Luke only nodded as he went to the small claustrophobic bathroom. His eyes went back to QT’s bottom. He looked down at the small toilet and shook his head no, imagining all of that woman suffocating the toilet bowl with her big ole butt.
Paul, still in his mail carrier uniform, disappeared into the bedroom to change into a pair of jeans and a tee shirt. Kalinda’s eyes followed him back into the main area taking him all in. He was truly a sexy man. The tee strained against all the muscles in his chest and biceps. The jeans were snug against his cute little bottom, and a wave of unbridled lust coursed through her.
“I saw that,” QT whispered.
Kalinda blushed. “Lord that man is some kind of fine,” she said under her breath to QT.
“Yeah, he’s okay, but he ain’t no Curley Joe,” she said elbowing Kalinda lightly. “My husband is not afraid to handle all of this right here.” Giggling, she lifted her butt, allowing the pounds of flesh to drop and jiggle.
“I ain’t mad at him,” Kalinda grinned.
“Me either, which is why I need to learn to cook. He bought me that B & B knowing good and damned well I can’t cook worth a shit. It needs a roof and a few more rooms, but I have to make it profitable, ya know?”
“Don’t tell me about trying to make a business profitable. I have to sell people on coming out the top right corner of Oregon to go hiking. Then they have to stay in a tiny ass house the size of a storage shed,” she mumbled. “To top it all off, if they want a bath, they have to take it outdoors on my patio.”
“Yeah, I was wondering about that. How will that work in the winter?” QT inquired.
“I will never know. I am from Georgia and I am not washing my body outside in subzero temperatures even if the water is boiling hot enough to cook a lobster!”
Luke had returned from the bathroom and was sitting at the table watching the two women. As mismatched and odd as they were, they seemed to have found a common ground. Chatting amicably, laughing, and developing what could easily be described as the start of a friendship. It was obvious his brother had some type of relationship with the woman’s husband as they too chatted quietly. He stopped for a moment, holding his belly. Luke’s stomach rumbled so loud that everyone in the room turned to look at him.
“Good grief,” Kalinda said. “Take off that jacket and have a seat. Paul, honey, let’s get your brother some food before he turns feral on us.”
“Pardon me,” Luke said, slightly embarrassed.
“No worries – food’s coming up,” Kalinda said.
Bowls of hot steaming food came to the table. A pat of butter sat atop the peas as the steam slowly melted it into the bowl. Perfectly crusted fried potatoes with green onions came next, followed by a large bowl of the leafy greens Luke saw her pull from the ground sautéed with carrots. Paul added the platter of steaks to the table and Luke’s eyes were wide.
“He can eat all of this?” Luke wanted to know.
“I can eat everything on this table,” Paul responded with pride.
“Bless the food, Baby, so we can dig in,” she told her husband. All the heads were bowed as Paul gave a quick blessing before jabbing his fork into one the juicy steaks.
The only sounds that was heard for the next fifteen minutes were forks hitting the plates, throats swallowing, and lips smacking. Curly Joe at one point looked up at her with puppy dog eyes and blew her a kiss.
“Man, are you flirting with my wife?” Paul asked holding his knife real tight.
“No, I want to get up and kiss her this food is so damned good. I can’t get up and do it because the food is so damned good. I want to keep eating,” he spoke with all sincerity. “Mrs. Darton, please teach my wife how to do this!”
Laughter filled the table as Luke took it all in. In so many ways he wanted to be jealous, but his weird brother was happy. As much as he didn’t like him, he was genuinely feeling some kind of way about this woman in his life. He watched Paul cut into the potatoes and then the steak and eat.
His brother was eating a meal and enjoying it.
Their mother, God bless her soul, very rarely if ever, stepped into a kitchen. She hired someone to cook for Paul who didn’t understand his disease. This woman did. His brother was truly enjoying eating food and dinner. A realization seeped into him that his dislike of his brother stemmed from meal times.
Dinner was always a pain for the family because Paul wouldn’t eat. If and when Paul did eat what was on the table, the food before him was bland or disgusting to the point he would end up vomiting. Their father would start yelling, their mother would come to Paul’s defense, and shared meal times slowly faded away.
Paul ate before the family in the kitchen by himself, a boiled piece of meat accompanied by what Luke considered to be a twig and a berry. As they entered their teen years, Paul made a point to never be home during dinner time. Outside of the brunch at Paul’s wedding, this was the second meal he had shared with Paul in nearly 25 years.
In his home with his wife.
Wife .
“I have coffee, but the only dessert I have are some cookies to go with it,” Kalinda said.
“Works for me,” Curly Joe chimed in.
“Coming right up,” she said. The front porch wasn’t really large enough to accommodate everyone, so she served coffee on the patio.
“Go out, sit with Luke and Curly. I got the dishes,” Paul said.
“You sure?”
“Of course, go ahead,” he said.
Kalinda made her way out the back door to find that her new friends had moved down to the hot tub, leaving her alone with Luke.
“I hope you enjoyed dinner,” she said, taking a seat.
“I did, Mary Jane Marshall,” he said, gazing at her out the side of his eye. “Yes, I know who you are.”
“Seriously? That’s all you have? I truly expected you to come out of the gate with something more substantial than my birth name. Kalinda Marsh is a brand. I worked hard to build it and I love to cash the checks that are paid to my business,” she said looking at him. “Go on.”
“Go on with what?”
“I know you went digging and drove all the way across the state to throw whatever you found in my face. So go on, spit it out and let’s get this part over with. I do want to come back to Portland for Christmas with your parents. Chop, chop Luke. What else do you have in your arsenal?”
“Aren’t you the clever one?”
“My life is an open book. Literally. I chronicled every day of it on a website for the world to see. I can give you a ten second summation on what you discovered. My mother was my father’s maid, my stepsister is a month older than I am. Yes, my mother is a very dark skinned woman that is why I am this pretty shade of brown instead of high yellow. What? What the hell do you think you have on me, Luke? I am listening,” she said with attitude in her voice and on her face.
“I know the one thing you have yet to find out, Mary Jane, Kalinda or whatever in the hell you want to call yourself,” he said.
“Please, enlighten me, Luke Darton,” she said sipping her coffee, unfazed by his tactics.
The gloat that sat on his face is what hurt the most. He also said his pissy little words to her with Paul standing in the doorway and QT and Curly Joe listening. This was why he came. He came to hurt her so she in turn could hurt Paul.
“You can run all you want, but it will never change the fact that no matter how many times you reinvent yourself, you will never be good enough. I want to know Mary Jane, or Kalinda Darton, once Wide Open Spaces is a success, will you run again?”
“Is that why you came all this way...to ask me that?” Kalinda said, standing up, ready to knock his smug face into the middle of next week.
“No, I came to ask you—who are you?” Luke said.
There it was. Sitting in the air like an airborne virus waiting to claim its next victim as they passed by. He knew he’d hit her at the one weak spot she could never defend. It hurt. It hurt like hell but she stood firm. H
er chin raised in defiance.
“Thank you for a lovely dinner,” he said to her. “Nice meeting you two,” Luke said to Curley and QT. He grabbed his suit jacket from the hook and made his way out the front door, down the three stairs. He climbed into his big expensive BMW, cranked the engine, and cruised out of their little canyon, leaving Kalinda shaken and feeling once more in her life, less than.
Long after Curly Joe and QT departed, Kalinda prepared herself for the next day. The arrival of the tiny houses had thrown her off, so much still had to be done to get the website up, decide on the badges, and create a basket of treats for the first set of weekend guests arriving next week. In three weeks, her mother would be here, which would be another set of issues.
Paul said very little as he watched his wife’s face. The steely determination was only a front for the hell storm brewing underneath the surface. If there was one thing Jeremiah Darton had taught his sons, it was that a pissed off woman should be dealt with using kid gloves.
“Boys, they will pretend as if nothing is wrong until in the middle of the night, you are awakened by a flood gate of tears. Usually, what they are crying about don’t have a damned thing to do with what is really wrong with them. You have to get to the heart of it and fast. If not, you will see a change in your relationship that you can’t bounce back from,” Jeremiah said.
This was probably the only logical thing the man ever said about women. Jeremiah Darton was as misogynistic as men came. Paul honestly believed his father was born with a cigar in his mouth, a glass of brandy in his hand, and the handbook of knowing nothing about women. How his parents had managed to stay married so long was beyond Paul’s understanding. Yet looking at the hurt his wife was trying to hide, his disdain for Luke had intensified. Unbelievably, the jerk had physically come all the way across the state to throw a monkey wrench in his life.
He just could not understand why.
The house was as tidy before they went to bed as it had been when he walked in from work. He was really going to have to get a grip on himself. He couldn’t run home every time he thought a man was looking at his gorgeous wife. Paul knew men were looking at her, and would look at her, because he could barely keep from staring at her himself. It was a concerted effort to also keep his hands to himself. Especially now. It was three a.m. and his mind wasn’t the only thing awake. He snuggled close to her, wrapping his arms around her waist, allowing his hand to come up to her face. His thumb grazed her bottom lip and he felt wetness.
Kalinda was crying in her sleep.
“Damn you, Luke!” he grumbled.
Pulling her tight into his arms, he whispered softly over her shoulder, “I have you, Kalinda.”
She moved in his arms, struggling against him a bit.
“I am here, sweetheart,” he whispered.
“But where is here?” she asked with a croaky voice. Kalinda wasn’t asleep.
“Here is where you and I make a stand against all the bastards of the world who don’t believe in us. It is you and me with a handful of magic beans,” he told her.
She sniffled, trying to find the right words. “I think my giant may be too big for you to slay, Jack,” she spoke just above a whisper.
“Tell me about this giant that you keep running from so I can help you find a new trail to get to where you are trying to go,” he asked.
“That’s the thing, Paul. I don’t know where I am trying to go. I just know it’s not where I have been,” she said, turning to her back. “I have been poor, ridiculed, mistreated, and underestimated. I went to college with a hand-me-down suitcase I found at Goodwill for $5. Little did I know the lining of the suitcase was loaded with unhatched roach eggs that infested my dorm room. So not only was I poor as hell, but I brought roaches into the dorm.”
Kalinda gripped the sheets in her balled-up fist. Her breathing was ragged as the next words came out. “I was known all over campus as Mary Jane Roaches,” she said.
“Is that why you changed your name?”
“I didn’t just change my name, Paul, I changed my life. I bought a hand-me-down sewing machine that I nearly took apart in the second-hand store, checking it for bugs. I started making my clothes and modifying existing pieces I got from used stores. Before no one wanted to be around me because of the roaches, then no one wanted to be around me because if they couldn’t help me, they were of no use to me,” she said.
“Help you do what?”
“Transcend being a poor black girl from the bottom of Georgia whose Mama was a maid to the man I could never call Daddy,” she said. “I have run from that ugliness all of my life just looking for somebody, somewhere, somehow to belong to something bigger than myself so when I bring my children in this world, they will never be ashamed of me.”
“Where you ashamed of your mother?” he asked gently.
“Yes,” she said as tears racked her body. “I have been ashamed of her my entire life, that she would be that man’s whore. I left Bainbridge and never looked back because I didn’t want to be in a town where I was known for being the daughter of Hurley’s Lancaster’s whore.”
“What else are you not telling me, Kalinda?”
She cried harder. Sobbing loudly, ashamed to admit what she’d never said to anyone. Ever.
“Say it out loud so that you can be free of it from this day forward,” he said.
The words were there, but she didn’t want to voice them. Saying them aloud would make her innermost pain come to life. It wouldn’t be a stupid secret that ate her alive each day. Paul would know, but he wouldn’t understand. He would never understand.
“I can’t understand if you can’t explain it to me,” he whispered. His fingers were intertwined into hers. He kissed the tips of her fingers, encouraging her to name the giant that dogged her every step.
Kalinda spoke softly, “I was also ashamed of my mother because she is so dark.”
“What?” Paul asked.
More tears ran down her face as she swallowed hard. She had said it. It was out of her head into his ears. He knew. She said it again. “I was ashamed of her for being so black. Because she is so dark, I didn’t even come out light skinned with good hair. I have had a perm since I was ten. A horrible perm that I gave myself with five dollars I stole from that man’s wallet while he was in her bedroom riding her like some broken down horse.”
Paul pulled her close to him, squeezing her tight.
“You are beautiful,” he said to her. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the tone of your skin and I have no idea what good hair is, all know is that I am so in love with you, Mary Jane Kalinda Marshall Marsh Darton. Your father loves you and he also loves your mother. You can’t be ashamed of how you were born or even how they made you, but you can be ashamed for allowing yourself to believe that you are less than because of skin tone and your hair.”
He wanted to tell her it was silly but she came from a different world. She came from a Southern life where taboos still hung over young women like the out of date ideas his father held about the opposite sex. They were not the weaker or the lesser to him, but equal in all things.
“Stop running, Kalinda, you are home,” he said to her.
“Home,” she repeated.
“Yes, you have found where you belong. You belong to me. You belong in my world and I don’t give a fuck what skin tone our kids are or if their hair breaks a comb, they will be my kids and I dare any man or woman to touch them,” he said.
Kalinda relaxed into him.
“Now, stop crying. We have other giants to topple before this is all over, so I need you rested. Sleep in tomorrow and take it easy,” he told her.
“Paul?”
“Yeah, Baby?”
“We need to talk about you and Luke,” she said. “I need to know why he hates you so much.”
“He hates me because I was born,” he said.
She knew there was more to the story, but the wee hours of the morning weren’t the time to discuss it.
“Paul?”
“Yes, Kalinda,” he said.
“I love you, too,” she said.
“I know Baby; get some sleep,” he said loosening his grip and falling into a fitful sleep.
Chapter 19
“S o? What is she like?” Jeremiah Darton asked Luke.
“She is a good cook,” Luke told his father.
“You drove nearly five hours across the state to come back and report that she is a good cook?” Jeremiah asked incredulously.
“Yes, she is. She is such a good cook that Paul was able to eat everything on his plate. I actually sat and had dinner with my brother, whom, I must admit, was enjoying his meal. It made him seem less of a freakish granola eater than he is,” Luke said.
Jeremiah sat watching his son. A small something that was much bigger than ‘she can cook’ was dangling in front of his face. A softer approach was necessary.
“Paul was enjoying the meal, eh?” he asked and waited. Of his two sons, Paul was definitely the smarter of the two. Luke was more of a hard charger. It didn’t really matter if he was right or wrong, he would continue pressing until he got what he wanted. Until his son’s next words, he’d never considered that what he wanted was darker than he’d ever imagined.
“Yes, that bitch is making him feel like he is some super hero. He and his little freaky friends make my stomach churn. There was a woman there with a bottom so big, she turned around and knocked me down. The whole scene was rather gross. I would love to take a can of gas and a match and burn all that shit to the ground,” Luke said through clenched teeth.
“Did Paul seem happy to you, Luke?”
“If that is what you would call that. I don’t know what happiness looks like. All of our lives, either you were pissed off at him, at Mom, or at me. We grew up in the shadow of your constant simmering rage, but he has always found a way to avoid it and be...happy. He even managed to be born with a fucking disease that excused him from sharing years of stiff, tense meals where you sat at the table in judgement, putting us down for not being what you wanted. I have always hated him for escaping you and this life. Now he gets to be happy, living on the side of a mountain with some black wench that he found in a chat room discussion on eating more berries for colorful shitting or something close. He again gets to be happy!”
Oregon Trails Page 13
