Almost without thinking, I stepped toward him and slipped my hand into his, wrapping my fingers safely around one of his.
For a second it seemed as though he leaned away from me, an automatic reaction to approaching danger, but then his eyebrows lifted slightly and he grinned.
I shook my head, already regretting my actions, but Clyde’s laughter bounced off the walls and echoed through my heart, and I realized I hadn’t heard him laugh like that since before he went to prison. His voice boomed as if his happiness came from deep inside, and the sound startled me so much, I took a step back and stared.
Wanting to hear more.
Chapter Thirteen
I could have kicked myself for holding Clyde’s hand. Good grief. He and I were not hand holders. We didn’t touch each other. Or hug. Truth be told, nowadays I never touched anyone except for bumping elbows with Ruthie when we sat too close at football games.
But Clyde’s hand felt different than Ruthie’s elbows.
I had lain awake thinking what his skin felt like against mine. The moistness of his palm. How my fingers smelled like him afterward, an unrecognizable scent that teased me until late into the night. Was it cologne? Deodorant? Some kind of cleaner from the Dairy Queen?
By lunch on Monday, it had long since washed away, but I ran the back of my forefinger beneath my nostrils, pretending to rub my nose. All I smelled was hand sanitizer.
I stood in front of Velma’s living-room window watching the skies darken over her back pasture. Drops of rain plopped quarter-sized circles on the top of the old picnic table, and a metal lawn chair rocked back and forth in the grass, threatening to tumble. Through the thin panes, I could feel the temperature dropping, but Velma—always the older sister—was too busy interrogating me to pay any attention to the weather.
“What time do you go in today?” She sat at the computer desk in the corner of the room, her head tilted back as she looked through her bifocals. Paying the bills was typically Ansel’s job.
“One thirty.”
“You worked much overtime lately?”
“Not really.”
“What you been doing with your free time then?”
Even for Velma, she was extra-inquisitive, but I began to understand. I let my head drop to one side as I crooned, “What have you heard about me?”
Her lips puckered. “Clyde Felton.”
It hadn’t been twenty-four hours since I held Clyde’s hand at Picnic Hollow—not to mention we had been alone—so she must have heard from the Parker sisters about the stroll down Highway 84. “We were just walking down the road.”
She stopped clicking her mouse but didn’t look at me. “They were saying you held his hand out at the lake.”
“But nobody was even—” In my voice I heard the whine of my fourteen-year-old self, insisting to my older sister that I would be good if only she gave me permission to go to the skating rink in Lubbock. But I wasn’t asking permission for anything.
“Aw, it don’t matter, Lynda. You and Clyde were bound to end up together.” She leaned back in the oak desk chair. “Does Ruthie know?”
“It’s not like we have anything to tell.” I frowned at the box monitor. “We’re just talking, that’s all.”
She reached for a Kleenex and wiped the computer screen, scrubbing firmly on a few fingerprints, and I wondered if Ansel had been eating popcorn while he played solitaire. “It’s clear Clyde’s crazy about you. Has been for a while now.” She let her palms fall to her thighs. “But I bet he has a thing or two he’d like to say to Hoby.”
Naturally she would cut straight to the crux of my worries. Even though I no longer had feelings for my husband, I did still have … a husband.
“A lot of us have a thing or two we’d like to say to Hoby.” I leaned my forehead against the cool surface of the sliding-glass door. Outside, dirt and gravel swirled across the porch, and in the distance, lightning shot starkly through the blackened sky. The pasture was alive with frenzied movement, and a dull grumble sounded every now and again, but in contrast, things lay still in the house. Only the faint scent of dust gave any indication that the storm brewing outside might ever reach us in our cozy nest. If I dated Clyde, I might be creating my own storm.
“I can’t go the rest of my life waiting for Hoby,” I said.
“Clearly he ain’t coming back.”
Her words cut like a knife across my pride, but I said nothing.
My sister was silent for a moment, and without looking I figured she had that stop-feeling-sorry-for-yourself expression on her face. She exhaled softly. “I reckon I’m borrowing trouble, but if you ever try to legally separate yourself from Hoby, he could mess with your mind again.”
My body wilted like a day-old carnation, and I slumped against the doorframe. It had been quite a while since I considered the notion that my husband might come back to Trapp. Right after he drove away in that bright-red wrecker of his, I had hoped and prayed he would come back, but after a while, I stopped praying.
The bedroom door down the hallway creaked open, and Ansel hobbled into the living room. “You girls solved all the world’s problems?” He chuckled at his own joke.
“Not just yet, but we’re working on it,” Velma said.
I smiled at the gray coveralls my brother-in-law wore. Velma had purchased the gently worn garment at Harold Porterfield’s yard sale, but when she sat down with her seam ripper to remove Harold’s embroidered name from the front pocket, she had stopped short halfway through the task and decided there was no need to continue. Over the years the coveralls had become Ansel’s favorite work-around-the-house uniform, partly because they were comfortable and partly because his wife had teasingly labeled him old.
Ansel sat in his recliner and raised the footrest, and I imagined his joints rusted like an old tractor. Within a few minutes, he was snoring softly.
“How’s he doing?” I asked.
“Same.”
I glanced at the churning clouds and noticed Ansel’s cattle making their way to the barn. A calf jumped and kicked, adding to the maelstrom in the sky.
Velma, a little rusty herself, stood and took four slow steps to the adjacent kitchen. She glanced back at the recliner, and her eyes turned into empty pudding bowls, scraped clean of their usual rich, chocolaty goodness.
“I’m not going to change,” I said.
“I know you’re not.” She smiled gently while she used a hand-cranked can opener on a can of pork and beans. “But I sure don’t know what I’d do without you, Lynda.”
It wasn’t like Velma to talk that way. Her strength and independence defined her motherly take-charge attitude in all she did, and she never needed anyone. Certainly not me. I stepped to the kitchen and pulled a pitcher from the cabinet just as a gust of wind pelted sand against the house like mosquitoes on a screen door. “Do you think we should take shelter in the bathroom?”
Velma waved the can opener toward the computer desk, her determination renewed now that I needed advice. “The weather radio will let us know if it gets that bad, but lawdy, I hope I don’t have to wake Ansel.”
I tore open a packet of lemonade mix and spilled the yellow powder into the pitcher, inhaling the lemony cloud it produced. As I let the faucet water run, I coughed to clear the bitterness from my lungs, wishing it were so easy to cleanse the bitterness from my heart.
“You’ll make it all right when Ansel’s gone,” I said softly, unsure of this new role I was taking on as the encouraging sister. It felt like a lie. It was a lie. “You won’t be alone.”
She reached into the refrigerator for a package of wieners, and her silence echoed as though the tiny kitchen were a vast underground cavern.
I didn’t know what else to say. My feeble words couldn’t prevent Velma’s pain any more than they could save Ansel’s life.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
I stirred the lemonade with a wooden spoon, watching specks of powder spin on the water’s surface, unable—or unwilling—to dissolve. “Maybe I won’t talk to Clyde again. We sure don’t need any more drama around here.”
Velma wielded a paring knife to cut small pieces of wiener into the saucepan with the beans. She said nothing, so I tossed the spoon into the sink.
“No.” A sigh slid from her lungs with that one little word, and it sounded as if the rest of her strength went with it. “You need Clyde.”
I stared unseeingly at the calendar above the sink, wanting to be a source of encouragement to her, yet unable to pull my selfish thoughts away from my own problems. “I’m scared, Velma. What if he’s like Hoby?” A sob made its way up from my stomach, but I quickly stifled it. “What if I just get hurt again?”
Her spoon gently scraped the bottom of the saucepan. “Aw, Lynda. Clyde Felton’s not going to hurt you.”
“He could have changed.”
“Nobody changes that much.”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to embrace her words and hold them close until they seeped through my chest and nestled in my heart. But I couldn’t. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a silent demon still whispered.
“He even goes to church now.” Velma calmly removed a blue serving bowl from the cabinet. “Now that I think about it … if you and me went to church, you’d see Clyde more often. And I’d see JohnScott more, too.”
What on earth? She jerked me from my thoughts and tossed me under a speeding locomotive. “What are you saying?”
“The folks down there are different now, right?”
I bit the inside of my cheek, not hard, just enough to worry the skin. Velma and Ansel weren’t churchgoing types, and she knew better than to suggest I was. “From what I hear, a lot of them have changed, but I’m sure a few are still holding out for Christ to come back.”
She lifted the saucepan with one hand and spooned beanie-weanies into the bowl with the other. “I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but I’d kinda like to see JohnScott somewhere other than the sideline of a football game. Don’t you think it’d be worth it to see Ruthie more often? And hear her husband preaching the words?”
I didn’t need to attend worship service to hear Dodd Cunningham preach at me. Clearly I was his number-one target recruit, and he pelted me with subtle encouragement nonstop. But as Velma rinsed her Revere Ware under the faucet, I realized she wasn’t talking about me. Or Clyde. Or even JohnScott. After all I had been through with that stinking church, she would never shove me toward that white-frame building unless she had a darn good reason. And that reason was snoring in the recliner.
“Ruth Ann knows where to find me.” I mumbled the excuse, not wanting to think about the true source of our discussion.
Velma smacked her lips as though her tongue were covered in taffy. “What’s that mean?”
“She’s married, going to college, wanting a baby.” I shrugged. “She’s got a full life.”
“You want a cart of cheese to go with that whine?”
“I’m not whining. Just stating facts, and she don’t need me.”
Ouch. I hadn’t meant to say that last part.
A spray of angry raindrops pelleted against the window as the clouds finally dumped their water on the ground below, beating the dry grass as the wind moaned against the roof. Velma and I both froze for a few seconds, awed by the power of the storm, and then she carried our gourmet lunch to the table and plopped the bowl down on the vinyl tablecloth. “Hmmph.”
I sat next to her and peeled a paper plate from the stack in the middle of the table. “I hate it when you make that sound.”
“I know.”
Of course she knew. The woman had raised me since I was fourteen, and we’d been through hell and high water together. She knew what irritated me, what worried me, what made me happy. And she knew, without my telling her, that I’d like to see Ruthie more often. That I wanted to see Dodd, too. That I even wanted to hear him preaching the words. But she also knew my frazzled emotions had more than they could deal with just thinking about Ansel.
And she knew I couldn’t … wouldn’t … go back to the church. Not yet.
“I know,” she repeated.
Chapter Fourteen
Clyde dropped by Lynda’s house after work, hoping he could get things straightened up in her yard before it got too dark. Her place had wind damage from the storm, but the house would fall down around her before she’d ask for help—from anyone other than Ansel. Clyde figured he was doing them both a favor.
Two clay flowerpots had blown off the porch and now lay broken on the ground, their long-dead plants spilling out like unearthed corpses. Clyde picked up the pieces and dumped them in the trash barrel under the carport, then took an ax to the fallen limbs of the mesquite tree. From the looks of it, the largest one had missed Lynda’s front window by only a few inches.
He worked quickly, and when she pulled up, he was piling the last of the brush at the side of the house.
“I could have done that myself.” She slammed the door of her little hatchback so hard, Clyde thought it might have dented. He laughed to himself. Ansel had kept that car running for years. Wouldn’t it be funny if she ruined it with a tantrum?
“No need to get riled up.” He reached for his ax. “I’ll be on my way.”
“You’d best come in and get a drink of water first.”
Clyde smiled. She’d have to do more than slam the car door if she wanted him to believe she was angry. “You hear about that tornado?” he asked.
“A hundred times. Every single detail.” She rolled her eyes. “It touched down in Slaton. Minimal damage. Metal roof ripped off the feed store. Forty-five years since the F5 hit Lubbock.” She paused as she unlocked the front door. “Though it seems like yesterday to Old Man Guthrie, as told to Sophie Snodgrass and the ladies’ quilting club that met at the diner for their after-piecin’ piece of pie. Lemon meringue.”
“Long day?”
“Not too bad.” Her eyebrows quivered. “I shouldn’t complain though, should I?”
He hadn’t meant the comment as an accusation, so he didn’t answer. He followed her into the kitchen, where he folded himself into a maple dining chair and watched her fetch him a glass of ice water.
“You hungry?” she asked.
“Sure. Pork chops and carrots?”
“Frozen pizza and ranch dressing.”
He chuckled. “I like you better at Dixie’s.”
“Everyone does.” She opened the freezer and removed a Tombstone pizza, then flipped on the oven. “I hate cooking.”
Clyde fought to keep his laughter buried in his chest. Lynda had hated cooking ever since her ninth-grade homemaking class when she burned her German chocolate cake. “Why do you cook for Dixie?”
“It pays more than waitressing.” She ripped away the plastic shrink-wrap, tossed the pizza on the oven rack, and twisted the timer. “It’s different at the diner, though. I don’t have to think about it, or care. The customer orders a pork chop, and all I have to do is throw it on the grill, then slap it on a plate. There’s no planning or shopping or recipe hunting. It’s mindless.”
“It’s a job.” He hated that for her, though he had suspected as much.
“It’s a job,” she said softly.
Clyde’s gaze fell to the table, where he noticed a few folded papers. He reached for them and opened the first. It was a letter, and he immediately felt sick to his stomach. “Why is Neil Blaylock sending you—”
She crossed the room and snatched the papers away from him. “It’s nothing. Just something I found cleaning out a closet.” She tossed them in the plastic trash can near the sink and rested her hands on the counter. “How tall are you?”
So she didn’t want to talk about her old mail. His eyes briefly skimmed the
ceiling. “Why?”
“I was just thinking you’re enormous, and I wondered how enormous you actually are.”
He rubbed the back of his thumb along the seam of his jeans. “Maybe six and a half.”
“Six feet, six inches?”
“Last time they measured.”
She opened the fridge and snatched the ranch dressing from the door, then thunked it on the table in front of him, glaring as though he had said a curse word. “I don’t like the way you talk. They measured you. They weighed you. They cut your hair.” Her shoulders shivered. “It’s like they owned you or something.”
He looked through the back-door window and noticed the neighbor’s hound in the glow of their porch light, loping from one end of the chain-link barrier to the other. “That’s because they did.” He lowered his head. For a fact, the State of Texas had owned him, but he was doing everything in his power to be different now. Lynda didn’t get it.
She had her back to him as she washed her breakfast dishes at the sink, one knee bent. He studied her. She didn’t have to do the dishes while the pizza cooked. She could’ve sat down and talked to him for ten minutes, but there seemed to be a shadow of doubt over her actions—slamming the car door, misunderstanding his comments, washing dishes when she normally would’ve let them pile up—as if the two of them had become strangers at Picnic Hollow. As if she was sorry it had happened.
A surge of panic swelled through him, and he stood almost without thinking, driven by the overwhelming urge to make sure she knew him. To tell her he was different now, and that in the months and years ahead of them, he would be even more different. He walked up behind her, and when she turned, her brow wrinkled.
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