by Marsha Moyer
"Well, I wish you'd told me that six or seven years ago," I said. "You could've saved me a lot of grief."
"You wouldn't have heard me. Anyway, regrets are a waste of time, if you ask me."
"That's because you don't have any."
"Sure I do. Mine just aren't as interesting as yours."
As she spoke, Ash came across the yard to the edge of the patio and opened the ice chest and took out three more tallboys. I guessed two of them were for Kit and Bailey, but something inside me started twisting itself in a knot.
"Where do you suppose he plans on sleeping tonight?" Geneva asked as Ash set two cans on the pavement, then popped the tab on the third and took a long drink.
"I've been wondering the same thing myself."
Ash noticed us watching him and cocked his head, looked back over one shoulder and then the other, then pointed to himself with the can and raised one eyebrow and grinned. I couldn't help it; I felt a stirring in my chest, a pinpoint of light in a place where for a long time there'd been none. I didn't want to feel that way; I knew Ash was just being Ash, using looks and charm to smooth over dubious behavior. How many times had he gotten away with it in his lifetime—ten thousand, a million?
"Oh boy," Geneva said as he closed the cooler and set his beer on the lid and headed in our direction. She picked up the Hefty bag. "Not that I'm not dying to stick around, but I think I'll leave this one to you."
Without a word, Ash swept me up and started to dance me across the patio under the glow of the Japanese lanterns, one arm around my shoulders and the other around my waist. Oh baby don't it feel like heaven right now, he sang along with the radio, don't it feel like something from a dream? Part of me wanted to tell him to knock it off, that he was making a fool of himself and a spectacle of us both, but it felt too good to be up against him this way, to breathe in up close the smell of him, to give myself over to the second-sense movements of our feet and all the rest of it.
"Lord, I've missed this," he said into my hair.
I lifted my head and looked at him.
"Well, it's been right here all the time," I said. "It's not like you didn't know where to find it."
"I think I forgot how it felt to be part of something like this." He gestured with his chin toward the backyard. "Something so good and, well, ordinary."
"You gave up 'ordinary' to go to Nashville," I reminded him. "Nobody put a gun to your head."
"Let me ask you something. When did you figure out you'd made a mistake?"
"About what?"
"About me. Marrying me, I mean, and following me to Tennessee."
"I didn't. Is that what you think I think? That I made a mistake?"
"You saying you don't wish you'd done things different?"
"Sure I do. That's not saying I wish I hadn't done them at all."
We stopped moving and stood looking at each other, a long look, unadorned. He reached up and brushed a stray strand of hair away from my mouth with his thumb.
"We've got a lot to talk about," he said.
I swallowed, nodded my head. In spite of everything that had come to pass over the last seven years, all that water under a very long bridge, I felt the exact same way I'd felt the first time Ash and I ever danced together at the Round-Up, when he'd put his mouth in my hair and asked me if he stopped by my house later, might he find the front door open? I knew what I was signing on for; I'd known then and I knew now, and whether it was love or engineering was nothing but splitting hairs.
"So maybe we ought to go home and get started," he said.
He smiled, and I felt the heat rush to my face. "It's just about Jude's bedtime anyway. I'll go on ahead, get him tucked in."
Ash nodded, his hand lighting gently for a second in the small of my back, sending a ripple along my spine before lifting off again. And then he did something I found sweet but strange. He leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead, right along the hairline. His lips were dry and cool. I felt the grizzle of his unshaved chin against my skin.
He took something from his pocket and pressed it into my hand. The house key.
"I'm right behind you," he said.
I managed to get Jude into his pajamas in record time, putting him to bed without a bath even though he was streaked all over with dirt and grass. "Don't I get a story?" he asked as I bent over and kissed the top of his head.
"Not tonight. It's way past your bedtime." I switched off the light.
"I want Daddy to read me a story!"
"Tell you what," I said. "You lie here nice and quiet with your eyes closed, and when Daddy gets here, we'll see." Backing out of the room, I crossed my fingers and hoped he'd be asleep before
Ash came home. I wasn't about to come right out and tell my son that I had other plans for his daddy.
I ran to the bathroom, throwing off clothes as I went, and jumped into the shower, sudsing myself and swiping a razor over my legs, the whole time keeping one ear peeled for Ash's truck in the yard. I rubbed lotion into my skin, all over, and put a squirt of Calvin Klein Eternity behind my ears. I remembered when Ash had given me the bottle, a few days after Denny first arrived to stay with us and I'd just found out I was pregnant with Jude. The gift had struck me as funny then—both the perfume itself, when I'd never been much of a perfume girl, and the name, which seemed so optimistic, so unlike the rough-and-tumble future that seemed to lie ahead of us. Little did I know how inconsequential those troubles would seem someday, how small and transient. I spritzed a little in the crooks of my elbows and behind my knees. If Eternity was forever, then, technically speaking, it was never too late.
I rifled through my bureau drawers, quickly concluding that sexy underwear wasn't an option; I'd left all my good stuff back in Nashville, and when it came time to buy new, I'd stuck to whatever I could get at Wal-Mart that was plain and cheap. I hadn't been thinking about sex then anyway, just survival, hardly imagining a time when the pendulum would swing back the other way. I slipped my white terrycloth robe on over clean, bare skin, and hoped that whatever God gave me would be enough for Ash.
In the kitchen I switched on the light over the stove hood and filled the kettle with water. I didn't really want tea, but it was something to do, something to take my mind off what was keeping Ash.
Not that it was time to worry, not yet; less than an hour had passed since that funny little kiss on the forehead on Dove's patio. Still, I had to admit it stung a little, knowing that the object of my desire was somewhat less burning in his desire for me.
Maybe, I thought suddenly, I'd gotten his signals wrong. No, it wasn't possible; Ash could be maddeningly cryptic about some things, but about this one, we'd always read each other loud and clear. Had one of my brothers smacked him upside the head with a horseshoe after all? Or maybe the local deputy, Dewey Wentzel, had pulled him over on the farm-to-market road. I had an awful memory of the first time I'd sat home waiting for Ash, the night of that first dance and the unlocked front door. I'd waited hours, and he never came, and then finally, at three in the morning, he'd called, claiming to be in jail. I'd hung up on him in a rage, my image of myself as a woman of the world in tatters, only to learn the next day that he truly had gotten arrested, the target of an irate not-quite-ex-girlfriend, and had spent the night locked up in the jail on the top floor of the courthouse. It was Dewey Wentzel who'd hauled Ash in that night, and from that day on, till Ash left for Nashville, there'd been no love lost between those two. For all I knew, Dewey had spent the whole evening lying in wait, sitting back in the pines off Little Hope Road with the cruiser lights off and the radar on, just waiting for Ash to go rocketing by and bust him.
I turned on the burner and took down a canister of chamomile tea. Chamomile was supposed to be good for the nerves. When the kettle whistled, I poured steaming water over a tea bag, then sat down at the table and wrapped my hands around the mug, watching the minute hand of the clock crawl forward. How many times had I sat here, just this way, holding a cup of tea between my hands
and brooding about Ash? How many nights of my life had gone down the drain, worrying about things I knew I had no control over, spending my fury and my tears on things I couldn't fix? Over the past eight months my sharpest feelings about Ash had gradually boiled off, the way you boil off a roux. I'd forgotten what it was like to be this angry, to hurt so bad it was physical, a sharp pain every time I breathed in. Or maybe forgotten is too drastic a word; I'd suppressed it, stuffed it down inside me the way I'd stuffed that old shoe box full of makeup under the bathroom counter. The tubes and compacts might be sticky or crumbling, but it was surprising, after all those years, how well they'd held their color.
I washed and dried my teacup and set it in the dish drainer, then walked through the house, turning out lights as I went. In the bathroom I scrubbed my face and my teeth, shucked my robe, and got into my ratty old nightgown, a cotton rag left behind in a bureau drawer, too decrepit for even a Speakes to bother with. For good measure, I locked the front door, feeling a little twinge of satisfaction as the dead bolt slid home.
I didn't think there was any way I would sleep, but I dropped off within minutes, into a strange dream about the Sistine Chapel. I'd never been there, not in real life, but I'd seen pictures, and a special once on TV. In my dream, the figures painted by Michelangelo all those centuries before came down from the ceiling and were walking around in my front yard, some in brilliant robes and tunics, some of them as naked as jaybirds, their muscles rippling and glistening like silk. I stood inside the screen door watching them, thinking, Why are you here? What do you want? One woman in particular, wearing a blue shawl, kept looking back over her shoulder at me with wide, worried eyes, like she knew a secret but wasn't sure she should let me in on it. I just stood and watched them wander around, muttering among themselves. They seemed to be waiting for something, but I couldn't figure out what, or make out what they were saying. I tried pleading with my eyes with the woman in the shawl: Tell me.
For a long time she gazed back at me. I watched her mouth move, but I still couldn't hear her. I shook my head. She beckoned me closer. I could feel the heat of the bodies now, the smell, not of paint, but of real flesh. I was scared. I knew they were perturbed, but why? What had I done?
The woman's lips parted. You said it was chocolate! she said. You said it, but it's not.
I woke sitting upright in bed, my heart skittering in my chest. Headlights swung across the front of the house, slashing a bright arc across the bedroom wall. The dogs were barking. I waited with held breath for a swirl of red and blue light, a blast of radio static, the news I'd been waiting seven years to hear.
The lights went out, and I heard a door open and close, a voice speaking to the dogs, silencing them. Not Dewey Wentzel, then; those dogs wouldn't have stopped barking for Dewey, or anybody in a uniform, under any circumstances short of him shooting them.
Then footsteps on the porch, the screech of the screen door hinges that I knew but kept forgetting needed WD-40. I threw back the sheet and slid out of bed and ran down the hall in the dark just as Ash started to pound on the locked door with his knuckles.
I turned the dead bolt and yanked open the door, flipping the switch for the porch light before I remembered the bulb had burned out and I'd never gotten around to replacing it. I stepped out onto the porch, pulling the screen door shut behind me.
"What the hell," Ash said, backing toward the porch rail. I could only make out the shape of him, silhouetted against the night sky, but I could smell him; it came off him in waves, sweet and sickening, his breath, his pores, maybe even the platelets of his blood. It was a smell I hadn't smelled in months, but it threw me right back to that last night in Tennessee. "You're a damn sight less friendly than you were last time I saw you," he said.
"That was three hours ago."
"Three hours? No shit." There was real wonder in his voice, that his deeds could have strayed so far from his original intentions.
"Where have you been? You said you were right behind me."
"Well, now, let's see. First I helped Dove put up the cooker and rinse out the coolers. Seemed like the least I could do, see-ing's how the party was my idea in the first place. Then I got a big old bag full of crawfish and drove it by your mama's."
"You—what? You went to see my mama?"
"I felt sorry for her, having to miss the party, 'cause of church and all. I wasn't sure she'd be too glad to see me, and she was in her robe already, but she asked me in and gave me a Coca-Cola. She seemed pretty happy to have the crawfish. She asked me to come by in a couple days and change out a bathroom washer for her."
"I'm not believing this."
"You know, Lucy, she isn't getting around like she used to. That hip of hers is pretty bad."
It was scary how normal his voice sounded, how silky and cool. When you hear drunk, you think of some guy weaving and slurring, passed out in a ditch. But with Ash, the more he drank, the smoother he got, the more charming and courtly. His hands didn't shake, he was hardly ever sick. He could frame a window drunk, play the guitar, drive, make love. The only snags were a troublesome tendency to black out, to lose track of time and have to scramble to cover his tracks, as well as a nasty streak that could spring up and out at you without warning, claws bared, like a cornered cat. It was the smell more than anything that gave him away, that and his eyes, black and opaque, a one-way mirror. I was glad it was dark and I couldn't see them.
"Then, let's see… I decided to make a quick stop by the Pak 'n' Sak, and you'll never believe in a hundred years who I ran into there."
"Elvis?"
"My old buddy Isaac King! He was on his way home from his job at the hospital, picking up a gallon of milk. How come you didn't tell me him and Rose had another baby?" I'd only seen Isaac a handful of times since I'd come back to Mooney, and then only from afar. I kept hoping I wouldn't run into him face-to-face so that I wouldn't have to explain what had happened. "He talked me into riding out to the house with him, to see Rose and the kids. I ended up staying a little longer than I intended. But here I am, finally. All of a piece."
"You're a piece, all right. Where'd you get the whiskey?"
"The what?"
"Give me a break. Did you buy it, or did Isaac give it to you?"
"I might've had a beer at Isaac's."
"Ash, you're stinking," I said. "Did you really think I wouldn't be able to tell?"
"Uh-oh," he said. "Here it comes. Mr. Shit, meet Mr. Fan."
"Do you even remember what you said to me earlier, on Dove's patio? You know, for such a slick talker, you sure know how to go the other way in a hell of a hurry."
"I can explain everything, Lucy, if you'd just calm down a minute and not go off half-cocked every time I try and talk to you."
"I don't understand any of this, Ash. What are you doing?"
"You mean, what's my intent?."
"Don't make fun of me! You've been here all day and I've yet to get a straight answer out of you. Why did we spend the whole evening sitting around my aunt's backyard eating crawfish? Then, just when it seemed like we were making a little bit of headway, you go off and get lost for three hours! You haven't got any more scruples than a rat in the gutter. If somebody dangles a bottle in front of you, you're gone."
"If we could just go inside and sit down—"
"No," I said. "You're not setting foot in this house, not in the shape you're in."
"You're trying to tell me I can't come inside my own house?"
"You slept in the truck last night, you can do it again. Or go find one of your fan club. To hear you tell it, the whole town's full of folks just waiting for Ash Farrell to show up and ring their doorbell. Jesus, Ash! I feel like I, I don't even know you anymore! You walked out of rehab, but you're still drinking, and talking crazy about quitting music… The only reason I can think of for you to've showed up here is that you've finally run out of places to run. How's that supposed to make me feel? How am I supposed to trust you again?"
"Mama?" Jude's voi
ce floated through the screen. "Who's yelling?"
"Nobody. Go back to sleep."
"Is Daddy here?"
"Hey, buddy." Ash pushed off the porch rail and moved toward the door. "What are you doing up? You oughta be asleep by now."
"I was waiting for you."
"Well, here I am."
"Can you come in and read me a story?"
"It's way past story time, baby," I said. "Run on back to bed now. There'll be plenty of time for all that tomorrow."
"Tomorrow's Saturday," Jude said cheerfully.
"That's right."
"And we're having waffles, right? And cartoons! Daddy, will you eat waffles with me and watch Power Rangers?. And then maybe later we can ride in your truck."
"That sounds great, Son. We'll see what your mama has to say about it in the morning."
"Get on back to bed, Jude," I said, but he hovered there, a nervous little ghost in the dark. "Can you tuck yourself in?"
"Only if you guys promise, no more yelling."
We promised, our voices subdued, and Jude faded silently up the hall. The night that had earlier been moonlit and plump with promise seemed to flatten around us. Low clouds scuttled overhead, and the woods smelled damp and rotted, like a grave. Neither Ash nor I spoke for a long time. I wanted to think he was considering the magnitude of our situation, but I knew he was really just working on his defense.
"I could sleep on the couch," he said finally. "Just for tonight."
"No," I said. "I left Nashville to get away from this. I'm not letting it start up again."
"So what am I supposed to say to my son when he wakes up in the morning and finds me out here in the truck? How am I supposed to explain that?"
"I don't know, Ash. How do you think I've felt the past eight months? It's hard to know what to tell him when you won't even admit yourself you've got a problem."
"I'll say I've got a problem! You want me to sleep outside in the cold, like a damned dog!"
"It's sixty-five degrees out here, easy. Anyway, you've got all that alcohol in you to keep you warm." More stashed in the truck, too, I bet. "Oh, why am I even trying to talk to you? You won't remember this conversation in the morning anyway."