As Far As Far Enough

by Claire Rooney

  She thought about that for a minute and then shook her head. “Harvey would never do that to me. He would never let it happen.”

  “Who’s Harvey?”

  “He’s what we have here in Laurelvalley that passes for a mayor. He pretty much runs this town even though we’re not much of a town. He’s a good man, and he’s known me since I was born. He knows what this place means to me, and he would never try to take it away.”

  “You have a lot of faith in him.”

  “Yes, I do, but it’s not just that. This is a very small place. I mean, Laurelvalley covers a lot of acreage, but there aren’t that many people. If you stub your toe and cry out loud, everyone knows about it before the sun sets. If Harvey tried to do an underhanded deal, he’d be run out of town before the ink was dry.”

  I shrugged. “Then my father would get the state to do it, and this town would get punished as well. How would everyone feel about a municipal trash dump being located here, a high security state prison or a toxic waste burial site to foul your streams and rivers?”

  She lifted her head from the pillow. “He could really do that?”

  “He’s done it before. How do you think Yucca Mountain happened? Someone made him angry and now they have a nuclear waste dump in their backyard.”

  “And he could do that here?”

  “If he thought the matter was important enough, he could pull enough strings to make something bad happen.”

  “And it’s so very important to him that you marry some guy you barely know and like even less?”

  I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. It sounded so stupid when she put it that way. “It’s not just that.”

  “What is it then?”

  I turned my head to look at her. “There were deals riding on me, long-term deals, things my father had been building toward for years. There were schemes and plans, plans within plans. It wasn’t just a marriage. It was a truce between two warring families, an alliance between rival factions. The marriage was their reason to come together. Without it, any deals they make with each other will make them look like traitors to their friends and weak to their enemies.”

  But it was more than that. It had been the beginnings of a plan to wrest power away from the conservative extremists and put the reigns of the government back into the hands of the conservative centrists by bringing two of the largest rival factions together through a common ground. I would have been that common ground and the bridge over the last chasm that blocked my father’s presidential ambitions. It was the whole reason I’d been born. But I didn’t know how to explain that to Meri, who kept her television in the hall closet and rarely considered the world out past the farm gate. Meri’s expression was quizzical, and I knew she didn’t really understand.

  “I hurt him, Meri. I queered his deal. I embarrassed him socially. He lost money, he lost opportunities, and he lost his only child.”

  Meri rolled onto her side and rested her head in the palm of her hand. “Does he really care so much about that only child?” she asked with something dangerously close to pity in her eyes. It made things move all wrong inside my chest.

  “I wish I knew,” I answered softly. “I’ve never been very clear on what he does and doesn’t care about. I do know that he cares about what the future will say about him. He cares about his legacy and the continuation of his legitimate line to watch over it. No grandchildren, no line.” I reached for her hand and raised it to my mouth. “If he knew about this,” I said brushing her knuckles lightly across my lips, “I don’t know what he’d do, but it would be something awful.”

  She stretched out a finger and touched my cheek. “You’ve been hiding what you are all your life, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t know what I am. I’ve never dared to put a label on it for fear that the ground might open and swallow me whole. That’s what my father says should happen to people with unnatural affections.” I squeezed her hand. “It doesn’t feel so unnatural, though.”

  “Am I the first woman you’ve ever been with?” she asked, smiling shyly. “Slept with, I mean.”

  “You’re the first woman I’ve ever dared to kiss.” I turned my head to kiss the finger softly stroking my cheek. “But you’re not the first woman I’ve wanted to kiss.”

  She blew out a slow breath between pursed lips. “That must have been horrible for you, to live like that.”

  I nodded. “It was hard, but it was also absolutely necessary. My father’s power base is very conservative. He says what he thinks they want him to say, so he speaks loud and often against gay people. He says it’s a mental illness and we should all be institutionalized. I don’t know what he really believes, but if the media got wind that his only daughter was gay, it would be a circus. He gets very angry with anyone who gives his enemies a stick to hit him with.”

  Meri twined her fingers around mine. “I think I’m beginning to see the true size of our problem.”

  She had no idea. “It’s not our problem, Meri. It’s just mine.”

  “No. You’re wrong about that.” Meri grabbed my chin and pulled my face to hers. “It is our problem. You belong here. I have no intentions of letting you go, and that’s the end of it.” She laid a finger against my lips.

  I shifted my head and bit gently on the tip of her finger. “You ’ave to,” I said through my teeth, “dere are bigger t’ings at stake dan jus us.” I closed my lips around her finger, circled it with my tongue and slid it slowly out of my mouth.

  She let go of my chin. “Are you talking about the farm?” A note of worry crept into her voice.

  “I’m talking about this whole town. He could turn everything around us inside out. It wouldn’t be right for me to stay here for my own comfort’s sake and let everyone around me suffer for it.”

  She looked at her damp finger and then closed her fist around it. “So, you’re just going to keep running?” Her eyes glittered in the dim light.

  “Yes.” I wrapped my hands around her fist and uncurled her fingers. “There are no other real options. Everything else is just wishing.” I laid a kiss on her open palm.

  “But where can you go from here?”

  I looked back up at the ceiling. It was very familiar to me now. The old plaster was lumpy in places. It caught the orange rays of the setting sun and threw odd oblique shadows across it. “I was thinking about driving to Florida and catching the next space shuttle to Mars.”

  Meri laughed softly, sadly. “There’s no way we could scrape up enough money for that, and besides, once you got to Mars, you’d just have to turn around and come home again.”

  “Oh, damn. I hadn’t thought about that.”

  She put her hand on my stomach, fingers gently stroking, making things lower clench and grow warm. “Seriously, Bea, when will you stop running? When the bike breaks for good? When you run out of money? When your father dies? When you do?”

  My throat tightened. “I don’t know, Meri. I don’t have any big plans. I can’t even see around the next bend. There’s no way to know where the road ends.”

  Meri studied my face with a sad little frown of her own. She lifted my arm, tucked it around her shoulders and snuggled herself against me, her nose nestled against my neck, her knee thrown across my lap. “So what are you going to do?”

  I kissed her hair. It still smelled like cinnamon. “I’ll finish repairing the bike and then, when he comes, I’ll leave.”

  “And you’re so sure he’ll come?”

  There was a spark of defiance in that question. I wished I had some reassuring words for her, but even though I’d never run so far as this, I’d hidden from him before, and he’d never failed to track me down, whether it was to the linen closet in the nanny’s quarters or to a friend’s garage two states away.

  “Yes, I’m absolutely sure, Meri,” I said quietly, and her body sagged against me.

  “Will you come back?” she asked, her words a warm tickle against my collarbone.

  “Will you want me to?
”

  “Yes,” she said. “This place won’t seem right without you.”

  “Then I’ll go, circle around a few times and come back as soon as I can.” I squeezed her closer to me, fighting hard to convince myself that it wasn’t a lie. Maybe it wasn’t, I thought, but it probably was.

  “But you’ll stay here for now, right?” She tilted her face to me and I kissed her.

  “I’ll stay right until the last minute.” I kissed her again, slower this time and much more thoroughly.

  She pulled herself up and slid on top of me. Her legs wriggled between mine, pushing them apart and she pressed herself hard against me. She was still wet and slick.

  “Then we should make every minute count.” She whispered against my lips. Meri grabbed my shoulders and thrust her hips forward, moved them around in long, slow circle, sliding herself over me.

  “Oh, god,” was my answer.

  Chapter Four: SECRETS

  Almost two weeks later, the clutch parts finally came in the mail. It had taken much longer than I expected it to. I didn’t dare try using any of my credit cards to order them, so I had to go through some complicated postal order routine. It made me wonder what people used to do in the days before credit cards were invented. While I was waiting for the damn things to arrive, it occurred to me that maybe the simpler life was also sometimes the harder one, and that maybe there were hard parts to every kind of life.

  I made some progress in fixing the bike. I could, at least, duct tape the broken plastic parts and reattach loose hoses and wires, but I soon reached a point that was beyond my expertise. I needed tools that weren’t included in the standard under-theseat tool kit, like wrenches and pliers and things. Meri wasn’t very helpful. She could drive a tractor, plow a field, bale hay and rewire a light socket, but she didn’t know what a socket wrench looked like. She showed me to a shed where her father had kept all his tools. It was on the far side of the pasture away from the barn, near where the old sheep pen was. We walked quickly down the overgrown path, once neatly bricked, now choked and weedy. She pointed to the shed with thin, pressed lips and tight, pinched eyes, turned and walked quickly back to the house.

  I watched her go, jealous for just an instance of her grief, and then it struck me, like a hammer to the heart, that I didn’t love my father. I was afraid of him. He had bred in me a blind obedience, but that wasn’t love. I’d grown up thinking that it was, but I was wrong. Just then, I wished I knew what it felt like to have a protector and not a persecutor, a confessor instead of a judge.

  I gave my head a quick shake, shoving away my impossible dreams, and turned to the shed. It was much grayer than the barn. Its moss-shingled roof was cracked and sagging in the middle. The door was swollen in its frame and only opened after a good hard shove of my shoulder. Dust and dirt sifted down from the ceiling. My shoes stirred more from the floor and made me sneeze. I rubbed my nose on my sleeve and looked around at all the neatly hanging tool-shaped lumps of rust. There was a row of different kinds of hammers, saws arranged by size, dozens of screwdrivers, coffee cans nailed to the wall filled with dusty clumps of screws or old empty mouse nests. A battered toolbox sat on the workbench, its lid still open and waiting. There were wrenches inside, all frozen with their jaws clamped tightly shut. A half-made birdhouse sat next to the toolbox, its mouse-gnawed wood dry and cracking. I touched a saw hanging in its place on a wooden peg. Dust and rust came off on my fingers. None of these tools would ever fix anything again. I closed the door behind me as best I could, went back to the house and wrapped Meri in a tight bear hug.

  Meri phoned her blue-haired Aunt Beatrice to ask if she knew anybody motorcycle savvy who would be willing to make a house call. Her auntie spent a good ten minutes chewing her out for not calling in over a week. I listened to Meri “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” into the phone, blushing and shifting from foot to foot. I kept snickering at her and she kept shushing me with an abrupt wave of her hand. I had to leave the room to keep from laughing out loud.

  In the end, her aunt said she would send over one of the cousins. Meri couldn’t tell me any more than that. She couldn’t even say if it would be a real blood cousin of some indeterminate remove or just somebody she called cousin for politeness sake. Everyone in Laurelvalley, who wasn’t an actual sister or brother, mother or father, was called cousin, aunt or uncle. Meri said that you couldn’t tell who was related to whom just by listening to people talk.

  She kissed me, shrugged into her jacket and kissed me again as she walked out the door. Aunt Beatrice had bullied her into paying a visit, and since we had lately been reduced to eating pickled mystery stuff from the pantry whose labels had fallen off, she was also going to get some groceries while she was in town and some feed for Sergeant, too.

  It was the first time I had been alone in her house for any significant length of time, and, to be honest, it felt strange, almost like I was in the wrong place. It was too quiet without her there. I didn’t care for it much, so I went out to the barn where I knew Sergeant would be glad to see me. There was always stuff that needed doing out in the barn.

  Sergeant was glad to see me, or it might have been the apple I had in my pocket. I spent most of the afternoon with him, piddling with the bike, changing his straw, braiding red ribbons into his mane, washing slimy horse drool out of the water trough. The sun was low in the sky when I finished with the afternoon chores, and I was just about to shut the barn doors for the evening when a truly ancient pickup truck rolled down the driveway, the kind with the round roofed cab and bug-eyed headlights. Its red paint was so faded that I almost mistook it for a huge hunk of rust on wheels. It was much older even than Meri’s decrepit truck, but the engine hummed prettily as it swung off the drive and pulled next to the barn. The man inside waved a hand at me and flashed an easy smile. I didn’t wave back since I didn’t know who he was or what he wanted. I just watched him. The truck door opened with a tortured screech of metal scraping on metal, and he got out. He was very tall, very broad and almost obscenely muscular. He might have seemed intimidating if it weren’t for the lazy slump of his shoulders. He was fairly young, and his face was almost handsome in a rugged fair-haired farm boy kind of way. It was deeply tanned and had just the beginnings of a cragginess that would probably take it over later in his life.

  He tipped his ball cap up on his head and held out his hand to me.

  “Hey, there. I’m Taylor. I’m looking for the guest with the ailing motorcycle.”

  I shook his hand. It swallowed mine, but he didn’t squeeze very hard. A true Southern gentleman. “The bike’s mine. My name’s Bea.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said flashing his smile again. “Like in Auntie Bea?”

  “No, like in the letter B brought to you today by the number ten.”

  He blinked a few times and then shrugged. Maybe they didn’t get PBS in this valley. “Alrighty then,” he said. “So, where’s the bike?”

  I nodded my head at the barn. “It’s in there, in the stall next to Sergeant.”

  He grinned a lopsided smile that made the corners of his eyes burst out into crow’s feet. “I’ll bet he’s enjoying that.”

  “Seems to be. He keeps eating parts off of it.”

  Taylor shook his head. “Crazy dumb horse. Well, let’s go see what we’ve got.”

  We went into the barn and stood in front of the bike. He gave a low whistle and looked at me sideways. “That sure is a lot of bike for such a little slip of a girl.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m pretty tall for a girl.”

  He shook his head again. “Tall helps your toes touch the ground, but it takes muscle to wrangle a bike like this. You look like you could turn sideways into the wind and disappear.”

  “You can’t wrangle a bike like this,” I said with a little bit of sternness. “It’ll kill you if you try. It takes finesse to control it, not muscle.”

  He grunted softly and ran a hand across the scratches on the tank. “Looks like you ran
out of finesse on a left turn somewhere.”

  “I ran into a deer,” I said flatly.

  He looked at me closer. He eyes went to the scar on my forehead, still pink and puckered, and they widened just a little. He whistled again. “That had to hurt.”

  “Yes, it did.”

  He grinned. “You must be tough as a nickel steak.”

  It was my turn to look puzzled. “I bet you’re related to Meri.”

  His grin dimmed and he pulled the brim of his cap lower over his eyes. “Now, why do you say that?”

  “I don’t understand half the things she says either.”

  He nodded his head and then shook it from side to side. “Naw, we’re not related. We just grew up together. We’ve been running around since we were both knee high to a grasshopper. You live in a small town, you pick up funny sayings.” He rubbed at his jaw. “I didn’t see the truck outside. She’s not here?”

  “No, she went into town.”

  He nodded his head, managing to look both relieved and disappointed at the same time. He turned to the bike. “Well, let’s see what we’re going to need to do to this.”

  I showed him what I had done and what still needed doing. I handed him the box with the new clutch parts.

  “I couldn’t put this in myself because I don’t have the right tools.”

  “Yeah,” he said absently, opening the box and rummaging around inside it, “it’s going to need a torque wrench, at least. I’ll have to look up the bike specs.”

  “There are no bike specs,” I said and he gave me a pained look. I shrugged. “It’s custom.”

  “All the way custom?” he asked, eyebrows rising. “From tire to tire?”

  I nodded. He lifted his cap and scratched his head. He took a closer look at me and then at the bike. He looked at me again with a new expression in his eyes.

  “Wow,” he said and settled the cap back on his head. “Who’d have thought?”

  My bike was almost like any other sport cruiser with shiny black trim and gleaming chrome. It was sleek and mean. It had sharp lines, but it didn’t stand out in a crowd unless you took a close look. At the time, I thought I was being modest. Later, it helped me to run fast without being noticed. I had it special built with an ultra light aluminum frame, a V-4 and all the bells and whistles I could think of that could be tucked away somewhere. I originally intended it as a mild rebellion against my father, spending a truckload of my allowance money on something he wouldn’t approve of, but somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the bike. I think that was when my world began to change.