Homefires (62 page)

“Well,” he drawled, “I can tell you that having sex with someone outside your marriage is not exciting. It’s hell. It leaves you feeling like pond slime. The whole experience made me realize what I have in you. Can’t you understand that?” The appeal in his voice only stirred my resistance to his one-way view.

“In a sense, I can. It’s just – I wish I didn’t feel this desperation about the whole thing. I need a purging.”

“At one time, you would have prayed and been rid of it.”

“Yeah.” I gave a sad little laugh. “Every other situation on earth, I could have prayed away. This – this has sapped the part of me that reached out to God.” I shook my head. “I don’t think God even wants to have anything to do with me now. I’ve pushed Him so far away. ...”

In reality, prayers stuck in my throat, undelivered. Something in my post-trauma psyche remained locked against the old Janeece and her ways, something turbulent and implacable.

Kirk turned to face me, his eyes glimmering in the silvery dusk. “If you need to have a fling, Neecy. Do it. I want you to get over this.”

I gazed at him, shocked at his words. “Kirk, I’ve never wanted a man on this earth other than you. Johnny Revel included.”

“Thanks, honey,” he whispered. Then he took my cold hand in his. “I’m serious as I’ve ever been. If a fling is what it takes to get you past this – do it. But I can assure you of one thing: it won’t be what you think.”

“Why, Kirk Crenshaw,” I gasped, horrified, “You’d never forgive me if I slept with another man.”

“I would,” he said softly, reverently, stroking my cheek. “Because I know you’ll not find what you’re looking for there.”

I stared inanely at him. “Where is God in all this, Kirk?”

I saw the shadow of his lips curve into an incredibly sad smile. “I haven’t known where God is for a long, long time.”

I don’t know for sure when I first whiffed the foreign smell on Kirk’s breath. We’d begun going out to dance on Saturday nights when Toby and Dawn were at Trish’s. I consoled myself that at least
they
were in church. Toby, after the drug incident, had not missed a service, had taken to going either with Trish and Gene or Daddy and Anne. He’d latched onto the Almighty with a tenacity I’d once had.

I felt badly that Kirk and I slept in entirely too many Sunday mornings. Yet, when we did attend, Kirk’s attitude nettled me to the bone. Why couldn’t he simply let me glean what I could from the messages without sullying them with his negative comments?

“What’s that smell?” I sniffed when Kirk kissed me on the drive home from Thursdays, a local disco. His arm draped my midriff and his fingers ran titillatingly over my hipbone.

“I had a drink.”

“When?” I gaped at his profile. Something went off inside me like tiny fireworks, shooting icy sparks out my fingers and toes.

He shrugged as though it were of no consequence. “On my way to the men’s room. It was just one mixed drink.”

“Oh, Kirk,” I moaned.

“Hey.” Kirk smiled down at me, his eyes glimmering reassurance. “Just one, honey. I’m not a drinker. I’ve already gotten a headache from it.”

“But I thought we agreed not to drink.” My stomach had fallen to my toes, having been replaced by my dully thudding heart. “We were just going to have a little fun. Date.”

“We are,” he murmured. “Don’t worry, darling. I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

I sighed and gazed ahead into the night, keenly aware that he already had.

The episode pummeled me into knots during that next week. Kirk was so solicitous I felt almost guilty about the funk I was in. Almost. He insisted the drinking lapse was but a tiny thing. All the same, it was, to me, a significant one. He’d already begun smoking when the kids weren’t around. That had upset me, but he’d laughed and teased my fears away, insisting he could lay them down any time he chose. The two things, together, gave me pause to consider where, exactly, we were headed.

I tried to pray.
Please God, make Kirk stop fooling around with alcohol and tobacco. It was such a triumph, spiritual and physical, when he’d denounced them years ago.
Where would his latest capitulation lead us?

Months passed and still, Kirk dabbled in the forbidden pleasures. My silent fear was that by catering to these appetites, he could easily slide into a lust mode. Too, I knew all too well that no matter how strong Kirk’s declaration of love, I still had no influence over his urges.

The realizations affected my appetite and sleep. My quandary drove me to insulate myself by reading and writing more. I tried to talk with Kirk about my fears, but he smoothly sidestepped them by promising not to do either again.

“We need to begin to take time apart – have some breathing space,” he suggested one day as I wiped my salon station clean at the day’s end.

“Oh?” I organized my brushes without looking at him, a sense of dread washing over me.

“We’re together all the time. No husband and wife should spend every waking hour together like this.” He spoke casually, shoulder resting against the trellis, hands shoved into neatly creased slack’s pocket, ankles crossed. “I want you to go to the beach to rest next weekend. You need that.”

I looked at him then, searching for a hidden motive. He looked levelly at me, concern marking his good looks. “I’m worried about you, Neecy. You barely eat and you’re too quiet.”

“Why don’t we go to the beach together?” I asked, propped against my work backstand, my arms crossed.

“Because you need time to just rest. I want it to be your birthday present from me.” He moved to take me into his arms. My stiffness soon dissolved when he began to kiss me and murmur his love against my neck, turning my joints to liquid. “Do it for me, huh?” he whispered.

“Hmm?” I’d already forgotten the question.

Kirk put the last of my suitcases in the car trunk and slammed it shut. We’d only a couple of hours earlier dropped Dawn off at Trish and Gene’s. Heather and Toby were spending the weekend at Dad and Anne’s. Grandma was elated and planned a virtual feast for Sunday lunch. I didn’t even deal with the fact that my family, by now, knew I was going to Myrtle Beach, alone, and being the conservative souls they were, would wonder
why?

“So,” I said, turning to face my husband, “when can I reach you tonight? The hair show will be over by nine, won’t it?”

He looked at me almost vacantly for a long moment, then –
as though programmed,
the thought flashed meanly through my mind – smiled and hugged me. “I’ll be home late. I’ll have a sandwich, then drive over to the Hilton for the hair show. I’m not sure when we’ll break up. Now,” he hiked up his watch, peered at it and pointedly assisted me into the car, “you’d better get started so you won’t be too late getting in. I don’t like the idea of you driving after dark.”

Then why are you sending me off alone?
I ground my teeth together, flashed a dry smile and waved as I drove off. For the next five hours, I had that off-kilter feeling that something was
not quite right. Was it
me?
Was it Kirk’s determination to rid himself of me? Was it a combination of everything, the smoking, drinking and his subtly taking control again now that he felt secure that I loved him as blindly as ever?

I thought dryly that the homefires I now tended were ones I could do without.

For some reason, MawMaw flashed through my mind.
I need you now, Neecy. You’uns will have to stand by me now Papa’s gone....

Dear Lord.
I couldn’t even hold MawMaw’s hand when she needed it, after all the affection she’d shown me all my life. We’d driven to Asheville at Christmas time and brought her down to stay a week with us. She’d been weak but happy being with us. She and Dawn spent the days together at home while Kirk and I worked at the salon. Each evening, we took her to a different restaurant to eat and she felt like Queen for a Day. Afterward, she and Dawn would demonstrate new little dance steps Dawn had taught her during the day and we’d laugh ‘til tears at her little rotund shape jiggling about.

Only thing was, behind the scenes, Kirk and I locked horns. I was so afraid MawMaw’s sensitive nose would pick up on the foreign scents of alcohol and tobacco, but Kirk refused to back off. I also feared she would overhear our arguments, which were becoming increasingly more heated, as Kirk’s golf times stretched longer and longer and his afternoon treks on unnamed
errands,
during my scheduled appointments, increased.

Helpless fury almost paralyzed me as his personality became more and more erratic. The last day of MawMaw’s visit was a scene from Hell. While she sat in our sunken den, I tried to reason with Kirk to stop drinking and disappearing all the time, which, I figured out by now, were connected.

“You stink like a stale ashtray,” I hissed at him in our upstairs bedroom, where he sprawled on the bed, grinning like an idiot, “not to mention the beer. Kirk, you were a
preacher, for God’s sake.
Don’t you even care what your image is?”

His slumberous eyes blinked slowly. “Can’t say as I do, Neecy.”

“Neecy?” MawMaw called from downstairs. “Honey, why don’t you come down and sit with me for a while before I have to go? I’m getting kinda lonesome.”

Her quavery appeal pierced me to the core. I’d shot Kirk a disgusted look and left, quietly closing the door behind me.

Tonight, rain rivuleted my windshield and I remembered driving MawMaw home that day, alone, because Kirk was in no condition to be around her. I knew, someday, he’d be ashamed. But not now. He’d won his mission to conquer me. He’d made me love him to distraction again and now, he’d become bored with the whole thing and had turned to drinking and God only knew what else.

I turned the windshield wipers on, barely able to see the highway ahead. Rain and tears blended in a melancholy symphony of grief and pain.

Grief for something vital and pure within the hallowed walls of marriage. Gone. Something inside me knew,
felt
the slimy spirit of betrayal.

Pain from my indomitable inner-self, who refused to accept its demise.

“Bloody rain.” I leaned forward, wiping the foggy windshield with damp wadded tissue, focusing my teary-blurred gaze on the road ahead. I slowed the VW down to a more tranquil forty-five mph.

I checked into the Landmark and settled in, tired and hungry. It was nearly eleven o’clock by the time I finished a sandwich from room service, a splurge I felt I deserved after the long drive. I called my home number. No answer.

I watched television for the next couple of hours. Then tried to begin a Fern Michaels novel but couldn’t concentrate. I tried again to reach Kirk. No answer. I looked at the ornate wall clock. One-ten am.

Only then did I give in to the tears that had threatened since I walked into the lavish setting surrounding me. I cried until I hiccupped and was out of breath. I pulled on my housecoat and went out onto the private balcony to fold myself into a lounge chair, where I watched the dark ocean until dawn turned it silver and the sun climbed up to paint its horizon golden and banish my nightmares. I went inside, closed the drapes and pulled the covers over my head and slept.