Joyland (34 page)

“Guilty as charged.”

“Good.”

It
wasn’t
just the once, and that was lucky for me, because the first time lasted I’m going to say eight seconds. Maybe nine. I got inside, that much I did manage, but then everything spurted everywhere. I may have been more embarrassed once—the time I blew an ass-trumpet while taking communion at Methodist Youth Camp—but I don’t think so.

“Oh God,” I said, and put a hand over my eyes.

She laughed, but there was nothing mean about it. “In a weird way, I’m flattered. Try to relax. I’m going downstairs for another check on Mike. I’d just as soon he didn’t catch me in bed with Howie the Happy Hound.”

“Very funny.” I think if I’d blushed any harder, my skin would have caught on fire.

“I think you’ll be ready again when I come back. It’s the nice thing about being twenty-one, Dev. If you were seventeen, you’d probably be ready now.”

She came back with a couple of sodas in an ice bucket, but when she slipped out of her robe and stood there naked, Coke was the last thing I wanted. The second time was quite a bit better; I think I might have managed four minutes. Then she began to cry out softly, and I was gone. But what a way to go.

We drowsed, Annie with her head pillowed in the hollow of my shoulder. “Okay?” she asked.

“So okay I can’t believe it.”

I didn’t see her smile, but I felt it. “After all these years, this bedroom finally gets used for something besides sleeping.”

“Doesn’t your father ever stay here?”

“Not for a long time, and I only started coming back because Mike loves it here. Sometimes I can face the fact that he’s almost certainly going to die, but mostly I can’t. I just turn away from it. I make deals with myself. ‘If I don’t take him to Joyland, he won’t die. If I don’t make it up with my father so Dad can come and see him, he won’t die. If we just stay here, he won’t die.’ A couple of weeks ago, the first time I had to make him put on his coat to go down to the beach, I cried. He asked me what was wrong, and I told him it was my time of the month. He knows what that is.”

I remembered something Mike had said to her in the hospital parking lot:
It doesn’t have to be the last good time.
But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us.

She sat up, wrapping the sheet around her. “Remember me saying that Mike turned out to be my future? My brilliant career?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t think of another one. Anything beyond Michael is just . . . blank. Who said that in America there are no second acts?”

I took her hand. “Don’t worry about act two until act one is over.”

She slipped her hand free and caressed my face with it. “You’re young, but not entirely stupid.”

It was nice of her to say, but I certainly felt stupid. About Wendy, for one thing, but that wasn’t the only thing. I found my mind drifting to those damn pictures in Erin’s folder. Something about them . . .

She lay back down. The sheet slipped away from her nipples, and I felt myself begin to stir again. Some things about being twenty-one
were
pretty great. “The shooting gallery was fun. I forgot how good it is, sometimes, just to have that eye-and-hand thing going on. My father put a rifle in my hands for the first time when I was six. Just a little single-shot .22. I loved it.”

“Yeah?”

She was smiling. “Yeah. It was our thing, the thing that worked. The
only
thing, as it turned out.” She propped herself up on an elbow. “He’s been selling that hellfire and brimstone shit since he was a teenager, and it’s not just about the money—he got a triple helping of backroads gospel from his own parents, and I have no doubt he believes every word of it. You know what, though? He’s still a southern man first and a preacher second. He’s got a custom pickup truck that cost fifty thousand dollars, but a pickup truck is still a pickup truck. He still eats biscuits and gravy at Shoney’s. His idea of sophisticated humor is Minnie Pearl and Junior Samples. He loves songs about cheatin and honky-tonkin. And he loves his guns. I don’t care for his brand of Jesus and I have no interest in owning a pickup truck, but the guns . . . that he passed on to his only daughter. I go bang-bang and feel better. Shitty legacy, huh?”

I said nothing, only got out of bed and opened the Cokes. I gave one to her.

“He’s probably got fifty guns at his full-time place in Savannah, most of them valuable antiques, and there’s another half a dozen in the safe here. I’ve got two rifles of my own at my place in Chicago, although I hadn’t shot at a target for two years before today. If Mike dies . . .” She held the Coke bottle to the middle of her forehead, as if trying to soothe a headache.
“When
Mike dies, the first thing I’m going to do is get rid of them all. They’d be too much temptation.”

“Mike wouldn’t want—”

“No, of course not, I know that, but it’s not
all
about him. If I could believe—like my holy-hat father—that I was going to find Mike waiting outside the golden gates to show me in after I die, that would be one thing. But I don’t. I tried my ass off to believe that when I was a little girl, and I couldn’t. God and heaven lasted about four years longer than the Tooth Fairy, but in the end, I couldn’t. I think there’s just darkness. No thought, no memory, no love. Just darkness. Oblivion. That’s why I find what’s happening to him so hard to accept.”

“Mike knows it’s more than oblivion,” I said.

“What? Why? Why do you think that?”

Because she was there. He saw her, and he saw her go. Because she said thank you. And I know because I saw the Alice band, and Tom saw
her.

“Ask him,” I said. “But not today.”

She put her Coke aside and studied me. She was wearing the little smile that put dimples at the corners of her mouth. “You’ve had seconds. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in thirds?”

I put my own Coke down beside the bed. “As a matter of fact . . .”

She held out her arms.

The first time was embarrassing. The second time was good. The third . . . man, the third time was the charm.

I waited in the parlor while Annie dressed. When she came downstairs, she was back in her jeans and sweater. I thought of the blue bra just beneath the sweater, and damned if I didn’t feel that stirring again.

“Are we good?” she said.

“Yes, but I wish we could be even better.”

“I wish that, too, but this is as good as it’s ever going to get. If you like me as much as I like you, you’ll accept that. Can you?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“How much longer will you and Mike be here?”

“If the place doesn’t blow away tonight, you mean?”

“It won’t.”

“A week. Mike’s got a round of specialists back in Chicago starting on the seventeenth, and I want to get settled before then.” She drew in a deep breath. “And talk to his grandpa about a visit. There’ll have to be some ground rules. No Jesus, for one.”

“Will I see you again before you leave?”

“Yes.” She put her arms around me and kissed me. Then she stepped away. “But not like this. It would confuse things too much. I know you get that.”

I nodded. I got it.

“You better go now, Dev. And thank you. It was lovely. We saved the best ride for last, didn’t we?”

That was true. Not a dark ride but a bright one. “I wish I could do more. For you. For Mike.”

“So do I,” she said, “but that’s not the world we live in. Come by tomorrow for supper, if the storm’s not too bad. Mike would love to see you.”

She looked beautiful, standing there barefooted in her faded jeans. I wanted to take her in my arms, and lift her, and carry her into some untroubled future.

Instead, I left her where she was.
That’s not the world we live in,
she’d said, and how right she was.

How right she was.

About a hundred yards down Beach Row, on the inland side of the two-lane, there was a little cluster of shops too tony to be called a strip mall: a gourmet grocery, a salon called Hair’s Looking at You, a drugstore, a branch of the Southern Trust, and a restaurant called Mi Casa, where the Beach Row elite no doubt met to eat. I didn’t give those shops so much as a glance when I drove back to Heaven’s Bay and Mrs. Shoplaw’s. If ever I needed proof that I didn’t have the gift that Mike Ross and Rozzie Gold shared, that was it.