I could have kicked myself for holding Clyde’s hand. Good grief. He and I were not hand holders. We didn’t touch each other. Or hug. Truth be told, nowadays I never touched anyone except for bumping elbows with Ruthie when we sat too close at football games.
But Clyde’s hand felt different than Ruthie’s elbows.
I had lain awake thinking what his skin felt like against mine. The moistness of his palm. How my fingers smelled like him afterward, an unrecognizable scent that teased me until late into the night. Was it cologne? Deodorant? Some kind of cleaner from the Dairy Queen?
By lunch on Monday, it had long since washed away, but I ran the back of my forefinger beneath my nostrils, pretending to rub my nose. All I smelled was hand sanitizer.
I stood in front of Velma’s living-room window watching the skies darken over her back pasture. Drops of rain plopped quarter-sized circles on the top of the old picnic table, and a metal lawn chair rocked back and forth in the grass, threatening to tumble. Through the thin panes, I could feel the temperature dropping, but Velma—always the older sister—was too busy interrogating me to pay any attention to the weather.
“What time do you go in today?” She sat at the computer desk in the corner of the room, her head tilted back as she looked through her bifocals. Paying the bills was typically Ansel’s job.
“One thirty.”
“You worked much overtime lately?”
“Not really.”
“What you been doing with your free time then?”
Even for Velma, she was extra-inquisitive, but I began to understand. I let my head drop to one side as I crooned, “What have you heard about me?”
Her lips puckered. “Clyde Felton.”
It hadn’t been twenty-four hours since I held Clyde’s hand at Picnic Hollow—not to mention we had been alone—so she must have heard from the Parker sisters about the stroll down Highway 84. “We were just walking down the road.”
She stopped clicking her mouse but didn’t look at me. “They were saying you held his hand out at the lake.”
“But nobody was even—” In my voice I heard the whine of my fourteen-year-old self, insisting to my older sister that I would be good if only she gave me permission to go to the skating rink in Lubbock. But I wasn’t asking permission for anything.
“Aw, it don’t matter, Lynda. You and Clyde were bound to end up together.” She leaned back in the oak desk chair. “Does Ruthie know?”
“It’s not like we have anything to tell.” I frowned at the box monitor. “We’re just talking, that’s all.”
She reached for a Kleenex and wiped the computer screen, scrubbing firmly on a few fingerprints, and I wondered if Ansel had been eating popcorn while he played solitaire. “It’s clear Clyde’s crazy about you. Has been for a while now.” She let her palms fall to her thighs. “But I bet he has a thing or two he’d like to say to Hoby.”
Naturally she would cut straight to the crux of my worries. Even though I no longer had feelings for my husband, I did still have … a husband.
“A lot of us have a thing or two we’d like to say to Hoby.” I leaned my forehead against the cool surface of the sliding-glass door. Outside, dirt and gravel swirled across the porch, and in the distance, lightning shot starkly through the blackened sky. The pasture was alive with frenzied movement, and a dull grumble sounded every now and again, but in contrast, things lay still in the house. Only the faint scent of dust gave any indication that the storm brewing outside might ever reach us in our cozy nest. If I dated Clyde, I might be creating my own storm.
“I can’t go the rest of my life waiting for Hoby,” I said.
“Clearly he ain’t coming back.”
Her words cut like a knife across my pride, but I said nothing.
My sister was silent for a moment, and without looking I figured she had that stop-feeling-sorry-for-yourself expression on her face. She exhaled softly. “I reckon I’m borrowing trouble, but if you ever try to legally separate yourself from Hoby, he could mess with your mind again.”
My body wilted like a day-old carnation, and I slumped against the doorframe. It had been quite a while since I considered the notion that my husband might come back to Trapp. Right after he drove away in that bright-red wrecker of his, I had hoped and prayed he would come back, but after a while, I stopped praying.
The bedroom door down the hallway creaked open, and Ansel hobbled into the living room. “You girls solved all the world’s problems?” He chuckled at his own joke.
“Not just yet, but we’re working on it,” Velma said.
I smiled at the gray coveralls my brother-in-law wore. Velma had purchased the gently worn garment at Harold Porterfield’s yard sale, but when she sat down with her seam ripper to remove Harold’s embroidered name from the front pocket, she had stopped short halfway through the task and decided there was no need to continue. Over the years the coveralls had become Ansel’s favorite work-around-the-house uniform, partly because they were comfortable and partly because his wife had teasingly labeled him old.
Ansel sat in his recliner and raised the footrest, and I imagined his joints rusted like an old tractor. Within a few minutes, he was snoring softly.
“How’s he doing?” I asked.
“Same.”
I glanced at the churning clouds and noticed Ansel’s cattle making their way to the barn. A calf jumped and kicked, adding to the maelstrom in the sky.
Velma, a little rusty herself, stood and took four slow steps to the adjacent kitchen. She glanced back at the recliner, and her eyes turned into empty pudding bowls, scraped clean of their usual rich, chocolaty goodness.
“I’m not going to change,” I said.
“I know you’re not.” She smiled gently while she used a hand-cranked can opener on a can of pork and beans. “But I sure don’t know what I’d do without you, Lynda.”
It wasn’t like Velma to talk that way. Her strength and independence defined her motherly take-charge attitude in all she did, and she never needed anyone. Certainly not me. I stepped to the kitchen and pulled a pitcher from the cabinet just as a gust of wind pelted sand against the house like mosquitoes on a screen door. “Do you think we should take shelter in the bathroom?”
Velma waved the can opener toward the computer desk, her determination renewed now that I needed advice. “The weather radio will let us know if it gets that bad, but lawdy, I hope I don’t have to wake Ansel.”
I tore open a packet of lemonade mix and spilled the yellow powder into the pitcher, inhaling the lemony cloud it produced. As I let the faucet water run, I coughed to clear the bitterness from my lungs, wishing it were so easy to cleanse the bitterness from my heart.
“You’ll make it all right when Ansel’s gone,” I said softly, unsure of this new role I was taking on as the encouraging sister. It felt like a lie. It was a lie. “You won’t be alone.”
She reached into the refrigerator for a package of wieners, and her silence echoed as though the tiny kitchen were a vast underground cavern.
I didn’t know what else to say. My feeble words couldn’t prevent Velma’s pain any more than they could save Ansel’s life.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
I stirred the lemonade with a wooden spoon, watching specks of powder spin on the water’s surface, unable—or unwilling—to dissolve. “Maybe I won’t talk to Clyde again. We sure don’t need any more drama around here.”
Velma wielded a paring knife to cut small pieces of wiener into the saucepan with the beans. She said nothing, so I tossed the spoon into the sink.
“No.” A sigh slid from her lungs with that one little word, and it sounded as if the rest of her strength went with it. “You need Clyde.”
I stared unseeingly at the calendar above the sink, wanting to be a source of encouragement to her, yet unable to pull my selfish thoughts away from my own problems. “I’m scared, Velma. What if he’s like Hoby?” A sob made its way up from my stomach, but I quickly stifled it. “What if I just get hurt again?”
Her spoon gently scraped the bottom of the saucepan. “Aw, Lynda. Clyde Felton’s not going to hurt you.”
“He could have changed.”
“Nobody changes that much.”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to embrace her words and hold them close until they seeped through my chest and nestled in my heart. But I couldn’t. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a silent demon still whispered.
“He even goes to church now.” Velma calmly removed a blue serving bowl from the cabinet. “Now that I think about it … if you and me went to church, you’d see Clyde more often. And I’d see JohnScott more, too.”
What on earth? She jerked me from my thoughts and tossed me under a speeding locomotive. “What are you saying?”
“The folks down there are different now, right?”
I bit the inside of my cheek, not hard, just enough to worry the skin. Velma and Ansel weren’t churchgoing types, and she knew better than to suggest I was. “From what I hear, a lot of them have changed, but I’m sure a few are still holding out for Christ to come back.”
She lifted the saucepan with one hand and spooned beanie-weanies into the bowl with the other. “I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but I’d kinda like to see JohnScott somewhere other than the sideline of a football game. Don’t you think it’d be worth it to see Ruthie more often? And hear her husband preaching the words?”
I didn’t need to attend worship service to hear Dodd Cunningham preach at me. Clearly I was his number-one target recruit, and he pelted me with subtle encouragement nonstop. But as Velma rinsed her Revere Ware under the faucet, I realized she wasn’t talking about me. Or Clyde. Or even JohnScott. After all I had been through with that stinking church, she would never shove me toward that white-frame building unless she had a darn good reason. And that reason was snoring in the recliner.
“Ruth Ann knows where to find me.” I mumbled the excuse, not wanting to think about the true source of our discussion.
Velma smacked her lips as though her tongue were covered in taffy. “What’s that mean?”
“She’s married, going to college, wanting a baby.” I shrugged. “She’s got a full life.”
“You want a cart of cheese to go with that whine?”
“I’m not whining. Just stating facts, and she don’t need me.”
Ouch. I hadn’t meant to say that last part.
A spray of angry raindrops pelleted against the window as the clouds finally dumped their water on the ground below, beating the dry grass as the wind moaned against the roof. Velma and I both froze for a few seconds, awed by the power of the storm, and then she carried our gourmet lunch to the table and plopped the bowl down on the vinyl tablecloth. “Hmmph.”
I sat next to her and peeled a paper plate from the stack in the middle of the table. “I hate it when you make that sound.”
“I know.”
Of course she knew. The woman had raised me since I was fourteen, and we’d been through hell and high water together. She knew what irritated me, what worried me, what made me happy. And she knew, without my telling her, that I’d like to see Ruthie more often. That I wanted to see Dodd, too. That I even wanted to hear him preaching the words. But she also knew my frazzled emotions had more than they could deal with just thinking about Ansel.
And she knew I couldn’t … wouldn’t … go back to the church. Not yet.
“I know,” she repeated.