The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc (3 page)

anxious. “You want another Coke?” she asked. Her voice was

strained.

“If it’s not too much trouble,” he answered softly, still watch-

ing her.

“No trouble at all.”

She stood up, threw her cigarette butt on the concrete porch step,

and ground it out with her bare foot. She’d read about ballet

dancers whose feet were that tough and was proud to find hers

were too, after summers of climbing barefooted over the rocks at

the creek with her kids. But she hadn’t meant to put out a burning

cigarette in front of Parker. She caught him staring at her. She felt

like a damn fool. He was going to think she’d turned into some

kind of a redneck hick. She practically flew off the porch and into

the kitchen.

Sissy had always been a flirt. She’d tried out a lot of rules on how

to do it, and discarded most of them, but Rule Number Five was

always with her:
Boys will squirm and grown men will pull on their

collars when a girl tosses her hair and looks at up them through her

eyelashes, or even better, over her shoulder
. Through the years,

T h e S c a n d a l o u s S u m m e r o f S i s s y L e B l a n c 1 5

she’d learned that this was more than a rule, it was a law of nature,

immutable and very reassuring. But Sissy always did it for fun, just

fun. She wasn’t going to actually do anything.

When she married Peewee, she’d promised to be a good and

faithful wife. And Sissy never went back on her word.

Of course, it hadn’t been so hard to resist temptation. There

hadn’t been a lot of it around.

But here was Parker, back after all these years.

The strap of her sundress had slipped down over her shoulder.

She hitched it up and reached her long, freckled fingers into the ice

bucket. Empty.

She pried a gray metal tray up out of the little freezer section, but

the lever was frozen tight. So she picked up the ice tray and

smashed it hard against the sink, which gave her some relief, but

didn’t help much in getting at the ice. She turned on the tap. Pretty

soon the cubes were floating.

What was wrong with her today?

A shadow fell across her body. Parker leaned against the door-

way. She didn’t turn. Nothing would make her turn or look at him

over her shoulder.

“Anything I can do to help?” he asked. She felt the weight of his

shadow on top of her. She shut off the tap.

A calloused hand reached over her shoulder and picked up a

dripping cube. He rubbed the ice over her shoulders as she stood

paralyzed. He ran it under her hair, under the strap of her sundress

and over her chest. His hard calluses scraped gently as they slid

across her freckled skin. She started to say something, but he ran

the ice cube over her lips. She tried to tell him to stop. He gently

pushed the melting cube, hardly more than a wafer now, into her

mouth.

He bent down—and without touching her body—kissed her lips,

tasting their cold wetness, licking her lips until Sissy shivered. She

touched his chest and found heat radiating from it.

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“Open my eyes so I may see . . .” Choir practice had begun and

Sissy snapped out of her fantasy. Parker was still leaning in the

doorway. “Need any help?” he asked again.

“Here.” She gave him the Cokes to open. She threw the ice cubes

into the glasses and poured the rest, water and all, into the ice

bucket.

Parker handed her the opened bottles. She turned and knocked

over the bucket with her elbow.

“I don’t know what’s come over me today,” she said as ice and

water spilled all over the peeling linoleum with its faded yellow and

orange flowers.

Parker bent down as Sissy grabbed a dish towel. “No harm

done,” he said, cupping the ice cubes in his big hands and throwing

them into the sink.

Sissy was mopping up the water under his work boots, when

Parker bent and gave her his hand. The pungent scents of musk and

creosote rose around her. She felt disoriented, confused.

Inhaling deeply, she could actually feel the heat radiating from

him. It was real. Her lacquered fingernails were shaking. She

thought about releasing the buttons on Parker’s work shirt. When

the blue denim fabric fell away, would she see the brown hair, just

as she remembered it, curling softly over his chest? She wanted to

bury her head in it. She imagined his big suntanned hands sliding

around her. Those big rough thumbs caressing her small breasts.

Rubbing them. Sissy felt her nipples harden. Her body came alive.

She wanted to run her hands over those wonderful thighs. She

could almost feel the bulge under those metal buttons on his shrink-

to-fit jeans. Feel him bunching up her skirt, sliding his hand under

her pants. She groaned softly.

“Sissy, are you okay?” he asked, still holding her hand.

Reality returned. But she didn’t want any part of it. Then she

realized his hand was trembling, too.

“Place in my hands the wonderful key/ That shall unclasp and set

me free,” the ladies sang across the street.

T h e S c a n d a l o u s S u m m e r o f S i s s y L e B l a n c 1 7

The Southern Belle’s Handbook chattered away in her head,

reminding her of all the sensible reasons she should stay away from

this man. To hell with the Southern Belle’s Handbook. To hell with

the creosote. Sissy stood on her tiptoes and raised her lips to his.

And with the flash of mutual decision that had gotten them into

trouble all those years ago, they were in each other’s arms. He

kissed her gently. She closed her eyes and felt the roughness of his

sunburned lips and his cold, hard hands play on the wings of her

back.

Sissy usually went through her life as through a tunnel, never

touching the walls. But today the walls were crashing in on her. For

the first time in years she wanted something.

As the sun lit up the stained glass window over the stove, Parker

began to bunch up her full skirt. She felt his jeans rub against the

bare skin of her thighs. He groaned softly. His right hand stroked

her underpants, while his left hand reached into her sundress. She

could hear the material rip, but she didn’t care because he was

working one breast out of her strapless bra. She sucked in her

breath as he touched her nipple. She touched his jeans and felt the

material around his buttons strain and pull tight and take on a life

of its own. Parker lifted her up and pushed her against the sink.

Breathing hard, he hooked her underpants and their lips came

together as he slowly slid them off.

“Open my eyes, illumine me . . .” the choir sang.

“I can’t, Parker,” she said, and they were the hardest words she’d

ever had to say. Pushing him away, she opened her eyes and saw the

faces of her children pressed against the screen door.

“Oh my God!” she whispered, straightening her dress and

pulling up her panties as best she could as the choir echoed,

“. . . Spirit Divine.”

“Sissy . . .” Parker began, and then he saw the children’s

faces, too.

She unlocked the screen door. “What are you all doing here? I

thought you were at a baseball game! I said I’d pick you up at six.

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How’d you get home?” She knew how stupid she sounded, how

guilty, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Hickey got mad and took the ball home. So Mr. Fletcher gave us

a ride,” Billy Joe, her twelve-year-old, said. He stared up at Parker.

The three children crept in together.

Chip, thirteen and surly, said nothing. His face was shut down,

but his eyes cut back and forth between his mother and the

stranger. He saw the wine-red lipstick smeared across Parker’s lips

and on his work shirt. And smiled.

Sissy pulled up the strap of her sundress and began to babble.

“Children, this is Parker Davidson. He was captain of the football

team when your mama was a cheerleader. I must have told you

about him. Parker, this is Chip, my oldest, and Billy Joe, and Mar-

ilee, my baby.” She put her hand on the little girl’s shoulder. The

six-year-old wrapped her arms around her mother’s hip and eyed

the stranger from the folds of her mother’s skirt.

“Hey there, partners,” Parker said, more coolheaded than she

would have imagined possible. And then with a catch in his voice,

he asked, “You got any more?”

“This is it,” Sissy said brightly, too brightly.

Chip turned away in disgust. So Parker bent over slightly and

held out his hand to Billy Joe. But the children weren’t looking at

his hand or their mother’s wet hair, which she was trying to tie up in

a prim knot on the back of her head. What they were staring at was

closer to Marilee’s eye level. Then Sissy saw it, too.

“Parker, for God’s sake,” she hissed, “turn around!” He did and

saw the metal buttons on his jeans were straining to burst free. He

tried to adjust his pants and caught the lipstick stain on his shirt.

The children took off giggling, slamming the screen door behind

them.

The ladies of the Southern Methodist Church of Gentry raised

their voices once again. “You have a friend in Jesus,” they trilled.

It’s a good thing, thought Sissy as she ran down the stairs after

T h e S c a n d a l o u s S u m m e r o f S i s s y L e B l a n c 1 9

her children. I’m gonna need all the friends I can get. “Get out of

here!” she called back to Parker.

He watched her haunches work under her yellow sundress as

she ran across the grassy yard, through the laundry hanging out on

the line to dry, past the wilderness of white and scarlet oleanders

growing along the fence. His heart was keeping time with the choir

as they sang and clapped. He tucked in his shirt and tugged on his

jeans, but there was nothing he could do about the bulge that had

risen again as he watched her. Jesus. He’d had no idea she could still

do that to him. He had to wait. He couldn’t risk running into some

stray Methodist and ruining Sissy’s reputation once again. That was

the last thing he wanted. He already felt terrible about the kids.

He focused his breathing. Pretty soon he was able to head for the

door. He glanced into the mirror and spotted the indelible lipstick

on his face. He had grabbed a towel and begun to rub his mouth

when he heard a truck drive up on the gravel and a door slam.

“Sissy!” a male voice yelled. Peewee LeBlanc had come home.

Sissy ran after her children. She wasn’t so worried about

Marilee. She was still a baby, but the boys were different. She could

imagine the smirks and dirty jokes.

“Sissy!” Peewee yelled.

She saw the kids hightail it over a fence and disappear. Maybe it

was for the best. It would give her time to figure out what she

should say to them. But what could she say? Neither the Southern

Belle’s Handbook nor all those books on child rearing she’d read

over the years, and she’d read them all, dealt with what to tell ado-

lescent boys who catch their mother kissing a strange man next to

the kitchen sink.

Peewee stopped on the top step of the front porch and kicked the

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mud from his boots. He saw Amy Lou Hopper come out the side

door of the Methodist church.

She whisked off her pointy blue glasses and waved a plump

white arm.

Peewee turned. “Hey, Amy Lou, you seen Sissy?”

“Why, yes,” she said, and smoothed the stiff wave of blond hair

that dipped over one side of her forehead. “Yes, I have.”

Storm clouds hunched together over the house.

Th e kitchen door faced the church. Parker cracked open the

screen and spotted some of the women he’d known as a boy grow-

ing up. They were walking along the sidewalk, singing in two-part

harmony as they headed for the parking lot. Then he saw Amy Lou

Hopper standing on the curb and heard Peewee’s voice coming from

the front porch! Parker slowly eased himself back into the kitchen.

Peewee saw Amy Lou hesitate and then walk out into the middle

of Hope Street. He felt like a jackass. Of course she wasn’t going to

stand out in front of the church and holler. It wouldn’t be ladylike.

Peewee knew that, unlike his wife, Amy Lou always acted like a

lady. “She was sitting right out here in front of God and everyone,”

she said in a pleased voice as she placed a white, pointed-toe linen

pump up onto the curb.

Amy Lou waited impatiently for Peewee to ask her what Sissy

was doing in front of God and everyone. She prided herself on the

fact that she was not a gossip, but of course if Peewee came right

out and asked, she’d be bound as a Christian to tell the truth. After

all, a man had a right to know what his wife was up to. She was

crossing the sidewalk to enlighten him when Peewee spotted the

tool belt lying next to the swing on the front porch. He picked it up

and saw the name on it, Parker Davidson. And then he didn’t want

to talk to anyone. He turned abruptly, leaving Amy Lou striding