Damon (5 page)

My old friend, Jaynie, had stopped in for a visit. We were talking about you-know-who, of course.

“Don’t you think he’s good looking?” I asked Jaynie.

She sat at the soda counter drinking a vanilla Coke while I sorted receipts for Chester’s taxes. She tilted her head and watched Damon as he returned the card, still frowning at it, as if he thought it were watching or speaking to him, and moved over to the magazine stand.

“He’s okay.”

“You don’t think he’s drop-dead gorgeous?” I asked, amazed by her lack of sight. I’d never seen a more handsome man in my life.

She shrugged. “Not my type. I like suits.” Then she looked me over and her eyes widened. “You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you?”

I threw her a glance that led to Bella, who was with a customer just over by the designer purses in the gift shop section, reminding Jaynie to keep her voice down. “Just a little,” I said, trying not to grin.

“Just a little,” she scoffed, leaning across the counter. “You’ve been banging like rabbits. I can tell.”

“You can?” A horrible dread passed over me that I might be walking around advertising my sex life. “How?”

“Because you can’t stop holding back that grin and he keeps looking over here at you. You’re blushing. And you’re wearing a dress – you’re sore.” She was too clever sometimes.

“Maybe a little.” I was blushing, I could tell, but I couldn’t stop. “He’s sorta living with me.”

Her smile fell and she stared at me as if I’d slapped her. “Living with you? Since when?”

Instantly, I knew what was wrong. I would let some strange man into my house, while I never invited her over. “He’s an old family friend,” I tried to explain, only making things worse. Jaynie was an older friend. “He knows how to deal with Mama, so…. He’s painting my house. And doing odd jobs. He needed a place to stay!”

There was nothing I could say to make things better. Thankfully, Jaynie didn’t have the stamina to hold a grudge. She released the tension in her lips. “He gets along with your mom?”

“Surprisingly well, actually.” I stopped working to watch Damon as he wandered aimlessly about the store. “Last night she sat mumbling for two hours while we were watching TV and he didn’t care at all.”

She finished off her drink and pushed the glass toward me. “Well, I’ve gotta go. I’m showing a house at ten. We’ll double date sometime. If he lasts.”

If he lasts
? Well, I couldn’t argue with her, but I could take offense to the way she threw it in my face. I knew it would be a miracle if Damon lasted longer than a month. The incident with Teddy,
Teddy
,
TEDDY
, had made me wary, and wise. Since then no guy had lasted longer than a month. They began to annoy me about that time, or else they started making demands I couldn’t fulfill - like wanting to come over to my house and meet my infamous mother. Or, more often than not, they discovered that I was just a little too strange and quit calling.

On the other hand, Jaynie and Steve had been together for four years, and although they weren’t yet planning to get married, it was implied they would someday. And instead of working for minimum wage in a drugstore, Jaynie had taken real estate classes. She was making a killing in Junction City, a good-sized town about twenty minutes away, selling cute little houses in the new subdivisions out near the interstate.

So, of course she was my superior, in every way.

Seeing Jaynie stand to leave, Damon cocked his head back and came my way. Jaynie made some comment to him on her way out of the store, but he ignored her.

“What did she say to you?” I asked.

“She said if I hurt you she’ll sic big dogs on me.”

“Yeah, she’s a good friend,” I decided. “I thought you were going to go buy paint supplies.”

He tried to lean over the counter and give me a kiss, but I glanced at my coworkers, who kept glancing at Damon, wondering about him, and me, and maybe the two of us together. I didn’t want to confirm anything for anyone when I wasn’t sure of our situation myself.

He glanced around, seemed to understand, and took a step back. “Meet me for lunch.”

“Okay.”

Abruptly, Damon put on a serious face, and then from behind me a firm hand landed on my shoulder. I straightened to find Chester standing there, eyeing Damon with suspicion.

“Maggie, kiddo, go in my office and see if you can find last year’s tax forms.”

I was being sent to my room, I knew, but it didn’t bother me. I caught Damon’s sly glance as I turned into the sequestered office in the back. I would see him at lunch, and no one could stop me.

***

When lunchtime came, we dropped by the house to give Mama her pills, since she couldn’t be trusted after the incident yesterday. Then we took a sack of café food to the park. Damon chose the most secluded table in a stand of trees by the creek. We sat on top of the table and watched the water trickle while we ate.

Damon was preoccupied, staring at the water without really seeing, attacking his burger mechanically.

“Did your granddad ever bring you out here?” I asked him.

He turned to look around at our town’s nice recreational spot. “I don’t think so. It’s not familiar.”

“What do you remember about me?”

“You?” He thought for a minute. “You were a pesky little baby I couldn’t play with.” He smiled and bumped my shoulder.

“Was I real little?”

“Pretty little. Still a baby.”

“You don’t remember my mother back then?”

He frowned, shaking his head. “I remember her, but nothing in particular. Just another grownup.”

“She didn’t… ya know… do anything that stands out?” I couldn’t believe she hadn’t made a scene that would have been burned into his memory.

He tried to remember, but in the end could only give an apologetic shrug.

“People say I’m gonna be like her someday. Nutty.”

“That’s bull,” he said.

“Really? She was normal until she got to be about my age. Then she went downhill pretty fast.”

“I’ve been around all sorts of crazy people,” he said. “They’ve got family, parents, kids, who aren’t like them at all. They say the risk is two to four percent for family, compared to one percent for the general population.”

I tried to absorb those numbers. “That’s encouraging, I guess. Where were you around people like that? In your neighborhood?”

He dug in the bag, handed me a little greasy sack of fries, and found his own. “I was in a place for a while. It was kinda… strange.”

A ‘place?’ Uh-oh. “Why?”

“There was an incident. It was… stupid.”

He obviously didn’t want to tell me, and I couldn’t decide if I had the right to know, just yet. But he was living in my house, and sleeping in my bed, so I did have the right.

“Was it something bad?”

“No.” He stared straight ahead. “It was just a little experiment. I happened to get caught, that’s all.”

“Drugs?”

“No,” he said, giving me a solid look at his eyes. Then he glanced away. “I just….” He shook his head and wouldn’t continue. He stuffed food in his mouth instead.

“Just tell me it wasn’t something violent.”

He shook his head and swallowed, washing his food down with his soft drink. “No, it was….” He sighed and turned his head away, unable to let it out.

“Never mind,” I said.

He smiled and put me in a chokehold, gave my temple a long kiss. Forgetting about food, I turned and wrapped my arms around his neck, melting into his embrace for a slow, lingering kiss.

Yelling kids jumped out of a car in the parking lot and reluctantly, we separated. We ate and watched the kids run and play. I was acutely aware of the decreasing amount of time left before I had to be back at work. It was already happening, this lag in familiarity, where we noticed we really didn’t know each other and had been running solely on hormone-induced delirium.

“How often does your mom go out?” he asked, shaking me from my pestering thoughts.

I hurried to munch some fries so I could get eating out of the way and enjoy my lunch hour. “Not much. She doesn’t like to leave the house. She thinks everyone is staring at her. And they do, the sorry pigs. She sits out in the gazebo some.”

“What does she do all day?”

“She paints by numbers and watches TV and cleans a little. Or scribbles in a notebook. Mostly, she sits and stares at the TV.”

“It’s probably her meds,” he said. “I saw what all she’s taking. They’ve got her bombed out of her mind.”

True, but he didn’t have all the facts. “Without it she’s uncontrollable. She’s tried to kill me more than once. She thinks I’m conspiring to have her murdered.”

I didn’t know why I felt I could tell him that, but it just popped out so naturally. I’d never told anyone, not even Bella and Chester.

He didn’t recognize the significance of what I’d said. “If what I think is true,” he said, “they’re way off base on her diagnosis.”

“What do you mean?”

He stuffed all the trash into the bag and set it out of the way. Then he turned and held my hand. His gaze was disturbingly serious. “That old man in the store. What’s his name?”

“Chester? Chester Brewer. But I want to hear about my mother.”

“Did you notice him in that picture from the saltbox house?”

“Yeah. He had hair back then. Remember when I said that? Bella was in the picture, too. They knew my grandparents from back when they were all kids. They grew up together.”

Damon bounded off the table and jogged away, leaving me wondering what he was up to now, if maybe he planned to leave me there. I never expected people to be normal. I always expected them to do something completely surprising. They rarely did, though.

He leaned in the window of his car and jogged back. He had the picture with him. He’d ditched the expensive frame somewhere.

Glad that everything was fine, and normal, I smiled at him as he climbed back up to sit beside me. “Here, look,” he said.

I took the picture, immediately focusing on my grandmother, and her man
.
Damon pointed to Chester. His brown hair had been styled in a severe crew cut. Nowadays, he only had a ring of white hair around the base of his cranium. He’d worn large black square glasses then. Wire frames now. He stared into the camera with no expression, just an almost-familiar face free of wrinkles.

Bella stood beside him somehow looking older in her early twenties than she did now, with that short, salon-curled brown hair styled close to her scalp and that weird hat.

“They look like they’re dressed up for a wedding or something. Or, a funeral.”

“Look at their faces.”

That was when I noticed how they were all standing, and staring.

With no personality, no expression.

They looked like mannequins. Especially my gram, who I always remembered as being vivacious, even in old age.

“She used to do a great Bette Davis routine.”

“Look at them,” Damon said, too insistent to hear my comment. “They’re like… I don’t know.”

“I know what you mean.” I took the opportunity to lean against him and rest my head on his shoulder. “I’m guessing funeral, not wedding.”

I was exhausted from lack of sleep and physical exertion but hadn’t noticed until now, with my stomach full and the sunshine warm on my skin and the water trickling so gently past. Damon’s comforting body beneath my head was like a drug.

But I couldn’t afford to get sleepy, so I sat up and slapped my cheeks and held my eyes wide for a few seconds. Damon continued to shake his head at the picture.

I loved the way he sat, how his shoulders were so unpretentiously relaxed, and the way he crossed his ankles and then tapped out a calming rhythm with his boots. I’d never really noticed the little things about people before.

He had a thousand little things to notice.

“They’re standing in front of a church or a school or something.” He turned and read off the back of the picture. “In Knoxville. 1959. I wasn’t born yet. Was I?” He looked up at the sky and shook his head. “No, I wasn’t. That was my father.” He growled low. “If only I could remember.”

He was off in his own world, so I slid off the table. Being so near him made me want to curl up in a bed with him and sleep for a day or two. I walked down to the creek and dipped my hand in the cold water.

In a minute, Damon walked down to join me, still studying the old picture. I checked my watch and saw that I had fifteen minutes left. I could be back at the store in two minutes, if I took the back roads, and didn’t get stuck behind any old people or tractors.

“Let’s go to Knoxville and find this place,” he said.

I stood up, interested in the idea. I hadn’t been to Knoxville in at least ten years. “When?”

He lowered the picture and blinked at me. “Right now.”

“Right now? I can’t. I have work. And my mother.”

“We’ll take her with us. You can make up a story at work.”

“No, I can’t do that. Chester’s busy with the taxes right now. They need me.”

“They don’t need you,” he told me, with such impersonal audacity I was stunned. “They’ve got six people working there today, not counting you. We need to deal with this situation. It’s serious.”

“What situation?”

“When was your last vacation?” he asked.

I had to take a moment to think about it. I’d never really considered vacations. “I’ve never asked for one because I have to deal with Mama so much. Whenever I need to, they let me leave.”

“Then we’ll go right after you get off. I’ll get your mom ready.”

“No, I have to work tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“We’re open till noon.”

He stared at me for what seemed like a very long time, and I was afraid I’d upset him, and made him think I didn’t want to spend time with him. But I had to hold my ground. I had responsibilities. I couldn’t drop everything just because he didn’t have a job, or was bored.

Finally, he relaxed and stroked my hair. “Then, we’ll go at noon tomorrow.”

But now I was mad. He claimed to know, to understand what life was like with a sick mother, yet he had no respect for all I had to deal with. I couldn’t go running off like a normal person. I’d not been so mad since yesterday, when I’d learned this psycho had been in my panty drawer.