Moon in the Fifth House
Johnny
“YOU KNOW THE constellations?”
“No. Mom did. She was always pointing them out. I never really saw them. Do you?”
“No.”
“Then it’s good we’re not sailors.”
Johnny chuckled.
They were lying on their backs on a blanket under the stars. Iz was at a slant to him and had her head on his gut. He was trailing a hand through her hair that flowed over his side. The fingers of his other hand were laced in hers and she had them pressed to the side of her tit.
Opposite Izzy, Ranger was lying with his back plastered down Johnny’s leg, head on Johnny’s hip.
Johnny’s tent was pitched about ten feet away from them. It was a one-man deal but he’d zipped their two sleeping bags together, they were a snug fit, but they fit, and he figured they’d be totally good to make do with the limited space.
The fire was crackling about five feet away in the opposite direction to the tent.
It was the first and only night of their camping trip and the experience had made Johnny decide they’d have a lot more of them.
But even so, he figured he wouldn’t need to buy a new tent.
It had been the first time in a while that he’d remembered they hadn’t been together for very long.
Mostly this was because Izzy spent the day surprising him.
What he learned probably shouldn’t have surprised him. She didn’t complain much ever, really. She just got on with it.
And the “it” she just got on with was anything and everything. Not just her doing her thing with her pots and her plants and her friends and her sister and her animals and her land.
That day, she helped him load up Mist and then helped unload him and unhitch Ben’s horse trailer before they took off to go camping.
The spot he camped was a mile and a half off the road. He’d packed her backpack and it was half the weight of his, but it didn’t weigh five pounds. Since she didn’t do this sort of thing, he figured that there would be a possibility that he’d need to shift some things around, take on extra weight with some of the stuff in her pack.
She’d hefted it up and didn’t say a word.
She’d then walked a mile and a half with it on her back and she also didn’t say a word except to talk about how it was so cool they were going to have good weather, or ask if he wanted her to take a turn with the cooler he was carrying or point out wildflowers and name them by name. “Look, Johnny, there’s some yarrow . . .” “The foxtail is everywhere . . .” “Awesome, corn poppy . . .” “There’s lupine . . . this place is filled with flowers. It’s amazing.”
He’d camped at this spot so many times he’d lost count and he’d never once seen the flowers.
Now he could say he liked lupine the best.
While he pitched the tent, he asked her to gather kindling for the fire and she did that, grabbing some small, downed branches when she did, carrying them back to the fire pit he’d created years ago and he knew others used besides him. She stacked it neatly, but far enough away from the pit that the dry tinder wouldn’t be in danger of catching a spark.
And then they were there. They were set up. In doing that, they didn’t have a disagreement or an argument. Iz was just along for the ride.
And liking it.
The only hiccup they had was when he took her to the edge of the river to teach her how to fish.
She seemed to like fishing and didn’t get squeamish about the bait. The fish liked her too, and she caught two bluegill before he got his first fish. They were too small to eat so he showed her how to unhook them and toss them back in.
She didn’t get squeamish about that either, to the point she watched her second bluegill swim away, turned to him and said, “This is fun!”
He grinned at her.
She immediately set about re-baiting her hook.
Five minutes later, he caught his first catfish and it was big enough for their dinner. So he immediately moved through spiking it and bleeding it out.
When he threw it aside and looked to her, she was pale and staring at the fish.
Her eyes drifted to his. “Um . . . you said you brought hotdogs in case we weren’t lucky at the lake?”
He tried not to bust out laughing.
But the cooler he had not allowed her to carry had sandwich meat and cheese for their lunch, a six pack for him, a bottle of wine for her, tartar sauce for the fish, cream for their morning coffee, milk, eggs and butter for their morning pancakes and a packet of hotdogs in the very unlikely event he couldn’t catch dinner for her.
“Did I just push you closer to vegetarianism?” he asked.
She swallowed and nodded.
He decided against teasing her by reminding her what was in a hotdog and instead leaned toward her, gave her a brush of his lips and moved back. “I got hotdogs.”
“’Kay,” she whispered.
She gave up on fishing then but she didn’t leave him to it and she didn’t give him shit about it.
She walked to their camp and came back with the book and pens she’d brought that he’d packed for her.
She then sat close to him, her knees up, her book on them, and she wrote in it, alternating between three pens and the times she’d stop to stroke Ranger, who’d gotten bored with fishing and was flat out at her side with his head in her lap.
Johnny didn’t pry when she was journaling. He also didn’t say anything when she put it away, stretched out her long legs in her shorts and tipped her face to the sun, focusing on petting Ranger and nothing else, clearly happy to just sit beside him while he was fishing and . . . be.
Margot never went camping or fishing. She’d cook a cleaned fish one of them caught, but she didn’t want to know about it and further detested hiking, outdoor clothing that was “not feminine in the slightest so precisely what is the point?” as well as mosquitos, sleeping on the ground and not being within driving distance of a mall.
According to his dad, his mother had felt much the same way.
Shandra hiked and camped but got bored easily, and a trip couldn’t last longer than it took a shower to wear off (her estimation, twenty-four hours) or they had to be in a campground that had showers and toilets, and camping in campgrounds was not Johnny’s gig.
It was about being in nature. The quiet of it. Life slowing down and your brain slowing down with it. Not being in nature with a bunch of other people, noisy families, kids out just to get drunk and therefore loud, and a lot of people who didn’t camp often who did stupid shit that could also be dangerous that drove Johnny right up the wall.
Eliza showed no signs of being bored. She said nothing when he caught his second fish, spiked it, bled it out or when he cleaned either of them (however, she didn’t watch, mostly because he took them to a place she couldn’t watch).
She helped him build a fire. She roasted her hotdog. He put his fish on aluminum foil and roasted them. They heated up a can of beans and shared them, eating straight from the can.
After they cleaned up, they made s’mores.
They sat through it all close together, Izzy leaning against him, one of each of their legs tangled.
They swapped stories. They laughed. They kissed a lot.
It was Izzy who got up first and put the blanket out for them to stare at the stars.
But Johnny didn’t say a word against it.
It was the best day he’d had in a long time.
What made it better was having the understanding it was also the first of many.
Izzy brought him back to the present by sharing, “She was a Mercury in retrograde type of person.”
“What’s that mean?” he asked.
“I have no idea. But she did. She always talked about what planets were aligned and what that meant. She used to say things like, ‘Venus is in the Twelfth House!’ That, in particular, meant she’d met some guy she liked. Or, ‘Clearly, Mars is in the Third House.’ This she’d say when Addie or me were acting like know-it-alls.”
Johnny chuckled again, staring at the stars and weaving her hair around his fingers.
“I should look it up, what all that means,” she whispered. “I should translate my mom.”
“Yeah,” he whispered back.
She fell silent.
Johnny did too, staring at the stars, holding hands with Izzy.
“I hate him.” She was still whispering but this one was fierce.
The stars blurred and Johnny felt his body get tight.
“Who, baby?” he asked gently.
“Dad,” she answered. “I hate him.”
He wrapped her hair around his fist like it was him giving her a reassuring hug and started, “Iz—”
“I lied,” she stated.
“Spätzchen,” he murmured.
“We weren’t happy. We were poor. Mom worked hard. She dated guys she liked and thought she could love, but they didn’t want a woman with kids or they just wanted a piece of ass or they drank too much and became jerks. She wanted to find love again. She wanted someone to help out too. She wanted stability, for her, for us. She wanted more. And Addie and me, we had to watch her go through that. Because of him.”
Her tone was low but harsh and when she stopped speaking, Johnny said nothing. He didn’t move. He didn’t prompt her.
He just laid there and waited for her to get more out.
She did.
“Addie was right with what she said in my kitchen. I caught on to it before she did. I saw it. What she found in Perry was what Mom saw in Dad. Dad played the guitar and he was really good. He wrote his own songs and those were really good too. Or as good as I knew, being a little kid. They still seemed good. He was a great singer. He had such a beautiful voice. I remember those times. I remember those being the only good times with him. How he’d get. How he’d be all dreamy and lovey and happy. How he’d put his guitar aside and pull Mom in his lap and hold her close and kiss her. Or catch one of us girls and swing us up and tickle us and shout, ‘I make beautiful babies!’ But it wasn’t that he didn’t get the record deal or get discovered and he got frustrated and bitter. He wasn’t even out of his twenties. There wasn’t time for that. It was just how he was. It was just who he was.”
Her fingers in his were getting tight, biting into the webbing, but Johnny just held on.
“I think it was the dreamer part of him,” she declared. “I think she wanted to be there to watch him build his dream. Live it. I think she liked to think she was his muse. That he’d get off the road and come to us and we’d be his sanctuary against life on the road and his adoring fans. That when he was on tour, he’d step up to the mic and say, ‘This is a song I wrote for the love of my life. For Daphne.’ I think she wanted to grow tomatoes and string beads and raise his daughters and walk at his side into awards shows being gorgeous and proud and people would say, ‘Look at her. The serenity. The beauty. No wonder he writes such amazing music.’ I think that was her dream. I think that was the dream he fed her that she swallowed whole. And I think when it didn’t happen, when it turned dark and ugly, it broke her in a way that could never be fixed.”
Johnny let her give this story to him and the stars and said nothing.
“I think she escaped my grandfather,” she continued. “I think my dad was the opposite of him. Free spirit. Romantic. She wanted peace. She wanted adventure. She wanted love. She found hell.”
She found that for certain.
Izzy kept going.
“A couple of years after we left, his mother, my grandmother, she showed at the door. That was the only time in my life I saw my mother be ugly. She opened the door to that woman and poison spewed out. She yelled at Mom. Screamed in her face. ‘What are you doing? How dare you keep his babies away from him? How dare you run away? He’s just troubled! You stand by your man! You never run away!’”
Izzy dragged in a jagged breath and let more of it out.
“Mom got right up in her face and yelled back, ‘Troubled is not hitting your woman in the face with your fist and knocking her down only to kick her in the stomach, you bitch. That isn’t standing by your man. That’s falling for his shit. That’s teaching your queens to be weak and that is not what my queens are gonna learn from me!’ She slammed the door in her face, turned to us and said, ‘If you ever see that woman again you run. You run away as fast as you can. And you find me.’ My grandmother banged on the door and shouted and Mom put us in our room and called the cops. I heard the murmurings. I don’t know what happened but that woman never tried to find us again. She never sent money to help out and she was rich too. We never saw her again. She gave up. And that was it.”
She fell silent and then started again, quieter.
“She cried that night, Mom did. That night my grandmother came and screamed in her face. I heard her. Woke up like I knew she was doing it and laid in the little narrow bed I shared with my sister because Mom couldn’t afford to buy another bed. We were head to feet, the only way we could sleep in it and have room to move. And I listened to her cry. Sob. And I wonder to this day why she was crying. If she missed him. If she was brokenhearted because he’d killed her dream. If she wondered if she’d made the right choice not standing by him. If she thought maybe she should have tried to change him. If she was just angry and that was the way she let it out. Or if she was just tired of it all and she knew we had to pack up and move again the next day and she couldn’t face it, which is what we did.”
“You’ll never know, baby,” he whispered.
“No,” she agreed. “I’ll never know.”
She took in a deep breath and Johnny waited.
Then she gave him more.
“So I hate him. I hate him because of cheap sandals and because he hit my mom in the face with his fist so hard he knocked her down and kicked her after she hit the floor. I hate him because I warmed up soup for my sister and me because Mom couldn’t be there to cook for us and because all we could afford was soup. I hate him that he wasn’t around to bury our dead cat and Mom and me had to do it, tears streaming down our faces. I hate him that he didn’t take pictures of me before my prom, and I hate him that it seems like he doesn’t even care he missed that or my sixteenth birthday or when I won my scholarship or when Addie broke her wrist showing off on that skateboard of her boyfriend’s. I hate him because he broke my mom when she was with him and I hate him because he kept her broke after he was gone.”
He heard her take another deep breath, this one hitched, and Johnny tightened, getting ready for what came next.
“We weren’t happy. It was fake. We faked happy. My mom died after a life that ran her down because she worked so fucking hard, and one of the things she worked hard at was faking happy.”
On the last two words her voice broke, so Johnny let go of her hair and hand and did a crunch to grab her under her arms, pulling her up and twisting her until he could lay her torso on top of his.
He rounded her with his arms, laid back.
Izzy shoved her face in his neck and wept.
Johnny stared at the stars and let her, holding her close with one arm, stroking her hair with another.
He gave it time.
Then he told her what he knew. What he saw in those pictures in her tack room.
“You actually were happy, spätzchen. You know that, right?”
She nodded with her face still in his neck.
“I . . . I . . . kn-know,” she pushed out. “I’m just being dramatic.”
“You’re just being honest,” he replied.
“I’m . . . I’m ruining our camping night.”
“No way, Izzy. You ever give that up to anyone?” he asked.
She shook her head this time but didn’t say anything.
“Then you just gave me something beautiful, baby. Precious. I’ll remember it forever. So you’re not ruining anything.”
The stars disappeared when she lifted her head, eyes to his.
“You sure?” she asked.
He slid a hand to the side of her head and rubbed his thumb across her wet cheek.
“Yeah,” he answered.
She studied him in the moonlight, wiped her hand across her other cheek then scooted down a little and dropped her head to rest against his pec.
Johnny slid his hand in her hair again.
They lay together in silence for a while before she broke it.
“Mom said we should never hate anyone. But I can’t help it, Johnny. I hate him.”
“I hate him too and I didn’t live through that, Iz. So give yourself a break, yeah?”
She nodded, her cheek and hair moving on his chest.
“Did you ever . . . I mean, you talk about your dad’s folks but not your mom’s. Did you at least have them?” she asked, turning the subject to him, he suspected to get it off where they were.
He decided she’d had enough so he allowed that.
“When we were older and we asked, Dad told us that Mom told him the home she grew up in was not a good one so she left the minute she could and never went back. Dad never even met them. He asked us if we wanted him to find them for us, and Toby made that decision, saying if we had her for the time we did and they didn’t give a shit enough to find her, and doing that us, then he didn’t think Dad should waste his time. I thought that was sound logic so I agreed and Dad honored that.”
“It does sound like sound logic,” she said.
“Yeah.”
She took a deep breath, turned her head and rubbed her face in his chest in that way of hers that was so sweet, then she settled back in.
“What would you do if she came back?” she asked.
“Hear her out and make my decision,” he answered then turned it on her. “What would you do if he came back?”
“I’d ask if I had any siblings, and if I did I’d ask where to find them and then I’d shut the door in his face,” she answered.
Johnny grinned at the stars, murmuring, “That’s my girl.”
She sounded like she was smiling when she replied, “Yeah.”
They fell into their own thoughts until Iz shifted, putting her chin to his chest. Lifting his head, he took his hand from her hair, put it behind his head and caught her eyes.
“I’m sorry I brought him—” she began.
“Shh,” he shushed.
“With Perry showing and you throwing the plate—”
“Baby, did you not hear me say how much it means you gave me that?”
“You make me happy and I . . . now that I know how it feels when it’s real, I guess I just—”
At that, he angled up taking her up with him and dragging her ass into his lap.
“You done with the stars and the moonlight or you wanna fuck out here under them?” he asked.
Her body jerked in surprise at his question.
He waited impatiently for her to answer it.
“I . . . well . . .” Her eyes darted side to side before coming back to his. “Is there anyone around us?”
“No clue.”
“Well, if there is, do you think they’d take a walk at night?”
“Tent,” he decided, surged up and took her with him when he did that too.
He had her hand in his and he was dragging her to the tent.
Ranger followed.
Ranger would have to wait outside for a while.
“Can we go back and gaze at the stars after?” she asked when Johnny had bent low to get into the tent.
He twisted his neck to look up at her. “After, if you can still move, we’ll do anything you want.”
He could swear he saw her face flush in the moonlight.
Johnny just pulled her into the tent behind him.
She couldn’t move when he was done with her, so it was Johnny who had to move to go deal with the fire and let Ranger in.
Then he zipped his woman and himself in their double sleeping bag, she curled into him deep, Ranger arranged himself on their feet, and Johnny Gamble and his woman slept in a tent under the stars.
That night, Daphne Forrester would have said her daughter’s moon was in the fifth house.
And she would have been right.
Johnny sat in the grass by Izzy the next morning while they ate the pancakes he’d made for them over the fire.
She was staring at the fire, quiet.
He kicked her sock-covered foot with his.
She turned her head to him.
“Happy?” he asked.
“I have pancakes and Johnny, you have to ask?” she answered.
He felt his face get lazy and he bent in to kiss her.
When he turned his attention back to his pancakes, she whispered, “It’s just that . . . I was thinking . . . it’s not that I’m sad even though it’s sad but it’s a sad I’m used to. That is, I wanted something for her. Something she didn’t really get. A long stretch of time when she didn’t have to take care of us. Time when she could just be Daphne. Time when me and Addie could worry about the kids in our lives and she could just spoil them. Time when she could find a man and not have to worry about whether or not he wanted a readymade family, just know in her heart that he wanted Daphne. Time to ride my horses and tend her tomatoes. Time to help Addie show Brooks how to be a good man and time to teach my daughters how to make her facials. Time when she could just be happy.”
Johnny didn’t look at her.
But he did tangle one of his legs with hers.
She kept whispering.
“She shouldn’t have looked for the dreamers. She should have found a man who knows all the different types of motor oil.”
Christ, they’d had sex before he made her pancakes and now he needed to fuck her again.
“Iz?” he called.
“Yes, Johnny.”
“So I have the strength to hike outta here, stop being sweet.”
There was a smile in her voice when she said, “Message received, Ghostrider.”
He gave a soft laugh.
“Johnny?” she called.
“Yeah, Iz.”
“Can we come camping again?”
He looked at her and caught her eyes.
“Absolutely.”