night,” Esther babbled, “sneaking in and out each other’s bedroom windows.”
Jackson stared down at her. Lucy told her that?
“I see,” Owen said, dragging out the last word.
But Jackson didn’t. This was getting out of hand.
“It was only a few times,” Jackson said. “You know … to ask her something, and once she helped me unpack.”
“But isn’t that sweet?” Esther said. “Oh, I love a good love story.”
Love story? He stared at her. What had Lucy said? He traveled his gaze around the lobby. “Where is she?” he asked.
Esther pointed down the circular hallway. “In the nursery. She loves holding the babies.”
This was the biggest surprise to him yet. He trailed behind Esther, arriving outside the nursery door in time to see Lucy in a rocker, an infant to her chest, her hair drifting over her cheek.
A lump stuck in his throat, and his breath wheezed in his ear, pulling in and puffing out in sonorous fashion.
“Well, go in,” Esther said.
But he couldn’t possibly. He’d disturb the memory now outlined in his head, the memory of another woman holding a baby just like that.
Esther moved in front of him. “Jackson? You okay?”
And Lucy looked up at him, glowing. “Come see,” she said.
His feet moved of their own accord, and he found himself standing over her.
The baby couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old. A cap of dark hair fuzzed around a red puckered face.
“Isn’t he precious?” she said.
“Yes.” He located his voice.
She tilted her neck and looked up at him. “You okay?”
He worked his jaw, opening and closing his mouth, words pushing at his tongue. “I just … I … I gotta go.” And sprinting from the room, he raced down the hallway and out the door into the lot.
***
“Jackson?” I called across the asphalt for him. The look on his face had scared me silly, then for him to disappear like that––
I spotted him in the distance beneath a trio of pine trees. He was leaning against the trunk of one, his eyes closed. He didn’t open them as I approached.
I laid my hand on his chest. “Jackson? What’s wrong?”
He was breathing funny, all rattley, like
you would if you’d run a long race.
“She had a baby,” he said.
A baby. Who had a baby? What was he talking about?
He inhaled a great gulp and blew it out slowly. “My mother.”
My heart stopped beating. It lay in my chest inert, powerless. “Your mother?” I don’t know how I spoke the question, I was so numb.
He nodded. “And it wasn’t my dad’s.”
Oh gracious. Not his dad’s. His mother had an affair? It explained so much, yet it didn’t.
“I saw her,” he said. “After she delivered it. She was sitting in a rocking chair beneath a window, swaying back and forth, back and forth. She called me over, asked me to hold it, and so I did. It wasn’t the baby’s fault.”
The baby. Not him. Not her.
“Jackson,” I whispered. I took his fingers in mine. “What happened to the baby?”
He gazed down at me, and I would have swam across the Atlantic to remove the pain. “She gave it away. Wouldn’t tell anyone where or to whom. I begged her. I wanted to know, but she refused. And my dad was ballistic. He’d thought it was his. But when we saw it, we knew it wasn’t.”
It.
“Not it,” I said. “Your brother or sister.”
He acknowledged this with a nod. “Brother,” he said.
Jackson opened his arms and drew me to his chest. I buried my face there, not caring my breathing was stifled by his shirt or that his cologne tickled my nose. He needed me for this.
“She sent us away like that, just like the baby. ‘Go live with your dad,’ she said. Like she didn’t have time for us anymore. She wouldn’t say who the father was, and my dad didn’t care. He cursed it. He cursed a baby, and I’m supposed to live with him and look in his eyes and not remember that?”
I didn’t have a solution for him. But I understood why he’d told his sister to spend the summer with their aunt. If he couldn’t look at his father, he wouldn’t expect her to either. He’d shoulder it himself.
I peeled my face away from his chest and looked up at him. “How … How could you tell it wasn’t your dad’s?”
Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. It had no bearing on the story, his pain over what his mother had done, or the life of the child. Jackson had loved it even though his mother didn’t. Then again, maybe she did. Who was I to say?
He clutched me tighter then. I was a lifeline to the earth, a stabilizing force in his life gone all awry. His voice shot through me, slicing down my spine, and coiling around my toes.
“Because he was black.”
CHAPTER 8
Needless to say, we missed the service. It seemed pointless to make Jackson sit there and pretend he was listening when I knew he wasn’t. But that’s not to say we didn’t commune with God. I’ve always said the place closest to heaven was outdoors. Something about walking through the forest or sitting at the side of a lake brought Him closer.
Jackson sat at the base of the tree with me in his lap, and I reminded him of a Scripture that came to my mind. I think God was in that too.
God often speaks in the tiny ways, the ways you least expect. He’s in a song on the radio, a quote from the internet, or the natural warble of a bird. He comes just when you needed Him the most, saying the exact right thing.
More than once when I grieved my dad, God talked to me that way.
I remember once, the Christmas after Daddy died, sitting underneath the tree sobbing my eyes out. “He should be here. He should help us.” And my mom tried to comfort me.
She patted my back, “There. There. He is. He’s watching.”
But her words brought no comfort because Daddy wasn’t in the room, wasn’t where I could see him. Then Travis walked over and handed me something – it was a music box Daddy gave me the year before. Tray had cranked it up, and it played the tune so sweet.
It was a popular Christmas song about coming home and seeing presents under the tree. I heard the words in my head, but I heard them in Daddy’s voice. He was singing right to me, and I knew then he was always with me.
“You know,” I said to Jackson. My head was at the base of his neck. “The Bible says, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus,’ so it’s okay you loved your little brother.”
“But doesn’t that make my dad worse?” he asked.
Our hands were folded together, his fingers in the midst of mine. “Your dad is angry, and anger makes us do things we don’t mean. You said he thought your brother was his. Think of how upsetting it was to be him and know it wasn’t.”
He sighed, and the sound rushed in my ears. “I suppose. But then what was her excuse? If the marriage was over, if she was sending us away, then why not keep the baby?”
I couldn’t answer that, and nothing I would say came close to the truth. “That’s something your mother has to ask herself.” I said.
“How can I miss her and hate her at the same time?” he asked.
I cast my head back to see his face. He was gazing at the sky.
“I think you will work through the hate and hang onto the love.”
He looked at me then. “Speaking of love. What exactly have you been telling Esther?”
Now, this came out of the blue. One moment he was all sentimental and the next back to being Jackson, the boy next door who I was almost dating who also couldn’t figure me out.
I wriggled in his lap. I’d done a teeny bit of exaggerating about things. Esther always brought that out in me.
“N-nothing,” I said, “Why?” I said it real bright like.
“Hmmm,” he replied, and he paused. “Well, first she said I kissed you.”
“Sh-she did? I don’t know wh-why.”
“Strange,” he continued. “Then she said we were ‘sneaking in and out each other’s windows.’ But she ended the whole thing calling it a ‘love story.’”
My face was burning.
“I can explain,” I said. At least, I hoped I could.
He was staring at me fierce now, his blue eyes taking on a hue I’d not seen before.
“Sh-she always takes things out of context. I didn’t say you kissed me. It was more she said it, and I didn’t correct her.” This was the truth. She’d painted the whole thing as if it was some romantic movie scene, and I’d thought that was funny.
“Go on,” Jackson said.
I swallowed hard. “I did kinda tell her about the windows, b-but honest I didn’t say we were doing anything she …”
“ … just assumed it.” He finished my thought for me. “I’m seeing a pattern here. And the last bit?”
I hung my head, so low I could lick my toes, and whispered my answer. “I kinda told her I loved you.”
He stilled. “Say that again? You didn’t speak loud enough.”
At this point, the service had let out, and the trees being a popular place for the kids to run and play, we were soon joined by a dozen little faces. Jackson didn’t appear to care, but I sure did. I did not want an audience for this admission.
“Go ahead,” he urged. “Repeat it.”
Oh, my tongue was thick, ten thousand pounds in weight and eight foot wide. I was tripping all over it.
He jabbed me in the side.
I lifted my chin. Well, if the whole world was gonna hear, I might as well make the best of it. I cleared my throat. “I told her …”
I spoke super loud, and all the little kids turned around. A parent approached to claim their child and then stood in place.
I gazed around the crowd and decided my pronouncement would be better spoken if I could say it direct. I stood to my feet and planted my feet shoulder width apart.
Jackson rose beside me. His arms were crossed, and he had the most determined look.
Blast him for doing this to me.
I began again, looking him square in the eye. “I told her I loved you.”
CHAPTER 9
“I’ve always said your words are going to come back around an
d bite you,” Travis said.
He was no help to me. Why was I embarrassed I’d said I loved Jackson Phillips? Jackson Phillips was a catch. He was the most adorable, handsomest, funniest man I’d ever met, and he put up with my antics, which was saying enough.
Yet I was so embarrassed, and I could not look Jackson in the eye.
Especially after some little kid told some other little kid who spread it to his big sister who told her friend about it. Like wildfire soon the entire church youth population was walking around talking about how Jackson and I skipped church to sit under the trees and make out.
Not what we were doing at all. But no one would believe me.
Jackson didn’t act like he cared one way or the other except for some certain satisfaction in making me tell it in the first place.
Travis was enjoying my discomfort. He didn’t believe we’d done that either; he knew me too well. And my mom, well, she knew me best. She did give Jackson the “what for”, but he passed inspection with flying colors.
“Young man,” she said, “I hope I can trust you.”
And Jackson looked at her contrite. “Yes, ma’am, you can. I said I’d kiss her, but I haven’t yet. You’ll know it when I do.”
I wondered about that, for sure.
We drove to the diner, Mom having decided, for once, to take us out to lunch, including Jackson. This was a rare treat, so we made the best of it, cramming in the corner booth and ordering a round of burgers and fries. We followed that up with milkshakes. At the end, hardly able to move, we loaded back into the car and drove home.
Jackson’s dad yelled for him when we got there, so we parted, me feeling like half of me was gone. Inside the house, I became restless, and I kept thinking about what Jackson had told me.
I was full of “what ifs”. I threw out most of them. I was only seventeen and so a lot of options weren’t available to me. But there was this one that kept niggling around in my brain. If I could only help Jackson find out what happened to his little brother, maybe he’d be okay with it.
I’d watched a lot of TV, so I figured no one anywhere would tell me anything, legally speaking. This left only one choice and that was talking to his mother. Did I dare?
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