In Stereo Where Available (22 page)

He sighed. “I promise I’ll stop if you tell me to. And I promise I’ll do everything I can to make it feel amazing.”

“Really?”

“Really. I love you, Phoebe. I swear I’m not going to let you down.”

I met his appealing eyes and weighed my fear against what I wanted. I wanted to be able to look at him, tomorrow or the next day, alone or in a gathering of people, and know that I’d held nothing back from him after he’d told me he loved me. I wanted to know what drove him, what lay at the end of the spectrum of his senses, the shape of the passion he had been holding back. And I didn’t want to live any longer with the knowledge that there were women in the world who knew him in ways that I didn’t know him. I didn’t want to live with that at all.

“I trust you,” I told him.

He put his hand behind my neck and kissed me, not quite the way he had in the car, but with a mind toward my fear. I could feel my anxiety slipping away with the touch of his hands, and then, empty of fear, the love rushing in to fill the void.

“Check it out,” said Jerry. We were stopped at a convenience store in Georgia, buying peach tea Snapples and a bag of pistachios and a local newspaper that Jerry would later read aloud from as I drove, quoting the conservative columnists in a deadpan Southern drawl that almost caused two accidents south of Savannah. He held up a copy of the latest edition of
People
magazine. Rhett, Ashley, and the four remaining
Belle of Georgia
girls decorated the cover in a photo montage. Across the bottom of the cover, in huge white letters, the text read,
The Final Battle!

I grabbed it from his hands and flipped quickly to the article. Across the counter, the gritty-looking man with gray curls under his Lot & Feed Stores baseball cap leaned toward me and said around his toothpick, “You going to buy that, missy?”

Out on the cement curb, I pulled the magazine back open and scanned over the bubbly text. “The Rebel cry has been ‘take no prisoners,’ but it’s every belle for herself as
Georgia
rushes to its thrilling conclusion. The past week’s announcement that one winning couple will star on MTV’s
Newlyweds
has the contestants plotting anew to win the hearts of
Georgia
’s leading men. But true love is its own reward!”

Jerry stood behind me with his head over my shoulder, looking at the pictures while he rubbed up against my backside in full view of the locals passing in and out the door of the Circle K. Ever since we got back on the road toward Florida, he had been acting like a middle-school kid trying to grope his girlfriend behind the gym after a school dance. For a guy who had claimed that the decision between sex and
Trading Spaces
was a toss-up, he didn’t seem to be thinking too much about paint colors and the thousand-dollar budget.

“Can you wait until tonight?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. I can try.”

“Try to focus on Christmas. That’ll take your mind off it.”

“Yeah, I was just thinking about that. My parents are probably planning for us all to go to church this evening. They’ve got a pretty nice church where they live.”

“See? Isn’t that better than just sitting around being frustrated?”

“Yeah. If we tell them we went to church yesterday, we’ll have the house to ourselves for at least an hour and a half.”

I handed him the magazine. “Get back in the car. I’ll drive for a while.”

Jerry’s parents’ house was a little Spanish-style place on a street lined with palm trees and impeccably tidy gardens.
Sunhaven
, said the sign at the entrance to the development.
A Community of Active Adults
.

“If you consider the VFW to be ‘active,’“ Jerry said as I read it aloud.

“Is your dad in the VFW?”

“No. He did a tour of duty in Vietnam, but the thing he’s interested in now is golf. He plays golf practically every day of the week. Sometimes my mom plays with him. I’m sure he’ll get me out on the course a couple times before we go home.”

“You play golf, too?”

“Sure, when I come down here. I don’t have the time back home. Or the money. But I like it. I’m okay at it.”

“Heavy metal and golf, huh?”

He smiled, blinking behind his sunglasses. “Don’t knock it. Everybody gets old eventually. My goal is to be one of those old guys who plays golf all day long and goes out to the Old Country Buffet for dinner every night to talk to all my old friends about prescription-drug coverage. And I bet Metallica will
still
be touring.”

I laughed. “So, have your parents said anything about sleeping arrangements?”

“Nah, they’re keeping me in suspense. Usually I get the sofa, but I’ve never brought anyone down with me before. Stella and her husband always got the extra bedroom, but obviously, her husband’s not here. My mom’s really nice, but I don’t know how she’d feel about us sleeping in a bed together. It’s never come up before.”

“How conservative are they?”

“Not overly. They’re like me. That’s why I can’t predict it.
I
don’t have a problem with unmarried people sharing a bed, of course, but if it were my kid asking, I might get a little jumpy. So we’ll see.”

Jerry’s mother had a blue tin of butter cookies out on the coffee table when we came in. She shook my hand with both of hers and ushered us over to the plastic-covered sofa with a multicolored afghan draped over the back of it. She was about five feet tall and very plump, with upswept dark brown hair in a style that looked like it hadn’t changed since 1969.

“So you’re Phoebe,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

I smiled and took a butter cookie. Why was that such a common thing for people to say during an introduction? Wasn’t it always a little frightening? Shouldn’t it be rude to imply that endless conversations about the person have been going on behind their back?

“Thanks,” I returned. “I’ve heard a lot about you, too.”

“I understand you’re a teacher.”

“Yes, I teach first grade.”

“Jerry’s a teacher, too. No wonder you get along so nicely.”

Jerry sat back and draped his arm across the back of the sofa. Like I was going to drive seven hundred miles with the guy to meet his parents and not know what he did for a living. I looked across the room, where the spindly, tinsel-strewn artificial Christmas tree stood beside a large, old-fashioned stereo cabinet. There were about two dozen pictures of Betsy and Marco lined up on top of the cabinet. Suddenly, I got it. To her, this wasn’t just a Christmas visit. This was like a college interview, with me as the admissions officer. It was potentially her one chance to get her thirty-three-year-old only son married off.

“We do have a lot in common,” I agreed.

“Did I tell you how we met, Mom?” asked Jerry.

She smiled, her cheeks dimpling. “How?”

“She was a wrong number. I got a phone number from a woman I met at a teachers’ conference and it turned out to be Phoebe’s number instead. How’s that for crazy?”

“Sounds
lucky
to me.”

“It gets weirder,” he added. “Her younger sister’s in one of my classes. The poor kid starts doing duck-and-cover maneuvers under her desk every time I start talking about Dante’s love for Beatrice in
The Inferno
or whatever. The whole thing’s killing her.”

Jerry’s mother laughed. “Small world, I suppose.”

“You got that right.” Jerry fanned his fingers out and rubbed them up and down my back, curled like he was holding a ball. “So Stella hasn’t gotten here yet?”

“Your father’s at the airport picking her up right now. I’ve got the bed all made up for her. Shame about her and Rick. I never did like him any too much.”

“Yeah, it’s a shame all right. She’s doing a good job holding herself together. So…where should Phoebe and I put our stuff?”

“Oh, just out here on the sunporch. Your father and I got a new bed and we moved the old one out here.” She stood up, and we followed her out to the glass-walled room, a little musty and tiled in white linoleum, with orange-carpeted cat perches along the windows. There was an old queen-sized bed pushed up against the wall, covered in bright white sheets, with an orange blanket folded down at the end. “That should do, I hope.”

“Sure, it’s fine.”

“Well, I’ll let you get settled in, then. Phoebe, it’s so nice to meet you.”

“You, too.”

She toddled off on her short legs, and Jerry grinned at me. “Slick, huh?”

“What’s slick?”

“You see how she pulled that off? See, she’s letting us share a bed.” He gestured to the windows. “In
here
. Where we can’t do anything.”

“Is that what she’s thinking?”

“Oh, I’m sure it is. She’s a smart lady. She even gave us the white sheets. I’m sure she’ll be going over them with a magnifying glass when we leave.”

I giggled. “Maybe we should get a box of those Afterglow things.”

“I should have warned you about her, though. Don’t take anything she says too seriously, okay? She’s kind of got an agenda. As you may have noticed.”

“I noticed. Don’t worry about it. All mothers are like that, except mine.”

“Just ignore it. I’m actually pretty surprised about this bed-sharing thing. She never let Stella and Rick get away with that before they got married. She must really be desperate.”

“Maybe she’s taking a cue from what happened to Stella and Rick.”

“Maybe. After they got married, though, it was a whole other story. Nothing like hearing your sister and her husband going at it on the other side of the wall to ruin a perfectly good holiday vacation.” He sighed and flicked the light switch off. “We’ll make it work. I can probably get Stella to distract her. She owes me big time.”

“So tell me more about yourself, Phoebe,” said Jerry’s mother. She passed the sweet potatoes with marshmallows across the table to me and smiled, the little metal hooks of her bridgework showing. I could see where Jerry got his talent for cooking. My own mother’s version of a Christmas dinner was a row of cans opened one at a time and heated in the microwave, plus a ham. This was the first Norman Rockwell Christmas dinner I could remember ever having been a part of.

“Well, what do you want to know?”

“She’s a twin,” said Jerry. “She’s also an Oprah’s Book Club fan, and she has appalling taste in music.”

“Oh, Jerry.” This time she passed the green-bean casserole. “Are you really a twin?”

“Yeah. My father has a set of twin sisters, too. They seem to run in my family.”

His mother smiled. “Oh, my. Look out.”

“Good thing you like kids, Jerry,” said Stella.

Jerry took a bite of mashed potatoes and gave her a reproving glare.

“We’ve had twins in our family,” his mother said. “Your father’s aunt had twin boys. We have a picture somewhere. Two cuter little boys you never did see.”

Stella swirled her fork in her gravy. I could see her slipping into her role around the dinner table, the pesky little sister. “Maybe you guys’ll have quadruplets.”

“You want to live to see them?” Jerry asked.

“Knock it off, you two,” said his father mildly. Jerry’s father looked very much like him, tall and blue-eyed and honest-looking, but with a gregarious self-confidence that Jerry had none of. “So you’ve got what, Phoebe? A sister, then?”

“Yeah. Her name is Madison.”

Jerry’s mother reached for the gravy. “Is she married?”

“Um, not yet. She’s sort of working on that.” They gave me a quizzical look, so I continued. “She’s on a TV show where you can sort of win a husband. One of those reality shows. The finale is tomorrow night, actually. Jerry and I are planning to watch it.”

“Well, I should hope so. Do you think she’ll win?”

“She might. She’s been kind of, uh, pulling out all the stops.”

Jerry coughed and reached for his iced tea. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or choking.

“Are you all right, Jerry?” asked his mom.

“I’m fine.”

“Well, let’s all watch it together,” said his mother warmly. “I’d love to see this sister of yours. She sounds like such an interesting person.”

Jerry hastily swallowed his tea. “You don’t have to. I’m sure you’ll meet her eventually. I mean, if, uh—”