The House on Persimmon Road (17 page)

“You’d better keep an eye on things here, sport. Keep the ladies quiet. Turn on the television, watch the late show, why don’t you?”

Justine was not so easily dismissed. She insisted upon accompanying him.

“There’s no ghost,” she confessed, once outside.

“I didn’t think there was,” Tucker said and grabbed up a short sturdy piece of wood as they passed the chicken coop.

“Is that necessary?”

“Boy Scout motto: Be prepared. Could be you had a prowler. Though we’re so far off the beaten path, it’d be a fluke if a transient found us. This is a pretty safe area. I’ve never locked my doors myself.”

—  •  —

What Tucker wasn’t prepared for was Justine’s nearness. He had spent hours putting her out of his mind, trying to forget the way her lips had felt beneath his own and the fragrance of her hair. The scent she now wore brought it all back. There was the swish of her short robe. He wondered what she had on under it and cast about for some reason to put his arm around her. But the moon and stars lighted their path and she was surefooted.

She hesitated on the back porch step. “We left through the door in my bedroom.”

“You keep the back door locked?”

“No, because the bathroom is out here.”

“You ought to leave a night light burning.” He reached around the screen and pushed open the thick wooden door. “Where’s the light switch?”

“The light hangs down on a wire above the table. You have to pull a string. And there’s a lamp on the counter by the microwave.”

“Wait here.”

A moment later the kitchen lights went on. “Okay. All clear.”

With Justine trailing a few cautious steps behind, they went through each room, switching on lights, checking under beds, in pantries, in chifforobes, behind furniture. In the living room Justine pointed out the fiddle-backed chair. “There it is.”

“Looks harmless.”

“I know. But it wasn’t there earlier. It was on the back porch.”

He picked it up, inspected it, put it back down. “It’s just an old chair. Well-constructed, though.”

Of course it is,
said Lottie contrarily.
Elmer built things to last, as you ought to know, Tucker Highsmith. You're living in the barn he labored on for better ’n six months.

Justine paused. “Have you ever heard of kinetic energy?”

“Sure. You think it moved this chair?”

“I thought of it. But I don’t suppose it’s likely. It’s just…”

Tucker hiked an eyebrow.

“They say kids can be conduits for unexplained movements, especially if they’re unhappy or going through puberty. Judy Ann and Pip haven’t been… They’ve been through some troubled times recently, and are sort of lost way out here. They’re not used to having to entertain themselves. Agnes and Mother don’t get along as well as I’d hoped either.

“But there has to be a logical explanation.” Justine felt as if something in her chest had broken. “We should never have moved here,” she whispered. “I had the mistaken idea that a new place, new faces…change—” She shook her head, going mute. If she said one more word, she’d start to cry. That was the last thing in the world she wanted to do in front of Tucker.

“C’mon now,” he said, his voice full of those slow interior syllables that seemed to reached into her soul. “You had a fright. Everybody got caught up in it and made it seem worse than it was. Now you’re coming down. It’s the adrenaline leaving. Everything will look better in the morning, after you’ve had a good night’s sleep.”

She looked so forlorn; he could not keep from touching her. He brushed stray hairs from her face with the back of his hand and trailed his fingertips down her cheek until they were beneath her chin. “Damn, but you’re lovely.”

His fingertips on her face were electrifying. Not daring to move or respond, Justine felt pinned beneath his gaze, her breath escaping in shallow huffs.

Lottie gaped.
Why, Tucker is courting Justine! What a hoot!
Still, it wasn’t seemly to watch. Such goings on were a private matter. Leastways, she and Elmer had always found it so.

On the long side of it, her chair was safe for the moment. Anyhow, it was Pauline who was the mischief-maker. Lottie felt bad now about frightening everyone else. She hadn’t meant to and was sorely unhappy with herself. Howsomever, in spite of the hoopla it had caused, she had managed a fair night’s work.

She flitted around the couple, who now had no interest whatsoever in anything but themselves and made her silent way to the back of the house. She had in mind to investigate the fuse box in the bathroom.

“If we started something, I’m not sure where it would lead,” Tucker murmured.

“Nowhere,” Justine replied, struggling to bring her emotions under control. She wanted to prolong the conversation but suddenly felt so awkward that she couldn’t. She could feel the heat radiating from his body and smell the soap he’d used. She had to pull herself together.
Had to.

Tucker put his hands on her shoulders and slid them down her arms. “So soft.” He could feel his heartbeat in his ears. “Justine, I think the impossible is happening. I’m falling in love with you.”

“Don’t do this to me.” Her voice was treacherous and thick. She wanted what his eyes, his mouth, his hands promised. But she knew instinctively, sorrowfully, that anything serious, having to do with a man, was never going to be easy for her again.

“Don’t do this to you?” he chided. “You moved into my front yard. What am I supposed to do? Ignore you? Sister, I can’t stop
t
hinking about you.” His hands squeezed her wrists. “You know what I do at work all day? Daydream. Like some moonstruck kid, I make up all sorts of scenarios between us— Hell! I know it’s too soon, but I feel like I’ve been hit over the head with a shovel.”

“Don’t.”

He gave her a grim smile. “I keep telling myself you’ve got more on your plate than you can handle. I tell myself you don’t need me in your life. I ask myself what I have to offer a woman with two kids, and come up blank.”

“You have a lot—”

“Name it.”

“I don’t know exactly. This is a stupid conversation, Tucker. We don’t
know
each other.”

“I know you.” He wanted to say something romantic, something to fit the occasion, but the words that came to mind chafed with the good-old-boy image he had of himself.

“When I saw you on the porch that first time, you switched something on inside me. I feel as if I’ve known you all my life. Something in my brain connected with you. You fit here, Justine. You do. Don’t talk about it being a mistake. That scares me. Makes me think you’ll just pack up and one day I’ll come home and find you gone.” Her expression was so dubious he knew he had to continue, convince her. He smiled the smile that made him seem so boyish.

“I know more about you than you think. I pick the kids’ brains. They love to talk about you. I know about the time you baked a birthday cake for Pip and it slid off the plate onto the floor. Judy Ann has a picture in her shoebox of you when you were pregnant with her. She says it’s a picture of her inside your tummy. Your hair was long then, almost down to your waist. I know about the time you were in the grocery store with her and accidently let one and blamed it on her—”

“What!”

Her face flamed, making her eyes seem like some warm and liquid sea, inviting him into their depths. He laughed and lost his momentum. “Yeah, she told me.”

“I’ll wring that girl’s neck. I will.” A second passed, two. Justine cleared her throat, her emotions once more in check. “It’s way past all our bedtimes.”

“Okay,” he said, releasing her. “Look, I have to go out of town, my crew has been loaned to a site in Montgomery, but say you’ll have dinner with me when I get back. Nothing fancy, I’m not a fancy guy. Burgers and beer—you’ll learn I don’t pick my teeth in public, spit on sidewalks, dip snuff—the basics.” He took her hand. “C’mon, we’ll let your folks know the ghost has been banished to the cellar.”

“We don’t have a cellar.”

“Don’t have a ghost, either.”

“Yes, I do,” she replied, heart aching, “the ghost of a failed marriage.”

“We’ll talk about that, too. Hell, we’ll talk about everything—raising kids, safe sex, mothers-in-law, paying bills, the price of eggs in China, even monks. Get it all out of the way.”

Tucker thought he might even tell her about the cookbook. If she laughed him off the face of the earth, he’d pull in his horns, save face, and cut his throat. Yeah, what she thought about the cookbook would be the bottom line. What she thought of his dad counted, too. The old man was as big a consideration as the book.

“You’re going too fast.”

“The hell I am. I’m holding back.” All those old clichés about love were true. You fell into it, headlong, with no hope of stopping, and that was it. And this after he had decided he’d never fall as hard for a woman as his dad had for his mother. Lord, but he was lost.

“You’re awfully sure of yourself,” Justine told him as they stepped onto the path between her house and his.

“I am. I surprise the heck out of myself sometimes. Don’t dawdle. I’m fighting the urge to carry you off into the bushes.”

“Crass, too.”

“Only on the outside, inside I’m—”

“What? What are you on the inside?”

“Tenderhearted?”’

“That just might be true.”

“I should’ve kissed you when I had the chance. I want to now, bad. But there’s Pip, standing on my stoop, playing lookout.”

Justine wished he’d kissed her, too.

Pip showed up clearly in the light from the porch. He looked so like his father that Justine’s heart wrenched. She withdrew her hand from Tucker’s.

Justine banged on the bathroom door. “Pip, what are you doing in there? I need to get cleaned up.”

I’ll tell you what he’s doing,
Lottie said with a snort of disgust.
He’s counting the hairs under his arms. And when he’s not doing that, he’s flexing those skinny arms of his or mugging in front of the mirror.

“Gee whiz, Mom,” he said pushing past her. “A guy can’t get any privacy around here.”

“You can have all the privacy you want—in your bedroom.”

“Without locks on the doors? Anybody can just walk in.”

“You weren’t doing anything nasty in there, were you?”

Pip’s face went the color of beets. “You sure are dumb, Mom. I’m growing up. You’re supposed to treat me with respect.”

Justine did a double-take, thoughtful for a moment. “Respect? All right, but that works two ways. There are five of us who have to use one bathroom. Growing up means having consideration for others.”

Including me, there’s six what have to use the room,
said Lottie. She hardly had a turn. Why, each time she thought she was clear to finagle the fuse box, somebody else came prancing in as if a call to nature was on orders from God Almighty Himself—not that she was taking up blaspheming, but there was something to be said for an outdoor privy. Nobody stood in line for that!

Pip was glaring at his mother through narrowed eyes. “Yah, you’re just nervous ’cause you got a date with Tucker. Don’t take it out on me.”

Justine opened her mouth, then closed it. There was truth in what he said, but she didn’t like having it thrown into her face by an eleven-year-old. “I am nervous. I admit it. That only makes me human, which doesn’t give you the right to hog the bathroom. Got that?”

“Sure,” he said, sauntering off. “You don’t have to make a federal case out of it.”

Lye soap, Justine. You spare it now and you'll regret it to your dying day,
Lottie said.

Pip slammed the screen door and Justine slammed the bathroom door.

Lottie sank down on the stoop and wilted. There was ruin in the air. Things built up and then tumbled back to nothing again so fast she couldn’t keep up.

After the fiasco with the chair, she’d been ever so careful not to wander about after the sun went down. Agnes had got into the habit of investigating every little noise she couldn’t put a name to. Not only that, but the fuse box was defeating her. Thus far, no matter how she poked and pried, no jolt of current whipped out to give her that wonderful sensation of being solid again. She was just as invisible as ever, a figment, a phantasm.

Lottie sniffed the air. Her mouth watered. Agnes was making popcorn and using real butter from the smell of it. She made a big bowl of it every day and nibbled on it while she watched game shows.

Lottie issued a mournful sigh and spent the time waiting for Justine to vacate the bathroom daydreaming of the time when she could partake of sustenance without having to sneak to do it.

—  •  —

“What do you think, Mother? Am I overdressed or underdressed?” Justine had chosen a peach-colored sundress, fitted at the waist with a full swirling skirt, and tied her hair back with one of Judy Ann’s ribbons.

“You look quite nice, dear. Refreshing.”

Agnes chafed. “Suppose I get sick while you’re out with…?

Justine sighed heavily. “I’ll only be gone a few hours.” Agnes was heaping guilt upon the guilt Justine already felt about leaving all of them at home while she anticipated an evening of fun—or if not fun, getting away from the hubbub of disagreements and constant friction. She was thinking of it as a mother’s day out. Looking at it as an actual date made her stomach lurch.

At the exact moment he had promised to call for her, Tucker drove into the yard and tooted the horn. The kids raced outside to say hello.

Tucker had grown to immense proportions in their eyes by virtue of the fact that the night before he had left town he had “hired” them both. For the grand sum of one dollar each per day, Pip had watered and weeded Tucker’s garden during his absence, and Judy Ann had fed and watered the chickens and gathered eggs. Tucker had graciously insisted that they bring home the eggs and whatever vegetables Pip harvested. Day after day Pip proudly deposited zucchini and yellow squash on the kitchen counter and green tomatoes were ripening along the windowsills.

To Justine’s surprise, the children had taken their “jobs” seriously. Not once did she have to remind them. And they had done such splendid
work
Tucker had paid them each a ten-dollar bill.