But I wasn’t sure I wanted to. All day, the feeling of him around me, in me, kissing me; the look of his smile and the throaty baritone at the bar last night—it seemed too much, too dangerous. Right this minute, I could walk away and feel only a little pinch. If I let myself get more involved with him, started liking another little thing and another and another, there’d be too much to miss when he hit the road.
As it turned out, though, he wasn’t at the farm when I got there, and that was worse. The animals came running to meet me when I unlocked the front door—Berlin tapping down the stairs to get her head rubbed, the cats twirling around my ankles in a much more self-serving way. They wanted the empty food dish filled. Like, yesterday.
Dark had fallen, making the lamp-lit rooms inside too lonely, too quiet, and I made some tea to carry out to the porch, a nice cup of Sleepytime to head off the lingering hangover headache that had dogged me distantly all day. I settled on the front steps where I had a view of the road and the top of the trees tossing in a light wind.
And for the first time, I realized that this was what my life was going to be in a year or so. No Michael. Shane would head off to his life. Malachi would be in Egypt or Barcelona or some other exotic place. My sisters would all be married, busy with their own families. My parents—well, who knew what would happen there?
I would be forty-one and forty-two and forty-three, alone, knocking around Sylvia’s big house with too many cats and a dog.
The recognition settled like a lead weight in my chest, too depressing to even cry about. I saw the years stretching ahead of me like a dusty road leading out to the prairie. Dun colored, bone dry, all life sucked out of it by gusts of hard, dry wind.
It was terrifying. What would I do? How would I find companionship? I thought of some of the women I’d known, divorcées or widows who dolled themselves up to go to the clubs on the weekends or hung out at museums and coffee shops and Barnes & Nobles, their smiles too bright, their makeup too polished, and I felt sick.
I was no longer young. I wasn’t old, but the blush was off the rose, as Nana Lucy would say. I’d taken a big chance on a dream that now seemed foolish and shallow, and now, instead of a nice, comforting, stable life, with a husband to lie down next to at night and a network of comforting women friends, I had nothing.
It made me think of Sundays. As a little girl, I had loved them—waited all week to put on my good dresses and patent leather shoes. I loved the bustle of our big breakfast and the rush to get to Mass on time—remember, my mother had three little girls to brush and comb—and the rituals at church. I loved the smell of incense and the way the light broke through the big stained-glass window. I loved afternoons filled with the smell of roasting meat, and the steamy darkness of winter suppers.
When I hit the wild days, Sundays bored me stiff. I got a job and worked them, just so I wouldn’t have to sit around the house and listen to football and yawn while everybody flipped through the thick newspapers. When I was a teen, Sundays embodied the stasis and provincialism of my world, of the tightly knit community and the city itself.
And I gleefully escaped them. Sundays with Billy were filled with sex or lazy drives on his motorcycle, or spent sleeping in recovery from a concert the night before.
When Shane was born, Michael abruptly started cooking breakfast on Sunday mornings. Big southern breakfasts, with fried potatoes and bacon and grits and homemade biscuits. Billy took to them like a starved child, and it became our ritual, Michael cooking every Sunday morning no matter where we were or what we were doing. When he met Andre, they both came over, and even when Billy started falling to drugs so badly, he often showed up on Sunday mornings.
With a wretched twist of shame, I realized I should have known that Shane would show up this morning—Sunday—to cook breakfast. It seemed a terrible breach that I’d forgotten.
Sitting there in the dark, with crickets whirring and Sylvia’s solid home behind me, what I wanted more than anything was to go back in time and rewrite my life so that my Sundays would now be what I was sure they were in my sisters’ houses. With a deep sense of lost chances, I realized I should have given them to Shane all along.
I heard the motorcycle before I saw the headlight cutting through the night. For a minute, I thought about jumping up and running inside, so it wouldn’t look like I’d been waiting for him, but the idea presented so many complications that in the end, I didn’t move a single muscle.
Or maybe it was just that he was so welcome on this lonely night, looking so competent and strong as he parked and climbed off the bike. I could see weariness in his step as he walked toward me, and his very presence meant we’d now have to deal with all that . . . stuff, but it didn’t matter. My heart lifted, just seeing him, just having someone else here with me so I didn’t have to face the night all alone.
But even that thought had a layer of lies in it. It wasn’t just somebody, it was Malachi. The difference mattered.
“Hey,” he said, collapsing one step below me. “You’re looking about like I feel.”
“Which is?”
“Worn out.” He looped his hand around my ankle. “You okay?”
“Not really. I’m fairly wretchedly depressed. How about you?”
His smile was shadowed. “The same.”
“I know a cure,” I heard myself say, in spite of my resolve. “Doesn’t last that long, but it works pretty well while it’s in place.”
“I’d love it, sugar, but it’s causing you too much trouble.” His fingers moved on my ankle bone. “Shane’ll be home soon, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I guessed that maybe he was none too happy when he didn’t have a single word to say to me the whole day until we ended up in the men’s room at the same time and he gave me a gentlemanly little warning.”
“What? Did he really?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I couldn’t help a little chuckle. “What did he say?”
Malachi didn’t laugh with me. “He said you’d been through enough and he didn’t want to see you get hurt, so I oughtta just leave you alone.”
A mix of humiliation and motherly satisfaction went through me. “Ah, he’s seventeen. Sex is all wrapped up in romance and black-and-white values.” I shook my head with what I thought was just the right touch of irony. “He still thinks it’s a man who takes and a woman who gets used.”
“Are you using me, Jewel?”
I met his eyes. “Maybe a little. We’re using each other to get through a hard time. Is that so bad?”
He moved, with that same feline grace that always took me by surprise, and caught my head in his big hand and kissed me. It was a savage kiss on one level, thick with the unresolved need we both felt to be properly naked and in a comfortable place to see what the whole thing would be like, and it gave me a rush to be wanted like that, to want it so much in return.
But as if he knew that was where my head was, it turned into something else. He tilted his head ever so slightly, and his lips were softer, more tender, his tongue dancing with mine in a waltz, not a tango. I felt his breath on my cheek, felt myself falling into that sweetness. I put my hand in his hair and stroked the silky length of it, breathing in his taste, his smell, his warm body.
And it’s corny, but it made me dizzy again. Lighter than usual, airier, more at peace. Before that really registered, he gently lifted his head. “We’ve both been around the block a few times, Jewel,” he said, his voice rumbling nearly below register. “We both know the difference in a kiss like that, and maybe it’s just gonna be smarter for both of us to leave this right here.” He swallowed, his thumb moving on my jaw. “I’ll never stay. I don’t know how.”
I brushed my fingers over his cheekbone, his jaw. “I know.”
He bent close again, pressed his mouth to mine, then let me go.
I took a breath, pulling away, somehow feeling a lot more at ease. “Well, glad we got that out on the table. Are you hungry? I have enough food for an army in there.”
“Now, that does sound good.”
“C’mon. I’ll fix you right up, soldier.” I stood up and he followed me. At the door, he took my arm and pushed my hair away and kissed the back of my neck. “Thank you, Jewel.”
I didn’t say anything, just opened the door and went inside.
Tuesday, I was summoned to Nana Lucy’s house for a fitting. The dresses had arrived as promised. Jordan was working a twelve-hour shift, so I had to go alone. Believe me, I did not want to, not after the little scene on Saturday. We’d all seen one another at the hospital, but they never lectured in front of other people.
Nana Lucy still lives in one of the old neighborhoods, called Goat Hill because a long time ago people grazed goats there. It stands over the highway now, reached by climbing narrow, hidden roads. Nana moved there as a newlywed and has lived there for more than sixty years. She raised her children there, has planted the gardens for sixty seasons.
Her house is an old bungalow, stuccoed in a tasteful pale tan with dark brown shutters, and has that fussy neatness that lets you know an old person lives within. Her grass is never more than one inch high, and a boy comes in once a week to keep the flower beds free of weeds. The hoses are rolled up and her car is never parked anywhere but on the pristine driveway beneath the squeaky clean carport. She sweeps her sidewalk every single morning.
It was my mother who opened the door, with bobby pins in her mouth and one hand holding up her hair in back. She waved at me, then started sticking pins in her hair, prying them open with her teeth. Little pieces stuck up all over, and I said, “Hang on, Mama. Let me help you. Where’s the brush?”
Inside, the house was as neat as outside. Plastic runners covered the carpet down the halls and plastic covered the lampshades—a habit I’d always found peculiar, but had probably once had a genuine purpose. In the days before the steel depression of the early eighties, the mill pumped out loads of sulfur and coal dust that settled on everything. People had called the city Pew-town for years because of it.
“Over there,” my mother snapped, pointing at a natural bristle brush as she tugged out the pins. “I don’t know why I can’t get it up right this morning.”
“Where’s Nana?” I fetched the brush and pointed at a chair at the dining room table.
My mother sat, her fingers worrying themselves in her lap. “She’s in the garden. Don’t ask me why she had to go pick zucchinis right now, when there are a million things to do, but that’s what she’s doing.”
As she talked, I took out the pins and unbraided my mother’s hair. “Oh, Mama,” I sighed as it fell free, even thicker and blacker than I remembered, each strand as shiny and healthy as a child’s. “You have such wonderful hair. You should wear it down sometimes.”
“At my age? Don’t be silly.” But her hands settled as I started brushing it, and she straightened in a kind of acknowledgment.
When I was a little girl, I loved playing with my mother’s hair. We fought for the privilege of brushing it out at night, to the point that we had to take a day of the week. “Tuesday always was my day to brush your hair out,” I said.
“Amazing you still remember that.”
I put the brush down and started weaving the hair into a braid. “I remember everything about my childhood. You wouldn’t believe how much.”
“Do you, Jewel? Isn’t that funny?”
“Not really.” I thought, but didn’t say, that it was because I’d left.
“Remember those little dolls your dad used to make out of hollyhocks?” She put her hands flat on her thighs. “You wanted me to make you a skirt just like the round petal of a hollyhock.”
I remembered. I also remembered that she’d done it—sewing wrinkled red handkerchief linen to a wide, lime green waistband. “I wore that thing to death.”
“Yes, you did.”
I rolled the braid into a bun that distributed the weight over as much of her scalp as possible. “I don’t know how you wear it like this, Mama. Doesn’t it give you headaches?”
“I’m used to it.”
“The headaches or the hair?”
“Both.” She handed me the last pin and stood up when I fastened it. “Let’s get this done so I can get to work.”
“You’re not still trying to do both work and the wedding this week, are you?”
“I couldn’t take two weeks,” she said with a scowl. “I’m taking next week off to make sure all the little stuff is finished right.” She bustled over to a box on the table and pointed to my shirt. “Get undressed.”
“Right here in the living room?”
“Who’s gonna see?” She looked pointedly at the heavy blinds protecting the furniture from the hard, southwest sunlight. “Just do it, Jewel. I’m in a hurry.”
Stung, I pulled the shirt over my head, oddly shy to have my mother see my body after so many years. At least I’d worn modest undergarments today, a bra that hid the tattoo, for one thing.
She brushed away the tissue paper lining inside the box, and I sucked in my breath in happy surprise. “Is that one mine?”
She made that peculiarly dismissive noise. “I told Jane you two couldn’t wear those soft colors, but she wouldn’t listen until she saw how they washed you out. She also didn’t listen when I told her to get fourteens.” She shook out the indigo dress. Still satin, but a rich, rich color that I would not mind wearing at all. “Jane, she’s like you, Jewel.”
“She is?”
“Take off the jeans, too.” She held the dress close to her, as if I’d soil it with chocolate-smeared fingers. Shyly, reluctantly, I did as she asked, wishing she’d at least let me shimmy out of them beneath the skirt. Too conscious of my round belly and big thighs, I waited for her to put it over my head.
It fell down around my body in a swish of luxurious heaviness, and she zipped the back easily—until she got to the bust. “Damn,” she said, as foul a swear word as she ever uttered. “You’re even bustier than my sister.”
I frowned. “Hmm. I have an idea.” Reaching behind me, I unfastened my bra and pulled it off through the sleeves, then bent over from the waist and squished everything upward and center. Still bent over, I said, “Try zipping it now.”
With a little cry of satisfaction, she did it. “Now let me look at you.”