The Almost Archer Sisters (17 page)

He stood up and put his hands under my armpits and shuffled me carefully backward over to the counter, my ankles still shackled by my jeans.

“On the count of three,” he said. “One—two—” and we hoisted my ass up onto the kitchen counter.

“Nice job this,” I said, patting the granite with my fingertips. It felt so permanent. “Too bad about Janey though.”

I pulled his shirt over his head too hard and it snagged on the earring he’d soon be parting with. I hated earrings on men. Even Lou finally acquiesced to my bitching about his gold hoop and tossed it. Both Beau’s hands grabbed the bottom cuffs of my jeans and he unveiled my calves and feet like a sculpture he’d made. He tossed them over his shoulder onto the kitchen table. I put my fists on his belt buckle, one of those complicated metal affairs he had to help me with.

“Sure, I’m sad. For Janey. She’s in love with me, I think.”

“Maybe you should call her.” I leaned back and fished for the wall phone, knocking the receiver off the cradle and handing it to Beau. Finish the job. Me. Pick me.

“Hmm. She’d be at work. I don’t know the number by heart.” He hooked his fingers into the sides of my underwear. “On the count of one.” I lifted my butt off the counter like a gymnast and they landed at his work boots. I reached down and opened the drawer by the phone.

“Look at you,” he said into my lap. “Peachy, Peachy, Peachy.”

“Want me to look up the number?”

“I can do it.”

While he slapped open the book across my naked thighs and dragged a finger down to the vet’s number in Belle River, I reached under the book and split open the top of his jeans, snapping off the button, which hit the floor.

He dialed and covered the receiver. “Do you mind. I’m on the phone.” His chest and arms were speckled with those dark freckles. He had a raised mole on his shoulder the size of a raisin and a hairy line down the front of his stomach. I could hear Janey Waterman answer the phone. She was always so nice to Scoots. She was the
one who had told me that tomato juice was the best way to battle skunk stink.

“Yeah—hey, Janey. How are you?” he said, winking at me.

I could hear her say, “Hey, good, you. Where are you?” Her voice was so small I pictured her being pulled backward, slowly disappearing into the new horizon we were drawing for her.

“I’m good. I’m at Lou’s. Yeah, uh, listen,” Beau was looking into my smiling eyes. I had dunked my hands into the front of his pants, not too far, scratching gently at the hair poking up out of the top of his underwear. It had the same kinky texture as the hair on his head. I felt wicked and perfect, and Beau was so hard he had to wince and pull a little away from me.

“Yeah. The thing is … Okay. Janey, I can’t see you anymore. And I feel cruddy calling you up to tell you this at work and everything, but I’m sorry. But something’s come up, and I really gotta go. I’ll drop off your stuff. I’m sorrygottago.”

He was laughing so hard by the time he hung up he couldn’t breathe. I took the receiver from him and slapped it back on its cradle.

“That was mean,” I said.

But he was still rocking from his joke.

“‘Something’s come up.’
Classic.”

“Are you sad? Wanna talk about it?” I said, feigning a pout. The Beth part of me, the venal and selfish part that I’d always denied myself, was coming to the surface and I welcomed it. He grabbed the phone book off my lap, held it at arm’s length to the right, and let it drop on the dog bowl, spilling the water on my black bra and on the floor, and I suddenly realized I had been wearing white underwear, but that this was just Beau, so what they didn’t match?

“Yeah. Very sad. I’ll probably need to cry all over your ass, Peachy.”

He spider-crawled his fingers between my thighs and I let a couple of them inside with an unbearable sigh that tipped me
forward into his smooth chest. With my heels I kicked down his underwear, and he pulled my legs forward until we were nicely lined up. I leaned back into the cupboards. His penis looked quite cute, kind of like a brave soldier peeking over an expensive granite trench.

“Is that for me?” I said.

He nodded.

“What should I do with it?”

“Whatever you want.”

I started to shift my ass forward when the phone rang.

“Uh-oh,” I said. “I think you’ve pissed off your girlfriend.”

“Ex,” he said, leaning toward the receiver. “Hell—o.” Silence. “It’s me. It’s Beau. Oh, hey,
Beth
. How are you?” Silence. “Good, fine. Yeah, yeah.” Silence. “No, he’s out. I was working on the Jeep. But, ah, Peachy’s here if you want to talk to her.”

Beau yelled my name out as though I was otherwise occupied in another room. I yanked the receiver and counted to three while Beau worked his fingers back inside me. I had to use his shoulder for support and for something to bite down on.

“Hey, Beth.”

“Hey, Peach. What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Beau’s working on the Jeep. Dad’s out shopping,” I said, suppressing a giggle. Beau was kissing a trail down the side of my torso, his other hand passed gently over my ass, which suddenly felt large and flattened. I was losing feeling in the lower part of my legs, so I lifted my heels into Beau’s hip bones to relieve the pressure. He hooked his forearms under my knees and pulled me forward.

“Listen, I’m going out to Long Island next weekend after all, Peach,” Beth said. “Joe’s folks are there and he wants me to meet them. I’m sure they’ll hate my guts, so should be good times.”

“Who’s Joe,” I asked. By then Beau had pushed himself all the way inside me, his big hands firmly grabbing both ass cheeks,
pulling the rest of me against him. We stayed very still for a few seconds.

“My new boyfriend and future rich fiancé. Oh, and Peachy?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you’re finally fucking Beau. It’s something he’s very good at. But for godsakes, use a condom.”

“Okay.”

“See you in a few weeks, you cheap, filthy whore.”

“Okay.”

“And bye, Beau!” she screamed.

I dropped the phone. We started making Sam on the new granite counter, and finished him off on the floor. Admittedly, it felt like incest, if incest was not only legal, but hot, and completely encouraged.

Sam had to have happened that afternoon because we didn’t have sex again for a couple of weeks. Though for days afterward the air between us was dense with the deed. Beau would amuse himself by circling around me in the carport, or the kitchen, finding good excuses to come by the farm when Lou was there, and embarrassingly bad ones when he wasn’t. I once watched from the upstairs window as he pulled out of the driveway, only to turn back around and inch toward the house. He idled his car in front for several painful minutes. That’s when I knew.

Lead legs took me downstairs.

I opened the front door and yelled through the screen over the loud engine. “Did you forget something?”

“Yeah,” he yelled back, scratching his head. “Can you check for my car keys? I think I left them on the kitchen counter.”

“Sure,” I said, turning around. I was patting around the newspapers littering the kitchen island when the screen door slammed behind me.

I knew then that he had picked me. But the decision to stay picked seemed to suddenly be mine and it was overwhelming. I
was terrified of the responsibility the decision suddenly entailed. If I became a part of him, formed a pair, the rest of my life would happen to me. I began to look even harder for his keys.

“Peachy, just say yes,” he said wearily, taking a step forward.

“Say yes to what?” I asked, standing still with my back to him.

“Pretty much everything?” he said.

“What if I don’t want pretty much everything?” I said, struck with the idea that his keys could have fallen between the bread box and the coffee maker.

“Then say yes to something. Say yes to a little bit.”

“What if I say no to it all,” I yelled over my shoulder, looking and looking for the keys.

“Wow. For someone so pretty, you sure are stupid,” he laughed.

“Fuck you, Beau,” I screamed, launching what was handy, the loaf of bread, at him. “You do not have the right to tell me I’m stupid because I might not want what you want. Right fucking now!” My voice cracking with the authentic fear buried just below the phony anger. “I’m still in school.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! I’m talking about my keys, Peachy. They’re in my ignition, for chrisakes!”

“Well, what if I say no?”

He picked up the loaf of bread and massaged it back to shape through the plastic, and carefully placed the loaf in front of the breadbox.

“Then you force me to have to wear you down,” he said in a somber voice I’d eventually grow to recognize as a five-or ten-second warning before he’d chase me around the house and fuck me where he caught me.

But the last thing he said to me that afternoon, exactly four days before I found out I was pregnant, was, “See ya, Peachy. Wouldn’t wanna be ya.”

Then slam.

A few days later, I peed on an expensive stick, and the first person I told after the stripe turned pink was Beth.

“Jesus. That man’s sperm could reforest the goddamn tundra,” she said. “It could cure baldness. He should be caged and studied. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t.

“You haven’t finished school yet. You have to finish, Peach. I didn’t realize you guys were getting serious. I thought it would be a little fling or something. I mean, Beau? Really?”

“I know. I mean, I don’t know. What’s wrong with Beau?”

“Have you told him? Don’t tell him.”

“I haven’t. I won’t … unless.”

“Think hard about it, Peach,” she said softly. “You know I love you no matter what decision you make, but I want you to keep your options open. You want to be a social worker, remember? But God, poor Beau. He’s going to get a complex. Short of actually boning Lou, guy’s been fucking his way into our family for years. Well, you could do worse than him. He’s nice. He’s a nice guy. He would have made a good husband. A good provider. He would have provided me whatever husbands provide.”

“Excellent endorsement. Nice to see Beau comes mildly recommended.”

“You don’t love him, do you?”

It was the first time I had ever heard the hint of envy in her voice, the first time something in Beth exposed a feeling of regret, completely against her will. And I was ashamed at how thrilling it was to hear, even though eliciting that sound was entirely unintentional.

“I do love him, Beth.”

“Oh well, that changes everything. Congratulations, twenty-year-old mother and wife!”

“You say that like it’s a tragedy.”

“Peachy, it is.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, fuck you,” she said. “Because if this is some weird way for you to fill my shoes, then knock yourself out, little sister. But we’re talking about you bringing a kid into this world, as well as bringing Beau into ours. And I just don’t believe you when you say you want all this. Sorry, Peach, I’m your sister, I know you. I have to be honest with you.”

“Yes. Honesty. Your greatest trait. Thank you, Beth.”

“And maybe I was hoping that my brother-in-law wouldn’t be the first guy who ever went down on me. Just hoping. Dunno. Maybe that’s too much to ask.”

I hung up on her. It was extraordinary, not only Beth’s talent for seeing any dilemma as hers, but for convincing me of it too. So I moved some of the leftover love I felt for Beth, the part she wasn’t using anymore, over to Beau and the future baby.

When I told Lou I was pregnant, he cupped his hands over his mouth and closed his eyes.

“Oh, Peach, how great,” he said, pulling me into a hug. “What did Beau say? What about school?”

“He doesn’t know yet.” He hadn’t come back to the house after that day but had phoned to tell me to tell Lou he’d gone to an RV show in Ohio. These were the days before cell phones, when people were sometimes unreachable, and no one panicked and no one died and no one lost their minds because they couldn’t speak to the person right now, right away, this instant.

“And I’ll finish school. I have every intention of finishing school. I’ll breast-feed in class if I have to.”

My face flushed with hot blood, and my eyes felt suddenly itchy. Lou put his hands around my upper arms and shook me a little.

“You okay?”

“Fine. I feel weird, but fine.”

“I wish your mother could be here for this. I’m sorry she’s not,
Peach. And I know Nell’s sorry too. But we got Beth, so that’s something. Let’s ring her up!”

I put my hand on a kitchen stool. The floor felt like it was moving.

“Let’s not. I’m very tired all of a sudden.”

Lou walked me over to the couch. I had to laugh, because though it seemed dramatic and unnecessary to be escorted, I clutched him like an invalid. I couldn’t have been more than a few weeks along, but the exhaustion was so sudden and acute, the surrender was less like falling asleep than fainting.

T
YPICALLY, PERFECTLY
, B
EAU
landed on bended knee and said, “Make me happy, Georgia Peach, and be my beloved wife.” I went, “Yeah, okay.” I wanted to wait until the baby was born, but four months later we got married at the Catholic church in town, the one to which we belonged, though had stopped attending after Nana Beecher left for good. Before agreeing to the ceremony, Beau and I had to sit through a series of courses on how couples under Christ should function. It was fun actually, and it made us both a little horny. After the ceremony everyone came back to the farm for a small reception in the back yard: Lucy and Leo, the Rosarios and the bachelor brothers, some of my friends from school, and Beth, who took me shopping for maternity wear the next day.

I had finals, so we took our disastrous camping honeymoon in Grand Bend two weeks later. It took Beau hours to set up the tent, while I sat and bitched, too tense to relax, worried my water would break in the night even though I was barely six months pregnant. We lasted two nights away, and I realized I wasn’t much of a leaver. That was Beth’s talent. Growing up, Beth cultivated the fantasy of throwing a hat in the air in the middle of Broadway, while I priced cotton sheets in the Sears catalogue, mail-order, as even driving
into Windsor seemed like too much of a trek to me. I ignored her florid descriptions of what her life was like living away from us, because when she talked like that it made me feel like I was built wrong, like I was a house with no front windows.