by Cathy Holton
She lay in bed beside Briggs that night and plotted her future.
Now that she’d fallen in love with Lonnie, she knew she’d been fooling herself about Briggs. She would never learn to love him. And he would never learn to love her, either, not in the way she needed to be loved. Briggs’s love would always be conditional, there would always be strings attached. It would always contain an element of possession. My car, my house, my wife. Briggs knew nothing of sacrifice.
Lola would graduate from college in June, and she would tell no one about Lonnie until then. It would be their little secret until after she received her degree and her teaching certificate. Her marriage to Briggs was planned for September, but she and Lonnie would be married soon after graduation and it would be too late for Briggs and her mother to do anything about it then. Lola would need to work initially while Lonnie finished his GED and started his own painting business. There would be many years of hard work, scrimping, and saving before they had enough to start a family.
Lola had no illusions about what her mother, deprived of her dreams of a family dynasty, would do. There would be no money coming from Maureen, no down payment for a small house, no expensive wedding or baby shower gifts, no educational trust fund for her Lumpkin grandchildren. When she died, Maureen’s money would go to her favorite charities. She would remain spiteful and bitter until the very end.
But it didn’t matter. Lola and Lonnie would be happy. They would work hard and they would struggle but they would love each other and each new baby, born to an already-crowded house, would be a blessing. They would sit together in the cool of the evenings and watch their children play, and Lola would know she’d made the right decision choosing Lonnie.
Her only guilt came from not telling Mel, Sara, and Annie about her plans. She wanted to tell them but she knew she shouldn’t. At least, not yet.
Some secrets were best kept.
J.T. was wearing a plaid shirt, a pair of faded jeans, and carrying an ax, and for a brief moment, Sara thought he was here to kill Mel. But then he grinned, and, lifting the ax, said to Sara, “Honey, I’m home,” and she realized he was doing his Jack Torrance impression and the ax was plastic. The feeling of relief that washed over her was fleeting but intense. She rushed forward to greet him, trying to insert herself between him and the swing, trying to drag him into the house before he noticed Mel and Bart.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” Sara said, tugging on his arm.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he said. He watched her with an amused expression, letting her drag him up the steps by the arm. Even in costume, he was the best-looking man in the place, which only reinforced Sara’s belief that Mel was crazy, or at least suffering from some sort of delusional post-Junior breakdown.
“The beer’s in the back,” she said over her shoulder.
He pulled his arm away and took her hand instead, and she pushed her way through the dope smokers, dragging him behind her. His hand fit neatly around her own, and it occurred to her that, other than that time at the drive-in when his fingers had brushed her knee, this was the first time they’d ever touched. A little flutter of excitement, like a pinpoint of light growing brighter, pierced her chest. She’d had ample time since that night to reflect on what had happened between them in the car, to wonder if it had been simply a trick of her imagination. The attraction, that moment of trembling possibility, might have been in her mind only. Surely J.T had given no sign since then that anything remarkable had happened between them.
She could feel him behind her, could feel the solid bulk of his body as she stopped to open the screen door. He leaned forward and grasped the top of the door with his other hand, holding it open for her. She looked up to thank him, and in that moment his eyes shifted to the right just, as if on cue from some unseen director, the crowd parted. Mel and Bart were suddenly visible, sprawled on the porch swing beneath the softly glowing light.
It all happened in slow motion like a movie, like a bad dream. The Clash sang in the background, “London Calling.” J.T.’s face took on an expression of stunned outrage, followed swiftly by a fleeting look of sorrow. The smile faded from his lips and his eyes grew sharp and steady. Mel, feeling their weight upon her, sat up slowly and looked around.
“J.T, don’t,” Sara said, trying to take his arm again, but he was already striding deliberately toward them. Mel saw him coming and began to shout. The crowd parted like actors in a chorus, and now there were only the three of them on center stage, illuminated by the softly glowing porch light. Bart sat very still, like a man who sees disaster coming but is helpless to stop it. His face was covered in lipstick kisses, and he wore a dazed, bemused expression. He seemed uncertain, for a moment, who J.T. actually was, and by the time he realized and began to stand, it was too late. J.T. swung, and in one smooth, well-timed movement, smashed his fist into Bart’s face. Bart sagged at the knees, and went down.
Sara pushed herself through the ring of spectators. Bart lay on his back, groaning. His hand covered his bleeding nose, and he held his fingers up toward the glowing porch light as if surprised by the sight of his own blood.
“Get out, get out,” Mel shouted at J.T.
Out in the street, a broken-down truck passed slowly, its muffler rattling.
J.T. leaned above Bart, breathing heavily. “You had that coming,” he said, and then, rising, allowed Sara to take his arm and lead him away.
They stopped by J.T.’s house to pick up a bottle of tequila and then they drove to Edwards Point. Sara clutched the passenger door of the 1974 Mercury Marquis and tried not to give way to hysteria as the big car roared and bumped its way steadily up the rutted dirt road to the top of the point. J.T. had been drinking steadily, and as they reached the top, he laid on the horn and howled like a madman. Sara, embarrassed, turned her head and tried to ignore him. She had never been to the top of the point. A long, narrow valley lay below them, sprinkled with the lights of Decaturville and Lebanon Cove. A thin sliver of moon, draped in silvery clouds, hung from the sooty sky.
J.T. turned off the engine but left the radio on. “Are you cold?” he asked.
“No,” Sara lied. She had left the house without a jacket, wearing only her overalls and a turtleneck sweater.
“Here.” J.T. shrugged out of his coat and gave it to her.
“How will you keep warm?” she asked, taking it from him.
He lifted the bottle. “Tequila,” he said, taking a long pull.
It was a bad idea, of course. All of it, drinking and driving, being in a car alone with him on a moonlit ridge. It all spelled disaster; but from the moment J.T. walked into the Howl at the Moon party, Sara hadn’t been able to think clearly. She had led him away from the party and then she had followed docilely as he drove her recklessly to the top of Edwards Point.
He held the bottle out to her.
She took the tequila and tilted her head, grimacing at the taste. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and gave it back to him.
“There’s something different about you,” he said.
“Me?”
“Your hair.”
Oh god, the pageboy wig. She’d forgotten to take it off. She pulled it off now and shook her hair free.
“That’s better,” he said.
She ran her fingers through her long dark curls, her scalp prickling with the cold. He continued to stare at her, and to hide her embarrassment, she leaned to fiddle with the radio. “Waiting for a Girl Like You” came on. She changed the station quickly.
“That’s a good song,” he said, lifting the bottle. “Foreigner.”
They sat for a while, neither one speaking, drinking and watching the lights of the valley.
He sighed and leaned his head against the window, looking up at the stars. “Sorry about breaking up your party,” he said. The apology struck him as funny and he chuckled and took a long pull from the bottle.
“You don’t sound sorry,” Sara said.
“I am,” he said. He offered her
the bottle but she shook her head. He slumped against the seat, staring despondently up at the stars and the sliver of pale moon. The bottle of tequila rested in his lap. He hadn’t shaved in several days and his lower face was covered in shadow. With his half-beard, his plaid shirt, and his wildly glittering eyes he looked a little like madman Jack Torrance. “Sorry I didn’t pop him in the mouth last year at the drive-in when he was being such an asshole,” he said, his voice trailing off.
So she hadn’t imagined it. There had been something there, something to do with her. (Or at least she hoped it had something to do with her.) She smiled secretly, turning her head and gazing down at the glittering lights of the valley. “Yeah, well, if anyone needed a curb-stomping it was Bart. The guy’s a total douche bag.”
He offered her the bottle. Now that she was over the first taste, the tequila wasn’t so bad. And it left a warm glow in the pit of her stomach, something to be appreciated on a night like this.
“I always liked you,” he said.
“Really?” It was the tequila talking, she knew, but it pleased her anyway.
“You were always so quiet. So self-contained. But I could see you had a good heart. Anyone could see that.”
“I’m not as quiet as you think.”
“Well, you were always quiet when I was around,” he said, and she waited for him to catch the significance of this, but he didn’t. He tugged on the tequila. She looked out the window at the row of dark trees standing like a palisade against the moonlit sky. “You have a tender heart,” he said, as if realizing he might have offended her. “You’re self-contained, but in a good way. Still waters run deep and all that.”
“Oh, thank you very much.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
“But her.” He raised the bottle and motioned vaguely toward the valley below. “She has a mean streak a mile wide running through her. Look at how she acted after her brother’s death. Look how she broke up with me without a flicker of emotion, as if the last three years never even happened.”
He couldn’t understand Mel’s self-containment and yet the reality was, Mel wasn’t self-contained at all. She was only giving him what she thought he wanted. She was as readable as an open book. A postmodern novel, not a classical one. He said he loved her and yet the truth was, he’d never been able to read her at all.
“She has no heart,” he said, handing her the bottle.
“She has a heart,” she said. “She just doesn’t wear it on her sleeve.” She took a long, slow drink, then wiped her mouth and handed him the bottle. “To understand Mel, you have to understand her childhood.”
“Bullshit! We all had dysfunctional childhoods! That’s just an excuse. You shouldn’t make excuses for her.”
She wrote her initials on the frosty glass. “That’s what friends do,” she said.
They sat for a long time on the moonlit ridge, until the cold began to seep up through the soles of Sara’s feet into her bones. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she stirred and said, “Do you want me to drive?” She looked behind her at the dark, rutted road. With any luck, she’d drunk just enough to take the edge off her fear and not enough to plunge them over the steep embankment to their deaths.
He gazed at her over the rim of the bottle. “Are we leaving?” He sat slumped against the door where he’d sat for the last fifteen minutes, lost in a profound silence.
“I’m cold.”
He sat up suddenly and said, “I’m sorry, baby.” He leaned over and started the car so the heater would run. Sara stared frozenly through the windshield, still caught up by the fact that he’d called her baby. After a few minutes, he switched off the engine. “Why don’t you move over here next to me?” he said, patting the seat beside him.
She didn’t know what to say to this, so she said nothing, sitting stiffly in the passenger’s seat and staring down at the twinkling lights of the valley. He didn’t ask again. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were singing “Don’t Do Me Like That,” and he leaned over and turned the volume up.
She stared at the scattered houselights below, twinkling like diamonds against the valley floor. She pulled the collar of his jacket up around her face and his smell enveloped her, a mix of musk and wood smoke and Old Spice aftershave.
After a while he began to talk about Mel. She sat quietly, looking out at the slumbering landscape while he tried to unburden himself of his love, as if by talking about it he could shed it forever. He droned on and on and she let him talk but gradually a feeling of despair and self-loathing came over her, creeping in like the cold. She was nothing more than a witness to their tragedy and guilt. She could have been anything, a stone, a flower, a blade of grass.
He fell asleep with his head in her lap, and as the moon faded and the first faint glimmerings of morning lit the eastern sky, Sara knew she would hang on until June. She would avoid Mel as much as possible and she would not see J.T. at all. She would hang on until graduation, when she would finally be free to go out into the world and begin a life of her own, far away from this one.
After that, she didn’t care if she ever saw J.T. Radford or Mel Barclay again.
Chapter 22
WEDNESDAY
he morning after the bonfire on the beach, everyone but Lola awoke with a hangover. She got up around eleven o’clock and went into the kitchen to make a big batch of wheatgrass shakes with milk thistle. She carried the glasses around on a little silver tray to the darkened bedrooms. Sara groaned and pulled the covers over her head, Annie lay on her back snoring at the ceiling, but Mel stirred, and eventually rose and followed Lola downstairs, where she sat on the sofa staring wearily at the sunlit beach. From time to time, she lifted her glass and sipped, grimacing.
“Jesus, this is vile,” she said.
“Of course it is,” Lola said brightly. “It’s good for you.” She sat cross-legged at the other end of the sofa in her pink satin pajamas, looking very much like a princess.
“How do you do it?” Mel said, squinting at her. Her eyes hurt. Each time she moved them she felt a piercing pain in her temples. “How do you spend a night abusing Margaronas and then look so fresh and lovely the next morning?”
Lola lifted her glass. She shrugged. “Wheatgrass and milk thistle,” she said simply.
Sara came downstairs a few minutes later with a bulky blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her tangled hair rose over her forehead like a feathered crest, and there were crease marks on her face where she’d slept hard.
Looking at her, Mel laughed. “Good morning, Sunshine,” she said.
“Fuck off, Mel.” She plopped down on the sofa, pulling her legs up and crossing them under the blanket. “I blame you,” she said morosely. “You and your damn Margaronas.”
Lola frowned like a schoolteacher and asked, “Where’s your milk thistle shake?”
“I threw it up in the toilet, along with everything else in my stomach.”
They sat for a few minutes, staring out at the sunlit sea. A lone jogger passed by slowly. Farther down the beach, a line of brightly colored umbrellas sprouted from the sand like poppies.
“We should go to the beach today,” Mel said suddenly, as if the thought had just occurred to her.
“We should!” Lola agreed gaily.
Sara groaned and put her head back. She had forgotten how hard it was to keep up with Mel. She was not as young as she used to be. She was older but perhaps less wiser, more rigid in body and spirit. Life and disappointment had done that to her.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Mel said, “I threw up, too.”
“Really?”
“No, not really. I have an ironclad stomach.”
Sara pulled her blanket more tightly around her shoulders. “And an ironclad liver to match,” she said sullenly.
Annie joined them an hour later, her white hair standing up on one side of her head like a gull’s wing. She slumped down into an overstuffed chair, stretching her legs out along an otto
man. Her slippers were pale and puffy, and made her legs look like toothpicks stuck in a pair of marshmallows.
“You know, you snore like a freight train,” Mel said to her.
Annie turned her head and stared at her with red-rimmed eyes. “Look who’s talking,” she said grimly.
“As God is my witness,” Sara said, holding up one hand, “I’ll never drink Margaronas again.”
“Oh, now, Scarlett, don’t go turning this into a challenge,” Mel said.
“I’ll never drink anything again,” Annie agreed sullenly. “At least not on this trip. I’m giving my liver a break.”
“We’ve heard that before.”
“This time I mean it.”
“Milk thistle is good for your liver,” Lola said, sipping her shake.
Annie gave Lola a weary look.
“Y’all are just a bunch of pansies,” Mel said, swiveling her head back and forth so that her eyes rolled and wobbled in their sockets like runaway marbles. She was determined to put on a brave front. “The Margaronas weren’t that bad.”
“Oh, yeah?” Sara said, eyeing her morosely. “Well, just so you know, I think I might have had an out-of-body experience.”
Lola stared dreamily out at the horizon. Her eyes were soft and blue. “Don’t you just love the astral plane?” she said to no one in particular.
Beyond the tall windows, rolling dunes glittered in the sunlight. Great waves of spartina grass swayed and flattened with the wind. Annie roused herself, staring out at the sea. “The Shuar tribes in Ecuador use mind-altering native plants to induce religious intoxication.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Mel said. “Margaronas are like a milder form of LSD. We haven’t been getting wasted; we’ve been expanding our consciousness.”
Sara made a derogatory sound. “The only thing expanding on this trip is my waistline,” she said. She got up and went into the kitchen to make another pot of coffee. When it was ready, she poured herself a cup and leaned across the breakfast bar, sipping gingerly. “Where’s April?”