Where the Kissing Never Stops (10 page)

“Who said?”

“They stopped for gas at the Chevron station; Mark saw them eating sundaes. Hot fudge, I think.”

Bradleyville’s like Cartoonland: news travels like those wavy lines that drift from house to house while the cartoon characters sleep, and in the morning everybody knows.

“Why don’t I come by later,” Sully said, “and we’ll drown our sorrows.”

“I think I ought to talk to Rachel.”

“Are you going to be home?”

“Kramer’s going to have that piece of mine watered down good and then probably I’ll have to turn it over again.”

“Well, I’ll find you.”

“Hello?” Rachel sounded exhausted. Had he kept her out all night? Or worse?

“It’s me,” I said coldly.

“Walker? How are you?”

“The question is, how are you?”

“Terrible. I’ve been in bed for two days.”

Oh, my God. With Tommy?

“Walker, are you there? When I get my period, I get these terrible cramps.”

“Oh,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief that would have propelled your average sailboat for hours. “You should have called me.”

“I tried, but there was nobody home; anyway, I’m not very good company when I’m like this.”

“Didn’t you get to go out at all?” Mr. District Attorney strikes again.

“Just once. Dinner with my dad the other night.”

“Damn it, Rachel. You went out with Tommy Thompson.”

“That’s right. My dad and I had dinner with his dad and him.”

“Is that all, just dinner?”

“Yes. What’s —”

I struck like I’d just caught her in the lie that would alter the course of history. I believe I even said
Aha!
“You had an ice cream with him afterward, just the two of you.”

“Were you spying on me?”

“Why, do you have something to hide? Anyway, Bradleyville’s a small town. Everybody knows everything about everybody else.” I thought of my mom. “Or almost everything.”

“Then why don’t they know that I almost always go to dinner with my dad when he’s doing business?”

“Some business, using his daughter as a —”

“He wants to buy some land from Mr. Thompson, that’s all.”

“Don’t you know what kind of person he is?”

“Mr. Thompson?” she asked.

“No, Tommy. God, he —”

“Of course I know. What do you think girls talk about in the bathroom? The political situation in the Middle East?”

“And you went anyway?”

“Walker, it was just for dinner.”

“Don’t forget those hot fudge sundaes.”

“Oh, well. Bring out the firing squad. That is incriminating.”

“I don’t want you to go out with him anymore.”

There was a long pause, maybe thirty seconds, which seems like an eternity when you’re just holding a phone and your hand keeps getting sweatier and sweatier. When she did say something, she sounded really serious.

“We probably shouldn’t talk about this right now. You’re upset and I still don’t feel well. It can’t be a good time.”

There was another pause, but I could feel something building.

“I’ve got to say one thing, though, Walker. I don’t want you to tell me who to see or what to do. If I want somebody to run my life, all I have to do is talk to my dad, okay?”

It was my turn to make her wait. I felt terrible, like my chest had turned to stone.

“Walker? Are you there?”

The best I could do was grunt. Lord, if I got any more primitive, I’d go in the kitchen and the pilot light would scare me.

“Okay, then,” she said. “I’ll say it: let’s not see each other for a little while. Now I’m upset, too, and… oh, I don’t know.”

We waited again, and pretty soon I heard the line go dead. I sat down next to the phone on this little milking stool that nobody ever uses. My mother glided by carrying a cup of coffee in one hand and a ten-pound book in the other. I had to hand it to her. She always reads stuff that’s hard, never anything with a caped rogue on the cover. She asked if I was okay.

“I guess Rachel and I broke up.”

“Honey, I’m sorry.”

“Well, maybe we weren’t really going together, anyway. It was just kind of an assumption. We’d only been out a couple of times, really, if you don’t count the passion by the lockers.”

She smiled at me and pointlessly straightened my T-shirt. “You’re such a sensible kid,” she said. “Such a good, sensible kid. You know when I came in the other night and I’d been crying? There was this guy at the club and we’d had coffee a couple of times and then the next thing I know he’s leaving with this twenty-year-old singer who takes off her clothes so fast you’d think she had a rash. I mean, no class at all, just ‘Hey, here I am’ and ‘Hey, look, I’m naked.’ Tony hadn’t said anything to me; he didn’t make any promises. But what do I do when he goes out with Little Miss Fiery Pants? I cry.”

It made me nervous to hear about my mother’s private life, her other life, the one away from home and me and Dad, or at least his memory. I guess I am a pretty sensible kid. I didn’t expect her not to have another life and go out with guys and, I guess, make love and even think about getting married. But I didn’t like to hear about it.

As for me, it was pretty clear the kissing had stopped.

As I drove toward the outskirts of town, I put the Rachel conversation on rewind. Boy, parts of it really frosted my balls, especially that stuff about her period.

Girls have all the breaks. They get to wait to be asked out, they get to say no all the time, and they have their famous periods.

I mean, there are mothers who cry for happiness when their daughters start. It’s a regular celebration.

What does a guy do with his first hard-on? It’s not like he runs to Dad and they shake hands enthusiastically and Dad hands over a bunch of condoms and says, “Now you’re a man, son, because you’ve got this dandy tool. Treat it carefully. Don’t stick it in a sheep or a blender, okay? And gosh darn it, your mother and I are real proud of you.”

I was a little late, and the water truck had made a round or two by the time I pulled up. I watched the wide spray sizzle, turn coffee-colored, and trickle into the furrows I’d made.

“Are you all right, son?” asked Mr. Kramer.

“I’m having a little trouble with my girlfriend.”

“Why don’t you call her and say you’re sorry?”

“Sorry for what?” I barked. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You know best.” He looked out across the damp earth.

“Look, is it okay if I pay this guy with a check?”

“No need for that. While ago one of my boys disced that section of Hugo’s over by the waterworks.”

“I’m sorry I yelled.”

“You’re just riled about your girlfriend.” He touched my shoulder so lightly it was like he was testing wet paint. “Why don’t you go on up to the home place and switch that plow there for a single disc. Once we see what that does, we’ll sit down and talk about what to do next.”

I took off, full-out at twenty-five miles an hour, waving at the other farmers who waited patiently behind me until it was safe to pass and just endured the blaring horns of the city slickers who swept past, their faces as tight as if they’d been rubbed with alum.

All that afternoon I sliced through furrows I’d made just the week before, running more or less perpendicular to them, transforming the easy currents of earth into a stammery chop.

Mr. Kramer was just climbing into his old Chevy when I finished. “This place is so poorly,” he said, “the fowl don’t even bother. I’d sure like to see a nice fat wren come down here and get himself a bite to eat. Look.”

Sure enough, not a quarter mile away the sky was full of punctuation. High above us, dark birds moved in pairs or flocks. If they looked down at my place, they rejected it and I began to feel protective and a little hurt, like having a child so plain he was always chosen last.

Anyway, the birds were probably all over at the Thompsons’, with Rachel feeding them off golden plates.

It was getting late when I saw Sully’s big white car come up the frontage road, turn, and park next to mine.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was over at Peggy’s.”

“Any news about Rachel?”

He shook his head. “Why don’t we go out tonight, just two guys on the town.”

“I’d probably bump into her and then kill myself. I think I’ll just hang around the house.”

“You know you’re better off without her, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Who needs a girl like that, anyway?”

“Like what? A girl like what?”

“A girl who lies.”

“She didn’t lie, exactly. We just had this communication breakdown. I wasn’t home when she called.”

“If my wife ever lied to me, I’d kill her.”

“Great. Some psychiatrist you’re going to make. Why don’t you just open a gun shop.”

“My dad says everybody lies and cheats.”

“Oh, screw your dad.”

“Hey, watch it.”

“You watch it. Whatever happened is between Rachel and me. I don’t need your stupid advice, and I sure don’t need to hear about your old man.”

“Well, at least my father makes a lot of money.”

“Compared to mine, you mean, who’s busy decomposing for the minimum wage?”

“And at least my mom stays home and doesn’t take off her clothes.”

“We’re all grateful for that.”

“She’s pretty enough.”

“Get serious. She only leaves the house on Halloween.”

When Sully gets mad, his freckles sort of light up, and right then he could have stopped cars at a railroad crossing. I thought he might take a swing at me, but instead he whirled on one heel like a drill-team captain and marched back to his car.

Two arguments in one day. Maybe it was in the air, like flu.

When I came slumping into the house, Mom said, “Perk up. We just had a nibble on that property of yours. I was hearing the kind of figures that would send you to college three or four times.”

“Oh, God, now I’m going to lose that, too?”

She gave me one of those critical looks mothers are so good at. If she’d been a Geiger counter I’d have crackled like crazy.

“What else have you lost lately?”

“I just had a fight with Sully, and I already told you about Rachel.”

“You and Sully have fought before and it’s always been okay. What’s going on with Rachel, if it’s any of my business?”

“It’s just this stupid argument. We’re both wrong.”

“But she’s wronger.” She looked me up and down like a forester inspecting a stunted tree. “Are you eating enough? You look thinner.”

“You may find me tomorrow passed out in the House of Pies.”

“That bad?”

“Well, what if I was a little late getting home? That’s no reason to start dating the biggest Don Juan in school.”

“Are you sure this isn’t a little lovers’ quarrel that’ll work itself out in —”

“And we’re not lovers, so don’t give me your birth-control speech.”

She pushed my hair back in the brusque mother-lion way she has. It’s affectionate enough, but about half the time it hurts, too. “I have to go,” she said, “but could you maybe not overeat and call Rachel instead? What’s the worst that could happen?”

“She could say she couldn’t talk now because she was underneath Tommy Thompson.”

“I used to feel that way, about your father,” she said. “I was really jealous. I’d imagine the craziest things, like he’d go away to a convention for the phone company and meet an ice skater. I guess I thought she’d be whizzing through the corporate offices in her flouncy little skirt. God knows what I thought. And it was always an ice skater or…”

I looked up. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“C’mon. Either an ice skater or what?”

“A stripper. Do you believe that?”

“Nothing much surprises me today.”

I sat in the tub and the soil melted off me. I experimented briefly with my johnson: sure enough, it floated, just like Sully said.

Then I wondered about Rachel. Was she having a good time? With somebody else? Did she realize what a mistake she’d made by going out with me? Would she use her father’s powerful connections to put out a contract on me so that no other girl would ever waste her time?

It’s funny about jealousy. You never imagine the beloved sleeping and drooling onto her pillow, never sitting on the toilet with an upset stomach, or even just standing around in her underwear and staring into the refrigerator. It’s always her laughing gaily and tearing off her blouse in mad abandon while she thinks,
Walker? Walker who?

As I dried off, I ran down my list of the things I would take into any bomb shelter with me in case of a nuclear attack:

Then I stood in a towel by the phone and thought about calling Rachel. What would I say if I got her? What would she say? Maybe I was afraid she would say she never wanted to speak to me again, ever, and then she’d blow a police whistle in the phone and deafen me for life.

I dialed anyway and got, naturally, that machine. There was her father’s big bow-wow voice; there was the beep; there I was not knowing what to say. I sure wasn’t going to apologize to a piece of magnetic tape, and who said I was going to apologize at all? I got mad all over again. She could at least have been home, hunched over the phone anxiously. I hung up.