Never Say Never

by Lisa Wingate

  All of a sudden, my DQ milkshake tasted sour, and the day felt tainted. There was that name again. Jen, Jenny, Jennifer. He called her all three. She came up repeatedly in little anecdotes about his past. Jennifer was part of all the good times, number three in a trio of musketeers with Kemp and his sister, Lauren. Jen was the only person who lived close enough to their ranch to be a playmate. They rendezvoused in the middle of the pasture to play in the big live-oak grove and wile away the hours, skipping rocks and swimming in Caney Creek.

  Kemp pointed to the grove as we bumped along a winding gravel driveway, past his father’s place, to an old stone farmhouse on the backside of the ranch, where Kemp was, in his own words, bunking for now. Gazing at the rolling, dry-grass sea, I pictured a little-girl version of Jen, crossing the pasture with her yucca sword, trotting high in the knees to clear the tufts of grass, her hair bouncing and catching the sun in waves as she galloped and tossed her head. Jen never went anywhere without pretending she was riding a horse, Kemp had commented after he told me about the yucca swords. I think the only reason she liked us was because we always had ponies around.

  Jen didn’t seem to be thinking about ponies when she saw Kemp at the vet clinic. She was thinking about Kemp—slipping comfortably into a pattern of interplay that revealed old affections, turning on a charm even baggy scrubs and a little smear of margarine on her cheek couldn’t hide.

  In the back of my head, the still, small voice of insecurity whispered that I could never compete with someone like Jen, Jenny, Jennifer, as if I didn’t know that already and hadn’t been aware of it forever. I understood it in the part of me that had realized it since the day my mother left a note on the table and walked out. It’s for the best, she wrote. I don’t know where I’m going, or where I’ll be. I just know I can’t be here. For a while, I thought it was temporary. My mother had always been flighty, fragile, temperamental. She’d come back eventually, after she worked through Gil’s death in her own way.

  But she didn’t, and time went by, and a couple years later, she sent a note with an address. She had a new last name, a new family. It was then that I knew what I had already suspected. I wasn’t all that great. If I were, my mother wouldn’t have replaced me with stepkids that weren’t even hers. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, even at thirteen. The truths you establish early stay with you. They’re written in the journal of who you are—the one you carry around in your pocket like an operating manual for life.

  Of course a guy like Kemp wouldn’t seriously be interested in someone like me. He was just being … hospitable, a polite host. Whatever was between him and Jen was really none of my business. The man had a life after all, and on a normal day, I wasn’t part of it. Jen was. Clearly she slipped into his thoughts quite often, and the two of them were important to each other. That didn’t explain why he’d kissed me in the laundry room. Maybe he put the moves on women all the time, just to see if he could—he didn’t seem like the type, but you could never tell. Maybe, given the hurricane relocation and my traumatic experience in it, I was communicating particular vulnerability and desperation, and he was just trying to cheer me up. Maybe the purple windsuit and lopsided ponytail made me particularly attractive… . Well, okay, not likely, but it made about as much sense as anything else.

  Just enjoy the afternoon, the voice in my head admonished, and I tried to banish the pointless inner dialogue. No matter where I went or what I did, the negative head talk jumped in the middle of every potential relationship. Not that this was a potential relationship, of course, but why clutter up the day with old insecurities and self-deprecating head talk? Right now, it was just Kemp and me and the mysterious bottle baby.

  Shortly after our arrival at Kemp’s little stone house, I met the bottle baby, and no amount of negative head talk could compete. Bottle Baby was actually a brown and white calf with soft doe eyes and a squeaky, pitiful little voice that awakened some motherly instinct I didn’t know I had. It was living in an enclosure behind Kemp’s place. I scratched its head while Kemp went in the barn to “fix lunch,” as he put it. He came out with a baby bottle the size of a football and handed it to me.

  “Really?” I held the bottle up uncertainly, checking out the giant udder-shaped spout on the end. “I mean, I don’t know how …”

  Kemp laughed and positioned my hands on the bottle, his fingers sliding over mine in a way that sent a current up my arms. “Just hold it out. Yeah, like that. He knows what to do. Oh, hey, don’t brace it against your stomach that way. He’ll—”

  Just before Kemp could finish explaining why I shouldn’t use my body to keep the bottle steady, the calf planted all four feet and butted his food source, forcing the air out of my lungs. “Ooof,” I coughed. “I think I lost a kidney.”

  Chuckling, Kemp said, “Guess I should have told you that to begin with,” then abandoned me and walked to the fence to refill a water bucket.

  “Guess so,” I agreed. Gazing down at the calf, now sucking the bottle with his little milk mouth dripping and his brown and white tail spinning like a propeller, I fell in love again. “How old is he?”

  “About three weeks.” Kemp dumped the bucket, then rinsed and refilled it, and stood leaning on the fence, watching the bottle baby drain the milk so fast the plastic was collapsing in my hands. “Pull it out of his mouth a minute and let the air in.”

  I pulled, but Baby hung on with impressive strength. “He doesn’t want to let … go … hey … there we are.” The bottle inflated, the calf blew out a loud, milky complaint, stomping his feet and kicking the air, and then I lowered the bottle, and he latched on again, rapidly draining the rest of the milk. “He’s really cute. Can I keep him?”

  Kemp chuckled. “Not if you want to trade me a dog for him.”

  I laughed, picturing the calf down at Blowfish Billy’s with Don and Hawkeye. “Sorry, it’s the dog or nothing. All my other valuables are stuck in a van somewhere between here and Perdida.” The flippancy of the comment surprised me at first. Right now, the Microbus and its contents didn’t seem to matter at all. I was more interested in wrestling the bottle from Baby’s mouth and watching him stomp and complain like an unhappy toddler. When he tried to use my windsuit as a pacifier, I ran for the fence and climbed to safety, laughing.

  “No deal, then.” Kemp took the bottle, rinsed it out, and hung it on a loose wire to dry in the sun. “Listen, don’t worry about the van.” His tone sobered as we walked to the truck. “As soon as the roads are open, Dad’s taking his car-hauling trailer and heading down to see about Imagene’s van. He’ll pick yours up, too.” He made it seem simple, as if it were a given that the vehicles would be sitting, undamaged, right where we’d left them. I had a feeling he was making it sound that way for my benefit.

  “Thanks. I’m just trying not to think ahead too much.” Actually, at the moment, I didn’t want to think at all about getting the van back. Its return meant my vacation in Daily, Texas, was over. As soon as I had transportation and the roads were clear, I had no excuse for not getting back to work.

  “Good plan.” He gave me a thumbs-up as we climbed into the truck and left Baby behind, headed for our next adventure, whatever it was going to be. When we reached the end of the driveway, he stopped and checked the road in both directions. “So, who do you know in McGregor?”

  It took a minute for the question to register. I was looking out the window, watching a huge flock of big white birds dip, dive, and circle against the afternoon sky. As they turned, sunlight caught their wings, then retreated, causing them to shine like silver one moment, then disappear into the sky the next. “What are those white birds? They’re really beautiful.”

  “Cattle egrets. You changed the subject again.” Leaning forward, he rested his chin atop his knuckles on the steering wheel and studied me, his eyes a warm gold in the sunlight.

  Something tugged inside me, then quickened. My gaze drifted to his mouth, and I thought about kissing him again. “I guess I did.” The nex
t thing I knew, I was telling him about my grandmother—about the big clapboard house, the room downstairs, which still held the porcelain sink and glass-fronted cabinets where my great-grandfather had practiced medicine, the banister Gil and I slid down when we could get away with it, the town kids hanging out at the drive-in, the uncomfortable family dinners, and my father sitting stiff in his chair, putting up with the sermon until he could leave the table and wander off with his guitar.

  By the time I was finished, Kemp had put the vehicle in Park and turned his body so that he was leaning against the door.

  Suddenly, I felt stupid for having spilled more of our sordid and slightly pathetic history. By now, he’d probably concluded that I was a total mess. His childhood, by contrast, seemed so normal and … well … healthy. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dump all that. Our family dynamics tended to be pretty weird.”

  Kemp smiled slightly. “You haven’t seen weird until you’ve been to a gathering of the Eldridge clan.” He rested an arm on the back of the seat, like he had all the time in the world.

  “Your family isn’t weird.”

  His brows shot up, then he chuckled. “You’ve been two days with Aunt Netta and you don’t think my family’s weird? You are a peach.”

  “A what?”

  “Aunt Netta says you’re a peach.” He winked, and I felt myself melting into a little pool on the seat. A peach… . Me?

  I felt warm all over, flushed in a way that had nothing to do with the afternoon heat. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever called me a peach before.”

  His lips spread into a slow smile that made the nerve endings in my skin go haywire. “I can’t imagine why not.” Just as my senses were taking a magic carpet ride to Shangri.La, he glanced up and down the road again, then slipped his fingers over the gearshift, like he was ready to proceed with our trip. “So … I could drive you over to McGregor. It’s only about fifteen miles from here, the back way.” He nodded toward the road opposite the direction we’d come.

  Uncertainty swept over me, sudden and surprising like the spray off a winter sea. “I don’t …” For a moment, I couldn’t think. What would happen if I said yes? Was the house even still there? If it was, would I have the courage to open the gate, walk past the stone lions, and traverse the pathway in the shadow of the oak trees, knock on the door …

  What if she wasn’t even there anymore? What if, all these years, I’d been mentally role-playing something that would never happen?

  What if she was there and she didn’t want to see me? What if she wasn’t any happier to have me standing on her doorstep now than she was to see my father, all those times the wind blew us in?

  Did I really want to know? Did I really want to make contact with her while I was homeless in the middle of a hurricane evacuation? She’d only think I was there looking for help, asking for a handout or a place to stay. She’d think things were just like they’d always been.

  Wouldn’t she?

  It was so much easier to leave the questions unanswered, to let time pass by. Just drift … from one week to the next, from one year to the next, from one relationship to the next. In spite of all my determination to build a different life, a better life than the one I’d grown up with, the truth was that I was just like my father. I’d drifted around, working in tourist shops, taking contracts on cruise ships, forming surface relationships. Everything I owned, everything I had to show for the first twenty-seven years of my life, could fit in a van and a tiny apartment. I’d grown up to be exactly what I was when Grandmother Miller saw me last. She wouldn’t like me any more now than she did then.

  The realization was painful.

  Nothing adrift is meant to stay adrift forever. The words of the street preacher on the pier floated across my thoughts like the shadow of a gull flying over. He’d quoted a Scripture about coming home, then he’d opened his arms to the sky and the sea and the gathering of transients and said, Come home, brothers. Come home.

  Home. My heart didn’t even know what that word really meant. Home wasn’t a cabin on a cruise ship, or an apartment over a surf shop. It was a place where you looked across a field of grass and saw whispers of your childhood among the live oaks and the yuccas drying in the sun. Kemp had no idea how fortunate he really was.

  I would never be home, because for me the past was scattered like dandelion seeds, bits and pieces sprouting here and sprouting there, nothing rooted very deeply.

  “How long since you’ve seen her?” Kemp’s voice was quiet, his face empathic. “Your grandmother.”

  “Since I was a kid. Thirteen, I guess. We visited once after my little brother died—to see his headstone in the family plot. After that, my mom moved to Arizona, and my dad and I spent the year with harvest crews up in the Dakotas. It was someplace different. I guess Dad thought that would be the easiest thing.”

  Kemp relaxed in his seat again, as if he’d stopped considering whether we would turn toward McGregor or toward Daily. “That must have been hard. I don’t remember when my mom passed on. I was too little, but I know it was tough for Lauren. Dad said for months she carried around a lap quilt that was Mom’s—just dragged it along everywhere she went. It got smaller and smaller until finally she just gave it up, I guess. I don’t remember the end of the story.”

  “I kept Gil’s Bible after he died.” I’d never told anyone that before. The Bible was my secret. Something I didn’t want to share with anybody, yet telling Kemp felt natural. “It’s hard to let go, I guess.”

  “I don’t think you have to let go, really,” Kemp’s gaze had drifted past me. Not out the window, but into some private thought. “At some point you have to stop dragging around the blanket, but it’s okay to tuck a few pieces in your pocket. The bright ones. Good memories. If God intended us to just move on, those things wouldn’t stay with us so long.”

  Watching Kemp’s face, I thought of the image he’d created. Gil and me. Little pieces of a quilt, the bright ones, tucked away safely in a pocket, where the sunlight and the weather couldn’t fade them. Close by. Beautiful to look at, still.

  The Bible was the piece where I stood in the sea and tried to baptize my brother. Gil was never afraid to die. He was only afraid of what would happen to the rest of us after he was gone. When we sat on the rocks that day, he told me everything he read in that Bible. Everything about heaven. He didn’t have any doubt.

  Now, pulling out that scrap of memory, examining it, I realized that when I’d sat on the shore with Gil, I hadn’t doubted, either. I’d believed—right up until God didn’t do what I wanted, what I needed Him to do. He didn’t save my brother. After that, I’d let what Gil believed, what I believed, drift away, let it float so far out to sea that it was only a speck on the horizon, indistinguishable.

  The realization was startling, almost painful in its intensity. It wasn’t that I’d ever told myself I didn’t believe, just that I’d never told myself anything. I’d let life go on, like the tide coming in and out, floating faith closer sometimes, and then farther away. It seemed like a workable arrangement, since the boat never moved completely out of sight. There was always a mooring line that tied me to Gil, to the place he was now.

  Gil’s Bible. Gil’s Bible was the thread that stretched from here to eternity.

  “Which way?” Kemp’s voice broke into my thoughts.

  I tried to decide. Wasn’t it time to finally confront the very things that kept me separate from everyone? To stop dragging them around like dead weight?

  Kemp’s phone rang before I could answer. Grabbing it off the console, he looked at the screen. “Huh, wonder what Dad wants,” he muttered, then apologized for taking the call.

  I waved him off, saying, “No, it’s fine.” My mind was churning. I felt like a skydiver who’d discovered too late that the chute hadn’t been packed correctly. I was spinning and spinning until I’d lost all sense of equilibrium.

  The conversation between Kemp and his father was short, and when it was over the question of where
to go next had been answered. Kemp’s presence had been requested, more like demanded, in a project involving gathering cots and furniture and moving them someplace to better house the evacuees.

  “Guess you heard all that,” he apologized. “Sorry.”

  Apparently, he couldn’t see relief sliding over my skin like warm oil. “No. It’s fine.” A quick twinge of disappointment pinched unexpectedly at the thought that this was the end of our day together. “Can I come?” It sounded desperate. Embarrassment prickled where a sense of letdown had been. It was hard to say which was worse. “I mean, I don’t mind helping.”

  “I figured you’d come along.” He made it sound completely elementary, as if he’d never considered dropping me off before moving on to Project Furniture.

  Something twittered in my chest, like a string of twinkle lights glittering unexpectedly on a warm summer night. I felt the momentary high I had when a piece of jewelry came together as if by magic, and suddenly there was something beautiful where there had been only bits and pieces before, or the sense of triumph I had when a shop owner called me to gloat about a big sale and request new inventory. Those conversations usually took place with me privately jumping up and down while clutching my end of the phone. With Kemp there, I had to make an effort not to seem so giddy.

  As we headed off to gather furniture, I was lighter than air, floating like a puffy little cloud in the passenger seat. Driving the back roads, we talked about Daily, the people there, the town’s history as a railroad shipping point for wool and mohair, its struggle as downtown businesses dried up in the face of modern commuter mentality. “Everyone just drives to Waco or Temple to shop anymore,” Kemp said, the words sounding melancholy. “But I guess you never know what’ll happen. Now we’re the Home of Amber Anderson, and the future film site for The Horseman. All of a sudden, there’s tourism. Who’da thought, you know?”