by Tawni O'Dell
E.J. makes the decision, and I feel the same rush of loving gratitude that I felt when he handed me the napkin.
He presses his lips against mine and holds them there, testing. Satisfied with the results, he pushes his tongue between them. I still can’t respond. I feel his hands push up under my dress and his fingers crawl beneath my panties and start tugging them down.
His kiss becomes more urgent and something inside me shatters. I hear the sound in my mind as clearly as glass breaking.
I grab his T-shirt and yank stupidly at it. He interrupts our kiss long enough to strip it off over his head. His ball cap goes flying. I’ve crossed a new threshold of importance.
I dig my fingers into his hair. I run my hands over his arms, shoulders, and back. I want to touch every inch of his flesh. I want to feel my bare flesh crushed into his. I want to leave a permanent indentation.
His hands move beneath my skirt, then he pushes them under my sweatshirt and unhooks my bra. He cups my breasts and rubs his callused thumbs across my nipples. His touch sends a jolt of longing through me that lodges in my womb. A spray of heat that I see in my mind as white sparks from red molten steel settles into my blood. It spreads quickly, liquifying my bones, and for the first time in my life I understand the word “swoon.”
He pulls off my shirt and I step out of my skirt and I’m left standing in a dark garage in nothing but a pair of harness boots and pink cotton panties.
He smiles at me and for a terrible, panicked moment, my intellect kicks in and starts to recite all the reasons why I shouldn’t have sex with him: because I love him; because we can never be friends again after this; because it could never work out between us. We could never be a couple. He could never be happy with just me. He’d never ask me to marry him. I don’t want him to ask me to marry him. I don’t want to get married. Why don’t I want to get married? Why won’t he ask me to marry him? I’m going to be just another notch on his bedpost. What about my bedpost? I’m not going to be good enough. I’m going to be too good. Why did he wait this long? Why is he doing it now? Why didn’t he do this when I had a twenty-year-old body instead of a forty-year-old body? Thank God he didn’t do this when I had a twenty-year-old’s brain.
He doesn’t give me any time to consider any of my fears. He lays me down on the couch and yanks off my boots while kissing my legs. When he reaches my thighs, I sit up and unfasten his jeans and slip my hands inside them, over his ass, gripping him and pulling him down between my legs.
After a lifetime of trying to get men to caress, stroke, lick, and suck, tonight all I feel is a deep primal ache to be filled.
I take him in my hand and guide him inside me.
I can’t help thinking of Shannon’s hurtful words: How can I love if I can’t feel? But I do feel. I am feeling.
I still try to find my way back to my safe place. I can’t help it. It’s instinct. But this trip is different. For the first time I see what the purpose of my furnished soul has become, no longer to shelter me from monsters but to help me cope with the emptiness of a ransacked heart.
I relax and join in E.J.’s rhythm. I can go back but I choose not to. I don’t have to. I can stay here and find the same thing.
I know now it was his face at my window, not trying to get in but telling me it’s time to come out.
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE SOUND OF TIRES on gravel wakes me. It wakes E.J., too.
We’ve fallen asleep on the couch. Some time during the night he got up and got a blanket for us. We’re wrapped up tight in it. The garage is cold but we have a delicious amount of body heat trapped inside our cocoon.
We both sit up in unison. I can barely see him in the dark, but somehow I can make out the concerned expression on his face.
“That’s Lib’s truck,” he says.
“You know the sound of his truck?”
He gets up and pulls on his jeans.
“What time is it?” I ask him.
“Almost three.”
He stops on his way out to give me a quick kiss. I take this as a good sign.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
I wait until he’s gone out the back door, then I wrap myself in the blanket and go open a window so I can eavesdrop.
Lib’s standing next to his truck.
The grass behind him is covered with a silver frosty dew that glimmers softly in the blurred moonlight like metal shavings spilled across the yard.
E.J. picks his way across the gravel drive in his bare feet. He forgot to take a shirt. I pull the blanket tighter. Just looking at him makes me colder.
“What’s going on?” E.J. asks.
Lib looks from E.J. shivering in nothing but his jeans to my car sitting in his driveway in the middle of the night but makes no comment.
“I’m sorry about this,” he says. “I know you gotta go to work in a couple hours.”
Lib’s better dressed for the weather. He has on a camouflage hunting jacket and a pair of heavy boots.
“I thought I could wait until tomorrow to tell all of you. That was my plan. I thought we could all get together at Jimmy’s place and have a meeting. But it’s driving me crazy. I can’t sleep. I can’t talk to Teresa about it because she’s a woman and she can’t understand what I’ve got to say.”
He reaches inside his coat pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He hands one to E.J. and lights it for him before lighting his own.
“The lawyer called. We heard back from Cam Jack today. If we go through with the lawsuit, he’s going to declare bankruptcy and close the mines.”
They stand in silence. I watch the orange tips of their cigarettes rise and fall away from their mouths.
“I went and talked to him. The lawyer. He kept going on and on about Cam Jack’s mines and what he’s going to do with his mines and how he’s choosing to operate his mines. And I started to get really pissed. I swear I was seeing red. His mines. The man’s never set foot in a single one of them. I’m the one who’s spent my life inside Jojo. I’m the one who knows her. He may own her, but she’s not his.”
E.J. smokes and nods.
“And he’d close her. I’m sure he would. He’d close her just like that. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about the men who are gonna lose their jobs and he also doesn’t care about her. She doesn’t want to sit around useless. Her and Beverly. It’s gonna happen one of these days but it’s not fair to do it to them already. They’ve both been through a lot.”
Another bout of silence passes between them. E.J. must be cold but he won’t show it in front of Lib. Lib must know E.J.’s cold but he won’t embarrass him by asking if he is.
Lib shifts his weight from one foot to the other and looks up at the sky. No stars tonight. No moon. Only a layer of clouds that makes the night seem wrapped in gray gauze.
“The whole time we were trapped down there,” he says, “I never had a bad thought about her. I never blamed her. I never hated the mine.”
E.J. continues nodding.
“What do you think we should do?” Lib asks.
“Doesn’t sound like you want to close your mine,” E.J. replies.
“Our mine.”
“You have to remember I’m slightly biased here because I’d like to keep my job.”
“The lawyer’s estimating we could each get a couple hundred grand from the sale of the equipment. That’s about six years of your salary right now.”
E.J. finishes his cigarette and tosses it onto the stones.
“I’ve been doing this job since I graduated high school. I’ve bitched and moaned about Cam Jack just like everyone else does. How he makes a fortune while we take home a lousy fifteen dollars an hour. How we haven’t had a raise in almost ten years now. How our health benefits have been cut and our 401(k)s slashed to hell.
“And it’s all true and I suppose it’s not fair and maybe there are people out there who got the time to dwell on it. But what it all comes down to for me is this: I love my job, and I figur
e it’s better to get screwed doing a job I love than to get amply rewarded doing something I hate.”
“So what’s your vote?” Lib asks him.
“Fuck him. I got better ways to spend my time than sitting in lawyers’ offices and courtrooms.”
“Amen to that.”
They shake hands. E.J. claps Lib on the back.
“Get some sleep, boss.”
“I’ll do that. And what about you? What are you getting tonight?”
He doesn’t answer right away. I can’t see his face so I don’t know if he’s smiling.
“An education,” he says.
He remains standing calmly in the middle of the driveway with his hands in his pockets until Lib’s taillights wink out of sight around a bend in the road, then he races back inside the garage, cursing the stones tearing at his bare feet.
“Jesus, it’s cold,” he says, trying to take his jeans off while he hops up and down to get warm.
“You spying on us?” he asks me.
“Yep.”
“What do you think?”
I walk over to him and wrap his naked body up in the blanket with me.
“I think Jojo’s a lucky girl.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I WAKE FROM A TERRIBLE DREAM. In it I’m wandering through a field full of flowers as tall as I am with faces of girls and halos of sharp purple petals that cut like knives when I brush against them. Their eyes and mouths are open in frightful expressive pain, but they make no sound and I sense they can’t see.
Snuffling, filthy hogs and emaciated, iron-eyed cows are feeding off them, leaving behind bloody scars as they tear leaves from their thick writhing stems ending in ropes of twisted fleshy roots clutching the muddy topsoil.
I try to scare off the cows and pigs but nothing will make them leave. I scream and shout. I clap my hands. I kick at them. I try to drag them away. I find a big stick and beat at them. They’re immune to everything I try.
Suddenly I understand that it’s too late and the impervious livestock are telling me not to waste my time. The plant-girls are already dead, yet somehow alive and suffering horribly, but no one can help them so no one should care.
The dream leaves me disoriented, and I’m not sure where I am when I wake up.
My head still hurts from being pistol-whipped. I reach behind my ear and gingerly touch the knot there, and notice E.J., fully dressed and whistling, standing not far from me, clamping the lid onto his dinner bucket.
I look up at the faintly lit sky through the window and a small surge of panic passes through me as I realize he could be late for his shift.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
“Hey. I tried not to wake you.”
“You’re going to be late.”
He shoves a last bite of toast into his mouth and washes it down with a gulp of coffee.
“I’m fine. I think I know by now how much time I need to drive to my job.”
“Are you sure you’re not going to be late?”
He takes a step toward me.
“What’s wrong with you, Shae-Lynn?”
I get up, slip into his T-shirt from last night, and move past him to his dinner bucket. I pick it up in order to hold it out to him. The weight is so familiar, even though I haven’t held one for twenty years.
“I could’ve packed it for you.”
“I’ve been packing it for myself for twenty years. It’s okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hey,” he says gently and takes the pail from me. “You don’t have to take care of me that way. You want George to make you some bacon?”
“Why? Are you saying I can’t cook?”
“For Christ’s sake, what is with you?” His voice turns rough. “I know you can’t cook. I can’t either. That’s why we have George.”
I like the way he said “we.”
“I thought you’d be in a good mood this morning,” he goes on. “I thought last night would’ve settled you down.”
“Settled me down? Is that why you did it? It was some kind of public service. Maybe if E.J. bangs Shae-Lynn it’ll settle her down.”
He slips on his coat and grabs his pail.
“I don’t have time for this.”
“You mean you don’t have time for me. You mean I’m not worth it,” I rip into him as I run after him heading for his truck. “Maybe if I was twenty-five and blond maybe then you would’ve woke up and needed to fuck me instead of jumping up off the couch and running to pack your lunch and leave…”
He whirls around on me and silences me with a look.
“Oh, yeah. And maybe if I was a senator or a ball player or some fucked-up teenaged prince you wouldn’t have slept through me getting up off the couch and you’d be prancing around in a harem girl costume for me right now serving me beer out of a solid gold pitcher.”
“Harem girl? You want a harem girl?”
“No, I don’t want a harem girl. I live in the real world. I have a real life and a real life is having a job and having to get there on time. Real life is having your old boss come by at three a.m. and wake you up and then going back to bed and getting the daylights fucked out of you by a girl you’ve loved your whole life and then falling fast asleep and oversleeping so you’re running late and don’t have time to wake her up and fuck her again before you leave.”
“Are you saying I don’t live in the real world?”
He looks frustrated enough to hit me but instead he turns his back on me and stares out at the horizon. Most of the clouds have cleared away. The sun has yet to make an appearance from behind the mountains, but the indigo night is beginning to fade into a predawn pinkish blue. Soon the remaining tatters of clouds will be lit from underneath and the sky will look smeared with peach butter.
“You want to fight,” he says flatly. “You love to fight. I don’t want to fight.”
“You mean you don’t want me.”
He shakes his head but won’t look at me.
“I want you. I don’t want your crap.”
I watch him walk away from me and drive off into a pink chrome sunrise before I go back inside the garage to get dressed.
I stop at the Snappy’s on my way home.
I buy one of every snack cake on their shelves along with a couple bags of chips and a box of Lucky Charms cereal.
I open the cereal while I’m sitting in the car in the parking lot and start picking out the marshmallow pieces and popping them into my mouth between sips of a steaming cup of coffee while I think about E.J.
He’s stepping into his coal-stained coveralls and pulling them up over his long underwear right about now. He’s putting on his knee pads, pushing his feet inside his steel-toed rubber boots, and slipping on his rain gear and his leather tool belt with his name and social security number inscribed on a brass plate. He’s grabbing his battered helmet with a peeling American flag sticker on the back and going outside to have a final smoke before heading into the mine.
It’s the same helmet he wore when he was trapped. It made it out with him, and he won’t wear another.
I think about my politician, my Frenchman, my prince, my third baseman, my Marine, my farm boy, and all the others. I never knew how any of them spent their days, and I didn’t care as long as they stayed safe.
I’ve followed E.J. down into the cold black depths of Jojo before it sinks in that he said he’s loved me all his life.
I close up the box of cereal and rip open a pack of RingDings before I start my car.
Sometimes I can be a real left-laner.
THE DAY PASSES at a snail’s pace. I have a fair amount of business but my thoughts don’t move at all. They’re parked at the foot of two large hills of depression: one formed from regret for the way I treated E.J. this morning and the other formed from the dread I feel over what’s going to happen tonight between Clay and Cam and me.
I think about not going tonight and pretending my conversation with Cam Jack never happened, but I know Ca
m will make good on his threat and see Clay on his own if I don’t bring him. I’ve thought about packing up my few belongings and Gimp and hitting the road so I never have to face Clay again, but I know I can’t do that either. I’ve thought about sitting down with Clay and calmly discussing the truth about my childhood and the choices I made during my teen years that led to my pregnancy, and my decision to have a baby and keep the identity of his father secret from him, but the thought of doing this is what makes the idea of packing up my car and running away so appealing.
I keep telling myself I shouldn’t be upset by the thought of Clay finding out. I have nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed about.
I told Cam Jack I was going to have his baby. I didn’t keep this information from him. He was the one who rejected me and his unborn son. He was the one who told me he never wanted to hear from us. He was the one who said he’d deny having been with me. Again he threatened to blackball my dad. He said I was a slut. Said the baby probably wasn’t his anyway. Said I was a greedy, lazy little hillbilly who was only after his money.
At the time I didn’t care about justice. I knew in a fair world he should have been financially obligated to help support his son and should have been a father to him, but I also knew I didn’t live in a fair world.
I didn’t care about revenge either. I understood the futility of a poor nobody teenaged girl trying to publicly expose a rich powerful man and cause a scandal. I knew it wouldn’t work. I knew that people like Cam Jack always bought their way out of problems, always managed to turn the victim into the culprit.
But I did care that he thought I was lazy.
He showed his true colors to me, and I was convinced Clay and I would be better off without him in our lives. My only interest was protecting Clay. I did what I thought was right. My motives were pure and noble. So why am I afraid?
Because now, with twenty-three more years of life behind me, I’m not so sure I was so selfless. Did I make this decision thinking of Clay’s best interest or my bruised pride? Did I deprive my son of the possibility of ever knowing his father simply because his father called me names?
