Darnay Road (34 page)

“That’s
you!” I yell at his retreat. “It’s you!”

“Calm
down, Georgia. It’s over. It’s over now. You go on out the back door and make
sure Easy gets down the road,” Granma says to me. She gets up then and so does
May.

“Why
would he say that? Why would he say all that to Easy…about me? It’s him. He’s
the fool!”

“Calm
down,” Granma says sternly. “Go with Easy.”

I’m
on it. I grab Easy’s hand.

“Fifteen
minutes,” she says, then she goes after Stanley who is still in the hall with
Marsha getting read the riot act from the sound of it.

“He
needs to go!” I call after her and Aunt May waves like I need to shut-up and
get.

But
I can hardly care. I hold the door open for Easy and he puts his hat on his
head and goes out first.

Once
on the stoop he grabs my arm. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s
an asshole,” I say. I have hot, angry tears. What he said…to Easy. About me.
I’m cursing now. I’ve been working on it. It’s kind of powerful, and those
words are just so right sometimes.

“Come
on.” I take Easy’s hand and pull him down the porch stairs, halfway along the
back of the house. I lift the cellar door.

“What
are you doing?” he says. He knows what I’m doing.

“Come
on,” I say again, and he follows me just like always.

I
haven’t been down here in a while. Debris is in front of the door. I use my hip
to push the door open and musty air and I go in and he follows.

We
stand close and he pushes the door closed. It’s dark, but we’re breathing and
here and real.

“He
doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know you.”

“He’s
nuts,” Easy says. “He’s…why would he say all that?”

“He’s
crazy. Wasn’t your dad crazy?”

“Yeah,”
he says. “He was. But…I didn’t know about yours.”

I
snort. “Truth? I didn’t either. I mean…I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”

“I
don’t want you to go back in there until he’s gone,” he says.

“He’s
going. His wife finally said something.”

“I
mean it, Georgia. I don’t put up with shit like that anymore. I quit when I was
young. After my old man.”

 
I slide my hands up his chest. He groans a
little. “Georgia…you hear me right? You know with my old man. You know
something.”

I
shake my head. I never wanted to think about that. This day is enough. What’s
been said…enough.

“You
came on us. You had cake for your birthday. You saw us.”

“No,”
I say. “No.”

“I
don’t take it anymore Georgia. You hear me? I won’t let him hurt you.”

“He
won’t.”

“He’s
got that anger. I hated what he said. He knows how to do it, reach in and
twist.”

“He
was talking about himself. He’s a liar.”

I
am holding Easy’s face. “He’s a liar,” I repeat.

“I
don’t know why you would wait.”

“Shhh.
I said I would.”

I
touch his neck, his face. His skin is smooth, damp, his hair, short, short
bristles, smooth under my hand.

His
forehead touches my own. His hands sit at my waist.

“I
love you,” I whisper.

Overhead the floor
creaks and we hear the muffled voice of Stanley. Rat-a-tat-tat.

Easy’s
arms come around me and he crushes me against him and I hold him the same way,
front to front, his heart smashed under my ear smashed over his heart. I love…I
love…I love.

“I
love you,” I say louder, but it’s soft, soft in this hard room with my father’s
voice overhead.

“Georgia,”
he says, but it’s breath and whisper. “Georgia.”

I
lift my face and his lips find me, kiss their way over my face until my lips
are against his.

We
are sinking down, I don’t know anything but him and moving and the floor, and
him on his back and me over. “Easy.”

Kiss
and breathe and touch and love.

His
uniform will get dirty. I don’t see his hat. I don’t care.

“You
can’t get hurt,” I’m saying and I’m crying. I’ve disintegrated into that hot
river of fear running under everything. I didn’t even know it was there.

“I
won’t,” he says. “I’ll come back to you, Georgia. I’ll come back.”

“I’ll
wait Easy. It’s not like he said. He doesn’t know me. There will never be
anyone else. Never.”

He
pulls me to him, his hand on the back of my head and he kisses me long and his
tongue, I’m shocked when it enters my mouth. I didn’t…I mean…I…floating.

“Georgia?”
he’s saying, soft so soft.

I
am limp on top of him. He cradles my head against him with one hand. The other
moves over my back, under my shirt. This is how people do it. This is how it
happens. It hits like a storm and it lifts you up so high. This is how love
rips you open. This is what they’re all afraid of.

Well
not me.

Darnay Road 57

All
I can think about is kissing Easy. I want to do it again. And again.

I
think of Abigail. All those years we talked about when and where and with whom
we would share our first kisses.

And
now that it’s happening, I feel differently. I want to keep it to myself long
enough to let it sink in. He had said he would kiss me every day, and we’d
missed two days, nearly three, and now, now I’ve lost count.

And
it’s private. I’ve been in so much trouble I can’t afford to share it. I don’t
want it thought about or talked about, or worse…judged. It’s mine and it’s his
and that’s all.

Our
love shields me from Stanley’s cruel words. It shields me, but it can’t take
those words away, those words not said to me…but near me like knives thrown
around the outline of my body in a carnival show.

In
the cellar, I want to keep going. Easy’s hand rubs over the back of my bra and
I say, “You can touch it,” but I’m so stupid cause he is already touching it,
but he pulls his hand away and brings it from under my shirt and he smooths it
over and over and he says we can’t keep going.

I
want to. But Easy tells me no.

He
tells me it won’t be this way.

I
say, “What way?”

“In
this basement,” he says. “This bomb shelter with your old man running his mouth
overhead. Not like this.”

I
wasn’t going to do it. Not everything. I couldn’t do that, well no I just got
kissed. Then he said, not like this and he pushes me up and I get on my feet
quick and he gets up and we dust off and he tucks his shirt all around and
grabs his hat off the floor and polishes the brim with his sleeve.

He’s hurt my feelings.

We get out of the cellar and sit on the
back porch and he kisses my hand and asks me what is wrong.

“Nothing,” I say, my hand tingling.

“We have to do everything right so we can
keep seeing each other.”

He touches my chin and I look at him. I
want to.

“All right,” I say. I put my head on his
shoulder then and his arm goes around me and that is more than I can imagine
for good, for wonderful.

It’s almost immediate that we hear Stanley’s
car doors slam and Stanley’s car starts up in front of the house. Easy is
supposed to be long gone and we stand and now I’m dusting off my backside
again.

“You need to go back in the house,” Easy
says. He’s going back to Disbro’s.

I don’t want him to, but he says, “We
have to show Vi we can keep the rules. She said fifteen minutes and it’s over
that now.”

I can tell he’s been in the army because
I don’t think he worried about rules so much before.

So I salute and it probably looks so
stupid, but that’s what I do and he salutes back, way better, as he walks away,
backwards so we can keep looking at each other.

I have to say, “Look out,” because he
almost walks into the flowerpot that has sat there without a flower for a
couple of years.

He makes it to the gate, still turned
around and he smiles and he says, “Aw come ‘ere,” and he holds out his arms.

I go to him and I leap up and my ankles
are crossed behind him and he spins me slowly, so slowly. We are getting very
amazing at hugging.

After a minute he sets me down and I
look up at him.

“When will you be back?” I am asking
that, and I get this flash that I’ll ask him that a thousand times before he’s
with me for good.

“Soon as I can,” he says and he kisses
my nose and of course I want more, lifting my lips even, though I don’t know it
until he laughs, looking right at my kisser and I feel so stupid but before I
can take it away he kisses me fast there.

“You’re so cute,” he says.

I hope he’s telling me the truth.

So we wave about three times and I go in
the house. I feel floaty and goofy and happy and sad too. It’s just a
somersault inside. There’s the kitchen, and Stanley’s words are still hanging
around, but they are smoke now, falling apart, getting absorbed by every other
bit of life in here.

Aunt May is gone too. It’s just me and
Granma now. “Saints alive,” she says to me entering the kitchen. She holds her
hand out and I go to her and she hugs me. “Pay your father no mind,” she says.

“I don’t,” I say, but there are reasons,
well a reason, and that is Easy. “But it’s not okay,” I let her know.

“No it is not.” She lets out a breath, a
short one. “I must lie down.”

I pull back and look at her.

“We
will talk about all of it, but not now,” she says so tiredly. She breathes
again, kind of wheezy. “You can lie with me and we’ll talk in there.”

I follow her into her bedroom, the old
walnut furniture that she shared all her life with Grampa still shiny and
unscratched.

I have spent many nights here, but not
too many as in my tender years I worked on my cases and held so much vigil at
my window the sill is marked up from the flashlight and the spirals on my many
notebooks.

“First off, Granma, did you go to the
doctor for the asthma?”

She sits on her side of the bed,
gripping the edge of the mattress. “Yes. May took me.”

“What do you do for it?”

“I have this,” she opens the nightstand
and shows me a funny thing that is as long as her finger and looks like a fat
plunger. She also has capsules and she inserts one of these into the plunger
thing and puts her mouth over the open end of it and plunges the medicine into
her mouth.

She lays the plunger on the nightstand
and sits on the side of the bed for a minute coughing a couple of times and
breathing more labored than usual.

“What does that do?” I ask finally.

“Helps my lungs,” she says. She lies
back then, on the three pillows she keeps there. She rarely lays flat.

I notice she has her shoes on. On the
white chenille bedspread that is usually a no-no.

I stop to untie them, slip one off then
the other. I get the foot pillow. It’s an old throw pillow, that radiant green
she used to love and now she’s stuck with. I put the pillow under her feet then
walk around to the other side of the bed and kick off my shoes and lie down,
also on top of the spread cause you never mess the bed up just to take a nap.

“Are you better now?”

“Yes,” she says.

I look at her quickly and her eyes are
closed. “I was on the porch with Easy cause he was worried about Stanley being
here.”

“For heaven sakes,” she says softly, but
she keeps her eyes closed.

The asthma I knew nothing about seems to
have taken its toll on her.

She is very quickly sound asleep. I have
the phone number for Disbro’s. If girls could call boys I might call Easy and
tell him I love him. I’m telling him now…in my mind thanks to Susy Smith’s book
ESP for the Millions
and thanks to Aunt May who doesn’t know I borrowed
the book via Abigail May and read it thoroughly. Anyway, I’m working on
reaching Easy, telepathically.

But my mother comes in, like an errant
channel when a plane goes over, cutting into what I’m trying to watch. I think
of my mother, my beautiful mother. My dad was never big enough. That’s what he
said. First time, I don’t blame her for running away. I don’t even blame her
for leaving me behind…with my Granma. And in Easy’s path.

No I don’t blame my mother at all. I
think she had a lover. I think she followed him. I think she followed love.
Across the ocean. Bigger love than Stanley Green was ever going to give. She
waited on him first and it wasn’t there and she left me, like an offering, left
me to fill his emptiness.

But he couldn’t love me either.