by K. Dicke
He abruptly stepped back, his forearm covering his mouth and his eyes looking to the floor. “We can’t. I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s not the right time.” He left the room.
Once I’d risen from the depths, and after a good loud groan and a “what the hell?” I put on shorts and a tank, and then sat with him on the couch where he was eating a big hunk of Irish soda bread that I’d baked earlier in the day.
I pulled his ear. “That’s for Julia. She’s not much of a baker.”
“My bad.”
“Is it good?”
“So good.”
“Better than me?”
His eyes met mine. “Kris, it’s not that I don’t want you. I do. Very much.”
“So when’s the right time?”
“We’ll both know.”
I held his stare for a moment. “That loaf was supposed to sit until tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t think she’ll mind.”
She wouldn’t. “She’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”
“I owe her and Donovan a lot. After Mom and Dad passed I was in a really bad place. They changed my life.”
I wanted to ask him what had happened to his parents, but didn’t. He’d tell me when he was ready. We stayed up for another hour talking about nothing in particular and playing footsie.
At midnight, I flounced onto my bed. “Are you staying because of Joel?”
“I’m staying because I want to be with you and because I just remembered you have birthday cake.” He flipped off the light, rolled me onto my side, and got behind me. He dragged his fingers through my hair and down my back, giving me the loveliest little shivers.
“Don’t stop. That feels really good,” I said. “I’ll be catatonic in a few minutes.”
His fingers continued their repetition.
What? I heard a small utterance but it was like my ears couldn’t pick up the frequency of his voice. “Dude?”
“I said, sleep well.”
I was out cold.
I woke at seven and he wasn’t in bed. But there was a note on the bathroom mirror that simply said “dawn patrol.” I assumed it meant he was helping out on Donovan’s shrimp boats, had an early start.
I cleaned cake crumbs off the counter, whisked the couch, threw together a stew, and then glanced at my Explorer, my electric guitar that was parked in the corner of the living room. Oh yeah, that’s what I need. It’s vibe time. With earbuds in position and playlists to spare, I got down to the business of getting it on. Playing, electric or acoustic, was the only time I ever let it all go. The sound removed me from the day to day, from my demons: work, school, Dad, boys, all of it. I didn’t hear anything but the notes. I didn’t see anything but the images in my mind. I didn’t feel anything but the vibration of the strings beneath my fingers. Once I got started and the music flowed, the world ceased to exist and even the floor seemed to dissolve under my feet.
But that day I couldn’t fully play out any song because the melody I’d heard the morning I’d woken on the beach with Jericho kept getting in the way. The three strains were developing complexity in the most wonderful way and I couldn’t get them out of my head. I strummed the melody over and over until three drops of water hit my forehead.
“You play electric too? You’re turning me on.” Jericho sat next to me on the floor—hair wet, damp shirt, too fine.
“You didn’t go to work. You went surfing.”
“Oops. You know a lot more than a few chords. You’re good.”
“You’re back. How’d you get in?”
“Sarah buzzed me up.” He motioned to the armchair behind us. “I was sitting there for the last fifteen minutes. How long you been playin’?”
“She’s an idiot détente!” Sarah’s voice came from her room.
“Savant!” I yelled back.
“That’s what I said! You might as well tell him about it so he doesn’t think you’re a psycho!”
“Tell me what?” he said.
I pulled the cord from the input jack. “I have an odd disability. I can’t hear my own voice.”
“You’re not deaf. You pay more attention to sound than anyone I’ve ever known. A bird chirps and you look almost every time.”
“My hearing is fine. It’s enhanced. I know I’m speaking, but the tone is indistinct, so please don’t go all Nick and start in on the whole Helen Keller thing. This is so hard to explain. Thanks, Sarah!”
He rubbed the side of his nose. “Like a computer voice or a robot voice?”
“It’s monotone-ish, kinda, but ambiguous.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Okay, when I was little, my brain started forming pictures to compensate. They’re similar to compression waves. My brain interprets vibration kind of like the magnet in the pick-up of this guitar or the sound hole in an acoustic. Everything I hear is transposed into waves. Anyway, Mom put me with a speech therapist for, geez, at least four years and she helped me learn to speak clearly. It took me a really long time to gauge volume!” I chuckled.
“Are you serious?”
“Dead serious. Over time, a long time, I’ve been able to nail down how loud I’m talking, how I’m intonating words, pitch … have I lost you?”
“I’m not sure I understand it, but that’s trippy. You see the pictures in your mind all the time?”
“Not anymore. When I’m speaking, it’s automatic. When I’m trying to learn a song, I use them to help me find melody, break down the passages, section out the instruments, all that. I play by ear … and brainwave.”
“So what’s your favorite song?”
“‘Daughter of Time.’” It’s a James Thompson. It’s my new anthem for life.” I nodded once.
He smirked. “You have an anthem for your life?”
“Can’t hurt.”
“Why’s it so inspiring?”
“The lyrics. The idea is that truth is the daughter of time, that in time the truth’ll be revealed, that nothing can hold it back. It was Queen Mary Tudor’s motto or some crap.”
“I like it.”
“I like it a lot.” It was my mantra—that in time I’d find my place in the world, find what I needed to move ahead with my life. And the chorus had some tricky sections that were nearly impossible to play, making it all the better.
The oven timer dinged and I got up.
He followed me into the kitchen and leaned against the fridge. “Is the speech thing why you had trouble making friends as a kid?”
I nodded. “I was so uncomfortable, so self-conscious about my voice that I spoke very little. My preschool teacher thought I was autistic. Mom was freakin’ out. And kids are mean. In kindergarten, I hung out with a Vietnamese boy who was learning English and didn’t talk much either. It wasn’t until Sarah and I became friends in second grade that I started talking more, probably ’cause she talked enough for both of us. I didn’t fit into society for a while. At that age, it was hard.”
“I kinda know what that’s like. My mom was a missionary, took me with her on her trips. We traveled around Indonesia, The Philippines, Central and South America from the time I was four until I was fifteen, never staying anywhere longer than six months and only getting back home now and again.”
“Really? What about school?”
“I was homeschooled off and on and in village schools off and on and in the system in California off and on—total inconsistency. I was either way ahead in a subject or way behind. But what really sucked was that I was forever the new kid in the hamlet—didn’t understand the language, the games, the food. Even now, there’re still times when I feel like I don’t fit into this world at all.” He looked from the pot on the stove to my face. “You make me feel like I fit in.”
He sounded sincere and I was struck by the sentiment. I was stepping forward to kiss him when Sarah came out of her room with her crystal-studded eyebrow tweezers.
She sniffed the air. “Is that Lupe’s birria?”
“What’s birria
?” Jericho said.
“It’s a Mexican stew. Sarah’s housekeeper taught me how to make it a few years ago. It’s fast, cheap, and spicy, kinda the way I wish you’d be sometimes.” I winked at him.
Boy Wonder breezed in without knocking, since he didn’t have the capacity to form a fist and bang it on a vertical surface. I shot him a look and he grabbed himself. The skin on his thigh was ripped up. He’d fallen off his board, didn’t know how he’d gotten the scrapes, but couldn’t have been more proud of the battle wound. I scrounged through my memory and pulled out every mental picture of Jericho. He didn’t have any scars on his body that I could remember. He was an experienced surfer and should have at least one mark on him. He caught me looking him over and his eyes swept my body. Heat flushed my system from head to toe and I immediately got out bowls to serve lunch.
CHAPTER NINE
On Wednesday, I was up at seven and high on caffeine by eight, movin’ with my music. I figured if Sarah could sleep through the vacuum cleaner she could sleep through my semi-noisy groove-a-rama. I was wrong. I woke her up, but she joined me and we were having a great time until Nick came out of her bedroom, catching me in a T-shirt and underwear yet again. But nothing, not even getting caught jammin’ in my panties, could keep me from my coffee-induced rock fest. And Boy Wonder was getting down, rubbing his nipples, adding to the fun.
There was a sharp knock and I made my way to the door funky style while putting on cutoffs. Jericho stood in the hall, his face as straight as his posture.
Party over. “What’s up?”
“Ran into Freddy last night. He said Deborah was reopening The Bakery and you were going back to work. But that can’t be right because you wouldn’t do something so stupid.”
Stupid? I walked to the living room and turned off my tunes. “And what if I am?”
“You’re going back?” Sarah said. “But—”
I coughed as a sign for her to shut up.
“Are you out of your mind? Explain how this makes any sense at all!” The volume of his voice rose with every word.
“I don’t like your tone. Ease up.” I crossed my arms and mimicked his stance.
“I really don’t care! You can’t go back there!”
“Where do you get off coming in here and talking to me like this? Oh my God, is that why you took me to The Landing, set up that little chitty chat with Jermaine?”
“Yes! You can’t be at The Bakery!” His eyes flared with bright blue light.
I looked at Sarah and Nick, who were following the argument but weren’t reacting to the glow on his face.
His voiced exploded. “Answer me! Why are you doing this?”
I sucked in a breath and looked to the corner of the room, concentrating on the fringe on the drapes.
_______
My father’s voice ruptured my eardrums.
“Answer me! Don’t stand there, get on it! I am so sick of you and your brother’s stupid shit! How fuckin’ hard is it to take out the trash?” He flung the garbage can across the garage and it hit the wall.
Brad was supposed to take the cans to the curb, but I was the one who was home when Dad noticed the mistake. I spent the day in my room so Dad wouldn’t have to look at me and then he ordered me to scrub out every trash can in the house to remind me to get my act together. I was ten years old.
_______
“Kris?” Sarah put her hand on my elbow.
My fingers rubbed hard against my shorts. Dad was still yelling.
“Kris?” Sarah said again.
I waited for Dad to storm out of the garage.
“He needs to leave.” I regulated my voice. “Nick, make him leave.” I went to the kitchen and took the yellow sponge from the sink.
Nick squared his shoulders. “She wants you to go.”
“I’m not leaving.” Jericho stared him down.
“You don’t want to start somethin’ with me, man.” Nick took a step closer to him.
“Don’t push me, Nick. You’ll lose.”
Nick pushed him. Jericho grabbed his wrist. In a blink, Nick’s face was flattened against the wall. Nick’s right arm was twisted behind his back that was held by Jericho, Jericho’s other arm hooked around Nick’s neck, immobilizing him. Jericho let him go.
“Enough!” Sarah took Jericho’s hand and tugged him to the front door. “You have no idea what you just set into motion. You have to go now. Please, for her.”
I heard a door close. She came to my room where I was kneeling on the floor, sorting the laundry.
“Kris, stop. I love that you clean, but not today, and not because of this.” She pulled me up and sat me on the bed next to her. “I know you can’t help it, but stop.”
“Why did he have to do that?” I bundled up the dirty clothes and stood. “I can’t be with him, can’t be with someone who goes off like that.”
“He cares about you. He didn’t handle it very well, but I can see his point. I wouldn’t want you going back there either. Sit down!” She wrestled a load of darks from me. “Whether you want to admit it or not, you care about him too. You yelled back at him. That means something. Why didn’t you tell him—?”
“I should’ve, I know. But he was being such a dick.”
She dropped the pile of shirts and shorts behind the chair. “Don’t clean. Put on your suit and let’s go down to the beach and be mellow.”
I started a load, made Sarah’s bed, and put on my bikini.
There was no wind or clouds, only baking sun—a true Texas summer. We sat at the edge of the shore and revisited other unpleasant memories, some that were funny then and some not, but we didn’t talk about her dad or mine. An hour passed, the sound of my father’s voice disintegrating with the waves.
Sarah suddenly jumped up. “Oh no! Crud, crud, crud! I have a massage appointment in fifteen minutes. If he cancels me I won’t be able to get in for weeks and he has the best hands in the Rio Grande Valley.” She broke into a sprint.
I was lost in a song when I saw Jericho standing fifteen feet away, his face calm. I really didn’t want to talk about Dad. But I wanted him to understand and rejected the lies I could tell him. He walked to me and I got on my feet.
He folded his hands under his chin. “I’m sorry I spoke to you that way. I’m so, so worried about you going back there.”
“Apology accepted.”
“You forgive me, just like that.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. I thought there’d be more arguing …” He turned his gaze to the waves. “What did I do? What did I set into motion?”
I tipped my head left. “Have you ever had a secret—no, not a secret—a truth that you hold closely?”
“You have no idea. Yes I do.”
“Then you’ll understand that when I tell you mine, you’ll respect what it means. My dad had a wicked bad temper. His policy was to punish first, ask questions later if he was gonna ask at all. ‘Answer me’ was something he said every single time. I hate those two words.”
His eyes were examining the discolorations on my forearms, burns from oven racks or grease. Then he zeroed in on the two-inch scar that ran from my right cheekbone to my ear.
“Stop right now. I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong. He never hit us or physically hurt us in any way. He got very angry, very fast.” My finger ran over the scar on the side of my face. “This I got having fun.” I turned my arms out. “These are from working.”
“He yelled at you?”
“He was really scary when he was fired up. I can’t say I wish he would’ve just hit me instead, but I’ve thought about it. And it’s not that I forgive easily—it’s that I know how it feels to not be forgiven.”
“You don’t get angry very often, do you?”
“I try very hard not to.” I took his wrist, prodding him to walk back to the building, the static shock so common then that I hardly noticed it.
“That’s how I’m trying to be.”
“Could’ve fool
ed me.”
He took both of my hands in his. “It won’t happen again. I wish I could take it back.”
“Forgiven. Now stop it.”
“Is your dad why you’re so responsible? Why you act older than you are?”
“That’s part of it. I am over a year older than my friends because we moved to Austin halfway through kindergarten and my mom wanted to get me further along with the speech lady and do the grade over. But yeah, I studied and worked like a dog when I was younger because those were the two things I wouldn’t get in trouble for with Dad. Old habits die hard. Job and school, job and school, keep Dad happy.”
“Please don’t go back to The Bakery. It’s not safe for you. It’s—”
“Deborah’s closing for good. It’s too bad though. I met some really interesting customers there.”
He didn’t catch the inference but his face and body visibly relaxed. “Thank God. I had the worst feeling about you going back.”
“Like your bad feeling about Joel?”
“Yes, like that.”
“So your bad feelings are equivalent to seeing the future, traveling through time, what?”
“Call it intuition, instinct, whatever. From the day I met you, I had a bad feeling about you being at The Bakery. From the first time I saw Joshua, I had a bad feeling about him.”
“So you’re psychic?”
“Not at all.”
“I gotta get movin’ or I’ll be late.” I opened the lobby door for him.
He came with me into the elevator. “Isn’t this when we get to make up?”
“Can you save the thought? In about twenty minutes, I’ll be chopping things with big, sharp knives. If I’m still in a J-induced haze it’s likely I’ll cut off a finger and then your whole workplace safety argument will go right out the window.”
“J-induced—?”
“Your name has way too many syllables. I’ve taken the liberty of abbreviating it.”
“I like it.”
“I’m glad. What’s goin’ on with your eyes? I know it’s not my imagination.”
He rubbed his back teeth with his tongue. “I promise I’ll tell you. Not today, probably not tomorrow, but soon. Promise.”
