Nancy Bartholomew - Stand By Your Man

"Vernell's gonna be mad as hell when he sees his truck," I said. I sat back up and took a swig of wine, a big swig. "I figure that's a hell of a way to go joyriding!"

Jack just stared at me, his brown eyes unchanging. Then he shook his head. "You think someone stole Vernell's truck and left a body in it?"

I didn't need Jack to say another word, because the next dreadful thought crowded in on top of it. "What if they killed Vernell?" I whispered. Whoever had been in the truck with the dead man had certainly killed him. What if he'd killed Vernell too?

Jack just shook his head again. "There's another possibility, Maggie," he said slowly. "And I don't think it's one you'll want to hear." I gulped down another hefty portion of wine and looked at him.

"What if Vernell killed that man?"

The possibility lay between us like a heavy stone. I wanted to be angry with him, but I just couldn't do it. He was right. I could hear it, coming from him, my friend. I just didn't know what I was going to do if the police started talking that way. It was a possibility, but I knew Vernell. I didn't think him capable of making that large a commitment. After all, dead is dead, and Vernell Spivey likes his options open. No, Vernell Spivey couldn't knowingly kill anybody. Impossible.

I closed my eyes again and leaned back against the sofa. I wasn't exactly envisioning world peace, I was just too tired to do anything else. A sudden wave of fatigue had settled in my bones and it made all thought and memory disappear.

Jack let me stay that way for a few minutes. I heard him get up and throw another log into the wood stove, then twist some knobs to adjust it. The longer I sat, the heavier I felt.

"Come on, Maggie," Jack whispered. The now empty wineglass was tugged from my hand. He reached for me, pulling me up and out of my stupor. "Let's go to bed," he said. "You can think on this in the morning."

I wanted to fight it. I muttered, "Let me sleep here." But he didn't listen.

"Come on."

He led me up the twisting, wrought-iron steps to his bedroom. We stepped out into a room filled with a huge waterbed and a thousand candles. A giant window took up the far end of the room, with a tiny balcony off of it. The lights of downtown Greensboro twinkled in the near distance, cut by the leaves of an aging oak tree.

"Okay," he said, pulling out a drawer and rummaging through it, "you can have the 'I Love Rodeo' T-shirt or, lemme see, there's a 'Take This Job and Shove It' tee that's broke in right nice. Which do you fancy?"

I stood there, numbly staring at the two T-shirts, unable to make even that small decision.

"You look like a rodeo," he said, shoving the shirt in my direction. "I get first call on the bathroom. You go on and get changed." He entered the bathroom and closed the door.

I stared after him as I fumbled with the buttons on my shirt. That was Jack for you. Mama would've called him a gentleman. He was, the gentlest man I knew. This wasn't the first time I'd stayed with Jack. I'd done it before, when the chips were down and I couldn't stay in my own home. He'd taken me in, slept with me in his bed, and never laid a hand on me. With another man I might've worried, but Jack wasn't like most men. He'd walked out of the Golden Stallion on many a night with one cutie or another. It wasn't that Jack didn't like women, quite the contrary. Jack loved women. He just didn't take advantage of them.

I pulled the T-shirt over my head and dropped my jeans to the floor. I was stepping out of them as he emerged from the bathroom. His shirt was off and his hair looked a little wilder for it.

I passed him, slipping into the tiny bathroom, where I found my guest toothbrush in its holder, just as it had been the last time I'd come to stay three months ago. I could hear him bustling around the room and knew what he was doing. By the time I stepped out into the darkened room, he had lit some of the candles and was already lying in bed. Naked. Jack always slept naked, said it made his dreams more vivid because he wasn't confined by clothing.

I took a deep breath and gently rolled into the waterbed, pulling the pile of quilts on top of me and trying to use them as a buffer between us. Just because Jack was a gentleman didn't mean he wasn't prey to temptation.

Jack rolled to face me, watching.

"Still uptight, huh, Maggie?"

I wedged the covers a little tighter. "Jack, just because sleeping with a naked man makes me uncomfortable, it doesn't mean I'm uptight. Besides, I'm too old for you."

He half-propped himself up on his elbow and grinned. Then he reached out his finger and twirled it around a strand of my hair.

"You're a pretty woman, Maggie. Don't underestimate yourself. I kinda like my women a little older, gives 'em an edge on the competition, to my way of thinking."

Suddenly the room seemed much warmer and I felt my face flush. Jack was enjoying my discomfort.

"Go to sleep, sweetheart," he said. "I'm not gonna bite you. Not yet, that is." He turned to blow out the candles, chuckling to himself. Then he gave the bed one good hard bounce that sent me rolling into him. I squeaked and pulled back, he laughed, and suddenly it all hit me funny too. We laughed and laughed, until I remembered Vernell and fell silent.

"Come 'ere, Maggie," Jack said, pulling me into him. "Get comfortable and go to sleep. When you're feeling this bad, sometimes it's nice just to feel another human being up next to you. Kinda keeps the universe in perspective, so to speak."

He was right. It did feel good to sleep with someone's arms around me, even if he wasn't Marshall Weathers. Lying there I remembered another night, three months ago, when I'd done the same for Jack. We had a strange relationship, unlike any I'd ever had before. The other men I knew couldn't sleep naked with a woman, not without getting ideas and feeling they had a point to prove.

I nestled in closer, the quilt still wrapped around my body, feeling Jack's arm, skin-on-skin against mine. Vernell was missing. Marshall didn't love me. And a stranger on a motorcycle was stalking me. Somehow, with the moonlight streaming in through the window and Jack beside me, everything seemed temporarily smaller and I could drift off to sleep. It wasn't world peace, but it was a temporary truce in the chaos of my life.

I stirred at dawn, sensing movement in the room. Jack was standing by the window, fully dressed and staring out at Greensboro by first light. He wore faded boot-cut jeans and a dark navy blue shirt. In the half-light of morning I studied him. Jack's mother was dying and he wore the sadness of her leaving like a heavy cloak. His shoulders bowed under the weight of losing his confidante.

"Are you going to see her?" I asked, my voice startling him.

He turned back to me, shaking off the mantle of sorrow and trying to smile. "Mornings are tough on her," he said. "I like to help her get started."

I thought of Evelyn, her short white hair framing her face like a wispy halo, so frail she could barely walk unassisted, yet hanging in, refusing to leave her son and the world she loved so much.

"Want me to come with you?"

He smiled. "Sleep, Maggie. I'll leave you some coffee."

I snuggled down deeper under the thick quilts, my eyelids heavy with fatigue. I heard his footsteps dying away as he descended the winding iron stairs, then listened as he made coffee for the morning. I tried to sleep, but found myself following Jack's movements around the kitchen. The awareness of yesterday came rushing back in flashes, and as it did I realized there would be no more sleep.

I lay floating on the warm surface of the waterbed, chilled by the reality of my situation. Mama had a way of summing up life when it got to its roughest going. She'd say: "Sugar, life is like a winding mountain railroad. It's the quality of the track that determines the ride." Vernell's track never ran true, while mine seemed to hit the brick wall of unpleasant reality with increasing regularity.