In the Midnight Rain (26 page)

"Thank you." She slid her body against his, skin to skin, and it didn't take him long to stop talking and start kissing. And this time, it was Ellie who led and Blue who willingly followed, and at the end of it, they slept, tangled, in the stuffy heat of afternoon.

Blue awakened to a feeling of sweat and disorientation, groggy from the heat and humid air. He didn't like sleeping in the daytime. It left him dull-witted and vaguely headachy.

As he surfaced, he felt female flesh against his hip, and the soft weight of breasts against his forearm. He smelled the shampoo Ellie used on the hair tickling his nose. Dizzy in the heat, or maybe because of her skin pressed against his, he shifted.

He didn't get up. Because he wanted to lie here and look at her, take her in, before she could raise up those defenses again. Even her honesty was a defense, a way to keep him a little apart from her. In sleep, the intensity of her waking expression slid away, leaving that sinful mouth parted softly. She tucked a curled wrist under her chin, and the other arm was flung out to the other side of her body, as if to keep her bearings in the wild sea of a double bed.

Her skin glowed with lovemaking and laughter and the dewy air. He caressed the delicate collarbone and the line of her shoulder with his gaze, touched breasts that were startingly lovely, shaped in twin pears with a crown of unusually dark cinnamon. Slid his gaze down her hip, her thigh, the delicate line of her ankle. Her skin was exquisite, creamy, but not as pale as he'd thought. Against the white quilt, she was tawny with pearl.

His gut ached as he looked at her, smelling their lovemaking on his hands and her skin. A low headache pounded in the back of his skull from sleeping in the heat, but that didn't stop him from swelling, once again, as he thought of what they would do tonight.

There wasn't time now for more, but he lifted on his elbow and kissed her shoulder, opening his mouth to taste her skin. The act sent electric shocks from the tip of his tongue to the tip of his member, which leaped in eagerness. She made a sound, and stirred, arching up a little into him.

Her cheeks flushed with pleasure as he ran his hands over her body. "We have to go," she whispered, but he felt the thready speed of her heart as he kissed her. A lost kind of heat flooded through him and he moved against her thigh, kissed her mouth.

And forced himself to stop. "Tonight, you'll be in my bed."

"What about Lanie?"

"Darlin', she's old, but not stupid. If she hears us, and that's a big if, she'll just chuckle to herself."

"Ew. I don't know if I like that. She'll think of me as one of your girls."

He shook his head, considered, then told the truth. "I don't bring women up there. We come here."

A troubled expression crossed her face, but he kissed her to keep any words from coming between them. "I just want you to sleep all night with me. I hate this bed."

She laughed. "All right."

The sun was low by the time they got to Rosemary's, and Ellie stopped for a moment to admire the low gold light falling on the fields around the house. Peaceful. It made her wish for a home of her own and a garden to tend and suppers to get ready. The thought gave her a little pang.

"Blue Reynard," Rosemary exclaimed when she opened the door. "You didn't bring me
Popeyes
chicken!"

"I got wrapped up in something," Blue said. "Sorry."

Ellie willed herself not to look guilty as Rosemary gave her the eye—or maybe she was just looking at her curiously. She caught Blue's eye by accident, thought of the condom emergency, and had to swallow hard against laughter. Her words came out in a breathless rush. "Hi, Rosemary. I'm afraid I'm not much of a cook, but I brought some potato salad from the grocery deli."

Rosemary looked from one to the other, and Ellie wondered if their wild afternoon was stamped all over them, visible in the swelling of their lips and marks they'd made on each other. Even just standing next to him, she felt a silvery pulse beating between them, winding round her throat, his hands, limbs, as if their cells could not abide the division between them.

But if anything showed, Rosemary didn't let on. "I'll forgive you this once. Come on in and get something to eat. We have a lot to do tonight."

Leading the way to the wide, old-fashioned dining room, Rosemary waved to the rest of the group. "I think you know everyone."

Ellie nodded toward Connie, and Alisha and Marcus on the other side of the table. Mrs. Nance, the librarian, waved cheerfully. Her glasses hung on a bright pink string today. Florence, her plate filled with fresh veggies and a little piece of meat, smiled. "Hi, Ellie. Good to see you again. Have you met my nephew Brandon?"

Ellie smiled at the tall, strikingly handsome youth. "You're the one going to the Air Force Academy."

He grinned. "And you're the one writing the book about my great-aunt Mabel."

"Yes."

From the kitchen came a small, dark-haired girl, about fifteen or sixteen. She carried a big pitcher of tea. "Bragging again?" she said to the boy.

"I don't have to brag. I got my mama to do that for me."

The girl grinned and put the pitcher on the table. "Hi," she said to Ellie. "I'm Shauna, Connie's girl."

"Shauna has been accepted to Tulane, University of Colorado, and
Yale."
Florence said, winking at her son. "I brag for everyone."

"Oh!" Ellie blinked. The girl was older than she looked. "That's terrific. Have you decided?"

"CU," she said. "I think I'd like to live in the mountains, and it would be nice to be not too far from somebody from home." She grinned at Brandon, "Even if he is obnoxious."

Blue chuckled. "Ellie learned a thing or two about winters when she went to college. You might want to ask her about it."

"That's true," Ellie said. "Be sure to take warm clothes you can wear in layers."

"I will, thank you. Did you like it, snow and winter?" She lifted a shoulder. "I'm looking forward to it."

"I learned that I'm a thin-blooded person," Ellie said as diplomatically as possible. "Snow is pretty, but I only like it through a window." She smiled. "A lot of people fall in love with it."

"It'll be nice for us," Connie said. "We can drive up to see y'all at once, and have somebody to travel with."

"Everybody, get you a plate and let's get the food done with. I have a gazillion pictures for us to get through, and I don't want to be at it all night."

They filled Chinet paper plates with chicken and Jell-O salad whipped to a froth, two different kinds of green salad—"the spinach salad only has a very light vinaigrette dressing," Florence said—and baked beans and potato salad.

"I'm starving," Blue said, low in her ear.

She allowed herself one quick smile at him. "Ditto."

As they ate, Rosemary explained what their purpose was. "Most of you know Marcus has been working for more than three years to get the Vietnam memorial approved. On the Fourth of July, we'll have the official unveiling—and Mrs. Nance is going to help us to put together a photographic retrospective to hang in the library. What we need to do is find as many pictures as we can of all the vets, living and dead, and arrange them into groups, so she can have them mounted and displayed."

She passed out duty assignments. It appeared to Ellie that most were given according to class: Connie and Marcus would work on the classes of sixty-eight and sixty-nine, which were by far the largest; Florence, the oldest of them, took everything before; Rosemary and Blue took the rest. Those unfamiliar with the faces would help the others.

The photographs everyone had brought were divided into neat stacks around the room, keeping them separated. "When you find a picture you want, mark the back with the owners' name so we know how to credit them. Y'all okay with that?"

A murmur of assent. "Please," Rosemary said, "be real careful about keeping the various piles apart. No one wants to lose any of their own pictures, or mix them up."

Ellie felt a jump of excitement when Marcus said, "Ellie, you mind helping us? Alisha's got an uncle in Florence's group."

"I'd be happy to."

The table was cleared and wiped down, and coffee set to brewing in the kitchen. Then the various groups clumped at different spots along the broad table, with piles of photos. Ellie moved to sit beside Connie, who looked grim. "I'm going to get a drink of water," she said, and her chair scraped loudly as she jerked away from the table.

Bewildered, Ellie looked at Marcus. "Am I intruding?

He shook his head. "No. This is hard for her." Flipping through the photos in his hands, he drew one out of the rusty-haired, goateed boy. "This is Bobby Makepeace. And Connie has never really said a proper farewell," he added as she returned.

A look passed between them. Connie glared. Marcus met the anger with patience and a lack of apology. "He didn't join," Connie said to Ellie. "He got drafted, and he couldn't get out of it, and his daddy would have killed him if he'd gone CO." A glance at Ellie. "Conscientious objector," she explained. She picked up the photo, and her mouth, the lipstick carefully repaired after supper, was tight. "I tried to get him to go to Canada. I'd have followed him to Antarctica. China. Anywhere."

Ellie saw Marcus put his big hand on her shoulder, saw the slight release of tension in Connie's body. "It made me so mad when they granted amnesty to all those people who ran to Canada. Not mad at them. Mad at Bobby."

"That's natural," Marcus said.

"I know." Lifting her chin, she pulled a pile of photographs over. "Let me show you who we're looking for, Ellie, so you can help."

There were twenty-three veterans between the two classes. Some of them Ellie recognized. Some she did not. Connie found a representative photo of each and placed them in a row across the top of their area for reference. "I guess we'll just make a pile under each one, huh?"

A little overwhelmed, Ellie stared at the group. Technically,
any
of them could be her father. She ruled out the obvious noncontenders: nine black men, five very fair types—if her redheaded mother had borne a child with a fair man, Ellie would almost certainly have been blonde—and three hee-haw types, including Crew Cut Dennis, who had been in the original photo Ellie had stolen from Rosemary's trunk.

That left six, minus Bobby Makepeace. Five. One was Binkle. Of the other four, one was dead in Vietnam, one in a car accident. One ran a co-op grocery business in Dallas. The other one was Connie's late husband.

That startled Ellie. She glanced at the photo and saw there was genuine possibility there. Binkle was swarthy but thick-featured, a trait Ellie didn't share. Surreptitiously, she looked at Connie's daughter. "Does she look like your husband?"

Connie's face softened. "Spittin' image. She got his green eyes. Did you notice how pretty those eyes are?"

"I did," Ellie lied politely. Her own eyes were green.

The piles began to accumulate. Marcus and Connie shared memories of everyone, of high school, and Ellie liked the way the memories eased the lines in Marcus's face, put a twinkle in his dark, usually serious eyes. He had big white teeth and a robust laugh that infected listeners with a need to at least smile.

"Oh, now look at that," Connie said. "Remember that old bus? What a wreck it was." She turned the photo so Ellie could see a faded color photo of an aged school bus painted with flowers and peace signs. Brightly colored curtains hung in the windows. "This is the group we told you about, the hippie kids. They never did get the bus going again. It just died right there alongside George Reed's pasture. He finally had it hauled off a year or so later."

Ellie chuckled. "This is almost a joke to someone my age. That such a thing ever existed."

"Oh, it existed." Connie flipped through the pictures, and handed one over. "These were some of the kids. Most of them took off pretty fast, hitchhiking or what have you, but the driver of the bus and a couple of girls hung around most of the summer. You remember, Marcus?" She gave him a picture, too. "What was that girl's name?"

Two girls, with the hipless bodies of adolescence, stood in front of the bus, arms around each other. One wore shorts and a halter, the other a filmy skirt and blouse. Both were barefoot. Ellie flipped it over. '"Diane and Suzie,'" she read aloud.

"We didn't call her Suzie, though." Connie grinned at Marcus.

He grinned, shot a half-abashed look at Alisha, and said, "Rapunzel. She had the prettiest hair I ever saw."

Ellie looked at the photo, and the woman did have the kind of hair that would loan itself to such a nickname. Yards and yards of thick blond hair. The girl herself was nearly lost in it. "I always wanted hair like that," she said. "So I could toss it around."

Connie laughed.

"The other one was Diane," Marcus said, slow, like he was remembering. "She was a sweet one. Kinda lost." He plucked a picture out of the pile, gave it to Connie. "Remember?"

Ellie had been listening to them discuss other remembered figures for a couple of hours, but it was oddly eerie to hear her mother's name on someone else's lips.

"Yeah, she was real nice," Connie said and handed it to Ellie, a casual gesture of inclusion. "Made me jealous she was so skinny. Rosemary, you remember her? Diane?"

"Sure."

"What was her last name?"

A tough flutter of heartbeat lodged at the center of Ellie's chest, and she stared down at the picture, praying they would not remember.

"I don't remember. Something Irish. It went with that red hair."

Connor, Ellie thought. Conn of the Hundred Battles.

Blue spoke up, his voice carrying an odd note. "Can I see it?"

Ellie tried not to look at him, not to meet his eyes, but she faded.

"A skinny girl with an Irish name, huh?" He took the proffered photo. "Cute." He passed it back to Ellie, his eyes direct as lasers. "Maybe O'Skinny?"

The rest of them laughed, but Ellie was suddenly aware that nearly everyone in this room had known her mother. Talked to her, seen the way she moved and the way she laughed and heard her voice.

It made her so deeply, unbearably sad for a moment that she felt actual tears well in her throat. She looked down at the picture, at the young woman with her clear white skin and turned-up lips, her breasts free beneath an Indian cotton blouse. Oh, Mama! she thought. Why'd you go away so fast?