Larry Joe sat Jojo on her feet and kept hold of her by the wrist. Danny J. was picking up the chair and some papers that had somehow gotten strewn on the floor.
“You’re bleeding,” Jojo told Larry Joe, gazing up at him with her big eyes.
He felt the tickling in his nose then, wiped with his fingers and brought away blood. He stared at it, somewhat stunned. Without a word, Danny J. slipped out and brought back a wet washcloth from their bathroom, holding it in front of Larry Joe, who took it and dabbed it beneath his nose.
“I’m sorry,” Danny J. said after a few minutes.
“It’s okay.”
“You can let go of me,” Jojo said. “I’m not gonna tell.”
Larry Joe had forgotten he still held her firmly. He let go of her, feeling like a stupid kid instead of the man he almost was. He was so often these days finding himself doing something like a kid, when he was trying hard to be adult.
He eased down on the side of the bed, and Jojo sat beside him, scooting close enough for her little hip to touch his and laying her hand on his thigh. It felt so small and warm through his jeans. Then she put her other hand, palm up, out to Danny J.
Danny J. slipped a glance to Larry Joe, and then gazed at Jojo’s palm a moment. With a reluctant grin, he smacked his palm on hers. After a minute, he said, “You guys want a Coke?”
Mason’s initial hesitancy to enter the house that afternoon had not been lost on Charlene. There had been a moment when she had wondered if he was going to turn and run back to his truck and drive away at top speed. For her part, she had almost closed the door in his face.
But from the moment he stepped over the threshold, he had seemed to settle on definite intentions. It had been a very long time since a man had had intentions toward her, and she was somewhat excited to discover exactly what Mason’s might be. All her womanly wiles, which had seemed to have been put to death with the difficulties with Joey, suddenly came back to life in a rush that almost astonished her. She found herself gazing at Mason, as attentive as a woman can be to a man who interests her. To a man who stirred the woman inside of her.
“Thank you for helping me clean up,” Charlene said, closing the dishwasher with her hip.
“Thank you for the supper,” he said, drying his hands on a towel. “You’re a great cook, and it’s better than what I normally have—a ham and cheese sandwich.”
He grinned, and his blue eyes came up and rested on hers in the manner of an intimate touch.
She said, “You said you can cook, and you proved tonight that you know your way around a salad.”
“Cooking just for me never seems worth the trouble.”
He glanced downward. There was a loneliness about him, she thought.
“I find it difficult to believe that you could not have any number of women who would enjoy your cooking and your company,” she said, listening intently to discover what he would say about women in his life.
“Not so many,” he said, with a sad grin. “I guess most women think I’m a pretty boring guy.”
“Now, why is that?” Realizing she was flirting, she pulled back a little, putting a hand on the edge of the sink, grasping it, as the urge to move toward him and press herself against his hard male body swept her.
“I don’t much like to go to clubs. I don’t dance, and don’t care much for parties, either.”
“I don’t either—go to clubs or parties, I mean. I do like to dance, but I don’t like to go where there is dancing. I don’t care to be around a crowd of people.” His gaze roamed over her face, seeking, caressing. “I like music. Country music mostly, but I like some classical.”
“I play a guitar.”
“You do?” She immediately imagined him holding a guitar, his fingers on the strings, and for some reason this affected her in an erotic manner.
“Yes, ma’am. Folk ballads mostly. Simple ones.” He smiled softly. “My grandfather taught me.”
“Oh? And who taught you to cook—your wife or your mother?” She wondered about those women in his life.
He blinked and looked away, and his warm expression was suddenly gone. Charlene had a little panic, wondering what she had said wrong, her mind racing with the disturbing suppositions that perhaps he was still in love with the divorced wife, or maybe still attached to his mother.
And then his gaze came to her again, and he said in a low voice, “I learned to cook in prison. I worked in the kitchen a lot there, with my roommate. He’d been a chef, and he liked to talk recipes. He liked to go over them, just like he was cooking in the cell, to pass the time.”
There was hurt in his voice and in his eyes that stared at her, searching for her reaction.
She said, “I had heard the rumor, but not what happened.”
Turning and bracing himself with both hands on the counter edge, he took a deep breath and told her that he had gone to prison for killing his wife’s lover with a boot.
When he paused, she said, “A boot?” She might have laughed at the ridiculous image that popped into her mind, but there was no laughter in her as she stared at his thick shoulders that seemed in that moment to struggle with the weight of sorrow and shame.
“Yeah,” he said. “I found them in bed together and I hit him with his boot, and he fell over and hit his temple on the corner of the night table. I didn’t get charged with murder because I’d used a boot, and even though he was pushed by the dead man’s family, the prosecutor could not manage to get anyone to believe a boot could be considered a lethal weapon. I was a wild, drunk boy, not insane. I got five years to pay my debt and grow up, and I was out in two.”
Charlene looked at him, at his face, tanned and lined from the weather and hard work, at the silver showing at his temples, at his eyes, blue and clear and straight on hers in the way only a strong man can look.
“You haven’t been a boy for a long time,” she said.
With a wry smile, he said, “No, ma’am. Not for at least twenty-six years.”
It seemed then that they put that subject behind them, because they gazed at each other, both of them smiling and shimmering with desires that surely, had they been anywhere else, would have left them no choice but to fall together.
Just then Jojo appeared in the kitchen doorway to say she was ready to get a bath. “You said you wanted to wash my hair tonight, Mama.”
“Oh, yes, honey. I’ll be right there. You go ahead and run the water and get in.”
“O-kaay,” Jojo said, turning very slowly as she gave Charlene and Mason a highly curious going-over that made Charlene wonder what impressions her daughter might have been picking up.
Mason, feeling very self-conscious, said, “I’d better be going. I have to meet Neville in a few hours for patrol.”
She said she would walk out with him. He wanted to take her hand, but he didn’t. He thought fleetingly about all he wanted to do with her.
Luckily, he saw now, he had stopped his truck under the shadow of the elm tree, where the light from the porch and pole lamps couldn’t reach.
She thanked him again for giving her a ride home and said how she had enjoyed his company at supper. He told her he had enjoyed it, too.
He could feel more than see her eyes. Before he knew what he was doing, he slid his hand up to cup the back of her neck and kissed her.
She was clearly surprised, and he was, too. It was like a jolt went through him. The next instant desire overrode every other emotion, and he went to kissing her, and she went to kissing him. A warm and moist and eager kiss, and even a moan in her throat that shook him to his core.
When they broke apart, he thought he heard her whisper breathlessly, “Ohmyheaven.”
He stared into her eyes for long seconds. His heartbeat was pounding in his ears and in his groin. He grappled for and found coherent thought, along with the handle to the truck door.
“Good night,” he said, opening the door.
“Good night,” she said.
She slowly turned and we
nt into the house and shut the door, and Mason drove away with the taste of her on his lips and in his heart.
The City Hall thermometer reads 78°
As Charlene lay in bed in the dark, looking at the patterns the moonlight made on the walls, she went over the events of the evening, dwelling on Mason’s blue eyes and his smiles and his intense looks of interest, until she came to his kiss, which still lingered on her lips.
She had, she only just now realized, wanted that kiss badly. Had he not taken the initiative—and she was very proud of him for that—she might have thrown herself on him and wrestled the kiss from him. She had wanted desperately to know if she were capable of feeling passion, of sharing passion with a man.
She thought back, counting the months to the last kiss she recalled Joey giving her. She had tried so often to kiss him passionately, trying to draw him back to her, but every time he had eased away, saying he had to do something or other. The pain of it came fresh upon her.
With sudden clarity, she realized that she had built a wall around the pain of Joey’s rejection. It wasn’t a new wall. It was an old one, first built when she had to learn to deal with the heartache caused by her parents withdrawing into their own turmoil. With each heartache since, she had added a row of bricks. She had been adding rows for many years, shutting herself into her own cell of loneliness into which only the children could come and go.
And in shutting out the pain, she had also shut out a great deal of hope and promise and joy that seemed too precarious to believe in. She’d been afraid of feeling. Feelings hurt.
She lightly touched her lips with her fingertips. They seemed to tingle, and with the memory, her body recalled the wanting, too. It was a good feeling, desire all full and exciting. It frightened her, too, made her feel vulnerable in a way that she lay thinking about until she began to ache with sweet passionate longing of a sort almost forgotten.
When the telephone rang, she jumped and let out a gasp.
Grabbing for the receiver, she fumbled and dropped it, grabbed it up and said a breathless “Hello?” along with a prayer that it was not her father or Rainey having an emergency.
Mason, in the old phone booth at the corner of the IGA, said, “I’m sorry. Were you asleep?”
“Oh, Mason.” She sounded relieved. “Oh, no, I wasn’t asleep. I was just layin’ here. I got startled by the phone. I always think that it’s bad news when the phone rings in the night. I think it may be Rainey or Daddy, you know.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have called so late.” It was almost eleven. He felt stupid for getting carried away and calling her at this time of night, and more stupid because he was standing there in a lit-up phone booth, in plain sight of Neville, who was waiting in the patrol car, the engine running and air-conditioning going.
“It’s fine,” she was saying. “I wasn’t asleep yet. Did you forget something? Are you missing a tool?”
“No. I got all those,” he said quickly. He turned his back on Neville and faced the wall of the building. “I just wanted to tell you again that I had a really good time tonight.”
“I did, too,” she said, and her voice sounded warm.
“I was wondering if maybe you would go out with me tomorrow. I know you said you weren’t ready to date,” he said quickly. “But maybe you and your kids would like to go to dinner with me tomorrow.”
“It’s kind of you to think of it, but I don’t think my kids are ready for anything like that. It’s just too soon.”
“Yeah. I can understand that.” He leaned against the phone booth door. “Can we start with lunch? Would you have lunch with me tomorrow at the cafe?”
“Well, okay.” She sounded hesitant. He wished she didn’t sound so hesitant. “But I have to check my appointment book in the morning to make certain what time I’m free. And if I have a walk-in, I might not be able to get away right on schedule.”
“That’s okay. I can go anytime.” He arranged to call her the following morning about a time for lunch, and then he said good-night, hung up and opened the phone booth door. The light promptly went out, and he wished he had thought of opening the dang door earlier, and then he wouldn’t have stood there in a spotlight. He should get himself a cell phone.
“Well, is she going out with you?” Neville asked, as Mason climbed back into the patrol car.
“How do you know I asked her?”
“You said you wanted to call her. What for, but to ask her out?”
“I’m havin’ lunch with her tomorrow.” Mason said and grinned, feeling terribly foolish but unable to quit smiling.
Twenty-Eight
The City Hall thermometer reads 76°
Winston switched on “Dixie” and went out on the porch to put up the flag. He looked at his newly set pole in the middle of the yard with rising anticipation. By Sunday, the Stars and Bars would be flying in the sky. His neighbor would be green with envy, and Winston didn’t think there would be any way Northrupt could top him now. His neighbor might get a taller pole, but that wouldn’t amount to much.
He looked across to his neighbor’s porch. With surprise, he saw the porch was empty. Possibly Everett had overslept, Winston thought, slowing his motions as he set his flag in the holder, expecting his neighbor to step out the door at any moment.
But his neighbor had still not appeared when the flag unfurled and the last strains of “Dixie” died away. Winston stood there feeling disappointed and a little worried. This was the first morning in the nine months since they had begun raising their flags at dawn that Everett had not shown.
He went down his steps and across the yard and peered down the Northrupts’ driveway. Yep, the Mercedes, all repaired now after the wreck, sat at the end of the drive, in front of the garage Northrupt used only during storms. He looked back at the still empty porch, annoyance rising.
The paperboy came pedaling past, tossing the paper right into Winston’s hands. “Hi, Mr. Valentine. Mr. Northrupt’s late this mornin’.”
“Mornin’, Leo. Yes, ’pears so.”
Carrying the paper, he went around to the roses. He didn’t need to water them, since they’d had some good rain. They were blooming bountifully, giving off a light scent in the cooler morning. He pulled clippers from his back pocket and began cutting blossoms, the entire time keeping an ear out for music from his neighbor’s porch.
Likely Northrupt had slept clean through, he thought. He couldn’t go barging over there, banging on the door, just because the man didn’t show his face at dawn. Sometimes when a person butted into another person’s business, a person found out stuff they would just as soon not know. Northrupt had never even invited him in for coffee. He didn’t think his neighbor would take kindly to him going over there and asking why he had not come out at dawn, especially if his neighbor was sleeping in.
Then, like a lightbulb coming on in his head, Winston thought, maybe this was a new tactic on Northrupt’s part. Maybe he was planning some really big new move, and he was just throwing this “nonhanging” of the flag in for the time being to irritate Winston.
Determined not to be irritated, he walked around the corner to go in the back door. There was Ruthanne sitting on the back steps, bundled in a long wool coat.
Winston said, “Good mornin’, Ruthanne.”
She regarded him blankly for a second and then smiled with recognition. “Good mornin’, Winston. I was just sitting here enjoying the birds singing. I think they sing so much clearer in the mornin’.”
“Yes, they do seem to.” He was judging her to see how much she was in her mind. That he was having to do this more and more saddened him. A sudden weariness came over him, and he edged down on the step beside her.
He handed her a rose, telling her to be careful of the thorns. Her gaze was on the trees. He pulled the pack of Camels from his shirt and lit up, blowing the smoke to the side.
She said, “We had lots of tall trees like this around our place in Creek County. They had so many birds in them, and
I started learning their names. Then we had to move all the way out to the west, and it was so flat and no trees, only a few Mama planted, and they never grew very well. We sure had some drought back then, didn’t we, Winston?”
“Yes, we did,” he answered, his own thoughts traveling back to what a lot called the “good ol’ days,” but when he had been a boy he remembered dust seeping in the windows and having to sleep on the porch, being eaten by mosquitos while trying to escape the hot house.
“They couldn’t drive Daddy out of town today,” Ruthanne said, “like they did then, just because he was colored and Indian and a good businessman. ’Course a lot of it was because Mama was so light skinned and beautiful. There was this one powerful white man who wanted her,” she said confidentially to Winston. “But Daddy loved Mama, and she was crazy about him. He said he would go out where a man could have his own land, and he’d make her proud. Then he went to work in the oil fields, you know, and after a while we lived nice, so I guess it worked out, but I still want to go to college. I’ll have to go back to Tahlequa for that and stay with my Aunt May. I want to be a teacher. I’ll teach about birds.”
Winston gazed down at the grass, thinking of how Ruthanne had been a teacher, before quitting and giving over her life to take care of her parents and her sister’s family. She was the only one of her family left, besides a few nephews who had no thought of her.
“I…I was a teacher, wasn’t I?” He glanced up to see a doubtful and confused expression play over her face. “I just have a lot of trouble keeping things straight these days,” she said, almost apologetically.
“Well, I wouldn’t let it bother you,” Winston said. “You are happy, and that’s a lot more than most people in their right minds can say.”
She smiled. “Oh, yes, Winston, I am happy. I just let myself be,” she said simply.
Driving Lessons Page 28
