Backseat Saints (42 page)

I let her put her arm around me. I am weak and suddenly so tired. I let her pull my head down on her shoulder and hold me.
I am clay in her hands, ready to do whatever she says, to smash into whatever shape she makes of me.

I
T’S PAST LUNCHTIME when I finally wake up. My gut is churning with anxiety, but the house feels empty. It is so quiet, I wonder
if my mother has gone out again. Her bedroom door is firmly closed.

In the kitchen I find coffee prepped and a note that says, “I have a migraine. Canceled readings for today. Do not turn the
sign on. Your ride comes tonight—Stay inside.”

She’s underlined the last two words. I nod as if she is present and expecting an answer. Under twelve hours, and I’ll be out
of Thom’s reach. It feels like a race, but one in which I am my mother’s passenger. It is a race that she is winning. Sherlock
Holmes himself could not take make and model, maybe even a license plate, on a car that’s parked legally all the way across
the country and find me in three days. Especially since Daddy would have pointed Thom toward Vegas, where he believes his
Claire is “playing cards.”

I shy away from that path of thought. I do not want to think about the circumstances under which my father would have given
Thom this information. I do not want to think about my part in it. I can’t right now. I have to get through the next twelve
hours, and at midnight everything will change. I don’t know enough about what will happen to even imagine it. All I know is,
I won’t be here, I won’t be me, and in almost every way, I’m fine with that.

In the front room, I hear Gret’s one-footed scraping at the front door, asking to go out. I open it for her. Parker’s dogs
are out, too, but I call her firmly back to me as soon as she has done her business. I can’t have her running the yard, perfectly
visible, a three-legged beacon announcing to Thom that his Ro is in this house. As she swishes past my legs and comes inside,
I see Parker opening the gate. His dogs surround him as he enters, leaping and wagging, so happy to see him. If Parker had
been gone only five minutes, his three would still be palm fronding him through the front gate like he was Christ entering
Jerusalem. Dogs are like that.

Miss Moogle puts her dirty feet right in the center of his belly, leaving muddy paw prints on his shirt. “Moogle! Be a lady,”
he says, but he’s grinning at her and the hands that push her down are firm but gentle. He’s one of the almosts, mucking up
my every way.

Based on the clothes—khakis and a rumpled blazer—he’s coming home from teaching an early morning class. His hair is out of
its tail. It hangs to his shoulders, thick and dark, thin sunlight catching the red. I like how it looks around his bony Irish
face.

I’m wearing flannel pajamas, and I’m barefoot with bed head and no makeup on, but even so I keep the door cracked open and
smile at him.

Parker comes up onto the porch, bypassing his own door to walk toward mine. “Day six?” he says.

“Yep. Can’t come out yet. But there’s no rule that says you can’t come in,” I say. I am absurdly pleased that I brushed my
teeth before I came downstairs.

He pauses, then says, “That’s so.”

I swing the door wide for him, saying, “There’s coffee running.”

“I’m more of a tea guy.” I close the door behind him. He walks to the center of the room and pauses there, looking around.
“Where’s Mirabelle?”

“Out, I guess,” I say, more for my benefit than his. I want to
remember the feel of being alone in a house with a man like this. Maybe even with this man.

“Out?” he says. He sounds incredulous as he turns back around to face me. He is near the love seat, but he makes no move to
sit down. No indication that he plans to stay for longer than a minute, but I want to keep him here. He’s speeding time up
with his very presence.

“I guess. Or upstairs in her room.”

“Has to be,” he says. “Have you ever actually seen Mirabelle go out?”

Last night, I think. I remember how she stood on the threshold, balanced with her toes even with the doorjamb, every molecule
of her inside. Then she tilted forward and tipped herself out onto the porch like she was stepping off a cliff.

“Of course I have. I met her at an airport,” I point out.

“Yeah.” Parker nods, thoughtful. “She still leaves town a couple, three times a year. But she eats enough Ativan to soothe
a whole pack of wild horses before she can get in the cab.”

“She goes to the library,” I say.

Parker shakes his head. “Not anymore. Has to be more than three years since she’s gone there. There’s this girl who works
down at the branch who comes by a couple times a week and swaps out books for Mirabelle. Their book club even meets here.”

“Groceries?” I say.

“Delivered. Last year I started bringing her mail in because she stopped crossing the lawn to go get it. The box kept overflowing.”

I shrug. I find I am not terribly interested in my mother’s possible agoraphobia. I don’t want to talk about her at all. I
have put my future squarely in her hands, and it disturbs me to realize how angry I still am with her under the numbness.

“Well, I guess I better…” Parker trails off, then he takes a step toward the door. I move to intercept him.

When we prayed together, me on my roof, him fighting nothing on his backyard lawn, it felt to me like a date. I think he felt
it that
way, too, but we never said good night. It’s not like he could walk me to my window. Moreover, there will not be another chance.
Tomorrow I’ll be gone.

I’ve blocked him, and now I come in way too close for friendly morning conversation. He looks older at this distance; I can
see the fine creases in the skin around his eyes. He is a little closer to thirty-five than thirty. I lift my hands up to
touch his face. He holds still and lets me. I pull him down, rising up on tiptoe, and I kiss him.

He stands absolutely still for this, too, only his mouth moving with mine, as a yes. It’s strange and static; it hardly feels
like kissing. I’d never been with a man before who wasn’t ready in some black underneath part to hurt me. A kiss with a dangerous
fella makes its own fever, black and sweet. It is the goodest kind of dirty.

This, kissing Parker, is as edge-free and white as an egg. He smells like Ivory soap, and he tastes like mint toothpaste and
cool water. It’s a lot like drinking water, actually. Pleasant and quenching, nothing more.

I pull back and I look at him, and he looks back. His eyes are a very pale blue. His gaze is so calm that he seems almost
placid, like now that this is out of the way, he might wander off and find himself a tasty cud to chew.

“That was nice,” I say, stepping back. “I’m glad we did that.” It’s true; now I will regret him less.

He smiles at me, a strange smile I can’t read. He says, “You’re welcome.”

“I’m welcome?” I say, quizzical, not sure how he means it. Maybe he means I’m welcome to kiss him again? Not likely. But this
cryptic echo of my mother in the airport irks me. She told me I was welcome, and I hadn’t thanked her, either.

“Yeah,” he says. “You’re welcome.” His strange smile widens, and now I
can
read it: He’s ticked.

“That was kindness? Charity work?” I say, ticked right back. “You’re saying I should thank you?”

For a second, he seems mad enough to actually be considering my questions, but then he eases and says, “I don’t mean that
you should thank me. But, yeah, that was pretty much just for you.” Now I’m on the verge of angry, and he isn’t anymore. I’m
not sure what he is. Not angry, not placid. “This is for me,” he says.

He steps in close, moving slow so I have time to hit him or wheel away or say no, but I don’t do any of these things. I like
kissing when I’m angry. I let him tip my chin up, bend to me, and this time his arm wraps my waist and pulls my body in, bringing
me close enough to feel his body’s heat, even through his clothes. This time, I am not kissing Shaggy-Doo.

Again, it is utterly not dangerous, but even so, I lose a little breath. I have had wilder rides, but I begin to understand
that I’ve been thirsty. I have been thirsty for so long, living in a dry and barren place, crawling along. He pulls me closer,
up against him. I feel his body rising to me, and in response, a coiled feeling starts low in my hips. His hands slip down,
cupping my ass and lifting me into him, and suddenly nothing is as sweet as this. When you’ve been in a desert, nothing is
more basic and more necessary, nothing is better, than water.

I think this, and then the kiss gets slippery and really good, and I am not thinking at all. I tangle one hand in his thick
hair. It’s longer than mine. I slide my other hand between us to cup him and he is ready for me, hard and too long for my
palm.

“No,” he says into my mouth, and he steps back, three steps fast, until the backs of his legs meet the love seat and he sits
down, fast and surprised. I am left standing there with my mouth open and one hand cupping the air where his not-at-all-impotent
cock used to be, the other lifted high. Three strands of his hair have caught and pulled out, hanging from my raised fingers.

I drop my arms and find I am already so flushed that my embarrassment cannot redden me further.

“We’re grown-ups, Parker,” I say. This could have been a helluva send-off.

He points at me and says, “Married grown-up.” He blows air out in a
whew
sound, then leans forward, his forearms resting on his knees. “This is not what I want from you. I’m sorry.”

When he looks up at me, his eyes have gone so sad that it is difficult to stay angry or even feel ashamed. My mother, who
apparently does not share my troubles with lying to women, told me he was impotent. She said that to make me leave him be
when I would not believe that he was celibate. But it must be so; Parker has been celibate since his wife died. I feel like
I’ve invaded some sacred space he’s made. And what does it matter to me, really, if my mother’s landlord has me on her reading
table or kung fu dances the rest of his life away, his hands moving slowly through the air to touch nothing, like a monk?
I won’t be here, either way.

I say, as kindly as I can, “Do I remind you of her? Your wife?”

“Ginny? God, no. Not at all.” I’m a little insulted, and it must show on my face, because he adds, “That’s a good thing. I
used to see a woman, and if she had two eyes, I would think, Ginny had two eyes.”

“I understand,” I say. “We don’t have to talk about it. I apologize. I just want you to know, I think it would have been really
good for me.”

“Good for you. Yeah,” he says. “Like a salad.”

I laugh, startled. I come and sit down by him on the love seat. I leave a good ten safe inches of air in between us. “I didn’t
mean like a salad.”

“Yeah, you did.” He is chuckling, too, but I hear something serious behind his lightened tone. He turns to look at me before
he says, “I don’t want to be a salad again, Ivy.”

That word
again
catches my attention. “You’ve been salad before?”

“Sure. You know how many girls—women—Mirabelle has filtered through that room? More than thirty since she started. Twenty-two
since Ginny died. You’re not the first neighbor lady to make a move on me.”

“Oh, they all must have,” I say in arch tones. “You’re pretty irresistible.”

“Don’t be mean,” he says, grinning. “More like five, maybe six, depending on what you’d call a pass. Two of them while my
wife was still alive, which was… awkward. Ginny was really sweet about it. She felt sorry for them, and she knew I was her
guy. The others happened long after Ginny. I wasn’t thinking about dating. But I was missing the company of women, as they
say.”

And now I have to ask, “So why did you say no? To them, not me.”

“Oh, I slept with them,” he says. My eyebrows rise, and now I am thinking my mother is really quite a fine liar. He thinks
I am reacting to him, because he’s slightly on the defensive as he says, “Not all of ’em.”

“How many?” I demand.

“Two. The first one, I wasn’t attracted to her, and she was a wreck. Wanted to hurt her husband, I think, more than be with
someone.” He waves it away with one hand. “But then this blond girl, freckles, long legs. Funny and pretty and really, really
crazy. It’d been more than two years. Hell, I’m not a saint. We were together for a week or so. Then she went back to her
husband. I thought, I’m not doing that again.”

“But you did,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, rueful. “Have you looked at Lilah? It’d be hard to find a single man who wouldn’t.”

“Lilah,” I say, but I’m not surprised. She was lovely, even weeping with half her face smashed in. It
would
take a saint to resist her if she came in close and said “please” with her thick black lashes all damp and matted up.

Parker says, “Just once. I think she wanted to see what it was like with a nice guy. Any nice guy. On my end, it felt like
a sneeze. It only made me sad. It only made me miss my wife.”

There could be something here, but after tonight, it will never be safe to cross my own old paths again. The best I can hope
for
is that kissing him has set my mouth for something sweeter down the line, even though it didn’t work for Lilah. “Let’s leave
it,” I say. “You’re welcome and I’m welcome and we’re both thanked.”