Dancing on the Edge of the Roof

by Sheila Williams

  “What are you talking about?” I wrinkled my nose and blew a raspberry at him. His hair had fallen down into my face. I pulled a strand and he yelped. He licked my nose.

  “You treat me like a whore,” he repeated, tracing the outlines of several O's on my breast. I closed my eyes. “You only use me for sex …” He licked my nipple and I gasped. “And you don't pay me!”

  I swatted at him and giggled.

  “I'm using you on credit,” I gasped. “Anyway, I think you should pay me,” I told him, gasping again as his hand found a certain spot that I hadn't known I had. “Besides, this is sexual harassment. You are my boss, you know.”

  I could feel his chest rise and fall as he chuckled.

  “Hell, Juanita. I ain't been the boss of that diner since you set foot in the place three months ago!”

  We giggled together in the dark. Two middle-aged love buddies working on a second chance. Second chance? It was probably the last chance for both of us. Our laughter melted into sighs again and then silence. I hugged Jess tighter than I had ever held any man in my life. He was real enough. But in case I was dreaming, I wanted to grab on to the dream for as long as I could.

  “When are you going to California?” Jess asked later. He slipped a heavy robe over my shoulders and sat down behind me, cradling me within his arms.

  “I don't know when I'm going.”

  Jess frowned, leaning forward to look at me. I avoided his eyes.

  “I don't know if I'm going.”

  He growled at me.

  “What do you mean, you don't know ‘if’ you're going? What the hell …”

  “Maybe …” I saw the Pacific in my mind's eye: deep-green and vast. The reds, oranges, and browns of Mexico danced in my imagination. I thought about adventures to come, but now, they seemed a million miles, a million years away. Jess's face kept intruding on my daydreams.

  There was a place in my heart for him. A place that was only his.

  But was there a place in my great adventures for him? Even the ones that were only pipe dreams?

  “Maybe … I'll just stay here …”

  “You'll just stay here? Juanita, that don't make any sense now. You've been talking about California and Mexico and Vancouver … forever …” He stopped. He hadn't known me forever but it sure seemed like it. “Ever since I've known you. Why wouldn't you go? Why would you pass it up?”

  He looked at me for a long time.

  I looked away.

  I had an answer on the tip of my tongue, but it sounded ignorant. Because I have a man now? I couldn't even believe that I was thinking that way! And I was not going to say that aloud. It sounded like some fourteen-year-old. I shrugged my shoulders as if I was trying to shake off an unwelcome hand. I heard Jess take a deep breath.

  “I … uh …” I struggled to come up with an answer.

  Jess shook me by the shoulders. Shook me hard.

  “Listen to me, woman. If it's me you're thinking about?

  If this has something to do with us?” He paused again. I knew that he was measuring his words, choosing them carefully, arranging and rearranging them in his head.

  His voice, when he finally spoke again, was low and hoarse.

  “Juanita, I want you to listen, OK? Don't interrupt me. I love you. You make me smile. You make me laugh. You piss me off more than anybody I've ever met. You've shone a light into a place in my heart where I thought no light would ever shine.”

  He stopped for a moment. I was crying. He kissed the tip of my nose. His lips were gentle and soft. But his eyes were still fierce.

  “But if you think for a minute that I would let you just stay here, you're crazier than I always knew you were! I don't want you to ‘just stay here.’ Listen, African Queen, if you love me enough to give up your great adventure, well, I love you enough to give up the urge to chain you to my bed and let you go to California, or Timbuktu, or wherever the hell else you want to go.” He stopped again. “Do you understand what I'm saying to you?”

  I didn't really. Because no one had ever said that to me before.

  “But … don't you want me to stay here? With you?”

  I thought about Jess, about his feelings. About the losses that already haunted him. I didn't want to add to that.

  “Yes. But what do you want?”

  I didn't know how to answer that question.

  I couldn't remember anyone ever asking me what I wanted. No man ever did anyway.

  “I wouldn't have to go alone. You could come with me.”

  Jess shook his head and chuckled. His hair caressed my shoulders. He kissed me on the back of my neck.

  “Did it. Took the hero's tour of Da Nang and Saigon, survived in one piece. Bummed around Europe afterward. Went to New York and did stir-fry, baked quiche in L.A. It's your turn, Juanita. And you've got to do it alone.”

  “How do you know I'll come back?” I challenged him.

  What a stupid question.

  Jess's eyes softened.

  “I don't know here,” he answered, tapping his head lightly with his finger. “But I do know here.” He took my hands in his and put them to his heart.

  “This. This is Juanita's place. Always.”

  I leaned against him and closed my eyes. Listened to the wind blowing through the trees. The sounds were whispery and soft. And I was glad to be home at last.

  I pretty much stopped staying at Millie's after that.

  I walked to work one day a week later. Jess was opening up.

  The night before, I had worked the dinner shift and we'd had a huge crowd. It was nonstop. I couldn't remember seeing so many folks on a Wednesday night. My feet hurt and my back felt like the Denver Broncos had done a tap dance on it. Jess had rubbed my feet and put the heating pad on my back and brought me tea. I thought I was the Queen of Sheba.

  I felt better in the morning, told Jess I wanted a cheese omelet with parsley and sausage links. He said he'd fix me a bowl of Cheerios and left, slamming the door. I smiled. I knew that I would probably have my omelet, parsley, sausage, coffee, and a rose in a bud vase waiting on me by the time I got to the diner.

  I had a lot more than that.

  As I strolled down the mountain and reached the highway, a curious scene caught my eye. It was a study in contrasts. And I was so amazed by the differences and the drama that the meaning of what I saw didn't hit me until later.

  In the pure, morning sun, the diner looked like a relic from the wild west, rustic and rough, its dark wood a stark contrast to the soft orange-blue sky and the deep, velvety green of the tall Montana pines. The parking lot, slate in color and still coarse gravel in places, added to the feeling of the scene, and, rising off in the distance, the mountains stood, looming over it all, snowcapped here and there. The sun was relentless, brilliant, and orange like the imported tangerines I had been buying for their tangy juice. The morning air was getting cooler now—it was moving into October—and the crispness had a color, too, sharp and pungent, even though it didn't have a smell. Teal. That's what it was. It hit my nose like ice. Teal. It felt like teal would if it had been a sensation or a thing rather than a color.

  And in the middle of it, right smack in the midst of the slate gray of the parking lot, staring up at the mountain and silhouetted by the strangely colored morning sky and the old, ghost town–looking building that was the diner, stood a man. A black man dressed in jeans and a baggy shirt and dreadlocks twisting around his head like tiny, hairy snakes.

  He looked almost as out of place here as I did.

  It made a pretty picture: the urban man and the wild, rural mountainside. I sketched it out.

  Mignon had talked me into taking art lessons at the community college's extension campus. I had been going twice a week for the past month and I loved it. Thought I was Renoir or somebody. But my “style,” if you could call it anything, was more like Grandma Moses.

 
; I started to draw the scene in my mind: the craggy sides of the mountains in the background; the texture of the huge evergreens up close; a stroke here and a stroke there for the millions of needles and the old, worn-down and ancient-looking diner, its sides rough and wind-burned.

  “Texture! Add texture!” I could hear my teacher coaxing me.

  I added the granules of gravel, circular and square and triangular, bits here and there, like the Impressionists I had been studying, dots and dots and dots of gray. I added the rusted sides of the old GMC truck cab that Roger Schumacher drove.

  Then I added the colors of Montana—the brilliant orangy-red gold of the sun; the deep sapphire of the sky and the evergreen—was there another word that would do as well?—the evergreen of the forest, winding up the mountainside toward a little dark brown cabin where, at times, you could see the silver ribbon of smoke curling upward from an invisible chimney.

  Against this backdrop, I added the nut brown–colored man, dressed in his faded jeans, a brown and tan baggy shirt, and the huge, black Frankenstein shoes he wore that probably weighed a ton. His back was turned so I couldn't see his face, but I drew it in my mind. He was looking up toward Kaylin's Ridge.

  I knew that this city boy—and that's what he had to be (how many dreadlocked, baggy-shirted, brougham shoe– wearing colored boys lived in Montana?)—had never seen anything like this little ridge here, wedged in between a small mountain range and a huge, jewel-colored lake, except in movies. I figured that he had spent his life riding buses or the subway, and that he might live in a high-rise apartment building. It amused me and made me sad at the same time to think that this boy had probably never ridden a horse. I was sure that he had never watched deer tiptoe delicately to the water's edge and sip in the early-morning hours. The only thing this boy had done in the early-morning hours was tiptoe into his apartment, his shoes in his hands, trying not to wake his parents at five A.M.

  This boy was used to seeing tall, modern buildings, and listening to car horns while he dodged city buses. He was used to walking fast at night, and hoping that the police didn't stop him and ask what he was doing. He might go to the park sometimes in the summer and hang out with his boys and smoke cigarettes and drink beer, but he had never trudged up a mountain ridge, strolled along a lakeshore, or stared out across a plain.

  He stood completely still. Wasn't moving at all, just looking. He was standing almost in the same spot I had stood months ago when Peaches dropped me off in the diner's parking lot. I remember looking up at the ridge and down at Lake Arcadia and wondering what kind of world I had lived in all my life.

  Then it dawned on me.

  That it wasn't just a man standing there.

  It was Randy.

  My son.

  He heard my feet hit the crunchy gravel and turned around. In his too-mature face I saw wonder at the beautiful Montana landscape but not much surprise at seeing me.

  “Hello, Momma.”

  “Randy?” It was the only thing that I could think of to say.

  He grinned, his dark face crinkling in places that even I didn't have wrinkles as yet. There were circles under his eyes. That made me sad. Life in the penitentiary hadn't been easy. But it was still a nice face. And in his tired but sparkling dark brown eyes I could still see the laughing face of my first baby.

  I started crying.

  He folded me into his arms. I hugged him tight.

  “Don't cry, Momma. It's OK. It's all right now.”

  I pushed back from him but still held on to his arms. They were firm and muscled. Not like the old Randy.

  I looked my boy in the face.

  “You haven't … you didn't …” I couldn't bring myself to form the words.

  He laughed at me, his white teeth still clean and even. He shook his head, still smiling. He kissed me on the cheek.

  “No, Momma,” Randy said firmly. He was amused at my attempts to question him. “No, I didn't break out. No, I didn't run away. Or kill a guard or scale the wall.”

  Of course my expression was asking him the next question.

  Randy shrugged his shoulders.

  “They let me out. A shock probation program that the state just put in. I've kept myself together, didn't bother nobody, and minded my own business. Been taking accounting courses. Tutored some of the younger guys in math …”

  I wiped the tears away from my cheeks. Tried to focus on my boy's face through my bleary eyes.

  “You were always good at math,” I murmured.

  “Yes, ma'am,” he agreed. “And something else, too, Momma …”

  Yes, ma'am? The last time that boy called me “ma'am” he was ten years old. Things had changed.

  “What else, Randy?” I reached for the canvas backpack that he was carrying.

  “I've been teaching Sunday school, Momma,” Randy said quickly as if he was out of breath rushing to get the words out in one blow.

  Sunday school? I stared at him.

  In the back of my mind was the image of three little kids dressed in navy blue and white (Bertie wore the white). They were squirming because their Sunday shoes were a little stiff and they were anxious to go play outside rather than sit through a lesson on Jonah and the whale.

  His voice was low and serious. His dark eyes held mine with a pleading look. As if he wanted me to give him something. As if he wanted my approval.

  “I found Jesus, Momma,” he finally spit it out. Then he looked at me again with the hopeful, wishing look.

  I stroked his cheek and pulled the backpack off his shoulder.

  “Jesus wasn't never lost, Randy,” I told him. “You were the one that was lost.” I nudged him toward the diner. “And now … you're found.”

  Randy chuckled then and took the backpack away from me.

  “All right, Momma.”

  Jess's eyes never blinked when I walked in the door with Randy behind me. He looked over his shoulder at us, flipped a pancake, and went back to turning the sausage.

  I should have known then.

  He started fussing.

  “Juanita! I've been trying to keep your omelet warm here while you spend your time socializing, but you know eggs don't keep too well. It'll be your own fault if they taste like Play-Doh.”

  I showed Randy a table and went to get him a plate and some coffee.

  “Jess, this is my son, Randy. Randy, this is Jess Gardiner.”

  Jess didn't even turn around.

  “Your trip all right, Randy?” Jess asked, his words clipped and sharp.

  “Yes, sir,” my prodigal son replied. He nodded at Mignon who dropped off a glass of orange juice. I thought she winked at him but maybe I was seeing things.

  “You have enough money for food and everything along the way?”

  “Yes, sir,” came the next reply right on cue.

  “Well, if you've got money left over, I should be getting some change, shouldn't I?”

  Randy grinned.

  I was confused.

  Change?

  “What change?” I asked, grabbing a blueberry muffin from the tray that Carl had just brought out. Randy loved blueberry muffins.

  Jess slapped three Montana-sized pancakes on a platter and snatched up a quartet of sausage links as a garnish. I put the muffin back. Randy had always been my skinny child. No way he was going to eat three state-sized pancakes, sausage, eggs, and a blueberry muffin—in one sitting.

  “I gave him one hundred and fifty dollars,” came the terse reply. “Randy, the bus ticket was only sixty bucks. I know you didn't eat up ninety dollars worth of food in a day and a half! I took the gray dog across the U.S. back in seventy-seven. Never knew anyone who could eat ninety dollars worth of McDonald's in that short a time.”

  A hundred and fifty dollars? I stared at my son and at Jess. But I wasn't even in this conversation.

  They both ignored me.

  Ra
ndy grinned and began digging in his pockets.

  “That was back in the day,” my son commented, pulling out a neatly folded set of ones, fives, and tens. He set them on the table. “Food costs a little more now.” His grin was getting wider by the minute.

  “It doesn't cost that much more,” came Jess's reply, his tone sarcastic. “And seventy-seven wasn't back in the day. It happened to be a very good year. Not too long ago either.”

  In the meantime, my jaw was dropping to the floor. And I almost dropped Randy's plate with it. These two men, who as far as I knew had never met, were talking to each other like long-lost cousins. Had I been kidnapped by aliens or something? When had Randy and Jess ever met?

  “W-when …,” I was cut off before I could get started.

  “Juanita, you'd better set that plate down. You're about to drop it.” Jess turned back to his pancakes. “Better be some fives and tens in that roll, Randy.”

  “Yes, sir,” came the muffled reply.

  I set the plate down on the table, my eyes narrowing as I studied my son. He grinned and ignored me and picked up his fork. I turned back to Jess.

  “Excuse me …”

  “And I want to see how you make that smothered chicken thing you were telling me about on the telephone,” Jess continued as if I hadn't said anything at all.

  Mignon flew by me with a tray of coffee cups and milk glasses.

  “Jess has been looking forward to meeting your son, Juanita.” She went by so fast I felt a tailwind. “He's kinda cute, you know.”

  “Excuse me?” I began again.

  “I tried to make those dumplings you described but they turned out like chewing gum so you'll have to show me.” Jess set several plates on the counter for pickup.

  “Ummmm … no problem,” Randy answered, chewing on a piece of sausage that he had stuffed into his mouth. “I adapted an Amish recipe. It's not really hard. You just have to make sure that you don't handle the dough too much. If you do, they get tough.”