Lucy unlocked the door for Delnor, who treated the bar as his living room every night come four o’clock. She poked her head out the door to check for Jeptha’s car. The parking lot was clear. She returned to the bar, serving up a shot of the cheapest bourbon to Delnor and fending off his ever-present requests for a free beer. Every time the door opened, her stomach jumped until she could assure herself it wasn’t Jeptha. Gradually, the place filled to the point that she lost track of newcomers.
Delnor was nursing his fourth shot when Lucy felt a tap on her shoulder. Her armpits prickled with sweat and her stomach soured when she turned and saw Jeptha. He wore a tentative half-smile as his blue eyes searched hers. He was looking, she was sure, for some sign of warmth. All Lucy could think was How did I let this happen? How could I have been so stupid?
“Hey,” she said, finally. “How are you?”
“I’m good. Been thinking about you.”
“Yeah?” The sick feeling in her stomach got worse, and she could swear her heart had never beat this fast.
“I was hoping you’d listen to us play tonight.”
“I don’t have much choice, do I?” she said.
His face fell. Lucy’s stomach felt even worse for having hurt him. “I’ll listen, Jeptha. Right now, I’ve got to get beers for these guys and food for that table. I’ll see you later.”
He nodded at her and walked, shoulders stooped, to the stage. Now she was sick to her stomach, sweaty, and guilty to boot. She ducked behind the bar to unload glasses from the washer. She not only needed to take care of this baby, apparently, but Jeptha’s feelings too.
“Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. Stupid. Stupid,” she grumbled with each glass, her anger mounting. Suddenly, she felt fingers grip her arms, hard enough to leave a mark.
“Lucy. Stop. You’re going to break those.”
Lucy looked from the glasses, which were stacked twelve high and swaying with each beat of the drum, to Judy. She hadn’t realized how hard she was slamming them.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why don’t you go grab some more Jack from downstairs?” Judy asked. As she headed downstairs, she heard Judy gingerly unstacking the glasses.
Lucy grabbed two large handles of Jack. She’d been tossing back shots of the stuff three week ago, but now all she wanted was to hurl the bottles against the wall. Instead, she stomped back up the stairs and placed them on the counter with a ringing clunk.
“I’ve seen people look at liquor in a lot of ways, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone look at a bottle of whiskey with such anger before,” Judy said.
“Now, that surprises me,” Lucy said. “It makes people do such damn stupid things.”
“I’m guessing you won’t be having a shot of whiskey with the band tonight?”
Out of Lucy’s mouth emerged a single rueful laugh, followed by a tear. And then another one fell. She turned to face the liquor bottles along the wall, mortified to be crying at work in front of Judy. Judy moved closer to Lucy, and a moment later, Lucy felt the lightest pressure on her back, as if Judy’s hand were a sun-warmed leaf that had floated softly onto Lucy’s shoulder. Judy cleared her throat.
“Is he really that bad?” Judy asked.
“Who?”
She nodded up at the stage. “That mandolin player.”
“Yes,” Lucy stopped. “No. I don’t know. Maybe I’m the bad one,” Lucy said, wiping her eyes with the towel Judy had handed her.
“He doesn’t ever take his eyes off you.”
Lucy was silent.
“From that first night in here, a few weeks back. If you’re in the room, he’s watching you like a Sox fan seeing Fenway for the first time.”
Lucy wasn’t sure what Fenway was, but she knew the look Judy was describing. She had been trying to ignore it, hoping that if she pretended not to see it, no one else would either. Her father had looked at her that way—his face lit with so much wonder and love. Then, it had made her feel like she could do anything, be anyone. Now, seeing that look on Jeptha’s face made her want to hide.
“I know,” Lucy sighed. “But you aren’t from here. You don’t know him. Besides, there’s more to it than that.”
“I may not know much about him or about the people down here generally, but I know that’s not a look you come across every day. I’d think twice before I squandered it.”
“Squandered it?”
“I’m just saying, maybe you should give the guy a chance.”
Lucy gathered the three beers for Table 6 by their necks and made her way out from behind the bar. “Maybe,” she said.
A FEW HOURS later, the band ended their set, and Lucy watched as Jeptha carefully put away his mandolin and stepped off the stage. Three of the trashiest girls in the bar leapt to their feet, their nearly identical miniskirts and hacked off t-shirts bearing a little less skin than a gaggle of strippers. Lucy couldn’t help but laugh when they flashed Jeptha candy-bright smiles and tossed their hair, their frosted tips all the same white blonde of lightning. He’d left with at least one of these girls before—and despite it being clear to even the most casual observer that all he planned to do was sleep with them, they kept coming back for more. She expected he’d stop and talk with them, maybe give one the nod, like she had noticed him doing whenever she had seen him out at bars in the past. She’d even seen him do it at church once—the girl had left her parents sitting in the pew and snuck out with him, coming back in after the final hymn with her hair all mussed up and her dress wrinkled. Lucy stopped laughing when she saw that he ignored them all and was heading straight for her like a cow to fresh hay. The looks they gave her were not warm ones.
“Hey, Lucy,” he said, his voice cracking. Lucy smiled for a moment; there was something sweet about the fact that she made him as nervous as a twelve-year-old boy.
“Y’all sounded good tonight,” she said. She pulled at a loose string on the bar towel, wishing she had a counter to clean. She’d wiped it down three times already.
“Thanks. We wasn’t as good as that night.”
“Well, that night was special,” she said. Jeptha’s face brightened like a small child seeing snow for the first time. “I mean, we were all drunk,” Lucy hurried to say. “Everything sounds better when you’re drunk.”
“Oh, right. Yeah. I guess that’s true,” Jeptha said, his fingers fidgeting with his belt buckle.
“No. That didn’t come out right. I don’t mean y’all sounded bad, just everything sounds better when there’s alcohol. Everything seems like a good idea at the time, right?”
“I suppose,” he said, shrugging and not meeting her eye. “Guess I’ll see you later.”
“Jeptha, wait. I didn’t mean …” Lucy stopped, not sure what she wanted to say. She looked up at him. His dark blond hair was shorn, and his blue eyes were bright with expectation. He was wearing the same gray t-shirt and jeans he’d worn that night. He looked good in them. She remembered then the feel of him under her, the planed edges of his body moving against hers. She shook her head against the vision and forced her breath to slow. It was Jeptha Taylor, for God’s sake. Judy’s words came back to her. Given the fact that his kid was currently dividing cell by cell inside her, maybe she should give him a chance. He was, she realized with a small shudder, sort of family now.
“Do you have plans tomorrow? I was thinking of going to Carter’s Fold, if maybe you wanted to come,” Lucy said.
“With you?” Jeptha said, his voice cracking again as he broke out in a grin that he couldn’t contain. His face was so hopeful that Lucy couldn’t help but smile.
“Yes, with me.”
“I do,” he said, nodding his head so hard Lucy was sure he’d give himself a headache.
“Pick me up at six? Here’s the address,” she said, and wrote “512 Maple” on a bar napkin.
He stared at the napkin like it was a treasure map. Lucy had a sudden vision of Jeptha as a child, back to a moment when he’d never had a drink, slept with a girl, o
r gone drunkenly careening around town. She was touched to think that that Jeptha was still in there.
“I’ll be there. I can’t wait,” he said.
Once Lucy saw the door close behind Jeptha, she turned to look at Judy, who had been pretending to clean up while listening to the whole exchange from the other end of the bar. “There, you happy?” Lucy said.
“What do I care? I just said maybe think about giving him a shot, but what’s that you guys say? ‘I don’t have a dog in this fight?’”
Lucy grabbed the empty beer bottles off the table closest to her and wiped it down. “God, I wish I didn’t either.”
3
JEPTHA WOKE EARLY ON Saturday morning. He cautiously opened his eyes, expecting the pounding headache, alcohol-dried throat, and ache of regret in his belly that he’d been waking with for the last three Saturdays, and most other days since he was fifteen besides. But his head was blissfully clear, and his stomach still danced with sheer astonishment over Lucy asking him to Carter’s Fold. The fingers that usually shook with tremors instead pulsed with the bluegrass from last night’s set. Wearing nothing but a pair of bright orange UT boxers, he lay on the wrinkled sheets and smiled up at the cratered surface of the ceiling tiles. He grabbed his mandolin off the bedside table and picked out a few notes from the song in his head. He was surprised to find after a minute or two that he was playing and humming along to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” the very first song he learned to play.
He had been eight the first time he picked up a mandolin. Once a week, his Meemaw had taken him over to her friend Miss Irene’s house, a one-story structure whose living room sloped from one end to the other so much that Jeptha always stuck a ball in his pocket to play with on the incline. No matter how much fluffy white peanut butter candy she gave him, he never got over his fear of her powdery smell, which barely covered a whiff of decay. One visit, fidgety and full of sugar, he had wandered around the house, hoping Meemaw might decide it was time to leave if he got too close to Miss Irene’s collection of tiny blue glass animals.
Next to the animal collection, a small, pear-shaped wooden instrument, a kind of shrunken guitar, leaned against one corner. He heard Meemaw’s voice drop into the half-whisper she used when she had some story she didn’t want Jeptha to hear about his dad, whose marriage to Jeptha’s mom Meemaw was always calling “ill-advised.” Miss Irene nodded in that understanding way Jeptha had noticed women had when they were talking smack about men. He reached his hand out toward the instrument. Neither woman looked over. Unsure how to grapple with it, he picked it up by the strings. His thumb and forefinger slipped off the metal wire, and he had to grab the wooden back with his other hand to keep from dropping it. His pinky finger hit the strings and bounced off, the sound rolling off Miss Irene’s living room walls the way the ball had sped down the floor. He hurriedly put it down and backed away.
“Do you know what that is?” Miss Irene asked, peering at him over her glasses.
Jeptha was too afraid to speak.
“That’s a mandolin. You ever heard one?”
He shook his head.
“Lord, Betty, why ain’t you ever brought him over to Carter’s Fold? Boy needs some music in his life. He’s old enough.” Turning back to Jeptha, she said, “Well, bring it here, Jeptha. I’ll show you. That’s right, grab it by the neck, not the strings.”
She took the instrument from his hands and held it up against herself. She strummed the strings until its soft, tinny sounds filled the room. Jeptha’s hands involuntarily reached out to touch it. Miss Irene smiled. He picked at the top string and heard a note ring out.
“You know ‘Shady Grove’?” Miss Irene asked.
“Yeah.”
Even as a kid, Jeptha had recognized something magical in the high, forsaken sound her fingers made against the pear-shaped instrument’s double strings. It made him feel lonely and understood all at the same time. As soon as she played the last note, he thrust his hands back out, desperate to hold it again.
Since that day, a mandolin was never far away from his hands. Jeptha used to sneak over to Miss Irene’s most afternoons to play, with Meemaw’s help. In addition to songs like “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Shady Grove,” Miss Irene taught him the mandolin’s notes and quirks. She showed him the beauty of the sound and how to draw it out so that the notes seemed to go straight to his heart. With her hands guiding his, he fell in love for the first time.
But, ten months later, Meemaw died. He saw Miss Irene at the funeral and walked the five miles to her house later that week. There, with tears in her eyes, she gave him her father’s mandolin. It was the most beautiful thing Jeptha had ever seen—it had a mother-of-pearl fern on the peg head and a swirl of wood at the bottom. It was far too nice for an eight-year-old, but because Miss Irene trusted him with it, he had kept it safe, even if he never went over to her house for lessons again. He wanted to, often, but he missed Meemaw too much to go to a place he’d only been with her.
This was the mandolin he kept beside him on the bed, the one he played with his band, and the one he played on the porch most nights, picking away while the sun set. Now, lying in bed, Jeptha was happy to hear the notes ring out, as true to the sound as they had been the day the mandolin was made. He moved deftly from the lullaby to “Shady Grove,” softly singing the words to himself.
Peaches in the summertime,
Apples in the fall,
If I can’t have the girl I love,
I don’t want none at all.
Some come here to fiddle and dance,
Some come here to tarry.
Some come here to fiddle and dance,
I come here to marry.
Until last night, for the three weeks since he’d had sex with Lucy in his back seat, he’d been drinking steadily. Every day that he didn’t see her, and even more on the days when he did and she brushed him off, he’d realized he had made a mistake taking her back to his car. His heart drained away faster than his beers, and he knew it was over before it had begun. He tried to tell himself that he was right back where he’d been before that night—lusting after her with her paying him no mind. But having been close to her, his neck still tickling occasionally from her whisper, his body aching to feel her weight on him again, it was no use. He’d called up one of his old girlfriends—a Chastity who had never been chaste—but the night had been a failure. It wasn’t sex he wanted, it was Lucy. Alcohol was the only thing that dulled the pain, and poorly at that. It’d gotten so bad there for a few weeks that Jeptha had toyed with calling up the friend of his who always had something on him, whether Oxy or heroin. But he resisted, grabbed another beer, and fiddled around on his mandolin a little more. He couldn’t forget the time his and Cody’s friend Dustin had died of a heroin overdose in the Porta Potty at his construction job, where Jeptha—who’d been stranded at the top of a lift for an hour when his friend took a break—found him, hunched over and blue. The sight had scared Jeptha straight from even thinking about touching the shit, right into the well-known and loving arms of his mandolin and booze.
But finally last night, the words tumbling out of her mouth were the ones he’d been wanting to hear for more than half his life. Happy as he was, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d started the whole thing out wrong, with a level of seediness that was so far from what he wanted with her. Tonight would be what he’d envisioned; tonight would be their fresh start.
He lay the mandolin down in its case and scratched his belly, trying to get up the energy to get out of bed, pee, and make some coffee. He was mid-grunt and halfway up when his brother Bobby’s bear-paw knock sounded at the door.
“Jeptha! You up? I been waiting on your ass for near on twenty minutes. Let’s go.”
“Damn, Bobby, you don’t need to yell,” Jeptha shouted as he shuffled to the door. “I got ears. And I’m up.” He pulled the door open. Bobby narrowed his eyes and grimaced at Jeptha’s boxers before looking away. “What? A man can’t sleep w
ithout a shirt on?”
“Frankly, Jeptha, I don’t give a damn what you sleep in, as long as you are up and ready to top some damn tobacco in about three minutes.”
“Alright, alright. I’m coming.”
Bobby turned without saying anything. He pulled on his gloves as he clomped down Jeptha’s stairs, the trailer swaying slightly with each step.
Jeptha threw on a pair of dirty jeans and a t-shirt. He dumped a quarter of a mug of instant coffee into a cup and filled it with lukewarm water from the sink. He had completely forgotten they had tobacco to top today. The farm never failed to ruin his day.
When Jeptha’s parents had died—his dad in a spectacularly fiery drunken car crash that luckily only killed him and his mom six months later from a found-too-late cancer that leeched whatever spirit she had left from her body as if she were a tire with a pinhole—they left the farm to their three kids equally. Jeptha’s trailer, which sagged a bit on the right side where he hadn’t jacked it up quite right, sat a couple hundred feet away from his sister Deanna’s house, which had been his parents’ house when they were alive. Deanna had inherited the house by virtue of being the only one of them who had kids. It had been that rare case when having kids before you were ready turned out to be a financial boon, and Deanna wasn’t going to waste it. At the point of a triangle, Bobby’s trailer butted up against the trees at the back of the property. The farm was situated on the slope of a small hill, with the valley and its road running from left to right in front of them. Each house had a view of the road, Jeptha’s dad’s car up on blocks, a fence, and the field of tobacco. Plus a view straight into each other’s homes. Deanna could see Jeptha drinking beer on his porch, while Jeptha listened to Bobby yell at the game on TV.
Holding on to Nothing Page 4