“I’m not sure,” I said. “Anything.”
“Anything.” The word hung there. “I don’t know that I like you following me. You’ve been watching me, haven’t you? You’ve been here for a while watching me. What gives you the right? You haven’t even said hello. You haven’t even asked me how I am, how I’m doing. You never called, Terry. Not even on my birthday. Never. You could’ve called.” Her voice was a low growl. “Even if you didn’t want to see any of us, you could’ve picked up the phone. You could’ve written. You could’ve let me know you were alive. You could’ve shown some concern, for even one minute. You could’ve done any of a thousand things, Terry, and you didn’t. Now you want to talk?”
I reached out and drew her into an embrace. My timing was off, as usual. I should’ve let her vent longer, bue d01D;t I thought that once she got started it might never stop. I was still avoiding responsibility.
She didn’t resist. She didn’t hug me back either. It was like holding on to a mannequin dressed like a young woman who sort of looked like my little sister. I kept at it, but there was no point. I let her go.
She said, “Is this where I’m supposed to forgive you?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just that I wanted to hug you, all right?”
“You going to give me a lecture?”
“About what?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either.”
“About whatever you think I need lecturing on, Terry. That’s really why you’re here.”
“You’re confusing me, Dale.”
I wanted to ask her what she felt about Collie. I wanted to know how his reputation had affected her in school and elsewhere. If instead of being known as a child of the nefarious Rand clan of thieves she was now marked as the sister of a thrill killer. I stared at that smear of blood-colored wax over her lips. I was as bad as the rest of my family. I didn’t want to ask anything of real consequence for fear of being asked something meaningful in return.
“What did Mom and Dad say?”
“They found condoms in the laundry and they don’t like your boyfriend.”
“Ah, shit. So that’s where that pack went.”
“Always double-check your pockets, Dale. Always.”
“So now you’re reporting back to them.”
“I’m here because I wanted to see you and say I was sorry for running out this morning.”
We locked eyes. I tried to let her read me. I didn’t know what it would mean or how it would go down, but I made the effort. She seemed about as satisfied as she could be under the circumstances, and her lips eased into a small, soft smile. She turned aside for a moment, and when she turned back the smile was gone.
“You really came back for Kimmy, didn’t you? Not us. Not Collie.”
“I don’t know why I’m here, Dale.”
“At least you’re telling the truth now. That’s something. Did you see her yet?”
“I saw her. I didn’t talk to her.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
I shrugged. It was my father’s gesture. It was meant to deflect honesty, intimacy, and insight. I couldn’t make it a habit. “She’s married to Chub now. They have a kid. It’s not my place.”
“But you watched her.”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“So what was the point of that?”
“Good question,” I said.
“Five years out there on a ranch beneath the big blue sky, lots of time to clear your head, and you come home with a brain as full of snakes as when you left.”
I lifted my chin and studied her face. “Fifteen and you know everything there is to know, eh?t? & br”
“Not quite.”
“Right.”
“Okay, so she found condoms. What parent is going to like the guy who’s having sex with their little girl?”
“That’s a mature way to look at it, Dale.”
“I do my best.”
“I’m glad. So how about if you introduce me to the guy and we leave it at that?”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you don’t.”
The wind grew stronger. I could smell more rain in the air, another storm rolling in. Dale’s hair flapped in the breeze and for a second I saw the little girl I remembered, slipping off to sleep with her head on a Princess Lilliput pillowcase while I read about hepcat James Dean-looking blood drinkers who romanced the ladies across deep black fields beneath a hunter’s moon. A twinge of regret banked through me.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go meet the beau.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, “seriously, that’s what you call him? The beau?”
“I do.”
She locked arms with me and drew me along as we threaded through the parked cars and the kids talking and getting wasted. She took me to a ’69 Chevy that looked like a 396-a speed demon, a racer with wide tires to hug the curves. Only the parking lights were on, glowing bright yellow as we approached. The radio groaned with a heavy bass.
The beau was propped up on the hood, laid out across his windshield, holding a beer and taking in the starshine. He was much older than I’d expected, maybe twenty or twenty-one. He shouldn’t have been dating a fifteen-year-old girl. My shoulders hitched.
He had darting eyes, and his nose had been broken at least once and badly set. It lent him a touch of character he hadn’t earned. He went shirtless and wore four black leather wristbands on his right forearm. Jeans cinched his waist, the seams straining as he slid off the hood. He was so skinny he looked half starved. He smelled of oil, acne ointment, and second-rate pot. A tattoo of foreign words was scrawled in black script along his left shoulder. His nose and bottom lip were pierced. He had a pencil beard that rode around the very edge of his jaw, no mustache.
“Butch, this is my brother Terry.” She gripped him around the waist so tightly he let out a little gasp. She glanced back at me. “Terry, meet Butch.”
We shook hands.
His voice had a focused edge to it, strong and clear, which I wasn’t expecting. “You’re the one who’s been out west,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“What’s that like?”
I had a hard time remembering. I strained to come up with an anecdote, a yarn, some kind of an accounting that would be good enough to tell to anyone who asked. But the harder I tried to recall the last half decade the less substantial it seemed. Fences, a lot of fencing, always in need of repair.
Luckily Butch didn’t really give a shit. He hadn’t waited for a response. “I think about heading out that way. You know, just getting on the road. Hitting three or four states in a couple days. Prairies. Farms. All those highways, all those exits. That’s glanwidot to be the life, right?”
I said, “Sure.”
I knew one thing. Dale and Butch might’ve hung around the lake most nights but they did a lot of cruising too. Nobody kept a machine like that and didn’t let out the clutch and tear up the streets. I could see them burning down Sunrise Highway, out past the barrens, flipping off the Hamptons and heading down to the beaches.
He was territorial the way most young men were, and he put on the same show. He kept a hand around her waist, rubbing his knuckles against her bare midriff, telling all the other punks around that she was his and his alone. I’d done it myself. I couldn’t hold it against him, except I did. A part of me wanted to kick his teeth out, but I supposed that was about par. It was his way of proving he had a bloom on her that her own flesh and blood never would.
He asked, “Hey, babe, can you get me another beer?”
“Of course. You want one, Terry?”
“No thanks,” I said.
She climbed into the backseat and I could hear her rattling a cooler. “We’re out. You want a Mike’s Hard Lemonade instead?”
Butch said, “What do you think?”
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
“That’s my girl.”
Dale slipped off, walking briskly but with a sexy sashay. As she moved across the area I could see her silhouette appearing every so often in the blaze of headlights.