Roll with the Punches (39 page)

"What's wrong?" he said, a hand stroking my arm.

"Nothing."

The front door opened and Music Man poked his head out. "Don't you two stay out there too long and get pneumonia."

We couldn't help giggling at Dad, still humming, patrolling the house and checking the plugs again.

"I sang that hymn with my mother as a kid." Dal stretched long arms to the porch roof and yawned.

"Really?"

"Yeah. Minnesota is full of Catholics and Lutherans. They know how to work a reservation."

"Oh." I stroked his warm arm. "Did you farm back there with your mother? That's hard to picture."

He cleared his throat. "We just had a vegetable plot, two cows, and a field or two of wheat then. Of course, now things are way different. "

"How?"

"No one farms much anymore."

Big question: "What did you do for a living?"

"I was a social worker for a while."

"You got a BA?"

"Yeah, but …"

Somewhere in the depths of my body, a tight knot let loose.

He went on, "Then I decided travel. Ate my way through Europe and Asia. Started on Africa. But in Ethiopia, things were so bad with the droughts and the in-fighting that I ended up working for the Red Cross."

"Did you run out of money?"

He was staring at some memory far away. "Huh? No. I wanted to help."

"When was this?"

He rubbed his face with a hand. "Let's see. I started traveling in 1999. I started at the Red Cross in 2001 and chased famines and tsunamis all over the globe. Reconstruction in Africa, India, Thailand, China. Last year, Hurricane Katrina. This summer, mudflows from earthquakes in Java." He looked ten years older, discussing this.

"Oh. You really are noble. And here I thought—"

"I was a bum? Well, yeah. Using all that gambling money.”

No way. Not another gambler. I felt sick. Test question number six: Are you a gambler? Tanked.

"I didn't earn it," he said. "And I've spent all this time running around the world, trying to matter, working, working, working, until I wore myself down and got sick. And now I'm home … with a direction chosen by my father and little ambition."

I wanted to say,
You must be some gambler to win all that
. But instead, I said, "Your family might help." Or they might be pretty resentful of his habit.

"Pushy snots in their fancy houses with their perfect kids. I feel like such an idiot trying to catch up, become an architect this late in the game, even with their support. I mean it just feels like I've had this very long adolescence. I want to be an adult now, come home and use what I already have. Which is what?"

Test question number seven: Satisfying profession? D-. No means of support.

He squeezed me, and I felt like a thick blanket had been peeled off him so I could finally see his face. Test question number five, about settling down, now looked pretty good. I wanted to ask questions 6A:
How serious of a gambler are you?
And number 8:
Why don't you have a girlfriend
? But who was I kidding? Cleo was probably right. My precious test questions were just another way to insist on unattainable perfection. No guy could ever measure up. Was I really that afraid of falling in love?

I said, "Why'd you spend all that time overseas?"

"Well, I didn't originally plan to. But after a while, it seemed childish to walk by these people and not try to help them. Exploitative. Me, the tourist, eating way better than they were in their own homes. I'm Christian raised, complete with the guilt. And the Indian in me figures I owe the earth back for …"

I smiled and gave him ten bonus points on the quiz.

He raked his fingers through his long, loose black hair. I could get lost in that hair. Black hair, like ninety percent of the world had.

"So you did good," I whispered, stroking his arm again.

He winced. "I don't know. I'm still trying to decide what to be when I grow up. I'm a horrible salesman, I'm not into technology, and I'm not really into my classes. But just sculpting metal seems so selfish. I don't know." He turned away.

"Gee. And living here at Insanity Central isn't helping you a bit, is it?" I slumped again.

"It's fine. It's really fine. You're more than fine." He nuzzled my neck. "Okay, I told you mine. Now you tell me yours."

"Mine's silly next to yours, Mr. Gandhi."

"I'm not nearly as saintly as you think." Eyebrow wiggle. "Sometimes I watch cartoons and play poker."

Gambling again. Minus ten points.
"Okay. I thought I'd found Reynard Jackson's house, but I hadn't. And I lost my superpower.”

His eyebrows raised.

I blurted out, "I can't tell what people want just by looking at them anymore."

"You could before? What did I want the first time you saw me?"

"Sleep?"

"Gee, maybe you did have something. What do I want now? Look deep into my eyes." His hand took mine.

Lust, lust, lust was all I saw. "Yep. Everyone wants the same thing. I tell you it's broken."

"No. What do I really want?" The steely blues drew me into a deep, dark, velvety space I could get lost in.

I licked my lips and swallowed. "Wow."

"What?" The depths held me achingly close.

I looked away, gasping. "God.”

"Not quite." His fingers grazed lightly up my arm, sending little bolts of electricity whizzing up it. Suddenly I couldn't seem to remember a time when Dal hadn't been there needling me and taking care of Music Man and getting under my skin one way or another.

"Intense." I cleared my throat. "Er—Donuts?"

He laughed.

"Hey, I've learned their value in the last two weeks."

"Yeah, I'm proud of you." The ponytail was sagging and there were circles under his eyes, but his cheeks were creased with humor and his lips looked wolfish. "And your desire is—" His hand strayed under my shirt.

"Adventures on horseback.”

His lips landed softly on my neck. The kitchen phone rang.

I let it ring until the message machine picked up and Marian said, "Rhonda? Jackie's been hurt and my car's not here. Can you come and give me a ride over to UCI Med Center?" Pause. "And by the way, it was me. I stole your book.”

Jackie had been a victim of a hit and run and was in surgery for internal injuries. Marian and I waited a long time in the rose-colored ER waiting room chairs, nodding off and drooling on our jackets.

"Go on home, Rhonda. I'll be fine," Marian finally said in the wee hours. "But—can you take my place at the RING-SCREW conference this weekend?"

"Sure, no problem," I said, squeezing her hand.

Her gray eyes looked sharply at me, her mouth curled up at the corner. "Aren't you mad at me for stealing your book? You haven't said a word."

"Marian. You're a terrible actress. So you think Jackie did it?"

Marian blushed. "Oh, honey, maybe. I just—she's been spending money like a crazy woman. Or a secret bestselling author. I'm so worried there's something fishy going on, and now somebody's hit her … And I'm terrified she's in trouble." She dabbed her eye.

"But why would she steal my book? Why not yours or George's?"

"Well, you and James talked so much about sending your full manuscript everywhere. I'm guessing she thought that with that many people reading it, how could anyone trace the theft back to her?"

I nodded. "That's possible. But didn't I tell the group I was only sending out partial packets, not full manuscripts?"

Marian shook her head. "We thought you and James had decided on only sending fulls."

Could Jackie really be Reynard Jackson? Had she stolen enough books from other writers for one of them to figure it out and hurt her for it? Maybe the mysterious F. H. from her letters? I said, "Marian, did you ever find that copy of
Memory Serves
on CD that I gave you? I really need it for the lawsuit."

"No, honey. I'll look for it."

*
      
*
      
*

I tried the doors of the Acorn Street house at 3:20 a.m. and was not amused that they were bolted again. I threw stones at Dal's window. No answer. Then I heard something behind me.

"Rhonda! Psst!" Dal was peeking out of the back of the van with an evil grin.

I ran to him and threw my arms around his neck, and we ended up giggling on the futon inside, kicking fake fur covers willy-nilly, so glad were we to be there together. I told him about Jackie and he hugged me tight. After some wild, crazy, jungle sex, we spooned and he asked me lazily in my ear, "What were the initials on that letter you got from Jackie's house?"

"F. H. Some editor at Haverton Masters Press, you think? Isn't that her publisher?"

"Nah. Probably Freddie Hamilton, your long lost evil cousin."

We slept tangled together in the van until 8:00 in the morning, when my bladder called and the van interior started warming up from the rising sun. Wrapped in a sheet, I ran into the now open house to pee. Then, careful to avoid Music Man, I got a robe, looked both ways across the yard, and sprinted back out to the van. Even though we had been together a very short time and our conversations had not gone very deep, Dal's arms were my magnet, my home, my joy. I had never felt this alive with a man before. We dozed a while, knowing that far from burning the house down, Music Man would be guarding the plugs and eating cold cereal. Of course, he might also be emptying the fridge onto the table.

What finally woke me was a pressure, no a sort of wiggling animal, against the side of my hip. Then a possessive hand on my breast and a mouth searching for mine among the red faux fur on the futon and the real black stuff on Mr. Mustang's wild mane. It seemed the right thing to do to just open my robe, part my legs, slide onto the fine, fierce coup stick he offered and ride away.

So ride I did, latching onto his neck and his mouth and wiggling all over in pure excitement. In no time, the van was bucking and tossing up and down like a crazy bronco in heat. Dal's wicked grin and teasing fingers made me yell way too loud for the time of day and the street we lived on. Arlene would just have to get her own pony.

I took off my gold necklace and twirled it overhead for my lasso. "Yeeeeehaaa!"

"Let her rip, Cowgirl.”

So I did. Riding the range on my Sioux pony, I war whooped at each fresh wave of glowing sensation. I savored pulse after pulse of heat, emanating from the fire pit in my magic subterranean kiva to flood my engorged teepee and bolt straight to the tips of all four of my sacred directions and beyond. Great Mother in Heaven.

Of course there was traffic on the street, but its noise just didn't make it through to this wild bareback rider. I shook and gasped and clutched my sexy Indian mount, our love flowering into awesome vibrating rainbows that flooded every cell and molecule of life for miles around. Finally, I groaned a giant, monstrous gush of satisfied ecstasy, followed by Dal's baritone shudder of release.

"Rhonda!" my mother's voice bellowed from about a foot away.

Oh, Lord. I fell on Dal, whispering, "Was that real?"

He nodded and grinned.

I suddenly felt nauseous.

The voice came again. "Yoo-hoo! Rhonda! Why didn't you answer the phone? I got out of jail a few days early! Come and wheel me into the house! Don't make the taxi man do it. And who let these awful, obnoxious gypsies park this hippie van in our driveway? Rhonda?"

"It's only Friday!” I breathed. “If I lie very still, will she go away?"

"No." He was shaking with laughter, gasping so hard I had to roll off him.

"But—"

"Time to face the music," he laughed. "You first. I really need to pee, but I'm, uh, not quite decent.”

I looked down. Yep. Mr. Coup Stick was still a happy guy. I gathered my robe and peeked out the front window, just in time to see Arlene start across her lawn toward my mother. Three other straight-laced neighbors were descending on us from the other side, all full of consolations. I ducked back down inside, breathing fast. "No. It's a frigging welcome wagon party out there!"

"Rhonda?" Arlene yelled. "I see you.”

"Rhonda! What are you doing in there?" My mother knocked on the side of the van.

Arlene said, "I wondered what this thing was doing here, Ethel. It sounded like a bunch of natives doing a war dance in your driveway. Glad to see you home, by the way."

Coup Stick Man laughed so hard he snorted. "Go on inside! My bladder's not made of iron, you know."

I crossed my arms. "Mine is."

So he pulled on his jeans and hopped out of the van, bare-chested, nose leading, wild black hair flying, waving at Arlene and the other gaping women. He paid the taxi driver and pushed Mom's wheelchair into the house, turning her toward the kitchen.

I waited until the coast was clear, knotted my robe sash, crept out of the van and sprinted across the yard. Mom and Dad were chatting in the kitchen. I crept down the hall. Halfway down, I heard Mom. "I know you're just Rhonda, not Monica, but you'll need a diamond ring on your finger to make up for the embarrassment I've suffered today!"

I shut my room door, leaning my forehead against it. Grrrr. Why did I even try? I was still "just Rhonda" to her.

"Want to try it in this room? I don't think we have yet.”

I jumped and turned.

Dal was lounging on my Road Runner bedspread looking gorgeous. Wild black hair, naked chest, delicious evil grin. He patted the spread beside him.

I cringed. "My mother's home!"

"So? Your dad was home before."

"Well, he's—but she's—and they're—you didn't hear what she just said, did you?"

"About the ring?" An eyebrow lifted.

"Dal, I'm really sorry. They're just—" My stomach tied itself in knots. "Parents!" I sat down by him.

"Well, I
am
a bum with no job or traditional job prospects for the next few years. Don't you want to marry me?" He lightly stroked my neck.

I shot him a look. "The
M-word
? We're just new, having fun. I hadn't dreamed …"

"Pinocchio. But putting someone through architecture school is such a drag, especially when he decides to ditch you for his receptionist four years later."