“Child lock.” I grin. Pop has neither the patience to disengage it nor the need to, generally free of backseat passengers. I know what she’s after: air. “Wait for it,” I say again, clutching her left hand, still interlocked with mine. “It’s those damn ovens, you know.”
“The incubators?” She fans her sweatshirt at its neckline.
“Apparently we shared one.” I figured Mom, in their heart-to-heart, already told her. “Something about how I siphoned off your lungs and you siphoned off my heart.” I shrug, likening it to jumping a car.
“It’s all kinnected,” she murmurs, her articulation strangely similar to her grandpa’s. Oxygen delivering, she gives a half-suppressed laugh. “So you’ve been taking my breath away longer than I thought, huh.”
If she only knew how like-minded she and my mother are. I take that likeness as a warning not to do what those fucking strings beg of me to do and pull my eyes from her joking mouth. I pull my gaze—and my hand—from her altogether and fixate on the radio. Music, yes, something that will never leave me.
“Right there. You just did it again.”
“No I didn’t.”
“It’s not easy for me either, Ace. You don’t want to end up like your dad. I don’t want to end up like my mom. But not wanting to end up like them isn’t going to stop this. Whatever this is that happens when we’re together.” She wipes her palms down the thighs of her running pants.
“And what is this, Shelby? Word-lover. Is there a term to define it?”
“‘Extraordinary,’ ‘illogical,’ ‘maddening.’ There are all sorts of words to define it. And don’t look at me that way.”
“What way?”
“All steely-eyed.” She squints back at me. “Eyes that want for all the world to believe you’re bad, bold, careless. You can’t hide the uncertainty in them. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it.” Her voice swells, maybe as though she’d like to feel it again. “That’s right, you’re as susceptible as the rest of us.”
“So what are we supposed to do. Act on this? Fall right frigging into it? When we already know the ending. Life’s not like those books you read.”
“Some of my favorite books are like that song…ambiguous.” Although she falters, still clinging to happily ever after, “Who says it has to end badly. Or at all?”
A sardonic groan-laugh reverberates in my chest. “Your life is going to change.” College, college guys, city life, city guys, white-collar career, white-collar guys—some blue-collar kid from Poke County ain’t gonna be able to compete with that.
“And yours isn’t?” she mocks. “You just hung out with some rock star and his roadies on a tour bus in Knoxville. Probably ‘groupies,’ too. Flashy, hot-to-trot groupies…” her hands rake over her plain braid and modest running attire “…who all but throw themselves at musicians.”
“It was one night. Not four years. And there weren’t any groupies.” On the bus, anyway.
“If you think for one minute that because you haven’t admitted to yourself—to your father—that music is your calling somehow makes it not your calling, you’re in denial. I’ve seen it and felt it, too! Music chose you, Ace. And I pray to God you choose it.”
The secret note square lying in wait, I can’t help but wonder if she would be so pro-music for my life if she knew that her biological father chose music over a life with her.
“Music will give you so much more than working in the mine ever could. It already has. Don’t you see how much I want that for you?”
“And that brings us right back to this.” I cup her plain face—more beautiful than any flashy face I’ve ever seen—in my hands. “I want college, running, career, city life, the frigging world…whatever you want…for you.” The admission, the letting go before first giving in, burns the way whiskey does before the buzz.
“Whatever I want?” she whispers, pressing her cheek into my palm.
“Don’t say it,” I whisper back. Those fucking strings tightening and just like a song, all they need are the right words before I lose myself to them.
“I want you, Ace.”
Yep. She said it, so innocent, so trusting. And I’m gone. There is no coming back from this.
From where Ace positioned me—astraddle his lap—his kiss, like that song, is full of suspense. Up and down, hard and soft, dynamic and restrained. I don’t know how it started or how it might end. Although it is in no way ambiguous. It is clear, single-minded.
All the angst, the times we wanted to kiss but didn’t, we make up for it here.
I don’t know that I could end it…if I wanted to. This feeling—love, is it—is a runaway train. Is this how my mother felt in the back seat of the Shelby Mustang with my father. When they conceived me? Even the consequence of that thought is not enough to deliver control.
His lips trailing from my jawline and down my neck, I want him to keep going. Where to? I don’t know.
“I trust you,” I murmur.
“Good. Keep telling me that,” I encourage, encouraging my mouth from her neck and back to her lips.
Trust me. Put that on me. Remind me of who you are, what you mean to me. You are more than just a feeling, an impulse, a release.
Boxing. Control it. The feeling does not own you. I moderate the intensity of our kiss, kissing to kiss her—not to check it off and move on—to taste her, to store away the textures and details. Play softly.
New territory, I’ve never been here before. Making out with a girl with no intent to score?
Score. Baseball. Bases. I stop my kneading hands, at her waist and inching up. First base, Cooper, no petting.
Arms? Is that first or second? I push the sleeve of her sweatshirt up, pressing my lips to the crook of it, atop the cotton ball bandage where she donated blood for my ungrateful father.
“Thank you,” I say, for myself and him.
She dips her forehead to mine, a breathy laugh on my face. “If I had known it would lead to this, I would’ve banked it a long time ago.”
And there is whiskey’s high, worth the burn. She’s happy. I didn’t fuck it up.
The rumble of Ace’s Jeep has become the most titillating sound, a sensation more exhilarating than a runner’s high.
Like Antony and Cleopatra before they started shacking up, kisses come sporadically. The secret only enhances the sensation.
An unspoken agreement that we act no differently in public, specifically at school—no hand-holding, no book-carrying, no ring-wearing. They would ruin it. Cheapen it. Reduce it to sex.
Ace’s reputation would climb to more godly heights. Not because I am a prize, but because even I give it up to Ace Cooper. My reputation could go either way. From ugly duckling to promising popularette or from geek to slut, my money is on the latter. At any rate, I don’t want the attention.
After a month I don’t want Enisi to leave either, despite the fact that she ran Miss Patterson off with a shotgun.
“She’s just checking in on Mom. She’s only trying to help,” I defended, as an appalled Miss Patterson fled in her supersonic Caddy.
“That woman’s too nice. Ain’t no one that nice for no reason,” Enisi said, standing behind her action…and her intimidating gun.
She ran everyone off. Especially Billy Don. The gun didn’t bother me then. I cheered. Mom was on lockdown, basically.
“No one gets in. She doesn’t leave,” Enisi established. Mom wasn’t even allowed to answer the phone. That’s why Wren got Enisi when she phoned about my donating blood. “You need a whole new set of friends, Maisy. Break the pattern. Build yourself back up.”
Precisely her reason for leaving now, she says it’s high time my mother stands on her own two feet. Although inspiring in theory, I fear the undertaking may prove impractical. Newborns don’t stand on their own in one month’s time. How is my newly clean mother supposed to.
On my next shift at Hot Brown, it became apparent that more than my mother’s sobriety hung in the balance of one month’s time.
&
nbsp; “One month,” Destiny said of her late period.
“Ohmygosh! Whose is it?” Tawny said, envy in her tone. “Girl…” you work fast.
Destiny shrugged.
“What are you going to do?” Raelynn said, aghast. “If you keep it…” you’re screwed.
Destiny shrugged.
“Is there anything I can do?” I said. “Can I take you somewhere, for counseling, advice…” a way out?
Destiny shrugged.
For once in my life, I agreed with Raelynn.
Running home from Hot Brown—and in light of Destiny’s declaration—I play up the runner’s high, almost convincing myself that it is better than Ace’s kiss.
It must be. I need it to be. Otherwise what separates me from Destiny? What separates me from my mother?
But as I round the corner of my drive, the mere sight of his Jeep puts an end to any convincing. Anticipation courses through me like the climax of a book—building, on the edge of my seat, and never delivering soon enough.
The high lonesome sound that drifts out of its rolled-down windows doesn’t even deter the sensation.
Is it because what happens in that Jeep is everything bluegrass isn’t—hopeful, reassuring. Or is it because the music means so much to him that it is growing on me.
What is not reassuring is the sight of my favorite bra—held on by a clothespin—among other unmentionables strung out to dry on a clothesline hanging from the lopsided lean-to carport.
In my mother’s flurry of sobriety, laundry has become a daily diversion. An all-day chore, manually sloshing or running each article of clothing along a washboard before subsequently running each through the wringer mechanism of the antiquated wringer-washing machine. The agitator mechanism long since burnt out. I should be grateful that she saved me the task, but in this very moment I wish she wouldn’t have.
Faster than I ran home, I pull everything from the line and chuck it into a basket.
“Missed one,” Ace says, disclosing his presence from beneath the propped-up hood of the Shelby while picking up a red G-string, which he makes a point of handing to me.
“That’s my mother’s.” I snatch it from him. It is. I couldn’t imagine walking in that chafing thing, let alone running in it.
Apparently parading his unmentionables does not bother him. The band is exposed above the low-rise of his jeans, accentuating the V-shape of his definitively male torso. T-shirt tucked in a belt loop and a wrench in hand, men’s fitness magazine covers from the library at school could not rival the image. I suck in a torturous inhale. This is how people wind up pregnant.
I step around him. My shoulder brushing his, seemingly impossible not to touch him in some capacity. Setting the laundry basket atop a makeshift workstation—sawhorses topped with plywood—I survey a few boxes empty of their new auto parts. How long has he been here working on the Shelby?
“I thought you were working at the mine?”
“I did, before dawn,” he huffs. “Part of Pop’s teach-me-a-lesson plan. He put me on graveyard shift. ‘Let’s see how bad you want it, son.’” Ace returns to the engine of the Shelby, taking his aggression out with the wrench, clattering against metal.
“He’s feeling better, then?” Probably as miserable as ever.
“Full of piss and vinegar…thanks to you.”
“He wouldn’t be thankful if he knew you were here fixing the Shelby for us.”
“For you,” Ace grunts, using his body as leverage to loosen a stubborn part with the wrench.
“It’s not your responsibility, you know.”
“You’re gonna need your own wheels, something other than the Jeep, eventually.”
Something other than the Jeep? The Jeep where we kiss. Is he breaking it off already? “How much did all of this cost? I’ll pay you for the parts.”
“Not that much,” he groans some more, manipulating iron. “It’ll pay for itself if I can get the thing up and running.”
It’ll pay for itself? Getting me out of his Jeep and out of his hair. He’s breaking it off. I scrabble through boxes, searching for a receipt. How much does a breakup cost!
He steps to me, thrusting his wrench down on the plywood. “Just drop it. I like doing this kind of thing.”
Yeah, because grunting and groaning is indicative of a jolly good time! I give the feral sounds a try, digging for a nonexistent breakup bill of sale.
“I’m not gonna take your money, Shelby.”
But his eyes take…me in up close, trailing over the perspiration on my face and at the ends of my ponytail stuck to the skin of my neck. From his belt loop, he pulls the t-shirt and wipes away every drop of sweat.
His touch the furthest thing from what I would imagine a mechanic’s touch to be, I wouldn’t mind at all being the literal Shelby.
Before tucking the t-shirt back into his belt loop, he wipes his own face and neck without so much as turning the shirt over to the dry side. He covers his sweat with mine, basically.
Is that why he’s breaking it off? Because things aren’t moving fast enough. We just exchanged more sweat here than we ever have in his Jeep.
“When I get through with this, you won’t have to run anywhere you don’t want to,” he says.
“I want to,” I say. “The only way to improve running is to run.” One, reminder that collegiate running requires development. Two, opposition to the notion that he must fix the Shelby for me as a parting gift.
“How are your times?”
“On the rise,” I say. They did diminish a bit after donating blood, as Wren warned. But they’re peaking—better than ever—just in time for the state meet.
“Good,” he whispers, his arm circling around my waist and reaching for the wrench he thrust onto the work bench.
I’d like to believe it’s equally impossible for him not to touch me.
“It’s been a long week,” he says over my shoulder, stock-still except for his breathing—as on the rise as my running times. Even the music squalling from the Jeep follows his body language, shuffling from bluegrass to a pent-up love song.
Yes, it has been a long week since our last make-out session, due to state meet preparation putting a damper on logging miles. The heat from, and the scent of, his bare torso makes mine ache for contact beneath my sweatshirt.
“Destiny’s pregnant,” I blurt out, as if that fact could somehow blunt the ache.
A soft groan-chuckle reverberates out of his chest and sinks into the pit of my stomach, tumbling like an Olympic gymnast. “I know you’re the smart one and all, but you can’t get knocked up from kissing.” He presses his lips to my temple—the sweetest, most affectionate, non-knocking-up kiss—before returning to the Shelby.
I don’t bother pointing out that his tender restraint only heightens my attraction to him. That it makes the thought of going further with him even more enticing. Precisely how kissing is the precursor to pregnancy.
Similar to oxygen, his form is strongly electronegative. Pregnancy panic and all, still I am pulled to it, idling beside it, and looking over the contents beneath the hood—a mechanical maze.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Tubes and wires,” he says, giving me a side-glance. “Things that connect things.” He manhandles a part, the wire disconnected from it, that refuses to loosen with his wrench.
Like those tubes and wires that connected us in that NICU oven. “So what you’re saying is working on cars is no different than working on humans.” Talking to him while talking to myself, I turn to rummage through tools. “You have to treat it with finesse, as though it is a part of a living, breathing system.”
“Now you sound like my mom. Brute strength, that’s what removed and replaced all these old parts.” His torso looks like the anatomy chart in coach’s weight room, every muscle flexed under the tension of the wrench. The part beneath is unyielding to, and thumbing its metal under the pressure of, brute strength.
A hollow pipe! Yes, that could work.
“Come on, mother…argh,” he growls. “The last frigging spark plug, seriously.”
I nudge him over with my hip, slip the pipe over the handle of the wrench and put physics’ “law of the lever” to the test.
“Don’t break it off in the engine block,” he warns, holding pressure on the head of the wrench to keep it firmly affixed.
It works! The spark plug lets loose.
“Oh, come on!” he howls. Pulling the pipe from the wrench handle and spinning it up into the air over his head, he spins and catches it behind his back—not to be outdone.
My neck bows back, offering up a howl of my own before conceding, “You loosened it up for me.”
“Of course I did,” he says with a roll of his eyes, dropping the wrench and dropping into my personal bubble. His hands sweep from my forehead and down the sides of my face until they rest on my neck, his thumbs cupping my chin. “God, I love…spending time with you.”
No sooner than his tongue parts my lips, a loud thump behind the Shelby sends us parting in opposite directions. He darts around the driver’s side, and I dart around the passenger’s side. Arriving at the rear wheels, we are met by my mother.
“First rule of being a mechanic, you block off the wheels,” Mom says. She slings another block of wood against the other back tire—thump—shoring it up with a swift kick of her boot.
“Yes, ma’am,” Ace says, at attention, the back of his hand wiping away from his mouth any telltale remnants of a kiss. “I would’ve done that. Just haven’t made it that far yet.” I surmise that means he hasn’t been underneath the car yet to warrant blocking the wheels.
“Good. Don’t push it. Pace yourselves. And for Christ’s sake, protect yourselves.” My mother takes it in a completely different direction.
Ace and I look in every direction but at each other, mortified by her abrupt parental innuendo.
“For starters, put your shirt on, Don Juan,” she says to Ace.
“Yes, ma’am.” Under pressure, it doesn’t loosen from his belt loop as gracefully as it did earlier.
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