Sticky Kisses

by Greg Johnson

  That afternoon Abby paged him. The new Infiniti Thom had leased after he’d crumpled the fender of his Accord (he hadn’t wanted to see the car again after that day) had a built-in cell phone, and now that Thom had the phone he didn’t know how he’d lived without it. He was on his way from a closing in Norcross to meet a woman client in Ansley Park; this was the second time he’d shown her the listing, which at $1.2 million would be the most expensive house he’d ever sold. She seemed on the verge of making an offer, and he was a little excited; he didn’t know if his flushed cheeks and aching eyes were due to a fever or merely his giddiness over the likely sale. He punched Abby’s number and immediately started babbling about the house, a restored brick Colonial on Westminster Drive.

  “Hey,” he said, grinning, “remember that hunk we both had a crush on in high school, Lawton Williams? The house is right across the street from where he used to live.”

  “Lawton Williams?” Abby said. He could imagine her crinkled nose, her look of mild impatience. “That was your crush, Thom. I never went out with that dope.”

  “Hah, but you would have,” Thom said. “I never told you this, but in high school I used to drive by his house all the time.” He laughed. “I was a stalker before they even had stalking.”

  Silence on the line. Abby was seldom in the mood for joking these days. They’d had dinner at Camille’s the other night, and Thom had noticed her features were sharper, more defined; there was a new vividness to her eyes, a quickness to her speech and even her walk, as though she were energized by some emotion akin to anger. Thom didn’t understand. She’d begun spending most of her time in the library and going to grad student functions at Emory, even though she wouldn’t enroll officially until summer school began. He supposed that he’d expected her to become the quiet, studious Abby he remembered from the time when she’d been working on her master’s. During those months her skin had turned parchment-pale from her hours in the stacks, and she’d gotten a bit dowdy, paying little attention to her clothes and makeup. But these days, though she kept going on shopping sprees with Valerie—her new clothes accented her trim figure, her hair was always shining—the excitement over her “new life” in Atlanta had dissolved. She no longer seemed quite content. There was a displeasing edge to her manner, her voice.

  “Listen, Thom,” Abby said. “I just talked to Mom last night.”

  “Really? How’s she doing?” he said eagerly. He’d brought up their mother several times recently, but Abby had always changed the subject.

  “She’s all right, but she’s upset that we haven’t kept in touch. She wants us to fly up there for Easter. You know how she is about holidays, and ever since Christmas—”

  “That’s a great idea!” Thom said. He’d turned onto Westminster and glided to a stop in front of the house, under the shade of a battered old elm; he glanced around but didn’t see his client’s car. “But wait, isn’t Easter—”

  “Yes, that’s the problem,” Abby said. “It’s this weekend.”

  Today was Wednesday. Thom reached aside for his appointment book and flipped through the messy pages, sending yellow Post-it notes flying.

  “Let’s see… I have something Friday morning, but I could leave after that. Easter weekend, you know, the real estate market pretty much shuts down.”

  Another silence. “You mean—you’re willing to go?”

  Thom closed his eyes; a wave of heat had prickled his scalp, the back of his head. He thought of those films about Death Valley he’d seen as a kid, the air so hot you could see its shimmering waves along the scorched earth, blurring the landscape like a fever dream. His eyes were moist. The idea of going somewhere, even Philadelphia, held a strange appeal.

  “Sure, why not!” he said. Then he wondered if he’d spoken too loudly; had he shouted the words?

  Abby said, slowly, “All right, I’ll see out about reservations. We could leave Friday evening, I guess, and come back Monday or Tuesday.”

  Now he understood, or thought he did. She’d been counting on him to decline the invitation; it was Abby who didn’t want to go.

  “Is that OK with you?” he said. He glimpsed something in his rearview, a bright-crimson flash of color. For a moment he thought his feverish brain had begun to hallucinate, but of course it was his client’s lipstick-red Mercedes.

  “Sure, fine, I’ll call you tonight, OK? After I call the airlines.”

  “OK, I should be home around—”

  But Abby had hung up.

  He sat there a long moment, steeling himself for this showing. He must do well. The client was already “in love” with the house, and in fact the place was so fabulous it had practically sold itself; but still he had to be careful. Sometimes if you said the wrong thing, took the wrong approach, a client’s enthusiasm could unravel quickly. You had to be a psychologist in this business. You had to stay on your toes. Thom took a deep breath. His head swam with heat, and now there was a dull, throbbing ache at his forehead, too. But he felt all right. He would do fine. He inhaled again, grabbed the door handle, and sprang from the car, smiling his eager salesman’s smile.

  Lying awake at night, he suffered not only the fevers, sometimes changing the sheets two or three times before he drifted off, but feverish memories, too, that reclaimed him with a hallucinatory power.

  Rarely had he been sick, even as a child. Rarely had he missed school. But when he was eleven years old, he’d suffered another fever—or a fever dream—and had stayed in bed for days. Lately he’d been recalling that long-ago incident, though like certain other memories it was something he’d discussed with no one, not even Abby. Especially not Abby.

  He was eleven years old. It was the day after he’d gotten hurt next door, after all the commotion died down.

  Because it was summertime he’d usually slept late, but that morning his eyelids had felt tissue-thin, and they trembled open at first light, the faintly dawning rectangles of his window shades searing his vision as he blinked his aching eyes. He understood his room was all but dark and that everything around him was heavy, solid, in place, but that wasn’t what he saw. His vision seemed coated with a warm mist, and his skinny kid’s body had felt heavy and tangled in the sweat-dampened sheets. He saw things he knew, he knew, he wasn’t really seeing. Amber-pale sheets of light throbbing on, off, on, off, with each beat of his heart; white-hot arcs of light shooting like stars from one corner of his room to another; countless pinpricks of neon reds, greens, yellows like dyed sugar sprinkled on cookies yet substanceless, elusive, dissolving if he tried to focus, but when he closed his eyes they reappeared, and again the sheets of amber light, and again the shooting stars. His eyes ached. His forehead burned. His tongue had felt dry, and he raised up feebly to call for his mother, for Abby, for anyone, but he had sunk too deeply into the fever and his head swam, falling back to the pillow.

  The day before he’d gone next door for Fourth of July. He’d gotten to know his neighbors quickly, but already they seemed like a second family since at that age time yawned, especially in summer, and your frame of reference lasted only a few days. You didn’t think much beyond that, forward or backward. So he’d hurried next door at the appointed time—half an hour early, in fact—in the loping kid’s way he used in his own house, rushing from one room to another.

  Only two weeks before, the Carsons had moved in, and it turned out they had a boy his age. The boy’s name was Kenneth, but he had a nickname, “Kit.” He’d told Thom to call him that. Even his parents called him that. Kit was a little red-haired kid, wiry and freckle-faced, always grinning; Thorn’s mother and sister had commented on how “cute” he was. They’d all been peeking out the living room drapes, which they kept closed against the heat, on the day the Carsons’ moving van arrived—“all” meaning Thom and Abby, their mother, and Verna, the Sadler family maid since Thom and Abby were babies. Their mother stood at one window and Verna at the other, Thom and Abby kneeling on the floor on either side of Verna’s knees.

&nb
sp; “Mmm-hmm,” Verna said, in her most emphatic negative. “That be some kinda ugly funniture.”

  Thom and Abby tittered, mostly to be polite; Thom hadn’t noticed the furniture.

  “But the wife is pleasant-looking, don’t you think?” Thorn’s mother said, doubtfully.

  “Guess they have just one kid,” Abby said, poking Thom absentmindedly in the side.

  “He’s a cute thing, ain’t he?” Verna said.

  “He looks like Huck Finn,” said Thom, with a small laugh. He thought of the big illustrated book of his sister’s he’d thumbed through one day when it was raining.

  “He looks like he doesn’t eat enough,” Abby said.

  “They’s all skinny, the mama and daddy too,” Verna said.

  That’s when Thorn’s mother had put an end to their spying. She’d stepped back from the curtain and put her hands on her hips, as if she’d just entered the room and discovered them.

  “Now, that’s enough,” she said. “What if they look over and see you children peeking out like that? They’ll think they’ve got lunatics for neighbors.”

  Abby sat back on her heels and laughed. “They wouldn’t be too far off.”

  Copying Abby, Thom laughed and sat on his heels, too, but lost his balance and fell backward. He wiggled his bare legs in the air, clowning, as though he’d fallen on purpose.

  His mother said, “Now Thom Sadler, I want you to go over there and introduce yourself to that little boy. You want to be neighborly, don’t you?”

  Only Verna had continued her lookout between the curtains, which she held cleverly pinned together with thumb and forefinger just beneath her unblinking eye.

  “Lawsy me, that’s summa the nastiest funniture I ever did see.”

  Abby said, “Yeah, you could go help them, Thom. Carry some boxes and build up these gigantic muscles even more.”

  She pinched her brother’s skinny upper arm.

  “Ha ha,” Thom said. He told his mother, “I don’t want to.”

  “Do it anyway,” she said briskly. “Meeting new people is like jumping into a pool. The water’s cold at first, but ten seconds later you’re glad you did it.”

  “Then why don’t you go over and meet them?” Thom said.

  “I don’t have time,” his mother said, turning away. “I’ve got a house to run, and so does Verna.”

  Verna took the hint and stepped back from the window. She looked down at Thom, who sat with his knees crossed, rocking back and forth like a much smaller child. He wore cut-offs and a T-shirt, and he hadn’t combed his thatch of dark hair this morning (lately he’d started to feel self-conscious about how he looked, though not self-conscious enough to do much about it) and the last thing he wanted was to trudge next door, shame-faced, and introduce himself to the neighbors.

  The look he gave Abby must have been more pained than he knew, for her eyes softened and she said, “OK, come on. I’ll go with you.”

  So they went next door and met the Carsons. The mother was friendly in a vague way, her attention focused on the movers—“That’s marked fragile!” she kept saying—while the father seemed outgoing and energetic, helping the two uniformed men and often winking at the children.

  “If you kids feel like pitching in, don’t be shy,” he grinned, backing through the front door holding one end of a sofa. “I’m paying these gentlemen by the hour!”

  Abby went immediately to the truck and began struggling with a small box perched on the edge, but Thom just laughed; he could tell that Mr. Carson hadn’t been serious.

  “No, sweetheart, I was just teasing,” he called as the shadowy living room swallowed him and, foot by foot, the long bruise-colored sofa. “Ask Kit to get you a Coke or someth…” but the rest of his sentence trailed off.

  Kit wasn’t much of a host and didn’t follow through with the Coke, but Thom liked him. Within the first five minutes, he’d told Thom and Abby that he was almost twelve he was in fifth grade they’d moved here from New Jersey his grandmother in Trenton had told them there were nothing but hicks in Georgia he wanted to play basketball when he got to junior high he wasn’t very tall now but his father and both his grandfathers were and that was a good sign, right?

  Thom and Abby smiled awkwardly, fidgeting like the polite Southern children they were and trying not to look like hicks.

  “What does your daddy do?” Abby asked.

  Kit’s daddy was an engineer!—he helped design engines for Lockheed if Kit didn’t become a professional basketball player he was going to be a pilot (his skinny arms shot straight out from his sides and he made cartoon airplane noises like a much smaller kid) or maybe an astronaut he hadn’t decided yet maybe he would go to West Point what school did Thom and Abby go to did they like it were the teachers nice how long was recess maybe they could all carpool or was it close enough that they could ride their bikes?

  If Thom had been there alone he would have changed the subject, but Abby always told the truth without thinking.

  “We go to Catholic school,” she said. “Sacred Heart. But this year I’m transferring to St. Jude’s—that’s the junior high and high school,” she added, proudly.

  Thom looked down, kicking at the gravel along the driveway. Then Kit had said something that surprised him.

  “Sure thing, I’m going to Sacred Heart too, my dad already went down and talked to the principal when he was here last week meeting with his boss, he said the school was brand-new and the nuns wore short dresses and nothing on their heads, and you could see their hair! He said a couple of them didn’t even shave their legs!”

  He curled both sets of his skinny fingers around his bottom lip and pulled down like somebody watching a horror movie. Thom and Abby laughed.

  Without warning Kit took off running toward the side of the house. He was such a bundle of manic energy that he made Thom feel old and tired, but instinctively he and Abby followed.

  “Come on back!” Kit called over his shoulder, and then came another stream of words about his stash of fireworks for the Fourth of July they were going to have a barbecue out on their patio every year they had gobs of sparklers and firecrackers and Roman candles it was going to be super Thom and Abby should invite the other kids around here back in their old neighborhood everybody came to their house on the Fourth nobody could do fireworks like his dad, so come on, come on!

  Neither Thom nor Abby had told Kit that setting off fireworks inside the city limits was illegal, and almost everyone went to the big displays in the Lenox Square parking lot unless they left town altogether. But a few evenings later, as Kit and Thom were fiddling in the Carsons’ backyard with an old bicycle Kit was trying to repair, “just for practice” for when he was an astronaut and might need to repair rocket engines on Mars, the subject came up again. Mr. Carson was a few feet away, affixing a hummingbird feeder to a pine branch. At first Thom hesitated when Mr. Carson asked, mumbling between the nails he held in his mouth, if Thom and Abby were coming to help them celebrate the Fourth.

  Thom said tactfully, “If our parents will let us. Sometimes we go to Lenox Square.”

  Mr. Carson looked over, grinning; he pulled the last nail from between his lips, casually as though it were a toothpick.

  “I hope they will,” he said. “I bought some extra stuff the other day, thinking you would join us.”

  Thom liked Kit’s dad so much that he decided then and there he wouldn’t tell him their fireworks plans were illegal. Maybe they would all get arrested and that would be part of the fun.

  Then Mr. Carson said, slowly, “Since the lots are so big in this neighborhood, I’m hoping nobody will mind. There aren’t any grouches living around here who’d tell on us, are there?”

  Thom smiled nervously, thinking of his mother, who wasn’t a grouch, exactly, but who did like to complain. And she hated loud noises.

  “Nah,” Thom said, placing a wrench in the wiggling hand Kit had held up.

  Thom didn’t understand why, but he felt so happy just being
here. It was one of those long summer evenings when the sun is already down but there’s plenty of light, the big trees turning a dim, lush green, the air crisp and dry, fresh-smelling. In the distance, along the dark line of trees bordering the Carsons’ property, fireflies had started winking. Though he was supposedly helping Kit, his attention stayed on Mr. Carson, who was so different from the other men in this neighborhood. Like Thorn’s father, who was a banker, most of the men got home around seven o’clock in their wrinkled coats and ties, gave their families a weary smile, mixed themselves a drink and settled down to read the paper, staying in their office clothes until bedtime. Thorn’s father would unbutton his top button and loosen his tie, but that was all. Already his hair was mostly silver, his kindly but abstracted face often seeming ashen gray when he sat reading the paper at the kitchen table under the harsh fluorescent lights. He read in there to appease his wife, who liked to chatter about her day while she finished preparing dinner, but Thorn’s father said little. Thom and Abby would greet him and receive his quick, automatic hug and maybe pick at his clothes, like younger children, for a few minutes while he mixed his whiskey sour and rifled through the paper until he’d found the sections he wanted. After that, they went their own ways until dinner.

  Kit’s dad was different. Though Thom guessed he wasn’t much younger than his own father, Mr. Carson had the lithe, lanky build of a high school athlete (Thom knew from Kit that Mr. Carson had been a teenage basketball star), and he sprang up the sidewalk after work with the same eager, loping gait he’d used leaving home that morning. Then he changed into a T-shirt and blue jeans, or sometimes shorts if the day was really hot, and worked on projects around the house or out back. He liked shooting baskets with Kit and Thom in the driveway, and he didn’t ask boring grown-up questions like what grade was Thom in, or what he wanted to be when he grew up. They talked about the Hawks and the Braves, about movies they’d all seen like Airport and Earthquake and The Towering Inferno, and about expeditions Mr. Carson wanted to take later in the summer to Stone Mountain and Six Flags. He wanted to go backpacking in the north Georgia mountains and go fishing on Lake Lanier and visit the Cyclorama and some of the battlefields outside the city. He said he was a Civil War buff, and though Thorn’s father read books on the Civil War, too, somehow Thom didn’t think his father and Mr. Carson would become friends. (Mr. Sadler had read lots of books, in fact, but Thom didn’t think he’d visited any battlefields.) Mr. Carson was like an overgrown boy, sometimes seizing Kit or Thom by the waist and hauling them into the air or shouting “Heads up” seconds before lobbing a basketball in their direction. Whenever Thom came over to Kit’s house, which was often, one of his first questions was, “Where’s your dad?”