Paula DeBoard - The Mourning Hours

Again she laughed. “Sorry! No can do. I guess you’re just stuck with me, Johnny Hammarstrom.”

“I’m serious.” Johnny’s voice was level, but there was an edge to his calm. If Stacy got up right then, everything would be fine. If she didn’t...well... “Any second now my sisters are going to be here, and we need to be gone.”

“I’m perfectly serious, too,” Stacy purred. “I’m just going to lie here on your bed, all stretched out, deliciously naked....”

“Stacy—now!”

They were both alike, I realized. Johnny never knew when to stop being the aggressor, and Stacy didn’t know when to stop egging him on.

Stacy ignored him. “I’d be like your own little princess in the tower, catering to your every whim. And I’d be good to you. I’d be so, sooo, soooo good to you. Come over here, we have time for more—”

There was a slapping sound, as if Johnny was batting Stacy’s hands away. “What are you, crazy? Get dressed! You’re going to get me in trouble!”

I’d been holding my breath for so long that I felt dizzy.

“Well, we wouldn’t want that.” Stacy sounded hurt, but as far as I could tell, she hadn’t moved yet.

Johnny sighed, trying to be patient. “Are you going to get up?”

“I don’t know,” Stacy said simply.

“What the fuck, Stacy!” Johnny exploded suddenly. There was a thunk, like he’d kicked something—an open dresser drawer or his bed frame. He swung his bedroom door open, banging it against the wall, and took the stairs two at a time. At the bottom of the stairs, he called back over his shoulder, “I’m going to be in the truck, and if you’re coming, you’d better get moving.”

Slowly, too slowly, Stacy stood up. She seemed to be muttering under her breath while she gathered her clothes. I pressed my ear to the wall, trying to pick out her words. But, no, she wasn’t muttering. She was humming—as if she had all the time in the world.

Johnny’s voice carried up the stairs, dangerously. “Stacy...”

“All right, I’m coming,” she called finally, starting down. “What’s the hurry, Hammarstrom? Got another girl to visit before dinner?”

When I heard the back door slam behind them, I unfolded myself from my hiding spot, taking in fresh gulps of air like a deep-sea diver coming to the surface. I rushed to my bedroom window, careful not to disturb the curtain as I peeked out. Johnny had already started his truck. Hands on the steering wheel, he stared straight ahead. Stacy only had one leg inside when he gunned the engine. As they made the half turn in the driveway, I saw her reach unsteadily out with one hand and, straining, pull the door shut.

ten

There was no way I could tell anyone about that afternoon. Mom and Dad would yell loud enough to be heard in three counties. Emilie would use the information as a bargaining tool in the future.

Besides, I wasn’t exactly sure how to describe what had happened. The sex wasn’t even the bad part, not really. There was sex in just about every movie on TV, even though Mom cleared her throat pointedly and Dad changed the channel before anything got too detailed. Sure, Pastor Ziegler said every single Sunday that “sexual impurity” was explicitly forbidden by God, but the act itself didn’t seem that strange. My parents had done it, and their parents before them, and even, presumably, Pastor Ziegler and his wife. It didn’t seem all that crazy that Johnny and Stacy would give it a try, too. No, what I kept replaying over and over in my mind was their argument afterward: Stacy refusing to leave, Johnny kicking his dresser, then gunning the engine of the Green Machine.

And of course, I couldn’t say anything to Johnny. I’m not sure what I would have said, even if I had dared, but the thing that kept coming to my mind was that I was sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have talked to Stacy that day under the bleachers. I shouldn’t have given her message to Johnny. I shouldn’t have encouraged her. Up until that afternoon, I’d been obsessed with Stacy myself. Now she scared me—she was too intense, too demanding. The further things went between Stacy and Johnny, the worse things got at home with Mom, the more I felt the heat of guilt creeping up my skin and sinking low in my stomach.

But if Johnny had been bothered by Stacy that day, he quickly forgot it. That very weekend, they went to a concert with friends in Green Bay. The next week she came over for dinner, and they held hands underneath the table. Their kisses, with her back pressed against the Camaro, were just as passionate as they had been before.

By mid-October, Johnny’s mind was more or less occupied with wrestling, anyway. His schedule was packed with predawn runs, after-school practices and weekend scrimmages. Mom and Dad agreed that this would be a good distraction for him, and things seemed to be settling down. There had been no more notes in the wash—either Stacy had stopped writing them or Johnny had become better at hiding them, and after a while, Mom started to soften toward Stacy, encouraging Johnny to invite her over on weeknights to study. “Better to keep them under our noses,” she’d say to Dad.

Stacy stopped by now and then in the evenings that fall, when Johnny was newly showered from practice, wet hairs still curling on his neck. She and Johnny “studied” in the kitchen, their feet entwined beneath the table, while Mom banged dishes noisily in the sink. They “studied” on the living room couch, textbooks balanced on their knees, Stacy’s head fitting perfectly into the crook of Johnny’s neck, while Dad snoozed in his recliner. Watching them, it seemed to me that they were drawn together like barbed wire to cow magnets.

I kept a close eye on Stacy at all times, half in love with her, half scared of what she might do. Sometimes it felt as if I’d imagined the whole scene in Johnny’s bedroom, the bedsprings squeaking, her protests that she wasn’t going to leave.... Sitting on the couch next to Johnny, she seemed as sweet and harmless as a slice of apple pie.

I couldn’t help watching her stomach, too—to see if it began to pooch out the way it happened with the married women at church. First it was a rounded blip, then a tight waistline, and before you knew it we were gathered in the church basement among streams of blue or pink crepe paper, discussing stretch marks and twenty-hour labors.

If it happened to those women at church, it could happen to Stacy Lemke, too. I spied on her whenever I got a chance, peeking at her stomach around the edges of my history textbook. I tried to imagine slender Stacy with her belly button protruding, her hands gripping the sides of her stomach, lowering herself carefully to sit. And what would Johnny be like as a father? Proud? Embarrassed?

It was funny because this—or something like this—was what I’d wanted last summer, when my heart had done a lopsided somersault every time I’d bumped into Stacy Lemke in town. I’d wanted Stacy for Johnny so that I could have a bit of Stacy for myself. But somehow, I thought, it had all gone wrong.

“Let me braid your hair, Kirsten,” Stacy coaxed on one of those fall evenings.

I considered, then shook my head slowly.

“Aw, come on,” Stacy said, reaching for me playfully.

“I don’t know.”

She reached for me anyway, her hands gathering a mess of hair at the back of my neck. Last summer I would have loved this. I would have melted into a puddle at her touch. Now I remembered the way she and Johnny had laughed at me, and I pulled back. “I don’t want to.”

Stacy sank back into the couch, frowning, her arms folded across her chest.

Johnny sighed. “Don’t you have some homework to do, pip-squeak? Something upstairs?”

I slipped off the couch and plodded to my room, where Emilie was engrossed in this month’s Seventeen. The cover read, “Thirteen Ways to Wear this Skirt.” How could there be thirteen ways to wear a skirt? I could only think of one.