Motorcycles, Sushi & One Strange Book

by Nancy N. Rue

  “Watch it now,” Lou said.

  It occurred to me that he hadn’t cranked his voice up once during this whole thing.

  “Is that acceptable to you, Jess?” he said.

  “Yeah, and like I said, she can keep the shirt.” I looked straight at her. “You can have everything.”

  I started toward the bedroom, but I stopped and turned around. “You don’t mind if I go in your room, do you?”

  “It’s over, Jess,” Lou said.

  Yeah, it is, I wanted to say. It is definitely over.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Only two things kept me from busting right through the alarm system and walking back to Birmingham that night. One was the fact that Weezie went into her little coma on the couch instead of going to bed in our room–her room. The second was that Chelsea called me back.

  “You actually have a cell phone?” she said when I answered.

  “Chels?”

  “Your mom finally gave in, huh?”

  “No. I got it from my–this guy.”

  I only felt a little bit guilty that I hadn’t told her about my father. After all, she wasn’t exactly telling me her deepest secrets either. Donovan was probably getting all of those. He probably was all of those.

  “A guy?” Chelsea said. “That sounds interesting. Where are you anyway?”

  “Florida.”

  “Oh. The guy’s your grandfather. I thought your mom was mad at him–”

  “Have you talked to Marcus?”

  “Not since he left for Canada.”

  “Canada?”

  “He didn’t tell you? Oh, I guess he couldn’t–you left town, like, all of a sudden, without explaining anything to any of your best friends. Do I sound bitter?”

  “Why is Marcus in Canada?”

  “You’re still mad at me because of Donovan. Forget about it. We broke up last night. It totally kills me to say it, but you were right about him. His teeth were, like, the least of his problems.”

  I was ready to scream. Was this how people felt when I babbled on and on and forgot what the point was?

  “Forget Donovan,” I said. “I’m over it. What about Marcus?”

  “He went on some kind of wilderness trip with his uncle. You picked a great time to decide you like him, Jessie–they don’t even have cell phone reception up there.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  That explained it, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

  “I don’t think there are any other girls on the hike if that’s what you’re worried about,” Chelsea said.

  It wasn’t. It so wasn’t. I suddenly couldn’t wait to get off the phone with her.

  “I have to ask you something,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m thinking I have a crush on Adam, but I know you kind of liked him, so I wanted to know if–”

  “Go for it.”

  “You’re mad at me again.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You know, you had your chance with him but you didn’t want to get serious with anybody. Now that I want him, you’re all funky about it.” I could just see her tossing her hair around. “That is so immature, Jessie.”

  It wasn’t her hanging up on me that stabbed me through the heart. It was that word. Immature. It came out of my mother’s mouth at least three times a day when she was in a No-Bed Phase, but my friends never said it.

  “You’re such a ditz, Jess, but we love you. You never shut up and you flirt like no other. If you were any other way we’d go, ‘Who are you and what have you done with our Jessie?’” Those things they would say. But I never thought they considered me to have “the maturity of an eight-year-old.”

  Maybe it was true. Lou sure seemed to think so. He did everything but put a chore chart on the refrigerator for me to stick gold stars to when I was a good girl. Using Rocky as my nanny actually went way beyond that.

  I put the phone back in the drawer and rolled miserably over onto my stomach, which was when I saw the RL book sticking out between the mattresses. Weezie must have pulled it from its place when she yanked her shirt out of there. Another pang went through me. Maybe that was why Lou started to believe her when she said I stole it. I’d told him I’d lifted the book at the airport, so why wouldn’t he think I’d take her shirt too?

  I shook my head at myself. Why did I even care that he doubted me, no matter what the reason was? I wasn’t a daughter to him like Weezie was. I was more like a responsibility. Something he had to take care of because nobody else could do it.

  Aw, man. I was feeling like I was going to cry again. I couldn’t be doing that every five minutes.

  I started to push RL back between the mattress and the box spring, but it wouldn’t go, so I decided I might as well open it. I was going to go out of my mind if I didn’t do something– and wandering around the house was out of the question with Weezer out there snoozing on the sofa. With my luck, she would wake up and accuse me of eating her banana.

  I propped up against the pillows and found the place that came up to meet me.

  He was standing on the shore of Lake Gennesaret–it said.

  I figured “he” was Yeshua. He seemed to be the main character in the whole story. Wouldn’t Mrs. Honeycutt be impressed that I could pick that out?

  It was a big fishing lake. There were a ton of people there waiting to hear him teach, and they were seriously crowding him.

  I couldn’t imagine myself getting that excited to hear somebody teach.

  He looked over and noticed a couple of boats tied up. The fishermen had just left them and were washing their nets.

  At least they didn’t use poles. I’d ticked off enough pole users on the beach. These guys must be professionals.

  One of them was a guy named Simon. Yeshua got in Simon’s boat and asked him to take it out a little from the shore, which he did–no questions asked. Yeshua sat in it and taught from there.

  I sat up a little straighter. Now that kind of school I could dig. Sit in the sand, work on your tan, and listen to an interesting guy. He must have been pretty interesting or there wouldn’t have been a whole crowd of people there hanging on his every word when they didn’t even have to.

  When he was done, he looked at Simon–the guy who owned the boat–and he said, “Go out where it’s deep and let your nets out. Catch some fish.” Simon said, “Look, you’re obviously an incredible teacher. You’re a master, even. But you don’t know about fishin’. We were out all night and we didn’t catch squat.” Yeshua said, “Just do it.” Simon said fine, and he did it–and his nets barely hit the water before they were loaded with fish–so many the ropes were about to break.

  Something about this was sounding familiar, like maybe I’d heard it back when I was a kid. But it dangled just out of my reach, so I went back to the page.

  Simon and his brother motioned to their partners on the beach to come help them, which was good because they filled both boats so full they could hardly get back to the shore. We are talking some serious fish here.

  Simon threw himself down at Yeshua’s feet and said, “Master, don’t even look at me–just leave!”

  Leave? That would be the last thing I would want him to do.

  “I can’t even handle being in your presence. You’re too holy. Just leave me here in my unholiness.”

  Okay. I could understand that. I would probably have said, “Listen, Yeshua, you don’t want to be around me. I’m a ditz-queen-airhead-moron.”

  I held the book away from me and looked at it from arm’s length. What was it about this thing that made me feel like I was in the story? Weird.

  I rolled over onto my belly with it and read some more as I knocked my feet together in the air.

  By then, Simon’s partners, James and John, the Zebedee brothers, were also standing there with their mouths open. It was obvious to all of them that they’d just witnessed a miracle. It got to Simon so deep he couldn’t get up off the sand.

  I could see that, al
though in that situation I would probably blurt out words that made no sense until somebody told me to shut up. Though maybe not Yeshua. He didn’t seem like the “shut up” type.

  Yeshua said to Simon, “Look, there isn’t anything for you to be afraid of. From now on, you’re going to be casting your nets for men and women.”

  Back the truck up. What did that mean?

  So Simon and his brother and James and John pulled their boats up on the beach and left it all behind–boats, nets, the whole works–and followed him.

  What about the fish?

  They didn’t need the fish now. They had Yeshua–and they had a new job.

  Huh. I hoped they were better at the new job than they were at catching fish. They pretty much stunk at that, until Yeshua got in there and made it happen.

  Too bad I didn’t have a Yeshua.

  Where that came from, I didn’t know. But it was enough to make me close the book and press my cheek against it until I fell asleep.

  We got through the weekend somehow. Saturday I slept in, and Weezie and Lou built sand castles while I took walks and chatted it up with the plovers and drew spiderwebs in the sand with a stick. That was the day I realized the whole beach was talking to me.

  It was weird. I knew that. But how could I miss what the gulls were saying when they all landed in front of me and whined, longer and louder than Weezie even?

  “I want that!” they wailed to me.

  “What?” I wailed back. “I don’t have anything!”

  They didn’t seem to care. They just kept begging. “I want. I want. I want.”

  The ocean itself, of course, kept calling to me in its splashes and swishes, to come out, and then come back in, and then out again, like it couldn’t make up its mind. I could relate.

  Even its foam had a life. It was always moving, always bubbling–and then at times it just seemed to disappear. I could relate to that too.

  But the plovers spoke to me the loudest and clearest, without even making a sound. They were hyperactive, skittering around just at the edge of the shore and always barely managing to avoid being swept away by the water.

  “Stop for a minute, why don’t you?” I said to them.

  But I knew why they didn’t. They couldn’t. And although I could relate to that most of all, I knew right that minute that I didn’t want to anymore. Not just because being hyper and over-bubbly and too-needy made me different from everybody else–but because it made me different from me.

  So while Weezie and Lou built an entire kingdom in the sand, I found a place at the base of the dunes where I knew Lou could still see me, because he would probably send out the Coast Guard if he couldn’t, and I just sat. For the longest I’d ever sat still when I didn’t have to my whole life.

  It was at least five minutes.

  “You couldn’t get rid of her this time, huh, Red?” Rocky whispered to me in church Sunday.

  I glared at the back of Weezie’s head. I’d volunteered to sleep on the couch so she could have her bedroom to herself, and I went out on the deck after supper and drew so she could be alone with Daddy and play Scrabble, my most un-favorite game on the planet–and she still wouldn’t speak to me. That wouldn’t bother me at all except that Lou kept getting quieter and quieter, which creeped me out. My mother always did that to me when she was getting ready for an In-Bed Phase.

  “You need a mocha fix,” Rocky whispered. “The Galleon, right after this.”

  I figured Lou must be paying him a lot. But the music got louder and everybody stood up to sing, so I didn’t get to say it. And then I had to concentrate on when to sit down and when to kneel down and when to stand back up–it was like doing aerobics.

  As soon as we got to the acting-out part, I totally forgot everything else. I wanted to see if Reverend Big Shoulders did the same thing he’d done the week before, and he did. This time I caught on that he was playing the part of Jesus, who I did know about from Sunday school days and “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (red and yellow, black and white, which I never did totally figure out). What I had never heard before was that when Jesus was serving the bread and the wine, he said it was his body and blood, which I thought was probably a metaphor–and wouldn’t Mrs. Honeycutt have a stroke if she found out I remembered that? What it meant to be drinking and eating something that was supposed to remind me of Jesus’ flesh and his red blood cells, I still didn’t understand. But just like last week, I almost couldn’t wait to get up front. And just like last week, I felt like we all knew each other and for a minute I belonged there.

  Actually, when I was following Lou back to the pew, somebody whispered, “Hi, Jessie.” It was one of the girls that had gone gaga over Lou in the coffee shop. I said “hi” back.

  As soon as church was over, Weezie hung on Lou’s arm like she owned it. Rocky nudged me.

  “She’s got no shame,” he said. “I’m having a mocha attack. Let’s go.”

  “I have to ask Lou,” I said.

  “I already did.”

  But I shook my head. I wasn’t taking any chances.

  I tapped Lou on the shoulder and got the hairy eyeball from Weezie.

  “Relax,” I said. “I just need to ask him something.”

  “What’s up, Jess?” Lou said.

  “Is it okay if I go over to the coffee shop with Rocky?”

  “Absolutely–”

  “I wanna go!” Weezie said. She sounded exactly like a seagull.

  “I don’t think you’re invited,” Lou said.

  “I never get to see Rocky anymore!” Weezie latched onto Rocky’s hand and pressed her cheek against his arm.

  I thought I might throw up.

  “She so just wanted to come because she doesn’t want me to get anything she doesn’t get,” I said to Rocky as we hurried across the street without the Weezer.

  He grinned down at me. “Nah. She wanted to come because she has a crush on me.”

  “I knew that kid had no taste,” I said.

  Rocky stopped outside the door to the Galleon and then pulled me by the wrist a few steps down the sidewalk.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  He let go of my wrist, but it was like his eyes were holding me there. “I just want to know something,” he said.

  “What? I thought you already knew everything.”

  “I do–except for why it is that I had to promise not to put you down by calling you Crash and reminding you about your kamikaze mission at the city gates, but you get to put me down whenever you want.”

  I stared at him. He actually looked serious.

  “This is the part where you say you’re sorry,” he said.

  “But only if I mean it, right?”

  “Forget it–”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He looked at me without smiling. I suddenly wanted to see the gap between his teeth.

  “I guess it’s just, like, a habit,” I said. “Especially with people who annoy the snot out of me.”

  “I do that?”

  “Hello!”

  He finally grinned. “So, if I try not to annoy the snot out of you, you’ll try not to do smackdown on my ego?”

  “Try,” I said.

  “Well, yeah. That’s all we can really do, right? Try?”

  “What happens if one of us messes up?” I said. I made quotation marks with my fingers. “Will there be ‘consequences’?”

  “You’ve been living with Lou too long already.”

  “I got that from the Weezer. So–”

  A green gleam came into Rocky’s eyes. “Okay–if either one of us messes up, we have to answer one question the other person asks about them. Any question.”

  “Are you on drugs? There is no way I’m doing that!”

  “You scared?”

  “No,” I said–although I was already getting butterflies the size of vampire bats in my stomach at the thought of it.

  “Then what’s the problem? I personally got nothing to hide.”

/>   “Neither do I,” I lied.

  “Then we’re on.” He put out his hand. “Shake on it.”

  I looked at it for a minute before I put mine in it. He pumped it one time and then spun me around so the back of me was pinned to the front of him.

  I let out a squeal. “You are a–”

  “Do I hear a put-down coming on? Watch it now–watch it!”

  I opened my mouth and threatened my teeth against his arm.

  “Hey!” He pulled away and looked at me, the greens still gleaming.

  “You didn’t say anything about biting,” I said. I could feel my own blues gleaming back.

  And then as he sauntered like a gangsta into the Spanish Galleon ahead of me, I felt them stop gleaming. I had a reputation back in Mountain Brook for being a flirt. And for running like a rabbit the minute a guy got all “serious.” I couldn’t afford to let any boy get that close. Not like Rocky was getting.

  Not like I wanted him to get.

  That was what stopped the gleam in me. He was never going to do more than flirt back at me. He was the Lou-appointed nanny.

  I couldn’t forget that–or that this was all temporary. I was going home soon.

  And yet I did forget at times during that next week.

  I got to do more and more at Rosie and Bonsai’s and had fewer and fewer minor disasters, which meant I got fewer and fewer hairy eyeballs from Bonsai.

  I rode on Levi with Lou every day except Friday, and I went down to the beach every night after supper and sat longer and longer in my spot by the dunes.

  When three o’clock came around, Rocky was always waiting to babysit me, and that made me remember. But I couldn’t help it: it annoyed me less and less as the days went by. Maybe that was because I got ahead on the “consequences.” He slipped that Thursday at Rosie and Bonsai’s, where he now came with Lou for leftovers every day, and asked Bonsai if he was sure there weren’t any tips of my fingers in the California roll, since they were letting me use knives back there. I was on Rocky the minute we were out the door.

  “I know, I messed up,” he said.

  He leaned against the wall and folded his arms. His muscles kind of bulged out of the no-sleeves jacket. I’d never noticed how much before.