Gettin’ Merry

by CATHY L. CLAMP; FRANCIS RAY; BEVERLY JENKINS; MONICA JACKSON; GERI GUILLAUME

  “Hey, hey, enough of that kind of talk,” I said. “There are still impressionable young minds within listening distance.”

  “Where do you think I got the information from about preventing a fifth kid?” Jolene raised an eyebrow at me.

  Kirby and I swung by my office to pick up her coat. She was talking, a steady stream of plans for the next couple of weeks for the students. I listened intently—as pleased as I was at the sound of her voice as I was by the fact that it sounded like she intended to stay.

  But by the time we made it out to her car, something was bothering me. She was talking too much. That wasn’t like Kirby. I have a student who talks incessantly when she wants to avoid saying what’s really on her mind. Something was bothering Kirby, too. And she didn’t want to say it.

  We stopped beside her car, her hands nervously fumbling with her keys.

  “Something you want to tell me, Kirby?” I asked, trying to keep my tone as light, as conversational, as hers had been.

  “No. . . .” She quickly shook her head. Then, “Yes. Yes, I do. We need to talk.”

  “We have been talking. Correction. You’ve been talking.”

  “But I haven’t been saying what I need to say.”

  My hand clenched around the engagement ring. Do it! Do it now! The voice in my head yelled at me to plunge ahead. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Something serious was on her mind. Maybe something I didn’t want to hear. I wasn’t going to make it harder on her.

  “What do you want to tell me, Kirby?” I asked softly.

  “I’ve . . . uh . . . been doing . . . I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Bear,” she said haltingly. Chewing on her lower lip, Kirby was barely able to meet my gaze.

  “Intellectuals are known to do that,” I agreed. A weak attempt at a joke. I could imagine that didn’t even rate on Norah Gilbert’s mouth quirk meter.

  “We’ve both been very busy with our careers.” Her voice was flat, mechanical, as if she were half-heartedly reciting a speech that she’d prepared.

  “Some busier than others,” I replied. “You should be very proud of yourself.” I placed my index finger under her chin, lifted her face.

  “I am proud,” she said, a glimmer of the former life in her tone. She folded her arms across her chest. Warding off a chill or body language to push me away? “But I’m also very ashamed. Ashamed of what I’ve done to you.”

  “To me? What . . . what have you done?”

  “I haven’t been fair to you, Bear. I’ve been true to you, so if it’s infidelity that you’re worried about, you don’t have to.”

  “Never crossed my mind,” I said quickly.

  “Sweet. But you’re a terrible liar. I’m ashamed because I’ve kept you here, hanging on a string while I went off to pursue my parents’ dream. They were educators, too. Missionaries. I didn’t understand at the time how they could have left me so many times. Now, I think I do. As hard as it is to leave you each time, it’s my dream now, Bear. It’s what I want to do. I didn’t realize how much I wanted to go until I was out there. I always thought that I would grow up, raise a passel of kids, and die here in Calhoun County.”

  “But that’s not what you want?”

  “Please don’t misunderstand me, Paul Barrett. I love you. Have always loved you, even when we were kids. But something’s calling me. I have to answer to that higher calling.”

  I took a deep breath, leaned against her car, regarding her for a few minutes before continuing. “So, why did you come back? Why are you here now?”

  “Because you needed me.” She shrugged. I wasn’t convinced.

  “To say good-bye one last time.” This time, I let the bitterness slip into my voice.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “So when are you leaving?” My voice was growing harder by the moment. I had to. I had to prepare myself that this time it could be for good.

  “I told you. After the New Year. I hope that we can squash this problem in your school by then. If not, won’t your regular counselor be back?”

  I nodded. The lump in my throat competed with the knot of pain in my heart—throbbed and grew to an unbearable size. She placed her hand against my cheek. I steeled myself against its softness, the emotions she thought she was soothing. Instead, she sent them into turmoil. Kirby rose on her tiptoes, planted a kiss on my cheek.

  I silently pleaded, Please don’t say we could always be friends. After all we’d been to each other, I didn’t want to go back to just being friends.

  “See you early Monday morning.”

  I’d known her for about twenty-eight years. Ever since the third grade. You’d think that in all that time a person would change—even only just a little bit. Not Kirby. She’d remained exactly the same. I should know. I tried my hardest to find something about her that time had altered. I stared long and hard into her face. I didn’t want to. Couldn’t help staring. I couldn’t help reaching out to touch her, either. My tentative fingertips traced the curve of her full lips and the sweep of her finely arched eyebrows and over thick sandy-colored lashes. My thumbs slid down the bridge of her nose.

  As always, she slipped out of my grasp. I couldn’t hold on to her. Not the way I wanted to. The elusiveness of her image reminded me why she hadn’t changed. She hadn’t changed because that’s how I’d capture her forever in my memory. If I couldn’t have her in the flesh, at least I could hold on to her in photographs.

  As I sat in the middle of my floor on a Saturday night, with scattered memorabilia all around me, I held a photo of Kirby loosely in my hands. I held the picture carefully—half-expecting the twenty-year-old photo to crumble like my resolve not to feel the pain of time’s passing.

  I dragged a shoe box closer to me and dumped out its contents. A periwinkle hair ribbon, some ticket stubs from a homecoming game, and a near-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. There was barely a swallow left in the dusty bottle. Jolene, Kirby, and I had guzzled most of it down. Too young to be drinking. Seventeen. Eighteen. We’d suffer for our foolishness the next day. But we weren’t thinking about that then. We’d all drunk from the same bottle to celebrate. Celebrate what exactly I’m not quite sure of. A football win? A birthday? The fact that soon we would be graduating and leaving this Podunk town behind?

  It didn’t really matter what we were celebrating. We were all together, at the height of our youth and glory. And that was cause for celebration enough. I’d kept the bottle—vowing as only a starry-eyed seventeen-year-old could that I’d hang on to the last drops. In essence, hanging on to my youth.

  If I wasn’t mistaken, Kirby was the last one to drink from it.

  “Welcome home, darlin’,” I murmured, then unscrewed the cap and polished off the last of the Jack Daniel’s. The resulting slow-acting burn as it washed over my tongue and slid down my throat wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d remembered. But then again, I couldn’t trust my feelings. Couldn’t trust my memories.

  “If your papa catches you with that, he’s going to beat you until you can’t grow anymore.” I thought I’d heard Kirby’s voice clear as day warning me as she did back then.

  Papa. She was the only one who ever said “papa.” We all said “daddy” or “dad” or “pops.” She always was different. I knew that from the moment I first laid eyes on her when she walked into my class in the third grade. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Mulholland, had guided Kirby to the front of the room and made her tell about herself. But even before she started talking about herself, I knew that there was something about her.

  She was different—from her mop of cinnamon-colored ringlets ineffectively held back by a black velvet headband down to her orange patent-leather Mary Janes. She had to be different. It wasn’t an affectation. It wasn’t forced. It was just the way she was.

  “Hell, he can’t hurt me. I’m a grown man,” I bragged. Seventeen years old, six-foot-three, and 250 pounds of solid swagger. That was me. Fresh off of a football win, I was riding high on my glory that night. For the l
ook Kirby gave me, so full of sweet sentimentality, I would have faced an entire legion of angry fathers.

  “That ain’t nuthin’ but pure booze talkin’,” Jolene insisted, deflating my ego. “You’d better get rid of that bottle before Mr. Barrett shows up here with his leather strap.”

  Jolene made a thwacking sound, the sound of leather against bare skin, and a mock cry of pain afterward. “Toby! Kunta Kinte! Toby! Kunta Kinte!”

  The name that I called her in response was just as ugly as the idea of a whipping.

  Kirby collapsed beside the driver’s-side tire, holding her sides and giggling so hard that she could hardly catch her breath. Her caramel-colored skin pinked. The light spray of freckles across her nose stood out boldly. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her face. I must have counted every freckle.

  Kirby hardly ever laughed out loud. Not since her parents were killed in a plane crash while on a missionary trip just before her eleventh birthday. She was so serious all of the time after that. When she did laugh, her entire face lit up. And that night, tears squeezed from her eyes as if they leaped at the chance to be free after being trapped for so long behind her facade of bravado.

  “Want the last hit?” I asked, shaking the bottle at Kirby, making the amber liquid glint under the stadium lights.

  “Where’s . . . where’s my cup, Bear?” Kirby fumbled for her paper cup.

  At first, she wouldn’t drink from the bottle. Always so prim and proper. If she was going to sneak a drink, she was going to do it with class. She tried to make Jolene and me drink from that cup, too—telling us that drinking from the same cup was ritualistic, symbolic of our unity.

  I wouldn’t do it. Not the way they left lipstick stains all over the cup. At first, I wouldn’t drink from the cup. But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t fascinated by what Kirby was doing with it.

  “Kikomba cha umoja.” Kirby had held the cup out in front of her in both hands and whispered the words softly, solemnly.

  “What in the world does that mean?” Jolene asked, scrunching up her face.

  “Never mind her, Jolie. The preacher’s kid is just speaking in tongues,” I taunted Kirby.

  “You don’t know what that means, either, do you?” She looked at me with one eyebrow raised. Maddeningly superior. “Your education is sadly lacking, Paul Barrett.” She sounded like her grandfather just then. But Kirby couldn’t help it. Old people had raised her. Made her old before her time.

  “You go to the same high school as I do,” I reminded her. “If I’m dumb as a post, then you’re the next post over.”

  “It’s derived from Swahili,” Kirby told me. “One of the tongues of our motherland. One of these days, I’m going to go back there.”

  “What motherland?” Jolene demanded. “You come from the good old US of A just like we do.” She pointed at the ground, stomping on the green football turf.

  “But your folks are Irish,” Kirby continued, tugging at Jolene’s red hair. “Don’t you celebrate Saint Patty’s Day?”

  “I wear green. But I wouldn’t call that celebrating.”

  “Anyway,” Kirby said with a long-suffering sigh. “It means something like unity. I was trying to show you two how much I appreciate your friendship. You’ve been like family to me.” She pinned us both with a teary-eyed stare. “I never had brothers or sisters. Barely know the cousins I have. And I don’t think I could have made it through this insane asylum called high school without you. So, I was offering to make you a literal part of my family. All you have to do is drink from the unity cup.”

  “It makes more sense than pouring out perfectly good liquor on the ground,” Jolene had insisted.

  When I’d first uncapped the bottle and offered my libation to the players’ field, Jolene looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. She’d reached out, grasped my wrist, and pulled it back.

  “Have you gone like totally insane, Bear? What do you think you’re doing wasting perfectly good liquor like that?” She knew what flaming hoops we’d had to jump through to get that bottle. Kirby had kept my mom occupied with some sort of debate about whether Paul or John the Baptist was the better biblical figure after Jesus. Jolene had asked my pops to show her his work-in-progress truck kit while I ransacked the liquor cabinet. With all of that carefully coordinated effort, it didn’t make sense to spill a single precious drop of it. But I had. Poured a considerable amount on the ground.

  Kirby and I looked at each other and said in unison, “This is for the brothers who ain’t here.”

  “Don’t tell me.” Jolene put her hands on her hips, jutted to one side, “It’s a black thang.”

  She absolutely hated it when Kirby and I knew things that she didn’t. And we tried our best not to exclude her. I didn’t know why she was so jealous anyway. She and Kirby had a connection, a bond, that I could not share. Even to this day.

  “It’s a Cooley High thing,” Kirby corrected.

  “We all go to Calhoun High School,” Jolene insisted. “Girl, you must be drunk. You don’t even know where you are.”

  “Not as drunk as you are. I’m talking about a movie, Jolie. Sit down before you fall down.” Kirby reached up and yanked on Jolene’s pleated red-and-white cheerleader’s skirt. Down she went, facedown in the grass in the opposing team’s end zone. That’s where I’d parked my truck long after the game had ended and the last of the spectators had emptied the stands.

  Originally, I’d planned to back my truck over the goalpost, to knock it down to show the other side that they couldn’t come on our home turf and mess with us. But Kirby talked me out of it. This close to graduation, we didn’t want to do anything to screw up our chances of walking with the rest of our class. Nothing would make my pops prouder. He’d only gotten an eighth-grade education himself. So we wound up parked in the end zone instead, looking for other ways to let off steam.

  “I dunno where that cup is.” I looked around, too, then pointed to a small white piece of paper sticking out from under Kirby’s left thigh. “There it is.”

  I’d reached for it, but she’d slapped my hands away.

  “Don’t you try to sneak a feel on me, Bear Barrett!” she chastised.

  “In your dreams!” The words flew out of my mouth, but if I’d been more honest, I would have told her that touching her was the desire of my dreams—and of the dreams of every boy in Calhoun County.

  Kirby and I were friends. Just good friends. I guess that’s why she felt comfortable enough to be there that night. She knew that I wouldn’t try anything to take advantage of her. But sometimes I hated the sound of those words “just friends.” There was nothing just about the relationship. Nothing fair about it all. She had all of the advantage. Kirby had known all of the ways to get to me, to get under my skin to make me squirm.

  I unscrewed the cap and wiped my sleeve across it. “Good enough for you?”

  “No. It certainly is not good enough.” She’d looked down her nose at the bottle. “What about your backwash?”

  “What backwash? There’s no backwash.” I was sure that I meant to sound offended. Indignant. But it might not have come out that way. My words were probably as slow and slurred as my memory of that night. I had drunk too much. And so had Jolene.

  What were we thinking back then? I was the only one who could drive my truck. No one else could handle the standard shift behemoth we affectionately called the Tank. When the curiosity of the stadium after hours faded, what were we expecting to do? How were we going to get home? Hindsight is twenty-twenty.

  “Let me see that.” She’d held out her hand, so I laid the bottle in her palm. Kirby held the bottle up to the light, inspecting it carefully, turning it this way and that.

  “What do you expect to see in there? Your future?” I sneered.

  “Pepperoni,” she said, and then giggled as if the sound of her own voice tickled her. “Isn’t that what you scarfed down after the game, Bear? About six slices? Or was that six pizzas?”

  “You’re so full of it
, Kirby. You’ve had enough. Give me that bottle back.” Normally, I could stand Kirby’s teasing. I usually retaliated by teasing her about being a showoff, know-it-all, holier-than-thou preacher’s kid. But not that night.

  “Nuh-uh. You gave it to me. No fair asking for it back.”

  She jumped up and started to walk backward, holding the bottle behind her. “You want it? Come and get it.”

  I must have chased her ten yards and back, only half-heartedly lunging at her. I could have caught her at any time. Any time. But the near misses, my swipes at thin air, were just like Kirby and me. So close and yet so far. Always running after something we knew that we wanted, but never quite bringing ourselves to take the extra effort.

  There was something elusive about Kirby. As if she didn’t want anyone getting too close. Even if I had managed to catch her while she darted away from me, I still don’t believe I would have held the true Kirby. That part of herself that I couldn’t fathom she held in secret. Kirby was full of secrets. Always had been. Maybe that’s what drew me to her. I was naturally curious. Knowing that she was a puzzle that I couldn’t figure out made me want to try more.

  “You go on and take the last of it,” I said as if I were in control of the situation. I was really just tired of running. Huffing, I sank down next to the truck. The passenger-side door supported my back.

  Kirby adjusted her denim skirt as she sat next to me. She swirled the contents one last time, making the silver and imitation ivory bracelets on her wrist jangle as she tilted the bottle to her lips. She could only stand a sip or two before the liquor got to her.

  “Whooo!” Kirby blew out a long breath. Fanning her face, she stuck out her tongue to cool the burn, then touched her tongue to the corner of her mouth to swipe away a few remaining drops.

  “It burns going down,” she’d whispered, tracing the hollow of her throat with her index finger. “I can feel it all the way here. And here. And here.”

  Mesmerized, my eyes were glued to her slender finger as she drew a line from her throat and then down the front of her spandex tank top, ending at her navel. Her hand splayed across her stomach, massing in slow, hypnotic circles just under the hem of her shirt.