Fear and Laundry (9 page)

“But you don’t?”

“Course not,” he snorted.

“What, then?”

“Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it?
What’s Jake gonna do with the rest of his life?
” He resumed eating, taking an angry bite of pizza.

“You think I’m crazy?” he asked, when I hadn’t said anything for a while.

“What?”

“The consensus around here seems to be that I’ve lost my mind,” he explained. “Figure you must be thinking the same thing.”

I shook my head. “I was actually just thinking that I could relate to what you said. About not knowing what to do with your life.”

He seemed surprised.

I drew my legs up into the chair, hugging my knees.  “I don’t know what I want to do, either. I mean, it changes every day.” It was nerve-wracking, frankly. And it didn’t help that I couldn’t talk to Lia about it. She practically had the next ten years of her life plotted out and didn’t understand where I was coming from. “Sometimes I wish someone would just step in and tell me what to do, you know? So I wouldn’t have to make the decision myself and risk screwing it up.”  

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said. “My dad loves to tell me what to do and I hate it.” He laughed hollowly. “My mom’s the opposite, though. She never has anything to say.
I trust you, honey
,” he mimicked Elyse’s voice. “
Just do whatever makes you happy
.”

I groaned. “Why do people always say that? My mom always says the same thing.” I knew she meant well, but it felt like totally useless advice.

He shook his head. Maybe it was an ex-hippie thing, he theorized. Hadn’t they been obsessed with everyone just feeling good and “doing their own thing, man?”

I laughed, and he granted me the first full-fledged smile I’d seen from him since he’d been home. He deposited his now-empty plate on the cluttered nightstand, stood and walked to the other side of the bed. Kicking a box out of the way, he bent to open the mini-refrigerator and rummaged around inside. “You want something to drink? It’s mostly soda in here that I swiped from the pantry. But there’s one Shiner.” He held up the yellow-gold can. “I’ll split it with you,” he offered, straightening.

But then he noticed my hesitation and reconsidered his offer. “You ever had a beer before?” he asked.

“Course I have.”
Once
, I thought. I stood up, hand on my hip. He looked doubtful but pulled the aluminum can’s tab and brought the beer around to me. I took it and drank, fighting to control my grimace as the sour taste washed over my tongue. “Thanks,” I said gruffly, wiping foam from my lip and handing the can back as casually as I could.

“Don’t mention it,” he said, amused.

I moved to the brass bed, sitting down next to his guitar and trying to think of something else to talk about. I was reluctant to go back to the living room, knowing I’d only lie awake worrying. I considered asking Jake for his opinion about his sister’s plan to break and enter into the Crawford to accost a rock star, but knew Lia wouldn’t like that. Instead, I told him I’d heard there was a sequel to the
Hellraiser
movie.

“Two,” he said as he walked past with the beer can. He poked through a pile on his dresser. “I’ve got a copy of the second one around here someplace.” After a little more digging, he held up a black VHS cassette, labeled with ballpoint pen and masking tape.

“A bootleg?” I asked, mock-disapprovingly.

“I got it from Paul Drake,” he said, as though this somehow exonerated him.

“Whatever happened to him?” I was genuinely curious about the fate of Burro Bruto’s last drummer.

“Haven’t heard from him in a while. He’s in jail, for all I know. Busted for video piracy. So, you wanna watch this?”

“Now?” I looked at his clock radio. It was after midnight. But I really didn’t want to leave. “Okay.” I shifted around, moving a pillow so it cushioned my back against the headboard.

He turned the television back on and switched out the tapes in the VCR. Black and white lines wriggled across the TV screen before the VCR’s automatic tracking kicked in to correct the picture.

I thought he’d sit in the chair, but he moved his guitar and settled in close beside me on the bed. It wasn’t until his sleeve brushed my bare arm that I became self-conscious about the fact I was alone in his room with him, wearing only a tank top and my penguin pajama pants. I tucked my hair behind my ears and started nervously gathering lint pills from my pant leg. He seemed perfectly comfortable, though, stretching one leg out alongside mine and bending the other. I watched him take a swig of beer and then rest his arm casually on his bent knee.

“Why’d you shave the beard?” I wondered aloud.

“What?” He touched his chin. “Oh. Wasn’t so much a beard as a four-day record of laziness. But thanks for noticing...Why? Did you like it?”

“It had a certain appeal,” I admitted.

“Now you tell me,” he said mournfully, and passed the beer to me.

***

“N
ic.”

I woke to feel Jake’s hand gently shaking my leg. “Nic,” he repeated.

I realized my head was resting on his shoulder and straightened up quickly, blinking around. “Hm?”

He smiled at me in his crooked way. “We fell asleep.” Across the room, the television was still on. Credits scrolled across the screen.

“Oh, God,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“No big deal,” he assured me. “It was just for a little while. But we missed the end of the movie.”

“I should go,” I yawned.

“Hey. Wasn’t trying to run you off,” he said, but I was already walking rapidly to the door.

“See you in the morning,” I said when I reached the hall. “Or in a few hours, I guess.” Technically it was already Sunday. Not giving him time to reply, I hurried away, back to the living room.

When I snuggled back in beside Lia, she hardly stirred. Clyde 2, however, woke and punished me for disturbing him by stepping heavily across my stomach, complaining as he jogged away in the dark.

I couldn’t get back to sleep right away. I kept seeing Jake’s face in my mind’s eye and feeling the ghost of his hand on my leg. His eyes weren’t the same color as Lia’s after all, I mused as I stared into the dark. I’d always thought they were, but...his were definitely lighter. Bluer.

And he had cute lips.

***

W
hen I woke again, Lia wasn’t beside me. I heard sounds coming from the kitchen. Lia’s voice, slightly muffled, and what sounded like cabinet doors opening and closing.

I went in and found her padding around fully dressed in jeans and a t-shirt but barefoot, with the kitchen phone pressed against her ear. Her hair was wet, dripping dark spots on her shirt, and I guessed she’d just showered. Clyde 2 trotted along behind her, mumbling disagreeably in cat-language. A plastic jug of orange juice sweated on the counter beside an open bag of Meow Mix.

“Yes, Mom,” Lia said into the phone. “Alright.
Yes
.” Seeing me in the doorway, she rolled her eyes. And then, with one final affirmative, she hung up the phone. “That was Mom,” she said, pouring herself a tumbler of juice.

“I gathered,” I said, raking my fingers through my slept-on hair. “Where is she?” I was amazed Elyse could be up and out of the house again already after getting in so late the night before.

“The Ag Pee Center. They’re having some to-do and are short on volunteers.” She meant the Agricultural Pioneers Center, a sort of museum dedicated to West Texas settlement and farming history.

“Lemme guess. She wants us to come help.”

“Not ‘us,’” Lia said. “I told her I’d come down there for an hour, but made her promise to leave you alone.” She pulled a cereal box down from the top of the refrigerator. “You want anything?”

I told her I didn’t and sat down at the table. So what should I do? I asked while she moved around the kitchen, fixing her breakfast and the cat’s. Sit around here and wait for her to get back? We were supposed to rehearse again today.

“You can come with me,” she said as Clyde 2 dashed for his food bowl. “Take the exhibit tour or something. We can rehearse when I’m done, hang out, do whatever. I’m really sorry about this, Vee.”

I’d started to tell her not to worry about it when Jake came in. “What’s going on?” he wanted to know, stretching one arm across his chest with the other.

Lia explained the situation to him.

“Can I come?” he asked when she’d finished.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“What for? You feel like wasting your Sunday passing out cookies and fliers?” She thought about it. “If so, I’ll call Mom back and tell her you’ll come down there instead of me.”

No, he said, sitting at the table with me. He didn’t want to volunteer, he wanted to take the tour.

Lia eyed him suspiciously.

“Nic doesn’t mind. Do you?” he asked me. Yawning, I shook my head no. Lia looked displeased but didn’t say anything, carrying her cereal bowl and juice to the table and sitting across from us. Jake and I watched her munch her Lucky Charms for a while, none of us talking.

“You know, you mumble in your sleep,” he finally said to me.

“I do not,” I said, not looking at him.

“You do,” he said firmly.

Lia dropped her spoon, with a splash and a clink, into the bowl. “What’s he talking about?” she snapped at me.

I clasped my hands together on the table. “Nothing.”

“Hardly nothing,” said Jake. “We slept together last night.”

“Excuse me?” Lia looked bored, like she knew he was kidding but didn’t think it was funny.

“Nic didn’t tell you?”

“Didn’t think it was worth mentioning,” I said, playing along with him now. “I mean, it was no big deal,” I said to Lia.

“You saying it wasn’t good for you?” he asked me.

“Never even would’ve happened if I hadn’t been drinking,” I said.

“That hurts, Nic. I mean, really.”

I snuck a look at him. He smiled and looked, maybe, impressed.

Lia looked from one to the other of us. “Okay. As usual, I have
no idea
what the two of you are talking about,” she muttered, more to herself than us. But she didn’t have time, she said, to try and figure out what we were on about. If she didn’t get to the Ag Pee Center within the hour, she’d have to hear it from her mother. “And I do not want to hear it. So if you want to come,” she said to Jake, “then come. But hurry your ass up.” She drained her juice glass, put her dishes in the dishwasher, and swept out of the kitchen.

***

“Y
ou’re sure you don’t want me to help?” I asked Lia as she pulled the Dart into the crowded Agricultural Pioneers Center lot. She parked beside a bronze statue of a Longhorn festooned with crepe paper and balloons. A vinyl banner strung across the front of the building announced an Open House from ten to three.

“No way,” she said. She looked in the rearview mirror at Jake, crammed up in the smallish back seat. “Help me keep Mom off her,” she told him, referring to me. “Make sure she doesn’t lock on the tractor beam.”

“Aye aye, Captain.” Jake extricated himself from the car and opened my door for me.

Elyse met us in the museum’s foyer, seeming to appear out of nowhere. So much for Lia’s original plan of having Jake and I simply slip past her mother unnoticed.

“Oh! Jake. And Veronica-honey,” Elyse began happily when she saw us. Behind her, a row of folding tables had been set up and covered with white table cloths. Patrons streamed past as volunteers gave out pamphlets, little plastic cups of lemonade and store-bought cookies on paper napkins.

“No,” said Lia, positioning herself between her mother and me.

“But,” Elyse tried again.

“Forget it, Mom,” said Lia. “I told you Vee’s off limits. You’re lucky
I’m
even giving you an hour of my time. I’m still mad at you.”

Elyse’s brow furrowed. “Liandra Pauline Mlinarich. Do you forget who you’re talking to?”

“Elyse Anette Mlinarich,” rejoined Lia. “Do
you
forget who let Eugenia Ridley scoop me?”

“Young lady,” Elyse huffed. But I noticed she backed up a step.

“I’m all yours till,” Lia looked at her watch, “one o’ clock. But these two are going on the tour.”

“Both of them?” Elyse asked.

“You don’t expect Vee to just wander around out there by herself, do you?” asked Lia, although this had been her original suggestion to me. Elyse looked unhappy but acquiesced. I smiled apologetically at her before moving off with Jake.

***

T
he A. P. Center was really more of a park. Thirty acres housed “over two dozen historical buildings grouped together to illustrate the evolution of ranch life in the West over several centuries” – according to the flier I’d picked up in the lobby. The buildings had been relocated from original sites and restored or renovated as authentically as possible.

“I haven’t been on this tour since elementary school,” I told Jake as we started down the dirt path toward Farrell House which, according to the flier, was built circa 1883. The doors on every building had been designed without a top half, so museum patrons could look in at the furnished and decorated interiors. When we got to Farrell House, I ran up the porch steps and poked my head in the kitchen door. Plaster loaves of bread and baskets of wax fruit collected dust on an antique dining table.

“I remember I wanted to move into one of these places.” I leaned on the door to look around the kitchen. “I thought the food and everything was real, so I’d never want for anything. Dumb, huh?”

He didn’t reply.

I moved to the next doorway and peered in at a bedroom. A bed with an iron frame stood against the wall, a hand-made quilt thrown over it. A pair of weather-beaten boots sat beside the bed on a patterned rug, giving the impression the house’s occupant would return and slip his feet back into them at any moment.

“You ever wish you could go back in time?” I asked Jake, eyeing the framed sepia photos hanging on the wall and wondering who the dour-looking people in them had been.

“And do what?” He kicked at a rock lodged between two wooden porch slats.

“I dunno. Something important.”