Raising Hope (20 page)

Chet raises his spatula and snorts. “What’re you, a goddamn weather girl?”

I laugh, a loud, nervous “Ha!” and I say, “Well, the weather’s interesting, don’t you think? I mean, I just wonder why it’s hotter this summer than it has been other years. The winters are different now, too. Not as cold, I don’t think, not as much snow.”

I’m babbling on like an idiot when the kitchen door swings open and in comes Jack. He interrupts my little speech on weather patterns, saying, “Ruth, can I talk to you for a sec?”

I turn and smile as bravely as I don’t feel inside. “Sure thing, Jack. What’s up?”

“Alone?”

Chet starts whistling and cleaning his grill again, and I have no choice but to wipe my hands on my apron and nod. I’m so nervous that my lower lip is trembling, and all I can do to make it stop is to start grinning like a foolish circus clown. I’m trying to act like everything’s okeydokey as I follow him out front to a corner booth. No one’s here, dammit, so I don’t have the excuse that I need to wait on someone. I drum my fingers on the table and put my eyes anywhere but on him. He just looks at me, and finally he says in a low voice, “What’s wrong?”

“What do you mean, what’s wrong?” I say heartily. “Everything’s great.”

“I don’t feel like everything’s great,” he says. “I really miss you.”

I laugh. “Oh God, don’t go getting your feelings hurt. I’ve just been busy.”

“Busy with what?” He doesn’t say it mean; he says it like he really wants to know.

I shrug. “Stuff. Stuff with Hope. Sara Lynn’s been working a lot lately. Trying to meet a deadline for her magazine.”

“Is that why you leave early every day, too?”

I stare at him coldly. “Dock my pay, Jack.”

He slams his palm on the table, and I jump. I’ve never seen him angry before. His voice is quiet but strained, like he’s trying to keep from yelling. “Dammit, Ruth, this isn’t about the restaurant. This is about you and me.”

I want to cry because there won’t be any more him and me after he finds out I’m pregnant. Best to beat him to the punch. “Maybe I’m tired of you and me.”

He scratches his bald spot like he does when he’s trying hard to take something in, and I want to hug him, crying, “I don’t mean what I’m saying. I’m just scared as hell about all of this. Please don’t stop loving me.” Stupid fool, that’s what I am. I cross my arms over my chest and say, “Maybe I think we need a break.”

He stops scratching and places both hands on the table, palms up, as if he’s showing me he’s not hiding anything. “Why?” he asks.

I snort. “Does there have to be a reason for everything?”

“Yes,” he replies immediately. “For something like this, you bet there has to be a reason.”

“Well, there’s not,” I say, sliding out from the bench. “So don’t bother me about it again.”

I walk back to the kitchen and grab my purse without even saying good-bye to Chet. I march back out to the dining room and try not to look at Jack, still sitting in his booth, looking like I’ve just kicked him in the stomach. He looks so sad that I can’t just leave it like this, and as I pass him I say, “Listen, I just need time to think, okay?”

He looks at me and says, “I think I should have a part in any decision you make about our relationship.”

“What relationship?” I hiss. “It’s not like we’re a couple, for God’s sake.”

“Yes,” he insists, grabbing my hand. “Yes, we are. It’s you who doesn’t want to go public. I’d have married you years ago.”

I pull my hand away, and the goddamn tears start coming. “Well, it’s too late for that now,” I say thickly.

“What in God’s name do you mean by that?” he says.

I lose it then and run out of there crying to beat the band. Stupid pregnancy hormones. “Never mind,” I cry. “Just never mind.”

As I get into my car and start the engine, I wipe away my tears with my arm. This is just so typical. I should have remembered that there wasn’t going to be any happy ending here. Not in my goddamn life. See, my track record for relationships isn’t so great. Well, let’s call a spade a spade—it’s pretty much sucked since the beginning.

In April of my senior year, I was coming out of a detention I’d landed for mouthing off to Mr. Dilbert—Mr. Dildo, we called him. It wasn’t that big a deal. Hell, it was getting so I was spending more time in the detention room than any other classroom. Too bad they didn’t give an award at graduation for “person with the most detentions.” I would have won for sure, beaten Sara Lynn out of something for once.

Finally, finally, after two hours of sitting at a desk watching the hands of the wall clock creep around the big black numbers, I was free. “You may go, Ruth,” said Miss Garrison, sighing. I jumped up and walked fast out the door. Turned the corner to get to my locker, and—bam!—ran right into Jeff Barnes.

“Ow!” I rubbed at my head. “What the hell!”

“Sorry.” Jeff was rubbing his head, too. “Are you okay?”

“I guess.” I laughed, even though my head still throbbed. “Man, you’ve got a hard head.”

He laughed, too. “Speak for yourself.” He was a rich kid who wore pressed khakis and shirts with a little horse embroidered on the front, so he didn’t run with my crowd. But up close, he didn’t seem snobby at all. He smiled at me like we were friends, and I realized I liked the way he looked. I liked his short hair and clean-shaven face, his shiny loafer shoes, and the way he stood up straight and looked me in the eye.

“What’re you doing here, anyway?” I asked. The halls were deserted. There was only the janitor, pushing a broom down the hallway.

“Yearbook,” he said. “I’m the editor.”

“Mmm.” I nodded, although I couldn’t have told you anything about yearbook. It wasn’t the kind of thing that grabbed my interest.

“How about you?” he asked.

“How about me what?”

“Why are you here so late?”

“Guess,” I said, smiling.

“Newspaper?”

I laughed and shook my head.

“Tennis team?”

I laughed some more, still shaking my head no.

He was getting the joke and asked, “Cheerleading?”

“No way,” I said.

“Future Homemakers of America Club?”

He topped himself there, and I laughed real loud and said, “No. Future Criminals of America Club. Detention.”

“What did you do?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Wised off to the Dildo.” He looked sort of impressed, so I bragged on myself a little. “I’m so sick of his crap. I mean, I’m out of here in two months. I don’t have to take his shit.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” he agreed. “I can’t wait to get the hell out of this town.”

“You going to college?”

“Williams,” he said proudly.

“Great,” I replied, because I could tell he thought it was a big deal.

“You?”

“Unclear,” I said. “Remember, I’m president of the Future Criminals of America Club. We don’t exactly go on to stellar college careers.”

He laughed. “You’re funny, Ruth.”

“Yeah, tell it to the Dildo.”

He laughed again and pointed to me. “See? You’re hilarious.”

I was feeling hilarious. I was even feeling pretty, the way Jeff was looking at me. “You heading home?” I asked.

“Yeah, I was. How about you?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t really feel like going home. It’s not like I have any studying to do or anything.”

“You know what? I’m accepted at college now. I don’t have any studying to do, either.”

“That’s the spirit,” I told him. “Better watch it or you’ll be a Future Criminal, too.”

He was looking at me differently now, like he was sizing me up and thinking. “You want to ride around a little?” he asked quickly, and I knew pretty well what he was getting at.

I stuck out a hip a little bit and tossed my hair back the way the rich girls did. “Yeah,” I said. “Why not?”

“I’ve got to go to my locker. Don’t go anywhere, okay? I’ll be right back.”

I stood in the hallway lined with puke-yellow lockers and waited, my mind racing and my heart beating fast. He came back quickly, panting a little, skidding to a stop in front of me. “Ready?” he asked eagerly. “Ready to go?”

“I’m just waiting for you,” I said, trying to be cool.

We went out the front door of the high school, a change for me. I used the back door off the gym. I wondered if I became Jeff’s girlfriend if I would start marching right in the front door. I saw myself, my frizzy brown hair pulled off my face in a headband like Sara Lynn Hoffman used, dressed in corduroys and a polo shirt, walking right through that front door.

“Hop in,” Jeff said. He looked a little pale, a little nervous, so I started talking a mile a minute when he started up the car.

“I like your car. I sure wish I had a car. I’m always either walking or depending on other people for rides. You know Gina Logan? She’s got a car. I ride with her a lot.”

He just nodded and smiled some, looking preoccupied as he drove us out to the tobacco fields west of town and stopped the car.

“I worked tobacco one summer. I was fourteen and some of my girlfriends were doing it. You know Kathy Lussman and Suzi Morgan? They talked me into it. Man, was it a disgusting job. It’s hotter’n hell, for one thing, and your fingers get all gross and brown. You can’t get that stuff off your hands. I’m telling you, that was the only summer I could take doing that job. Never again.”

He looked so miserable, squirming in his seat and not even having the courage to look at me, that I finally said, “Oh, hell,” and leaned over and kissed him myself. Well, that was all I needed to do to break the spell on Mr. Shyness. He started cramming his tongue in my mouth, forcing it past my teeth. Then he reached under my shirt and tried to unhook my bra. It was taking him forever, and I was getting a backache from trying to contort into whatever position would make it easier for him to unhook the damn thing. I finally pulled away from him, saying, “One sec,” and unhooked it myself. He breathed sort of funny, like he had asthma or something, when he pushed his tongue back in my mouth and grabbed my nonexistent boobs. It flashed through my mind that rich girls always had perfectly perky boobs—not too big, not too small, but just right. Girls like me either had no boobs or disgustingly huge ones. Well, he seemed to be getting along all right. “Ow,” I muttered as he squeezed a nipple hard. Okay, so there wasn’t much for him to feel, but he didn’t have to pinch me.

“Sorry,” he said, taking his tongue out of my mouth and then diving it right back in. I was beginning to get the idea of the expression
sucking face.
He started to unzip my pants, and I immediately went for his. Gave me something to do. It wasn’t like I hadn’t made out with guys before. I’d gone about this far. In fact, I’d gone about this far lots of times. What did I care if some guy felt around my body? I’d always stopped it right about here, though.

“That’s it,” I’d say when I’d had my good time, and zipped up my pants and buttoned my shirt.

“But, but . . . ,” the guy would always say, looking at me like his eyes and his private part were going to pop right off his body.

“See ya,” I’d say, and I’d be smiling as I got up and walked away. It always was a good feeling to walk away from a boy right when he wanted me most. Jack yourself off, Jack, I’d think.

So here I was feeling Jeff’s little appendage and listening to his breathing get even more fast and wheezy. He was trying and trying to unzip my jeans, and after what seemed like a million years, he finally managed to get them undone. I felt like I was watching a long-distance runner stumble across the finish line. I only had one life to live, and I felt as though I’d soon be turning fifty in this car. Finally, I pulled down my own pants and underpants—with one hand, I might add, as I was still grabbing his puny penis with the other—and I happened to glance at his face and see that it was all red. Little beads of sweat were pouring down his forehead and nose, making his glasses all slippery and crooked. He was so goddamn hopeful, so goddamn excited, I couldn’t stop him. Hell, it
wasn’t
like watching a long-distance runner, it was like watching a Special Olympics long-distance runner. How do you not give a Special Olympian a medal?

So I didn’t pull back when he grabbed me and tried to set me on top of him. I went right along, and I swear, the guy was going to need an inhaler if he kept on the way he was going. My back was jammed into the steering wheel, and I said, “I can’t do this.”

“Oh God, no, please, please,” he cried, wheezing.

I slapped his arm. “No, silly. I mean, I can’t do it right here. Let’s get in back.”

So he threw me off him, opened the driver’s-side door, shut it again, and got in the backseat through the back door. Me, I just climbed back there. No sense in freezing my ass off.

“Ohgod,” he said, diving his tongue right into me again and pinning me underneath him. Next thing I knew, he was starting to poke himself into me. “Ohgod, ohgod, ohgod . . . ,” he chanted. “Wait!” He pulled himself out and leaked his stupid sperm all over my stomach.

Well, if that was sex, you could have it. I liked what came before the act much better, that was for sure. “Eww,” I said, brushing at my stomach. “What the hell!”

He was still above me, his eyes closed and his little wheezy breaths coming further apart now. “Sorry,” he said, panting. “I wanted to get a condom, but . . .”

But what? I thought. You couldn’t hold it, so you sprayed your body fluid all over me? “Can you get me a tissue?” I asked. “Look in my bag. On the floor of the front seat.”

He lay there holding himself like he couldn’t quite believe his little thing had been inside a girl. His mouth was open, and his glasses were way down his nose. “Today?” I said. “Do you mind?”

“Oh, sure. Sorry.” He leaped off me and leaned over the front seat, grabbing for my purse. “Here you go,” he said, holding the purse by the strap for me to take.

“Um, I kind of
can’t move
here,” I told him. If I moved even a little, that gloppy pile of slime lying on my stomach was going to spill everywhere. “Just go into my purse and get a tissue.”

“Oh, yeah.” He laughed. “Okay. Sure.” He dug into my purse and handed me a ratty, wrinkled, linty tissue that probably had been at the bottom of my bag since 1978.