Mean Season

by Heather Cochran

  So I stood my ground beside the mustard display and in a moment, Max looked up, then turned toward me, then walked the few yards between us, until he was standing up against my cart.

  “Leanne,” he said. “How are you? How’s your prisoner?”

  I told him how Joshua had started commuting to the Musket Fire set the day before. “A car came to pick him up at something like five this morning.”

  “You didn’t go with?”

  “At five in the morning?” I repeated. “Even I’m not that much of a morning person.”

  Max nodded, then looked away. “Well, anyway,” he said. He looked like a tired and fidgety version of the Max Campbell I’d stood beside, under the trees at Beau Ray’s party. Frankly, he looked like he wanted to be gone, away from me and the Winn-Dixie and Pinecob altogether—rather like Joshua looked when he had first arrived.

  “What?” I asked him, trying to get him to meet my eyes. “Are you okay? Smax?”

  “Don’t call me that,” he snapped. Then, “Sorry. I’m fine. Just busy, that’s all.”

  I looked around, down the aisles. There was no one in sight except a bored cashier chewing gum and picking at her nails. It didn’t even look like he was planning on buying the olives, so I figured it had to be me.

  “My family really appreciates you coming all the way back for the funeral,” I said.

  Max just nodded. The muzak in the Winn-Dixie suddenly seemed loud, what with so few words filling the space between us. I thought, this is that point when it’s time to give up, when both the heart and the mind turn toward home.

  “I guess I ought to be going then,” I said.

  Max said okay, but didn’t move. Since I’d said I was going, I knew it was up to me to turn away, but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t wait for the next James Bond movie before I saw him again.

  “No,” I said to him.

  “No?” he asked.

  “It’s not okay. Why are you being like this?” I asked. “I thought…” I started to say but wasn’t sure how to finish. Thought what? That a kiss from him meant everything? Was that so far-fetched?

  “Why am I being like this?” Max asked, then shook his head and said nothing more. He was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read, and I felt my face go hot.

  I knew I had to say it, had to stop being scared and just say it. What was the point, otherwise? Where were we ever going to go if I stayed where everyone expected me to stay? Dad had been killed, Vince had left, Beau Ray had died and still my heart went on beating out the days. I had to trust that that fist of muscle in my chest would keep beating, tomorrow and the next day, no matter how Max reacted.

  “I thought,” I started again. “At Beau Ray’s birthday. I thought things—I thought we were different. I thought you said you wanted to be with me. I thought I was the person you wanted to start dating.”

  “You were,” Max said.

  I felt a wave of relief even as I noticed how he’d used the past tense. At least I hadn’t been making it up. “So what happened? You left and you didn’t call. You said you were going to call and you didn’t. You’ve got to tell me.”

  “I said I’d call or stop by,” Max said, his expression still frozen.

  “So what happened?” I asked him again.

  “You kissed Joshua Reed is what happened,” Max said. His expression flashed to reveal something, frustration maybe, or bitterness, but at least it was something alive. He sounded angry, like I should have known this all along. I felt sort of side-swiped.

  “How?” I began, but what he’d said was true, so how didn’t really matter. Maybe my father had been right about secrets. What good had it done me to hold my cards close? “You’re right,” I told him. “I did. I kissed Joshua Reed.”

  “I saw you,” Max said. “All that stuff you said about how there’s nothing going on and how much you’re into me. Then I come by to see you and the two of you are on the couch,” he said. “I mean, look at me and look at him. How am I supposed to compete with that? How could anyone?”

  “There’s nothing to compete with,” I said. I thought of Joshua, of the kiss on the couch that Max had seen, and the time in the bathroom that remained only our own. Joshua was beautiful to behold and to hold. But he wasn’t Max, and he couldn’t become Max, as talented an actor as he was.

  “Yeah, right,” Max said. He shook his head.

  “You left,” I pointed out. “You went to California.”

  “Temporarily,” he said. “I came back.”

  “Not for me,” I said.

  He closed his eyes. “I would have, if I’d thought—” he said. “Jesus, Leanne, I told you—”

  “And then there’s Charlene,” I said.

  “I’m not with Charlene! That’s over.”

  Maybe I could trust him about Charlene, but not about the rest of that California sort of life. I’d seen the way Joshua lived. I’d heard the stories.

  “You’re going to have girls taking their shirts off on your lawn. You’ll be going out with models. I’d just be some girl who never left Pinecob,” I told him.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “I mean, some of that sounds good, but you don’t know the part about people being nice for no reason I can figure, people acting like they know me when they don’t. Hey,” he said, and waited until I met his eyes. “Before this summer, I didn’t leave Pinecob either. I thought that was something we had in common. I liked that we had it in common.”

  He shoved the olives back onto the shelf and leaned against the row of cans and jars and squeeze bottles. He shook his head, then looked at me again, like he was willing himself not to be angry.

  “You want to tell me what the real deal is with you and Josh?”

  I studied him hard, wondering whether there was enough of an opening, in time or space or fate or luck, for both of us to slip through.

  “There’s nothing. There’s no deal,” I told him.

  “Yeah, right,” Max said. “At the birthday party, I believed that. And then I saw you—”

  “Listen, everything I told you at the party was true. Every word of it and a lot more, besides,” I said.

  Max frowned, not like he didn’t believe me, but rather like he’d heard something he hadn’t expected to hear. He looked like he was about to say something, but I wasn’t finished. All I’d long held close was biting at my hands to get loose.

  “And meanwhile, no one asked me to date him exclusively,” I told Max. “Including you. Far as I can tell, I’m not dating anyone. Not you, not Joshua Reed, not Lionel, not anyone. And did you ever actually ask me? Did you say anything?”

  Max looked a little scared then, like he was surprised I could bark like that. But I didn’t care any longer. If he didn’t like what he heard or saw, he could walk away. He’d done it before.

  I rambled on, my voice rising. “I’m so sick of making it easy for every damn person I know, picking up after everyone and doing the shopping and organizing. How about someone making it easy for me? How about someone saying, ‘Leanne, I don’t want you kissing any other guys because I want you next to me.’ Not one guy has ever come up to me and said that! And I know it, because if someone I liked ever said that, I’d remember. I’d say, ‘damn straight, now we’re getting somewhere!’”

  This is when Max took my hand. He took it, even before I held it out to him. I didn’t realize how loud my voice had gone until I heard Max speak, quiet and calm. He said my name and he didn’t sound fidgety at all.

  “Leanne Gitlin,” he said, softer than he had in a while.

  “What?” I asked him. I thought maybe he was going to tell me to simmer down or go home. But he didn’t.

  “I don’t want you kissing any other guys.” I looked down at his hand, holding my hand. I looked up at his face, at the crazy half earlobe and those denim eyes, looking back at me. “I want you next to me.”

  “See, now that makes things different,” I said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

>   Epilogue

  Day ninety came right after the week they filmed the love scene between Josiah and Elizabeth, where they’re frolicking by the stream, and things get steamy. If you look close, right at the end of the scene, you can catch a glimpse of Joshua’s house-arrest sensor, a gray plastic thing that looks out of place in 1863 Virginia. Right before they walk off into the woods. But you have to look close for it, and to know what it is you’re looking for.

  Joshua wasn’t shooting on day ninety—Lars had arranged a free day for him. First a car came to take all his stuff from our house, and then the police arrived to escort him back to the courthouse where Judge Weintraub had to declare that he’d served his sentence and tell him something about probation and something else about his license still being suspended. They took the sensor off, and Joshua just nodded, glancing repeatedly at his ankle like he didn’t quite believe it was gone.

  “Usually this is where I’d say that I don’t want to see you back here,” Judge Weintraub said.

  I was standing by the door, listening. Mr. Bellevue and I had come over from the county clerk’s office to watch it all happen.

  “But I hope you’ll understand the sentiment if I say that you’re welcome back in these parts at any time,” the judge said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Joshua said.

  The judge nodded, and then he came out from behind his bench and gave Joshua a hug. It made me want to cry, really, when Judge Weintraub told Joshua that he had family in Jefferson County. And I think I saw Joshua choke up a little, too. Then Lars pointed to me, standing there by the door, and Joshua came over. Mr. Bellevue politely excused himself.

  Joshua smiled at me and ran his fingers through my hair. “It’s a great cut,” he said. “Very Left Bank.”

  “We have your address, right? If you forgot anything…I can mail it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “But I’ll be down at the shoot for the next month. You should stop by if you change your mind about being an extra. I told the judge to convince you to give it a try. Or you could just hang out in my trailer.”

  “You’ll have enough distractions,” I said. “Besides, I’ve got a lot of stuff to get done in the next couple weeks. I don’t want to be a bother.”

  “You can’t bother me anymore. It’s only the other way around.” He smiled. He was still the most beautiful man I’d seen up close like that. “You know, I brought a lot of crap with me this summer. I know that.” He held up his hand because I was starting to interrupt him. “And you just…I don’t think it was a fair trade.”

  It was true and not true. Without Joshua’s crap, I doubt that Momma would have met up with Judge Weintraub. And who’s to say if Vince would have been spurred to come back, if he hadn’t seen me on that Hollywood Express exclusive, up-ending a pyramid of apples? And maybe it did take a nudge, a bump in the guise of Joshua Reed, incarcerated movie star, to get Max to move from the shadows into my life. You can’t know things like that.

  I think about those twists of fate, the strange run-ins that can alter everything in the blink of an eye, or the shift of a single season. I think about Sandy and Alice, living up in New York, who might never have met if Sandy’s brother’s boss had given him vacation time. I am certain that if Momma hadn’t found her Pat Boone picture, I wouldn’t ever have written to Judy for a photo of Joshua Reed. And if I keep tracing back, I know that Momma wouldn’t have been sorting through that box if Dad hadn’t died. So good does come from bad.

  I think about Beau Ray, of course, because bad can come from good, too. It doesn’t really matter whether you think there’s a reason for the events that hit your life or no reason at all. They still happen.

  But on that day in the courthouse, saying goodbye to Joshua, I didn’t know the half of what was coming, no more than I had known the day of Beau Ray’s football picture. It seems a well-walked path now that Lionel would marry Lisa, that Jackie Reed would come back to Joshua and that I would finally get my law degree. But the only thing clear back then was that the ninety days were over. Joshua had done his time, and things were supposed to fade back to the way they’d been before. But of course, they could not.

  They could not, for me at least, because I knew that I was leaving Pinecob. Twenty-five years old, and I was finally leaving. Max and I, together. In two weeks time, he’d be flying back in from California, so I’d have someone to sit next to on the plane ride out. These days, when I look at Max Campbell, I still see that gangly twelve-year-old I met when I was eight. I still see the boy who ran into traffic for a dog. But now I also see a man, nearly thirty and nervous as hell to be flying, sitting beside me all the same.

  MEAN SEASON

  A Red Dress Ink novel

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-4869-4

  © 2004 by Heather Cochran.

  Author photo by Laurie Steiner-Halperin

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  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real. While the author was inspired in part by actual events, none of the characters in the book is based on an actual person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

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