Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

He was thirteen and she was seventeen, and Bill didn’t think that this was the beginning of a lifelong romance. But it did Tim no harm for his first time to be with a young woman who, he well knew, had been brutalized in her previous sexual encounters, and who therefore would require patience and kindness. It helped that he was young and inexperienced enough to be entirely intimidated, and would therefore be very slow. And it did Amelia a world of good to discover the difference between a lout and a gentleman in bed. Bill had a shrewd idea as to what had started them down this road, and she had an even shrewder idea as to who first reached for whom.

Well, she was a poor guardian of teenage morality, no doubt, but Amelia was looking less like a forty-year-old barfly and more like a seventeen-year-old girl, and Bill couldn’t regret that. It wasn’t just the newfound discovery of good sex, of course; nothing was ever completely about sex, no matter what the Freudians said. The tai chi was giving her control over her body, a physical confidence. Moses had left the filleting of the day’s salmon entirely up to her, and had viewed the results with nothing more than a disparaging grunt. From anyone else, that was like being awarded the Olympic gold medal, and judging from Amelia’s flushed, proud face, she knew it. She hadn’t been hit in four days. And a young man was looking at her with something close to adoration in his eyes.

Tim looked proud and confident, with no hint of the swagger so common among adolescent boys after their first score. Held together for the first terrible years of his life by some inner, unplumbed strength all his own, rescued by Wy in what sounded like the nick of time and given a home, regular meals, rules by which to abide and, above all, unconditional love, Tim had the makings of a truly good man.

“Amelia,” Moses said.

Amelia looked up, her olive skin flushed with laughter. “Yes, uncle?”

“It’s Sunday,” he said. “We go home tomorrow.”

Her smile faded. “Yes, uncle. I know.”

On the floor Tim straightened.

“Do you go back to your husband tomorrow?”

Amelia sat up and pushed her hair behind an ear. A log split in the stove and hissed and spit when the flames hit sap. The damper flapped when a gust of wind tangled itself in the chimney. Boughs creaked outside.

“No, uncle,” she said. “I won’t go back to Darren.”

Bill felt Moses stiffen, she thought with momentary surprise, and smiled to herself. “You sound pretty sure of yourself.”

“I am.” She said the words as if she were taking a vow.

It was amazing what four days of tai chi, sweats and fishing would do for the self-confidence, Moses thought complacently. The voices whispered a warning. He ignored them. This time they would be wrong. It had happened before, not often, but often enough to allow him to retain some hope in the face of unrelenting forebodings of death and disaster.

Bug off, he thought, and somewhat to his surprise, they did. And he wasn’t even drunk.

Across the room Moses murmured something in Bill’s ear, and she laughed. “Do you think they know we saw?” Tim whispered.

Amelia looked at the older couple. “I hope not.” But she wondered. She’d seen Bill looking at her with a speculative glint in her eyes, and when she came back from the outhouse this evening her knapsack had been moved and the pills inside had shifted location. She didn’t mind; she didn’t want to be pregnant, either. She didn’t know what she wanted, exactly, but then it had been so long since she had felt the courage to want anything.

Five months ago she had married Darren Gearhart with no desire other than to be a good wife and the mother of his children. She had wanted to sleep with him, too, and she now knew enough to know he had wanted to sleep with her. If he hadn’t, he would never have married her. The realization didn’t hurt as much as it once had.

A good wife, she had thought, meant keeping a clean, neat house, serving good meals on time, keeping the checkbook balanced. The second shock, after her wedding night, came when he told her to close her bank account, one she had been building since she first began to earn money as a baby-sitter at the age of twelve, and deposit its holdings into his own. She asked, timidly, if he would put her name on it, too. That was the first time he had hit her. It didn’t hurt much, not like later, but it was the third shock, and then the shocks piled up so thick and fast that she lost the ability to differentiate between them.

She no longer had money of her own, there was only his money, doled out a few grudging dollars at a time. If she couldn’t stretch them to cover the purchase of food and the maintenance of the trailer they lived in, she had to ask for more, and she learned quickly that she didn’t ever want to ask for more. She learned not to visit her mother, too; he would either accompany her and be so rude that she would leave before she was too embarrassed, or on those few occasions when she managed to slip her leash and go off on her own, he would track her down and take her home.

Her mother knew, though. Amelia remembered her father. Oh yes, her mother knew, all right.

If Darren wasn’t yelling at her, he was hitting her. If he wasn’t hitting her, he was fucking her. It never stopped. She had thought he would be gone fishing most of the summer, but he’d been fired off the Waltzing Matilda practically before the season began. The skipper of the Matilda was Amelia’s uncle’s oldest son, and he had sought her out afterward, to apologize, she thought, but Darren had picked a fight with him and run him off before he could say so.

The five months had seemed like five years, and there had seemed no end to them. She could no longer sleep through the night, starting at noises when he wasn’t next to her, and under constant assault of one kind or another when he was.

She’d been sleeping at fish camp, four dreamless nights of uninterrupted unconsciousness, in a bunk with clean sheets and a soft pillow all her own. She looked at Moses and felt something as close to love as she’d ever felt for a man. She thought how wrong people were who said he was an evil spirit. Even her mother, an elder who should have known better, had warned her children against him.

Tim’s hands stopped shuffling the cards, and she looked up to see him watching her with grave eyes. “Are you okay?” he whispered.

She smiled. “Oh yeah,” she whispered. “I’m perfect.”

You sure are, he thought fervently.

To him, she was beautiful. The bruise on the side of her face had faded to a faint yellow and the dark shadows beneath her eyes were gone. Her hair, which she hadn’t combed until her second day at fish camp, hung in a sleek, shining, black fall. Her olive cheeks were darker after three days spent outside and she moved with a new assurance. She looked him straight in the eye and smiled, and he had a hard time not ducking his head. He couldn’t stop the flush that rose to his own cheeks.

“It was so good,” he whispered.

“Yes,” she said. She stretched a little in memory, her breasts pushing at the front of her shirt. “Yes, it was. The second time especially.”

He swallowed. “Yeah.” He shuffled the cards and they went all over the place. He bent over, picking them up, glad of the opportunity to hide his expression. “Amelia?”

“What?”

He gathered together all his courage and whispered her own question back at her. “Can we do it again?”

He heard her inhale, her involuntary, delighted and slightly surprised chuckle, and then Moses got to his feet, giving Bill a surreptitious tickle on the way up. “Come on, boy, time to bring in some more wood.”

The last thing Tim wanted to do was leave before his question was answered, but he rose obediently and followed Moses into the storm. A gust of wind ripped the door from his hand and slammed it shut. “Moses!”