Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  “WAGYUS.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a kind of cow. Those were belated birthday presents from their momma.”

  “They came around the side of the house, laughing their heads off, and Ruth said, ‘He’s trespassing; he doesn’t belong here.’ And that put me in my place for sure. I still hadn’t focused on the kid in the black hat or the other one, with the pony tail, for looking at what was printed on their T-shirts.” He turned to Theo, embarrassed. “Sorry, this is not for mixed company.”

  “Hey, boy, you’re talking to a schoolteacher.”

  “You sure?” Drew gave them the BE A DICK: PLAY HARD and then the WISH YOU WERE HERE, complete with downward gestures.

  Shorty wheezed until I thought he might manage that heart attack after all.

  Theo said, “I see all these kids with the shirts turned inside out; they think we can’t read backward.” She was taking in every word, clucking over him as if he was a prize student.

  Drew got back into his story. “Then the kid in the black hat said, ‘I’ll make bail. That’s my old man.’ You could have knocked me over with a turkey feather. Those were my boys, Cile. And I hadn’t recognized them. Didn’t you about pass out when they showed up looking like that?”

  “I’d seen them off the courts before,” I told him. “Those boys and I go way back.”

  “I made them promise not to tell you I’d come by. I also told the linebackers to go easy on my biceps, that I was going to need them for pushing the old John Deere manual tiller up at the farm.”

  Those sneaky kids, what a good time they must have had.

  “I told them I had a surprise for you.” He looked pleased with himself.

  Theo took the sandwich plates. To me, she said, chiding, “Andy didn’t get lost. I told him R-O-B-I-N and he was here in nothing flat. It’s pitiful how you used to get lost.”

  “Farmers have that sense of direction,” I told her. “Like birds.”

  “Bees,” Theo said.

  “I had a map. Plus we’d been almost there, after Cinco de Mayo.”

  “Where’s the Bel Air?” I asked him. “How come you’re in the truck? How come you’re bringing furniture to your old girlfriend?”

  “I sent it back,” he said, sheepish. “That’s after I hauled it out to Experienced Cars and Trucks to get the dent in the front of it knocked out.” He gave me an old Andy smile, smacking his fist into his palm in imitation of a collision. “It took all the fun out of it, having it in mint condition, somebody else doing the work. I wanted us to find an old one, you know, fix it up. The way we were going to do with the Firebird.”

  “You seemed pretty in love with it.”

  “Go ahead. Rub it in. I deserve it. I guess I was snowed that Emvee had known what I wanted; I thought that I’d maybe been so eager to get out of there I’d sold her short. I asked the boys; they said it was their grandmom who told her what to get. I’d have sent it back anyway; but that was the clincher.”

  Theo bent over him in her aqua garden, asking, “How about a little banana cream pie, Andy? I made two this morning, knowing you were coming.”

  “I might try a taste.” He took the plate she handed him, finished the piece in four bites, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “How about you, girl?” she asked me.

  “Sure.” By the time we left here, Drew and I were going to look exactly like the Guests. “How come you aren’t fishing?” I asked Shorty. “You didn’t have this heart problem at four a.m.”

  “Matter of fact, I went fishing. Your fellow here called yesterday, and I had an idea he might drop by. I came home when they quit biting. I thought maybe he needed to hear the merits of bait fishing since his old man had passed away and all he’d ever learned was lure fishing. That’s no sport. I figure a boy should get fishing education along with his circumcision.”

  “At two days old?” Theo raised her brows.

  “A figure of speech.”

  I looked at Drew, trying to see if he was really back or only temporarily back, regrouping. “What happened after you turned in the car?”

  “You want to hear?”

  “You tell me, do I?”

  He nodded to Theo. “Maybe I’ll have another bite of that pie.” He held out his plate, halved the slice in two bites. “I tried to think it out. What the game was; why all of a sudden nobody wanted me to leave. I’d been an unnecessary adjunct at home in the Carpet Palace; a member of the wrong congregation to my mom. Then all of a sudden they’re giving me this society-section surprise party with special effects flown in from three coasts. I fell for it; I admit it. But then I started asking myself, What’s going on here? I knew it wasn’t me they cared about; I knew for sure it wasn’t the hundred inches of blacklands soil it took ten thousand years to make. It had to be money.”

  Shorty gave him a poke. “You can bank on that.”

  “Some other year, Mary Virginia might have helped me pack, taken the residuals and her jewelry, and moved to Dallas to some Park Cities address faster than you could say rich. Now she was dragging her heels. I’d missed something.”

  I slipped out of my Reeboks and slid my feet up his legs under cover of the aqua print tablecloth.

  “I got out the twenty-five-pound, ten-thousand-page environmental impact study that DOE, that’s Department of Energy, put out, which I’d been using as a doorstop at the office, and gave it a look-see. I didn’t read it through. Nobody is ever going to read it clear through—you know, honey, I’m going to have to get reading glasses, can you believe that, at my age?—anyway, I checked the table of contents, skimming along, and there it was. UNANTICIPATED EXPENSES. Un-ANT-icipated expenses, ha, ha. What I learned was that the ‘unanticipated expenses of fire ants’ eating through their cables’ was going to raise the cost of the supercollider from the original four-point-four billion to seven-point-five billion.

  “In other words, first time around with their estimate they didn’t deal with the fact that fire ants can chew right through underground cables like they were eating licorice sticks. There was this line—I’m quoting here—‘the fire ant appears to be attracted to electrical equipment.’ Doesn’t that kill you? How swift the federals are?”

  “What does that mean? You won’t have to sell?” I slipped my feet between his knees.

  “That prices are soft, and that Mary Virginia knew that and was waiting for them to firm up. I did a little homework, called around up there to the swindlers handling the land quotes, got it verified there was no hard money now. Then I sat her down and put it to her straight: it was going to be the next century before they were ready to tunnel under our blacklands. I said she could have the house right now, whatever she could get for it, plus some east Texas stuff. I pointed out that oil prices are going to go back up a lot quicker than it was going to take for Congress to pass a new collider budget that allowed them to build the whole smasher from the ground up from different plans, to ant-proof it. We’re talking serious delays, I told her. Decades.”

  “It must have worked; she was packing, she said, when I saw her.” There didn’t seem to be any point in mentioning the fat sale of ParkGate to the Asian interests.

  “She folded. One thing you can count on, Emvee doesn’t like to wait around. Patience isn’t her long suit.” He looked at me. “What it really means is, nature has a way of taking care of her own. What it means is, we’re not going to be losing our grasslands, this century at least. Looks like it’ll fall to the boys to be the ones to keep what’s left of the land when all that’s left is the land. I guess they won’t make too bad a mess of it.”

  “Are you going to live up at the farm?” I tried to sound as if this was a casual question.

  “Come on, Cile, I said I’d been suckered. I said I’d been stupid.”

  “I didn’t hear you.” I let him guide my feet into his lap.

  “I said it. I’ve got witnesses.” He waved at Theo and Shorty. Glancing at my plate, he seemed to be wondering
why I’d got pie and he hadn’t, and helped me along with mine.

  Theo beamed. “Does this mean I’m going to get to be Mom of the Bride?”

  “Sure does,” Drew said. He looked at me. “Doesn’t it? Cile? Come on, honey.”

  “I didn’t get to give you away the first time,” Shorty told me, looking as if he was already thinking bachelor dinner with all his fishing buddies included.

  “Maybe that’s why it didn’t take,” I said.

  “I told them on Huckleberry if we didn’t get back over there in a couple of hours, that would mean I’d run into trouble and was going to need reinforcements.” Drew checked his wrist, banded in watches.

  “You didn’t give everything back, I see.”

  “I’m keeping this.” He gestured to the Piguet calendar watch, which wasn’t going to have to be set until the year 2030. “Each boy can have a timepiece from his grandfather.”

  I stood. Kissed Theo. “Heart attack,” I said. “That’s such a slick trick.”

  “You can only use it once.”

  I kissed Shorty. “Get back to your trotlines,” I said. “You’ve done your duty. We’re going to tie the knot.”

  Wheeze, wheeze. He stood up and we had a wet, fairly fishy hug.

  Outside, I said, “You follow me out of the Birds.”

  A block past the Heart of Texas Fairgrounds, I stopped on Hackberry and pulled over to the curb. Drew parked the pickup behind me. I got out and walked over to the truck, getting there just as he got to the passenger side.

  His arms all the way around me, we waxed the side of the rebuilt ’58, just the way we used to.

  “God,” he said, “I missed you like crazy.”

  “Lord,” I said. “It’s been forever.”

  “I love you.”

  “You can fix up the Pontiac, but only I get to drive it.”

  He slid his hands under my shirt; found my mouth and stayed there.

  “Will you spend the night with me?” I asked, coming up for air.

  “Where?” He sounded panicked.

  “My house.”

  “Your house? Can we do that?”

  “I don’t know.” I asked him, “Can we?”

  “What about the kids?”

  “Mine are going to the Bledsoes. Won’t yours be needing to pack their tennis rackets?”

  “Stay all night?”

  “There’s a trapdoor from the attic down into the old root cellar.”

  “No kidding?” He looked down the street. “I guess we could do that.”

  “What’ve you got under there?” I pointed to the back, which had a huge pile of stuff covered with a tarp. It looked as if it belonged to a bunch of Okies transporting all their worldly goods.

  “Table, I told you. Dining table. The chairs. Six is all we have.”

  “What else?”

  “What else?”

  “You said you brought something else.” I raised the corner, or tried to, but it was tied down with ropes.

  “Surprise,” he said. “I’ll show you at the house.”

  “Not much of a surprise, with six kids looking on.”

  “You’re right about that.” He began to work the knots. He pulled the stays loose and lifted a corner. Right there, wedged tight with ancient army blankets, on its side, was the white slatted weather station, looking like a beekeeper’s hive. “What do you think?” he asked me. “Is it too late to start again?”

  I looked at him, Andy, Drew, through all those years, and I said, “I don’t think so. There’s going to be a lot more weather in Texas.”

  Then in tandem we drove as slow as the law allowed, down Hackberry to Blackberry to Mulberry to Huckleberry. Rolling to a stop in front of the Gingerbread, we could hear the music blasting away and see our kids bouncing in time just as they had so long ago. Once upon a time.

  A Note About the Author

  Shelby Hearon was born in Marion, Kentucky, in 1931, lived for many years in Texas and now makes her home in Westchester County, New York. She is the author of twelve novels, including Owning Jolene, which received an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award. She has taught in a number of writing programs, including the University of Houston and the University of California at Irvine, and was the recipient of an Ingram Merrill grant in 1987, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1983, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction in 1982 and the Texas Institute of Letters award for fiction in 1978 and 1973. Married to philosopher Billy Joe Lucas, she is the mother of a grown daughter and son.