by Nancy N. Rue
“One what?” I said.
“Wave,” he said. “Not this one.”
The water swelled, and Lou grabbed my arm so that we both floated up and came down in the same place. Our clothes were soaked by then.
“Okay–this is a good one,” he said. “When I tell you, swim for shore like a mad dog. You can swim, right?”
“Yeah–”
“Okay–now! Swim! Go!”
It was either do what he said or drown. I pointed myself at the shore and dug in with my arms and kicked like that mad dog he was talking about.
“Pull–pull–pull!” I could hear him yelling right behind me. “Okay, now–let go and ride it in!”
I stopped swimming and prayed I wasn’t going to my death. The wave caught up to me and lifted me up–until I was on top of it, shooting toward the beach. When it started to drop, Lou yelled, “Keep going! You’re doing it!”
I let myself fly until I was completely out of the water, on my stomach in the sand. I dropped my head and giggled from way down somewhere in the hollow of myself. When I lifted my face, there was a small potbellied bird, just a few feet away, looking at me.
“Cut me some slack,” I said. “I never did this before.”
I heard Lou whooping behind me, and then he slid onto the sand and laughed at the bird as it freaked out and skittered away.
“I talk to them too,” he said. “They’re plovers. A little neurotic, but, then, we all have our issues.”
Uh-oh. I started to get up.
“Sit down,” he said.
Unlike Weezie before me, I went with it on the first command–partly because I was too out of breath to run. Lou spread his hands out on the sand, which I could have predicted he was going to do.
“So what pushed your buttons was Weezie saying she thought you had ADHD–or you were on drugs.” His lips twitched. “Like she knows that much about either one. But that set you off–we agree on that?”
“That I got upset?” I said. “Yeah.”
“Is it something you’re ashamed of?”
“Then you believe her. She’s, what, ten?”
“Jess.” Lou tilted his head. “I didn’t need Weezie to tell me. I already knew.”
I felt my eyes narrow. “My mom told you.”
“Nobody told me. It’s just there. Nobody had to tell me you have blue eyes, either.”
“So you’re saying I act like a crazy person!”
“No, you act like a person who’d climb right out of her skin if she could.” He kind of smiled. “I know the feeling.”
“You have it?” I said. “I got it from you? Gee, thanks for that, ‘Dad.’”
Lou patted the sand I was rising from, and I sat back down. But I wouldn’t look at him. I dug a hole with my fingers.
“No, I don’t have ADHD,” he said. “I have other demons, trust me, worse than yours.”
I jerked my head up from the hole. “Did you say demons?”
“It’s just a figure of speech. It means I have things to deal with too, so I know how hard it is. And I think I can help you.”
I smothered the hole with my hand. I so did not want to hear him tell me that if I just concentrated and tried harder, I could be like any normal human being. I’d heard it all before. The hair on the back of my neck went up and stayed there. I reserved the right to bolt if he kept this up, out of breath or not.
“I have to ask you some questions,” he said. “I’m not interrogating you–I just need information so we know where we need to go from here.”
I could tell him where I needed to go. Him too, for that matter.
“Have you been officially diagnosed by a doctor?”
“Yes.” I gave an explosive sigh. “Several times.”
“Are you on medication?”
“Yes. No.”
The eyebrow went up. “Which is it?”
“I’m supposed to be taking it. I flushed it all down the toilet before we left Birmingham.”
As usual, he just nodded. “And you did that because…”
“I wanted to drive you crazy.”
He laughed. He actually laughed. “That’s not a drive, Jess, that’s a putt.”
“Huh?”
“I’m already pretty crazy. It would take more than you crashing a scooter into a wall to send me over the edge. Unless you’d been hurt. That might do it.” He immediately stuck up his hand. “And don’t start thinking you’re going to break a leg or something so I’ll put you on a plane back to Alabama, because it isn’t happening.”
I was really starting to hate him.
“Look, Jess, I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck. I don’t know you the way I’d like to, but don’t you think I can see that you don’t want to be here with some strange guy who shows up after fifteen years and tells you he’s your father? I don’t blame you. And you’re worried about your mother. Plus you didn’t want me to find out your secret. Now you have a smart-mouth little sister who’s jealous of you–”
There was so much in that that I wanted to scream at, but since I only had one mouth, I went for, “She is SO not jealous of me.”
“I do know Weezie. She’s having a hissy because you’re here with me all the time. That’s why she turned into a sea witch with you.”
I felt my eyes squinting in that way that made my mother say I was pulling attitude. “So, do you, like, know everything?” I said.
“Not even close. All I know is that I want to help you.” He squinted out over the water. I saw him swallow that Ping-Pong ball he seemed to have in his throat at moments like this. “I’ve been praying about it, and I think I know what to do. But for today–” His eyes came back to me. “What do you say we spend some time together?”
I would rather have been shot. I shrugged my shoulders all the way up to my earlobes and squinted until I could hardly see. But it was like he was wearing some kind of emotional armor.
“How about a ride?” he said. He nodded toward the motorcycle.
Great. Now he was learning my weaknesses and playing on them. And I thought I hated him before. I started to shake my head. And then he said–
“We could do the beach before it starts getting crowded.”
Aw, man. How totally delicious would that be–if it wasn’t with him. Although, who else was it going to be with at this point? I pretended to be gazing at the horizon.
“Don’t I have to have a jacket and pants and all that?” I said.
“Got it. And your helmet.”
I let my lip curl. “Okay, so, no offense, but I’m not wearing Weezie’s helmet. She’d have a meltdown if she found out.”
It was the first time I saw Lou look confused. “Why would you wear Weezie’s helmet?”
“I wore it the other day.”
“No you didn’t. That was yours.” He got the Ping-Pong ball going again. “I bought that before I went to Birmingham. I just hoped you’d come here and wear it someday.”
He got up and went toward Levi. I told myself I didn’t have any choice but to follow, and I kicked at the sand as I went, just for the sake of ‘tude. One ride didn’t mean I was taking his “help.” It just meant that if I didn’t do something–anything– I was going to go as crazy as my mother.
CHAPTER TEN
I had hardly ever used the word perfect to describe anything about myself or my life. But that day that I spent riding on Levi the Harley with Lou, it came into my head a dozen times. Maybe more.
Going down the beach–the beach, not just the road beside the beach–and smelling the salty-fishy-seaweedy mixture that didn’t exist anywhere else I had ever been: that qualified as perfect.
Sitting in the F. A. Café at a table shaped like a fish, peeling steamed shrimp and eating them and being assured by Lou that I was doing it right because there was no way to do it wrong: that was also perfect.
And parking Levi on a low bridge that had the Atlantic Ocean on one side and what Lou told me was the Intracoastal Waterway on the other so we could watch
the sun set and hear the gulls cry to see it go: that might have been the most perfect thing of all.
I could hardly admit to myself that he was okay to be with. I still got my hackles up every time I caught him looking at me like he was about to tell me how he was going to help me, change me, turn me into a smart little daughter like Weezie. But hours went by and he didn’t say another word about it. And so the word perfect could stay in my head.
I crashed on the couch while Lou was cleaning the barbecue after our grilled salmon supper, and I didn’t wake up until Sunday morning when he pulled up the shade on the sliding glass door. That was not perfect.
“I let you sleep as long as I could,” he said as he set a glass of orange juice next to me on the coffee table.
“We’re going to work today?” I said. “Isn’t it Sunday?”
“Yes, it’s Sunday, and no, we’re not going to work. We’re going to church.”
I peered into the juice. There were seeds and pulpy things floating in it like he’d squeezed it out of the orange himself. I was pretty sure I’d never had it that way.
“I didn’t bring any church clothes,” I said, neck hairs fully extended again.
“What are church clothes?” he said.
“I had to wear dresses and matching socks when I used to go,” I said. It had been so long since then, I’d probably worn hair bows too.
Lou grinned. “I’m having a hard time imagining that. And I don’t think you’d want to wear a dress on a Harley anyway.”
“We’re taking Levi?”
“In thirty minutes.”
I was in capris and a top in twenty. There was no doubt that I had a boring sermon in my future, an hour of trying to sit still and not nod off and fall out of the pew. But if going meant I got to ride on the back of Levi, I was there. The rest…well, I never planned that far ahead.
When we crossed the bridge we went straight, instead of turning like we did to go to the shop, and headed into a part of St. Augustine I hadn’t been in before. The town acted as sleepy as I was, with only some gray-headed people strolling through the big park with their coffee cups, which made me want caffeine. Maybe while Lou went to the service I could spend the hour in that coffee shop on the skinny brick street we turned onto…
Fat chance. He pulled Levi into a parking space right next to a gray building with a red door and a steeple, and there was a cross on top of every part of the roof that came to a peak. The stained-glass windows were a dead giveaway: this was the place. As we went up the front walk, with Lou herding me like a sheep that was about to make a break for it, bells chimed so loud they made me jump. The whole thing couldn’t have been more old-timey. I looked longingly over my shoulder at the coffee shop and sniffed.
“Smells great, doesn’t it?” Lou said. “We’ll go over there after.”
“Do they make lattes?” I said.
He stopped on the first step and twitched his lips. “Yeah, but I think the last thing you need is espresso.”
“But I love–”
“Make it decaf and you’ve got a deal.”
It was the only thing that got me through the front door. The only thing.
I’d actually loved church when I was a kid. We got to sing songs with motions and stick flannel people and camels and donkeys on boards to tell stories and make stuff out of Popsicle sticks. It was way better than school. I even still believed in God, although I pretty much figured he’d lost my address or wasn’t speaking to me, because I couldn’t concentrate on sermons about seeds growing and Jesus coming back to tell me I wasn’t going to heaven if I didn’t shape up. But if the Richardsons–the last family that took me to church–hadn’t moved away, I might have quit going anyway, because I’d gotten too old for children’s church and had to go to the adult service and pretend like I had some clue to what the preacher was talking about. I didn’t have much hope that this, today, was going to be anything but a snooze session.
To make matters worse, it was quiet when Lou and I walked in, except for a guitar playing. Which meant any sound I made squirming around in my seat was going to bounce off the stained-glass windows and have people going, “Shh,” and giving Lou dirty looks.
That, however, wasn’t the worst of it. I’d barely slid into the pew when somebody else came in from the other end and sat next to me. Rocky.
The word perfect vanished from my vocabulary.
He leaned across me and shook hands with Lou and then smirked into my face. I could see straight through the gap between his front teeth. Wasn’t there some kind of commandment about thou shalt not go to church just to torment somebody?
“You got rid of Lou-WEE-za already?” he whispered to me. “You’re good.”
I started to tell him to shut up, but the music got louder and an organ and a violin joined in and everybody stood up. I basically forgot about Rocky because there was so much going on–singing, and then kneeling down, and then sitting to listen to people read something about fig trees, and then standing up to sing again, and finally sitting for a sermon that was preached by a guy in a white robe and sandals. If he was supposed to look like a saint, he wasn’t pulling it off. The guy was taller than Marcus and had gristly gray hair and shoulders like the dudes who came in to eat sushi. The only thing that sunk into my mind before it wandered off was him saying something about the story of the fig tree really being about the manure. I didn’t know you could talk about fertilizer in church.
I was just starting to peel off my nail polish when the sermon was done and we were singing again. If I remembered right, this should be just about over, which made it the shortest service I’d ever been to.
But then we were up again, and Lou and Rocky were both looking up at the front where Big Shoulders was standing behind a table with a pottery goblet and a round loaf of bread, like he was about to fix lunch. I was still holding out for coffee when he put his hand on the loaf and said, “On the night before he died, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread.”
He picked up the loaf and lifted it. “And when he had given thanks he broke it,” which Shoulders also did. “And gave it to his disciples saying, ‘Take, eat–’”
Whoa. So he was acting out what he was saying up there. That was kind of cool.
He went on to raise the cup, and said, “Drink this, all of you, in remembrance of me.”
I’d obviously missed something–in remembrance of who?–but it looked like other people were going to get in on the act too, because the two rows in front of us emptied out, and people went up to the front and stood in a semicircle while Shoulders gave out pieces of bread.
“Have you ever seen communion before?” Lou whispered to me.
“I don’t know what that is,” I whispered back. I glanced at Rocky, sure he was going to have something to say about that, but he was looking down into his lap.
“Just come with me and watch,” Lou whispered. “You’ll receive a blessing.”
“Okay,” I said.
I had no idea why. But I kind of wanted to be part of the acting out. It reminded me of those plays we did in Sunday school when we pretended to be animals on the ark or cows at the manger. Those were the only times my mother ever came to church–to see me in a play. And then we booked out of there before, as she put it, they could get their hooks into her. At the time, I didn’t remember any hooks. Only later did I figure out she meant they were going for her checkbook.
So I followed Lou up to the front and watched every move he made as he cupped his hands and held them up so Shoulders could put a bite-size piece of bread into them and then dipped it into the cup somebody else brought around. Big Shoulders stopped and put his hand on my head and whispered something, but I was busy looking across the circle at the other people dipping their bread. I felt like I knew them. It was deliciously strange.
That lasted until after we sang the last song. It was obviously okay to talk in a normal voice then, and Rocky said to me, “You got through the whole service without breaking anything, Crash. Mino
r miracle.”
“Shut–”
“Join us at the Galleon, Rock?” Lou said. “I’m buying.”
Rocky’s eyes glittered across my face. “I would, but I’ve got plans.”
Okay, so maybe God was rewarding me for coming to church.
“Too bad,” I said, plastering on my best killer smile.
“But I can be late. You want me to round up everybody else?”
“Sure,” Lou said. “We’ll meet you over there.”
I didn’t ask who “everybody else” was. I was afraid he was going to say it was a posse of Rocky clones. Besides, I was still getting over the fact that the kid actually had the nerve to show up at church and even act like he was praying, when he was obviously a poseur. I’d caught him with his head bowed and his eyes closed several times during the service. Didn’t you get struck by lightning for stuff like that?
I followed Lou across the street to the coffee shop–the Spanish Galleon, the sign said–where he ordered me a decaf vanilla latte with extra foam. I was sitting on a high stool under a pair of crossed swords on the wall, hoping they would fall down and stab Rocky in the heart when he walked in, when he did come through the door, followed by two other teenage guys and three girls. He actually had friends?
Then I watched with my chin hanging almost into my foam as they all shoved their way past Rocky and crowded around Lou, the girls hugging him, the guys punching at him the way boys do when they like somebody and don’t want to go so far as to say, “I love you, man.”
“I miss you, Lou!” one girl said.
“When are you coming back?” a guy said.
I could barely see Lou because most of them were taller than he was, but I heard him say, “Cut me some slack, guys. You’re killin’ me.”
“Thanks for hogging your old man.” Rocky hopped up onto the stool next to me. I considered knocking him off of it.
“I’m not hogging him,” I said. “And he’s not my old man.”
Rocky picked up my coffee cup and sniffed at it. “So he’s not your old man and he’s not your dad. What do you call him–Bio-Dad?”
I snatched the cup back and splashed foam on both our hands. Rocky laughed out loud. I might have poured the whole thing over his head if a blonde girl hadn’t poked her head out of the mob around Lou and said, “We gotta go, Rocky. We’re already late.”