10

Will rocked back on his heels as if to leave, so Cass stood on her tiptoes and, reaching her nose to his neck, inhaled the sweet stench of his day’s labor like it were perfume, and he rocked forward again. He rubbed her lower back, rested his chin atop her head.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” he said. “Wasn’t sure where to go. You’re the only person I could think of who’d understand.” He hesitated, then added, “Shit, I didn’t mean to kiss you like that, either.”

“You didn’t?”

“Not without asking.”

She’d been clutching his shoulder blades. She stepped back, took his hand, and pulled him into the house. While he shut the door behind him, slid his boots off, and hung his coat over a chair, he inspected the room as though she’d contracted him to remodel it.

He asked for a glass of water and she pointed to the cupboard in which Tilly kept the glasses. He poured himself a full glass from the faucet and gulped it down and set the glass on the counter and faced the sink.

“You use needles, too?” she asked.

“Sometimes. Just to … just to relax some. Not often, though.”

There was embarrassment in his voice so she changed the subject. “You hungry? There’s hotdish.”

He turned toward her. “Maybe. Sorry, I ain’t trying to be strange, but I need to talk to you,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

“Sure you’re not hungry?”

“I did wanna kiss you,” he said, ignoring her question. “I do. I’ve been wanting to. I should’ve called you first.”

“I don’t have my phone.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m gonna make you something to eat, then we can talk. But let’s not wake Tilly. She’s a light sleeper.”

“Okay.”

Drowsy, he sat at the kitchen table smirking. She felt his eyes on her as she fixed him a plate, warmed it in the microwave, and placed it and a fork on the table. She went to her room to put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt and returned to find the plate before him untouched. He held his hand out to her and she sat beside him and took it and cupped it in her lap as she might’ve something fragile. He bowed his head and lifted her hand to kiss it again and again, less out of sentimentality than the need to avert his eyes, she sensed, as his kisses grew increasingly deliberate and infrequent before ceasing altogether, then he merely pressed his lips to her knuckles.

“Will, you’re spooking me out.”

“I’m sorry about all this. You know, I make most of my worst decisions at night.”

“Is that why you’re here, to make a bad decision?”

“Maybe,” he replied coyly.

He sat up and smiled at her. In his dimmed eyes lingered glints of hedonism.

“It’s about Delilah,” he said. “You and her both, really. Neither of you asked me for help, but I can’t just sit by with all this going on. I try talking sense into her, but she don’t much listen to me. You know she’s leaving?”

“She told me she might.”

“No, she’s leaving tomorrow. Been packed for weeks. One reason why she brought you to my place today instead of hers.”

With his fork he rearranged some macaroni noodles on his plate, then pushed it away and turned his chair to face her.

“She didn’t even tell me till tonight, Cass. She didn’t want nobody to know, especially not Jack.”

“Not the worst idea in the world to get outta here if that’s what she wants. She ain’t perfect, but she’s been real good to me, all in all. Better than I deserved at times.”

“You deserve the best, Cass, and you shouldn’t say otherwise.”

They eyed each other for several moments, then she kissed him deeply, playing with the tufts of hair behind his ears.

After a minute, she paused and said, “I never knew you felt any way about me.”

“People don’t always say how they feel.”

“But I ain’t beautiful.”

“Don’t talk like that. You are.”

“Not really, but I don’t mind.”

He pulled his head back. “Stop that. I’ve always seen you as beautiful and wonderful and tough, and that’s why I came. I’m sorry this is all so strange and sudden, but I don’t think nobody else could understand what’s been on my mind lately. Delilah would kill me if she knew I came here. She didn’t want me to tell you how I felt till I got clean. Hell, I couldn’t wait no more, after today. The thing is, Cass, we’re young and all this shit will blow over eventually and it might be that you and I are left behind here together. What will we do then? Maybe you don’t feel like I do right now, but maybe you will someday and maybe it’ll be beautiful for us together, us two and Bradley. You look so sad at times and it’s goddamn hard to see you that way.”

In at once a whisper and a moan, she called his name, and before she could say more, he stood and carried her to her bedroom. She kissed him on the way, her ankles locked behind his back.

“Careful,” she said. “Tilly really is a light sleeper.”

He backed into her bedroom, quietly pushed the door shut with his foot, and sat on the end of the bed. She pushed him onto his back atop the quilt and began to undress him.

“You want this, don’t you?” he asked.

She nodded.

“You’re not a virgin?”

“No,” she lied.

“I wouldn’t wanna be your first. Not like this.”

She pulled his jeans off, then slipped out of her sweatpants and panties. When she climbed atop him, he drew her close and she laid her face on his chest.

“Cass, I gotta tell you something before we get too far. Delilah ain’t leaving alone tomorrow. Vick’s going with her.”

She lifted her head.

“The things she’s most ashamed of she’ll always come around to telling me about. It turns out that she made some mistakes last summer with Vick when she and Jack weren’t doing well. It was once, then twice, then a few more times. I don’t know what she was thinking. You can imagine how I felt when I found out. Sorry to tell you this, but I don’t trust your dad a bit.”

She lay beside him, pulled the quilt over her legs. “I don’t, either,” she whispered to the ceiling.

“He’d been on her a long time about leaving with him. He’d get her pills and they’d liquor up and talk about it. I could tell when they’d been together because afterward she’d say how mad she was at Jack. To Vick’s credit, he listened to her. That’s all she ever needed in a man. They weren’t serious about leaving. She wasn’t, at least. It was just drunk-talk, go start a new life in the Southwest, whatever.”

“Delilah don’t love Vick,” she interjected in disbelief.

“She’ll never love nobody but your brother, but she kept saying she was done with him. She wants to have kids, has for a while now. She saw what happened to me and Bradley’s mom after we had him, and she knew Jack wasn’t ready to be a father. She told Vick all this a month or two ago, and he told her to give Jack another chance, just one more, and he’d talk to him, see if he can straighten him out. Delilah was inspired by it all. I was skeptical. We both know how Jack is. Vick told her that if it didn’t work out, he’d saved up some money to get her resettled somewhere else, cover her rent and all that in New Mexico, which was a lie, of course.”

“Then he got Jack to go along with him on the robbery.”

“It was clever. I mean, Vick needs that money to leave town with Delilah, but whether or not he ends up with it, Jack’s outta the picture. Even if he comes back from wherever he’s gone, Vick broke them. I’m worried about Delilah going with him. Shit, I couldn’t even talk to her about it today, about the shit Vick’s pulling. I didn’t think she’d believe me. Vick has already come between us a few times. Now, they’re supposed to leave tomorrow with that money everyone’s talking about.”

“Funny, he told me I was going with him. How do you know Jack’s gone?”

“Delilah says so.”

“And how do you know he didn’t take the money when he left?”

“I figured, since Vick promised Delilah he’s got it.”

“Well, he don’t.”

“Really?” he replied, curious.

“You’re one of the only people I’ve talked to in days who didn’t right away wanna know where Jack and his money are.”

“To be honest, I never lost much sleep over Jack and Vick’s games. But is it true?”

“What?”

He faced her. “That you’re hiding the money for your brother?”

“Ain’t for my health.”

“I’m afraid of how this is gonna end, Cass.”

“Me too. But I ain’t asking for no savior.”

“Don’t mean you won’t need one. Suppose you got to keep it?”

“The money?”

“Right. I mean,” he clarified, “what would you do if you could do anything you want with it?”

She frowned and said nothing for a while. He waited. Finally, she said, “Jack always talked about buying up the Johnson property so he could get the farm back. Build up the barn and buy some animals and fix the fence where it’s broke and all that.”

“But those are Jack’s plans,” he replied, a little frustrated.

Unable to muster even a passable fib, she stayed quiet. For a long time, she stared at the ceiling, into the kaleidoscopic stucco above, which spoke, as if palms to a palmist, of her worst fortunes, until her resolve to battle the early morning lachrymose waned. Soon she was kissing him again, sliding him inside of her, putting the heel of his hand between her teeth to mute her exhalations. She bit him, perhaps too hard, she worried, though he seemed not to notice, then he quickly and abruptly came. His body laxed, she rolled off of him, and he sat upright. She watched him, waiting for him to collect his clothes and rush out, but after a minute he instead lay back down facing her.

She closed her eyes and he spoke in a harried whisper as he made many promises to protect her from her assailants and settle her troubles with her uncle, to come see her often and take her to dinner in Brainerd, to do everything he could to ensure that Jack lived comfortably and found work in New Mexico. After a while he incanted these pledges as though affirming them to himself.

She fell asleep and dreamed she was walking through the backyard clearing, toward the house, in a torrent of springtime afternoon rainfall, sloshing through, she realized, not water but blood, libations to gods whom she was too naïve to fear, before whom to tremble. She carried on her shoulders a foal so young it had yet to produce its first oily nicker. From fatigue she fell burdened to the slough that, when the rain quit and the sun pierced the clouds, coagulated like slag around her legs, they, she and the foal, baked in the crematoria of nude daylight, two beasts cauterized to one, a scabrous imperfection inurned by the landscape, carrion for death itself.

She woke enfolded in her quilt, in a bog of perspiration, alone. She dressed in her jeans and faded green sweatshirt and braided her hair to one side, again exposing the burn.

When Tilly asked over coffee who had come the night before, Cass denied seeing anyone or going anywhere.

“Could’ve sworn there was someone here last night. I heard a voice. And what about the hotdish you left out to spoil?”

Cass merely handed over Tilly’s cell and ran her fingertips over her braid, thinking of Will, and soon Tilly began babbling to herself about making church on time.

Cass went out to start the truck. The morning was windless and splendidly bright, crisp yet warm enough to melt rooftop snow that descended from fractures in the gutters, needling holes in the banks around the house and pinging an overturned tin ash-bucket beside the garage. The torso remained wire-wound to the clothesline.

After coffee, Tilly dressed in cobalt slacks and a sweater and Cass put on her coat. She aided Tilly to the truck and they headed toward church. The forests were lush with compressed snow, and along the ditches, varicose shadows formed by oak and maple limbs dazzled proud and dark and prolific as ichor. As soon as Cass turned onto 84, she slowed to half the speed limit. Bloom’s cruiser was off to the side of the road, a quarter-mile ahead.

Cass approached slowly, parked behind it.

“What are you doing?” Tilly asked. “Let’s keep going. We’ll be late. Someone probably hit a deer.”

Bloom stood in the ditch in his black police parka, hood up, hands on his head.

“If we’re gonna sit here, why don’t you get outta the car and see what it is?!” Tilly barked.

Cass cracked her window and placed a cigarette between her lips. The wind wailed like a newborn. She gripped the wheel with both hands, and Tilly, suddenly timid, asked, “What do you suppose it is?”

Cass said nothing. Even before Bloom, who’d been too transfixed by the object in the ditch to hear Tilly’s truck, dropped to his knees in the snow, she knew it was Jack. Her cigarette fell from her lips, landed between the pedals.