“Yeah, well, you can let me know anytime,” he said again. “If you miss me at school you can always call me at home. You could...” He stopped midsentence when Misty pushed through the swinging door looking for me, her eyebrows going up in surprise to see Merle there. I could what, I wanted to say, but Merle had already leaned back in his chair, moving his knee so there was no risk of brushing against me again.
“I’m always looking for other yards to mow,” he said, turning to Misty. “Both of you can let me know if you need somebody.”
“My brother does most of the yards around here,” Misty said. “We don’t really have any grass, you know, but he’s done Kate’s yard for a long time.”
Merle just smirked and shrugged, put that whole little sandwich in his mouth. “So maybe he’s tired of doing it.”
I called for Misty to come on but she ignored me. “Katie wouldn’t want you mowing her yard anyway. You’d probably run over her cat with your mower, spray him all over the place.”
“Right,” he said. “You keep believing that.”
“Maybe we will.” She nudged me with her elbow. “Where’s R.W.?” she asked, her voice softening with the question. She flashed him a flirty little smile I had seen her practice in the mirror of her medicine cabinet a million and one times.
“What’s it to you?” he asked, and then they grinned at each other.
“Just curious.” She picked up a little sandwich, pulled the sliced olive off the top. “Oh, Kate, I forgot to tell you. I think Dean might ask you to go to the senior prom.” I didn’t say anything, just stood there with my face burning, eyes on that crystal salt shaker. She had told me again and again that we would be much more desirable to guys if they thought other guys were after us. “What do you think, Merle? Don’t you think Kate and Dean will look so cute together?”
“I don’t,” I began, about to say that I knew nothing about any of this and that Misty was way out of line to be discussing it when Merle’s “Who cares who goes anywhere with her?” hit my ears loud and clear. Merle crammed another sandwich in his mouth. This time he didn’t pick up one of the little party napkins as he had before but wiped his hands on his pants. “See ya,” he mumbled as he passed Mrs. Landell in the doorway.
It was like everything had sped up, and I followed Misty back into the living room, where she wanted to know what I was doing in the kitchen with Merle Hucks to begin with. Did I like Merle Hucks? Did he act like he liked me? No, I told her, no, a thousand times no. He had given me no reason to think that he liked me; his knee had brushed mine but it was an accident, and yes, he had talked to me, but what else could he do when we were the only two people in the room. Who cares who goes anywhere with her? he had said. Over by the refreshment table, Mrs. Poole was smoking rapidly while Sally Jean told her that her house was anesthetically pleasing. “What?” Mrs. Poole barely got the word out of her mouth before Sally Jean launched into a newly learned proverb: There are two special gifts we give our children; one is roots, the other is wings.
I kept hearing Merle say “hysterectomy,” and it seemed so out of character, Merle Hucks saying hysterectomy without laughing, without hesitation. “You could call me,” he had said and I couldn’t help but wonder what else he might have said if Misty hadn’t come in. He seemed like a different person there in Mrs. Poole’s kitchen when it was just the two of us, so different from the boy who came to school smelling of grease and onion rings. Even though he’d been out working in the yard, he looked cleaner there in her kitchen as he held the salt shaker up to the light and tilted it to catch the colors.
“Thanks a lot for laughing during my report,” Misty said later when we were sitting on my front porch. “Did you see Ruthie Sands when I said her shirt was polyester?” Misty laughed her loud hyena laugh and then went silent. “I hate Ruthie Sands.” She pushed off the floor to move the swing back and forth while I sat on the step and threw twigs out in the yard for Oliver to pounce on. “And Merle Hucks. Are you positive you don’t like him? You know I won’t tell.” I threw another twig but Oliver just sat and watched it; he was not nearly as frisky as he’d once been.
“Shhh,” I said, thinking that at any minute Merle would step from Mrs. Poole’s house and start walking this way. He could go home the back way, scaling our fence as I’d seen him do before, but I really didn’t think Mrs. Poole would allow that. “Someone might hear you.”
“So what do you care?” Misty pushed off again, the swing chains creaking. “Or do you? Just say one way or the other.”
“Well, I sure don’t want him getting hold of Oliver,” I said, and forced a loud, Misty-style laugh.
“Oh, he wouldn’t really hurt your cat,” she said and grinned. “I was just teasing around with him. But I really do think Dean might be thinking about asking you to the prom.”
“Yeah, right.” I went to the bottom step and rubbed Oliver’s back as he arched and stretched under my hand. “And of course I laughed at your report. You wanted people to laugh.”
“Who, me?” Misty batted her eyes, took a long drag from an imaginary cigarette as she mimicked Mrs. Poole. “Hey, your song sounded really good, too. I didn’t get to tell you because you were in the kitchen with Merle.” She paused, waiting for a reaction, but I didn’t look up. “Anyway, I’m gonna tell Lily and the others that I want you to sing for them in the bathroom next week. It’ll be like an audition. Lily has the idea that we’ll call ourselves Lily and the Holidays and enter the school talent show on the last day.”
I heard Mrs. Poole’s front door close and then within seconds, he was there, coming down the sidewalk. “Won’t that be fun?” Misty was asking; she still hadn’t seen Merle coming. “My mother would love that name, wouldn’t she? You get it, don’t you, like after Billie Holiday. Lily and the Holidays.”
“So what are you, Halloween?” Merle stopped right in front of my sidewalk and stood there, hands on hips, a toothpick in his mouth. Misty had to stand up from the swing to be able to see him over the tall lagustrums at that end of the porch.
“Yeah, right,” she said and came to the edge of the steps, held onto the porch rail with one hand and swung around in a mimic of some kind of model pose she had seen and studied.
“Or Ground Hog?” Then he turned and looked at me. “So where’s the prom date? Thought he’d be over here mowing the yard.”
“He will be soon,” Misty said. “And for your information, I’m more like Christmas; I’m Thanksgiving. I’m the Fourth of July. You know last Fourth of July my mother...”
“I was kidding,” Merle said, before she could tell the story he’d already heard at least once at school. “You know. A joke. Just kidding.” His voice got soft, almost like a whisper. I wanted him to look at me the way he had in Mrs. Poole’s kitchen, to finish what he had planned to say about me calling him at home, but he turned and started walking, intentionally stepping on every single crack in the sidewalk until he made a right turn and disappeared through the gates of Whispering Pines.
“Did you see that?” Misty asked. “He was so nice to me; he was flirting, don’t you think?” She turned and waited for my response, her eyes carefully lined in moss green. “He was flirting with one of us I’m sure.”
I stood and walked to the other end of the porch, where Oliver had moved and was sitting on the banister, his tail going back and forth like a pendulum. I rubbed his back, slowly glancing to the side just in time to see Merle disappear behind a grove of trees.
“You know.” Misty was beside me then and looking in the same direction. “One of us could go for Merle and the other for R.W.” That time she said double-u, and it made us both laugh. She was still staring into Whispering Pines when she started talking about Mo, about how she didn’t understand what her mother saw in Gene to begin with.
“You know,” she said, staring at her hands there on the banister, at the bright red polish on her gnawed-up nails, “some mornings I wake up and I say, oh, thank God, because it seems like a nightmare, jus
t a dream.” Her chin began to quiver and she bit her lower lip, paused until she had control and had blinked back the tears. “Sometimes it’s as long as a minute before I remember. Once I even called for her. I screamed, ‘Mama,’ and when I opened my eyes, Sally Jean was there in the doorway in that old ugly flannel housecoat of hers.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and laughed. “Why did it happen? Of all the people in all the cars on all the roads, why did it have to be my mother?” She turned and looked at me. “And of all the women in all the towns who drive cars that need new tires, why, why did my dad have to pick the Queen of Proverbs?” She reached for me then, her arm tightening around my neck as she squeezed and pressed her face into my shoulder. She opened her mouth, gasping like I hadn’t heard her do since that night before Mo’s funeral, and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying. “Make new friends but keep the old,” she finally whispered, voice cracking. “Some are silver, some are gold.” She pushed me back and looked me in the eye, shook her head and then collapsed in laughter. She lay back on the floor of the porch, her tennis shoes propped up on the railing and moving back and forth with her laughing like windshield wipers. “So maybe I’ll go for R. Dubya,” she cackled, holding her stomach. “You know what they say.” She paused, wiped the little tear from the corner of her eye, breathed deeply and then sputtered. “One girl’s R. Double-U is another girl’s R. Dubya.”
“Anyone can be an R. Double-U,” I added, by then down beside her, my long feet right next to hers. “But it takes someone special to be an R. Dubya.”
“Bless this mess,” she said and sighed, stretched like a big cat and then relaxed, eyes closed, while my mother’s hanging planter turned in the wind, fuchsia blossoms drooping and scattering their petals.
Fifteen
Not long after school got out, Misty and I were out on the porch painting our toenails a color called Raspberry Dazzle when Merle walked by and Misty whistled. My impulse was to jump down into the shrubbery, but my toenails were all wet, and I had cotton wedged between my toes the way Mo had taught us to do. Instead I grabbed one of our fashion magazines and held it over my face. Merle stopped right there on the sidewalk like he might walk up on the porch but he didn’t. “Who’s that whistling?” he asked.
“Well, it certainly wasn’t me.” Misty got up and stood on the top step, hands on her hips. She had lost quite a bit of weight, and though she still had a way to go before she fit into all of Mo’s old shorts, she was very confident about the change in herself, confident enough to wear short shorts. The imprint of the webbing of the lawn chair where she had been sitting was firmly mashed and molded into her white thighs. “What makes you think a girl would whistle at you?”
He just shook his head, squinted off in the distance of the warehouse. “I didn’t say I thought a girl would. I was talking about you” I stayed seated and just listened to the two of them; there was a friendliness there beneath the surface.
“So what am I then?” she asked, and moved her hips. “A woman?” Misty threw back her head and laughed; she had told me that my project for the summer was to learn how to flirt, and that she was going to teach me.
“I thought an albino” he said and looked up and down her freckled white legs, bent down to pick up a pebble.
“Aw, go to hell,” she said, swinging one leg back and forth, toe pointed. “You’re just upset cause you haven’t been getting anything off of Perry Loomis or whoever you’re after.”
“Shhhh.” Impulsively, I jumped up and grabbed Misty by the arm, the cotton still between my toes. “My mother is going to hear you.”
“Don’t want you to get in trouble,” he said and looked up, those pale green eyes squinted against the sun, but he barely glanced at me before turning back to Misty. He tossed the pebble onto my sidewalk, and I watched it roll up to the bottom step. “There’s a cat,” he said, and pointed to Oliver. “Why don’t you dogs chase it?” His voice was the same tone as when the two of them had swapped insults earlier. He looked at Misty then and grinned.
“Cause we see a bigger pussy,” she hissed in a low voice but loud enough for him to hear.
“Stop, will you stop?” I twisted her arm until it went pink under my fingers. “Please?” I looked at him, too, and he grinned.
“Oh, I’m just kidding,” Misty said, and patted my shoulder, winked at Merle. “Katie takes everything so seriously.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed.” He started backing down the sidewalk, hands in his back pockets. “So don’t be so serious.” He smiled and then turned and walked away. When he got to the edge of the cemetery, he stopped and looked back. “And you,” he pointed to Misty, “you stop chasing cats. Kate used to think she was one.” And then he made that sound, that high pitched meeeoooowww that I hadn’t heard in years.
Misty looked at me with raised eyebrows. “You’re getting the hang of it,” she said. “Now next time you start flirting, well, do it without that.” She pointed to the wads of cotton between my toes. Later that day, long after Misty had gone home and most people were inside eating supper or watching TV, I looked out my bedroom window and caught a glimpse of Merle out in Whispering Pines. He was just sitting on one of the large tombstones, as motionless as if he were a statue himself; he turned once, face into the wind so that his bangs were lifted from his forehead, and it seemed like he looked right at my window. There was a split second when I was sure of it, so I just stood back and watched him. All around him the sky was dark and swirling with the rush that comes just before a summer storm.
It was the following week that Angela arrived at our house without any warning at all, or, as my mother chose to believe, only with warning to my father, who, it seemed, had forgotten to tell us. I had decided to make a serious appraisal of myself based on a beauty scale in Glamour magazine, and I was doing just that, sitting in the swing and trying to determine the shape of my face and eyes, when the rusty blue Impala pulled up and stopped.
I hadn’t even heard my father come out onto the porch, but he was there, standing on the top step, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves pushed up, waving his arm just as he had done that day years before on Ferris Beach. It all seemed to be in slow motion, the creak of the swing, my father moving down the sidewalk, Angela lifting the trunk and leaning in, the swish swish of Mrs. Poole’s sprinkler as it fanned a misty arc over the top of the hedge.
My mother was there, too, a scarf covering her hair and tied loosely at the back of her neck. She had come out to shake the dust mop, and now she stood like a soldier at attention with the mop over her shoulder, in her faded knit pedal pushers and slip-on sandals, her legs alabaster white next to mine, which were already tan. Tanning was a beauty element in my favor, but I was too stunned to add this to the Glamour checklist. My mother looked at my father, eyes wide, mouth open, a look more of shock than anger, but he wasn’t even looking. I watched her shoulders sink, saw the head of the mop fall loosely to the floor. “Fred,” she whispered, her hand immediately reaching to remove the scarf and then dropping to the neck of her sleeveless top, but he didn’t even hear her as he reached into the trunk and came out with two small suitcases. “Oh God.” Mama glanced at me and then turned and dashed back into the house.
I felt torn, back and forth like the swing or the swish of the sprinkler, back and forth like the sound of a lawnmower down at the end of the block. The two of them hugged, standing beside the bags on the sidewalk, while I concentrated on the distant humming sound. Angela’s hair was longer than before, parted down the middle, a small section on each side braided and pinned back. She wore short shorts made of fabric that looked like newsprint and a halter top to match. Even in her wedged platform sandals, she was still a good six inches shorter than my father, her calves shapely muscular. As they came up the walk side by side, I heard a sudden movement and knew that my mother had been standing there behind the dark mesh of the screen.
“Kitty?” Angela said. “How are you?” She pulled me up from the swing and took me in fro
m head to foot; I was barefooted and still taller than she was. “You look wonderful,” she squealed, and gave me a quick hug.
I followed them inside, where the foyer was cool and dark compared to the brightness of our yard. “Cleva?” my father called, and walked towards the kitchen. I knew she would act as if she had never seen a thing. “Cleva, we have company.” Angela was still laughing about how her old car had barely made the forty-mile drive when my mother came out into the hall, her hair hanging loosely down her back; she had a fondue fork in her hand and a look of surprise on her face. It was planned spontaneity, right down to her bare feet, something she never did.
“Well, what a surprise,” she said. “I’m just doing my same old little housewife things, just whipping up a little chicken Kiev, baking some bread, chocolate cherries and mandarin oranges for dessert.” She smiled the same way she did when she had to reprimand me in public. “Honey, could you go see if Sally Jean has a stick of butter.” She nodded and smiled as my father led Angela upstairs to our guest room and then turned quickly, eyes anxious as she grabbed my arm. “Tell Sally Jean that I need all the butter she has and some of those mandarin oranges that she is forever talking about.” She twisted my arm harder. “Tell her if she doesn’t have them to please go to the store and bring them to me, that I’ll pay her back and owe her one.”
Poor Sally Jean’s cabinets were overturned as she searched out two cans of oranges, thrilled to be able to serve and please my mother; she gave me five sticks of butter with promises of how she would gladly go to the store if my mother needed more. I repeated all of this as I placed the butter and the cans in my mother’s desperate hands, and then I went and stood at the screen door and stared out at the rusty blue car. Mrs. Poole’s sprinkler was still going and there was a faint rainbow mist over the hedge.
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