Julia's Chocolates (20 page)

I shook my head. “How about if you and I play doctor?” The words slipped from my mouth the way melted chocolate slips from a spoon.

His forehead rested on mine. “I’ll play doctor with you anytime but now.”

I opened my eyes, and our gazes collided, and I noticed lighter blue specks in his eyes like dawn, and a blue-green like the sea. I noticed the height of his cheekbones, and the way his sun-bleached hair fell over his forehead. And I noticed his mouth inches from mine.

And I smiled.

And he smiled back, just a little. His mouth covered mine, and I closed my eyes as white-hot heat poured from his lips to mine and then landed in that toasty-warm spot between my legs. I wrapped an arm around his neck, my other hand on his massive shoulder.

Dean Garrett was not a follower, and he guided me through that kiss, and I followed along, enjoying every millisecond, his lips pressing against mine, each kiss more urgent than the next, his tongue doing a marvelous job of making me wonder what else that tongue could do on other parts of my body.

My breasts were pressed against his chest, and for once I didn’t mind their size. Dean had a huge chest—he could handle those suckers. And then I just let my body melt, like the chocolate I had been making.

Until I heard Aunt Lydia’s voice and Stash’s laughter.

“Well, Stash, honey,” Aunt Lydia drawled from the doorway. “I think we can surmise that Julia does indeed like Dean’s sausage.”

I
was not having a good day at the library. Ms. Cutter was watching me like a three-eyed leech. Shawn and Carrie Lynn were tired and pale. Carrie Lynn kept putting her blanket over her head. I had seen new bruises on both children the day before. I called the police, and they referred the call to Children’s Services. I was furious at the condition these children lived in and even more furious at Children’s Services for doing nothing. The woman at CS sounded utterly annoyed with me.

“Ms. Bennett, I believe we have already told you that we do not remove children from their homes just because their mother is poor. We saw no sign of drug usage in the house.”

I gasped. “Did you look at the mother? Didn’t you see the sores on her body, how she scratches herself all the time, how skinny she is?”

“I don’t think you understand what Children’s Services does, Miss Bennett. We do not take children away from their mother because she has sores on her body and scratches. The children were clean and appeared well-fed.” When I explained to the woman that the children looked well-fed because I brought them lunch and dinner and snacks every day and had also bought them brand-new clothes and shoes and brushes for their hair, she said, “Well that’s all well and good, and we appreciate good citizens like you, but, really, we are busy. If you see a problem, you can call again, but until then this case is closed.”

Click
.

We had had several other Psychic Nights in the past few weeks. One had been called Organizing Your Orgasms, another had been called Dedicating Your Desires. Tonight’s Psychic Night was titled Your Hormones And You: Taking Over, Taking Cover, Taking Charge.

I thought it sounded splendid.

“Hormones have ruled us forever!” Lydia scolded me as we worked that morning, the early morning sun cutting through the slats of the chicken house. I glanced at the chicken she held in her hands. She shook the poor bird in her exuberance, and I saw the chicken’s eyes pop in fright. “Isn’t that right, Hilga?” Aunt Lydia yelled at the chicken. She is usually so gentle with her ladies.

“Too much estrogen has robbed us of our inner souls. Hormones flow and fluctuate and dive and soar and make us go damn, damn crazy. I can hardly stand looking at Stash when I’m having a hormone rush. He walks in the door and I feel the need to throw my jam at his head.”

I followed Aunt Lydia through the barn. She let the lady go, and we heard a very grateful-sounding
cluck cluck
. Hilga’s chicken friends gathered around her and
cluck-clucked
sympathetically. “Lydia’s off her hormonal rocker! Hormonal rocker! Hormonal rocker!” I could almost hear them say.

“Hormones take over our thoughts and actions. We must learn to control them!” Lydia jabbed a pitchfork into a bale of hay. I was surrounded by chickens, all clucking contentedly now that Aunt Lydia had released their comrade.

“Hormones are a nuisance,” Aunt Lydia announced, picking up eggs from underneath squawking, resting, clucking chickens. “But with yoga, lots of walking, good sex, and a little pot, we can be in control. Of course, there’s other ways to be in control of your hormones, but I’ll save my womanly secrets for tonight!”

One chicken pecked at her hand. She grabbed that chicken’s beak quick as a wink. “Now you listen here, Marie Jane, I’ll have none of that pecking. I’ve talked to you about this before.” She kissed that tiny beak, then moved on.

“Women need to vent their problems and trials and tribulations and hormone-fluctuation levels with other women. Men are hampered by the fact that they have thingies which make them naturally selfish and self-centered and boorish and unthoughtful,” she declared, the chickens clucking at her raised voice. “Women, however, can do it all. Run companies, raise children, volunteer, tickle men’s teensies at night. Our work is NEVER done!”

“So what time is Psychic Night?” I asked.

“Seven o’clock, over at Lara’s.”

“At Lara’s?”

“Yes, at Lara’s. I talked to her yesterday. She did not sound joyful. When I see her I will undoubtedly be able to ascertain where her hormone levels have taken her!” Aunt Lydia reached down and petted several of the ladies, calling them Honey Claws and Sweetie Beaks.

“Her husband is out of town at some minister’s convention or something where they pray and pray and pray. I hope all that prayer does not take away from his testosterone-driven libido! Women need a man who can put out and up when their hormonal levels allow the passion lurking inside to run free.”

I grabbed a few more eggs. A chicken pecked me. I thought about men who can put out and up. I thought about one in particular and wondered how far he could put it up, then grabbed a few more eggs as my face grew a tad hot. The memory of the kisses he had given me at the mailbox that day and his continual invitations for another breakfast made me hotter.

“Take these ladies, for example,” Lydia said. “If I don’t keep a few roosters around here, they get so uppity, so feisty. Every now and then they need to get laid.”

I smothered a laugh, imagining the chickens at a bar, dressed to the teeth, but dressed sort of slutty, too, intent on having a one-night stand.

“Like other females, they need to get their orgasms out! If they don’t, my ladies here start coming on to each other.” Aunt Lydia shook her head. “Can’t relate to that one myself. But if my ladies want a rooster around to satisfy their basic urges, good for them. They can have a rooster.”

“You mean the chickens turn gay without a rooster?”

“Damn straight they do,” Aunt Lydia said. “So I keep a few roosters around. The darn things cockadoodle doo all day, and I have come to believe it’s their way of strutting their stuff, strutting their manhood. If they were smart enough to realize that my ladies only want them for sex I don’t think they’d cockadoodle so loud.”

I banged my head on the slanted roof, then looked behind a battered bookshelf. Sure enough, the ladies had hidden a hoard of eggs.

“Now, you, Julia. You need a rooster in your life. A man just for sex, nothing else. Men are good for sex and money, Julia.” She looked under an old chair she had in the barn and grabbed four eggs. “But sometimes neither one is very good, so you have to take care of yourself. But if you can find a man who’s good to you and wants to tra la la at night, super. But for heaven’s sake, don’t marry them! Men are best in small doses.”

She must have seen my body language, which said,
Forgetaboutit. I don’t need a man in my life, they scare me to death.

“Now don’t be like that, darlin’. They’re not all insane creeps. Most of them, but not all of them. Take Dean, for instance—”

“No, no, please,” I said, flinching as a chicken pecked me on the hand. “Let’s not take Dean at all.” He was too tempting.

“All right!” Aunt Lydia said, her voice startling a few of the ladies. “We won’t take him. But he would be a good candidate for a little sex now and then, and then you could send him on home. If you wanted to. He is one fine man, though, and big enough to warm a woman’s bed for years. Otherwise, with the exception of Dean Garrett, look for a man in small doses.”

“Right, Aunt Lydia. Got it. A small-dose man is what I need.”

“That’s exactly it! Have a lovely day, Agnes.” Aunt Lydia let the chicken fly from her arms, both pointer fingers straight up in the air. “You need A Small-Dose Man.”

I went back to work while Aunt Lydia burst into song about A Small-Dose Man, rhyming as many words as she could. It had a country feel to it, until she burst into an operatic soprano. The ladies fluttered around her.
Cluck. Cluck. Cluck.

I might have kissed Dean a few times, but I was going to force myself to call it quits with him. I had to, I really did. And I would. As soon as I stopped having the time of my life.

I kept my head hidden by my hair, bending extra low to get the eggs from the ladies, who alternately clucked in a friendly way to me and pecked my hands.

Dean Garrett was impossible. Demanding but gentle, independent and strong, and very smart—smart enough not to be arrogant.

And we were going to make great…friends, I told myself. Great friends. As soon as he stopped kissing me every morning.

I went to work at the library, ran a splendiferous Story Hour, with kids roaring like lions and growling like bears, read an extra story to Carrie Lynn and Shawn, then packed their dinner in Shawn’s backpack, as I did every night.

Shawn told me they always ate their dinner after their mother was gone for the night or “busy in her bedroom.” If they’d been kicked out of the house, they ate their dinner on the merry-go-round in the park.

I had bought both of them a packet of new socks, and they seemed excited about those.

I then went straight to Lara’s. I was early, but I had called her on my new cell phone, and she said it was perfectly all right if I came over. I knocked and heard her yell at me to come on in, so I did.

Again, I was struck by the sterility of Lara’s home. Beige walls. Beige carpet. Blue accents, prim furniture. Heavy drapes. Freaky. I could hear her walking around upstairs, and I wandered into the kitchen to put the Double Chocolate Snowball I had made on the counter. I had been designated the dessert person ever since the gals had tasted my first chocolate dessert.

The kitchen was the same. Not a thing on the counter except my cake, a mixer, and a coffeepot. Spotless. Lifeless. The kitchen opened up to a family room with a tiny nook for eating. A plastic tablecloth with tiny red flowers covered the table. I went over to the curtains covering the backyard sliding glass door and opened them. Light streamed in like a tunnel.

It was about 6:00, but still bright and cheerful outside. For the life of me, I couldn’t mesh the Lara I had met the first night at Aunt Lydia’s with the woman who owned the house.

But I was about to see the other side.

“Hi Julia,” she said, entering the kitchen. She was wearing beige slacks and a green crew-neck sweater. A thin gold chain with a tiny gold cross hung from around her neck. She smiled as she looked at the dessert. “Yummy. What did you make this time?”

I told her, and then we took off on the plane of polite chatter.

We discussed nothing of importance. It was the type of surface conversation that hundreds of millions of people engage in every day. Nothing deep. Nothing controversial. Nothing that reveals much of another person. And sometimes chatter like this can be comforting. Soothing. Sometimes you connect with another person.

But other times it’s just a cover-up.

I let her indulge in the cover-up.

“So how’s your work going at the library?”

“The library job is fine as long as I stay out of The Vulture’s way.” I thought about Shawn and Carrie Lynn’s expressions when they saw their new socks. “Well, it’s fine except for two kids who have a meth addict for a mother, no father, and aren’t fed or bathed on a regular basis. Oh, and their mother, or someone in their home, beats on them, but Children’s Services won’t do anything about it.”

“What?” Her voice rose three pitches.

I told her about the children, and then Lara stood in her kitchen and cried. She fingered the cross, and I wondered if she was going to rip this one right off her neck, too.

“Childhood sucks,” Lara said. “Totally sucks.” She leaned her forehead against the sliding glass window. Lara was young and beautiful, but sadness was definitely pulling on her face like a toilet plunger.

“Yes, childhood sucks,” I agreed.

“There’s nothing you can do as a child to fix your situation. You’re stuck. It’s all you know. Unless my father was at a prayer meeting, he would preach at my brothers and me for two hours every night, alternately screaming and making us cry when we couldn’t memorize a Bible verse.

“I remember how the Rutulsky family infuriated him. They owned the best bakery in town, and they didn’t go to church. ‘Damned to hell!’ he’d yell, ‘The Rutulskys are damned to hell!’ Then he would quote from the Bible for about an hour, ranting on and on while the three of us and my mother were forced to sit on the couch and listen to him. The Rutulskys actually came to our church once, and on the way out I remembered the kids looked positively horrified and the parents looked at me with pity.”

“Pity?”

Lara kept staring. I noticed that she’d lost more weight. She was past scrawny now.

“Yes, pity. My father had given a sermon about disciplining your children, how to spare the rod was to spoil the child. He condemned others for not taking a firm hand to their children, talked about wives needing to be obedient to their husbands, how they must submit, obey, the man is the head of the house, that type of thing. Of course, he spoke on full throttle, screaming his lesson out to the congregation. ‘Submit, women! Submit! Or you are sinning! God will punish you if you do not bend to your husband’s will!’”

I nodded. I had watched my mother submit to men her whole life. Violent, mean, manipulative men. And I had watched how some men in her life seemed to submit to her. Sick. Her submission had had nothing to do with the Bible, I was sure of it.

“Those Rutulskys walked out of there pretty fast after the service, although Mrs. Rutulsky stopped to hug my mother. My mother got tears in her eyes, held Mrs. Rutulsky’s hand for a moment. I heard Mrs. Rutulsky say to my mother, ‘Our door is always open to you, Susanna.’”