Jones, Beverly R

by All Things Sacred (Lit) (Triskelion)

  He leaned down toward her. The sweet, fresh smell of her consumed him. Her breath tickled his face and aroused in him a passion he had long forgotten. He rubbed his thumb across her cheek. But instead of reaching for the lips he so desperately wanted to taste, he moved his head upward and kissed her on the forehead. “It was just a nightmare,” he repeated gently and squeezed her shoulder.

  She looked up into his face again. “Jackson,” she stammered, “I had a memory, didn’t I? As awful as it was, I had a memory.”

  He smiled at her in the darkness, happy for her, but also feeling a tinge of regret. It was beginning now. She would be leaving them soon. Maybe sooner than he wanted to think about. It seemed as though he had known her all his life. From the first moment he saw her in the hospital, and through all the days he sat by her bed, something had changed in him. Or maybe it was more that he recognized someone inside of him that he used to be.

  She sat up and moved away from him. The glow of the moonlight now cascaded around her shoulders and rained down upon her body, casting an image of her that took Jackson’s breath away. Her breasts beneath the silky nightgown moved with the rhythm of her deep breathing as she shuddered to control her crying. His eyes moved to that delicate hollow at the base of her throat as it pulsed with each breath. God, how he wanted to kiss her there. He reached out and gently touched the side of her neck with his fingers, his thumb lightly tracing that fragile spot. Her skin was so soft. “Kendall,” he whispered.

  He moved toward her on the bed and looked solemnly into her eyes.. He saw the way she looked up at him, and something seemed to lurch in his gut.

  “Jackson?” she whispered softly.

  As suddenly as the sensation had overcome him, it seemed to disappear as Jackson sat back, looked quickly away and released his hand from the side of her neck.

  Kendall quickly recovered and managed to say, “That’s a good thing, right? I had a memory, even if it was a bad one.” She hesitated before adding, “Maybe the rest will all come back to me soon and I can get out of your hair and get back to my own life.” She forced a smile.

  That was just what he was afraid of. What he knew was coming. Just one of the many reasons why he couldn’t kiss her. Why he wouldn’t allow himself to do this. He managed a smile of his own as he said to her, “You’re not getting in my hair, you know that. But I’m sure you’re anxious to regain your life. And I’m happy for you.” He arose from the bed and stood looking down at her. “The sun will be up before we know it. We should both try and get some sleep.” He smiled again as he turned and walked toward the door.

  “I think I’ll read for awhile,” she said, and reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. “I don’t know if I could sleep right now, anyway. That awful vision of the knife keeps swimming around in my head.”

  Jackson turned abruptly as he reached the door. “What did you say?” “I said I think I’ll read for awhile.” “No. About the nightmare.” “It was pretty scary. I never saw his face, but he seemed so familiar to me. He was pushing me

  back against the car seat. Then there was a knife at my face.” She shivered. “I even remember something he said. He said, ‘you really thought you’d get away with this, didn’t you?’”

  Jackson leaned against the door and furrowed his brow as he looked at her. The room was now illuminated from the beam of the lamp, the furnishings no longer hidden in the shadows. She sat atop the bed, the sheet pulled up around her, looking back at him with the innocence of a child whose harmless dream had just been explained away.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, suddenly pinching her eyebrows together in a frown. “Kendall,” he said, letting his breath out slowly and evenly, “there was no knife. And the man who attacked you on the highway never had you inside the car.”

  Chapter 9

  >The following morning arose bright and sunny. Tom and Jackson worked with the rest of the crew under blazing skies, their shirts off and thrown over the side of the pickup. They removed their shirts as often as they could. A ‘farmer’s tan’ appealed to neither of them. As Jackson stood talking to John, who was perched atop the bright green John Deere tractor, its motor idling, he caught sight of Tom walking toward the pickup. “Where are you going?” Jackson called after him.

  “I smell something good cooking,” he said and grinned back at Jackson.

  Jackson laughed at him. “You could smell the aroma of food coming out of that house if you were in Texas. How do you always know when it’s lunchtime, anyway? You’re not even wearing a watch.”

  “It’s all in the nose,” Tom replied, touching the side of his nose with a finger.

  “Yeah, right.” Since they were at least two miles from the house, Jackson doubted that Tom smelled anything but horse manure. He reached the pickup as Tom was slipping on his shirt. Jackson retrieved his watch from inside the truck. It was exactly eleven-forty-five. Fifteen minutes to get back to the house and wash up for lunch. He shook his head and laughed again. He pulled on his shirt and he and Tom jumped into the truck. They drove the dirt road around the fields toward the rear of the house.

  Just as they reached the yard, Jackson caught sight of the van from Yellow Jasmine Boutique pulling away down the gravel road toward the highway. “Oh, boy,” he said to Tom. “I hope that went okay.”

  “What woman wouldn’t want a truckload of clothes?” Tom laughed.

  “This one,” Jackson replied and grimaced, preparing himself for the worst.

  ***

  Inside the house Kendall was pacing back and forth in her bedroom. She was surrounded by dozens of boxes and shopping bags placed on tops of dressers and tables. Even more were on the floor, leaving nothing but a small path through which Kendall did her pacing. Garment bags were stacked and laid across the bed. More hung in the large walk-in closest and from the upper edges of the doors.

  “Look at this!” Kendall exclaimed to Casey. “This is crazy! There is no way I can accept this.” She resumed her pacing as Casey stood nervously just inside the bedroom.

  “Well, why not?” Casey asked her sheepishly.

  “Why not?” Kendall waved an arm across the room. “My God, there must be tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothes here!”

  “But it’s a gift Tom and Jackson and I want you to have.”

  “A gift?” Kendall looked at her as if Casey had just spoken from a padded cell. “Are you nuts? You can’t give me a gift like this. I just can’t accept it. It would take me a lifetime to pay this back. And I don’t even have a job, for crying out loud.”

  “Oh, but you do have a job,” Casey protested. “You work here on this farm.”

  “I consider anything I do here equal trade for my living here,” Kendall countered.

  “Now you’re the one who’s nuts,” a male voice spoke from behind Casey. Kendall turned and saw Jackson standing in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb, his arms folded across his chest. Tom stood behind him grinning. “There are plenty of people who have stayed here,” Jackson continued. “Distant relatives from out of state, people in this community who needed a temporary place to stay while renovations were being done to their homes or for various other reasons. So far, none of them have cooked every single meal, cleaned the entire house top to bottom, gathered the eggs in the morning or repaired the fence around the chicken coop, cleaned out our stables or picked the vegetables out of the garden. If you think you’re going to do all that in fair trade for sleeping in that bed over there, you are sadly mistaken. It is beneath my dignity to allow such a thing. The clothes are a thank-you for the work you have done so far.” He scanned her over before adding, “And I do believe you could use some clothes.”

  He continued, as if giving instructions to a new recruit. “Starting Friday, you will receive a weekly check in payment for the work you continue to do here every day. This does not make you our maid. It simply means that you should receive compensation for sharing the load just as much as everyone else does around
here. End of discussion. Case closed. Now, Tom and I are hungry. When’s lunch?” Jackson turned around and headed down the hall toward the kitchen.

  Kendall was close on his heels. “That is ridiculous! There is nothing I have done so far that warrants that entire store full of clothes in there! And have you forgotten you’ve already paid all of my medical expenses?”

  Jackson reached the kitchen and turned around to face her. “You know very well what that was for.”

  “What? For stopping on the side of the road? Lots of people stop to help other people, and sometimes they get hurt, but they still pay their own medical expenses, or at least their insurance does. They don’t depend on the kindness of strangers.”

  “Well, you don’t have any insurance, do you?” Jackson clenched his jaw.

  “I don’t know,” Kendall’s voice lowered as a look of sadness and confusion came over her. Suddenly a distinct voice shot through her mind like a lightning bolt.

  We collected nearly six-thousand dollars in premiums just this afternoon. This is too easy. Like taking candy from a baby.

  Kendall shook her head back and forth as if trying to dispel a gnat. Where in the world had that thought come from, she wondered as she stared at the floor. Was she having a memory of something? Whose voice was that ringing in her head?

  Jackson’s breath caught in his throat at the disheartened look on Kendall’s face, afraid he had reminded her of her lack of memory by mentioning insurance.

  Kendall shook her head again and looked up at Jackson. “Maybe I do have an insurance policy,” she continued, her voice regaining its impertinence, “and as soon as I find that out, I intend to repay you for those medical expenses. But until I do, you can be sure that I absolutely am not going to accept those clothes in there or anymore money from you.”

  “Then you can spend your days watching television and reading, because you’re not going to do anything else around here.”

  “What?” Kendall looked at him incredulously.

  “I don’t believe in slave labor.” He looked at her with steely determination in his eyes.

  Tom and Casey had followed them into the kitchen and now leaned against the counter, watching the exchange. “I wouldn’t argue with him anymore if I were you,” Tom said.

  Kendall looked at Tom and Casey helplessly, then turned back to Jackson. “Look,” she said, “if you consider the expense it takes to feed and house me, then that should be fair compensation for anything I do.”

  “Oh, you’re right. All that water you use in the shower is about to break me. And stop reading in bed at night. The electric bill has skyrocketed since you’ve been here.” Jackson smirked at her.

  “Okay, listen, how about if I just keep a few pieces of the clothes in there? And no weekly checks.”

  “No deal. Something smells great. What’s for lunch?” Jackson asked as he walked toward the stove.

  “Jackson, please, I love working around here. Can’t we come to some reasonable agreement on this?” Kendall asked as she followed him over to the stove.

  “Sure. You and Casey go through the clothes in there. Anything Casey likes, you have to keep,” he said, knowing Casey would like most, if not all, of them. He bent to open the oven door. “What’s in here?”

  “Don’t open that,” Kendall grabbed at his hand to keep him from opening the oven. “It’s a cheese soufflé and you’ll ruin it. And no weekly checks, right?”

  “Wrong. You still have to accept the checks. I just won’t give you as much as I had planned. Feel better?”

  “And just how much had you planned on giving me?” Kendall crossed her arms and looked at him suspiciously.

  “Two thousand dollars a week. Now you’re only getting one thousand. Is that thing about done? I’m starving.”

  “Oh, go wash up for lunch,” Kendall fumed as she lifted the lid on the steamer of broccoli. “One thousand dollars a week. That’s insane,” she muttered, spooning the broccoli into a serving dish. “Who pays someone fifty-two thousand dollars a year to do housekeeping? Well, I won’t cash them. They’ll just sit in a drawer.” Kendall continued mumbling to herself as Jackson and Tom left to clean up for lunch.

  ***

  In the end, Kendall kept most of the clothes. Just as Jackson had expected, Casey was insistent in her selection of almost all of them. The only items Casey agreed to return were those in a style she thought were too old for Kendall and some of the duplicate nightgowns and robes. There had also been six bathing suits, two one-pieces and four bikinis. Kendall argued about the necessity of having six bathing suits, but Casey assured her that she would need all of them. Now that Kendall’s cast was off, Casey eagerly suggested that they could swim in the pool every day and the bathing suits would fade sooner than Kendall thought. Kendall thought this, too, was ridiculous, but she gave in simply to stave off another go-round.

  ***

  That evening after supper, the four of them sat in the den watching a little television, talking and sharing jokes and various stories of their experiences on the farm. Tom and Casey sat together on the couch, Jackson in his favorite easy chair. Kendall sat in a chair at one end of the couch opposite Jackson. Kendall recounted the conversation she had with Casey about chicken snakes in the henhouse.

  “Every time I go in there now to collect the eggs, I take an ax with me.” Kendall laughed.

  “Oh, believe me, you’ll know when a snake has gotten into the henhouse,” Tom assured her. “You’ve never heard so much squawking.”

  “I’ll never forget the first time I saw Mom go in there and kill a chicken snake,” Jackson said. “I must have been about four years old and I was playing in the dirt, digging out little roadways for my Matchbox cars. Casey was just a baby, swinging in a little bassinet under the tree. All of a sudden I heard this ruckus coming from the henhouse. Those hens sounded like they were fighting for their lives, squawking and carrying on, and it was so loud. I’d never heard anything like that before. I remember how much it scared me. All of a sudden Mom grabs a hoe and goes tearing into the henhouse. When the door shut behind her, I thought I’d never see her again.” Jackson laughed. “There she was inside with all this loud screeching. The next thing I knew, the door opened and out she walked carrying the hoe extended out in front of her with a headless snake draped over it.”

  Tom and Casey laughed at the recounting.

  Kendall gasped and shivered. “I don’t know if I could do that, just chop a snake’s head off like that.”

  “Depends on how bad you want the eggs,” Jackson said. “I remember when that happened, I thought the chickens were being attacked by the snake. My mother assured me the chickens were just fine. They were putting up such a fuss because the snake was crawling through their nests eating their eggs.”

  “Ooh, remember that time, Jackson, when we were playing out in the fields and we had to cross a ditch to get back home and we almost stepped right on top of a water moccasin?” Casey laughed and gave a little shudder. “That was creepy.”

  “Do you people have anything other than snake stories?” Kendall asked.

  “Sure,” Jackson said. “There was that time when that old dog we used to have bit Cynthia on the butt. Now, that was funny.”

  Kendall asked, “Why did he bite her?”

  “A dog doesn’t have to think too hard about biting Cynthia.”

  Right at that moment they heard the front door open and footsteps coming down the hall. Cynthia’s voice called out, “Where is everybody?”

  “Speak of the devil,” Tom laughed.

  Kendall wondered if Cynthia ever knocked. It seemed the norm for her to just walk in when she arrived.

  “We’re back here in the den,” Jackson said.

  Cynthia appeared in the doorway, stopped for a moment to surmise the situation, then walked over to where Jackson sat. Without a word, she sat down on the arm of the chair, leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. Jackson appeared a little taken aback, but he made a valiant attempt n
ot to show it.

  “Hi,” she breathed at him. “I’ve missed you this week.”

  “We just saw each other Saturday,” Jackson said as he shifted in his chair.

  “Yes, but that was five whole days ago.”

  Kendall saw Casey roll her eyes, though Cynthia was too engrossed in Jackson to notice. Casey spoke up. “Oh, yes, how did the party at the Martins go, by the way? I was surprised Jackson came home Saturday night.” Casey spoke politely to Cynthia, though obviously baiting her. “I thought you two were going to spend the night.”

  “Well,” Cynthia squirmed on the arm of the chair and smiled, “that party turned out to be a bust. Nobody wanted to stay that long.”

  “Oh?” Casey asked with a bemused look on her face. “I saw Sally in town the other day. She said she and Robert stayed through till Sunday afternoon.”

  “There’s no accounting for Sally’s taste. I really don’t even know what Robert sees in her.” Cynthia sniffed as she sat up straighter and began to run her hand through Jackson’s hair.

  “Hmm. Yes, it’s odd, the two people you see together sometimes, isn’t it?” Casey said.

  This time Jackson shot Casey a look of displeasure, though he was obviously uncomfortable with Cynthia perched on the arm of his chair, playing with his hair.

  Cynthia turned her attention back to Jackson. “I wanted to talk to you about the barbecue on the 20th,” she purred. “It starts at five o’clock, right?”

  “Like it always does,” Casey cut in. “But that’s over two weeks away. We’ve got plenty of time to worry about that.” She then turned to Kendall and said, “Remember I told you about the barbecue we have once a month on Saturdays? Just about everyone around here comes to it. All of the farmhands come with their wives or girlfriends, and people from town and other farmers in the area usually come. Darlene always brings her famous banana pudding. It’s always a lot of fun. And now that your cast is off, you’ll be able to swim in the pool, too. And we usually have a game of softball before everyone eats. I think you’ll really enjoy it.”