Flirting With Pete: A Novel (31 page)

“What happened then?”

“It lasted a month. I gave her money and sent her back, but it was never the same for her there. She left again, alone that time. I don’t know what happened to her after that.” He finally looked at Jenny. “I know what happened to me. I moved from place to place and couldn’t find peace. It was like I had the mark of Cain on my forehead. I met all the wrong women. Until you. I don’t deserve you, Jenny, but I want you anyway. I’m willing to change to keep you. We’ll start over together.”

Jenny’s heart was so full that she was able to say little more than a wishful, “You make it sound easy.”

“It has to be, if you want it enough.”

Jenny wanted to believe that in the very worst way. “But what if there are other people involved— like that friend and your family? What if they don’t want you starting over?”

“They will. Times are hard. They need the help.”

“My father will say the same thing. He won’t want me to leave.”

“The situation is different. Your father doesn’t need you the same way. His needs are entirely selfish. But you’ve been loyal to him all these years. You’ve put your own interests second to his. Now’s
your
time.”

“But he’s my father.”

“You’re an adult. You have a right to make choices of your own.”

“You don’t understand. He won’t
let
me leave.”

“No,
you
don’t understand,” Pete insisted. “You aren’t
his
to let or
not
let leave. You’re your own person. He makes the choices that decide his life. You have a right to make the ones that decide yours.”

Lord, how many times she had told herself that. Dan had said it, too, and Reverend Putty, and Miriam.

“What if he disagrees?”

Pete grinned. “I’ll help you convince him. Between the two of us, it’ll be a cinch.” Prayerlike, his hands came down between her breasts. His palms raked her nipples. His mouth followed.

She clutched his head. “I want to start over. I’ve been wanting to for so long. Only I couldn’t.”

He worked his way up until his mouth was next to hers. “Me neither, because I kept thinking I could do it alone. But I can’t.” His eyes went to hers. He looked vulnerable. “You’ll leave with me, won’t you?”

She caught her breath.

“Marry me? Have my babies?”

She put her hands to her mouth. She couldn’t believe what a
gift
he was, offering her everything she had always, always wanted.

“I love you, Jenny.”

She paused then, thinking again— still— that he was too good to be true. “Really?”

“Really.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I’ve had lots of relationships. I’ve never told a woman I loved her before.”

“There’s so much you don’t know about me.”

“I know what I need.”

“What if there was something so dark it’d curdle your blood?”

“You’ve heard my dark secret. Yours can’t be much worse. Besides, blood doesn’t curdle.”

“You know what I mean. What if there was?”

“If there was, it’d make me feel less guilty for my own crummy past. It’d help me remember that things have to be different this time. I love you, Jenny.”

He sealed the words with a kiss, and she returned it, but that didn’t seem enough somehow. She wanted to do something special, something different, something other women in his life might not have had the courage or the know-how or the love to do.

Still kissing him, she urged him to his back. She licked his chin, then his throat. She scraped her teeth down his chest, along the line of hair that tapered toward his navel, and all the while her hands worked at his zipper. By the time her head reached it, she had him free. He was hot against her lips, smooth to her tongue, musky in a way that cleared her head of the past so completely that nothing could mar the purity of her pleasure— and it was a shock, that pleasure. She had started this for him. It ended up being just as special for her.

And so the night went. They talked, made love, and slept; talked, made love, and slept. Shortly before dawn they climbed out to the roof and watched the sun rise and slowly burn off the fog. With the fog went the chill, and with the chill went prudence. Opening the quilt, they lay nude in the still-pale sun, and once that was done, making love was inevitable.

Some might have said Jenny was thumbing her nose at the town, making love in broad daylight that way. Jenny herself would have said, if asked by someone who had no business asking, that she was simply christening her new slate roof.

In truth, she was celebrating a change in her life. She had never been as happy or as bold, certainly never as sure of herself as she was with Pete. And calm. That, too. Even with Darden coming home the next day.

So she slept deeply, back inside the house now, once the sun had moved higher, and she only awakened when the sound of the doorbell grew insistent.

Jenny struggled into her nightgown as she ran down the stairs. Holding the neck closed and the fabric bunched away from her breasts, she opened the front door a crack and squinted into the mid-morning light.

Reverend Putty looked to be leaving. He quickly turned around and came back. “Dear God in heaven, I was worried,” he said with a sigh. “I’ve been ringing the bell for ten minutes. I was beginning to think something was very wrong. Normally, I’d have simply assumed that you were off walking or even in town, though I just came from there and I didn’t see you, but then Dan asked if I wouldn’t remind you about the roof, since I was coming out here anyway, and when no one answered the bell I got to thinking—” He looked upward and crossed himself.

“I was asleep,” Jenny said.

“Well, I can see that”— he glanced at his watch—“but it’s eleven in the morning. That’s nearly half the day gone.” He sighed again. “All right, I’ll tell Dan to tell Merle that whatever he thought he saw up on that roof earlier was wrong. Here you are, covered head to toe in a prim-enough gown. Merle said you were naked, can you imagine that? ‘Naked on the roof in the cold,’ he said. I asked Dan. We agreed you’d have to be out of your mind to do something like that.”

Jenny yawned.

“Though if anyone has reason to be,” Reverend Putty went on, “you do. It’s been a rough spell for you, MaryBeth. I was glad to see you at the dance Friday night. After that, I was hoping you’d be at church on Sunday. I wrote my sermon with you in mind. Well, with Darden in mind, actually. It was about God’s love and what it means to forgive. I believe some of my people needed to hear it, though I do understand how they feel. They’re frightened. Darden was intimidating even before all this. But I think what we have to do now is to lay the past to rest. He paid for his crime. It behooves the rest of us as good Christians to welcome him back.”

Jenny wasn’t holding her breath for that to happen.

“It was an upbeat sermon. I’m sorry you missed it. If you’d like, I’ll print up a copy for you. I have to hand it to that computer. It does come in handy for times like this when someone just can’t be there to hear my message. You used to like coming to church, MaryBeth.”

“I went because Darden went.” He took her with him. She hadn’t had a choice. No matter that her mother refused to go, or that Darden’s belief in God was questionable. He had wanted the town to see her standing beside him.

“I recall you came even after Darden went away.”

“A few times.”

“Why did you stop?”

Jenny might have shrugged and looked away. But knowing what lay ahead, she wanted her say. “It was a bad time. I was alone and feeling guilty and sick. I needed someone to tell me I wasn’t terrible, but no one in town would do it. I thought that because people were in church, in God’s house, they might see me more kindly.
Look
at me more kindly. They didn’t. They could’ve used your sermon back then.”

“Try to understand, MaryBeth. They found the situation frightening. They didn’t know what to say.”

Jenny worked her head around on her neck to ease a kink that sleeping in the attic had left.

“They would like you back.”

“Did they tell you that?”

“They nodded through my whole sermon.”

Jenny could certainly see it. Reverend Putty’s sermons put Darden to sleep all the time.

“I’d like you back, too. You and Darden, both. Perhaps next Sunday? It would be a sign to the town that you’re willing to forgive and forget.” He bobbed on his toes and looked amused. “Consider this a personal invitation”— he shot another quick look upward—“from You Know Who, via His servant, yours truly. God loves you, MaryBeth.”

“Does He?”

“Why, of course.”

She wasn’t sure she believed that. “I waited for Him to help me. He didn’t.”

“Oh, He did. He left you alone to work things out for yourself, so that you’d become a stronger person. I can see that you are. Those are beautiful earrings you’re wearing. They were your mother’s, weren’t they? Yes, they were. She wore them on her wedding day. I do believe she said they were a gift from your father. I married them, you know. I’ve been here that long. They were happy back then. Ahhh, dear. All we can hope now is that she’s resting in peace and forgiving Darden.” He tipped his head. “You used to look just like her. Maybe not so much anymore. You look quite different, actually.”

Jenny felt quite different, actually. “I found someone who loves me. His name’s Pete.”

“Pete? Pete who? Do I know him?”

“No. He’s from out west. You probably passed him on your way here. He rides a motorcycle.”

Reverend Putty scratched his head. “I don’t remember passing a motorcycle.”

“He was going in to get our breakfast. Coffee and doughnuts.” Just like the best of the
Cosmo
men did. She smiled at that. “He’s so cool.”

The pastor remained puzzled. “I think I would’ve heard the noise of a motorcycle.”

“Not the way he oils his machine,” Jenny said.

“Ahh. Well. That’s nice. I’m happy for you, MaryBeth. You deserve a good man.”

“I’ll be leaving with him.”

“Leaving Little Falls?”

Jenny nodded.

“Will Darden be going with you?”

“No. This is his home.”

“But you’re his daughter. You’re all he has.”

“Yes, but now that you’ve given your sermon on forgiveness and invited him back to the church, he has you and the flock. Doesn’t he?”

Pete brought back two jumbo cups of coffee and a dozen doughnuts. “I have a sweet tooth,” he confessed and proceeded to consume three doughnuts to each one of hers. Jenny might have worried, if his body hadn’t been so firm. But she was hungry, too, and there was no mystery why. In no time, the whole dozen doughnuts were gone.

He sat on the rear legs of his chair and patted his belly. “That was good. I don’t feel one bit guilty.”

Neither did Jenny. But the issue of guilt was a land mine. It lay just below the surface, unseen by the naked eye but ready to explode. “If you did feel guilty, what would you do?”

“Chop wood. Run a couple miles. Back home? Mend fences. By the time my stomach was growling again, the guilt would be gone.”

“What about other kinds of guilt? Like about your family.”

“I can’t turn the clock back and change what I did or didn’t do. All I can do is go on.”

“Have you forgiven yourself then?”

“That would mean what I did was okay, which it wasn’t. But I can move on and learn from mistakes and be different.”

“Moving on for you means going back to your family. By being different now you can make up for things you did then. I can’t. So what do I do with the guilt?”

“What guilt?”

“Guilt. Doing things. Not doing things.” She was skirting that land mine, but coming ever closer. “Don’t I owe it to Darden to stay?”

“Do you want to stay?”

“No!
No!
But Darden went to prison for me.”

“He went for killing your mother.”

“But he did it for me.” She wanted to say more, wanted it so badly she could almost taste the words. But a tiny part of her swallowed them back down, afraid still.

“Jenny?”

She looked away.

The front legs of his chair hit the floor seconds before he took her chin and turned her face to his. “I love you, Jenny.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know enough.”

“What if you don’t? What if there are things—”

“— that would curdle my blood?”

“I’m serious, Pete.”

“So am I. I love you.” He pressed his chest. “Right here, where it isn’t necessarily rational but where it feels as real as anything else in this world— right here something clenches each time I look at you. Like you’re the key. Like you can help me make things right. Okay, it sounds weird. A week ago I didn’t know who you were, and maybe, just maybe, if I’d been a day earlier or a day later riding through Little Falls, we wouldn’t have met. But I don’t believe that. I think we’d have met one way or another. I love you.” He made a show of thumping his chest.

Which was how she loved him, she realized, and she knew then that she had to tell him more. Maybe not everything. But certainly more.

So she took his hand and led him upstairs, through her bedroom closet, up the ladder, into the attic. Way at the back under the eaves was a box of newspaper clippings. They covered her mother’s death, her father’s arrest for the crime, and his trial.

Pete carried the box to the back window and sat down to read.

Jenny crouched in a shadowed front corner and watched him lift out one article after another. She knew each by heart, she had read them so many times, knew just what he was reading when, and read along in her mind. She waited for a look or a sound to show he was as revolted as she was. Her breath came in harsh gasps from the place deep inside where the past festered, and all the while she pressed the same spot on her chest that he had pressed on his, felt the tightening there, the fear, the hope.

Finally he folded the last article, slid the box back under the eaves, and came toward her, and her fear rose and rose and rose. But his face held neither revulsion nor hate. His expression was sad, but tender. It was a miracle, she knew, but the love that she so desperately needed to see was still there.