by Glover, Dan
“Wow, I didn’t expect that.”
“I love you too, Jem.”
Billy hugged the little girl close while looking at Lisa and shrugging. It felt as if he knew Jem already… that he’d been away a long time finally coming back to her. Had he dreamed of her too? Of whom did Jem remind him? She seemed a miniature Lisa… dark hair with large brown eyes… like a fawn’s. Billy studied the depths of Jem’s eyes… a sparkle seemed to emanate deep inside them, coaxing him into remembering… what?
“You’re going to be my new daddy.”
Jem was still holding onto Billy, touching his shirt, rubbing the fabric between her thumb and index finger as if reassuring herself of his reality, measuring him, testing to see if she was really awake or if perchance she dreamed.
“We’re going to be a family.”
“I'd like that too; we can all be a family, you, me, and your mommy.”
“Daddy... I’ve been dreaming about it. I knew you’d come. But someone is missing… where is the other lady? I dreamed of another lady who is going to be my other mom. Why didn’t she come with you?”
“Who are you talking about, Jem?”
Lisa looked at Billy as if she had a feeling she knew what Jem was saying but at the same time she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing.
“A blonde-haired lady… she’s so pretty and she smiles a lot and she has the bluest eyes,” Jem said, turning her head to the left, looking into the air as if the answers were there for all to see.
“Allison? Do you mean Allison Johns? But you’ve never met Allison.”
“Yes… that’s her name… I remember now. She’s going to be my other mom… I’m going to have two moms… and a new daddy.” Jem said it as if everything was already decided. “You’ll see. I met her in my dreams. I know it’s going to come true.”
“You know something, Jem?”
“What, daddy?”
Jem asked… with her brown eyes… her mother’s eyes… wide and smiling.
“I’ve been dreaming about it too. Ever since I was a little boy not much older than you are now I’ve been dreaming of being part of a family. I didn’t have much of a family when I was growing up.”
“Why not?”
“Well, my daddy left me and my momma all alone one day and never came home again.”
Billy remembered things he’d rather not but he sensed Jem needed to understand.
“I guess he didn’t like being with us all that much. And even before he left, we weren’t much of a family. He used to holler, a lot, for no reason, and sometimes he’d hit my momma, and hit me too.”
“You would never hit my momma.”
Jem kept holding his hand in her fingers like she didn’t want him to disappear.
“And you’d never yell at me.”
“Absolutely not, I love your momma, just like I love you, Jem.”
“You think God talks to you, don’t you?”
Jem stared at Billy as she stood twirling her long brown hair in one hand and held onto Billy’s little finger on his right hand with her other hand. Billy looked at Lisa. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head to indicate that she hadn’t said anything to Jem about it.
“Yes, Jem, sometimes I do.”
Billy answered, honestly. He somehow knew if he lied that Jem would know.
“How do you know that, Jem?”
“I dreamed about it, mommy.”
Jem looked at Billy.
“What does God say to you, daddy?”
“He tells me to do things I would rather not do.”
Billy looked at Lisa for some kind of approval. Lisa just shrugged her shoulders again though.
“Like what?”
Jem was pulling on Billy’s finger in an effort to retrieve his attention.
“To hurt myself.”
“Why?”
Jem seemed genuinely perplexed.
“I don’t know. When I ask God, I never get answers.”
“Are you sure it’s God?”
Jem searched his eyes.
“No… I’m not sure it is. Can I tell you a story, Jem?”
“I like stories.”
“When I was a boy we lived close by a man who kept a wolf in a cage. I thought it might be a big dog but my father told me to stay away from the wolf. When I asked him what wolf, he hit me on the ear and told me not to be stupid, that I knew what wolf. I didn’t stay away, though.
"Every day I would sneak through a hole in the fence around the yard where the wolf stayed in a cage… a little tiny cage… and he could just turn around. That’s all he did all day long, turn, turn, turn. I brought him scraps left over from our meals. He would gobble them down in an instant and look for more but that’s all I had.
“One day I tried to turn him loose. I used a big rock to hit the lock on the cage. I hit it again and again until my arms got tired and my hand felt like bees were buzzing inside it. I thought I could break the lock. But it was too hard and it wouldn’t break. The wolf stood there looking at me with his ears perked and his eyes bright, as if he knew what I was trying to do.
"I imagined him running away down the alley and into the woods… finally being free. I couldn’t do it though… I couldn’t break the lock and set him free. A boy hasn’t the strength needed to do such a thing.
“A couple weeks later we moved away… we were always moving. My parents were very poor. We’d stay a couple months at one place and then have to move to another place. I never saw that old wolf again. Sometimes I dream about him though.
"I dream that I am the wolf. I dream I am locked in a place where I will never get out. I dream how people walk by me all day long and no matter how I wail at them, none of them look my way. They don’t see me. I am invisible. And no matter how I try and wake myself up, I can’t. I’m already awake.
“So I think I make up stories in my head about God speaking to me. It probably isn’t really Him. It is that wolf in the cage speaking to me. It is my mind playing tricks on me. That happens when a person is stuck in a place where they have no hope of escaping from… they start to have delusions… they hear voices.”
“You need someone to set you free.”
Jem held Billy’s hand in hers.
“I’ll help… so will my mommy and my mom. You’ll see. We’ll all help set you free and you won’t hear those old wolf voices any more.”
Chapter 34—I Do
“Do you, Lisa, take this man, Billy, as your lawfully wedded husband?”
They stood together in back of Twenty Nine Katz on a stunning June day… Lisa insisted on being married there. She hated churches or anything to do with religion. Billy didn’t argue being much of the same mind. A Jewish Rabbi, a friend of Tom Three Deer’s youngest son Chayton, agreed to perform the ceremony.
The jitters had Lisa in their clutches. She didn’t remember being this nervous when she married Jem’s father, Richard. Of course, they’d just been kids and neither of them knew what they were doing, or anything about life for that matter. Poor Richard… dressed in the same blue suit that he’d be buried in just a year later after he fell asleep and crashed his semi-truck head-on into a railroad train.
“We have some bad news, ma’am.”
Sometimes, in the moments just after waking, Lisa could still hear the policemen banging on her door as if they were trying to knock it down.
“I do.”
A frog croaked in Lisa's throat. It sounded to her as if someone else choked on the words. Everything seemed set in slow-motion. She glanced around the nearly empty chapel. She wished her mother could be there watching as she did at her first wedding, but Lisa’s father had taken care of that… shooting her dead in a drunken fit of rage before putting the pistol into his own mouth and pulling the trigger… that fucking old no-good bastard.
“Leave him, mom.”
Lisa had begged her, over and over.
"Leave him..."
Stop it, Lisa, she told herself. The past is gone and th
is is a new day, a better day.
Jem, her little flower girl, stood next to Billy smiling a big toothless smile… after losing her front teeth to the tooth fairy… and bouncing up and down on the balls of her little white slippered feet. The court had finally granted her custody of her daughter after what seemed like years of wrangling. Billy had been instrumental in that by giving Lisa his savings in order to pay the attorney.
Roger Barnes, Billy’s best man, stood directly behind Billy in a dark tuxedo. The gruff-looking guy had tears running down both his cheeks. Roger offered to close down the tavern so that Billy and Lisa could be married there and they gratefully accepted.
Allison Johns stood behind Lisa in her pink bride’s maid dress. Lisa had a mad notion of marrying her too, especially after Allison admitted her affair with Billy. Rather than feeling jealous, Lisa found herself amazingly turned on by visualizing Allison and Billy together, or perhaps even the three of them.
Allison’s mother Maura and her lover Jamie sat behind everyone else in the back of the room, arm in arm, looking as though they wished they could be marrying each other too. They made eyes at each other, kissing and caressing one another with such affection that Lisa couldn't help wondering if one day she might share those same moments with Allison.
Tom Three Deer and his wife Michelle sat beside Maura and Jamie, with Kimi, their daughter, and her new husband, Carlson Twin Bears, whose life Tom had saved many years ago back at Pine Ridge. Lisa hoped her life with Billy would be as happy as Tom's and his family.
Yelena sat apart from everyone. Looking at her, Lisa wondered if the old woman might be lost in the memories of her youth, of her marriage to the wild Gypsy boy, and of her travels along the banks of the River Volga. Yelena had given Lisa a beautiful bracelet she said she had worn on her wedding day over fifty years ago. Though she didn’t want to accept the gift, Yelena told Lisa that it would be good luck for her to wear it.
"It is of no use to me, pretty lady. Please take it. It is a good luck charm made by Gypsies. Whoever wears it is blessed with long life and much happiness. I want very much for you to have it."
Billy fairly glowed, looking every bit as if it might be the happiest day of his life. The little boy who showed up at Twenty Nine Katz not so long ago now stood tall and proud as a man, the man who Lisa had always desired but never dared believe existed.
“Do you have the ring?”
The Rabbi looked to Billy. Billy turned to his Best Man. Roger wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hands, fumbled into his jacket pocket, and handed the ring forward to Billy.
“Yes, sir, I have it.”
“Place the ring on Lisa’s finger, Billy, and please repeat after me: with this ring, I thee wed.”
Billy took her pale slender shaking hand in his, brown and firm, and slid the golden ring onto her finger as he gazed into her eyes. It fit perfectly. Her heart spoke in rhythm to the Rabbi's words… telling her she'd never been more in love than at that moment. Lisa scarce imagined anyone could be so happy.
Touching the Gypsy bracelet she wore Lisa wondered fleetingly how long the feeling would last. She thought of her first husband, how they had spent but a handful of days together before his passing, like Yelena and her young love.
The world was too hard a place for love to bloom for long, like a rose growing in concrete it was bound to wither and die. She remembered all the romance stories she had read as a girl growing up in the slums of Los Angeles under the shadow of her abusive drunk of a father and how they all ended happily and forever after.
Even then she sensed that love was just a fairy tale told to children who didn’t know any better. Her parents taught her all about love and how badly it hurt. Her mother was love personified yet she had attracted the most hateful of men and suffered brutally for it without even so much as a whimper.
No one was watching her too closely so Lisa walked outside. Going to the old picnic table that lingered ever so near the edge of the sea she sat down careful not to rumble her dress too much, lighted a cigarette, took a long draw on it, and felt the familiar dizziness and nausea wash over her.
The ocean was restless. It surged against the rocky cliff behind the tavern, withdrew a bit, and then heaved upon the shores again, like a fighter never wearied. Lisa thought of Allison, of how the kisses seemed to blossom in her eyes when they were together, and whether or not she had made the right choice by marrying Billy Austin.
If it meant the end of her relationship with Allison she never would have went through with it. Seeing Maura and Jamie at the wedding gave her hope that the love she felt for the beautiful blonde girl from southern California was just beginning and not ending.
She hadn’t told Billy of Allison's confession. It hurt her that he didn’t confide in her but she told herself it all happened before they met so there was no reason why he would even consider telling him about his past lovers.
Still, she had opened up to him in ways she had never done with anyone. She loved how Billy listened to her without interruption, how he hung upon her every word as if it might be the last thing passing between them.
Perhaps she was wrong. Billy hadn’t grown up at all. He was still a little boy hiding in corners with his dark little secrets as if no one would ever discover what a rascal he really was. Lisa thought what a thin line separated love from hate and how careful she must step in order not to trip over it.
Why had Allison suddenly felt the need to confess her transgressions with Billy Austin? Was it merely a ploy on her part to nullify the feelings Lisa had for him? Perhaps Allison wanted Billy for herself. She wondered if when she walked back into the tavern that she might see them dancing together close and tender with eyes only for each other.
Had no one noticed her missing? She was the bride, after all. A sort of anger began to blossom in her stomach like a hard little knot that she couldn’t seem to unravel.
"Stop it, Lisa. You know better."
Chapter 35—Hello to Jell-O
A cold, wet, and squishy glob of something cold hit Billy in the back of the head
He put his hand to his hair. It came away full of green goop. What the hell? He tasted it. Jell-O. He heard a squeal of delight and turned his head in time to see Lisa running out of the kitchen holding a large bowl of the green jiggly stuff, with Jem and Allison right behind her. He’d just sat down to eat a sandwich, and now, this.
“So that’s how they want to play it, huh?”
Billy giggled at his wife's antics as he ran to the refrigerator. Inside another bowl full of red Jell-O jiggled… cheap fun Lisa called it. It became clear to him now. The night before he’d gone to the refrigerator to get a soda and saw a dozen plastic Tupperware bowls full of Jell-O in there. When he asked Lisa why all the Jell-O… were they going on a picnic… she giggled and told him he’d have to wait to find out… that it would be some cheap fun.
Taking a bowl into his hands he walked over to look out the window. It jiggled as he walked making him start laughing again. He could see that Lisa and Jem waiting just outside the front door to ambush him, with Allison nowhere to be seen… he suspected she lay in wait too. Slipping out the back door and creeping through the bushes that grew thick and green alongside the house the hot still air stifled him as sand flies buzzed around his head but didn’t alight.
“Yo, ho, ho! I got you!”
He hollered as he leapt out of the shrubbery armed with a big gob of Jell-O in one hand and a full bowl in the other, ready to do battle.
“Oh, sweetie, you wouldn’t do that to me, would you?’
Lisa purred like a tigress. He hesitated ever so slightly. And with that, Allison—looking extremely alluring in a white tee shirt cut off just below the bottom of her breasts and matching short shorts—slipped up behind him dumping a whole bowl of yellow Jell-O right on top of Billy’s head.
“Oh, are you ever going to get it now!”
Billy said in a menacing voice, with Jell-O leaking down over his face and co
vering his shirt. Allison ran but before she could make a clean get-away he pelted her right between her shoulders with a big messy gob of the squishy red stuff. Jem began laughing so hard she crumpled to the ground. Billy loomed over her for just a second with wide eyes and his best scary face just before he dumped his entire bowl of red Jell-O all over her.
“Mom! Help me!”
Jem squealed in mock fear with delight on her face. "
Help, Mommy!”
Allison and Lisa leaped on Billy’s back as Jem jumped up to get more ammunition from the refrigerator. After several more trips to the kitchen they were all covered with the sticky sweet mess from their heads to their toes. They collapsed in a heap along with Jem in the soft green grass, laughing until tears rolled down their cheeks and hugging each other close, giggling again at how they were all four covered in red and green and yellow Jell-O. Allison lay on top of him while Lisa and Jem lay on either side.
“I got you so good, Billy.”
Allison was peering into his face with her incredible blue eyes and giggling again at the thought of it.
“You never even saw it coming.”
“You just wait, girl.”
Billy started to laugh at her giggles and tickled her until Allison leaned in kissing him full on the mouth. They were in the habit of kissing each other hello and goodbye much like Billy and Lisa did. Billy didn’t know if Lisa minded their kissing… she had never said anything about it so he’d never brought it up either. Allison’s tongue touched his for just a few seconds as her shirt rode up; she pressed her tiny breasts into his chest so he could feel her hot and excited before she rolled off pulling down her shirt and still giggling.
“I’m going to change my clothes and make a drink… care to join me?”
Allison took Lisa by the hand in leading her away. She looked over her shoulder at Billy and winked… he wondered about the longing he saw in those blue eyes. He was so excited he ached.
“I want to come with.”
Jem giggled as she got up, taking Billy by the hand to help him to his feet and into the house.