The Feminine Touch

by V. J. Chambers

  “Sure,” said Nash. “You didn’t want to let her pay for the repairs?”

  “Well, no, I barely knew her. I mean, she let me stay over, but up in those rooms where y’all are staying, you know. So, she was helping me out, but she wasn’t… well, anyway, I had my pride. She offered to just pay for some of it, but I said no.”

  “Was it…?” Nash tried to think how to put this. “Could it be that you were worried that if you accepted her help, you’d owe her something?”

  “Exactly.” Charity nodded. “I didn’t want her to think that she would have any right to, you know, use her lesbian wiles on me.”

  Nash laughed.

  Zoe laughed.

  Charity laughed too. “Kind of ironic, right?” She laughed some more. “Now, see, I don’t agree with Siobhan about that whole idea that all people are sexual. I think Siobhan is sexual. I think she can go either way. But not me.”

  “Oh, really?” said Nash. “But you just said—”

  “Well, I think I was so worried, because I knew that deep down, I had always had this attraction to women, but I never wanted to say anything about it, because I was afraid. I didn’t want to be different. I wanted to be like everyone else.”

  “That makes sense,” said Nash. “I understand that.”

  “You do?” Charity smiled. “Because it’s a little weird.”

  “No, no.” Nash shook his head. “Keep going.”

  “All right, well, she told me that anytime I needed to, anytime I just couldn’t drive all the way back to Bington, that I should stay with her, and I tried not to take her up on it, but one night I was falling asleep at the wheel, and I couldn’t drive. So, I went over to her house, and she said, ‘Come on in.’ She was heating up a frozen lasagna, and she said it was too much for one person, and if I wanted, I could eat with her. That night, we got to talking, and she has this way about her. I felt real comfortable, and I told her all kinds of things. Anyway, that just kept happening, and one thing led to another, and we sort of fell in love. I mean, she only wanted to take care of me, you know. She was always that way. And it didn’t… I mean, if I hadn’t been attracted to her, it would never have become a romantic relationship. I think she would have been just as caring if I considered her like a big sister or something. She’s a good person.”

  “You would say that about her? That she’s a good person?”

  “Oh definitely. I mean, take this thing that you called me about? That scholarship? She doesn’t have to give away her money, but she does. And that’s not the only place that she does that. She gives a lot of money. And she really takes care of this town, too. She’s very, very caring. I mean, you say you knew her, right, Nash? Wasn’t she caring when you knew her?”

  Nash licked his lips. “Uh… you know, we were in high school, and she didn’t have a lot of money back then, so…”

  “No?” said Charity. “Really?”

  “I’m not saying she was a bad person,” said Nash. “I really liked her. I considered her a friend. But she was sort of, um, aloof, I guess. She didn’t really connect with people, and she didn’t try very hard.”

  “Huh,” said Charity. “That’s so weird how people change, isn’t it?”

  THE PAST

  One day, Nash looked up in gym class, and there Siobhan was, sitting at the top of the bleachers. There were a bunch of other kids on the bleachers too, all sitting in a clump.

  In Nash’s gym class, all the students were broken down into groups of ten. One kid was head of the group, and that person had to make sure all ten people in the group were there and dressed for gym. Then that person would report to the teacher, who noted the information.

  Nash’s gym grade was composed entirely on whether he put on shorts and a t-shirt every day. You had to dress for gym to participate. If you didn’t, you had to sit on the bleachers.

  The bleachers, where Siobhan was sitting.

  Nash was standing in line, waiting for his group leader to note his presence and his gym clothes. He was staring up at Siobhan.

  “Why are they here?” someone next to him said.

  “The art room got damaged in the storm,” said the head of his group. “Where’s Jennifer?”

  “She wasn’t in health class,” someone else spoke up.

  “Okay, Jennifer’s not here,” said the head. She pointed up at the bleachers. “I think they just put the art classes in here.”

  “I heard that Ms. Gray was so pissed off that they wouldn’t give her a real classroom that she quit, and now there’s no art teacher,” said someone else.

  Nash stared at Siobhan. “So, they’re going to be here tomorrow?”

  “Probably,” said the head of the group.

  The next day, Nash didn’t dress for gym. Siobhan was sitting all the way on the top row of the bleachers. She was sitting away from the rest of the art class, her history book open on her lap. She was scribbling in a notebook.

  Nash climbed all the way up to her. “Hey,” he said.

  She looked up at him. “Classic Rock. It’s you.”

  He sat down. “Yeah. It’s me.”

  She went back to her book. “I’m kind of busy.”

  “Working ahead?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  He nodded. He didn’t want to piss her off, but he felt like he had to talk to her about this. “Are you with Pike now?”

  She didn’t look up. “No.”

  “He had his arm around you that day at the park.”

  “I know he did.”

  “But you’re not together.”

  She shut her book. “This really what you want to talk about?”

  What he wanted to know was whether or not there was any point in talking to her at all. But he wasn’t brave enough to say anything to her, to make a move like that. Instead, he just raised his eyebrows. “You going to talk to me at all? I thought you were busy.”

  She surveyed him. “Well, I am pretty far ahead. But if we’re going to talk, I don’t want to talk about Pike. Pike isn’t worth wasting words on.”

  Nash wasn’t sure what to make of that.

  “Why are you here, anyway?” she said.

  “This is my gym class,” he said.

  “Why aren’t you doing gym, then?”

  “I forgot my gym clothes,” he lied.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “So, if you don’t want to talk about Pike, what do you want to talk about?”

  “You approached me,” she said. “You pick the subject.”

  He considered Farrah. Discarded that. There was no trace of her. No one knew what had happened to her. The police had talked to each of them, and Arthur had been right. They hadn’t asked why they were all in the room together. They weren’t interested in them or in acid. They were interested in Farrah. Nash only hoped that they weren’t withholding information that could help them find her.

  “I’m waiting, Classic Rock.” She was gently teasing.

  “Well, the last thing I want to do is keep you waiting,” he said, grinning at her. He was starting to feel a little more at ease. Being around her did that sometimes. Sometimes it made him crazy nervous, too. “Waiting is a completely horrible thing to have to go through.”

  “Oh?” she said.

  “Definitely. There’s the boredom for one thing, and then the anticipation of something happening, which makes it even harder to wait.”

  She shrugged. “Well, that’s why you bring some homework along everywhere you go. So, then, while you’re waiting, you get things done.”

  “Yes, that’s very efficient,” he said.

  “I know it is.” She was grinning even wider. “But no matter how many people I explain my system to, no one ever adopts it.”

  “That’s because it’s insane,” he said, and he laughing.

  “Insane?” She drew back, feigning offense. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

  “Maybe you can convince yourself to do homework all the freaking time, but mos
t people don’t have that kind of self-discipline.”

  “Well, who wants to be like most people, anyway? Most people are boring.”

  He considered. “Yeah.” Then he arched an eyebrow. “Wait, are you saying that I’m boring?”

  She shrugged. “You think what you want.”

  “Now who’s not being very nice?”

  She giggled. “I’m sorry. I take it back.”

  “No, no.” He put up both of his hands. “I don’t want your pity. If you think I’m boring, you should just say so.”

  “I don’t.” She giggled some more. “You’re not boring at all, Classic Rock.”

  “Neither are you,” he said, smiling at her. “You’re the least boring person I know.”

  They talked like that for the rest of the period.

  The next day, he hesitated in the locker room, peering into his locker at his gym clothes.

  He didn’t dress.

  He didn’t dress for three weeks straight, and he spent every day talking with Siobhan instead. They talked about school and the teachers they had in common. They talked about music and television shows that they watched. They talked about worries for the future. They both wanted to get out of this little town, to go somewhere and do something else, but they were worried they would get trapped, and they didn’t know how to avoid that.

  Then midterm grades came out, and he was getting an F in gym.

  His parents freaked out. There was lots of yelling from his mother, who wanted to know how he could possibly be flunking gym of all things. She said he had to go to the teacher and ask if he could get extra credit. Nash didn’t think that there was a such thing as extra credit in gym, but he went anyway.

  The teacher actually did assign him extra credit, but it was to stay after school and run the cross country track with the cross country team. That was because the gym teacher coached cross country. So, Nash stayed after school. He ran.

  And then Siobhan was gone. They had fixed the art room, and they had somehow gotten Ms. Gray to come back and take over her job, and Siobhan was back in her class. He was back in his.

  Then he only saw her in Advisory, and she would be working hard on whatever homework she was trying to get done. If he tried to talk to her then, she’d tell him that she was sorry, but she really had to get this done.

  So, after that, they didn’t talk much.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Sure, I know her,” said Kitty Turner over the phone. “You recording me okay?”

  “You’re coming through loud and clear,” said Nash, who was used to recording phone conversations. “Can you state who you are and how it is that you know Siobhan Thorn?”

  “Sure,” said Kitty. “I’m Kitty Turner, and I make jewelry that I sell on Etsy. I know Siobhan through the Etsy community.”

  “You mostly talk to her online?”

  “Mostly, but we have some little get-togethers every couple years. There are maybe four of us doing pretty well with jewelry making, and we’ll take little mini-vacations to each other’s houses.”

  “All right, great,” said Nash. “So, can you talk a little bit about your impression of Siobhan? What’s she like?”

  “Driven,” said Kitty. “She works really hard. You’ll typically find her in July, working her ass off on things she knows will be popular during Christmas. She likes to work ahead.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that,” said Nash.

  “She makes amazing jewelry too,” said Kitty. “No one knows her techniques except the people who work for her. She shows them how to do it, but they have to sign this non-compete contract that they won’t do the technique for anyone else and they won’t teach anyone else how to do it. So, it’s a big secret. Whatever it is, it’s positively amazing. The beading she does with metal… absolutely gorgeous.”

  “What about beyond work? In her personal life?”

  “I think she’s happy. She’s got a little family, basically, with Charity and the little girl. I think they’re very close. But we don’t tend to talk about that stuff as much as we talk about jewelry and the business.”

  “Has she ever done anything… um, violent that you know of?”

  “What?” Kitty laughed. “Of course not. Why would you ask something like that?”

  * * *

  Rachel tugged on the edge of Nash’s shirt.

  “Oh, hey, there,” he said, turning and looking down at her. “What are you doing over here?” He and Zoe were coming down the steps outside the studio. It was midafternoon, and the sky was gray. It was probably going to rain later on.

  “I want to be interviewed,” said Rachel.

  Nash smiled. “Oh, yeah?” He knelt down to be eye level with her. “Well, what do you want to tell me about?”

  “Will you interview me?” said Rachel. “Will you put me on your podcast like my mommy?”

  “Well, the podcast is about Siobhan,” said Nash. “So, if you want me to interview you, you’d have to tell me about Siobhan.”

  “I like Siobhan.”

  “You do?”

  “Uh huh. She’s nice. And she’s pretty. And she makes me rings and bracelets that are so, so pretty. I have a whole collection. You should come and see them sometime.”

  “If your mommy says it’s okay,” said Nash.

  “Okay, I’ll go ask her,” said Rachel. “If she says yes, I’ll come back and tell you.”

  “Maybe a little later, okay?” said Nash. “We’re busy now.”

  “Are you going to another interview?”

  “We are,” said Nash.

  Zoe smiled brightly. “See you later.”

  “I’m going to go and ask her,” said Rachel.

  “You do that,” said Nash, chuckling.

  Rachel scampered off.

  Zoe watched her go. “You’re good with her. Children terrify me.”

  “They’re just like adults, only smaller,” said Nash.

  “No, they aren’t,” said Zoe. “Adults don’t need tissues or start crying uncontrollably at the drop of a hat.”

  “True,” said Nash.

  “I guess it’s because you have a daughter.”

  “I’ve actually only known her for a couple of months,” he said. “Her mother hid the pregnancy from me. Then out of the blue, she calls me up, tells me I have a daughter.”

  “Oh, wow,” said Zoe. “That’s nuts.”

  “Yeah,” said Nash. He was heading for the car.

  Zoe kept pace with him. “Are you sure she’s really yours? Did you get like a test or something?”

  Nash looked sidelong at her. “You’re not a very trusting person, are you?”

  “People do weird things is all,” said Zoe. “Maybe she’s using you, and you don’t know it.”

  “Actually, there was a test. But I didn’t ask for it. Tabitha suggested it. Said it would make things easier. Ariel’s definitely my kid.”

  “I don’t think I want kids,” said Zoe.

  “I always did,” said Nash. “I guess I didn’t think I was ready, but now…”

  “Maybe I’ll change my mind.” Zoe shrugged.

  Nash went around the side of the car and opened the door. He slid inside. Zoe sat down next to him. They pulled out of the driveway and onto the road.

  * * *

  Lauren Phillips had freckles and sandy hair, which she was wearing in a sloppy ponytail high on the top of her head. She sat on the porch of her double-wide, absently fingering the microphone Nash had pinned to her. “The way I understand it—”

  “Don’t do that,” said Nash.

  She looked startled. “What?”

  “Uh, the mic. If you touch it, the sound quality degrades. Just leave it.”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said.

  Zoe looked over her shoulder out at the horizon. “You sure you want to sit out here? I think the sky is about to open up any minute.”

  “Oh, you don’t want to go inside,” said Lauren. “It’s a mess in there.”

  “It’s fine,�
� said Nash. “Just go back to what you were saying.”

  “Oh, right,” said Lauren. “Well, the way I understand it, Siobhan started out selling vintage jewelry on Etsy. She had some jewelry that her mom had left her, and she sold that, and she made some good money. So, she invested it into materials to learn to make her own jewelry. And that was when she discovered the beading technique she does with the soldering iron. It’s very complex, and it’s not easy to learn. When she hires you, you spend days just practicing it to get it right.”

  “And that’s how it happened for you?” said Nash. “She hired you, and then she trained you in this technique?”

  “Yeah, that’s how it went,” said Lauren. “She’s real picky about it. You don’t get through to the next stage until you can do it just right. She won’t let any of her jewelry go out if she’s not proud of it.”

  “So, you’re good at it now?”

  “I’m pretty good, yeah.” Lauren laughed.

  “But I understand you’re not allowed to teach it to anyone?”

  “I’m not allowed to do it anywhere other than her studio. I had to sign a contract saying that,” said Lauren. “People try to copy it all the time, but nobody ever gets it quite right. If anyone ever did get it right, she’d probably suspect that one of us blabbed.”

  “And what would she do then?”

  “I don’t know what the consequences would be, but she wouldn’t like it. And it would hurt her business. Which would in turn hurt the whole town, because a lot of people rely on her, so I don’t think anyone would.”

  “Rely on her, huh? That’s interesting.”

  “There’s not a big influx of money coming into this place,” said Lauren. “She pays people to do things for her, and it helps. She’s a little bit of an institution around here.”

  “But you’re not working for her right now?”

  “Well, in the spring, it tends to slow down a bit. We get real busy around Christmas, and then she’s got everyone in there working. And we usually do a big push in the late summer to try to predict what will sell at Christmas and get ahead of the curve as best we can.”