Stephen King - Joyland

“Tell me.”

“I decided to give my father what he wants, which is to be invited back into my son’s life before it’s too late. He said terrible things about how God caused Mike’s MD to punish me for my supposed sins, but I’ve got to put that behind me. If I wait for an apology, I’ll be waiting a long time… because in his heart, Dad still believes that’s true.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, as if it were of no matter. “I was wrong about not letting Mike go to Joyland, and I’ve been wrong about holding onto my old grudges and insisting on some sort of fucked-up quid pro quo. My son isn’t goods in a trading post. Do you think thirty-one’s too old to grow up, Dev?”

“Ask me when I get there.”

She laughed. “Touché. Excuse me a minute.”

She was gone for almost five. I sat at the kitchen table, sipping my coffee. When she came back, she was holding her sweater in her right hand. Her stomach was tanned. Her bra was a pale blue, almost matching her faded jeans.

“Mike’s fast asleep,” she said. “Would you like to go upstairs with me, Devin?”

Her bedroom was large but plain, as if, even after all the months she had spent here, she’d never fully unpacked. She turned to me and linked her arms around my neck. Her eyes were very wide and very calm. A trace of a smile touched the corners of her mouth, making soft dimples. “ ‘I bet you could do better, if you had half a chance.’ Remember me saying that?”

“Yes.”

“Is that a bet I’d win?”

Her mouth was sweet and damp. I could taste her breath.

She drew back and said, “It can only be this once. You have to understand that.”

I didn’t want to, but I did. “Just as long as it’s not… you know…”

She was really smiling now, almost laughing. I could see teeth as well as dimples. “As long as it’s not a thank-you fuck? It’s not, believe me. The last time I had a kid like you, I was a kid myself.” She took my right hand and put it on the silky cup covering her left breast. I could feel the soft, steady beat of her heart. “I must not have let go of all my daddy issues yet, because I feel delightfully wicked.”

We kissed again. Her hands dropped to my belt and unbuckled it. There was the soft rasp as my zipper went down, and then the side of her palm was sliding along the hard ridge beneath my shorts. I gasped.

“Dev?”

“What?”

“Have you ever done this before? Don’t you dare lie to me.”

“No.”

“Was she an idiot? This girl of yours?”

“I guess we both were.”

She smiled, slipped a cool hand inside my underwear, and gripped me. That sure hold, coupled with her gently moving thumb, made all of Wendy’s efforts at boyfriend satisfaction seem very minor league. “So you’re a virgin.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Good.”

It wasn’t just the once, and that was lucky for me, because the first time lasted I’m going to say eight seconds. Maybe nine. I got inside, that much I did manage, but then everything spurted everywhere. I may have been more embarrassed once—the time I blew an ass-trumpet while taking communion at Methodist Youth Camp—but I don’t think so.

“Oh God,” I said, and put a hand over my eyes.

She laughed, but there was nothing mean about it. “In a weird way, I’m flattered. Try to relax. I’m going downstairs for another check on Mike. I’d just as soon he didn’t catch me in bed with Howie the Happy Hound.”

“Very funny.” I think if I’d blushed any harder, my skin would have caught on fire.

“I think you’ll be ready again when I come back. It’s the nice thing about being twenty-one, Dev. If you were seventeen, you’d probably be ready now.”

She came back with a couple of sodas in an ice bucket, but when she slipped out of her robe and stood there naked, Coke was the last thing I wanted. The second time was quite a bit better; I think I might have managed four minutes. Then she began to cry out softly, and I was gone. But what a way to go.

We drowsed, Annie with her head pillowed in the hollow of my shoulder. “Okay?” she asked.

“So okay I can’t believe it.”

I didn’t see her smile, but I felt it. “After all these years, this bedroom finally gets used for something besides sleeping.”

“Doesn’t your father ever stay here?”

“Not for a long time, and I only started coming back because Mike loves it here. Sometimes I can face the fact that he’s almost certainly going to die, but mostly I can’t. I just turn away from it. I make deals with myself. ‘If I don’t take him to Joyland, he won’t die. If I don’t make it up with my father so Dad can come and see him, he won’t die. If we just stay here, he won’t die.’ A couple of weeks ago, the first time I had to make him put on his coat to go down to the beach, I cried. He asked me what was wrong, and I told him it was my time of the month. He knows what that is.”

I remembered something Mike had said to her in the hospital parking lot: It doesn’t have to be the last good time. But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us.

She sat up, wrapping the sheet around her. “Remember me saying that Mike turned out to be my future? My brilliant career?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t think of another one. Anything beyond Michael is just… blank. Who said that in America there are no second acts?”

I took her hand. “Don’t worry about act two until act one is over.”

She slipped her hand free and caressed my face with it. “You’re young, but not entirely stupid.”

It was nice of her to say, but I certainly felt stupid. About Wendy, for one thing, but that wasn’t the only thing. I found my mind drifting to those damn pictures in Erin’s folder. Something about them…

She lay back down. The sheet slipped away from her nipples, and I felt myself begin to stir again. Some things about being twenty-one were pretty great. “The shooting gallery was fun. I forgot how good it is, sometimes, just to have that eye-and-hand thing going on. My father put a rifle in my hands for the first time when I was six. Just a little single-shot .22. I loved it.”

“Yeah?”

She was smiling. “Yeah. It was our thing, the thing that worked. The only thing, as it turned out.” She propped herself up on an elbow. “He’s been selling that hellfire and brimstone shit since he was a teenager, and it’s not just about the money—he got a triple helping of backroads gospel from his own parents, and I have no doubt he believes every word of it. You know what, though? He’s still a southern man first and a preacher second. He’s got a custom pickup truck that cost fifty thousand dollars, but a pickup truck is still a pickup truck. He still eats biscuits and gravy at Shoney’s. His idea of sophisticated humor is Minnie Pearl and Junior Samples. He loves songs about cheatin and honky-tonkin. And he loves his guns. I don’t care for his brand of Jesus and I have no interest in owning a pickup truck, but the guns… that he passed on to his only daughter. I go bang-bang and feel better. Shitty legacy, huh?”

I said nothing, only got out of bed and opened the Cokes. I gave one to her.

“He’s probably got fifty guns at his full-time place in Savannah, most of them valuable antiques, and there’s another half a dozen in the safe here. I’ve got two rifles of my own at my place in Chicago, although I hadn’t shot at a target for two years before today. If Mike dies…” She held the Coke bottle to the middle of her forehead, as if trying to soothe a headache. “When Mike dies, the first thing I’m going to do is get rid of them all. They’d be too much temptation.”