Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

He said, “I was watching you sleep. You looked like a little kitten.”

“That was so wonderful. But it was—”

“What?”

“All for me. I want to be good for you.”

“It was good for me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Is it because I’m a virgin? I don’t want to be a virgin. Not now. I’m glad there was no one before you but I want to... do everything. With you.”

He leaned over and kissed her. “You sure are impatient,” he said.

“I mean—”

“One perfect hell of an impatient virgin. Don’t you know we got all the time in the world?”

“I do love you.”

“Why, I guess you better. Don’t know what I’d do with you if you didn’t.”

She grinned. Then her face went serious again. “Isn’t there something I can do?”

“Like what?”

“ You know.”

He kissed her again. “Didn’t I tell you all the time we’ve got? Now I have to go out for a little while. I have to see about something. You take a little nap until I get back, hear?”

“I don’t know if I can sleep. Can I come with you?”

“Not this time. I won’t be long.”

She watched as he dressed. She just loved to watch him, loved the easy grace with which he moved. Before he left he came over and kissed her again. “Just like a little kitten,” he said, and she made a purring sound and he laughed softly.

She lay in the bed, her head on the pillow, her eyes squeezed shut. If he didn’t come back—

But he would come back, of course he would. She fastened on the thought and sleep caught her by surprise.

NO, I never suspected anything like this.

To tell you the truth, I never thought much about having a sister back there. Once I was gone I just never looked back. I had a life to make for myself. It hasn’t been easy, I’ll. say.

I don’t suppose I gave much thought to the idea of her growing up. She was just a little kid to me, like she stayed the same age in my mind as she was when I moved out. I don’t suppose she even remembered me or thought much about me if she did. And I would guess they poisoned her mind about me if she thought about me at all.

I’ve got kids of my own now, and the hours Roy works and all, believe me, it’s a handful. I’ve got all to do to take care of my own life.

I feel terrible, of course, but it’s like something you read about in the papers. It doesn’t touch me. I feel bad, but I can’t feel that it touches me.

We were never close.

It was just too perfect the way things were falling into place. First the car and now the girl. And all just as he had known it would be.

Damn, but he was just completely on top of things! The wrong car had come and he had known to wait for the right one, and he had not had long to wait. And then the wrong girl had come and he had thrown her out of his car and out of his life, and drove around looking for nothing, nothing at all, and sure enough the right girl walked out of a dingy movie house in Grand Island, Nebraska, and into his life.

And he kept knowing what to do. That was the amazing part of it. He had stopped early in the day in Grand Island. There was no reason at all to stop there, except that he had by God known it was the time and the place.

Years of moving around, years of waiting, and all the time knowing that somewhere out there was the other half of himself. And every time he’d found a girl he’d been disappointed, until he had known in advance to expect disappointment, but still in the back of his soul there was always the ache for the right girl, the perfect girl, and who would have guessed he would find her here?

And, remarkably, he had found her at the precise time when she was ready to be found. Ready to move out, ready to pull up stakes, ready to grab at a new life. Ready to belong to somebody, and the somebody she was ready for was Jimmie John Hall, and it couldn’t be plain and simple luck because there was no such thing. You couldn’t get by on luck. Nobody could. You got by on drive and push and edge. You stayed on top of things and on top of yourself, and you were always ready, and everything broke right for you when the opportunities came along.

Of course she might disappoint him. So far everything about her had been right, so incredibly right that it stunned him. The soft unreached cleanliness of her. The tone of her voice. The way she set her head when she listened to him, and her way of hearing both the words he said and the words he did not say. And what she said — he could actually listen to everything she said; he had no need to tune her out or shut her off.

If she did disappoint him—

But he was not going to think about that now.

The sounds she made. The way she softened and melted beneath his hands. The way she let go and was so utterly his and became more completely herself in the process.

Looked like a little kitten when she slept.

Hard to believe anyone could sleep with another person in the room. He himself had to be alone in order to sleep. But she had dropped off in his arms, her face moist against his chest, and she had not stirred when he disengaged himself and got out of bed. She went on sleeping like a warm little kitten while he sat in the chair watching her. And he could have gone on watching her all I night.

He might even be able to sleep with her himself.

He backed the car out of the parking space, drove out of the lot and circled carefully around the town. While his woman lay trustfully sleeping, he would have to provide for her. He needed money. There would be two of them now, and with her at his side he would have to stay in decent places and eat in decent restaurants. He couldn’t expect to use the credit cards much longer. By now, even if no one had turned up Walker P. Ferris’ body and identified it as such, surely someone had begun to wonder what had happened to old Walker. There would be a missing persons’ report filed if there hadn’t been already, and there would be a notice out about the car. He could hold the car for a little while longer, but he would have to figure on paying cash from now on.

The last pill he had taken had worn off, but he still felt as if he were coasting on a speed run. He stopped for a traffic light, eyed the Sunoco station on the far left corner. Not everybody used credit cards. Gas stations still took in a certain amount of cash.

A while ago he had taken forty dollars off an Exxon station. Where? It might have been in Valdosta, Georgia. It seemed to him that he had been through there about the same time as he hit the Exxon station, but he couldn’t be sure. He remembered the incident itself well enough, though. He’d stopped there late at night to use the men’s room and noticed on his way back to the highway that there was only one attendant on duty, an old man who kept dozing at his desk. And so he had given the man time to doze off again and then crept around the station from the back. He could readily picture the old man at his desk, the underarms of his dark-green work shirt soaked with sweat, the roll of fat on the back of his neck, the empty coffee container and half-finished sweet roll on the desk before him, the moths buzzing furiously in the light of the yellow bulb they supposedly couldn’t see.

One little tap on the back of the head with his piece of pipe. That was all it took. The old man had started to stir even as the pipe was descending, as if warned by instinct, but it hadn’t done him any good. One little tap and he was stone certain of a few hours of sleep, and the cash box yielded a stack of ones and fives and a single ten, and it all added up to forty dollars.