One summer, p.20
One Summer, page 20
“In the fridge.” Glenda was in the bathroom giving her two girls a bath. Their every splash and giggle could be heard in the living room—the trailer was that small. It boggled Johnny’s mind how Glenda could live in a space consisting of two tiny bedrooms, a living room barely big enough for a couch, an easy chair, and a TV, a minuscule kitchen, and an equally minuscule bathroom, with four kids and not go insane.
“Jeremy, would you do me a favor and get me a beer?”
Silence greeted this request. Jeremy was too caught up in his program to hear. Johnny thought about trying again, at a greatly increased volume, but then decided against it. Let the kid watch TV in peace.
“Come on, pardner, got to scoot,” he said to Jake, who obligingly permitted himself to be set down on the couch. Johnny got up, stretched, and walked into the kitchen in his socks to get himself a beer. His sneakers had been lost somewhere beneath the couch, removed earlier by Jake, who was developing a fascination with shoe strings.
Opening the refrigerator door, Johnny saw one intact six-pack with some surprise. He could have sworn there had been two. How many beers had he drunk?
Did it matter anyway? Johnny mused as he pulled one free of the rings and popped the top.
“Hey, Johnny, throw me a Coke!” Jeremy called over his shoulder.
“No Coke!” Glenda shouted from the bathroom.
Jeremy shrugged. Johnny poured the kid a glass of milk and took it over to him. It was really touching how Glenda tried so hard to be a good mother to her kids. Making them drink milk instead of pop, for instance. Giving every one of them a bath every night. Reading books to the younger ones, though Glenda had never read anything more complicated than a cookbook herself, to Johnny’s knowledge. Making sure that Jeremy and Ashley, at six the older girl, did their homework on school nights. Glenda hadn’t been raised with such care. Johnny knew that her childhood had been almost as rough as his own, and he thought a lot of her for trying to give her kids better.
At least, since they’d started going out, he’d made sure there was always food in the refrigerator. He’d gone hungry himself enough times to be unable to stand the idea of kids not having enough to eat.
“Ugh,” Jeremy said without looking up as Johnny set the glass on the floor beside him.
“You’re welcome,” Johnny answered dryly, and settled back down on the couch to drink his beer. Jake immediately climbed onto his lap again, resting his curly blond head against Johnny’s chest. Poor kid, he didn’t see much of his dad, and he was clearly hungry for a man’s attention.
“Tell us a story, tell us a story!” Ashley and her sister erupted from the bathroom, galloped the few feet down the hall to the living room, and leaped on Johnny. Freshly bathed, with their blond hair pinned on top of their heads and wearing sweet little ruffled nightgowns, they were so cute that he forgave them for spilling his beer.
“Not a scary one,” three-year-old Lindsay said solemnly as she claimed the knee that Jake wasn’t using. Jake, jealous of his prerogatives, pushed his sister. Lindsay pushed back.
“One about monsters,” Ashley said wickedly. Ashley was curled up as close to Johnny’s side as she could get.
“No scary ones!” Lindsay screamed, pushing at her sister.
“Could you guys please shut up?” This request was made by Jeremy in a loud tone.
“All right, bedtime!” Glenda came into the room, clapping her hands. Her T-shirt was soaked, and so was the front of her jeans. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Johnny noticed that fact without the interest it should have provoked, though Glenda was a voluptuous woman. Damn it to hell anyway, what was wrong with him? But he knew the answer, and it didn’t make him happy: Glenda wasn’t the woman he wanted.
The woman he wanted had been at that damned town picnic—the picnic that probably would have run him out on a rail if he had dared show his face at it—with another man. The respectable, solid citizen type. The prick.
Johnny took another swig of beer.
“Aw, Mom!” four voices said in chorus.
“I mean it! Hit the beds! I’m gonna count to three—and the last kid in has to sit in the middle of the back seat tomorrow when we go to church.”
That produced immediate results. The trio on the couch scrambled for their beds, and even Jeremy got up and turned off the TV.
“It’s just a trick, Mom. You know I always gotta sit in the middle to keep the little kids from fighting,” he said gloomily.
“You’re always the last kid in bed,” Glenda retorted, ruffling his hair as she walked by him toward the bedroom that opened directly off the living room, the larger one that she shared with the two girls.
From down the hall, Jake called plaintively, “Mommy, I’m scared!”
“Go on to him, Jeremy,” Glenda said over her shoulder.
“Do I have to?”
“Yes!”
“Shit!” Jeremy said under his breath. Fortunately for him, his mother didn’t hear.
Johnny finished his beer and started on another to the sound of Glenda’s voice reading her girls a bedtime story. From the opposite end of the trailer, he could hear Jeremy reading to Jake. Ever since he’d been coming around, that was how they’d done it: Glenda had read to the girls, and Jeremy had read to Jake.
When Glenda finally emerged from the bedroom, she smiled at him and put a finger to her lips as she closed the door. Then she walked past the silent TV and down the hall to say good night to the boys.
Johnny drained the last drops from his can and walked into the kitchen to get a replacement. It was getting harder and harder to get the cans free of the damned little plastic rings, he discovered as he yanked at one. The remaining three, still looped together, dropped off the refrigerator shelf right onto his toe.
“Ouch! Goddamn it to hell!” The beer he held in his hand crashed to the floor alongside the others and rolled away. Johnny hopped about on one foot cursing as Glenda emerged from the back bedroom to glare at him.
“Hush!”
“Hurt my damned toe!”
“Shhh!”
Johnny picked up the half-empty six-pack. It hung by a loop from one finger as he gingerly tried to set his foot on the ground.
“Want to watch a tape?” Glenda, callously unsympathetic to his pain, stood in front of the TV holding up a videocassette.
Johnny grunted, stuck the beers back on the shelf, and retrieved his fallen one, which had rolled partway under a cabinet. He shut the refrigerator door and limped over to collapse on the couch. He massaged his big toe through the thick white athletic sock. Damned thing was probably broken. Glenda, meanwhile, slid the tape into the VCR and curled up beside him.
The movie was one he’d already seen, and Glenda, tenderly rubbing her hand along his thigh as she stared at the screen, was building up to something he didn’t particularly feel like doing. With one foot, he probed unobtrusively beneath the couch for his sneakers. There they were!
“Gotta go, babe,” he said, bending to retrieve his shoes and slide them back on. He tied the laces, then took a final swig from his beer before setting it down on the floor.
“Now?” She was frowning.
“Wolf’s home alone. If I don’t go let him out, he’ll do a horse pile in the living room.”
“You ought to house-train that dog.”
Johnny grunted and stood up. Surprisingly, the movement made him feel kind of woozy, and he staggered.
“How many beers have you had?” Glenda stood up, too, and steadied him with a hand on his arm.
Johnny shrugged and, stepping away from her touch, fished in his pocket for his keys.
Glenda walked over to the refrigerator and looked inside, then came back to Johnny, shaking her head.
“Uh-unh, you ain’t goin’ nowhere, friend,” she said, deftly removing the keys he had just extracted from his pocket.
“Give me back my keys!”
“I won’t!” Glenda retreated, holding the keys behind her back. “You know, you drink too much.”
“I don’t either. Give me those keys.” Johnny walked over to her, wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug, and tried to wrestle the keys from her fingers.
“You get caught for drunken driving, they’ll send you back to jail.”
That gave him pause. “I’m not drunk.”
“Yes you are.”
He let go of her and collapsed again onto the couch. “So I’ll spend the night,” he said, knowing what she would think of that idea.
“You cain’t! Tom”—Tom was her almost ex-husband—“might find out and use it against me in the divorce.”
“So give me my keys.”
Glenda stood there for a moment, undecided. She was chewing on a fingernail, his keys dangling from her other hand. He could lunge and get them, but he didn’t feel like lunging, and besides, he didn’t want to hurt Glenda. As unfocused as he was feeling, he just might miscalculate his own strength.
“I’ll call you a ride,” she said after a minute. Johnny pondered this surprisingly sensible suggestion. A taxi would be a good idea, he thought. He really had quite a buzz going.
Glenda disappeared into her bedroom to use the phone.
Johnny leaned back against the cushions. The couch had a broken leg—it was propped up at that end with a dictionary and a paperback romance—and a green chenille bedspread was spread over it as a kind of makeshift slipcover, but it was surprisingly comfortable. If he wasn’t careful, he just might fall asleep.
“Don’t go to sleep,” Glenda said, plopping back down beside him and staring at the TV again. “It’d take a bulldozer to move you.”
“I won’t.”
For a moment neither of them said anything as Glenda watched the TV and Johnny stared at nothing. Then Glenda glanced sideways at him.
“How come you don’t wanna do it?”
“Do what?”
“You know.”
Johnny did. He shrugged and slid his arm around her. “What makes you think I don’t?”
“I can tell.” Her hand slid over his crotch in a way that was more matter-of-fact than suggestive.
Stung, Johnny caught her hand, removed it to her own lap, and dropped his arm from around her shoulders.
“Maybe I’ve had too much to drink, like you said.”
“That never slowed you down before.”
“Glenda, I was eleven years younger back then. Nothing slowed me down.”
For a few minutes neither of them said anything. Johnny thought maybe she’d gotten engrossed in her movie and hoped that he’d heard all he was going to hear on the subject.
“Johnny?”
“What?”
“Can I ask you somethin’?”
“Short of putting a pillow over your face, I don’t guess I can stop you.” His reply was sour because he guessed the question had to do with why he wasn’t hard, which was something he didn’t feel like talking about. It was embarrassing not to be able to get it up instantly. Last week, before he’d gotten so tangled up with Miss High and Mighty Schoolteacher that he didn’t know which end of him was which, he hadn’t had to work at bedding Glenda. The urge had just come naturally, as it should.
“You got somethin’ goin’ with Miss Grant?”
“What?” he almost yelped as his eyes swung around to Glenda’s face. Eleven years ago, she hadn’t been able to read minds.
“You heard me.”
It took a minute for Johnny to recover his poise. “What in the world makes you ask a question like that?”
“Somethin’ in her voice.”
“Something in her voice?” He must have had too much to drink, because the conversation was befuddling him.
“Yeah. I could tell she didn’t much like the idea of you bein’ with me. She sounded real stiff-like. Not friendly, like she usually is.”
“When did she sound real stiff-like?”
“When I talked to her.”
Johnny almost ground his teeth. A hideous suspicion occurred to him, so hideous that he was almost afraid to give it voice.
“When did you talk to her?”
“A little while ago. When I asked her to come get you.”
“Goddamn!” Johnny bounded up off the couch and glared down at Glenda. The room swayed again, but he stayed on his feet. “What the hell did you call her for? I thought you were calling a cab!”
“There’s only two taxis in Tylerville, and both drivers are liable to still be at the picnic. You know that.”
He’d forgotten. “Goddamn!” he said bitterly. Turning, he walked to the TV, snatched his keys off the top where Glenda had left them, and headed out the front door.
“Johnny, stop! You cain’t just leave!”
“The hell I can’t!”
Glenda followed him outside. She was almost wringing her hands, she was so upset. “But she’s coming! She’ll be here any minute! What’ll she think if you’re gone? And anyway, you’re still drunk. You cain’t ride that motorcycle drunk.”
“I don’t give a damn what Miss Goody Two-Shoes thinks. And I’m not drunk.”
He reached his motorcycle and pulled it down from its center stand. For a minute he had to brace himself against the weight of it, which normally wouldn’t have bothered him.
“You are so. Give me those keys!”
She had followed him down to the gravel drive that ran past her trailer. Hers was closest to the road, and a sickly yellow lamp at the gate of the development shed a meager amount of illumination on the scene. By its light, he was able to see that she was really upset.
He put his bike on its kickstand and caught her by the shoulders.
“Hey, I’ll be all right,” he said, his voice gentling.
Glenda stared up at him for a minute. Without bright daylight to point out her flaws, she looked almost as young as she had all those years ago, when they’d been friends more than lovers. Kind of like now, Johnny thought, and felt a rush of affection for her.
“You really like her, don’t you? Miss Grant.”
Johnny thought about lying, but he was too on edge and too buzzed and too sick of playing the whole stupid game. “Yeah, I really like her.”
“She’s real classy, I know. But isn’t she—well, like, old?”
Johnny shrugged. “We’re both adults.”
“Are you sleeping with her?”
Johnny released Glenda’s shoulders and turned away. “You don’t think I’m going to answer that, do you?” Grabbing the motorcycle’s handlebars, he kicked the stand up and straddled the seat.
“Johnny, wait!” Glenda pressed up against him and threw her arms around his neck. Johnny looked down at her with more than a hint of irritation.
“Let go, Glenda.”
“You’re just gonna get hurt, messin’ around with her. She’s not your kind. Not our kind.”
“That’s my problem, isn’t it? Would you please let go of my neck?”
“But—” Glenda’s eyes shifted briefly, staring out into the night, and when they returned to his, there was resignation in her face. “Yeah, I guess it is your problem. You be careful, you hear? I’d hate to wake up in the mornin’ and hear that you’d been arrested—or had a bad wreck.”
“I’ll be careful.” Surprised by her easy capitulation, Johnny dropped a quick kiss onto her cheek and inserted the key into the ignition. Turning it, he gunned the throttle and kicked the engine into life.
Maybe he had a buzz on—okay, he did have a buzz on—but he could ride this baby through hell in the dark blindfolded. He’d get home all right.
With a wave to Glenda and a shower of gravel he was gone, roaring into the night.
28
Glenda watched him go, a kind of sadness on her face as she wrapped her arms around herself. He hadn’t seen what she’d seen—the blue car coming around the bend, past the light at the other end of the trailer park. It was Rachel Grant’s. That kind of foreign car was unique enough in Tylerville that it was instantly recognizable.
Johnny had been mad as hell at her for calling Miss Grant to come fetch him, but who else could she have called? Not many people she knew around town wanted to let Johnny Harris into a car with them. A lot of them thought he’d killed that girl. Glenda didn’t. She’d known him all her life, and she’d never seen him lift a hand to a woman in violence. A man who didn’t hit, to her way of thinking, didn’t kill. Maybe another man in a drunken fight, but not a woman, and not the way that girl was killed. It took somebody vicious mean, or crazy, for violence like that.
Johnny was going to be mad when he found out that he hadn’t succeeded in avoiding Miss Grant after all. The lane leading back to the trailer park was wide enough for only one vehicle to traverse at a time. Glenda didn’t see the schoolteacher politely pulling over to let Johnny by. Glenda had told Rachel that he was drunk as a skunk and liable to kill himself before he went a mile.
Johnny and Miss Grant, getting it on. Now that she thought about it, Glenda wondered why she hadn’t suspected it before. He’d always had a soft spot for the schoolteacher, reading books and writing things to impress her and being real polite when she was around. And since he’d come back, the two of them had hung out together a lot. Why, she’d even given Johnny a job in her daddy’s hardware store.
And Miss Grant was kind of pretty, in a well-scrubbed sort of way. Her clothes were all wrong—really frumpy, with none of the style on which Glenda prided herself—and she had no chest at all. But her complexion was good, very good, for a woman her age, and she had a snooty air about her that a man from a background like Johnny’s might find kind of sexy. A challenge and all that.
Still, it put paid to her budding hopes that she could grab him for herself. Not that she was crazy in love with him or anything, but he was good with the kids.
“Glenda!” The whisper startled her out of her reverie. Stiffening, eyes widening, she turned and peered around. On three sides there was nothing but darkness. Behind her now was the dim glow of the light.
“Who is it?” For some unknown reason, she was afraid. Which was silly. There was nothing to be afraid of in Tylerville. No crime at all, except an occasional silly teenager shooting out some lights or knocking over a mailbox with a bat. Nothing violent, not even a mugging, in eleven years.
