Homefires (4 page)

“I was thinking about the wedding – ” My voice caught when his hands boldly touched my skin in formerly forbidden places. Next thing I knew, we were between new white sheets, naked together for the first time, glorying in freedom, in the
rightness
of it all and we began to laugh, hugging and rocking back and forth, side to side, kissing and laughing and kissing...
until the laughter stopped and primitive urges, long, long denied, emerged.

Kirk stopped and gazed down at me. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

In answer, I pulled his head down and kissed him. The discomfort I felt soon gave way to the excitement of unfolding wonders and because of Kirk’s tender concern, the consummation would not be completed until later that evening.

Instead, he playfully tugged me from the bed. “Get dressed, woman. Cook me some dinner.”

We quickly pulled on cut-off shorts and matching white and Crimson Chapowee High pullovers and, excited as three-year-olds, invaded our sparkling, sunny-colored kitchen with its free-standing white cabinet and chrome and yellow dinette set, pulled out shiny new pots and pans and commenced cooking a fantastic dinner.

Kirk peeled potatoes and sliced them for potato salad, his first cooking venture. I showed off my fluffy buttermilk biscuits, lumpless gravy – learned at age nine from MawMaw – and crispy, juicy Southern fried chicken, compliments of Anne’s tutelage. We topped off the meal with Kirk’s favorite dessert, Banana Pudding with golden toasted meringue icing.

As I put dishes in a sink full of hot soapy water, I felt Kirk move to stand behind me, wrapping me in his arms, his hands doing magical things to my bosom. “Kirk!” My breath caught in my throat as he smoothly turned me into his arms and up against his arousal.

He kissed me deeply, leaving me breathless and clutching at him.

“I never knew,” he muttered huskily, “that flour on your nose could be so sexy.”

“Mmmm.” I rubbed against him. “That move is pretty sexy, too.”

He looked into my eyes, his turning dark as the night. “Let’s go see,” his voice was raspy as a corn cob, “what we can do about it.”

The kitchen became our home’s hub, where we relaxed and chatted, listening to Fats or Johnny Mathis while delectable aromas wafted from the oven and frying pan. It was during those lingering intimate moments that we began to delve past yet another layer of self.

Each day brought surprises. Kirk gazed at my bowl across the dinette, clearly shocked. “You mean you eat
sugar and cream
on your oatmeal?”

“You mean you
don’t
?” I shot back, equally astonished at his mound topped only with butter. After a moment of silent impasse, we burst into laughter. Kirk later divulged that the Crenshaw’s plain oatmeal was to spare the expense of sugar. Nor did they drink milk in their coffee for the same reason. I began to really see the Crenshaw’s poverty level.

Food made
togetherness
ours. The morning hours, before Kirk went to his second-shift mill job, passed swiftly because we slept late and ate brunches concocted with creative zeal, anything from sausage and pancakes to pot roast and potatoes, didn’t matter, it was all fun and adventure.

Today was beef stew we’d cooked from a
Good Housekeeping
cookbook, a shower present of mine. “It’s delicious,” I spooned the last bite from my plate.

“It’s great,” Kirk agreed, sipping his ever-present coffee contentedly. “Though I’d like to let it simmer for another twenty minutes next time.”

“Think so?”

“Yeah. Needs to tenderize just a mite more.”

“Mmm.” I smiled at him.

He leaned forward on his elbows, gazing at me as though seeing something for the first time. “What’s behind that smile?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“Oh…just that everything is so perfect.” I drew on my iced tea glass and sighed. “You’ll never know how much it means to me to have a place that’s truly mine. It’s hard to explain.”

Kirk reached across the table and took my hands in his. “I love you so much, honey,” he murmured, frowning with the effort to verbalize his feelings. “The fact that you didn’t have a mother to care for you made me love you even more.”

“Thanks,” I muttered, growing a tad uncomfortable with the pity I heard in his voice. “I guess I did okay, considering.” I thought of sad-eyed Trish – then pushed away the thought.

Kirk’s laser turquoise eyes pinned me with a look I’d seen sporadically – an unreadable, dissecting gaze that did not let up simply because I grew fidgety. “Anne…” he hesitated, uncertain, then forged ahead, “Anne’s okay – least she’s been nice to me. But she doesn’t treat you and Trish like she does her own kid.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said, desperate to dispel his claim. “Cole’s a baby and – ”

“Look,” Kirk held up a hand. “Let’s just drop the subject. You don’t want to see…”

“I think we
should
drop the subject.” I gave Kirk an appealing look and reached for his hand.

His large, beautiful square fingers curled with mine. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “I don’t mean to hurt you. Ever.”

“It’s just that – Kirk, family is so important to me. And it seems that those most important to me – I lose them.” I shrugged awkwardly, fighting back tears

“What if you had a family like
mine
?” Kirk’s eyes glimmered suddenly with dark humor. “A sot for a daddy and a mama who doesn’t see anything but her misery? And brothers and sisters who wouldn’t spit on each other if they were all on fire. Living in a house where Christmas went by unnoticed.” He chortled. “I’d have
died
for just a box of chocolate-covered cherries, y’know?
God a’mighty
, I love those things. And there were never any hugs or ‘I love yous.’ We just survived. Yanked up by the hair o’the head. You want to talk about
mess,
we’ll talk about mess.”

We both cracked up. That always did it when I got soppy and sentimental about things I couldn’t change. Kirk could always dredge up down-dirty
real
scenarios from his life, which were infinitely more desperate than anything I’d ever experienced.

“Anyway,” he spoke as he moved around the table, took my hand and pulled me up and into his arms, “this –
us
– we’re family now. And I won’t leave you. I’ll always be here for you, Neecy,”

“And I’ll always be here for you, Kirk. You’ll never have another Christmas without chocolate-covered cherries. That’s a promise.”

On most Sundays now, Kirk and I attended worship services at Chapowee Methodist Church, along with Daddy, Anne, Trish and little Cole. My feelings for my stepmother Anne remained ambivalent, at once affectionate yet vigilant. Vigilant because of Trish’s ongoing quandary. Nothing blatantly obvious. Just a feeling I got. And things Trish, on rare occasions, hinted at.

Before Dad and Anne’s marriage ceremony, everything was bliss, quite backward from fabled versions. Afterward, all hell broke loose. Daddy’s homefront sovereignty hit big potholes when he and Anne toed off. The same
take control
Mama had found romantic and masculine, his new bride found archaic and intolerable and many’s a skirmish Trish and I stumbled into. I fended okay, but Trish, little Trish who crooned to any creature
hurt,
found herself wandering about a bloody minefield, dazed and indefensible to what the next step might set off.

In a nutshell, it was Daddy’s excessive protectiveness that set his baby up for rejection, for that’s the way he viewed Trish:
my baby.
Just as he related to me and, earlier, to Chuck as
mine.
Possessive. Subjugated. For in those days, one side of my father knew only absolutes. The more he insisted Anne heap affection on Trish, the more he sequestered the two. I’ve thought many a time how, had he left it alone, it might have healed itself sooner.

“Do you want the kids to call you ‘Mama’?” he asked one day during a rare truce.

Anne looked at him for long moments pondering, measuring. I held my breath, finding that, surprisingly, I missed calling someone “Mama.” I did not like being half-orphan. I’d never, ever forget my precious mother, but at the same time, I didn’t like the pity being motherless brings. In fact, I detested pity.

Anne’s fair brow, set below flaming titian hair, furrowed. “No, that wouldn’t be right.”

My heart plunged and a new, sharp ache formed inside me.

Something flickered in Daddy’s face, a shade of grief. “Okay.” He gave a limp shrug, that in itself uncharacteristic. But I knew, it was not okay. And Daddy could –
would
hold a grudge as long as he breathed.

“Blood’s thicker’n water,” sprang Grandma Whitman’s litany to mind, one she’d always muttered during family loyalty tests. Now, the implication smacked me broadside as I dealt, again, with the changes inaugurated by Mama’s sudden death. I had, until now, attained a measure of continuity in my life, a sense of
me.
I’d desperately convinced myself that I remained intact, despite that the pain of losing her still sat heavily upon me. Youthful resilience had mimed healing, using other things to help divert me from the immediacy of loss.

Until that moment, when Anne said, “No.”

That’s all I heard.
No.
Rejection. It proved one thing I’d suspected for some time now.

I was unlovable.

Everything flooded in on me in that moment, transporting me back to a day or two after Mama’s burial. We’d remained at the home of my mother’s parents, Daddy and the three of us, nurturing and grieving through the difficult raw days following death. That May day was incredibly bright and sunny, deriding our sorrow and sending Daddy out alone for a drive.

It was while Daddy was gone that Chuck, Trish and I overheard MawMaw’s weepy version of my mother’s crisis when birthing me years earlier. Seems the inexperienced intern who delivered me had overlooked the afterbirth, then sent Mama home.

“Joe let her lay there and nearly die,” MawMaw’s quiet sobs wafted through her open bedroom window to where we huddled together on her small front porch. “If you’n me hadn’t a’ gone to see her when we did, she’d a’died. You could
smell
the infection when we walked in. Poor lil’ thing was a’burnin’ up with fever, all alone. Joe was nowhere around.” I heard Papa trying to hush her.

Her jaded view shocked and disappointed me but knowing MawMaw’s propensity to being swept away with emotion made me tolerant. Besides, I knew with eleven-year-old logic that her venting was for Papa’s ears alone, was not about Daddy at all but about her dead child, about
loss.
MawMaw was not known
for tact when passion seized her, but that same passion, flavored differently, propelled her to love a grandchild as
offspring.

And when my brother Chuck, for reasons known only to him, later that afternoon took Daddy aside to repeat MawMaw’s comments, my father’s face had emptied before he whisked us away from loving grandparents whose worst sin was loosedtongue ignorance.

The
betrayal
devastated Daddy because he’d loved Mama more than life itself and had endured MawMaw’s
pprrkk
ing through early honeymoon days and on through the years, respecting her still for Mama’s sake.

Now, Mama was gone. Daddy’s resolution was simple. “I don’t have to put up with it anymore. I didn’t neglect your Mama. I’d gone to the store the day her folks came a’visiting. I was only eighteen years old, for heaven’s sake. Didn’t know nothing about afterbirths and such.” He grew quiet as the car hummed us away from MawMaw’s house. “That old battleaxe’s had her last go at me” was his final comment as he drove us to Grandma Whitman’s, who hated MawMaw, a mutual thing generated when their offspring married, both certain all the newlywed’s trouble spawned from the other in-law.

Daddy proceeded to excise my grandparents from our lives as succinctly as a surgeon’s knife and reinforced with every stubborn gene at his dispatch. Within a week, the genetic validating forces of my life – namely those who loved me unconditionally – all but vanished.