My Heart Can't Tell You No (12 page)

CHAPTER VII
 

June/July 1984

“W
ell if it ain’t that ugly Irish kid!” Lew glanced at Joe
f
rom his lawn chair near the stream’s edge. “What are you back in town for?”

“I got transferred back to this area.”

“Look what Lew got!” Robby peered at the stringer holding two trout.

“Ya better watch it, a little thing like you, I might mistake you for a fish and put you on my stringer too,” Lew told the child.

“I’m going to your birthday.” Robby walked to Lew, leaning on the arm of his chair as he gazed up at him. “How old are you?”

“Seventy-three.”

“Is that why you don’t have any hair on the top of your head, ‘cause you’re so old?”

“I have hair. I just sent it out to the cleaners. You think I’m bald, take a look at those old men kneeling over there.” Lew nodded toward Tom, John and Joe. “They’re losing it fast.”

“I am not!” Tom’s hand immediately went to his shock of hair as if checking for reassurance. He looked quickly at Joe who was closest to him, and bent slightly with a look of alarm. “Am I losing it? I’m still okay—
right
?”

“Tom’s got lots of hair,” Robby told Lew.

“Tom’s just a young pup yet.”

“Not that young.” Tom cast his line after getting the okay from Joe that his hair was fine. “If I remember, you were already thinning out by the time you were thirty-two.”

“Well, it comes from an active sex life. Women can’t leave your hair alone. We get them so wild they just rip it out and don’t leave you alone long enough for it to grow back in. Ain’t that right, John?”

“Christ. How would I know?” asked John. “Ever since Jenna came along I’m lucky to get it once a month. Then there’s a bawlin’ fit if she isn’t sleeping right in the middle of Beth and me.”

“Listen to him,” Tom said. “What he isn’t telling you is
he’s
the one crying if he wakes up and she isn’t there. Hate to see it when she’s sixteen and wants to go on a date. There better be room in the guy’s car for John and Beth, or Jenna won’t be able to go.”

“When she’s Maddie’s age I might consider letting her go out on a date.”

“Is that what happened to you, Joe?” Robby turned toward him.

“What’s that?” Joe smiled at him.

“Did some woman tear your hair out? Wouldn’t she let you go?”

The four men looked at the boy then chuckled at his sincere curiosity.

“He ain’t bald!” Robby pulled Joe’s hat off and Joe couldn’t tell if the boy was disappointed at being joked with, or disappointed that Joe didn’t have some woman tearing at his hair. “He’s got lots of hair!”

As the morning drew to a close, Joe sat watching Lew and the boys. Lew wasn’t the same huge man he had been last time he had gone fishing with him. He had trimmed down about fifty or sixty pounds. He looked good, still overweight, but good. His smile was still there. It always would be; Joe was sure of it. Although Lew’s hair was mostly gone on top, Joe couldn’t see the difference from ten years earlier. It was still coal black and thick along the sides.

“What are you next week, Lew?” Tom asked. “Fifty?”

“Forty-nine. Don’t rush me.”

“Last time I was back Maddie told me you had two heart attacks. How’s it been lately?” asked Joe.

“Some days good. Some bad. Who knows if I’ll be around for my fiftieth birthday,” Lew said lightly, picking up his rod as its tip jerked.

“Right,” Tom remarked. “You’ll be burying all of us before you punch in your time card, old boy.”

“Look! Lew’s got another one!” Robby ran back to his great uncle, staring at the fish that wriggled fiercely on the end of the line.

“Aren’t you going to try?” Lew looked at the youngster. “You and Joe are the only ones not in the water yet.”

“He can’t sit still long enough to watch his pole,” Jackie told him.

“I’ll watch it for him.” Joe took the rod and began baiting the hook, then cast the line. Using a branch to hold the rod erect, he sat against the trunk of a tree

“Don’t you have a fishing license this year, Joe?” asked Lew.

“I haven’t bought one in about ten years. I think I paid about two bucks for it back then.”

“Twelve-fifty now,” John told him.

“Ten years?” Lew asked. “That must have been the summer Bob and Maddie decided to take a dunk down that way. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Next time I saw you was the next year when you met up with me and Maddie at that football game. You were in some mood that night when you got to the game”

“I remember that night,” John chuckled. “He was in a bad mood before he even got to the game. It was the only time I ever saw his kids. He brought them down for Mom to watch.”

“Wife busy?” Lew asked Joe.

“You could say that.” His calm uninterested answer belied the intensity of the memory of that day; a day that started out bad and ended even worse. Hell, his whole year had been bad; longer than that, if he were honest with himself.

September 1975

After the fishing outing when Maddie fell in the stream, it hadn’t taken long for Joe to put in for a transfer at work. Within a month, he, his wife, and their two-and-a-half-month-old baby girl were living in a city forty miles to the north. He cursed himself after the scene with Maddie. She had done it to him again, aroused him faster than any woman his own age could. He would have taken her right there near that stream if she hadn’t subtly reminded him of her age. He didn’t know what made him feel worse—the thought of making love to someone he had always thought of as a sister—or believing he was some kind of pedophile. The fact that he was married bothered him. He believed in the institution of marriage. It was his wife he didn’t believe in.

Just how he got to be married still baffled him. He thought about that day more than two years earlier when he had been at Lew’s birthday celebration, and then what had happened on the dike with Maddie. He had drunk himself into believing his plan had actually made sense. A plan to save himself from literally diving on top of the girl and relieving the intense desire she provoked within him. A plan, that if he had been cold sober, he would have rejected in an instant.

He had returned home that evening and telephoned his old steady from high school; he could start with her. He had heard she was divorced and living with her parents again.

For two weeks he had seen Lena Johnson every evening before going to work and although it wasn’t the greatest, the sex with her curbed the appetite he had for Maddie. Those two weeks left him with a body that was fed, but he quickly grew bored with Lena’s same old self-centered ego.

Two months passed. His company in the evenings varied, never dating the same girl more than twice. He wasn’t sure he ever would be with someone who could arouse him half as quickly as he had been that day on the dike. But each time he thought about it he became disgusted with himself all over again.
Christ
, she was only a child.

The telephone call in itself didn’t surprise him. Lena had been calling about twice a week ever since he stopped dating her, but he had always managed to find some excuse not to see her again. This time the reason stopped him in his tracks and didn’t allow another rejection. She was two months pregnant. They had to get married.

His wedding turned out to be everything he didn’t want. A tuxedo, (he would have preferred his Army uniform but it
clashed
with what his bride wanted) and a gown of white (what a laugh, he thought, as he had watched her stroll down the aisle toward him).

This year though, at twenty-six, Joe had two children to support; seventeen-month-old Felicia and five-month-old Oliver (the names were not of his choosing). On this particular Friday, he was home by three-thirty to find his wife gone, and two crying babies in his living room while their sitter lounged on the sofa with her nose deep in a movie magazine. His entrance was quiet until his daughter saw him and sent out a shrill cry for his attention. The sitter got to her feet immediately.

“Joe. I didn’t hear you come in. I didn’t realize it was this late.”

“Yeah,” he said dryly as he picked up his daughter, quick to note what her problem was. “So I gather.”

“I was just about to change her.”

“Don’t bother, I’m here. You can go home now. What time did Lena leave?”

“Around noon.” The sitter picked up her magazine and started for the door.

“Did she say when she’d be back?”

“Five.”

Joe watched the girl leave then changed Felicia’s drenched diaper. He had no idea why it took Lena five hours to do their shopping, especially when he’d go to the store often during the week for supplies she had
forgotten
. He didn’t stop to ponder on it as he put Felicia in the playpen. He was much more concerned with the bath he wanted before he could leave that night; one of the few escapes he could take advantage of.

As he lifted Oliver he noticed the baby needed a bath even more than he did, so he carried the boy in his baby seat into the bathroom then brought Felicia back to the bathroom as well. As he undressed he watched Felicia walk to the shelves in the corner and begin pulling down the clean towels and making a mountain in the middle of the floor. He’d get them after his bath, he thought. He undressed Oliver, then looked up in time to see Felicia make a mad dash for the toilet.