Between, Georgia

by Joshilyn Jackson

  They moved forward, eyes locked, each on her own side of the square. They came even with the center fountain, and at the same moment, they slowly turned their faces forward and continued past each other. I realized I had stopped breathing, and I sucked in a huge gulp of air that tasted oddly frigid, in spite of the fact that it had to be 80 degrees outside. Ona went into the diner, and Bernese saw me and cut the last corner, coming across the lawn and then to the end of the crosswalk to meet me.

  “You going to get some supper?” she said.

  I nodded. “Lou and Fisher are sitting with Genny.”

  “Glad to see you’re getting out. I know Genny’s probably driven you bat-crap.” She continued past me up Grace, heading for home.

  My eyes met Henry’s across the square, and by unspoken assent, we started walking toward each other. I crossed the street and walked directly across the grass, meeting him by the fountain.

  “Want to come back to my place and get drunk?” said Henry Crabtree.

  “God, yes,” I said.

  CHAPTER 15

  HENRY LOCKED THEfront door of the bookstore behind us. The overhead lights were off, and we wound our way through the stacks using the fading sunlight that was coming through the display window. By the time we got to fiction and literature, I was having trouble seeing where I was going. I put one hand on Henry’s shoulder and let him lead.

  At the back of the bookstore, in front of his office, Henry had put in a seating area where shoppers could relax and read and have a cup of coffee. There was a wide sofa covered in stripes of rose and gold velvet, the nap soft and worn through in patches.

  Two pale gold corduroy chairs flanked the sofa, turned to face each other so the three pieces formed a conversation pit around a low coffee table. Henry stopped walking, and when I let go of his shoulder, he went behind one of the chairs and turned on the floor lamp.

  “Take a load off, Nonny Jane,” he said. The lamp had a beaded burgundy shade that dampened the light coming from the lowwatt bulb. Without the overheads on, it was a cozier, more intimate place than Henry’s apartment.

  I sank into the sofa, and Henry disappeared into his office for a moment. I heard him thumping up the stairs and then back down. He returned bearing a half-full bottle of Jameson and two rocks glasses.

  “I could make Irish coffees, but I assume you’d rather skip the niceties and get right to the Irish?” he said.

  “Let’s not screw around.”

  He nodded his assent and sat down beside me. He lined up the glasses on the coffee table and poured a generous shot into each.

  “Skoal,” he said, and we each picked up a glass and downed it.

  It burned a righteous path all the way to my empty stomach.

  I set the glass back down, and Henry poured again, first for me, then for him. He touched the rim of his glass, tracing it with his forefinger, then starting talking, picking up right where we had left off in the Crabtree parts yard.

  “In some ways, Reau Crabtree was my only parent. You know Mama had some problems.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “After my dad died, she got worse. Stayed in her pajamas most days. I was thirteen and practically raising Lily, giving my mother her meds, running the store. So many times, I was ready to head to Highway 78 and put my thumb out. Ona always knew. I’d be twelve seconds away from walking. Ditching Lily. Letting Mama drown in her own juices. And right then Ona would drag in.

  She’d be drunk. Or she’d be so hungover that the first thing she’d do was go have herself a good puke in our toilet. Then she’d make Lily and me some eggs. Pack Lily’s lunch. Give me a roll of quarters and tell me to skip school, spend some quality time at the Loganville arcade.

  “I’m not blind to what Ona Crabtree is, but before she’s any of the things you said, she’s my family. There’s no way for me not to love her.”

  I reached for my glass, and Henry reached for his at the same time. “Skoal,” I said, and we threw the second shot back. It went down easier than the first. I banged the glass down on the table and then tilted my head back and closed my eyes. I heard the click of Henry’s glass coming to rest beside mine, and then I heard him pouring for us again.

  I said, “You don’t have to explain them to me. If there’s a human alive who truly understands the meaning of the phrase

  ‘family obligations,’ you are looking at her.”

  “I’m not apologizing. I’m telling you something.” He paused and I opened my eyes. He was rubbing his long fingers against his forehead, as if trying to press whatever was in his brain down and out through his mouth. “Tucker slashed Lou and Bernese’s tires.

  He was bragging about it to Ona. Skoal.”

  He downed his shot. I was feeling a little dizzy, so I left mine sitting on the table. I wasn’t sure what he was presenting me. A peace offering? Or an equal exchange of information from one hostile side to another? Maybe it was the whiskey, but I thought I felt again the presence of the thing that had been growing between us, and my heart started banging like a fist against my rib cage. I hadn’t realized how much it meant to me until I thought I’d killed it.

  I looked him dead in the eye, and I let the little green thing between us bloom. “Tucker didn’t do it. He must have been lying to score points with his mama. Lori-Anne slashed the tires. I saw her. Skoal.” I picked up my glass and tipped the shot down my throat. I set the glass back down and then looked at him, big-eyed with nerves. “And if you tell Ona that, you will have mightily shafted me.”

  “And if you tell Bernese that Tucker is claiming he did it, she’ll have him arrested. Ona will know it came from me.”

  My hands were shaking. “So why did we do that? Whose side are we on?”

  “Not Bernese’s,” he said.

  “I’m not on Ona’s.”

  “I know.” He capped the whiskey and turned to face me squarely. “I’ve decided to be on yours.”

  “My side is Bernese’s,” I said, a little muddled from three shots and no dinner. I clamped my trembling hands together in front of me, trying to still them.

  “It shouldn’t be. Bernese is in the wrong. Not alone there, but she’s wrong. You know it.”

  “Then whose side should I be on?”

  “I hope you’ll be on mine. Ours. Be on ours.” He moved down the length of the sofa until he was right beside me. He was deliberate and slow, and I watched him, unmoving, with my heart beating so hard that I felt its pulse from throat to knees. I didn’t look away. I didn’t even blink. He reached up slowly and took my head in his hands, burying them in my hair on either side of my face, and then he kissed me, and I closed my eyes and let him.

  Again I felt that odd sense of slipping backwards, of falling into something, and this time I didn’t fight it. I had been fighting it before I was even aware it was there, and for what? For Jonno? To hold up my side of a vow that was so eroded it was sand slipping through my fingers? I grabbed Henry’s shoulders and let myself fall. He fell with me, and the kiss changed radi-cally, immediately, and Henry Crabtree was all over me.

  His hands were fumbling at my clothes, desperate and clumsy, and my hands were doing the same to his. My fingers felt swollen, as if they were filled with too much blood. My pulse beat in every joint as I plucked helplessly at his buttons. I gave up and jerked his shirttail out of his pants so I could run my hands up underneath and feel his heated skin. Then he pulled my hands away, and I was briefly blinded as he wrestled my T-shirt off over my head.

  “Freckles,” I whispered, embarrassed for a moment to be tearing at Henry Crabtree’s clothes in my jeans and my tatty bra, but he said, “I love freckles,” and his voice was thick, and I believed him. He was kissing my collarbone, his fingers busy with the bra’s clasp. I got most of his buttons undone and engaged in a desperate, thick-fingered battle with his belt buckle while he was tugging down my jeans.

  Underneath the pull of the strange gravity that was drawing us down and down into the depths of the velvet
sofa, I felt strangely relieved; Henry wasn’t very good at this. He hadn’t studied. He didn’t know me like a book and he wasn’t reading me from some lofty height, bending my body to his practiced will. He only wanted me. He wanted me so bad he couldn’t get my jeans off fast enough, and whatever he was doing to me, thank God, thank God, it wasn’t pretty. He didn’t care if it was pretty, and I didn’t care, either. I only knew I wanted him to, and he did.

  But then he pushed himself away from me, saying, “We have to stop.”

  “No, we do not,” I said, emphatic, and I sat up and reached for him again.

  “I don’t have anything,” he said.

  But I did. Of course I did. I’d put my purse beside the sofa. I grabbed it and dumped it out, mostly onto the floor. Change went tumbling across the Berber carpet, my lipstick rolling under the coffee table. My contact solution bounced once and skittered away. I rooted past my keys and a pen and grabbed one of the little packets that were always in my purse these days.

  “Oh. Good, then,” said Henry Crabtree, taking it, too intent on using it to question why a married woman carried such a thing. He pulled my body back to his. My teeth banged into his chin and I clutched at him awkwardly, tilting my head back farther to kiss him until we were in free fall again.

  And then we were together, my jeans still twined around one ankle, his shirt still mostly on. We melded into something pri-vate, externally unbeautiful, but from where I was, beneath him and then open-eyed above him, watching us from inside the moment, it was perfect, perfect, perfect.

  Afterward we lay enmeshed on the wide sofa, breathing in unison, face-to-face on our sides, grinning foolishly at each other.

  My back was pressed into the sofa’s back, and I had something digging into my ribs. I rooted around underneath myself and pulled out the canister of pepper spray Jonno had given me a year or so ago after a rash of muggings near the UGA campus. I tossed it over Henry and heard it ping off something on the floor and roll away.

  “So this is what adultery is like,” I thought. No wonder Jonno had been such a fan. I pushed the thought away. No one wanted Jonno in the room right now.

  I sat up and untwisted my jeans, finding my panties stuffed way down inside one of the legs. Henry began putting himself back together, too, as well as he could. I couldn’t stop smiling at him. I had never seen Henry looking so rumpled. His Dockers were draped over the lamp, and they had survived almost un-scathed, but his shirt hung open, hopelessly wrinkled. At some point I had pulled off the leather tie that held his hair back, and hurled it away. His hair was all one length, dead straight, thick and black, and it hung to his shoulders. He was barefoot, his glasses cast aside.

  Henry’s face was fine-boned, and the combination of severe cheekbones and a cut-glass mouth gave him an ascetic, almost an-drogynous beauty. The effect was heightened by his wiry build, his deep-set eyes, his long, elegant hands. But now, disheveled and grinning at me, ringed with the glow of good sex, he’d slipped into the skin of the dangerous thing that lived in him. It was an edge I had always sensed but rarely saw. I liked the few strands of slate that were mixing in with his black hair. I liked how the skin crinkled up beside his eyes as he smiled.

  Henry found his glasses and then helped me gather up all the crap that had tumbled out of my purse. Once we had it all packed away, he handed me the purse, and we stood awkwardly together.

  “You know I have to get home,” I said.

  “Are you okay to walk?” he said, and I realized I was buzzing from the whiskey.

  “Crap. I need a Velamint,” I said. There was nothing but rubbing alcohol at Mama’s house, and Bernese had kept the same bottle of gin in her medicine cabinet for twenty years. I assumed she used it to sterilize needles, because Lord knows I never saw anyone drink it.

  “You need a meal,” said Henry. He listed right as he walked back to his office, and I realized he was not entirely sober him-200

  self. I followed him. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a giant Otis Spunkmeyer orange muffin, still in its plastic wrapper.

  “Eat this on the way home,” he said.

  “I think I better leave by the back.”

  Henry walked me through his office, and we stood by the door for a moment while he straightened my clothes and I ran my hands through my hair, trying to look like a girl who hadn’t just had the best sex of her life on a semipublic sofa.

  There was no such thing as a town smaller than Between. If I came weaving and hiccuping around the corner from the rear entrance to Henry’s store with a bed snarl on the back of my head, everyone in town, including my mama, would know about it before I could finish my five-minute walk home.

  “Will I see you tomorrow?” I asked.

  “I thought you were going to Athens,” said Henry.

  No one had wanted Jonno in the room, but there he was anyway. I swallowed hard, looking away.

  “Unless . . .” Henry trailed off, and he swallowed, too. “Oh.

  You’re not going to Athens.”

  “Genny came home today,” I said hurriedly. “I forgot to tell you. But I’m going to try to work it out so that I get to go. It depends on Genny.”

  “Right,” Henry said.

  “And you saw Ona and Bernese. On the square? That’s a flame and a fuse getting awfully close to meeting up with each other, and I’m the only water in town.”

  “Right.”

  “I swear, I am going to try to go to Athens. And I meant what I told you before,” I said.

  “You told me you were done with Jonno. Then you said, ‘For fuck’s sake, Henry. I’m married.’ ” His voice was calm and level, and his eyes met mine, dead earnest. “I know I’ve jumped the gun here. Either I don’t listen or I don’t learn. But I need to know.

  Which is it?”

  After a long time I said, “Both.”

  He started smoothing his hair back. He’d found his leather tie while we were packing up my purse, and he tilted his head down to look at the floor as he gathered his hair and bound it.

  “Okay, then,” he said. He moved to open the door for me, but I blocked him, not sure what to say.

  “Henry? I won’t say anything to Bernese about Tucker, or anything you tell me.”

  “I know that.” He sounded distant and slightly exasperated.

  Then he bundled me out the door and closed it behind me.

  I walked home, eating the muffin as I went, wishing I were flexible enough to kick myself in the head. What was I doing?

  Earlier that same day, driving home from Loganville General, I’d been crazy-weepy because I thought Henry wouldn’t ever speak to me again. Not five minutes after that, I’d been questioning whether I wanted a divorce at all. Either way, I had no business tumbling onto a sofa under Henry Crabtree. Maybe I had the exact marriage I deserved. I was no better than Jonno; Jonno had only gone first.

  And then two minutes ago, I had vehemently sworn to Henry that I would try to go to Athens. I’d meant it, too, but dammit, I had already promised Fisher that I wasn’t going, that we could have movie night. But Genny was definitely expecting me to go and would make herself ill with guilt if I didn’t. Bernese had all but offered me one of her wide selection of firearms so I could skip the divorce and make myself a widow.

  And then a lightbulb went off in my brain. Hadn’t I also told Ona Crabtree I would come to her house for dinner on what was turning out to be the most overbooked Friday of my life? Yes, I had. And I had told her I would bring her a check, written by Bernese, for those dogs.

  Of course, that was before Mama killed them. I doubted a check could fix anything now, unless it was signed with Bernese’s heart blood and came in a box with her head. If I didn’t find a way to soothe Ona, she would call in the Alabama Crabtrees, and I held little sway with them. Whatever awful thing they took it in their heads to do, there would be no way for me to stop them. I couldn’t let it come to that.

  Everyone wanted something from me, and I hadn’t a clue what I want
ed myself. But I did know there was one person who was absolutely on my side, first, foremost, and no matter what. Mama.

  Mama could help me cut through all the crap in my head and decide what had to be done.

  That night, once Genny was settled and Lou and Bernese had taken Fisher home to bed, I went into Mama’s room and drew my heart on her shoulder. She was already in bed but awake. She started and then smiled as she signed, Sorry. My mind was far away. Are you going to bed?

  In a minute. I sat down beside her.

  She found my face with her hands and traced its shape, leaned in and kissed my hair, but then she jerked away from me as if she had been stung. She signed, Did Jonno come here? To Between?

  Of course not.

  She cocked her head to the side, and then her body relaxed and a slow grin spread over her face. You have a sweetheart!

  I started to protest, but she pushed my hands away and signed, Don’t lie to your mama. I know. You have a sweetheart. Is it Henry?

  I nodded hesitantly into her hand.

  Finally! she signed, shocking me a little.

  I’m still married, Mama. Shouldn’t you be giving me a lecture?

  She shooed her hand at me, as if whisking off the peskiest of the Ten Commandments with an airy wave. If it takes this much sin to get your head straight, so be it. You need a sweetheart.

  I don’t know if I would call Henry my sweetheart, I signed. I don’t know what he is.

  Mama was close to laughing. Don’t try to fool me! I had a sweetheart myself. It was a long time ago, but I still have a nose, and you don’t forget. Henry is your sweetheart.

  I felt bright heat bloom in my cheeks, and my mouth dropped open. Genny always signed “sweetheart” to mean “boyfriend” or