No Place Like Home (6 page)

Jasmine gave him her best, toothiest smile, tossing back her mane of shiny hair. “Jasmine,” she said in her perfect voice, her hand fluttering at her neck.

He smiled and nodded. “This child can’t be your boy,” he said with the right note of awe.

Her eyes widened. “Oh, he’s mine. If I live through it.”

Mama hung back, looking from him to me with her arms crossed over her chest. “Malachi,” I said, “this is my mother, Rose, and my grandmother Lucy.”

Nana Lucy had been picking over the black grapes in a bowl on the table until she found one that met her standards. Holding it between her long, gnarled fingers, she scowled. “Malachi?” She said it with a particularly nasal whine,
MAH-la-ki
. “What kind of name is that?”

I saw Michael and Malachi exchange an amused glance, and it struck me that they were
brothers
, with that long, unspoken knowledge of each other. “We always wondered what my mother was thinking,” Michael said.

“Why didn’t she just call you John?” Nana asked. She ate half the grape, slowly.

Malachi’s big white teeth flashed. “It would have made my life a lot easier, I can tell you that.”

He seemed enormous in the middle of them, towering over all the women, even Jane, who only came up to his shoulder. Lost in the forest of legs and knees, Danny adamantly slapped Malachi’s big thigh. “Hey! You want to come outside with me?”

“Okay with me.” He raised his eyebrows for permission from Jasmine. “But you gotta promise no blood, all right? I get kinda woozy.”

Michael met my eyes across the room, that little secret smile on his mouth, like he wanted me to notice his big sex god brother taking a little kid outside to play. “Predictable,” I said.

Malachi got the joke, chuckling low as he took Danny’s hand and headed for the door. He winked. “Works, though.”

Nana, who also got the joke, pushed my hair off my face. “You’re too old to wear your hair down like that.”

I didn’t look at Malachi, who left the room with Danny, leaving only the chaos of my family behind. Manageable. “I like it this way,” I said, and pulled the hair down that she had pushed back.

Jane touched it. “I
love
it,” she said, her fingers lazing through the curls. “Very Renaissance.”

“Thank you,” I said, and plucked a few grapes out of the bowl myself.

My mother still hadn’t said a word, and I looked up to see her staring out the kitchen window at the man and boy playing in the yard, her mouth in a straight, measuring line. “Hey,” I said, “let’s take this out of Michael’s kitchen. He’s creating.” I grabbed the bowl of grapes. “Come on, Nana.”

She waved me away, and I knew she wanted to sit alone with her guy. For whatever reason, she’d adopted Michael Shaunnessey, and loved coming here to fuss over him. He loved it, too. He gave me a nod. “About a half hour,” he said.

We settled around the giant dining room table, little pockets of chatter rising and falling. Shane deposited Karen in a chair. “I’ll be upstairs,” he said. The long, long day was starting to tell in his face. He’d be asleep in five minutes.

“Don’t you want something to eat?”

“Not right now.” He went up the stairs, his combat boots heavy, even clumps instead of the usual two-at-a-time race. I smiled to myself. A hangover is a good teacher.

Jane caught the smile. “Not feeling top of his form, is he?”

“Nope,” I said. “But tell me what you guys were doing. How’s the wedding going?”

“Oh, it was just a fitting,” Jane said. “They still have to take up the waist a little more, but the dress looks good. The big thing is,” she said with glowing eyes, “we found a house!”

“A house?”

“It’s real pretty,” Mama said, relaxing enough now that That Man was out of the room to take a handful of grapes into her palm and start eating them, one at a time, gesturing with them as she talked. “Even has roses growing up the porch. We can get over to Eagles and fix it up in no time.” She pursed her lips. “What’s that paper Carol got for her stairway?”

“Oh, the paisley! Yeah,” Jane said. She took my hand. “It’s so beautiful, Jewel. You’ll love it—the light is so pretty. Two bedrooms and even a family room. Over by City Park, so we can take walks in the evening, and when we have babies, it will be so easy to go to the zoo.”

I listened to her descriptions with a sense of missed possibilities. She was so responsible, this baby sister of mine, and it hadn’t appreciably ruined her life. She had been going steady with her boyfriend, Steve Candelario, since they were both juniors in high school. They’d done everything by the book, these two—homecoming dances with corsages, and the prom in tuxes and evening gowns and limousines. They both went to college right here in town, achieved their degrees in four years flat, and graduated together, and now that they’d been out in the workforce for two years, had decided they’d saved enough to get married. It was almost scary how sensible they were.

The wedding itself promised to be an undertaking of Herculean proportions and would require the careful diplomatic planning of a peace treaty. Steve’s family was at least as enormous as ours, with roots that went back in the area a hundred years, with another three hundred before that in New Mexico. And while both families were Catholic, his family was Hispanic, with their own long traditions.

“I’m so proud of you,” I said, touching Jane’s hand. “It’s going to be so wonderful.”

Nana Lucy came to the doorway. “I’m ready to go home now.”

Everyone stood up. Jasmine said, “I’ll just dash out and get Danny, and meet you around front.”

Jane rolled her eyes at me, and I kept my face straight. Mama swatted Jane’s arm, which only made her grin. She leaned close to me. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” She glanced over her shoulder. “Alone?”

“Yeah. Let’s go on out.”

Dusk was gathering along the edges of the sky, and between the two mesas to the west where the Arkansas river flowed through, the sun glowed like a magic ball. I looked over my shoulder to the cottonwood at the edge of the yard, and the very top of it caught those long burnished fingers of light the way it always did, a reliable and beautiful thing that never failed to capture me.

“What’s up?” I asked Jane, putting my butt on the porch railing so I could see in the door. Mama and Nana Lucy were fussing over Michael.

Jane took a breath. “Well, um . . .” She tossed a lock of hair off her forehead, glanced down at the tip of her blazingly white tennis shoe. “This is hard.”

“Hey, it’s me, remember?”

“Yeah.” She raised her head, a charming little flush on her cheeks. “Okay, I’ll just say it. Can you teach me how to be sexy? Nobody else can do it. They don’t get it—they’re giving me white lace nightgowns, Jewel, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad, and nobody wants to tell me anything, and I just thought—” Her cheeks went completely crimson. “Oh, that’s bad, I mean, uh . . .”

“You really are a virgin,” I said in some wonder. “That’s so cool!”

“I guess,” she said in some misery. “But so is Steve, and neither one of us knows anything, and what if it’s a big disaster after all these years of waiting?” She was very close to tears.

Impulsively I took her hand. “First of all, you are so beautiful that he’s going to just die when you take off your clothes. Trust me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.” I squeezed her fingers, and thought about the rest. How did a person learn, except by fumbling along in the backseats of cars or trading idiot stories with friends or making mistakes—unless someone told them? “I’ll help you pick out something decadent for your wedding night, if you like. And if you have specific questions, I’ll be happy to answer whatever I can. But most of the mechanical stuff you can find at the library. The rest, you’ll teach each other.”

She wiggled a little, bending at the knees, then up again, a movement that made me remember her so clearly as a toddler. So much time. I’d lost so much time with her. “I just wish I could look like you,” she said.

I felt ancient. The wise woman, the crone. “No, you don’t. You look like you, and that’s good.”

“I know that part.” She sighed and pulled her hand out of mine, frustrated. “You aren’t listening. I mean look at you tonight—Nana was clucking her tongue before we even got in the house and Mom got all worried and I couldn’t see you so I didn’t know what the big deal was, but then I did see you, just sitting against the wall, so comfortable in your body and so sexy I just wanted to be you for five minutes.”

“Keep talking, Jane,” I said. “You are
so
good for my ego.”

“Jewel! I’m serious.”

“I know. I’m sorry—and I know what you want.” She wanted sueded silk and black bras. Very easy stuff, that. “We’ll go shopping, just us.”

“Thank you.”

Malachi and Jasmine came around the side of the house, Danny complaining all the way. Jasmine had that grim, exhausted look she got when she had to match wills with him, and I whistled sharply to distract him. “Yo, Danny-boy. Wanna go see the street rods with me this weekend?”

“Can Malachi come?”

“Mr. Shaunnessey,” Jasmine corrected.

“Whatever. Can he?”

“If he wants,” I said. Across the purpling dusk of the world, our eyes met, mine and Malachi’s, and it was that strange, rippling thing again. Feeling him, the force of him, across a big space of grass. Purely physical, and somehow very pleasant. He was so very climbable.

My mother tsked. “Guess you don’t want to help with Jane’s new house, then, huh?”

Immediately I felt defensive. I could fool a lot of people, but my mother saw through me like cheap glass. “I just thought maybe—” I stopped. “I was just trying to help.”

She met my eyes, that clear, no-bullshit look that had made me so angry so often when I was a teen. “I know what you were doing,” she said quietly. “I thought you’d wised up a little after all you’ve been through.”

I crossed my arms, stung, but took the offensive. “If Jane’s working on her house, my dad will be there, won’t he?”

“Probably.”

“Then I guess that solves that, now doesn’t it?”

She took Nana Lucy’s arm to help her down the steps. Nana pushed my hair back. “Think about what I said. It’s time to cut your hair. You’re not young anymore.”

Ouch. I nodded in deference to her elder status and stood on the porch until they left, struggling to keep a smile pasted on my face. I felt cheap and silly in my tank top and my too-long, little girl hair.

Michael’s hands landed on my shoulders, and his body was warm against my back. “Don’t,” he said against my ear. “You look fabulous.”

I let go of a pained little laugh and surreptitiously wiped a tear from the corner of my eyes. “What do you know?”

He laughed, his old laugh, full and deep and so infectious. “I’m the king of the fairies. It is in my power to know these things.”

Even though I’d known it was coming, I laughed with him. Long ago, when we first met, Michael’s ethereal beauty had enchanted me. NaÏve and young—and made brave by the copious amounts of wine we’d all drunk—I’d blurted out one night that he looked like the King of Fairies. Needless to say, he’d roared with laughter along with everyone else, but I think the description has always pleased him. He fancies himself to be a magical being in ways, Pan or maybe Apollo.

“What’s this?” Malachi asked, coming up the steps.

“An old, old joke,” I said.

His mouth stretched up on one side. “The king of fairies?”

Michael straightened, pushing a little between my shoulder blades. “Malachi, this woman needs some wind in her hair. Y’all go get some tequila. We need margaritas.”

“But dinner must be almost ready!” I protested.

“I can hold it for ten minutes. Go on,” Michael said. “Can’t eat chicken wings without margaritas.”

“We can go in my car,” I said.

Malachi snorted, looking at the station wagon. “Nah.”

Malachi pulled out his keys. “Come on, sugar,” he drawled, “Let’s go for a ride.”

MICHAEL’S MAGNIFICENT CHICKEN WINGS

6–8 lbs of chicken drummettes, For Sauce:

washed 1
¹
/
₂
cups coffee

2–3 cups water
¹
/
₂
cup Worcestershire sauce

1 orange 1
¹
/
₂
cups ketchup

Worcestershire sauce
¹
/
₄
cup cider vinegar

2 Tb vinegar 3 Tb chili powder

Pepper 2 tsp salt

Salt 2 cups onion, chopped fine

Nutmeg
¹
/
₄
cup minced hot chilies,

jalapeño or serranos

6 cloves garlic

Honey

Put chicken in a large ceramic bowl. With a fork, poke holes in the skin all over the wings—don’t get fancy about it, it’s just to let in a little more flavor.

In a large measuring cup or bowl, mix 2 to 3 cups of water (enough to cover wings), the juice of an orange (plus the fruit, shredded up into little pieces, if you want), a couple hard shakes of Worcestershire sauce, a couple tablespoons of vinegar, plus a dash each of pepper, salt, and nutmeg. Pour over the chicken; cover chicken with plastic wrap or foil. Have a beer or two and come back later for part two.

Put on some music. Probably best to have some southern rock, blues, or even some good bluegrass kind of gospel for this particular undertaking, though I have used K.T. Oslin to good effect some days. Also, it’s good to open another beer.

In a big pot, mix all sauce ingredients except the honey.

Simmer for a half hour. Thicken with honey, and pour over chicken wings. Bake at 350º for an hour and a half, turning halfway through, basting as necessary. Really good with margaritas.

Chapter 5

So I got my wish. Malachi got on the bike and pulled it upright, turning the ignition to bring the engine to rumbling, low-throated life. His thighs tensed, big and strong beneath the black jeans, and he handed me a helmet. “Spoiling your image now,” I said, taking it. “Don’t you want the wind in your hair, freedom man?”

“Not if it means a cracked skull.” He pulled his own helmet on and shifted forward, leaving room for me to get on.

There’s a reason bad boys ride motorcycles. They’re very dangerous machines. I put my hand out and braced myself on his shoulder, feeling giving flesh and hard muscle beneath the turquoise T-shirt, and slid behind him, settling as far back as I could to avoid pressing against him.

“Hang on,” he said, and when I put my hands on the seat, he added, “Hang on to
me
.”

So I did. Put my hands around his waist and leaned into him. No way around it.

And this is what my mother knows about me: I could pretend all day and night to be holding myself rigid, but he smelled good, even better than he had this afternoon. Soap and clean breezes and healthy man. Against my arms, his sides were hard as iron, his back warm against my breasts and belly. I relaxed into him, enjoying it, enjoying him and the rumbling engine between our legs and the soft summer night air blowing over my skin. The moments sizzled along my nerves, worked their way into my chest, and untied some tight knot that lived there. Our bodies moved, into turns, out of them, and he called over his shoulder, “Not your first ride, I take it.”

“No,” I called back, and heard myself laughing.

At the liquor store, I realized I should have done something with my hair, which had flown all around in the wind. But somehow it didn’t matter nearly as much here. I yanked off the helmet and carried it in my hand, feeling like a tough girl, like a wild woman. I loved walking in there with Malachi, too, and picking out tequila and fresh limes. He picked up a box of salt and I took it out of his hand and put it back. “Kosher salt for margaritas. He’d kill you if you brought back regular.” I picked it out and tried to remember if there was any triple sec around the house. Margaritas were my favorite, and I was picky about the way they were made, thanks to a long stint as a bartender in a Mexican restaurant in LA, back when Billy and Michael still thought they’d make the big time.

“Is it okay for Michael to drink?” he asked me suddenly.

I started to say, “What difference does it make?” but that would be too bold. Instead I looked up and smiled. “He’s feeling great today, because of you. Let him enjoy it.”

He turned his mouth down at the corners, an expression of acceptance. “I can do that.” His boot heels made a solid, reliable noise against the tiles of the floor. “Your grandma’s mean.”

I smiled. “She’s not so bad, once you get on her good side.”

“How’d you come from that family?” he asked, and frowned over the bottles of sweet and sour.

“What d’you mean?” I pointed to the right brand.

He gave me an “oh, get real” look, which I ignored. “Do we need anything else?” he asked.

“I think that’s it.” We carried it all up to the cash register. The cashier called from the back, and I shifted, examining the tiny, pretty bottles of amaretto and Frangelico behind the counter, mainly trying to keep from eyeing Malachi’s hands as he pulled bills from his front pocket. Hands are kind of a weakness. By now you’re thinking that pretty much everything about a man is a weakness for me, and you’d be halfway to right, but there are certain things that cool my attraction pretty fast, and ugly hands is one. A lot of big men have spatulate hands, with blunt fingers and those weird-looking fan shaped nails. Michael, for all that I love him, doesn’t have great hands.

Malachi’s hands were strong. I watched him flip the side of his thumb impatiently over the edge of the bills, and the tendon below moved beneath dark skin. His nails were oval at the end of straight, long fingers.

“All those women in your kitchen tonight are good girls,” he said, tossing a twenty and a five on the counter. He braced himself on his palms and looked down at me, one knee cocked to sling out a hip. “You aren’t.”

Stung again, I made a noise and narrowed my eyes at his pose. “Do you practice every single gesture?”

“Nope. Do you?”

“What does that mean?”

A lift of one shoulder. “What did you mean?”

“This is a stupid conversation.” I looked over my shoulder to see what was keeping the guy, and he was finally lumbering toward us. White grizzles of whiskers clung to his jowls and he didn’t make conversation as he rang everything up.

Malachi picked up the bags. “After you,” he said with a courtly gesture, and grinned. “That one, I’ve practiced.”

I managed to smile only a little bit. Outside, I pulled on the helmet. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said. A streetlamp shone directly on his head, putting arcs of white light across his crown and the straight, aggressive bridge of his nose.

“Which one?” I twisted my hair into a long rope and tucked it down my shirt, feeling at a slight disadvantage because the helmet muffled my hearing.

“Do you practice?”

“I don’t have to practice,” I said, and put my hand out for the liquor.

He grinned. “Exactly.” He put on his helmet and swung easily on to the seat. I slid on behind him, glad to have something to put space between us on the way back.

At the house, he caught my arm as we were going up the walk. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings back there.” He paused. “With the good girl thing.”

“Oh, that.” I waved my hand. “You didn’t.”

“Yes, I did, and I apologize. I meant it as a compliment.”

His big dark eyes were earnest and I suddenly realized that he was a good deal younger than me. Maybe even more than five years. He was probably flirting with me not because of my black bra or anything else, but because he was being nice to his brother’s best friend. The lonely older woman.

“I know,” I said, and carried the bags into the house. “No big deal.”

Shane was setting the table on the porch when we came in. He gave me a lift of his chin, but his smile was for Malachi. The same smile, I realized suddenly, that Danny had given him—slightly abashed and admiring, wanting approval. “Hi,” he said. “Michael says we’re eating outside.”

I went to the kitchen to help Michael. Behind me, I heard Malachi join Shane outside, their voices braiding into the sound of crickets starting up their night song.

Michael had not heard me come in, and although he straightened quickly, I’d already seen him leaning hard on the counter. When he raised his head, I saw the strain that had settled beneath his eyes and around his mouth. Covering the pang it gave me, I cocked my head to the porch. “Go,” I said. “I’ll take it from here.” I grabbed a long apron from the hooks by the door and tied it on.

He moved slowly, pushing up and away from the counter he’d been leaning on, and I turned toward the stove, giving him a little space for dignity. His big bony hand fell on my shoulder for a second and I touched it with my fingers, then let him go and opened a drawer to find the tongs for the wings. For a long minute, I stared into the tangle of utensils, hearing distantly the sound of the male voices, rich and full against the silence in the kitchen. Berlin’s nails clicked against the kitchen floor as she crossed the room to sit beside me, her sherry-colored eyes in a red face so very empathetic.

Shane appeared and carried everything out while I mixed a pitcher of margaritas. Malachi came in, too, and took the bucket of ice, the glasses, and the saucer of salt. Shane came back for a forgotten pile of cloth napkins and saw the pitcher. “Cool.”

I made a noise. “Like you’ll get one.”

“Come on! I’m seventeen. It’s a party. Just one? It’s not like I never had anything to drink in my life.”

“You’re lucky I’m going to let you eat, boy.” I picked up the pitcher and pushed him out of my way. “Go put some music on.”

Michael, or maybe Shane, had gone all out. They’d gathered up dozens of my candles, all shapes and sizes and colors, and put them on the outside of the windowsills, on the table, along the railing of the porch. The round table was covered with a dark cloth—I smiled to think of Michael choosing the dark one in case people got barbeque sauce on it—and set as elegantly as a Martha Stewart picture. They were good at mood, these two. “It’s beautiful,” I said, putting down the pitcher. I pointed to Malachi’s big blue goblet and he handed it to me to be filled. “See how much better kosher salt looks than regular?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, lifting the glass in a toast.

From within came the mellow guitar and whiskey voice of Bonnie Raitt. “Good choice,” Michael said with a smile, handing me his glass. “If he flunks out at the music game, he can always be a DJ.”

Shane clicked off the dining room light as he came through, so we were plunged together into the intimacy of the candlelit dark. I remembered to pull the apron off over my head before I took the seat next to Michael. Shane sat between Malachi and me.

I raised my glass. “To good friends and good food.”

“And good God let’s eat,” Shane said. “I’m about to starve to death.”

“When you went upstairs,” I said, helping myself to a pile of wings, sticky and juicy, “I thought you’d be out for the night.”

“I just had to get away from all the lectures.” Shane scowled. “This is one part of living here I hate the most—getting a lecture from ten different people on the same thing. Most I ever got before was two.”

“You might think,” Michael said, choosing a chicken wing at leisure, “that a body’d want to avoid trouble after that.”

Shane looked down, chastened. He’d been flying all day on the slight notoriety, and the strangeness of Malachi’s arrival, and then the edge of teen righteousness at the repetitive lectures. Michael’s slow, reasonable, southern voice let the air out of him in one sentence. “Yeah,” he said. But he scowled at his plate, his knee wiggling in his discomfort. “I didn’t mean to really. Just . . . one thing led to another.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Michael said, licking his thumb with careful disinterest. Then his blue eyes pinned my boy right where he sat. “Happens a lot more when you’re a fool about your liquor.”

Malachi looked up at that, his eyes narrowing. “Damn,” he said quietly. “You sound just like the old man.”

Michael grinned. “Yeah, I do. Been hearing it for years.” He looked at Shane. “What’re the rules about drinking, man?”

“One an hour. No shots. No shotgunning beers. No driving.”

Malachi made a noise I couldn’t quite place. Derision, maybe. But Michael was focused on Shane. “And how many of those rules did you break last night?”

“I dunno.” Shane raised a shoulder. Then his mouth quirked. “Uh, all of them. Not the beers.”

Michael’s mouth lifted on one side. “And you see where you landed.”

Shane nodded.

I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been giving him instructions on drinking?”

Michael took my hand across the table. In the candlelight, he looked almost like himself, his blond hair gleaming on his shoulders, the dual hoops in his ears glittering. “Did you think he’d never get around to trying it?”

“Maybe.” Just like he’d never have sex or a broken heart, or be penniless and have to eat refried beans from a can rolled into a tortilla for six days straight. Michael’s fingers moved on mine, and I didn’t have to look at him to know he was smiling fondly.