The Girl from Charnelle (5 page)

“Oh, it's colder than I thought,” he said inside the car. “Let me warm her up.” He flipped on the heater. “Were the boys good for you?”

“Yes, sir.” He smiled nervously, and she could tell he got the joke this time.

“Good,” he said.

“Did you have fun tonight?” she asked.

“Yes. Thanks for coming.”

“You're welcome.”

They drove for a minute in silence.

“Did you have fun at the New Year's Eve party?” she asked. She said it fast and tried to make it sound casual, but her heart started beating quickly in the quiet after she spoke. She was suddenly aware of her breath misting lightly in front of her.

He glanced sideways at her, pursed his lips, and nodded his head slowly. “Yes, ma'am,” he drawled, smiling, and there was a joke in that. “Yes, I did. Probably too much fun.”

“You drank a bunch, huh?” She laughed.

“Yeah, I guess I did. I felt it the next morning, too.”

She looked at his mustache. She remembered the way it had felt against her cheek, above her lips when he kissed her, like the bristles of a toothbrush. “So did Manny,” she said. “He was so sick he didn't even want to watch the Cotton Bowl on New Year's.”

There was an awkward lull. She held her hands in her lap and stared out the window.

“Did
you
have a good time?” he asked.

She nodded, then realized he couldn't see her. “Yes.”

“You sure do like to dance,” he said, and she remembered he'd said the same thing that night. “You're good at it, too.”

“I don't know,” she said dismissively. “It's fun.”

After a minute of silence, he said, “Listen, Laura, I sometimes do foolish things when I get a little drunk. Sometimes I remember them, sometimes I don't. Well, I vaguely remember doing something a little foolish that night. And…well…I'm sorry about that.”

So that was it. He didn't even remember. Or not all of it. Or maybe he was just sorry. She realized that she'd rather he didn't remember than be sorry.

“Don't worry about it,” she said.

He turned down her street and pulled into her driveway. The lights were on in the living room and at Mrs. Ambling's house next door. He shifted the car into park.

“Thanks again,” he said. “For baby-sitting, I mean.” He smiled, and at that moment she felt a bold thrill run through her. She nodded and started to open the door, then turned and leaned across the bench seat and kissed him on the cheek. His face was clean-shaven, smooth. Then she kissed his mouth. She pulled back and looked up at him in the dark, smiling. His thick, nearly white eyelashes seemed to shimmer. She liked that expression on his face—slack-jawed, stunned, astonished really, his eyes wide open.

“You're welcome,” she said and scooted over and out the door. She ran to the house, her arms swinging freely, and hopped up the cement porch stairs, still rimmed in snow. She looked back at his car but could only see the two white globes of the headlights. She could not see inside but could imagine him peering out, fixing her on the porch. It was risky, she knew. Her father, her brothers, Mrs. Ambling—anybody could have been looking
out—but she didn't care. She liked the recklessness of it. He'd done it to her.
Turnabout was fair play.
Isn't that what Manny always said, needling her? She smiled and waved and then was inside, where Gene stared up at her from the floor where he was working on a model airplane. Manny just barely acknowledged her with a nod, his ear next to his transistor radio. Her father walked into the living room, wearing a yellow apron of her mother's, a gray dish towel in his hand.

“How'd it go?” he asked.

“Good,” she chirped and pulled the dollar from her coat pocket, waving it so they all could see.

I
n school the next week her English teacher, Mrs. McFarland, told them—quoting some German writer, Laura couldn't remember who—that “boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” And that struck Laura as perfectly right. Anytime she'd done something that scared her, just plunged in—dancing wildly, walking on the edge of Palo Duro Canyon, swimming across Lake Meredith with Manny and Gloria one summer, running outside in her underwear in the snow on a dare at a slumber party, and now kissing Mr. Letig in his car—she always felt wonderful afterward, triumphant and graceful. And yes, like there was some touch of genius in the act itself. She'd have to remember that. Yes, she would.

The following Wednesday Mrs. Letig called and asked if Laura could watch the boys that weekend. “Sure thing,” she said, this time without consulting her father.
The next Saturday night she dressed nicely, but not too nice, not like before. She had washed her hair and braided it, and when she undid it, her hair was wavy. She had been thinking about him, and she looked forward to seeing him. She planned to gauge from his eyes how he felt about her kissing him in the car. But there would be no secret trips into the bedroom this time. None of that foolishness. That was crazy.

She couldn't figure out what to call him. Not so much in public—in anybody else's company, she would always refer to him as Mr. Letig, and she doubted there'd be another “incident,” as she now thought about it. But for herself, she wanted a private name. “Mr. Letig” seemed too formal, and “Letig” too much a man's way of talking to another man. It made her think of locker rooms and Manny's sweaty gym clothes. “John” was what Mrs. Letig called him, but still she liked that name best of all. It was simple, familiar, intimate, and when she thought of him as John, she could see the boy in him. It must be odd to have many names, she thought. She could see herself only as Laura. She'd never had a nickname. Her father called her sister Morning Glory. When her brothers were little, they'd sometimes called her Laalee, but it was something they grew out of soon enough. Miss Tate. She could imagine that, though it seemed proper, too proper, what some of her teachers called her if she was talking with her friends when she wasn't supposed to, that voice they use when they want to scold or humiliate you. Later, when she married, if she married, it would be Mrs. Something-or-Other. Mrs. Letig. Laura Letig. She had to admit it had a nice ring to it.
Hush now. Stop that.

 

Cold again, but not that cold. And Mr. and Mrs. Letig, John and Anne, were ready to go when she got there. He looked at her now, smiled, and was there something else as well? She smiled back, what she hoped was mysteriously.

When they returned around ten o'clock, Mrs. Letig gave her another dollar. It was odd how his wife was the one doling out the money; that had not been the way with her parents. Her father always took care of the money, paid the bills, paid for everything. Even at the Piggly Wiggly or Spenser's General Store, they ran tabs, which her father paid off at the end
of each month. Laura wondered vaguely if that was perhaps why John Letig had kissed her, if there was some connection between his wife's control over the money and what happened that night at the Armory.

She got in the car, where he was waiting behind the steering wheel. She smiled, asked easily, “Did you have fun?” She felt mischievous. She wanted to tease him. He nodded. They drove in silence for a few moments, and then he turned on the radio to Bobby Darin crooning about his “Dream Lover.” Tapping her foot to the song, she couldn't stop smiling. She felt calm and knowing.

“You surprised me last time,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” he said.

There was a pause, then she said, mock annoyed, “Do you want me to apologize?”

He laughed. “No, no need to do that. I liked it. In fact, I've been thinking about it ever since. Sometimes nothing but. Yesterday I about near cut my hand off at the table saw because of you.”

He laid his hand open on the seat and showed her a cut across his palm.

“That's terrible,” she said.

“Yep, that's right. It's terrible. But you had me preoccupied.”

She felt horrible that she had caused such an accident. She reached down and touched his palm.

“Aaaahhhhh!” he screamed, and his hand flopped on the seat like a fish.

She jumped, her hands flying to her mouth. “Oh, my God! I'm so sorry!”

He started laughing. “I'm just kidding.” He put his hand down. “It doesn't hurt.”

She reached across the seat and hit his arm. “That wasn't funny,” she said, but she laughed hard, then caught herself. “It wasn't.”

“Then why are you laughing?”

“Shut up,” she said.

“You're very pretty, Laura,” he said. “Especially when you scream like that. ‘Ohhhhh, my God! I'm so sorry!'” he shrieked.

“Quit it,” she said. “You're cruel.”

“
Cruel?
I just said you're pretty.”

“I don't care what you said. You're still cruel.”

But she liked this about him, liked this easy teasing. He wasn't driving
her home. He drove past her house and then down a dark, houseless road several blocks away that turned to gravel.

“Where are we going?” she asked, a little nervous.

“Just for a short drive. Is that okay?”

She wasn't sure, but she said, haltingly, “Yeah, I guess.”

“I could take you home.”

“No, that's okay.”

He drove a little farther east of town, out where the houses became farms and ranches and the lights from the town were dim. He turned left, down another potholed road that led to an unlit farmhouse. On the radio, Wilbert Harrison sang brightly about going to Kansas City—Kansas City, here he comes. Letig parked behind the barn. The windows were boarded up, the grass high around the doors. She didn't know if she liked this. He turned off the lights but kept the car running and the radio on, where now the Platters harmoniously complained about the smoke in their eyes.

“I thought you wanted to drive,” she said, trying to regain the lighthearted tone from before.

“Not anymore.”

“What is this place?”

“This used to be my uncle's farm. I worked here when I was about your age.”

He turned the ignition off and cracked his window so that a cool draft blew in. She felt uneasy. He laid his hand across the seat, close to her. “It doesn't hurt. Really.”

She reached down and touched his palm nervously, then rested her own hand on the seat next to his. He put a couple of fingers gently on the top of her hand. She wanted to back things up. She preferred the teasing and laughter from before. Everything seemed too quiet now, too charged.

“Why did you kiss me?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said, laughing. “To get you back, I guess.”

He nodded. “You're a flirt, aren't you?”

“No.” She didn't smile.

“Hold my hand.”

“Why?”

“Because I want you to.”

She opened her palm to him, and he put his hand in hers. His hand was big, easily twice the size of her own. And there were thin hairs on the back.
He squeezed her palm. She could feel the cut. She remembered when she and Marlene Shopper were much younger, they'd cut their palms with an army knife and rubbed the blood together. Blood sisters.

“That's nice,” he said.

He leaned over, and she moved her face away instinctively. He leaned in very slowly and kissed her cheek. She turned away. He reached out with his other hand and gently turned her face back to his. Then he kissed her softly on the lips. He tilted his chin away but kept his forehead next to hers, almost touching.

“What would your wife say about this?” she whispered. She wasn't sure why she'd said it. It sounded like a line from a movie.

“Let's not talk about that.”

“But—”

“Shhhhhh.” He placed his index finger next to her lips, then dropped his hand and kissed her again. She let herself be kissed, and then she could feel her head moving toward him. It was like easing from the side of a boat into a warm lake. Different from kissing boys, very different. That gravity, a heaviness she remembered from New Year's.

As they kissed, he touched her face again and then slowly moved his fingers down her neck to the top of her chest. She put her hand on his, to hold him, to keep him still. His hands were very different from his lips—big, a roughness to them, despite his long, slender fingers. They made her nervous.

He was gentle, though. He didn't move his hand, just let it rest there.

“Sorry,” he whispered. She pressed her lips against his harder. She didn't want him to talk about it. Words only complicated things, made her more nervous. He pulled back. “I don't know what to think about you,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You
are
a flirt, aren't you?” He kissed her again. “How old are you?”

She hesitated, thought about lying. But didn't. Her birthday was in December. “Sixteen.” She almost added “barely,” but stopped herself.

He lifted his eyebrows and then leaned his head against the seat. He closed his eyes and made his red mouth into an O and blew out in an exaggerated sigh.

“Ouch!”

He was still holding her hand. She liked the way he looked there,
against the seat, relaxed, his eyes closed. He looked vulnerable. She put her other hand up to his face, ran the backs of her fingers across the light stubble of his cheek. He didn't move, didn't open his eyes. She touched his lips, those almost feminine lips, thick with that strange redness to them, his blond mustache above like soft bristle.

Then, abruptly, he pushed her hand away, sat up, and shook his head.

“I better get you home. It's late.”

Something had happened. Some line had been crossed. The feeling was not the same.

“Okay,” she said quickly, not wanting to agitate him further. “Sure. Fine.”

He started the car, turned on the lights. Everything was suddenly about shifting gears, backing up, the logistics of getting her home—like nothing had happened. But something had, and they both knew it. What had felt good just a few minutes ago now felt ugly, unseemly. He wouldn't look at her. He pursed his lips. He was thinking. She could imagine what it might be about but didn't want to say anything.
Don't tamper with it,
she thought, that old phrase of her father's when he was fixing something and the kids were underfoot. She adjusted her dress, pushed back her hair. She felt embarrassed. “Mack the Knife” was playing now, and he turned up the volume, too loud, as he drove, looking straight ahead. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit up. He shook his head now and again. She saw his lips move in the silent gesture of words, but they weren't the words to the song.

“I'm sorry,” he said when they reached her house. “I shouldn't have done this. I knew I shouldn't, but I did, and I'm sorry.”

She didn't know what to say to that. He was too solemn. Was he implying that it was his fault or hers?

“Okay,” she said.

“Would you do me a favor?” he asked.

What, what is it? What did he want from her?
“Yeah,” she said, “sure.”

“Don't say anything about this.”

Why was he being so cold about it? It hurt, his voice. “I wouldn't,” she said.

“Not to anyone.”

“I won't, really. I promise.”

She felt insulted. She started to cry. Suddenly the tears were there, and
she was angry about it, angry that they were sprouting from her eyes. She turned her head and wiped at her face quickly so he couldn't see. Her throat constricted.

“Hey,” he said and turned off the radio. “Hey, there. Calm down.”

She laughed, a propulsive sound, too loud for the car. “I'm sorry,” she said, laughing again and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “It's dumb. It's
so
dumb.”

He reached across the seat and touched her arm, a gesture of pity. She resisted, but he pulled her arm toward him and held her hand, squeezing it firmly. She could feel the cut.

“Are you gonna be okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yes, sir.” A current of bitterness crept in. It was no joke now. She turned to him. He smiled, but in a kind of grimace, his forehead wrinkled, eyes squinting shut.

“Hey,” he said. “I'm—”

But she was out the door before he could finish. And then inside. She didn't look back this time.