Chapter 19: Of mice and women, rednecks and government conspiracy theories.
We make the short walk to the park, and as promised, I show her the statue of General Custer. It’s like she said — not much to see, just an old dead white guy who killed a bunch of brown guys and got turned into a statue later. He’s fucking cocky and full of himself even in bronze death: cowboy hat tilted to the side, chest forward. Sword out and at his side, holding it like he’ll run an Injun through any second.
Amy gazes up at the statue, and the dying sun plays on her head, bringing out red-brown highlights I hadn’t guessed were there before. I step forward until I’m standing right behind her, and the urge to pet her head like she’s a fucking puppy and I’m that big, dumb oaf from Of Mice and Men is strong. But I keep my hands on my hips.
She turns around, squints up at me. The sun’s directly behind her now, splicing through General Custer, giving Amy’s head a halo of golden light.
“Explain to me again why we’re looking at the statue of General Custer?”
“Because it’s literally the only fucking thing to look at in Marcine.”
The wind picks up, blows at my back. I got my hair cut to just a little longer than chin-length before I flew to Ohio, thinking it would be easier to deal with, but now the breeze pushes it forward and into my face. Irritated, I try to blow it away with little puffs of breath, and when that doesn’t work, I try to tame the mane by shaking my head.
Amy reaches up, smiling, uses her two Tinkerbell-sized hands to push the thick, wavy stuff off my cheeks. But instead of letting go, she holds it there, behind my ears, stopping the wind from blowing it into my face again.
“It’s not the only thing to see in Marcine,” she says.
I give her a lopsided grin. “No?”
“No. I’ve found something else I rather like looking at.”
My hands come off my hips, find Amy’s waist, gently tug her forward. She keeps her eyes locked on mine, hands on either side of my face, waiting.
I lean down into the kiss we both feel coming.
It’s not awkward or sloppy, the way some first kisses are, with two people discovering each others’ rhythm for the first time. Kissing Amy feels natural. Easy. Like it’s something I don’t have to try at but can just do, fall into like shooting a basketball or trimming carrots into decorative garnishes. Like something I’ve done a million times before.
Or might do a million times again.
Maybe she feels the same way?
I can’t say for sure, but when she pulls away, it’s with a contented sigh that ends with closing her eyes for a brief moment before opening them again and bringing her hands away from my face.
I lace my fingers together in the small of her back; she leans against my hands, squeezes my arms.
“There’s got to be something besides General Custer you can show me,” she says after a few moments of comfortable silence. “This park, for example.” She lets go of one of my arms long enough to sweep a hand around the expanse of rolling grass, budding dogwoods, park benches, basketball courts, covered bandstand. “I bet this is the kind of place you used to come to with your family when you were a kid, right? July Fourth picnics? Outdoor concerts in the summer? Barbecues?”
She waits for me to nod. Which I do.
“Then show me around. Tell me another story — like the one you told me on the plane.”
I glance around the park, looking for something to trigger a memory. Everything does, of course — park benches I’d made out with Jenny on. Basketball courts I played on in the evenings after work after I left the WNBA in Phoenix and moved back to Ohio with Jenny to “focus on our relationship.”
The apartment just the other side of the courts, where I found the positive pregnancy test in the bathroom six months after we moved back home.
So much for focusing on our fucking relationship. I look away from the courts and search for something else.
Marty McFly appears at my elbow. He tugs on my sleeve. “Hey,” he says. “What about that?”
I follow his pointing index finger, and finally my eyes land on a memory that doesn’t have Jenny in it, at least, not directly: the covered band stand.
I laugh out loud.
“What?” Amy asks. She follows my gaze to the bandstand.
“What’ve I told you about my brother Gerry?”
“He’s the one who… owns the restaurants in Philadelphia?”
“No, no, that’s PJ. The good brother. This is Gerry. The screw-up.”
“The one who’s going back to school?” Amy says, and I hear the reprimand in her voice.
“Okay,” I concede with a roll of my eyes. “The one who used to be a screw-up. Maybe.” I rotate her towards the bandstand, start walking. She takes my hand, laces her fingers with mine, and again it feels like the most natural thing in the world. I give her hand a little squeeze and start in on the story about Fourth of July, summer after my sophomore year in college. Gerry was fourteen at the time, and I caught him high as a fucking kite hiding behind the bandstand, ranting about a government conspiracy theory that involved rats equipped with sonar equipment.
“…So my friend and I — ” (and I say friend because I’m skimming over Jenny’s involvement in the whole thing) “— took him back to my house before my parents got home, sobered him up enough to get him quiet.”
I chuckle, shaking my head at the memory.
“The things we do in our teens, right?” Amy says.
I nod. “Though in Gerry’s case, it’s ‘the things we do in our teens, twenties, and thirties.’ If I had it to do all over again, knowing how Gerry’s life turned out, I wouldn’t have covered for him that night.”
I take Amy’s hand again; we meander through the park.
“And how did it turn out?” she asks cautiously. “If it’s okay to ask.”
“It’s okay,” I say with a shrug. “Gerry’s story isn’t anything half of Marcine doesn’t know anyway. Probably even your friend getting married knows if she’s from here.” I take a breath. “Gerry… Well, everyone in my family dealt with being exotic freaks in different ways.”
“Exotic freaks?” Amy asks, nose crinkling in a way that I have to say I find kind of adorable.
I wave my arm around, trying to include in its sweep the whole of quaint-fucking downtown Marcine. “In case you haven’t noticed, this is a white bred, redneck little town. There’s maybe three other black families in the whole Marcine zip code. No Asians to this day. And then there’s us. Definitely not white but never quite black enough for the, like, ten other black kids. My brothers and sister and I, we were fucking zoo animals growing up. Spectacles.” I shrug. “Dutch bent the attention to her advantage, of course, because that’s what she does — made herself Queen Bee. And since I was… well, big, I poured my energy into being an athlete. I figured no one would mess with me if everyone knew I could beat the shit out of them. PJ thought he could win people over if he was smart and charming and worked harder than everyone else. But Gerry? Gerry just rebelled.”
I let out a bark of a laugh. “And in a twisted kind of way, I respected him for it. The rest of us were all searching for approval even if we said we weren’t; Gerry had a sort of ‘fuck you’ attitude from the time he was eleven or twelve, but it turned into a drug problem by the time he was fourteen, fifteen. He went into rehab for the first time when he was seventeen; started using again as soon as he got out. Dropped out of high school. Fought constantly with my parents. They tried to fix him, but you can only be fixed if you wanna be, y’know? So he just got worse and worse and finally ended up running off with a bunch of friends when he was eighteen. We tracked him down to California, but he was full-on junkie by that point — a fucking walking, breathing public service announcement, living under bridges and eating out of dumpsters and shit. My parents brought him home, he stole from them, split again, they brought him back, he did it again. In and out of rehab. On and off the streets. Finally, a couple years back, he gave my mother a black eye and my father put his foot down. Told him he wasn’t a part of the family anymore, wasn’t welcome at home. And that was the last I’d heard about Ger. Until I came home a few days ago.”
I look down at Amy, who has a pensive look on her face. Like she’s taking it all in.
“Sorry,” I mumble. “Maybe all that was TMI.”
She shakes her head. “Not at all. Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me.”
We arrive at the edge of the park, across the street from the coffee shop we started from. Without discussing it, we end up next to her parked rental car a moment later.
She leans against the car door, reaches up to brush hair out of my face again. Lets her fingers brush down my cheek and jaw.
“Thanks for coming out with me tonight,” she says.
I take both her hands. “Thanks for asking me out. Although I am a little jealous you beat me to it.”
She smiles; I lean in for a goodnight kiss, but am startled out of it when I hear a male voice boom out from across the street, “Get a room, fucking queers!”
I jerk my head in the direction of the voice, anger smoldering, and spot a twenty-ish, heavy-set kid with a beard and a baseball cap. He and a couple of his sniggering buddies are coming out of Dillan’s Bar & Grill down the street, not far from Ben’s record shop.
As if we’d discussed it ahead of time, Amy and I both give the boys the one-fingered salute in perfect fucking synchronized timing. They return the friendly gesture. I open my mouth to yell something, probably like Fuck you! or Kiss my big black ass!, but before I can get a word out, Amy wraps both her hands around my shirt collar and yanks down hard, pulling me down into a ferocious kiss. She has to stand on her tiptoes to reach me, and even then I’m too far away for her taste. I get what she’s up to, so I help her out, hoisting her up, hands under her thighs, pressing her back against the car.
Our PDA annoys the shit out of the rednecks down the street. They holler and cuss and I hear an empty aluminum can hit the asphalt in the middle of the road and slosh and roll pathetically in our direction. Amy grins against my lips and starts to giggle through the kiss, but still won’t let go of my collar.
I wait until I hear the pick-up truck in front of Dillan’s roar to life and peel out, honking at us, all three rednecks still yelling from the cab, before I break the kiss. I set Amy gently back down on the ground, and she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Now that was a fun good-night kiss,” she says, still giggling.
I smooth dark hair away from her face, tuck it behind one ear. “No. That was your official ‘Welcome to Marcine.’”
The answering smile she gives me has mischief and sympathy in it at the same time. They kind of cancel each other out, and the resulting crooked curl of her lips mainly make Amy look like she’s got a secret she’s not ready to share yet.
“Well,” she says at last, pulling the rental car’s key from her pocket. “I should go. Are you going to be at your family’s restaurant tomorrow?”
“How can I stay away? I’d miss all the fun.”
“So then… Is it alright if I drop by for lunch?”
I nod. “That’d be nice. I’ll introduce you to the fried chicken.”
She puts a hand on her stomach. “In case you didn’t notice, we’ve already met.”
I put my hands on her sides, run them down her waist and around the curve of her hips. I know what she’s implying, but Amy’s not fat. Curvy, maybe. But curvy like an old European oil painting — elegant and voluptuous. My hands end their journey on her butt, and I start to squeeze, but she pushes my arms away.
“Nuh-uh. You already got the good-night kiss to end all good-night kisses. Don’t push your luck.”
I laugh. “You’re spunky.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” She puts her palm on my chest, pushes me gently back so she can open the door and get in. “See you tomorrow?”
“If you don’t, I’m tracking you down at your hotel.”
“You don’t know where I’m staying.”
“I grew up in this town. And there’s only three hotels. If I want to find out, I will.”
She rolls her eyes, but she’s grinning when she closes the door and starts the car.
I stand there with my hands in my pockets, watching until she drives out of sight. When I walk back to Mom’s car, I’ve got a big, dumbass smile on my face.