CHAPTER 3
Later that night, wrapped up on my bed in my blue crocheted feather-filled comforter, eating only a small piece of apple pie with whipped cream, okay, two pieces, the waves pounding on the surf, I reentertained myself with the rest of my conversation with Reece ...
He tucked the wet cows into the wad of clothes. I took a deep breath. “It’s a long walk; you don’t have to come back with me. I can return your jacket.”
“No way. I’m not letting you walk back alone. I’ll see you home to get something dry on, then we’re going to the hospital.”
“The hospital? Not a chance. I don’t enter hospitals. They make me nervous.”
“Me, too, but you’re going. You swallowed a lot of water, and I want them to check your lungs and make sure you didn’t take a knock to the head.”
“I can take myself to the hospital.”
“I’ll take you.” He smiled with nice white teeth and stuck out his hand. “Reece O’Brien.”
“Nice to meet you, Reece.” I shook his hand. My hand trembled. “I’m June MacKenzie.”
“June? Were you born in June?”
The light rain suddenly turned into a deluge as we headed to the stairway. I was a double-drowned rat. “No.”
“Oh.”
He seemed pleasantly baffled.
“It’s a family name, then?”
I didn’t want to explain. It was a wee bit embarrassing to talk about sex in front of him. “June is the month when my parents conceived me.”
“Ah. I see.”
I stared straight ahead at the pounding surf.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?” he asked.
“Yes, three of them.”
“What are your sisters’ and brothers’ names?”
I could see the hazel flecks in those green eyes, a crooked scar by his right eye, another on top of his left cheekbone. I want to kiss the scars... . Whoa, June! Had I just thought that? I want to kiss the scars. Where the heck had that come from? I was off men, completely! Done with men!
“Did you forget your brothers’ and sisters’ names?” He smiled at me.
I smiled back. He had such nice... lips! “What? No. No. I know their names.”
Yes, I did. I knew my brother’s and sisters’ names, but my, how would it feel to hug a man that size? Oh, shoot! What was I thinking? “I know their names,” I said again, with a bit of defiance, but I heard my voice come out as a whisper. “I do.”
“Good.” His eyes dropped to my lips. It was a flicker, but I saw the drop. My mouth suddenly felt like it was on fire. What? I couldn’t be on fire for him, or any man. That was ... that was ... bad!
“Their names are ...” Who was I talking about again? Whose names?
“Your brothers and sisters,” he prompted, still smiling.
I accidentally made a funny sound in my throat. “Yes! I have a brother and sisters and they have names.” I looked at the ocean for answers.
“That’s fortunate. If they didn’t, what would they be called?” His voice was low and husky.
“I don’t know what they would be called without names.” What was going on? I was freezing, I was in shock. Ha! That was it! I had almost been pulled out to sea. He’d saved me. Now I was transferring my emotions to him.
“So. My brother’s name is ...” Quick, June. Your name is June ... “His name is March. March. And I have a sister named ...” Reece was a cross between Poseidon and Zeus ... he needed only a chariot to complete the image. “August. She’s an August.” I shook my head to clear it. “Her name is August. She’s getting married soon. Her fiancé’s family is proper. Scary proper. Blue-blood proper. I have another sister ...” Chariot. Horses. A sword. Did Greek gods have swords? What would Reece’s sword be like? June, come on! “The other sister has a name. She is a September.” I bit my wet lip. “I mean, her name is September. She is not a September. It’s just September. One word.”
“Just September. One word.”
As an ex-trial attorney I have been in court hundreds of times. I was never thrown, never intimidated, never embarrassed, even when the judge was threatening to charge me with contempt of court, even with obstinate juries or screaming opposing counsel. No, never, but this man.
“Do you have brothers and sisters named for the months of the year?” What an inane question. No! No, he didn’t. You and your odd MacKenzie clan are the only ones who are all named after months!
He chuckled, deep and masculine. “I have two brothers and two sisters. Their names are Shane, Jessica, Rick, and Sandy. Dull compared to yours. Your parents must have enjoyed the months of June, August, September, and March.”
I stumbled a bit on a rock, and he caught my arm. This time, I avoided locking eyes with him so as not to be possessed by his handsome magic. “I’m sure they did enjoy those months. Every month is a happy month for my parents.”
“That’s a rare thing to hear. Tell me about them.”
Okay! I could do that! A normal conversation! “They met when they were sixteen and ran off and got married after they graduated from high school. My oldest sister arrived a year later, then my next sister, me, and my brother. We’re all eighteen months apart, give or take a few months.”
“Young parents.”
“Oh yes, and they’re way cooler than any of their kids. They’re ex-hippies.”
“Outstanding.”
“Yes, we had an outstanding childhood. Different. Wild. Nomadic.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You want to know about my childhood?” I pushed a strand of wet hair off my face.
“Yes, I do.” Those eyes were sincere. I was being pulled into a green pool, only the pool was warm and sexy and had big shoulders. Look away, June. Look away! Remember, you do not believe in lust at first sight.
I shook my head to clear my burgeoning passion. “My sister August was born on a commune in California. My next sister, September, was born in the back of our VW van. I was born in a hippie colony here in Oregon. There’s some difference, not much, from a commune. My brother was born about fifteen feet over the U.S. border.”
“Fifteen feet?”
“About that. We had been in Mexico, living on a farm with other Americans, but my nine-months-along mom decided at the last minute that she wanted March born on American soil, like the rest of us, so they drove through the night. My brother was born on the other side of the customs building.”
“That must have been quite a ride.”
“It was. I remember it. We packed up the van on the fly. We were all wearing tie-dye shirts and sandals. We also had three mutts, two cats, and a bird who flew loose in the van. We had a box of apples and a box of bananas. I slept on the floor of the van between my sisters with our dog, Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, asleep over my legs. Our other dog, Flower Child, snored away on a seat, and the third dog, Fleas, because he had fleas when we found him, my sister was using as a pillow.”
“You are making my childhood sound as boring as heck. I can barely stand it.”
“We were traveling gypsies in a VW bus.” I drew my arms tight around my freezing, shaking body, the rain relentless.
“So, your brother made it to the U.S. border?”
“Yes, he did. My poor mom. No drugs at all during childbirth. She wanted it natural. All of us were natural. My father grabbed two tartans out of the back of the van for her to lie on.”
“Tartans?”
“From Scotland. Our ancestors are from Scotland, and our family takes our love of Scotland seriously. Afterward, my father’s face was whiter than my mom’s. I remember my sisters and I had to stay in the van and there were a bunch of men in uniform helping my mom, and all of a sudden one of those men was holding our brother, March, who was screaming his head off, but, I’m sure, delighted to have been born in America.”
He laughed again.
My, what a seductive and deep and gravelly laugh. My!
“And after he was born?”
“A doctor had been passing through customs and one of the guards ran him over to our mom, so he was able to do some sewing up, so to speak. A couple of hours later, after the border guards fed us, we were back in the van, March squawking in my mom’s arms where she lay on the floor. Within two hours we were in a fancy hotel. It was strange. Our childhoods were so nomadic, we worked on farms and communes, and the basics, electricity and plumbing, often weren’t there, but once or twice a year we’d go stay in a hotel with pools, hot tubs, and free breakfasts where we stuffed ourselves silly with pancakes and waffles. After March was born we had seven nights of complete luxury.”
“Then back on the road? You didn’t go to school?”
“Not traditional school. We weren’t homeschooled, we were bus-schooled.”
“What does ‘bus-schooled’ mean?”
He smiled. I melted further. For a moment I faltered again, couldn’t speak, lost my train of thought. I coughed. “We learned all about geography, geology, and the history of the earth from our travels. We’re all fluent in Spanish. Our father loved math, so in fourth grade we were doing basic algebra. He thought it was fun, so there we’d be, up at two in the morning, doing algebraic equations after learning about the constellations. My mom had us write in journals every night and we read the classics.”
“A family of readers, then?”
“We ate books. It was required. We would visit other MacKenzie relatives often, and read their books, too. Books are your friends, my mom told us.”
“How did your parents make a living?”
“My father is a talented painter so he would set up a stand at open markets, or in small towns we were passing through, and people would hire him to paint pictures of themselves, their homes, their pets. Once word got out, there were long lines. Sometimes he would paint murals at schools, churches, even civic buildings. He’d go in with a design, they’d love it, and all of a sudden they had a mural in their hallway and we had a check.”
I laughed despite the cold that seemed to be living in my body from the inside out. Could blood turn to icicles? “My mom is an incredibly talented seamstress. She made all of our clothes and called it Hippie Chick. One time she took yards of beige material bought at a garage sale for fifty cents and sewed my sisters and me dresses with six inches of lace at the hem. People loved them, they stopped us on the street. My mom sold a lot of clothes when we were in that bus. Her flowered shirts, flowy and bright, sold well. She’d buy used jeans for twenty-five cents, cut out patches from colorful material, and sew them on. She added beads and feathers to plain blue shirts. She could turn anything into a fashion statement, and she did.”
“She was a clothing artist, then.”
“Yes, and she taught us. We would all spend hours together sewing into the night. There wasn’t a formal bedtime. We’d use a lantern and she showed us how to make a boring dress unique, how to make a normal skirt something special. Ruffles, sequins, embroidery, shortening, lengthening. And lace. Oh, the lace was always in abundance. Our favorite. We used it all over everything. Satin was our second favorite. Sewing was a fun game for us.”
“And you learned a lifelong skill.”
“That I did.” I sewed until I decided, insanely, that I should let that part of my life fly off into the wind and disappear over the mountains. Part of me flew off then, too, and I was soon a miserable cog in a legal machine. I went back to sewing to refind my lost self. How strange to say sewing recently saved me, but it had.
I was so curious about his family, but we started climbing the staircase and all I could think of was that I didn’t want to go first because I didn’t want my rear in his face, but I didn’t have a choice. A gentleman, he had me go first.
I wanted to grab my bottom and hide it. It is not overly large, but let’s simply say that I enjoy eating, have never desired to be model slim, and believe my curves, instead of the skinny, intense thing I used to be, signal a healthier eating life. Besides, I could die tomorrow. Why deny myself the finer pleasures of life like chocolate, fresh lobster with garlic butter, and clam chowder?
I tripped up a step, started to tumble forward, my freezing feet and legs not responding, and that strong arm whipped around my middle and pulled me back up. Again.
But this time my back was tight against his chest. The chariot chest. Hard and tight, a thigh partly between mine.
Oh, mercy.
His face was so near to mine. Inches. Oh, inches.
He smelled delicious ... a combination of the beach and sunshine and musk.
Mercy, mercy, mercy me.
“Boil me dry, and hang me out on a laundry line like a dead possum,” Estelle said, shaking her white curls. “It is a miracle. You have brought a man to this house. Who is he and what does he want and do you even know how to talk to a man without telling him off?”
“He is a tall drink of water,” Leoni whispered, as if Reece could hear her talking through the window as she spied on him from my second-story studio. “And he’s getting back in his truck and driving away! Oh, no! Run after him, June! Get him, get him!” She whirled around and started pushing at my back. “Go, go!”
I wanted to sneak into my light blue bedroom and take a hot shower, but if I did that, my two employees, Estelle, who is seventy-eight and blunt because, “Why waste time at my age?” and Leoni, blond, twenty-seven, and a single mom, would simply trail after me, probably right into the shower. Yes, they are that nosy.
“I am not going to run after him, Leoni.” I dripped on my wood floor. I knew where Reece was going, he was going home to get changed. He said he’d be back up at my house in ten minutes. Ten minutes! Hardly any time to put my face and hair and myself back together!
“Why not?” Estelle asked. She used to be the mayor of a large city. “Politicians’ middle names are Crooked and Creepy,” she’d told me once. “I would only go back if I was allowed to throw things at annoying people’s heads.” She is also a most excellent seamstress, taught by her grandmother, who was taught by her grandmother. She shook her pointer finger at me. “You need a man in your life to get rid of that excess energy you’re always sizzling off. Keeps a body young.”
“You’re wet, June!” Leoni declared, as if I didn’t know it. She stomped a red, knee-high boot. She dresses in retro style and buys only used, vintage clothing. “Wet and soaked. Did you go swimming in your clothes? That’s dangerous, June. You should know better.”
“A wave ran after me and tackled me to the sand.”
“One of those sneaker waves?” Estelle said. “The curse of the Oregon coast. They sneak up on you and rip-rap, rip-rap.” She snapped her fingers.
“That would be it.”
“Are you all right?” Leoni asked.
“Didn’t hit your head, did you?” Estelle asked, peering over her glasses at me. “You don’t want to lose your marbles. Some of yours are broken already. You weren’t hurt, were you?”
Leoni squealed, as understanding dawned. “Did that tall drink of water rescue you?”
I bit my lip.
“He did! I can tell by the guilty expression!” Estelle pointed her scissors at me. “And it all started with a semidrowning. You look terrible. Makeup streaking, hair a wreck. Could you not have kept yourself dry for this one man?”
I almost giggled, couldn’t help myself, then turned on my heel toward the bathroom.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to get the seaweed, whale poop, and salt water off of me.”
I heard Leoni whisper, “Maybe for the first time in a million years she’ll get a date out of this,” to which Estelle said, voice on full volume, “That mouth of hers is a whip. She scares men. She sews wedding dresses that women kill for, but she swears she’ll dress as a gnome before she be-bops down the aisle in one herself.”
I rolled my eyes and skeedaddled for the shower, turning on the radio as I hurried in. My favorite song was on. It was about a small town on the river, sunshine, hope, and a cheating boyfriend who was locked up in jail for running naked through the streets, his girlfriend threatening to shoot him from behind and, “blast his butt to Jupiter.” It was hilarious.
I sang along as I showered, washed the ocean out of my hair and dried off, quick as a lick, then jumped into jeans and white sandals. I pulled on a white lace shirt and a flowing white lace blouse, both of which I’d sewn, a rope belt I’d wound together with gold ribbon, and gold hoop earrings. I pulled a comb through my blond curls and dried it. I added lotion, liner, mascara, and lipstick. I reached for a lotion that smelled seductive, called Amber Moonlight, and rubbed it on my neck and wrists.
Fifteen minutes tops, I was new, improved, and done.
“He’s been back for five minutes,” Leoni whispered, again worried that Reece had bionic ears. “He knocked and I left him downstairs in the family room. He must live nearby. He’s not wet anymore, either. He is a piece of heaven. A piece of handsome work. A stud.”
“What are you two going to do?” Estelle said, again not bothering to curb the volume of her ricocheting voice. “If I were you, I would dispense with the preliminaries and invite that tiger to my bed.”
I waved my arms at her, as in, be quiet!
“In fact,” Estelle mused, “I think I’ll invite him myself. He probably has a hidden thing for women of a certain age and experience.”
I tried not to smile like a fool at the thought of my taking the chariot driver to bed. “He’s taking me to the emergency room.”
“How romantic!” Estelle dramatically clutched her chest. “Maybe you can take X-rays of each other’s bottoms. Or you can give each other colonoscopies. Tar and feather me, you can get your pap smear and he can wield the tools ... or,” she used her fingers to form two guns, “you can practice giving each other stitches and shots in the butt!”
I rolled my eyes.
“Go, go!” Leoni insisted. “Before he escapes! Before he runs off or is intimidated by your harsh and ghastly view of men in general. Please do not go into one of your harangues about how men are comparable to vermin, spiders, or orangutan spit. Please don’t tell him your history. Please don’t lecture him on the faults of his ‘species,’ and for Godzilla’s sake, don’t list the problems that men have caused in this century, or in the last century. Try to be nice ...”
“I’m going to be nice. I’m always nice.”
“Not with men, you man-decimating wreck,” Estelle said. “You’re a charging grizzly bear with night sweats.”
“I’m not going to change who I am because of a man.”
“No one’s asking you to change,” Estelle argued. “Heck, I have never changed one iota of my charming personality for a man. We’re telling you not to assume he’s inherently a monster because of his plumbing and I’ll bet he has big plumbing. Big plumbing!” She semishouted the last two words.
I blushed again. Darn it!
“Don’t bring any of your sewing needles with you, is all,” Leoni said, wringing her hands. “Figuratively or literally.”
“We’re going to the emergency room. That’s it. I’m not going to poke him with needles or give him a shot.”
Estelle threw her hands in the air. “You have a date! You had to almost drown to get one, but you have a date!”
“When are you coming back?” Leoni asked. “Don’t rush. You need to savor the sweetness and sparkle of the date.”
“It might not happen again for years,” Estelle said, crossing her arms. “Years. Maybe even this millennium.”
“I won’t be gone long. As you both know, we’re swamped in work and I don’t even have time to go to the emergency room.”
“Go anyhow!” Leoni said as she cupped her hands into a heart shape. “No matter what they do to you, even if they give you an enema, it’ll be worth it!”
“Don’t screw this up, June,” Estelle said. “When you’re my age, you take romance where you can get it and be grateful for it. Take life by the horns and swing it around and dance with it, that’s what I always say.”
I turned to head down the hallway. I stopped at the photo of my family’s VW van, with all of the MacKenzies in front of it. There were purple peace signs painted on the sides. We were in Montana then. I’d taken an old photograph and blown it up to a three-foot-by-four-foot canvas.
I held two fingers up. Peace.
On my way down the hallway, I ran into an astronaut.
“Hi, Morgan,” I said. Morgan is Leoni’s seven-year-old daughter.
“Hi, June,” she said through her white NASA astronaut’s helmet. It wasn’t an authentic NASA helmet, obviously. It was an oversized, battered white motorcycle helmet that she’d stuck a NASA sticker to. She wore a white astronaut jumpsuit, an ex-Halloween outfit, in red and blue, and carried a clipboard and pen. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to the emergency room.”
Through the eye shade I could see her confusion. “Are you dying?”
“No. A wave got me.”
“Oh.” She wrapped her arms around me. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine.” I hugged her back. Downstairs Hercules was waiting.
“Good. Do you know about astronauts’ toilets on their space shuttles?”
“No, I don’t.”
“There’s a vacuum for solids and there’s a hose for liquids. There are two bars that hold your thighs down because there’s no gravity up in space and you don’t want to float away from the toilet doing your private business.”
“No, that would be a mess. Sweets, I have to go.” The chariot was here!
“I met that man downstairs.”
“Oh, ah. Good.”
“He’s tall. I think he’s smart enough to be an astronaut.”
“You do?”
“Yes, I asked him if he understood why NASA astronauts need spacesuits and he told me why. We discussed why I need a camera on my suit, a headlamp for seeing outside of the shuttle, an oxygen tank, and a battery and water supply for a life-support system.”
“Wow. I’m impressed.” Aha! He was kind to kids!
“Yeah, me, too. Is that your boyfriend? My mom doesn’t have a boyfriend. I’m going to go upstairs and study my astronaut books.” She tilted her spacesuit helmet up at me. “He’s going to be proud of me, you know.”
My stomach clenched. “Morgan, I’m proud of you already. So is Estelle and your mom and your teachers, who all say you’re bang-up smart. You know more about space shuttles and astronauts, the galaxy and astronomy, than almost anyone on the planet and you’re only seven.”
“Well, when he knows I’m an astronaut, he’ll want to see me again.”
My stomach clenched again. Morgan’s father, the loser, the bottom-dwelling algae/larvae, had left Morgan’s mother when she was five. He told Leoni he was going to the store for a cherry pie and never returned. Leoni noted that he remembered to take his golf clubs, hunting gear, camping tent, expensive bike, and he cleaned out their bank account. Ever since, Morgan has dressed, almost each day, as an astronaut because her father was interested, however mildly, in space. She wants to be impressive so he’ll be impressed with her and come back and live with them again.
It breaks my heart. I hugged her again. “I want to see you every day, right here, because if I don’t see you, I don’t have a good day.”
“Yeah, I know. The kids made fun of my astronaut suit again.”
“What do they know? They’re too young to understand brilliance when they see it.”
“They think I’m weird.”
“Who cares what they think? All that matters is that you recognize that you’re wonderful and cool.” I tried not to cry for Morgan. “Your mom made peanut butter cookies because she was super-mad at the bodices of the yellow, twenties-era flapper dresses. Have a couple, read your space shuttle book, and organize the pink lace drawer for me, will you?” I give Morgan jobs all the time to do. It makes her feel wanted and needed. I pay her, too.
“Okay.” She smiled at me through the dark visor. “I’ll tell you about a new design for a space shuttle I sent NASA last week. The one I worked on for about three months with all the details and about twenty pages of explanations. I think they’ll write me back.”
“They might, Morgan. As least they know brilliance when they see it.”
I tried not to let my heart squeeze too tight when I thought about the pain of abandonment that kid’s selfish father had caused her, then turned to tromp down the stairs toward Hercules.