No Place Like Home (9 page)

But there were hollyhocks blooming around the lilac bush, tall stalks with red flowers, and I remembered the dolls he used to make for me out of them. I remembered riding on his shoulders, my hands tight in his thick hair, being so proud to walk into church with him, my dad, the handsome one, Romeo, the one the women all wanted to talk to for even a minute if they could.

At my elbow, Malachi said, “Come on, sugar. Let’s go get something to eat, huh?”

I hadn’t heard him approach, and his deep rich voice seemed suddenly very sexual, seemed as if it would carry a long way. Darkly, I hoped it would, and went down the steps.

We weren’t far from my old stomping grounds, and on some strange impulse I didn’t bother to dissect, I drove by my old high school, looking imposing on its hill. “That’s where I went to school,” I said, pointing. “And when Billy showed up to whisk me out of Pueblo, it was right on that front lawn.”

“That’s when you fell out with your dad?”

“Yep.”

He looked around me at the tall steps, real interest in his face. His long arm stretched out along the back of the seat, a very ordinary thing for such a big man to do, but the suggestion of thumb so close to my neck made me a little more aware than I wished to be. “Tell me about it.”

A kid in a primered Impala was bearing down on me from behind, so I pulled over. Where to begin?

“Have you ever gone to the state fair anywhere?”

“Sure.”

“Well, it’s a big deal in Pueblo—the biggest event every summer, especially for kids. We used to live really close to the fairgrounds, and we’d go as often as we could scrape up the money, just to hang out and listen to the bands and see all our friends.” I stopped, rolling my hands on the steering wheel, the taste, the excitement of those summer nights coming back on waves of neon and laughter.

“The summer I was seventeen, Billy and Michael’s band landed one of the free tent shows. A good way to get some exposure, all that, you know?”

“I remember. They did a lot of that for the first year or so.”

“Everybody was talking about them, especially about Billy. He was just about the most gorgeous thing my friends had ever seen.” I closed my eyes with a happy smile, remembering the astonishing pleasure of that music. “And you know how good they were. I didn’t even notice Billy right away, you know? He was cute, but it was Michael’s voice that got me—it was like that Roberta Flack song. I stood there in the audience and just cried.”

“Does Michael know this?”

“Oh, sure. We’ve talked about it a lot.” I took a breath. “Anyway, they went into a set of heavy rock and roll, to get the crowd all hot, and I started dancing. When the set was finished, Billy came looking for me.”

We were quiet, looking at the wide green lawns, the imposing columns, the very high schoolish look of it. “I partied with them, Billy and Michael, that night, and I went back every night after that until they left six days later.”

Oh, the pain of those long weeks afterward, spending hours and hours on the phone long distance with Billy in some other city, my heart eaten up with jealousy and longing! He swore undying love for me, but even then I was smart enough to know he was tempted every single day.

Which probably lent a good deal of triumph to what happened next.

“About two months later, when I came out of school, Billy was waiting.” I could see the day so clearly, still. “I came down those steps, and it was a sunny day with a big wind blowing all these leaves into circles, you know? I didn’t see him right away, because I was totally miserable being in school after that big adventure in the summer. All the kids seemed so stupid and shallow.” I shook my head.

“I remember that feeling.” He touched my shoulder, once and away.

I pursed my lips, remembering, “There was a big knot of girls at the bottom of the stairs, and they were doing that giggle and point thing, you know, a sure sign there was some boy who thought he was the baddest thing around.” I glanced at him. “Are you getting how cool and together I was?”

He chuckled.

“So I look up, and there he is. Leaning against his motorcycle with his hair blowing all around him, his arms crossed. He even had on a leather jacket.” My heart rushed a little, like it had then. “I thought I could see his eyes, burning me across the whole lawn, and it finally hit me that the kids were all whispering his name, telling each other, ‘That’s Billy Jake, from the Lost Boys Band.’ And then they were looking back at me, waiting to see what I’d do.”

“God, that was a stupid name,” Malachi said. “I tried to talk him out of it, but his agent just thought it was so damned clever, he wouldn’t listen to me.”

I grinned. “Not as bad as Johnny Cougar.”

“Huh. Mellencamp got it together eventually, though, figured out he was being used. Billy was never that smart.” He realized whom he was talking to and winced. “Sorry.”

“You’re right. I knew it even then.” I shrugged and looked back at the grass, at a day more than twenty years in the past. “I hated Pueblo—it seemed so provincial and backward and blue collar . . . and Billy knew how I felt. He sat there on that bike, and I knew he’d come for me, that all I had to do to walk away was just get on that bike and ride away with him.”

I looked at Malachi and smiled. “I remember exactly what he said, too.” I dropped my voice, let the southern drawl—did I mention I’ve always been a sucker for a man with a drawl?—slow my syllables, and said, “ ‘Come on with me, Jewel. I don’t know where we’ll end up, but you know where this road leads.’ ” So many years later, my breath felt short over the enormity of the decision I’d made so easily in that instant. “And he was right, so I put down my backpack, zipped up my coat, and I went with him.”

“And I bet they swooned, those kids watching.”

“Maybe,” I said, putting the car back in gear. “But I bet a lot more of them thought I was a fool.”

“What do you think?”

I looked over my shoulder and waited for a car to pass so I could pull out, thinking of my father’s snub. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

“So what’s the deal with your dad, then? He’s not talking to you twenty years later because you ran off with a musician when you were still a kid?”

“Not exactly.” I took a breath as we passed an old Catholic church, and struggled for a way to put four hundred years of Sicilian tradition and women into a single sentence. “I shamed him in front of his friends and his relatives and his customers. The only way he could save face was to wash his hands of me.”

And I remembered, too, with an ache that hadn’t gone away in all these years, how it had happened. In a voice that was emotionless, I said, “I was afraid to go home, right then. I mean, I guess I knew it was crazy, but it was also what I needed to do, and I was afraid they’d talk me out of it.

“So I just went with him to Denver. And my father followed me. Tried to get me to come home.” Oh, the memory could still bring tears to my eyes, my father standing there in the rain outside the little motel we were staying in, his eyes burning with fury, Billy behind me in the musky darkness of the room where we’d been making love. “He told me if I didn’t come home with him right then that I’d be dead to him forever.”

“That was a long damned time ago, Jewel. Why don’t you just say fuck it and move on? Why are you still trying?”

I just shook my head, thinking of hollyhock dolls. Zeppoles in the shape of letters. Riding his shoulders to church.

We stopped at Burger King for lunch. The drive-in line was a million cars long—well, okay, three, but I don’t like drive-ins in this car, never know when the screaming will start and then I’m trapped—so we went inside. The lunch rush was over and the employees were laughing in a little knot behind the counter. Some young kids in the back, hair in nets, a middle-aged woman scrubbing down the counter, a boss type in a clean shirt on the phone, making notes on a clipboard, his back to us.

The woman put down her washcloth and looked at us. “Can I help youse?”

We both ordered, me a burger and shake, Malachi two giant burgers, a giant order of fries, and a monster-sized Coke. He paid, gallantly, for all of it. I widened my eyes at his order. “Your arteries are hardening as we speak.”

He flashed that grin, wiggling his eyebrows. “I work it off.”

The boss type hung up the phone and gave us a distracted grin. “How you folks doing today?”

I smiled. “Good, thanks.”

He took another look at me. “You related to Jordan Sabatino?”

“You think?” I grinned. “My little sister.”

A subtle war happened on his smooth brown face. Admiration—he’d been one of Jordan’s many suitors, that was obvious—but also a little avaricious curiosity over the “little” sister part. “Ah,” he said, his eyes glittering. “You’re the dangerous one, then.”

“Yep,” I said lightly, happy to have a straw to unwrap. “That’s me. Ms. Dangerous.”

He leaned closer. “I thought you lived somewhere else, New York or something, with that—” he glanced at Malachi, trying to decide if he could be the rock star of Jewel’s legendary flight “—band.”

The band. Right. I poked the straw through the starred hole on the top of my shake, unable to stop the flicker of heat over my ears at the stories that had circulated about me. This was a new variation, and I could just imagine how it had gone. Jewel the Slut who ran off with the whole band. “I married Billy Jake,” I lied with a level gaze designed to take that greed out of his eyes and sit him down in the back pew of the church where he’d atone for his gossip. “We were married fourteen years before he died.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I heard that.” He straightened, lifted his chin in the traditional parting gesture. “Hey, tell your sister Matt Sedillo said hi, eh?”

“I will.”

Malachi had been quiet, but when we carried the red plastic trays over to the table, he said, “How many people live in this city? I thought it seemed like maybe one hundred thousand, maybe one hundred fifty thousand?”

“That’s about right.” I unwrapped my sandwich. “Why?”

He gave me a puzzled little frown. “You keep meeting people everywhere. It’s like a small town.”

“Ah. That’s the two degrees of separation.”

“What does that mean?”

“There was a play called
Six Degrees of Separation.
It was also a movie, one of Will Smith’s early roles. You ever see it?”

He was busy with his giant burger and only shook his head.

“Well, it was about the connections between people. The idea that if you sit down with someone else, you can find a connection between you within six degrees—like your uncle was married to his first-grade teacher’s mother.” I frowned and counted, trying to find six degrees, then waved my hand. “Anyway, in Pueblo, that narrows down to two.” I took a bite of my burger. “Sometimes two in seven directions.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Like that guy.”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Weird. Kind of claustrophobic, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” I said, looking at the woman behind the counter. Truth was, I liked it. Nine times out of ten, I could find a connection with a stranger in five minutes or less. Not that I’d bother most of the time, but it’s kind of comforting to know you can. It was one of the things I’d missed like hell while I was gone—that web, knotty and sometimes limiting, but also somehow secure. You can’t fall too far with that web below you.

“You like it,” Malachi said. “Even if a guy like that slobbers all over the counter?”

“I don’t like that part,” I admitted. “But it kind of means that people don’t get too far off the track if they plan to hang around.”

“Which you didn’t.”

“Right.” I folded the paper from my sandwich, knowing outsiders didn’t like the web, never had. It was hard to be woven into it, for one thing. Hard to like something you can’t participate in. I cast around for a way to put it in terms he might understand. “It keeps the really dramatic, awful things to a minimum. If there’s trouble, there are a lot of people to split the load and handle it.”

“I’ll buy that.”

I nibbled the lettuce around the edges of my sandwich, a thousand examples of the way that worked running through my head. Then I smiled, looking up at him. “Divorce sucks, right? I mean, there are times that it’s the only option, when two people are just totally wrong for each other, but in maybe ninety out of a hundred cases, the marriage’ll work out if both people are committed, don’t you think?”

He lifted a shoulder. “I guess.”

“Well, even if you don’t have the experience, you can see that maybe it’s bad for kids, that it’s a lot easier on everybody if the marriage works out in most cases.”

“Yeah, okay. I can see that.”

“Until I went to high school, I never knew anybody who was divorced except one family down the block, and that guy was such a loser that everybody really wanted to see her get rid of him.”

“I see where this is going. I don’t buy it, Jewel.” He shook his big head stubbornly. “What that gets you is a bunch of really miserable families where one person or the other is just dying to get out.”

“No, it doesn’t. If the expectation is that you get married for life, the other option presents so many problems that people tend to put a little more elbow grease into making the marriage work however they can, sticking it out through the tough times.”

A faint bitterness crossed his mouth. “Well, it sounds nice, but I still don’t buy it.” He met my eyes. “You had to get rid of Billy eventually. I remember when Michael talked about it. There was no saving him.”

“Well, first of all, I wasn’t actually married—and you know, I sometimes wonder if that might have made a difference.” I shook my head. “But second, sometimes it just doesn’t work out. He had a lot of problems before I made him leave, and even when he got addicted to crack, I didn’t stop loving him. But I didn’t want Shane to see his father that way. “

He crumpled his empty sandwich wrappers carefully. “I gotta tell you, sweetheart, that I think the opposite is the real truth. People are happier without all those external ties, making choices day to day over whether to stay or go, change and grow. I think people get stuck in places like this, stuck in the expectations everyone has for them. You thought so, too, or you’d never have ridden off on that bike with Billy.”