Rachel Gibson: Truly Madly Yours

Nick and Louie hid their bikes behind pine trees and crawled on their bellies beneath the thick buck-brush edging the terraced lawn. It was a spot they knew well. Louie was twelve, older than Nick by two years, but Nick was better at waiting than his brother. Maybe it was because he was used to waiting, or because his interest in Henry Shaw was more personal than his brother’s. The two boys made themselves comfortable and prepared to wait.

“He ain’t comin‘ out,” Louie complained after an hour of surveillance. “We’ve been here for a long time, and he ain’t comin’ out.”

“He will sooner or later.” Nick looked at his brother, then returned his attention to the front of the big gray house. “Has too.”

“Let’s go catch some fish in Mr. Bender’s pond.”

Every summer Clark Bender stocked the pond in his backyard with brown trout. And every summer the Allegrezza boys relieved him of several twelve-inch beauties. “Mom will get mad,” Nick reminded his brother, last week’s experience with the wooden spoon across his palms still fresh in his mind. Usually Benita Allegrezza defended her boys with blind ferocity. But even she couldn’t deny Mr. Bender’s accusation when the two had been escorted home stinking of fish guts, several choice trout dangling from their stringer.

“She won’t find out ‘cause Bender’s out of town.”

Nick looked at Louie again, and thinking of all those hungry trout made his hands itch for his fishing rod. “You sure?”

“Yep.”

He thought of the pond and all those fish just waiting for a Pautzke’s and a sharp hook. Then he whipped his head back and forth and clenched his jaws. If Henry got married again, then Nick was going to stick around to see his wife.

“You’re crazy,” Louie said with disgust and scooted backward, out of the buckbrush.

“Are you goin‘ fishing?”

“No, I’m goin‘ home, but first I gotta drain the lizard.”

Nick smiled. He liked it when his older brother said cool stuff like that. “Don’t tell Mom where I am.”

Louie unzipped his pants and sighed as he relieved himself on a Ponderosa. “Just don’t be gone so long she figures it out.”

“I won’t.” When Louie jumped on his bike and peddled away, Nick returned his gaze to the front of the house. He propped his chin in his hand and watched the front door. While he waited, he thought about Louie and about how lucky he was to have a brother who was going into the seventh grade. He could talk to him about anything and Louie never laughed. Louie had already seen the puberty film in school, and so Nick could ask him important questions, like when he was likely to get hair on his balls, stuff a guy just couldn’t come right out and ask his Catholic mother.

A wood ant crawled up Nick’s arm, and he was just about to smash it between his fingers when the front door opened and he froze. Henry walked out of the house and paused on the veranda to look over his shoulder. He motioned with his hand, and a little girl stepped through the doorway. A mass of blond curls framed her face and cascaded down her back. She placed her hand in Henry’s and the two of them walked across the porch and down the front steps. She wore a frilly white dress with lacy socks like girls wore to their First Communion, but it wasn’t even Sunday. Henry pointed in Nick’s general direction, and Nick held his breath, fearing he’d been detected.

“Right back there,” Henry said to the little girl as they moved across the lawn toward Nick’s hiding place. “There’s a great big tree that I’ve thought could use a treehouse in it.”

The little girl looked up at the towering man by her side and nodded. Her golden curls bounced like springs. The girl’s skin was a lot paler than Nick’s, and her big eyes were brown. Nick thought she looked like those little dolls his Tia Narcisa kept locked in a glass cabinet, away from clumsy boys with dirty hands. Nick had never been allowed to touch the pretty little dolls, but he’d never really wanted to anyway.

“Like Winnie the Pooh?” she asked.

“Would you like that?”

“Yes, Henry.”

Henry lowered to one knee and looked into the girl’s eyes. “I’m your father now. You can call me Daddy.”

Nick’s chest caved in and his heart pounded so hard he couldn’t breathe. He’d waited his whole life to hear those words, but Henry had said them to a pale-faced stupid girl who liked Winnie the Pooh. He must have made a sound because Henry and the girl looked right at his hiding spot.

“Who’s in there?” Henry demanded as he stood.

Slowly, with fear gripping his stomach, Nick rose to his feet and faced the man his mother had always said was his father. He stood straight with his shoulders back and stared into Henry’s light gray eyes. He wanted to run, but he didn’t move.

“What are you doing in there?” Henry demanded again.

Nick shoved his chin in the air but he didn’t answer.

“Who is he, Henry?” the girl asked.

“Nobody,” he answered and turned to Nick. “You go on home. Now get, and don’t come around here anymore.”

Standing in buckbrush up to his chest, with his knees shaking and his stomach hurting, Nick Allegrezza felt his hopes die. He hated Henry Shaw. “You’re a lizard-sucking son of a bitch,” he said, then lowered his gaze to the golden-haired girl. He hated her, too. With his eyes burning hatred and stinging with anger, he turned and walked from his hiding place. He never returned. He was finished waiting in the shadows. Waiting for things he would never have.

Footsteps pulled Nick from thoughts of his past, but he didn’t turn around.

“What do you think?” Gail moved behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. The thin material of her dress was the only thing separating her bare breasts from his back.

“About what?”

“About the new and improved me.”

He turned then and looked at her. She was bathed in darkness and he couldn’t see her very well. “You look fine,” he answered.

“Fine? I spent thousands on a boob job, and that’s the best you can do? ‘You look fine’?”

“What do you want me to say, that you would have been smarter to invest your money in real estate rather than saltwater?”

“I thought men liked big breasts,” she said with a pout in her voice.

Big or small didn’t matter as much as what a woman did with her body. He liked a woman who knew how to use what she had, who lost control in bed. A woman who could let go and get down and dirty with him. Gail was too worried about how she looked.

“I thought all men fantasize about big breasts,” she continued.

“Not all men.” Nick hadn’t fantasized about a woman in a very long time. In fact, he hadn’t fantasized since he’d been a kid, and all those fantasies had been the same.

Gail wrapped her arms around his neck and rose onto the balls of her feet. “You didn’t seem to mind a while ago.”

“I didn’t say I minded.”

She slid her hand down his chest to his stomach. “Then make love to me again.”

He wrapped his fingers around her wrist. “I don’t make love.”

“Then what did we just do half an hour ago?”

He thought about giving her a one-word answer, but he knew she wouldn’t appreciate his candor. He thought about taking her home, but she slid her hand to the front of his jeans, and he thought maybe he’d wait a while to see what she had on her mind. “That was sex,” he said. “One has nothing to do with the other.”

“You sound bitter.”

“Why, because I don’t confuse sex and love?” Nick didn’t consider himself bitter, just uninterested. As far as he was concerned, there was no payoff in love. Just a lot of wasted time and emotion.