by Holly LeCraw
He felt a presence behind him, like his own conscience. He turned around. It was, instead, a dark-skinned man in green coveralls. The man’s patient yet slightly superior expression immediately annoyed him. “Yes?” Jed said.
“It’s full-serve,” the man said, with an accent Jed couldn’t place. He held out his hand for the pump.
“Oh,” Jed said. “Sorry.” He did not move.
“I’ll do it, sir.”
The name patch above the man’s pocket said Bob. Jed resisted the impulse to ask if that was really his name. “I’m almost done,” he said. “Thanks.”
“I will do it, sir,” the man repeated, unsmiling.
“Almost finished here, don’t worry about it—”
The man didn’t answer, didn’t withdraw his hand.
Jed looked at the man’s empty hand, the white script Bob on his chest, then around him at the lovely little village where things were done a certain way and no other, and though his mother had taught him manners, yes, she had, he suddenly didn’t care. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, and yanked the nozzle out of the tank and jammed it back into its holder, reattached the gas cap with a violent twist.
“Uh, sir—”
“What? What now?” The man had backed up a step and looked intensely disapproving. He cut his eyes to the pump. Clenching his teeth, Jed took out his wallet and thrust a couple of twenties at the man, whose eyes had somehow become his mother’s. Jed, really. When had he ever been angry at his mother? When had he not listened to her? She had kept him in line, he had let her. He had always, deep down, agreed with her. That is no way to act. Jed, really. The man was no longer holding out his hand. “Take the money,” Jed snarled, and finally the man took it.
He got in the car and slammed the door. Through the closed window he heard the man saying “Sir, sir,” but he could not look at him. He started the engine. Possibly the man wanted to give him change but more possibly he was going to scold him or pity him, and Jed could not bear either; most probably the man just thought he was another garden-variety preppy prick, and that thought was the most bearable, but Jed was not going to wait to find out. He screeched out of the driveway and toward the eastbound ramp, over the little Yankee stone bridge, and all he could think was, It’s Marcella’s fault, all her fault, goddamn her, all her fault.
Someday I am going to lose her too.
He could not stand it. For a second rage encased him so that he was paralyzed, he couldn’t see, but he pushed it away, he knew how to do that, God he was good at that—push it away and go back to Goddamn her or, even better, Goddamn Toni, and even though he knew it was childish, he let himself seethe this way for the rest of the drive back to Mashantum.
JED WAS FURIOUS all weekend. It was frustrated desire, was all it was. It came up, mutated, at odd times. He figured out a way to show a little of it: he said they had had a fight. He and Marcie. On the phone, on the way. Yes, about her parents, but that wasn’t all—and no, he couldn’t fucking explain. Billy and Callie began to tease him about another one biting the dust, but when he barked back at them they didn’t say any more. Callie actually looked afraid, which made Jed even angrier.
Early Sunday evening, when he could stand it no longer, he called. He had become a creature of habit. Marcella was his habit, and Toni had deprived him. She had interrupted their precarious rhythm of weekends. As the phone rang he thought, What if Toni is still there? Simple—he’d hang up—or maybe, damnit, he’d just say Hello, guess who—
But Marcella answered. “Jed,” she breathed, her voice warm and glad.
“Is Toni—”
“She just left.”
He waited a beat. Finally he said, “Do you want me to come?”
“Yes, darling. Please.”
He hung up the phone. His hand was shaking but it was the tremor of fatigue, of tense muscles finally relaxed. He could go. He could go. He felt like he had been straining at a starting line and the barrier had been removed so suddenly that he might simply fall over.
Collect yourself, man. Fool.
He had begun speaking to himself this way.
He might have gone straight for his car keys and headed out the door if he had not heard voices just then in the next room. Of course, he would have to tell Callie now, and Billy. As it turned out Callie was already in bed—she’d taken to napping at odd hours, disappearing at a moment’s notice. Billy was watching a Red Sox game in the living room. “Hey, look,” Jed said. “I, um, just talked to Marcie.”
Billy, slouched on the sofa, his legs wide and slack, looked at him with a grin spreading over his face. “Her parents gone?”
“Yeah. I’m going to go see her. Uh, now. Just overnight.” Jed did not sit down.
“Make-up sex. Hard to pass that up.” Billy stretched his arms over his head, yawned. “But, you know, I’ve got to leave tonight myself. I’m just checking the score here.” He lowered his voice. “Callie might freak.”
Jed looked at Billy. He knew Billy wanted an ally and there was a time when Jed would have been glad to do it, but now there was something he wanted more, much more. He said, “Yeah, she might. Why don’t you drive up tomorrow morning?”
Billy’s voice hardened almost imperceptibly. “I’ve got an early meeting, bro.”
“Yeah. You’ve got a wife too.” He was swimming in rage again, floodwater from another storm, he knew that, he didn’t care. Gritting his teeth so he didn’t shout, he said, “This whole setup is fucking crazy.”
“Tell Callie,” Billy shot back, as if he had been waiting for a chance to say it. “I didn’t want her to move to the fucking Cape.” They glared at each other and then Billy slumped a little and turned away and said, “I’ll call Toni Atkinson. Maybe she can stay over.”
“Don’t,” Jed said instantly. His fist was clutched at his side. He was furious but also now cunning: all he had to do was drive back to Marcella, and he would not, not, not give that up. “Callie needs family,” he said. “She needs you.” As he said it, Jed knew that there was something looming in front of him, some reason to worry about Callie. He should sit down with Billy, figure out what was going on—but not now, not now! “And what about Jamie?” Jed said, shameless. “Sleep outside in that tent again with him. He would love it. My God.”
Billy looked at Jed strangely. “He’s in bed already,” he said. “He’s asleep.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Besides,” Billy said, sitting back into the couch, something about his posture determinedly cheerful, “I’m still recovering from last night. My back’ll never be the same.”
Billy was a good man, a decent man, Jed knew this very clearly—a man who had once been one of his best friends. And this had changed. Jed did not know when it had. But he was still family; that didn’t change; he didn’t want to see this wide stripe of weakness running through Billy, part of the larger thing Jed was refusing to see. He knew that Billy didn’t want to talk about Callie either, not really, and that he should make him, but he wasn’t going to. All he wanted was to get back to Marcella’s house and bed and arms, for just a little while. He felt quite clear about that. He would not think beyond that. Jed stood there, not backing down, and finally heard Billy sigh and agree. “I want to meet her, though,” Billy warned, and although his tone was light his eyes were not teasing anymore. “I want to see what all the fuss is about,” he said. “Because this seems like something different. It seems like there is something serious going on.” He was no longer smiling. “Am I right?”
“You’re right.”
Billy looked at him, unsmiling, as though he wanted to say more, a lot more, maybe he wanted to talk after all, but Jed took a step backward. “I owe you, bro,” he said. “Tell Callie I’ll be back tomorrow night. Late.” He was out, he was gone, he was already flying down the highway; his anger with Billy had not faded but instead migrated to a place where he stored pieces of puzzles, puzzles he fully intended to solve, later.
TONI WAS DRIVING DOWN THE DARK IN
TERSTATE and singing to the radio. It felt good to be alone in the car. The darkness outside seemed comfortable. Normally she didn’t spend a lot of time sitting around analyzing; she’d rather move, rather act. But what else could you do on a car trip besides sit there and think? And she let her mind wander and finally settle on this odd new warmth she felt toward her mother.
Toni had always thought her mother was beautiful, but like someone from another world almost, sort of untouchable even though Marcella was always literally touching her, smoothing her hair or stroking her cheek. Toni had felt her to be far away, had always wanted more more more of her, not the love Marcella lavished on her but something else she couldn’t name. The house when she was growing up did not have the relaxed feeling of her friends’ houses and it was easier for her to blame Marcella than Anthony. Wasn’t it her mother’s house, anyway? Wasn’t it her mother who was always there?
But she had had a good time this weekend and had not felt homesick in her own bedroom as she often had before. Her mother seemed happier for some reason—was that why? That didn’t really make sense. Her mind wandered and settled on something different: it was Callie, Toni decided. Callie had opened her eyes, although Toni did not know how to tell her this. When she watched Callie with Grace, Toni felt an unfamiliar jealousy, wanted the feel of that tiny body, the charge of that utter neediness. And it was weird, but she also was afraid of Callie, and admired her, and had a very strange contempt for her, and one day she realized she was just afraid of what Callie had been through. She thought, Well, at least I have a mother.
It had been a revelation. She was not the kind of person who sat around and thought about what she already had. But then when she fought with her father over the Woodshed and her curfew and his ridiculous fear about her growing up—what was she supposed to do, never change?—calling Marcella seemed attractive. Before, she would have been mad at her mother even as her fingers dialed her number.
So she had that warmth behind her. She would rather have stayed with her mother, lounged around and gone to the beach with her, had a real vacation. She would rather not have had a job to go back to, and babysitting on top of it. But there was little Grace. And there was Jed. It was exciting and disturbing to think of him. Just as she was not used to appreciating her mother, she was not used to pursuing some guy and not having him like her back. She wasn’t used to pursuing at all. The prickle of her thoughts became uncomfortable, and when one of her favorite songs came on the radio she turned it up as loud as it would go.
WHEN JED AWOKE AT MARCELLA’S on Monday morning, the bed beside him was empty. He slipped on his boxers and walked barefoot down the hall. The house was silent except for the first birds singing outside. The kitchen and living room were deserted.
He found her on the porch, sitting in one of the wicker armchairs, looking out into the trees and the growing light. At the sound of his footsteps in the doorway she turned to him, unsurprised. He said, “I thought you had disappeared in the night. I thought I would never see you again.”
She only smiled, a soft smile that he knew should be all comfort.
He sat down in the other chair. For a minute or so he did not let himself look at her. Instead he, too, looked out at the trees, the well-shaped Connecticut hardwoods, and the just-risen sun gleaming through the leaves. The morning air was already hot, but it did not make him feel the same disquiet he had felt Friday at the gas station. Instead he had the odd feeling that it was fungible, the air, that he could make of it whatever he wanted—that he could will it into summer heat or winter cool merely by the force of his thought. For a moment that sort of power seemed to hang in front of him, ripe for the taking. Then it was gone, and he remembered that it was Monday morning.
He had never spent a Monday morning with her. It was the most quotidian of occurrences and for that very reason he knew it was extraordinary. He tried to tell himself that Monday didn’t matter; after all, it wasn’t as if either of them had an office to go to. In Mashantum the days flowed together and he often didn’t know which one it was, except that now he was always waiting for the weekend—but here he was, in Connecticut, on a Monday. He did not want to feel out of place. He did not want to think he had any order to fit into, any progression to make. He knew that Callie would be at home waiting for him with her flat hopeless eyes, and he resented that great weight. What if he told Callie about Marcella? Told her what—he couldn’t tell her everything—part? But that wouldn’t work. The edges would become confusing to him, he would forget what he could say and what he couldn’t. He and Marcella would never be ordinary, he would never walk through Mashantum hand-in-hand with her. And he felt the fury again, a discrete thing, an obstacle. Its edges glowed white-hot. He had to turn away again. Turn his back although that way he left himself exposed. You had to try to see what was coming.
He turned to Marcella. “You woke up so early,” he forced himself to say. He stood, and took her hand and drew her up to him.
“I am an old woman,” she said, with a flick of her fingers. “Sleep isn’t as important as it used to be.” She looked at him from under her lashes. She rarely flirted. Her lack of guile was one of the things he loved. He didn’t want her to do it now.
So he didn’t answer her. Instead, he leaned down and took the collar of her filmy bathrobe in his teeth. Slowly, he pulled it off her shoulder. Underneath she was naked, as he had known she would be; still he drew in his breath. He blew on her nipple and watched it harden in the air, and then he cupped the weight of her breast in his hand. Her eyes fluttered closed, and he felt himself stirring, the anger retreating. He licked his forefinger and then circled her nipple, and, softly, she moaned.
He watched her face. He had made her float, she was aloft, there was no morning, no Monday, no sun growing hot above the trees. He needed to keep watching her, to not think, and so he pushed himself, hardening, against her, parting the silky cloth between her legs. She opened her eyes, and as he watched, her focus gradually sharpened and narrowed and came to rest on him. “Don’t come back from wherever you were,” he whispered. “Stay there. I want to come with you.” Now it was her turn, though, to say nothing and she only pressed into him.
He felt as he always did, that he wanted to lay her down right there, take her on the floor. He forced himself to breathe slowly. He felt his blood pumping. “Feel what you do to me,” he murmured. Her pressing became a grinding; the bathrobe fell off her other shoulder. He leaned down again and licked one nipple, hard, then the other, and she cried out.
Yes, he was floating now too. He untied the robe and it fell to the floor and he lowered himself to his knees and tasted her, softly. Gently he pushed her legs farther apart. Her hands gripped his shoulders, hard. He tasted her, again and again, and he could tell from her trembling that she could barely stand. His tongue was flickering, he was gripping her thighs, he was nearly holding her up and now she was roiling above him, collapsing in a long unbroken series of fluttering cries, and so he did lay her down, on the heap of her robe. Her hands groped for him, pushed his head back down and then her hips rose and shuddered and shuddered again. He held himself to her until she twisted away, moaning, and then finally, finally, he rose up and plunged into her. As soon as he was in her, he was safe.
She was all softness and warmth and her scent was everywhere. He remembered they were on the hard floor, and began to thrust with exquisite slowness. There was no separation between their bodies. He did not want to feel any space at all. He was sweating and was sure the heat was only his but then all at once, as though they had been signaled by his body, the cicadas began wailing their song of late summer. They buzzed up into their impossible pitch as though they were screaming over, over, and he caught Marcella’s face between his hands and buried his fingers in her hair, and as he pushed himself into her as deep as he could go he whispered what he had been thinking since he walked onto the porch: “I will never get enough of you. I will never have enough. I will never have enough.”
I
Both Marcella and Cecil loved good food, but on the Cape going to a restaurant together was a risk they did not often take. Even several towns away from Mashantum they worried about bumping into a friend of a friend, although it was not as dangerous as it would have been, say, for Anthony, a resident of Boston and the Cape all his life.
Once, they ventured to the mainland, to a seafood place near Plymouth Rock. It was filled with tourists in shorts and had cartoons of Pilgrims on the menu, but they laughed and ordered anyway. As Marcella picked at her overcooked stuffed flounder, she said, “Someday, darling, I will cook for you. A real meal.”
“Please do,” Cecil said, his eyes crinkling at the corners in the way she loved. “Rescue me.”
“No, I mean it,” she said. “We will find a kitchen, and I will cook, and we will have a real dinner together.”
As she said it, she realized it was more than a joke, or a dream—it was a need.
They made it happen, finally, in August. Marcella had had to plot and plan and lie to arrange a night away and she was sure that Cecil had too, but they did not discuss these exertions; they never did. She also was trying hard not to tell him that she felt the cooling late-summer days ticking by like she was a condemned woman. Every night she could physically feel that the sun was setting earlier, the world darkening in response to their looming separation. She was having trouble sleeping. Her life had broken and she did not know how to fix it.
Cecil had found a better-than-average motel with kitchenettes, in Sandwich, still on the Cape but far from Mashantum. Marcella had planned an entire menu and shopped for all the supplies. They would bustle about the stove together, they would set the table and eat by candlelight, she would feed him a weekday supper—she had purposely picked dishes that were not too elaborate or fancy, dishes she remembered from the kitchen table of her childhood.