by Rob Mclean
She gathered up her things and followed John to the living room, where they found the rest of the family.
Shelley was embedded in a tattered, cracked leather recliner with her brightly painted toes pointing skyward. David and Maddie sat on a worn cloth lounge. They ware all watching a game show.
“We’re off now,” John announced.
David got up and Maddie copied him. Shelley didn’t move a muscle.
“I won’t get up,” she said. “Only just sat down.”
Angela tried to imaging the effort involved. Most likely, one day they would find the massive matriarch dead in her recliner with some infomercial still trying to sell her something.
Shelley muted the television and then pointed the remote at John and Angela as she talked to them. “Good to see you again, Johnny. You kids have fun tonight.”
She then directed her remote at Angela. “Now you look after my Johnny. I hope you’re not just messing with him. He’s not as tough as he looks.”
A rush of panic flickered across Angela’s face. Had this smelly, half-feral woman seen right through her? She quickly composed her expression and gave her a pleasant, innocent look.
David cleared his throat. “I think that’s Shell’s way of saying that John is lucky to be going out with someone so…” his gaze evaded hers as he struggled to find the right word.
“Yair, that too,” Shelley said glaring at David.
“Are you going?” Maddie said. She rushed over and threw her arms around both John and Angela. She hugged them tight, burying her face in John’s chest. “Don’t go.”
“It’s okay, Maddie,” John said. “We’ll be back again soon.”
Angela liked Maddie. Her childish, open honesty touched her. With her mother’s suspicious hostility and her father’s slippery creepiness, she wondered how Maddie, or her brothers, for that matter, could have arisen from that gene pool. Even if God could make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, He might have been challenged working with that genetic stock. She did however, wonder how soon she would be back here again, if at all.
“What about you?” Maddie asked with child-like tact and directness, putting Angela on the spot.
She stole a look at John before saying, “I’d love to come back and see you again sometime Maddie.” Then with a sidelong look at Shelley, she added, “Maybe you could come with me to church someday.”
Madison’s eyes widened. “Would you?”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Doris,” Shelley said, not moving her eyes from the television as she turned the volume back on.
Angela’s ears burned. She sent a mental prayer for help as she made it her goal to bring Madison to church as soon as Heavenly possible. She so wanted to unleash a barrage of abuse at the horrid woman, but instead smiled sweetly at her as she continued to ignore her by watching TV.
“Thank you so much for the meal. It’s been an education meeting you…” Angela turned to David, “both.”
“I bet it has, sweetheart,” Shelley said.
“Young John’s a lucky man,” David grinned. She tried to put the lecherous image out of her mind as he put his hands on Maddie’s shoulders.
“Thanks, David,” John said brusquely. He shepherded Angela out the front door with a protective arm around her. “Later…” he called over his shoulder as they went out the door.
They said nothing as they got into his car and drove off.
Angela saw that John’s sunny blue eyes were hidden under a dark scowl. Was it something she had said or done? It wasn’t until they had left the suburban streets and turned onto a main road that Angela spoke.
“Maddie’s a little sweetie, isn’t she?” Angela ventured, trying to break the brooding silence that lay between them.
“Not too bad for someone who was damaged in the womb.”
“No, that’s not right. Don’t blame yourself for that. Whatever’s wrong with her would have nothing to do with anything you did.”
“Is that right, Doctor?” John said. His sarcasm cut like a poisoned knife.
“Don’t be angry at me.” Angela’s temper flared. “I’m on your side.”
John’s shoulders sagged as he sighed. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be cross at you.” He shook his head. “I just don’t know why she would want to bring up all that stuff.”
‘Because she’s a horrible, nasty woman and I can’t believe she produced anything as wonderful as you,’ she wanted to say, but thought the better of it. Instead, she suggested that she might be feeling threatened.
“Threatened?” John repeated, running the novel concept around his mind, trying to fit it into his experience. “Could be…” he conceded.
“Of course she is. What about all that ‘my boy’ stuff she was going on with when you introduced her?”
“Oh, she’s just proud of me,” John said without a hint of conceit.
“What about Jarred? Isn’t she proud of him as well?”
“Sure she is, but he’s a freak of nature.” John grinned at his own joke.
Angela was glad to see his sense of humour had returned. She hoped he didn’t look at Maddie the same way.
“Your step-dad was a bit quiet,” Angela probed. She found him smarmy and obsequious, but at the same time she felt it was all just an enforced, tamed down façade he put on for public viewing.
“Believe me, that’s a good thing.”
“You think he’s okay with Maddie?” She worried about how he would be like with Maddie, especially as she got to puberty, but she didn’t want to come straight out and accuse him of anything.
“What do you mean? Of course he is.” John gave her a puzzled look.
“He wouldn’t hurt her, would he?”
“No, she’s his own child. He dotes on her. You saw that?”
“I mean sexually,” Angela said as gently as she could.
John’s nostrils flared. “No, no way,” he said. Then as the thought seeped in, he added, “He’d better not.” John fixed Angela with an interrogative glance, “What makes you ask that?”
“Look, I’ve only just met the guy and he’s probably a perfectly nice guy…”
“No, he’s not,” John interjected.
“Well, how old is Maddie? Nine, ten?”
“Nine.”
“It’s just that she won’t be a little girl much longer…” She let him fill in the rest, rather than spell it out and have to actually say it. She watched John’s brow crease as he thought the suggestion through. After a moment, he shook his head.
“As long as he stays off the booze, it should all be fine.” He sounded so confident. She wished she could be so sure.
“He’s been good for years now. I don’t think he’ll be troubling anyone anymore.” John nodded at his own assessment. “Besides, Mom will tell me if he does.”
“Ah…” It suddenly all made sense to her. John was the beast-master, the lion-tamer who kept David’s inner demon in check. John took her lack of comment to be a lack of understanding, so he continued.
“When we were kids, he used to come home from work totally smashed, off his face, drunk. I didn’t know it at the time, but he used to beat Mom fairly often. He always had a temper and we knew to keep out of his way.”
Angela had an awful image of the two young boys hiding away as quietly as possible, all the while listening to their mother being abused.
“She wasn’t always as big as she is now,” John continued. “After my dad died she would have been pretty down. Then she met David and they moved out here from Missouri. Things were okay for a few years. I guess they were in love.” John negotiated the traffic on auto-pilot as he told his story the same way.
“I would have been about five when I first remember him hitting us kids. Maybe we were too loud, or maybe we were just in the way…” His voice trailed off as he became lost in his memories.
“Or?” Angela prompted him.
“Or maybe he was just a mean son of a bitch.” John spoke with venom that sh
e hadn’t heard from him before.
“Sorry,” he added when he saw her reaction.
“He seems such a meek, little man now though.”
John shook his head. “Not when you’re a little kid. You see, he was about eighteen years younger and blind drunk. To us, he was a regular, standard-issue monster.”
Angela nodded with understanding. “It must have been horrible.”
“Yeah, the worst bit was that it was so random. Sometimes he didn’t drink at all, but more often he did. Then, most often he’d be a belligerent tyrant and we’d all tip-toe around him or keep out of sight, but sometimes, just occasionally, just often enough to throw you off guard, he’d be a happy drunk.”
Angela could see that they’d all be anxiously waiting to see which personality would emerge from the wash of booze, listening as he came in the door for clues or signs that they should hide or relax.
“But even then, his mood could change in an instant. One moment he’d be the model dad and the next, he’d punch Mom in the face. There’d be blood everywhere and he’d be looking to blame us.”
Angela couldn’t image this sort of thing happening these days. “So how did he change? Did he get help?”
A grim smile curled at the corners of his pursed lips. “He got help alright.”
Angela waited while he made a left turn through an amber light.
“I guess it was Jarred’s doing. You see, one day, when he was about nine or ten and Mom was getting a belting, he didn’t follow the script. He didn’t get out of the way. He got hit and he didn’t stay down.” John’s jaw clenched as he spoke. “I couldn’t believe it. Here was my scrawny little brother standing up to him. I felt so…”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t think much at the time. I just got Jarred out of there. I grabbed him and dragged him outside, away, out of his sight, out of the line of fire.”
“That’s good,” Angela hoped the disappointment she felt didn’t come through in her voice.
“But Jarred’s a smart little scrag. He came up with the idea that we organize ourselves. We got ourselves some baseball bats and went back in.” John’s grim smile returned.
“He didn’t know what hit him. He was standing over Mom. She was on the floor, cowering, but it was him on the floor, begging, by the time we had finished with him.”
“I would have been tempted to kill him,” Angela said.
“We would have too, but it was Mom who stopped us. Could you believe that? After all the crap he gave her, she must have still cared something about him. Something we couldn’t, for the life of us, see.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Anyway, we tied him up. He cursed and swore, but in the morning he was as sore and sorry as could be.
“He promised he’d change, but we didn’t believe a word. We kept those bats hidden and nearby and we had to use them a few more times before we were sure that he had learned that the rules had changed.”
“Pastor Greg says that pain is there to help us learn.”
“Well, it works for me,” John said.
She put her hand on his thigh as he changed lanes. He winked at her before putting on his sunglasses.
“Hey, what was all that with Jarred and David wearing sunglasses in the kitchen when we arrived?” she asked, suddenly remembering the odd scene.
John’s mouth curled up in a half smile. “They knew you were coming over, and they wanted to check you out without you seeing.”
“Oh…” Angela didn’t know what to feel about that. Flattered, on one hand, but it reinforced her assessment that David was definitely creepy. But Jarred? She didn’t have time to wonder too long as they had arrived at the cinema complex.
John found a park a little way from the entrance, but it gave them time to walk together, holding hands across the car-park. Part of her revelled in the attention that he was giving her.
The glow of a new relationship was something she hadn’t really ever had before. She remembered that after she and Zeke had fumbled and groped each other at summer camp, he had agreed that they should ‘keep company’ from then on, but that was more a sense of duty, an obligation, not a romantic choice on his behalf.
Their relationship had grown over time into a comfortable, mutually satisfying partnership. He got all the sex he needed, and she got the social status that came with being with the ‘cool’ guy. She wondered now how she could have ever been happy with that arrangement.
The movie was boring. Some action hero miraculously dodged all the bullets fired by all the incredibly inept henchmen. Although he got beaten to a pulp by the bad guys, he still managed to get back up to save the world as well as getting the impossibly beautiful girl as well. She nearly fell asleep during the endless fight scenes. She knew that the good guy would win, and she just yawned while she waited for it all to end.
John, however, was riveted. He didn’t notice that she was not watching the movie and was observing him instead. His muscles tensed and flexed in sympathy with the on-screen hero, he was so engrossed.
Later that night, as he drove her home, he was still enthusing about the movie and appeared to have forgotten all about his mother’s nastiness earlier. She checked her phone as they pulled up to her house, but had no messages or missed calls. She had hoped for at least a contact from Christy. She might be too caught up with the new guy, Aaron. They were getting pretty close last night.
It was less than twenty-four hours ago that she had been Zeke’s girlfriend and now she was sitting in John’s car with his purity ring on her finger. She smiled to herself as she again re-examined the ring. She couldn’t believe that John actually intended to wait for her. If he was anything like every other guy she had known, which she had to admit, so far, he was not, then he would be pushing the limits before too long.
The car rolled to a stop outside her house. He took the key from the ignition and the engine died along with the radio. In the silence that followed, Angela saw the curtains of the front room sway.
John saw them too and grinned. “She’s good. She could get a job in surveillance with BlackSky.” Angela smirked at the thought of her mother obsessively tracking her through some big brother security company.
Whether it was because of her mother’s over-protectiveness or the lack of contact from her ‘friends’ or perhaps the unusual weight if the purity ring on her finger, she decided then to probe the limits of John’s resolve. If she was being entirely honest with herself, she would have included her attraction to John in that list as well.
“I’d love to see the look on your mother’s face when she sees that I’ve delivered you home safely yet again,” he said, jerking his thumb towards the house and grinning.
“But I’m not home safely yet,” Angela said with mock innocence. “A lot can happen between here and the front door.” She reached across and pulled his face towards hers and kissed him hard and passionately. He resisted briefly, no doubt worrying about Clarice watching them, but quickly relented and returned her ardour.
Angela moved in closer and moved her hands over his body. Her hand slid down from his cheek, along his neckline, then down to his expansive chest. She toyed with his nipple, drawing teasing circles with her finger. He broke the kiss, pulling pack to look at her questioningly.
“Just how serious are you about this chastity vow?” he asked between panting breaths.
“Very.” She smiled reassuringly as she moved her hand south, feeling his rippled abdominals under his t-shirt. “I just don’t believe that you have the same commitment.” She stopped at his belt-line and gave him a quick grin.
“What are you doing?” he asked, gasping from holding his breath for too long.
“Just checking things out,” Angela said in the sultriest voice she could muster. She smoothed her hand over the outside of his jeans, and felt the firmness within.
He grabbed her roving hand and moved it away. “You’re not making this easy,” he growled.
“No, I’m pretty sure I’m making it
hard,” she smirked.
“Well don’t,” John snapped. He reached over and opened her door. “You had better be going.”
Angela put on a hurt expression. “Don’t you want me?”
“Of course I do. More than anything else, but…”
“But?” Her eyebrow arched.
“It’s complicated.” He glanced up to the house, looking out for her mother. He turned and took her hand in his. His blue eyes lifted and suddenly she felt his intensity as she peered into her eyes. “I want you. Every cell in my body screams out to have you, but the only way I’m good enough to see you is if we keep our distance.”
“I know,” she could fully understand.
“I guess it’s a bit like a nuclear reactor. Too much fuel, too soon and you get a meltdown.”
A frown appeared as she pursed her lips. “You make it all sound so clinical and unemotional.”
“But don’t you see? It has to be like that,” he pleaded. “If it wasn’t…well, it might be uncontrollable.”
“And we wouldn’t want that, would we?” She gathered up her things.
“No, not at this stage. I might be with you now, but in the end, I’d lose you.”
Angela felt her throat tighten at his words. She blinked several times to keep her composure and gave him a demure smile. She gave him a quick kiss, leaving him with a stunned look on his face before making her way out of the car.
She stood on the street and poked her head back in the car. “Don’t forget church tomorrow.”
John grunted as she closed the car door.
She watched his car as it drove away up the street, only turning to go inside once he had gone around the corner.
He wouldn’t have seen her skipping like a schoolgirl to her front door.
Chapter 32
Akil eased his eyes open. His head still ached and his sinuses were full and dripping.
He had been dreaming that he had been having a conversation with the alien ambassador. Concern and compassion had radiated from the envoy as they talked like old friends. But all the pleasantries had dissipated once his eyes opened and he remembered where he was.
