Never Been Kissed (20 page)

Brody must have. While she’d been sleeping in Nonnie’s apartment, he must have gathered up some more of her things. Shoes, underwear, all of her camisole tank tops so she wouldn’t have to wear a bra.

Looking at him, with his edges and his sharpness and his silence, she realized anew what she’d known when she was seventeen—
He has such a hidden, wild heart.

“What about your mom?”

If she hadn’t been touching him she wouldn’t have noticed his pause, his minuscule flinch.

“Linda? What about her?”

“Is she going to be there?”

Brody shook his head, looking back at the trees, away from her. “She died seven years ago. Cancer.”

Oh. He said it like he was all right with it. Like the words had no tie to the reality of his grief. Perhaps he’d buried it, like he seemed to bury so many other things.

What a relief it would be to comfort him, to run her hand across the clenched muscles of his jaw. Hug him, perhaps, if he’d let her. Because at this moment he looked like what he needed most in this world was a hug.

“I’m so sorry.” Lame words but all she had.

“We were, too. I mean, it was hard. She was a pretty special woman and I think without her … we all just became lost.”

“Lost?”

He laughed, a quiet humph in his chest. “You’ll see.” He stopped so suddenly in front of a small beige house that she got pulled back by her hand in his elbow.

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and his
eyes took in the overgrown bushes and long grass. A downspout had come unattached from the eve’s trough.

There was something stark under his expression—almost as if he was braced for an awful inevitable.

Instantly, she regretted stepping out of the bedroom and forcing this issue. But Ed had been, under his gruffness and his passive-aggressive posturing, so … vulnerable. Perhaps it was the cane, or his gray complexion, but she hadn’t been able to let him walk out that door without agreeing to dinner.

And Brody with his stillness was equally vulnerable. In a totally different way, of course. Like an avalanche just before it happened, when everything was so still, but under the surface breaking to pieces.

“Are you okay with this?” she asked.

“A little late to wonder that now,” he muttered and started up the cracked sidewalk to the front door. Before they even got to the stoop the storm door opened and a man stood there, thick red curls poking up from his head. A smile flashed across his face so bright and so alive that it took a second for him to wrestle it under control.

Ashley couldn’t help but smile back at him.

“Wow,” the man said, opening the screen. He wore blue jeans and perhaps the ugliest plaid button-down shirt ever created. Red and black and brown with green thrown in. But his eyes were twinkling in a universal symbol she recognized. “That’s quite a shiner.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s quite a shirt.”

It was silent for a moment and she felt a hot blush sear her face. Brody made a choking noise beside her and she opened her mouth to apologize, but Sean threw back his head and howled.

“Oh, you are going to be fun,” he said, holding out his hand. She let go of Brody and grabbed on to Sean, who shook her hand as he helped her up the stairs. “I’m Sean,” he said. “Brody’s brother.”

“I’m Ashley …” she started. She didn’t want to say her last name. She’d been enjoying her anonymity.

“I know who you are, Ashley. Brody told me. And it’s a pleasure to meet you.” Sean smiled down at her from his rascals face and turned to lead her into the house. “I hope you’re hungry. We’ve got Cora’s fried chicken and I’ve mixed up a batch of my famous red beans and rice.”

“Famous?” Ed asked and Ashley turned to see Brody’s father sitting in an easy chair just inside the room. “You never made them before in your life.”

“About to be famous, then,” he said and winked at Ashley, which cemented it. She loved Sean. Sometimes friendship was like that—immediate and sticky.

“Can’t wait,” she said.

She realized Brody hadn’t come in, that he still stood on the stoop, watching them through the open door.

“Come on in, Brody,” Sean said. “I got you two thighs and a bunch of Cora’s coleslaw.”
Your favorites,
was the subtext.
I got you everything you like because I love you.

“Sounds good, but I’m going to fix some of this stuff up out here.” Brody jerked his thumb back at the yard.

“What stuff?” Sean asked.

“The downspout, the bushes, the grass.”

“You’re going to mow the lawn?” Sean asked. “Now?”

Brody nodded.

Sean stepped forward. “It’s dinner, Brody,” he whispered. “Do you know how happy Dad is that you agreed to come?”

“I didn’t agree,” Brody whispered back, “she did. And the work needs to be done.” The tone was totally accusatory and Sean snapped his head back like he’d been slapped.

“Brody,” she whispered, “don’t—”

“You”—his eyes, when they turned toward her, were alive with heat and anger—“have done enough.”

And then he was gone, off the landing and around the side of the house. Both Ashley and Sean sagged for a moment as if they’d been walking hard against a stiff wind only to have it suddenly stop.

“Quite a family, huh?” Sean asked.

“I’ve seen worse,” she said and patted his shoulder. “But I’ve never seen a worse shirt.”

He laughed wearily and finally stood up, his shoulders straight. “Come on in,” he said. “You want some tea?”

“Tea would be great,” she answered and Sean took off across the beige carpet into a dark kitchen. On the wall around the television there were dozens of picture frames. Some of the photos were slipping down in the glass. One was blank—as she walked by she looked at each one.

There was Ed as a young groom in a black tux and a skinny bow tie, his hair slicked back from his head, standing next to a beautiful woman with Sean’s red hair piled up on her head, carrying a bouquet of white chrysanthemums. There were pictures of the two of them, young and sleek in swimsuits near a familiar body of water, and Ashley realized it was the river where Brody had taken her.

And then there was Linda standing next to a stiff-legged little boy in too short pants and a Star Wars T-shirt with the Darth Vader decal flaking off. The boy looked terrified, but she was smiling hard enough for the both of them.

Brody, she realized. She wondered what Brody had thought about being adopted by a white couple. It’s not like it was the norm in 1970s Arkansas.

There were a few more of Brody with Ed, fishing poles in hand. Brody seemed less scared and in one he was looking toward Ed, about to smile.

But the next photo was a family picture, and a much older Brody, no smile on the horizon, stood distant
from the group of Ed, Linda, and Sean, who was a toddler. Looking at the rest of the pictures she realized that was a pattern that kept repeating—Brody just off to the side. Brody watching his little brother. Brody, some trophy in hand, not smiling, staring at the camera with vacant eyes.

“Brody was adopted. In case you were wondering,” Ed volunteered and she jumped, having forgotten he was there.

Ed sat in his chair in a sea of beige, his hand constantly worrying the pale wooden handle of his cane. His stillness seemed poised on the edge of something.

The whole house had the air of suspension, as if it had been frozen and kept in this state. Nothing was dusty or dirty, the only thing cluttered was the table by his chair. It was as if, other than the photos, the house had been wiped clean of any sign of life.

“He told me,” she said, stepping carefully toward him.

“I’m surprised he told you anything about us.”

That makes two of us.

“You want to sit down?” He jabbed in the direction of the couch with the end of his cane.

“Thank you,” she said and perched on the edge of the nappy beige couch. It gave every impression that it would swallow her whole if she leaned back.

“He wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t come out of that bedroom.”

“Now, how do we get him in from the lawn?” She tried for a joke, but Ed didn’t laugh.

“His mother was the only one who could get him to do what she wanted.”

Though clearly they didn’t share any bloodlines, they were similar men, Ed and Brody. So she braved the icy stillness around him, the sorrow he wore like armor, and put her hand over his on the cane.

He started and glanced away at the picture window
in front, where they could see clumps of leaves raining down from the gutters Brody was obviously cleaning.

“He said Linda was a special woman.”

Silent, Ed nodded, his face momentarily a mess of wrinkles and eyebrows. Oh, he needed a hug, too. What was with these guys?

“We’d finally given up on having a baby of our own,” Ed said with a mighty sniff. He twitched his hand away from hers. “Linda had wanted a big family but we … we just couldn’t. We were already pretty old when we decided to try adoption.”

“So you decided on an older child? An African-American?”

“I don’t know if we decided anything. I know we met Brody and it was over for her. The two of them looked at each other and … it was done. Brody was hers.”

Was he yours?
she wondered.
Is that what the distance is between you?

“I’d known my wife my whole life and never seen her the way she was with Brody.” His smile was quick and sad.

“When did you have Sean?” she asked.

“Linda got pregnant three months after the adoption was final. Three months. All those years and tests and money and suddenly—bang, she’s pregnant.” He shook his head, like he still couldn’t believe it. “Doctor said sometimes that’s what happens, the minute you stop worrying so much, nature takes over. But it was a real bad pregnancy. High risk. She spent most of it in the hospital. Got to the point I stayed with her at the end. And then after Sean was born, they were still in the hospital for another three months. And Sean spent the first year in and out on account of his lungs.”

“And Brody?” she asked, all the pieces coming together for her.

“Alone, mostly.” Ed looked away, out the window to
where Brody was moving the ladder. “Almost a full year he spent mostly alone in this house, he was like a ghost, so quiet. He got himself to school, packed his own lunch. Cleaned his clothes.” His voice broke and he coughed heavily into his hand.

She’d seen tribal elders in the camps who sat the way Ed did, proud and ruined at the same time. Survival sometimes had a terrible cost.

“You telling all our secrets, Dad?” Sean asked, standing in the doorway with two glasses of tea.

“She asked.” Ed shrugged.

Sean handed her a glass of tea and then he took another glass, this one with a straw in it, to his father. Ed reached for it with shaking hands.

“I got it, Dad,” Sean whispered and Ed leaned forward and took a sip from the straw.

“It’s not sweet,” Ed said.

“Doctor said you had to cut back. Sweet tea isn’t for you anymore.”

“Don’t get old, Ashley,” Ed said. “Everything that makes life enjoyable gets taken away from you.”

“Come on now, you haven’t tried my red beans and rice. It might be your new reason to live.” Sean set the glass down on the small table cluttered with prescription bottles and crossword puzzles.

Ashley glanced at her own tea, at the small ripples across its surface from her own shaking.

“I remember being five,” Sean said, “and asking my mom why Brody was different from other kids. Because he was … I mean, he was so old. Like old man old. And he was twelve. He didn’t laugh, didn’t joke around, or even play, really. He just … watched. And he watched me all the time, like at any minute I was going to fall down in convulsions. And my mom told me that some people don’t know how to be loved—”

Ed made a scoffing sound in his throat.

“You think I’m wrong?” Sean asked.

“He’s a full-grown man, Sean. Not a kid.”

“You look at that guy out there so messed up he can’t even come inside and you tell me he—”

“Doesn’t want to be loved,” Ed barked. “At least not by us.” His runny blue eyes fixed on Ashley. “Probably not by anyone.”

“Those beans were awful,” Ashley said, her hand securely settled into the crook of Brody’s elbow. As they walked her hip brushed his and he felt the contact, like electricity up the side of his body. Half of him was lit up, the other half was jealous. “They were still hard.”

“I told you not to try them.” He tried to ease away from her, because honest to God there was only so much a man could take—but it felt awkward so he stopped.

“That would have been rude.”

“Well, now you’re poisoned so …”

It was dusk and the bats were swooping over the tops of the trees. He’d forgotten about the bats. Suddenly he remembered spending the night at the river with Sean when they were kids and a bat had swooped down and flown right into his head.

Funniest damn thing Brody had ever seen.

“Are you smiling at my discomfort?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Just remembering the time Sean got attacked by a bat.”

She was quiet for a moment. And he was reminded of being a kid and pretending to sleep when Linda checked in on him at night. How aware he’d been of her standing in the doorway while he pretended to sleep.

He was aware of Ashley in the same way right now. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do with the burden of her expectation.

“Sounds hilarious,” she finally said, and he could breathe again.

In his back pocket his phone vibrated.

“Is that your phone?” Ashley asked and he nodded. “Are you … going to answer it?”

“It’s my boss at the security company. He’s been calling all day.”

“Do you need to get back to work?” she asked and tugged on his arm to get him to stop. “Oh my God, Brody, I told you you didn’t have to stay.”

“Calm down, Ashley. I am doing everything I need to be doing.”

They turned the corner and the bar was in sight down the road, the neon dark in the windows, the garage next to it all boarded up.

“Sean seemed pretty happy about you helping do some work in the garage,” she said.