One Summer (27 page)

 … of Johnny’s motorcycle. Because, of course, that was what it was. He turned the machine in a wide arc at the barricade and headed back down the open street away from the convivial gathering of friends. A woman was mounted behind him. Her helmet hid her face, but from her build and the strands of curly, blond hair that blew in the wind, Rachel concluded that Johnny’s companion was Glenda Watkins.

At the knowledge that it could have been she, Rachel felt heartsick.

27

“Y
ou got any more beer?” Johnny, sprawled out on the dilapidated couch in the living room of Glenda’s trailer, felt restless. The TV was on, blaringly loud as it broadcast a
Wild Kingdom
special on poisonous butterflies of the Amazon or some such thing. Stretched out on the floor, his head propped on his hands, Jeremy watched, transfixed. Jake, four, sat contentedly in Johnny’s lap and stared at the TV, though Johnny was pretty sure the kid had about as much idea of what was happening on the screen as he did.

“In the fridge.” Glenda was in the bathroom giving her two girls a bath. Their every splash and giggle could be heard in the living room—the trailer was that small. It boggled Johnny’s mind how Glenda could live in a space consisting of two tiny bedrooms, a living room barely big enough for a couch, an easy chair, and a TV, a minuscule kitchen, and an equally minuscule bathroom, with four kids and not go insane.

“Jeremy, would you do me a favor and get me a beer?”

Silence greeted this request. Jeremy was too caught up in his program to hear. Johnny thought about trying again, at a greatly increased volume, but then decided against it. Let the kid watch TV in peace.

“Come on, pardner, got to scoot,” he said to Jake, who
obligingly permitted himself to be set down on the couch. Johnny got up, stretched, and walked into the kitchen in his socks to get himself a beer. His sneakers had been lost somewhere beneath the couch, removed earlier by Jake, who was developing a fascination with shoe strings.

Opening the refrigerator door, Johnny saw one intact six-pack with some surprise. He could have sworn there had been two. How many beers had he drunk?

Did it matter anyway? Johnny mused as he pulled one free of the rings and popped the top.

“Hey, Johnny, throw me a Coke!” Jeremy called over his shoulder.

“No Coke!” Glenda shouted from the bathroom.

Jeremy shrugged. Johnny poured the kid a glass of milk and took it over to him. It was really touching how Glenda tried so hard to be a good mother to her kids. Making them drink milk instead of pop, for instance. Giving every one of them a bath every night. Reading books to the younger ones, though Glenda had never read anything more complicated than a cookbook herself, to Johnny’s knowledge. Making sure that Jeremy and Ashley, at six the older girl, did their homework on school nights. Glenda hadn’t been raised with such care. Johnny knew that her childhood had been almost as rough as his own, and he thought a lot of her for trying to give her kids better.

At least, since they’d started going out, he’d made sure there was always food in the refrigerator. He’d gone hungry himself enough times to be unable to stand the idea of kids not having enough to eat.

“Ugh,” Jeremy said without looking up as Johnny set the glass on the floor beside him.

“You’re welcome,” Johnny answered dryly, and settled back down on the couch to drink his beer. Jake immediately climbed onto his lap again, resting his curly blond head against Johnny’s chest. Poor kid, he didn’t see much of his dad, and he was clearly hungry for a man’s attention.

“Tell us a story, tell us a story!” Ashley and her sister erupted from the bathroom, galloped the few feet down the hall to the living room, and leaped on Johnny. Freshly bathed, with their blond hair pinned on top of their heads and wearing sweet little ruffled nightgowns, they were so cute that he forgave them for spilling his beer.

“Not a scary one,” three-year-old Lindsay said solemnly as she claimed the knee that Jake wasn’t using. Jake, jealous of his prerogatives, pushed his sister. Lindsay pushed back.

“One about monsters,” Ashley said wickedly. Ashley was curled up as close to Johnny’s side as she could get.

“No scary ones!” Lindsay screamed, pushing at her sister.

“Could you guys please shut up?” This request was made by Jeremy in a loud tone.

“All right, bedtime!” Glenda came into the room, clapping her hands. Her T-shirt was soaked, and so was the front of her jeans. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Johnny noticed that fact without the interest it should have provoked, though Glenda was a voluptuous woman. Damn it to hell anyway, what was wrong with him? But he knew the answer, and it didn’t make him happy: Glenda wasn’t the woman he wanted.

The woman he wanted had been at that damned town picnic—the picnic that probably would have run him out on a rail if he had dared show his face at it—with another man. The respectable, solid citizen type. The prick.

Johnny took another swig of beer.

“Aw, Mom!” four voices said in chorus.

“I mean it! Hit the beds! I’m gonna count to three—and the last kid in has to sit in the middle of the back seat tomorrow when we go to church.”

That produced immediate results. The trio on the couch scrambled for their beds, and even Jeremy got up and turned off the TV.

“It’s just a trick, Mom. You know I always gotta sit in
the middle to keep the little kids from fighting,” he said gloomily.

“You’re always the last kid in bed,” Glenda retorted, ruffling his hair as she walked by him toward the bedroom that opened directly off the living room, the larger one that she shared with the two girls.

From down the hall, Jake called plaintively, “Mommy, I’m scared!”

“Go on to him, Jeremy,” Glenda said over her shoulder.

“Do I have to?”

“Yes!”

“Shit!” Jeremy said under his breath. Fortunately for him, his mother didn’t hear.

Johnny finished his beer and started on another to the sound of Glenda’s voice reading her girls a bedtime story. From the opposite end of the trailer, he could hear Jeremy reading to Jake. Ever since he’d been coming around, that was how they’d done it: Glenda had read to the girls, and Jeremy had read to Jake.

When Glenda finally emerged from the bedroom, she smiled at him and put a finger to her lips as she closed the door. Then she walked past the silent TV and down the hall to say good night to the boys.

Johnny drained the last drops from his can and walked into the kitchen to get a replacement. It was getting harder and harder to get the cans free of the damned little plastic rings, he discovered as he yanked at one. The remaining three, still looped together, dropped off the refrigerator shelf right onto his toe.

“Ouch! Goddamn it to hell!” The beer he held in his hand crashed to the floor alongside the others and rolled away. Johnny hopped about on one foot cursing as Glenda emerged from the back bedroom to glare at him.

“Hush!”

“Hurt my damned toe!”

“Shhh!”

Johnny picked up the half-empty six-pack. It hung by a
loop from one finger as he gingerly tried to set his foot on the ground.

“Want to watch a tape?” Glenda, callously unsympathetic to his pain, stood in front of the TV holding up a videocassette.

Johnny grunted, stuck the beers back on the shelf, and retrieved his fallen one, which had rolled partway under a cabinet. He shut the refrigerator door and limped over to collapse on the couch. He massaged his big toe through the thick white athletic sock. Damned thing was probably broken. Glenda, meanwhile, slid the tape into the VCR and curled up beside him.

The movie was one he’d already seen, and Glenda, tenderly rubbing her hand along his thigh as she stared at the screen, was building up to something he didn’t particularly feel like doing. With one foot, he probed unobtrusively beneath the couch for his sneakers. There they were!

“Gotta go, babe,” he said, bending to retrieve his shoes and slide them back on. He tied the laces, then took a final swig from his beer before setting it down on the floor.

“Now?” She was frowning.

“Wolf’s home alone. If I don’t go let him out, he’ll do a horse pile in the living room.”

“You ought to house-train that dog.”

Johnny grunted and stood up. Surprisingly, the movement made him feel kind of woozy, and he staggered.

“How many beers have you had?” Glenda stood up, too, and steadied him with a hand on his arm.

Johnny shrugged and, stepping away from her touch, fished in his pocket for his keys.

Glenda walked over to the refrigerator and looked inside, then came back to Johnny, shaking her head.

“Uh-unh, you ain’t goin’ nowhere, friend,” she said, deftly removing the keys he had just extracted from his pocket.

“Give me back my keys!”

“I won’t!” Glenda retreated, holding the keys behind her back. “You know, you drink too much.”

“I don’t either. Give me those keys.” Johnny walked over to her, wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug, and tried to wrestle the keys from her fingers.

“You get caught for drunken driving, they’ll send you back to jail.”

That gave him pause. “I’m not drunk.”

“Yes you are.”

He let go of her and collapsed again onto the couch. “So I’ll spend the night,” he said, knowing what she would think of that idea.

“You cain’t! Tom”—Tom was her almost ex-husband—“might find out and use it against me in the divorce.”

“So give me my keys.”

Glenda stood there for a moment, undecided. She was chewing on a fingernail, his keys dangling from her other hand. He could lunge and get them, but he didn’t feel like lunging, and besides, he didn’t want to hurt Glenda. As unfocused as he was feeling, he just might miscalculate his own strength.

“I’ll call you a ride,” she said after a minute. Johnny pondered this surprisingly sensible suggestion. A taxi would be a good idea, he thought. He really had quite a buzz going.

Glenda disappeared into her bedroom to use the phone.

Johnny leaned back against the cushions. The couch had a broken leg—it was propped up at that end with a dictionary and a paperback romance—and a green chenille bedspread was spread over it as a kind of makeshift slipcover, but it was surprisingly comfortable. If he wasn’t careful, he just might fall asleep.

“Don’t go to sleep,” Glenda said, plopping back down beside him and staring at the TV again. “It’d take a bulldozer to move you.”

“I won’t.”

For a moment neither of them said anything as Glenda
watched the TV and Johnny stared at nothing. Then Glenda glanced sideways at him.

“How come you don’t wanna do it?”

“Do what?”

“You know.”

Johnny did. He shrugged and slid his arm around her. “What makes you think I don’t?”

“I can tell.” Her hand slid over his crotch in a way that was more matter-of-fact than suggestive.

Stung, Johnny caught her hand, removed it to her own lap, and dropped his arm from around her shoulders.

“Maybe I’ve had too much to drink, like you said.”

“That never slowed you down before.”

“Glenda, I was eleven years younger back then. Nothing slowed me down.”

For a few minutes neither of them said anything. Johnny thought maybe she’d gotten engrossed in her movie and hoped that he’d heard all he was going to hear on the subject.

“Johnny?”

“What?”

“Can I ask you somethin’?”

“Short of putting a pillow over your face, I don’t guess I can stop you.” His reply was sour because he guessed the question had to do with why he wasn’t hard, which was something he didn’t feel like talking about. It was embarrassing not to be able to get it up instantly. Last week, before he’d gotten so tangled up with Miss High and Mighty Schoolteacher that he didn’t know which end of him was which, he hadn’t had to work at bedding Glenda. The urge had just come naturally, as it should.

“You got somethin’ goin’ with Miss Grant?”

“What?” he almost yelped as his eyes swung around to Glenda’s face. Eleven years ago, she hadn’t been able to read minds.

“You heard me.”

It took a minute for Johnny to recover his poise. “What in the world makes you ask a question like that?”

“Somethin’ in her voice.”

“Something in her voice?” He must have had too much to drink, because the conversation was befuddling him.

“Yeah. I could tell she didn’t much like the idea of you bein’ with me. She sounded real stiff-like. Not friendly, like she usually is.”

“When did she sound real stiff-like?”

“When I talked to her.”

Johnny almost ground his teeth. A hideous suspicion occurred to him, so hideous that he was almost afraid to give it voice.

“When did you talk to her?”

“A little while ago. When I asked her to come get you.”

“Goddamn!” Johnny bounded up off the couch and glared down at Glenda. The room swayed again, but he stayed on his feet. “What the hell did you call her for? I thought you were calling a cab!”

“There’s only two taxis in Tylerville, and both drivers are liable to still be at the picnic. You know that.”