'Til Grits Do Us Part (25 page)

My jaw quivered as I tried to get a rein on my tongue before I spewed something hateful. Deer-blasters and ultra-right-wing freaks! THIS is what I'd chosen for my life?

“No! For goodness' sake, Shiloh. Sit down.” Adam grabbed my hand and pulled me back down to the booth. “Stop thinking I'm judging you. That's not what I meant at all. I meant I wanted to wait for your sake.
Yours
, do you hear me? Mine, too, but I was thinking mainly of you.”

He exhaled, tracing my fingers with his. Making those little shivers of sensitive flesh echo up and down my arm. “You're beautiful, Shiloh. I love you. Don't you know how easy it would be to…to…”

“To what?” I felt tears smart again behind my eyes.

“To do a lot more than just kiss you.” Adam let out a long, shuddering breath, closing his eyes. Those brownish eyelashes quivering before he opened them again. Color gathered in his face, across his cheeks, and under the blondish hair that fell over his forehead. “Please try to understand me. And if you can't, then just do this for me. Like you said to Stella with her smoking.”

His lips, redder and suddenly beautiful in their firm lines and touch of moisture, pressed together as he thought. “I've made mistakes before. Maybe not to the extent that you might think is important, but it was for me. I don't want to do that. Not with you.”

“Why not with me? What makes me so different?”

“You're…you're precious.” Something like tears glimmered in his eyes as he reached out to cup my cheek. “I want everything to be right. No regrets.”

I didn't reply. Just sat there thinking, remembering what he'd told me on the grassy banks of the lake where he'd asked me to marry him, slipping a ring twisted out of grass on my finger. After I'd reminded him that I would never be the pristine, sugar-sweet bride of a protected youth.
“I'm not asking you to be me,”
he'd said.
“I'm asking you to be you and marry me.”

Adam abruptly leaned forward and brushed my cheek with his lips. Warm lips, and soft. Then he sat back in the booth and unwrapped a clean napkin, dabbing gently at the corners of my tear-swollen eyes.

I reached out and accepted the napkin with a nod of thanks, sniffling in the rest of my tears. And abruptly jerked myself out of the booth, wondering how I'd gone and gotten myself engaged to stubborn Adam Carter, Mr. “you-don't-know-Virginia-Beach” who nixed my beautiful Morning Sun honeymoon package.

“I've never heard of anybody doing something as crazy as waiting for a kiss,” I managed, my lips quivering. “Do you know that?”

He reached out for my hand. “Well? Then maybe we can be the first.”

I stared at him as his fingers slipped through mine, not sure if I should call the old Western State Lunatic Asylum in Staunton and have him committed—and maybe me, too—or press my head to his chest in a tight hug. Just like most people in the South: infuriating and irresistible at the same time.

Instead I wordlessly turned on my heel, pushing my way through the prom stars to the dinky Dairy Queen bathroom.

Adam's face tensed with worry when I slid back into the booth. I'd more or less composed myself inside the frigid, over-air-conditioned stall, trying not to look at the graffiti scrawled in the new metal walls. “You okay?” He reached for my arm. “I didn't mean to… It's just an idea, you know.”

“An idea. Right. A pretty different one though, I'd have to say.”

“Weird, you mean?” Adam asked, rubbing his thumb across my arm.

“Hmm. Yeah. Maybe that, too.” But I tried to think of something else to talk about. Think about. I started unwrapping my cheeseburger, hunger stirring with a surprising fierceness. Like just after I'd finished a ten-mile run, body craving carbs. Fries. Oh, they looked so good.

“So how about you?” Adam asked in a brighter tone, perhaps trying to lighten our emotions. “I guess you went to prom, too, right?”

“No.” I shook two french fries free from the paper sleeve. They'd cooled to a dull lukewarm—the bane of fast-food fries—but still looked tasty, if not a bit oily. I ate them and licked the grains of salt from my fingers.

“You didn't go to prom? Why not?”

“I was too busy rushing Mom to the hospital after she overdosed on some psychedelic tea her guru gave her.” I chewed another fry. “I almost lost her that time.” I cleared my throat, feeling my breath congeal. “And I told her…”

Adam put his hamburger down. “Told her what?”

“That I hoped she died.” I swallowed, the fries morphing into starchy clumps in my esophagus. “Guess I got my wish, huh?”

Adam's hand found mine through the mess of greasy papers on our tray, and he linked our fingers together. We sat there together in silence, and I was glad that for once he didn't try to say something to assuage my guilty conscience. He simply wiped his fingers on his napkin then lifted my palm to his mouth and kissed it. Resting my hand gently against his stubbly cheek.

My eyes flickered down to the paper tray liner, where we'd squirted a splotch of garish, orange-red ketchup. Pooled by our fries like blood. My free hand flitted to my throat, tracing the line where the knife blade had pressed into my skin.

“Are you afraid to die, Adam?”

I whispered it so quietly that Adam had to lean forward to hear. One of the high school boys at a nearby table spun a tray on his finger like a basketball, grappling for it as it careened sideways and clattered on the floor. Punctuated by an explosion of laughter and applause.

“Afraid to die? No. Not really.” He kissed my fingers again as he let them go.

“Everything in Japan's about avoiding death.” I finished unwrapping my burger and picked it up. “The number four.
Shi
. It sounds like the word for death. Nobody gives gifts in fours. It's a bad omen.” I took a bite of my burger, which gushed melted cheese and salty dill pickle rounds. “You don't stick chopsticks upright in your bowl or pass food chopstick to chopstick because that's how they deal with rice offerings and cremated remains at funerals.”

Adam's eyes widened over his cup.

“Lots of things, really. You don't sleep facing north because that's how people are laid out for cremation. And so forth. Never write somebody's name in red ink.”

As soon as I said it, I choked on my bite of burger, the gritty pieces of meat lodging in the back of my throat.

“What's wrong? You don't believe that stuff, do you?” Adam reached across the table to pound me on the back.

“No way. Not anymore.” I coughed again to clear my throat. “But the note on my car was written in red ink. And both florist's cards from the bouquet.”

Adam's face paled. “Red ink? Is that supposed to mean something?” “I have no idea.” I took a sip of my Coke. “But it's…yes. A little weird. Do you know anybody who regularly writes in red ink?” “My dad. A math teacher.”

“Right.” I tried another bite of burger. “And Clarence prefers red pens when he does his crossword puzzles. You better believe I'm going to talk to the police about Clarence.” I chewed in frustration, wishing I'd never had reason to suspect Clarence. My coworker, of all people. Why couldn't the note on my car have blown away in the wind, like so many of my worries about Mom's death?

“But that's the thing, Adam. Everybody tries to avoid death. Most of Mom's guru chasing and cult following was about that, too—finding a way to prolong life and earn points for the next one. I know differently now. But the idea of death still bothers me.” I chewed a while in silence. “It's terrible no matter how you look at it. I've written up a few car accidents that gave me nightmares. Even as a Christian, I don't like it.”

“I guess nobody does.” Adam looked across the table at me. “And that's why we put our faith in Jesus. He's the only one who's ever beat death and lived to tell about it.”

He glanced over at the raucous crowd of prom-goers, where two couples made out in the corners of the booths. The others toasted noisily with chocolate-dipped ice-cream cones. Girls dabbed delicately at their lips with paper napkins, heads bent together as they reapplied lipstick with shining compact mirrors.

“Most people go on acting as if life's forever and the afterlife is some sort of cosmic lights-out.” Adam balled up his napkin. “Without a care in the world. There's no judgment. No accounting for our actions on earth. Faith is irrelevant. But…that's not the way it is.”

The pulse of the electric guitar on the radio died during an unexpected lull in the teen chatters, and I heard Adam's voice come clearly. “We only have one life, Shiloh. We have to live it for Him. That's all that matters.”

I looked over at a neighboring table as Adam's words swelled the walls of my heart. One of the tuxedoed guys clumsily balanced an ice-cream cone on his nose, arms spread. I wondered if he'd ever considered that when he walked out those glass doors with his date on his arm and climbed into his car, a drunk driver might veer across his path. Or a deer, for crying out loud. Goodness knows deer crashes killed enough people in Virginia every year. I wondered if he was ready to face death—there in his tuxedo, a silly grin plastered across his face. Plans for love and college and a future dancing in his head.

Was I ready? I picked at a sesame seed on top of my bun, remembering the cold steel of the knife.

“Well, I know one thing for sure. As much as I love Jesus, I'm not looking forward to dying.” I wiped my fingers on a ketchup-stained napkin. “And I could never live with knowing that I caused somebody else's suffering and death.”

“Let that go,” said Adam gently, wiping a crumb from my chin. “Leave it with God. He knows better than we do.”

“I know.”
But
. I bit into my burger and didn't finish the rest of my thought. “It's so easy for you, isn't it, Adam?” I blurted, mouth half full. Wondering what my life would be like now if I'd grown up here in the Bible Belt, listening to sermons and going to Sunday school. Laughing with my prom date at a small-town restaurant instead of stepping over discarded syringes on my way to the homeless shelter in Brooklyn after Mom got evicted for the third time. Hoping my neighbor's leering boyfriend wouldn't try to kiss me again while I cracked open their bullet-ridden apartment door, begging her to call 911 after Mom passed out in the hallway.

“Easy?” Adam stopped chewing. “Maybe you're right.” He wiped his mouth on a napkin. “But I'd die for Him, Shiloh, without a second thought. And for you.” He ran his hand over my silver engagement band. “I guess that ups the stakes a little.”

I glanced up at Adam as I balled up my napkin, feeling in the well of my stomach how different we were: a man who wouldn't kiss me or even come in my house alone—engaged to a woman who hadn't cared when her ex-fiancé roomed with another woman. Or pretended not to care, rather.

Adam's short, conservative haircut and simple Gospel answers slammed up against my quaking fears and old superstitions. His fishing tackle box versus my sleek cherry-blossom-patterned teacup and Japanese fashion magazines.

Can we really do this, God?
I felt my heart beat painfully in my chest as my ring glimmered in the light. A spark of fluid silver, both cold and alive. Liquid fire. A paradox wrapped around my finger.

For one shimmering moment I didn't know who was right—me or the drunk outside the door who'd proclaimed us the “perfect couple.”

Maybe both.

Or maybe neither.

Adam's cell phone vibrated suddenly, buzzing against the table where he'd dropped it with his keys. He frowned at the number and punched the button with the heel of his hand, wiping his fingers on a napkin before putting the phone to his ear.

“Yes, sir?” He sat up straighter, mouthing “police” as his eyes jerked up to meet mine. “Did you find him? Oh. Okay.” His expression sagged. “Thanks anyway.”