by Amy Allgeyer
Cole comes back with a pair of cut-off sweatpants. “The bathroom’s the first door on the right.”
I close the door behind me and struggle out of the tight, wet denim. After cinching the shorts around my waist, I glance in the mirror, wipe away a smudge of eyeliner and head back to the kitchen.
“Okay.” I’m looking seriously ridiculous in my wool sweater and his gym shorts. But when Cole turns around he’s not looking at my clothes.
“Wow. Nice legs.”
“Thanks.”
“You run?”
“No. Volleyball.”
He takes my wet jeans, and I follow him into the kitchen, where he rinses the beer out in the sink.
“I feel pretty silly like this,” I say, tugging the shorts up. “I hope your parents don’t come home soon.”
“No worries.” Cole shuts off the water and turns to me. His grin isn’t all dimples this time. It’s sexier, hungry animal dressed in Southern gentleman. Something in my stomach flip-flops, and I start thinking about what his hands would feel like on my bare legs.
“No worries about them coming home? Or that I look silly?”
“Both?” He walks his fingers around my waist and steps closer. “They went to Charlottesville to see my sister this weekend. She’s at UVA.”
“Oh. All weekend?”
Cole lays my jeans on the counter and puts one hand against my cheek, staring into my eyes. I’m all alone with the cutest guy in the world. I’m trying to think of something perfect to say, but all I come up with is, “I didn’t even know you had a sister.”
My jeans slide off the counter. I hear the buttons hit the floor, but Cole’s hands are around me, doing a slide of their own—one up my back, the other, across my butt in the too-loose shorts. I feel out of breath, like I’ve been climbing the ridge trail. I can’t think straight with his kisses covering my neck, my cheeks, my mouth.
We wobble into the living room, stumbling over each other’s feet, and crash onto the couch. He’s pressing into me. His hands are sliding across my ribs, pushing my sweater up. It feels so warm, his skin against mine. I want more. I want to feel the muscles in his stomach, to run my hands across his bare chest.
I’m tugging at the buttons on his shirt, wishing it had a zipper. So preoccupied am I with the treasure beyond the stupid freaking buttons that I don’t notice my shorts—his shorts—are sliding down my thighs. Along with my underwear.
“Whoa,” I gasp.
“God, Lib. You’re so beautiful,” he murmurs in my ear.
“But …” I can’t think. It feels good, what he’s doing. Oh my God. What is he doing?
“Aw, Liberty,” he whispers. Now he’s fumbling with his jeans. My hands are frozen on his shirt. I’ve never done this. Never come anywhere close to this.
His hips are against mine now. I can feel the heat of his body on my skin, his angles, hollows, and points. He’s doing that thing again, that feels so good—but also scary. I’m way, way outside my comfort zone.
“Stop,” I whisper.
Whether he can’t hear me or whether he’s ignoring me, I can’t tell, but nothing changes.
“Stop. Cole, stop.”
“Shh … you’re okay,” he says.
I scoot away from him, up the couch. The elephant pillows are hampering my progress. “Cole! Stop! Stop it!”
He groans, loud, and rolls off onto the floor, breathing hard. “Dammit, Liberty. You can’t just cut me off like that.”
“I’m not ready,” I mumble. My logical mind says I shouldn’t feel bad, but I do. And childish.
Cole says nothing. I pull my underwear and shorts back up, and sit huddled on the couch, watching him stare at the ceiling.
My half-empty beer sits in silhouette against the flickering television. A toy commercial has replaced The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. I stare absently and wonder what exactly just happened here.
On the surface, it seems obvious. Cole wanted to have sex. I asked him to stop and he did. I have the right to decide what happens to my body. I guess he has the right to be pissed about it. But it’s not like him to lose his temper.
I feel like I should apologize for something. But the only thing I can come up with is “Sorry I was late,” which seems ridiculous. So I sit in silence, hugging my legs, half-naked and feeling totally exposed.
“I’m sorry,” Cole says finally. “I wasn’t trying to force you.” He turns toward me. “You know that, right?”
I nod.
“You’re just so beautiful. I can’t help it.”
I nod again. “It’s okay. It felt good, but … I can’t.”
His turn to nod. “A’ight. It’s okay.”
He stands, pulling his pants up as he does, and heads into the kitchen. He’s back in a few seconds with my wet jeans. “They’re not dry, but at least they don’t smell like beer.”
The return of my pants seems to indicate an end to the evening. It can’t be later than eight thirty, but there’s some wicked-crazy tension in the room. Again, I feel like I’ve been tried and convicted of something, though I’m not sure what.
Cole takes my beer into the kitchen and dumps it while I get changed. As I pull on my pants, I think how glad I am that I drove.
He leans against the door frame. “Are we okay?”
He’s the one asking the question, but I don’t think I’m the one with the answer. “All square.” I hope my face looks surer than I feel. I want him to hug me. To tell me everything’s fine. Getting rushed out the door, I feel like I’m being punished.
“I’m doing something with Dobber tomorrow night,” he says. “But I’ll see you at church on Sunday?”
“Oh.” We hadn’t technically talked about Saturday night, but I sort of assumed we’d be together. “Okay. You and Dobber are talking again?”
“What? You mean that thing at lunch?”
I nod.
“That was nothing. He knew I was right. He just had to remember it is all.”
“Oh.” I want so badly to disagree, but it seems stupid to pick a fight in the middle of making up. “Well … good.” I take my purse and keys off the table behind the couch, trying to think of some way to make things normal between us. “So, your parents won’t be here, but you’re still going to church Sunday?”
“Only if I get to see you.” It’s embarrassing how his dimples melt me, no matter what.
“I’ll be there. No chance of skipping with Granny around.”
“It’s a date, then.” He winks and wraps his arm around my shoulders as I head for the door, making me feel at least a little better.
“Hm. Don’t let her hear you say that.” If she knew what just happened here, she’d be making summer sausage out of Cole right now. With a chunk or two of me thrown in for good measure.
Cole grins. “It’ll be our secret.”
Fourteen
“Ms. Briscoe? Any ideas?”
My eyes fly up to the front of the class, where my calculus teacher taps an equation on the board. “Um …” I have no idea what he’s asking. For the past twenty minutes, I’ve been replaying the conversation I had with Cole yesterday at church. The one where he acted like everything was totally normal. Sort of. “Um … no.”
Mr. Patterson frowns and points his marker at me. “Pay attention, please. Jones, how about you?”
Jones offers up a suggestion as I fall back into my thoughts. After the service, Cole and I talked for a while; then he kissed me good-bye, much to Granny’s horror. Basically, a perfectly normal Sunday … but something still felt off, and I’ve been worrying about it ever since. That, and everything else. Like flunking Calculus. And the water. And Granny.
Today’s the appointment for her x-ray, and I’ve been wondering about the cost. Will it be a hundred dollars? Or a thousand? It doesn’t really matter since we don’t have either. Not even clo
se.
Thanks to the quarter tank of gas I put in the car today, we have only twelve dollars for this week’s groceries. Eight dollars less than normal doesn’t seem like a big deal until I start trying to figure out what we’re going to give up. Some food? Granny’s Mountain Dew? Ironically, eight dollars is exactly what we spend per week on bottled water.
“You okay, over there?” Granny asks, as we’re driving to her appointment.
“I’m fine. Just thinking. How about you?”
“I’m awright. Just, I don’t feel too chatty.”
“No, neither do I.”
We’re a couple miles from the clinic when she says, “You think I got it?”
“What?” I look over. Her face is drawn up with worry, like it’s been stitched on. “Cancer?”
Her lower lip quivers as she nods.
What can I say? I don’t want to worry her. But she’d see right through me bullshitting her, and that would piss her off. After a few seconds, I give her the truth. “I don’t know.”
She reaches over and squeezes my hand. “Me neither.”
I’m pulling off the highway a few minutes later when she says, “Your family’s your rock, Liberty. You remember that. Whatever happens to me, the good Lord says if you build your house on solid rock, you gon’ be okay.” There are tears in her eyes.
I roll up to the stoplight and turn to her. “Stop that. Right now! There will be no quoting from the Bible unless we find out something’s wrong. Okay?”
She laughs, a croaking, baby bird sound that builds into a belly laugh that brings on a hoarse cough. “You tickle me. Awright, then. Drive on and let’s get them pictures shot. I’m plumb tuckered out already.”
The x-rays take all of fifteen minutes, and then we’re in the car, headed back over the mountain.
“Granny, how long’s the water been orange?”
“Oh Lord, Liberty. You done asked me that fifty-leven times.”
“Just an estimate. Like, a year? A couple months?”
“Been less than three, ’cause it weren’t that way before Tanner’s Peak got blowed off.”
“Did you ever drink it?”
“I reckon I did. Toward the beginning. They told us it was safe.”
“Who did?”
“The county.”
I tap my fingers on the steering wheel. “Did you get some kind of report?”
“Yep. Came in the mail, all official looking.”
“Do you still have it?”
Granny sighs. “Reckon I do. Somewheres.”
“If they said the water was safe, what made you stop drinking it?”
“Well, it don’t taste right.”
“How long did you drink it before—”
“God almighty!” Granny says. “Am I on trial for my life? Stop asking me all these dang questions. I’m tired.”
“All right, all right. You just rest. We’ll be home in half an hour.”
“Wake me up then,” she says.
“What else would I do? Leave you asleep in the car?”
“I wouldn’t put it past you.”
When we get home, Granny heads for the couch, and I head for the old wood desk in the corner of the dining room. The drawers are stuffed with paperwork—letters, receipts, bills. Like Granddaddy, Granny keeps everything. Unlike Granddaddy, she doesn’t organize any of it.
It takes an hour, but I find the water report buried in the third drawer. There’s a cover letter from the county saying the numbers on the report are well within legal limits, and a second page from Quality Laboratory Services. I glance at the data listed, but it doesn’t mean much to me. Random numbers follow various elements: coliform bacteria, nitrate-nitrogen, pH, iron, sulfate sulfur, chloride, etc.
I have to say it all looks pretty professional and well done. I’ll look up minimum standards for drinking water next time I’m at the library. But the letter says they’re within legal limits, which means our water is safe to drink.
I walk into the kitchen and fill a glass from the sink. It’s safe, I tell myself, staring at the bright orange liquid. According to the county, I can drink this and not get sick. That’ll save us eight dollars a week in bottled water. That’s 40 percent of our grocery bill. We could get almost twice as much food—meat, vegetables, maybe even some fresh fruit!
I put the glass to my lips.
It’s safe. The county paper says so.
Just a little rust. Everybody says so.
I’m thinking of strawberries and oranges and rib-eye steak. My mouth is watering like Niagara Falls, but then Granny starts to cough. It goes on and on until she’s hacking up what I know are tiny clots of blood. Probably wiping them on the inside of her T-shirt so I don’t see them, so I won’t worry, so I’m not reminded that she’s dying.
Sighing, I dump the water into the sink.
Fifteen
The radiologist said it would be days before we get the results, so for the rest of the week, we go through the motions. Granny rests, worries, and prays. I worry too, but I try not to let her see. MFM sends new emails that I regularly delete without reading. The application I requested from Georgetown arrives. The early-action deadline isn’t until November, so I put it aside. But I wonder if it’s even worth filling out. Even if they accepted me, I still don’t have any money.
Other than that, it’s life as usual. I go to school and hang out with Cole. Things are back to normal, I think, but I never mention the mine, and I only go to the library when I know he’s busy with other stuff, like during baseball practice—which is where he is when I finally get to check those water numbers.
It’s just like the county claimed; all the levels are well within the legal limits. It appears Granny’s water is just as safe as the water we had in DC. My mind spins out a dozen different conspiracy theories. Maybe the testing company lied about the results. Maybe the county altered the data. But none of them really make sense. Neither the lab nor the county would want people drinking bad water.
“Hey, beautiful.”
I jump ten feet and click “home” … trying to leave the water quality web page before Cole sees it.
“Hey.” I stand and turn to him, blocking the computer. Its dial-up connection is slower than glaciers. “I thought you had practice.”
His eyes stare past me, toward the screen. “We got done early.”
“Nice.” I put my hands on his shoulders, hoping he’ll look at me instead. “So, what are you doing here?”
“History project.” Instead of looking deep and romantically into my eyes, he leans down and starts reading the web page.
There’s silence. Then he stands up, frowning at me. “You’re still tryin’ to make trouble for the mine?”
“Not trouble,” I say. “I just want to—”
“All the stuff Mr. Peabody does for this town. All those jobs he creates.”
“Okay, hang on.” I try to keep my voice level, because I want him to really listen to me. “You keep saying that MTR creates all these great jobs. But all the numbers indicate that a mountaintop removal mine uses thirty percent fewer workers than the old way. So Peabody actually cut jobs.”
Cole rolls his eyes. “Where’d you get that? One of your bleeding-heart websites about saving salamanders?”
“No, it’s a fact,” I say. The librarian’s giving me a pretty furious shh signal, so I lower my voice. “Think about it. Half this town used to work for the mine. Now there’s only a handful of jobs. People are living on welfare. Businesses are bankrupt.”
“That’s not Peabody’s fault,” Cole says. “That’s because of the economy.”
I’m baffled that someone as bright as Cole could be so deluded by the mine’s propaganda machine. “No,” I say gently. “It’s not.”
“Look, Liberty …” He kneels down and puts his hands on my knees
. “I understand you’re upset about your granny. But …” I can tell he’s trying to pick just the right words. “Sometimes cancer just happens. It’s not Peabody’s fault. It’s not anybody’s fault.”
“But what if, in this case, it is somebody’s fault? And what if that somebody is the mine?”
“What if it’s not? I mean, think about what you’re doing. If you’re wrong and people end up losing jobs over this … Peabody Mining’s the only game in town. If he shuts down, there’ll be nothing.”
“And that’s worse than people dying?”
“Lib, I don’t understand how somebody as smart as you can buy into all these smoke and mirrors.”
Oh my God.
“Look, just trust me on one thing. You have to stop stirring up trouble. For you own good.”
“My own good? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m worried about you. You wanna fit in here, right? But if you keep pointing fingers at Peabody, you’re just gonna piss people off.”
“But people are dying,” I say.
“Not because of the mine.”
“You don’t know that!”
He runs his hands through his sweaty hair and hooks his fingers behind his head. “Look, can’t we just … what’s the term? Agree to disagree?”
“Sure.” I can agree to disagree—without agreeing to drop my research.
He leans forward and kisses me on the forehead. “I just want you to be happy. Take my advice and leave the mine alone. Okay?”
I just smile and bite the hell out of my tongue as he heads for the history section.
Saturday morning, spring’s made a full frontal attack on winter. The dogwoods are budding out and the last little bite in the air is gone. There’s always a point between the cold and warm of the year when I step outside and just know, somewhere in my bones, that winter’s over. It’s probably some kind of caveman instinct, but it makes me feel hopeful. Or it would, if I didn’t have to re-create the miracle of the loaves and fishes at Kroger today. Another week’s worth of food to buy and eight dollars less to do it with.
After breakfast, I fire up the El Camino and drive down the mountain with Granny’s SNAP card and twelve dollars in my pocket. Forty-five minutes later, I’m holding two packages of frozen vegetables and staring at the cases of bottled water in the cart. I already put back Granny’s Mountain Dew, but I’m still three dollars short. My choices are (a) have no vegetables this week, or (b) put back one of the cases of water. Which means, we’d run out of water around Wednesday. Which means …
