DREW LIKED POKING around in the shed, which was a single car garage with barn doors, freestanding from the house and filled with treasures.
“We’ll extend it here,” he said, gesturing with his right hand. “Then I’ll find that old ’57 Chevy stuck in somebody’s garage, they don’t know it’s worth sixty gee, they let me have it cheap, what they paid for it. One of those cars that somebody had and only drove it to church.”
“What did your dad do with his cars?”
“Traded them in every other year. He thought a doctor should have a new car; or maybe my mother thought that. How do I know? I know the reason all the stuff out here is in such good condition is because Dad’s folks lived here and used the place, took care of it. They didn’t care that the chairs were Stickley chairs, big antiques, they kept them fixed because kitchen chairs were for sitting on in the kitchen. I don’t know how my mother kept her hands off the stuff up here. You know those things on the wall in the bedroom, used to be the parlor, one shows a bear hunt and one a buffalo hunt? They happen to be Pratt pot lids worth about a grand each. Granddad and his wife just liked how they looked.”
“I’m going to miss the parsonage,” I said. “Your grandparents had nice houses.”
“Yeah, I wish you could keep it. We could use it in town. I’m going to have to keep the office there, for the paperwork.”
“Just think,” I said, leaning against him while we talked, “we can go anywhere together in the city we want to. We can eat in Circleburgers, we can eat barbeque at Eva Lee’s, we can toss a few at the Greatest Little Horseshoe Pits in Texas. We can—”
“Don’t remind me of back home. I can feel panic sneaking up on me when you do. It’s been two days and she hasn’t said one single let’s-talk-about-who’s-paying-who-how-much word. You know how the hair on the back of your neck rises up? I bet right this minute she’s talking to some Dallas lawyer on the phone. Make that plural. Getting all her ammunition loaded in the cannon.”
“How’d you ever find the bikes in here?” I was looking at farm equipment and tools six feet deep along the back of the shed.
He gestured behind the implements. “We’re going to fix them up. We’re going to rebuild them and then rebuild the Pontiac—” he patted my car, which was taking up most of the front of the shed—“so we can toodle all around the blacklands like vigilantes, checking up on what the federals are doing. Pa and Ma Williams.” He pulled me against the side of the Firebird, kissing me the way he used to against his old fixed-up pickup.
The bikes were great; he was right. I could see, when he uncovered them, that they were in amazing shape, with fitted “slipcovers” over each. Plus locks on the wheels, as if thieves were going to drive by and know to root around behind every neat stack of two-by-fours and four-by-eights in order to lift a couple of bicycles that looked like props from a late fifties movie. The Western Flyer—my bike—was just a basic boy’s red and white, with fat whitewalls, if that’s what you called the tires, and fat pedals and those things like streamers coming out of the handlebars. Drew’s was a Schwinn Black Phantom, totally deluxe, weighing in, he said, at sixty-five pounds. It was green and had enough chrome on it that you almost needed shades to look at it. Might they have been bought for him?
I could remember how gross these things had seemed when we were in high school; then everybody wanted lightweight imported bikes. I reminded Drew of that.
He shook his head. “The LeMond carbon-fiber racer I wanted to buy then? You couldn’t touch it now for under twelve gee. Minimum. Anyway, that’s not what you need on the farm-to-markets. What you need is what we got.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
For lunch, we ate our steaks, almost black on the outside, almost raw on the inside, and then had two peach kolaches from the Czech bakery, all of it washed down with a fresh cup of boiled coffee. We’d worked off breakfast messing with the bikes, getting them out. And then making love once more, feather pillows at our backs on the old four-poster.
Drew propped his 1927 Rolex Oyster on the table so we could watch the time. Usually after lunch we made a pallet on the floor and stretched out to talk, mostly about how someday we were going to tell them. Today we stayed at the table, to celebrate that we really had done it.
“I’m thinking of our wedding,” Drew said.
“Wedding? Bridesmaids, flower girls, ring bearers, rice, that kind of wedding? Maybe they’ll throw potatoes at ours.”
I could see him squirm around like a kid with a plan. “Not that kind.”
“A simple church wedding, with Eben officiating?”
“Not that kind. Anyway, you’re about to become an Episcopalian.”
“What do you care? You don’t believe all that.”
“Maybe not, but the Presbyterian church is the place in which I’m not going to believe it.”
“I’m thinking of a dance.” He looked happy with himself.
“A dance? A real honest dance? Somebody playing guitar and bass and piano? A big slick floor with sawdust on it?”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “Maybe we can do it at the Czech Fest. An anniversary, sort of, right?” He counted on his fingers. “A month, three weeks really, till Easter, call that a month. Another month, then we move out. Two more for the divorces. One more for all the snags. One more to pay off the Dallas lawyer, make that plural. That’s September. We can bring the kids all up to West for the Fest, then drive on over here for a big barbeque. I mean the real stuff, hill country best. The kind where the brisket’s been in that closed pit for thirty-six hours, with that burnt crust and the juice dripping out. We can have a band here, too. Hang lights from the trees.”
“How can you be thinking about food again?”
“I don’t have any trouble.” He rubbed his foot up the side of my leg. “A person eats when they get hungry in the country.”
“Is that right?”
He looked sly. “When are you going to tell your folks?”
“They can read about it in the papers.”
That’s more or less how I heard about them. Actually I heard it from Theo, back when she was Miss Moore and still my unfavorite teacher out of a crowd of contenders. Your daddy and I are going to tie the knot, those were her words. Maybe I’d drop by their house, over in the part of town where all the streets were named for birds, and tell her my news. The preacher and I are going to split; my boyfriend and I plan to tie the knot.
“Shorty’ll hear it from some fishing buddy, one of the retired coaches, and say, ‘Who? Cile? You mean my girl?’ ”
I laughed, because Drew did try to get under my skin talking about my daddy, and I didn’t mind letting him see that he had. Usually that meant his mind was on his mother. Anyway, mine was. “Do you think it’ll be all right at Lila Beth’s on Easter? I want it not to be awkward.”
“Don’t sweat it. Nothing fazes Mother. She’s got a set of manners that covers everything. When Dad died in the ice storm, she read up on Thank You Notes in Reply to Letters of Condolence.”
“You’re making that up.”
“She’ll look over the chapter on Divorce in Close Family Members, Such as a Daughter or Son.”
“I owe her a lot.”
“Me.”
“Besides that.” I looked at him, at the way the freckles had faded together into what looked now like a deep wind-burn. How the brick red hair had faded to a dark rosy brown. To me he was always Andy and Drew, rolled into one.
“She thinks you’re great,” he said. “There’s never been any love lost between her and Mary Virginia. You know that. She never warmed to that Dallas routine.” He picked up the ’27 Oyster and waved it in front of my eyes. It was countdown time.
I nodded and leaned over to kiss him on the nose. Then the mouth. Then we washed up the kitchen. We threw out the rims of fat from the steak and the rest of the loaf of bread, putting them out back for whatever might come along: raccoons, black bears, bobcats. Probably nothing that wild anymore; these days more likely bluetick hounds from one of the nearby farms.
Together we closed up the house, got my car out, and padlocked the shed. Turned his truck around. Then we stood a minute. It was good when we weren’t in such an awful hurry, when we didn’t just wave and rush off, looking at the sky over our shoulders, hoping nothing would drop out of it on the way back.
“We never talk about the kids,” I said.
“Sure we do. What do you mean? We did. We’re going to invite them to the wedding, remember?”
“What if the girls want to stay in town? I mean even in the summer?”
“Then they can stay in town. Come out weekends.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I think about that. They’re such jocks, their lives totally revolve around the teams they’re playing on. They talk about this ecology; argue it all the time. Cows. But the truth is, their eyes light up most when they’re competing. Even Earth Day, which they’re already working on like crazy, the main event for them is the marathon run along Lake Brazos. Lord, of all the people in the world to end up with these giant jocks for children, I’m the last one you’d imagine. I thought, if I thought at all, that I’d have a couple of little sweet-faced soft-voiced wallflowers. The kind I was always going to have to be nagging to get out there and make friends or get interested in something. You know?”
“Instead,” Drew said, helping me into the car and leaning in the window to finish talking, “I’m the one expected to have the giant jocks and ended up with the sweet-faced wallflowers. You never can tell.”
“Drew, don’t. Don’t ever say that. What a thing to say. Trey and Jock are the”—I bit my tongue not to say sweetest, which was the first word that came to mind—“neatest, brightest boys in the world. And the most athletic. Come on. What’s got into you? They’re great tennis players, good students, and … great guys.”
“Yeah, forget it. Hell, Cile, we never have time to even have half a conversation about anything. I’m not dumping on the boys. You know that. It was a joke. We need to get this done and get ourselves out here where we can have time to start something and finish it. I was thinking again about what’s going on up the road. How they don’t get the picture that when you lose the grasslands you lose the country. Thinking that with my luck, the boys would both end up being Dallas lawyers, representing the government in its fight between the superfluous supercollider and the nesters down here south of Waxahachie making all the trouble.”
“I know. I just had an attack of the nerves.”
“I’ll call tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“I love you, honey.”
“You’re right, the bikes are swell.”
While I warmed up the Pontiac, Drew headed back toward his pickup, singing off key, “All My Exes Live in Texas.”