Sugarland

by Joni Rodgers

  Chloe waved her hands under the air-dryer for a moment, then came over and wiped them on Kiki’s evening gown.

  “Do you think Daddy remembered to feed the fish?” Chloe asked.

  “I’m sure he did, sweetie.”

  “And Miss Calico?”

  “Miss Calico can make her own way in the world,” Kit told her. “She can run fast and catch mice to eat. She can climb trees to get away from dogs. And she has nine lives. She’ll always be okay.”

  “Do you think the baby birds are still there?”

  “Oh, I hope not, sweetie. I hope they got strong and brave and flew away as free as the wind.”

  Chloe nodded, but her expression was one of great sadness, the expression of someone struggling to understand. Kiki pulled her little girl onto her lap and rocked her on the wooden chair, thinking about what she could say to Wayne on the phone. Wondering if he’d send her the money for plane tickets. Wondering what he’d be like if she went back.

  “Hushabye, don’t you cry... go to sleep my little baby...” she sang and stroked the bridge of Chloe’s nose, an almost hypnotic gesture that had been soothing her since she was a baby. “When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little ponies...”

  He’d keep a pretty tight lid on her for a while. Whenever she’d try to leave and then come back, he’d watch her like a hawk the first few weeks, counting the money in her purse and comparing it to the grocery receipts, calling and hanging up to make sure she stayed in the house all day. She could handle that for a while, she figured.

  “Blacks and bays... dapples and grays ...”

  She could handle the other stuff once in a while, too, as long as he didn’t hurt the kids, and he never did. Just her. Somehow that seemed not so bad. And it wasn’t really like a beating if somebody just slapped you or shook you by your shoulders. Maybe he really didn’t know he was pushing hard enough to knock her down, and it wasn’t his fault if she bumped into the wall or the cupboard or something. And then he was always so sorry and solicitous about it later.

  “One by one... see them come...”

  She just wouldn’t make him mad. She wouldn’t give him any reasons. She wouldn’t say “no” to anything he wanted.

  And she would cook nice dinners for him and have everything perfect when he came home from work.

  “... dancing for my little baby...”

  She would be a good wife and keep everything nice. She’d keep her dang mouth shut and not aggravate him. She wouldn’t screw up or do anything stupid or ask him where he’d been or where he was going. She’d make the kids be quiet and make herself look pretty, and she’d go down on him just the way he liked it, on her knees in front of him, her hair twisted like a rope around his hand. Kiki closed her eyes, accepting the image without gagging on it the way she used to.

  “When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little ponies.”

  The bathroom door creaked open, and Xylo Haines stood there, dark eyes wondering, full lips slightly parted.

  “Now that,” he spoke softly so as not to wake Chloe, “is blues.”

  “What’s with all the movies?” Cooper asked, and Kit whisked the bag out from under his hand right at the last moment.

  “I thought it would be fun to have a... a home... cinema... party!”

  “What does that mean?” Cooper looked suspicious.

  “This!” Kit whipped out her Ace in the hole, and Cooper whooped and grabbed it out of her hand.

  “Allll rrrright!” he exclaimed. “Dad! Look what Mom got!”

  “Yeah, I see.” Mel looked suspicious, too, but kept on stirring the spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon.

  “I’ll let you watch this on two conditions,” Kit stated to Cooper. “One: no Jim Carrey imitations. I don’t want to hear any of his crude jokes repeated in this house. And two: you go to bed without arguing at nine o’clock.”

  “No way!” he protested. “On a Friday?”

  “Never mind, then,” Kit shrugged and dropped Ace back in the bag.

  “Okay already! Nine.”

  Cooper stomped off, well aware he was being manipulated. Mel picked up the bag and poked through the stack of plastic boxes.

  “Goonies? They’ve seen that a million—” He stopped, and when Kit turned around, he was staring at the back of the HOT! HOT! HOT! box with sort of a confused half smile. “What’s this?”

  “What... that?” She couldn’t really read the expression on his face, so she started babbling. “It’s ... it’s ... oh, you know what happened? I—somebody—I guess they picked up my bag, and I picked up their bag and—geez! Can you believe that thing?” A short little laugh tripped out of her throat. “I mean— I can’t believe somebody would actually rent something like that, you know?” She took two forks and furiously tossed the salad. “Geez! I guess they’ll be surprised when they get to the ol’ stag party and find Care Bears: The Movie.”

  “Yeah.” Mel laughed a little, which Kit thought was good, but then he said, “You should complain to the manager when you take these back tomorrow.”

  He shoved the box in the bag and his hands in his pockets.

  “Nice car, though. On the front there.”

  “Oh. Really?” Kit said and displayed great interest as he showed it to her.

  After cleaning up the dinner mess, Kit sat at the table and played Chutes and Ladders with Mitzi while Mel and Cooper watched Ace Ventura. When that was over, she agreed to let them stay up long enough for Gulliver’s Travels, but Mitzi was asleep within ten minutes, and Cooper decided to climb into bed with a book, complaining that the Lilliputians’ mouths weren’t moving in time to the dialogue.

  On her way down from tucking them in, Kit froze on the stairway. She distinctly heard the words “torque wench” from the darkened living room.

  “ ... as long as you don’t mind getting a little slippery,” someone giggled.

  Then she heard Mel laugh.

  She flattened herself against the wall and crept down far enough to look through the arched doorway. Mel had shucked out of his sweats and was sitting in his boxers, as he usually did after Kit put the kids to bed, but instead of lolling back with his arms outstretched on the back of the sofa, his ankle propped on his knee, he craned forward on the couch cushion, as if Miz Pistonpumper had him by the front of his T-shirt. The light and shadow of whatever was happening flickered across his face.

  Kit hurried back upstairs, piled her hair on top of her head, whirled under the shower, and thrashed through a drawer she hardly ever opened, mining for some flimsy underwear. She unearthed a midnight purple G-string unit from some prehistoric weekend trip to New Orleans and pulled her bulky bathrobe on over it.

  “Hi,” Mel grinned, embarrassed when she came in and found him staring. “I urn... I was just checking out that car.”

  “Oh?” Kit sat beside him on the couch.

  “Sorry. I’ll turn it off.”

  Mel started to get up, but Kit seized his wrist and said, “No!”

  He looked startled.

  “I mean... Well... did they show it yet? The car?”

  “Yeah,” Mel admitted.

  “Oh.”

  “But only for a second,” he hastened. “They might show it again, and then—then you could see it, too.”

  “Right. Sure. I’d like to.”

  Mel sat back on the couch, leaving a formal distance between them. The horny henchmen were receiving what Kit guessed was the fabled lube job.

  “So ... do you wanna play Scrabble or something?” He asked casually, though he sounded a little short of breath.

  “Not really,” Kit sidled over to him. “Let’s just hang out.”

  “I should have tried to go in to the hangar tonight,” Mel said. “We’ll need all the extra hours I can get if we’re going to go to Orlando in June.”

  “You’re entitled to a day off, Mel,” Kit tensed. “You’re not some kind of robot. And the kids need to see you once in a while, too.”

  “Well, ri
ght, but—I just thought... Never mind.”

  When they stopped talking, the squeaking and churning and yelping from the television seemed to get louder and louder. They sat in the midst of the sound effects.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Kit asked suddenly.

  “Oh—urn ... no,” Mel startled and pointed the clicker at the television set, subduing the volume.

  “Are you sure? ‘Cause I could make some.”

  “No, don’t—don’t bother. It’s too hot for coffee, anyhow.”

  “Yeah,” Kit offered him a sly smile, “it is getting kind of hot in here.”

  “Is the air on?”

  “No,” she deflated. “Remember, we were going to try to cut down until summer hits?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “I could turn it on, though. If you want.”

  “No, no. That’s okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure.”

  “Because, you know ... I could turn it on.”

  “No. It’s ... it’s fine.”

  The henchmen were duct-taped to their chairs now.

  “This music is so bad,” Kit commented.

  “Bow-ba-dit-dow-buppa-dip-a-dit,” Mel imitated the sleazy synthesizer, and they laughed together, relieved for a moment.

  The garage gals had shed their overalls. They were kissing each other and playing with their tools, making a noise Kit only came close to when she was walking barefoot on blazing hot sand.

  “Oh,” Mel said, “there’s the umm... the ...”

  “Car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow,” Kit said, “it’s really ... nice.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, very nice. Nice car.”

  “Yours is nicer, though.”

  “Well, yeah, because mine is a ‘62, and that right there ... that’s a... a...”

  “69?” Kit quipped, and Mel laughed nervously.

  They stared in silence until the action relocated to the business office of the garage, and the Falcon could only be seen in fleeting glimpses through a window, between Candyapples’ upraised stilettos.

  “So ...,” Mel picked up the remote, but didn’t hit REWIND or STOP.

  “So ... what?” Kit said, touching one finger to the back of his hand.

  “So, that’s it. So, I guess...”

  She let her finger drift up the side of his wrist.

  “Can I make a confession?”

  He nodded, and she opened the front of her robe to let the midnight show.

  “I didn’t really get somebody else’s movie. I rented it.”

  “You ... umm ...,” Mel laughed nervously. “You’re kidding.”

  “I thought you might like it.” She traced her fingers up his sleeve to his shoulder and then turned her nails down to scratch him gently. “Do you?”

  He didn’t say anything. Just swallowed, nodded very slightly.

  “I thought you might find it kind of ... exciting.” She slid her other hand up the baggy leg of his shorts. “Hmmm. Evidently, you do.”

  “Yeah,” he whispered hoarsely, “kind of.”

  “Oh, look, there’s the car again,” Kit teased her foot up and down his shin. “And that must be Miz—oh. Goodness. Those are certainly ... impressive.”

  “Yeah.” Mel shifted on the sofa and looked into Kit’s face. “Yours are nicer, though.”

  He cupped his hands beneath her breasts, and she smiled, wanting him to lean forward and kiss her, but instead, he leaned back, wanting her to go down. And she did. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth. But he hadn’t quite worked himself out of his underwear when the phone started ringing.

  “Dang!”

  “Let it go!” he whispered, thrashing free of his BVD’s.

  “What if it’s Kiki?”

  “She’s a grown woman, Kit! She’s not your baby sister anymore.”

  Kit glanced toward the doorway as Mel dove down the front of the purple teddy. He freed her from the lace and ribbons with a frenzied, bomb squad dexterity and planted his mouth with the urgency of the unweaned. Kit felt a tinge of excitement fizz from her tailbone to the roof of her mouth. She groped below, and Mel moaned when she closed her hand around him. He lifted her onto his lap, hooked the G-string aside, and just that quick, was in clear up to there.

  Kit interlocked her fingers behind his neck and touched her forehead to his, concentrating on the connection between the two of them. With her back to the TV, she could almost block out the wheezing of the videotape synthesizer, but that dangbastard telephone would not shut up. She tried to focus on Mel’s mouth and his rhythm and the adroit placement of his thumb, but after a few more rings, the guilt and the jangling got to her.

  “Mel, honey, can we—”

  “No.” He tried to hold her there. “Don’t go!”

  “Mel, I’m sorry, honey. I can’t just ignore her.”

  “Kit, please don’t leave.”

  “I’ll only be a minute, I promise.”

  She stood up and pulled her robe closed.

  “Kit, for Christ’s sake!”

  “I’m sorry, Mel, just—please!” She took his face between her hands. “Hold that thought, okay?”

  In the kitchen, she snapped on the light and stood in the glare for a moment before picking up the shrilling telephone.

  “Hello.”

  “Kit!” Only he said it like “Ket.”

  “Ander!” she hissed. “What are you thinking? Mel’s right in the other room!”

  “Kit, I want so much to be with you again—”

  “No! How many times do I have to tell you? I can’t.”

  Faint background sounds of traffic told her he was at an outside phone booth, which made it seem all the more clandestine and seedy.

  “I am having so great a desiring for you.”

  “No!”

  She stepped inside the broom closet and closed the door the way she did when Mitzi and Coo were being too noisy for her to hear the bill collector’s threats.

  “Ander, this can’t happen. You have to stop calling me.”

  “But I love you, my beautiful Kit. Years now, years! I wait for days you come to my store, and I watch you working—your beautiful hands. I build things I know you have to paint, so I can make you come to be with me any little more hours I can have you. And always I am thinking in the night of kissing you, and then I can kiss you, and I see these beautiful breast at last, and I need to touch this beautiful woman again. To make love to this lady I care so much.”

  A feeling Kit couldn’t recognize or put a name to—what it was to hear these things said to her—it was substantive enough to sway her on her feet, and she had to lean against the closet door.

  “Ah Gott, Kit, I feel like crazy man. My mind is going crazy with these many desiring thoughts of you, of touching your skin. I am so very, very much so love with you. I am wanting you more than my own life!”

  “Ander ...” There was a long silence while Kit tried hard not to feel the luxury of it, tried to face the closet interior and focus on the shelf-papered reality of its contents. “Ander, it’s not right.”

  “Is not right to love someone you know and have respect and work by the side of this person and laugft with them years and years? Do you say is right to have lovemaking with this person, but then say you don’t love them? Do you say you don’t love me, Kit?”

  “No,” she spoke quietly into the cache of Resolve and Lysol and Love My Carpet. “I don’t say that.”

  “Ah, thank you, Gott!” he breathed. “Marine tusen tag.”

  “But Ander,” Kit kept her voice as even and slow as she could, “one of the things I love most about you is that you cherish your family as much as I cherish mine—”

  “Kit, please—”

  “—and I know you don’t want to lose that, Ander, do you?”

  “I want to be with you. I must to be with you. You don’t know what is this burning I feel.”

  “I do.” She leaned into the hanging brooms
and mops. “I do know. But I’m not going to let myself think about it anymore. I’m not going to jeopardize my family like that ever again. It was wrong and stupid, and I hate myself. I’m just going to do my best to find another job and make it up to Mel as best I can, and I think you should be trying to do the same for Ruda. I can’t imagine what she must be going through.”

  “Ah, Gott.” His voice crumpled with emotion. “I am never wanting to hurt her. And to hurt you, Kit. I am so very much sorry. I never want you to be not working here anymore. You are most talented artist. Most talented of students in all my life and wonderful painter, and I always want to see you every day.”

  She couldn’t answer him.

  “Now I mostly miss you,” he whispered.

  “Ander...” Kit stood there for a moment, aching with her own desire to change things. “Don’t call here again.”

  Biting her lip, she stepped out of the closet and hung up the phone. She got a drink from the sink and sat down at the kitchen table, just on the edge of the chair, clutching her robe as high on her neck as she could, too bleak for tears, too weary to want anything more than water. She wished Kiki were here, and that one simple thought of missing her engulfed Kit in a sudden riptide of loneliness. They’d never gone this long without talking. Eleven days. But Kit was afraid if she called Orlando, and Vivica answered, her mother would have that maternal psychic insight into everything Kit had done.

  After a while, she heard a telltale rumble from the living room. The movie had run out, and Mel was snoring in front of the blue screen, an afghan across his lap. She hit the REWIND button and touched his shoulder.

  “Mel.”

  He snorted, opened his eyes, and squeezed the back of his stiff neck.

  “Who was on the phone?”

  “Kiki.”

  “She okay?”

  “Yeah. She just needed someone to talk to.”

  “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear it.”

  He handed her the afghan, and she felt a damp spot on it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “That settles it,” Mel took hold of the wide lapels on her bathrobe and pulled her over to him. “First thing tomorrow, I’m gonna go out and buy us an answering machine.”