Something Fierce (7 page)

“No, I won’t,” he said and looked at the television. “When are you ever going to get sick of that stupid musical?”

“Never,” she said. Then she imagined Seth telling her not to accept that invisible track, to get off of it, to at least try. So she asked, “Did they find anything wrong with Grammy?”

“Nope,” Timmy said. “The new doctor said the same thing all the other ones said. There’s nothing wrong with her. It’s psychosomatic.”

“She needs the attention,” Kerri said, absently. “Like all the women in this family. But she’s old; what else can she do?”

“That’s a mean thing to say.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Maybe. It’s still mean.” He sat the soup bowl next to the television and shoved his hands into his pockets. He rocked back on his heels and asked, “Were you with a guy last night?”

She nodded that she was.

“I knew it.” He raked his hair off his forehead. “I swear you go out with these losers just to piss Mom off. But you’re only hurting yourself. You’re the one that gets screwed in the end.” Then he added, “Literally!” like he was proud that he’d caught the pun in time to take advantage of it.

She had an urge to defend herself, to explain that it was different this time, that Seth wasn’t a loser, wasn’t just another guy. He was the first one since she moved back home three years ago that she’d been able to spend the whole night with. Not only sleep next to, but sleep deeply and soundly, knowing that she was with someone who was undoubtedly good…even when he was behaving badly. And when she woke from that trusting sleep, he had coffee ready for her and he’d made her breakfast. She wished she would have taken his number now. She was so stupid sometimes. “I don’t do anything with them,” she said, deciding to tell Timmy what he needed to hear.

“I’m not a retard, Kerri,” he said, finally. “I know you’re not playing bridge with them.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m not suck’n and fuck’n either.”

“Then what?”

“Making them chase me around, buy me stuff.”

“Like Creepy Kyle,” Timmy said, his mouth curling into a vicious smile. “Old Faithful. Do him.”

“Now who’s being mean?”

“Come on. Please.”

Kerri shut off the television and began chewing a fingernail. “Umm,” she said in a deep, uncertain voice, “what do you have there, Kerri?”

Timmy grinned.

“Oh nothing,” she said, not sparing herself in the charade, mocking the childlike voice she used to get her way with certain men. “Just a purse that I love. That I
adore
.” She let out a theatrical sigh. “But have to put back because I can’t afford it on a salesgirl’s pay.”

She impersonated Kyle taking the purse from her and booming, “Well, it’s yours now. My gift to you!” Then, studying the purse, her lip and left eye twitching to mimic facial tics that made Kyle as irresistible for caricature as his habit of nail-biting, she said, “Holy shit! Even with my employee discount, this sucker is…” she made her face spasm again, “
three hundred and fifty bucks
!”

Timmy laughed, clapping his hands.

“Well, of course, honey,” Kerri said, widening her eyes. “It’s a
Coach
bag. And worth every penny.
You
were the one who wanted to buy if for me! But don’t worry, I won’t hold you to it…”

Face convulsing, Kerri struck a thoughtful pose and held it long enough for Timmy to completely lose it, then went on parodying Kyle who she remembered was probably nursing a hangover about now. “It’s not that I don’t
want to
, Kerri…but it’s a lot of money for a purse…” she started chewing a fingernail, looking Timmy in the eye, “for a girl that already has…”

“Like a hundred purses!” Timmy cackled.

“Yeah, like a hundred,” Kerri’s spoof of Kyle repeated, “but…if that’s what makes my girl happy, I’ll just have to…ah…credit card it.”

“I pity the guy…” Timmy said, his face shining with laughter, his hair falling into his eyes.

“Serves him right,” Kerri said back to her own voice, “for thinking a woman’s love could be bought.”

After she showered and dressed for work, Kerri sat at the bar in the kitchen and fought the urge to return calls, to—as Seth would say—fill the time just to fill it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, she thought, letting herself dream a little, if he really did call? If he could help her be different, be better. She was imagining kissing him when the sound of the garage door brought her back to reality. A few minutes later, her mother came in carrying two armfuls of groceries. Without looking at or speaking to her daughter, Rebecca Engel sat them down on the table and on her way back to the garage said, “You’re more than welcome to help me unload the trunk, Kerri.”

“Timmy!” Kerri shouted.

Her brother appeared. “What’s up?”

“Mom wants you to help her unload the groceries.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I have to leave for work soon. Besides, you are the man of the house.”

“Whatever!” he said, and went out to help.

While her brother and her mother wordlessly covered the table with bags of groceries, Kerri feigned interest in an article explaining the necessary lies a woman must tell the man in her life. Timmy then disappeared with a bag of potato chips and Rebecca put the food in the cupboards. “I’m not bothering you, am I?” Kerri’s mother asked her.

“Not at all,” Kerri said, noticing that Mother was wearing another of her shirts. For the past several years, Rebecca had been helping herself to Kerri’s closet whenever she felt like it. Kerri had retrieved a half dozen of her shirts from her mother’s bedroom a week ago. As usual, not a word had been spoken on the subject, not when the shirts traveled to her mother’s closet nor when Kerri had taken them back. There were certain things, many things, they just didn’t discuss as if not talking about them made him nonissues. Rebecca had, for example, done random searches of Kerri’s bedroom since she was fourteen. Conversations of the right to privacy and personal property had been laid to rest long ago by her mother’s simple, nonnegotiable law: my house, my rules.

She emptied the last bag, folded it neatly, and placed it under the sink with the others. “Where were you last night?” she asked, still without looking at Kerri.

“Where were you all weekend?” Kerri asked. She loudly flipped a page in the magazine.

“When you cover the bills around here, I’ll be happy to give you a full report,” she said, looking out the window over the sink. “Where were you last night?”

“Out,” Kerri said.

Now her mother turned and looked at her. “I’m in no mood, Kerri.”

Under the full brunt of her mother’s dark eyes, Kerri said, “I was at Lynn’s house. We watched a movie and I fell asleep.”

“You could have called,” she sighed, still looking at her. “You know how Timmy gets when you don’t come home.” Then, she asked, “Are you eating?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“You’re looking anemic again.”

“I’m eating. I feel great, actually.”

Her mother took the magazine Kerri was looking at and smiled at something in it.

“Guess what?” Kerri pushed out a laugh, making another attempt to be different. “Lynn’s pregnant…again.”

Her mother’s facial expression didn’t change. She tossed the magazine aside. “You have always had weird friends, little girl,” she said, walking out of the room.

Kerri turned to the doorway her mother had just gone through and gave her the finger, but knew better than to risk holding the pose for more than an instant. Mother’s retaliations could be vicious and unpredictable.

Kerri was eight years old the first time she recognized her mother’s quiet cunning. They’d been bickering all day and that evening while Rebecca was trimming Kerri’s hair, there’d been a “slip with the scissors.” Rebecca had “no choice” but to cut her daughter’s beautiful, long hair short. Brutally short. Kerri had cried for days and Grammy—who had spent hours brushing Kerri’s “princess hair”—had gasped when she first saw it as if her granddaughter had come in missing an arm. Rebecca, however, claimed to like the new style (which wasn’t a style at all) and no amount of pleading or crying or fit-taking on Kerri’s part disrupted the monthly haircuts for the next year or so.

Kerri was repeatedly mistaken for a boy and when Mother overhead this, she’d laugh. The bigger fuss Kerri made when it was announced that she was “due for a haircut,” the shorter and more severe the cut would be. Grammy, who’d missed the long hair almost as much as Kerri did, was the key to growing it back. Kerri cried to Grammy and Grammy nagged Rebecca, insisting that Kerri was plenty old enough to choose her own hairstyle and should be allowed to grow it back if she chose to do so. “I don’t care what she does as long as she keeps it clean and brushed,” her mother had eventually said, as if that had anything to do with why it had been cut and kept short.

Kerri was putting on her coat when Timmy came back into the kitchen. He said in a low voice, “Why did you tell Mom you were at Lynn’s last night? I thought the whole point of screwing around with losers was to piss her off.”

She sat on the antique gossip bench and zipped up her boots. “I wasn’t with a loser last night.”

“Who then?”

“Someone who made me feel…who makes me want to be…” Hell! There was no way she could put it into words without sounding like a cardboard character in some cheesy romance. “I don’t know. But it was different. I didn’t tell Mom because it’s none of her business.” And it was even more than that. She felt protective of Seth, a sentiment that she didn’t remember ever feeling for anyone but herself. School started in a week and this kind of fraternizing with a student, even if she was no longer
his
student, would jeopardize his livelihood and very possibly bring an end to something he loved doing.

“Do I know him?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, “because I’m sure that he has figured out by now that I’m a fuck-up and that getting involved with me would be the worst thing he could ever do.”

“You’re not a fuck-up, Kerri. I wish you’d stop saying that.”

She realized that she wanted to tell someone and that Timmy was the only person she really could tell. “You have to keep it quiet. I don’t want anyone to know.”

“Done. So?”

“Do you remember the hot teacher I was crushing on?”

“The guy who wrote the novel?”

She smiled and nodded.

Timmy raked the hair out of his eyes, his hand stopping halfway back his head as if stuck in his mop of hair. “You slept with your English professor?!”

“Shhh!”

“That’s the
special guy
?”

“I shouldn’t have told you.” Kerri turned to leave.

“No, no,” he grabbed her arm. “I’m just surprised. How…how old is he?”

Kerri pulled her arm away and continued to the car. “Goodbye, Timmy.”

“Kerri!” He followed her into the garage. “I’m just surprised that’s all. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Kerri got into her car and lowered the window. “What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. Not your professor! You have to admit it sounds like typical bad-ass Kerri.”

“Well, it’s not. Maybe it started that way, but…” She remembered the way Seth had stayed naked throughout the evening, not posing or primping, but as if he’d forgotten that he was nude. His body was much like she had imagined it: muscular arms and shoulders, a nice chest, a flat stomach, well developed legs covered with soft, dark hair.
What’s the matter, Ms. Engel?
He’d said, catching her staring at him.
Get in over your head?

“But…?” Timmy asked.

“I got in over my head.” She hit the garage door opener. “I’m late.”

“When do you get off tonight?”

“I have to close; I won’t be out till midnight.”

“I’ll wait up.”

The house was dark when Kerri returned from work, but that didn’t discourage her from bounding up the steps two at a time and bursting into Timmy’s room.

“Did you ever hear of knocking?” he said, sitting up in bed, reading a book.

“He called!” she said, climbing under the blankets. She had carried her phone with her all night, something that was against store policy, but she wasn’t about to risk missing the call even though she didn’t expect him to call at all and certainly not tonight. “I was in the men’s department and actually, at that very minute, was looking at a shirt that I thought would look really good on him and my phone started to vibrate with his call. Isn’t that weird?”

Timmy nodded that it was.

“I couldn’t believe it. He’s so funny, he always makes me laugh. He said that since I gave him an easy out, he was going to take the opportunity to really think about it, weigh it all out, what was best for me, for him, what was the best thing to do here, right?” Timmy motioned for her to talk quieter so as not to wake their mother downstairs. She nodded and continued in a lower voice, “But he couldn’t stop thinking about me, not for a minute! And last night was the best night he’d had since coming here five months ago, the best time he’d had in
years
. So he decided to wait at least twenty-four hours, but couldn’t! He just couldn’t do it. You’re not saying anything.”

“You’re not giving me a chance.”

“Right. Sorry. Well, anyway, he asked me if I had plans this Friday and of course, I told him that I didn’t and so he is taking me out to dinner.”

“You work Friday nights,” Timmy said.

“Yeah, I’ll call in sick. The hard part is going to be waiting two and a half days to see him again.”

Timmy was staring at her, his face void of any expression.

“What?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’ve never seen you this excited about a guy. About anything.”

“I never have been. I feel like I’m high.” She giggled. “Why are you looking so serious?”

“He has to be a lot older than you.”

“So what! He looks young. And he’s sexy and passionate. He’s the most passionate person I’ve ever met and being around him makes me feel passionate too. He makes me
want
to be better, be happy. What therapist ever did that for me? What doctor? What medication?”

“What if he just wants to mess around with a young girl for a while and you get hurt?”