Chapter 4 What a Charmer
What a Charmer
I love our house, I really do, but carrying three heavy bags of groceries from the parking area in front of the main house down the long fence-lined path to our house in the scorching sun isn’t sexy.
By the time I tumble through the front door, which I nearly have to kick in, I’m a wet rat in a soaked shirt, bangs pasted to my forehead.
Then, just as I reach the counter, the container of beautiful raspberries I hand-selected and was especially looking forward to enjoying hops right out of the top of the bag like it grew legs and spills all over the floor at my feet—mere seconds before I make it to the counter.
I’m still gathering them off the floor when Tanner bursts into the house.
“Oh, hey, babe!” he cheerily calls to me as he runs off to the bedroom.
“Sorry, in a hurry, just grabbin’ my lucky clipboard!
Can’t believe my ditzy butt forgot it, of all things.
So much goin’ on at school. Did you hear about what’s-her-name who’s retiring?
Everyone’s goin’ nuts, no one saw it comin’, everyone’s favorite teacher of …
what’d she teach?” He’s shouting all of this from the bedroom now. “How do you feel about that, babe?”
“Y’mean how do I feel about a teacher whose name you don’t know who teaches a subject you can’t remember?” I stare down at a handful of tasty raspberries I can’t eat. “I’m gutted.”
“Can’t find my dang lucky clipboard.” He emerges from the bedroom. “Have you seen it?”
“Can you describe it at all? Or have you also forgotten what it looks like?”
“Red and white, plastic, long, one corner chipped from a time I dropped it in the locker room my first year as coach.” He stops in front of me, crouching down to help. “Sorry, babe, I didn’t see you down here. Damn, these raspberries look good.”
And he pops one into his mouth. Right off the dirty floor.
I gawp at him. “They’re straight from the store and I haven’t cleaned them yet!”
“Five-minute rule,” he says with a wink, chewing away.
I don’t know what it is—his charming eyes, the cute way he smirks while he chews, or the fact that he’s enjoying something I’m denying myself on account of them falling on the floor—but I catch myself just staring at him blankly.
“It’s my version of the five-second rule. Waste a lot less that way.”
My eyes drop to his lips.
Their plumpness. The corner that always curls up when he’s trying not to laugh. The sound of them smacking as he chews on that tasty, unclean, floor-bound raspberry, making it sound like a treasure in his teeth.
“You left your clipboard by the, uh, couch,” I finally answer, words slow and distracted. “From last night. Writing in it.”
He snaps his fingers. “That’s right. Of course. Couch.” His eyes find my lips, too. A beat passes. He looks pained, then happy, then pained again, working through something in his mind before he finally lets out the confession. “I wanna kiss you right now.”
I stop collecting raspberries.
Honestly, I want him to kiss me, too.
But everything lately has been so stressed and strange.
Even with our efforts to maintain normalcy.
To go about our lives. To act like nothing’s wrong—especially for the benefit of our kids.
Marcus has only just recently stopped giving me those suspicious sidelong glances.
It feels like we’re making progress. Or at the very least burying everything more effectively. You know, like healthy couples do.
But I can’t bring myself to give him even as much as a peck. I am the worst husband in the world. “Said you were in a hurry.”
“Not enough of a hurry to steal a little sexy-sexy, kissy-kissy time with my man.”
He’s been cuter lately. Sweeter. More playful.
I can’t help but fear it’s all just a ploy to seduce me away from my own thoughts and complex feelings, which Tanner still has yet to properly acknowledge, even all these weeks later. Has it been weeks already since that night he told our families we’re renewing our vows?
How can I trust any sexy-sexy, kissy-kissy anything from him?
“Heard you took somethin’ off the menu at T&S’s,” he says.
I look down at the floor, struck. “Temporarily.”
“The Football Sundae Special was our thing. Coach Larry just asked me ‘bout it. I … didn’t know what to say.”
I feel instant guilt. Then frustration. Then finally a childish, dismissive sort of flippantness I can’t explain when I say, “It needs some work. I’m … I’m workin’ on it. Took it off the menu. Why is everyone in our dang business?”
Smartly, Tanner seems to leave well enough alone. “That’s okay, that’s alright, no biggie. Told the guy my hubby has his reasons for everything. He didn’t pry.”
He even supports me in my passive aggression.
Of course I’m not working on it.
I took it off the menu because a week ago when I was working at the store, I’d come out of the back to find two adorable lovebird teenagers by the window spoon-feeding each other mouthfuls of a Football Sundae Special, giggling, playful, totally in love.
The Football Sundae Special was a delicacy my husband and I created by accident one of the first times we made love—our special little thing, until I decided one day out of total madness to refine it and slap it on a menu.
The teenagers kept kissing and giggling and looking happy.
And I just couldn’t stand another second of that.
King of Pettiness, right here, table for one.
“Still coming to the game tonight?” he asks, his playful tone traded for something softer, perhaps reading my face for once and backing off on digging any deeper.
And that somehow makes me feel even more bad.
So I pull another Billy and go into some rant about something unrelated to anything at all.
“Are you ever gonna take care of that enormous branch reaching out for our roof?” I point at the front window—which isn’t quite the right window, but I point anyway.
“It’s as thick as a trunk. All it’s gonna take is a single termite to chew through it before that thing comes crashing down.
It makes me nervous every time I look at it, been saying for over a year. ”
He chuckles in that vexingly patronizing way he does. “Babe, that monster of a tree has been there since before this house was even built. I’m pretty sure Jimmy leapt off of it into the pond ten or eleven times while we were growin’ up. It’ll hold until we’re a hundred and our kids are grandpas.”
Jimmy is my husband’s younger brother—twice as cocky, also married to a man, and as athletic as they come. There really must be something in the water on the Strong ranch. Their last name is no accident.
I suddenly wonder if Jimmy’s husband Bobby is someone I can possibly confide in. He’s so kindhearted and patient.
Two things I feel like I’m lacking lately.
“Yes,” I finally answer him. “I’ll be there. At the game.”
His eyes light up. “Really?”
It’s time to be nice. I’m tired of my moodiness today. “Yes, of course.” I’m even practicing my plastic smiles here at home when I’m supposed to be allowed to let the mask drop. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“My good luck charm. You’re, like, responsible for half of my boys’ morale, I hope you realize.” He brings a hand to my cheek for a rather unexpected caress, which forces my eyes right back into the beautiful trap of his.
It’s no secret why I fell in love with this man.
None at all.
A single, innocent glance into those gorgeous, giving eyes of his explains everything.
Next thing I know, he’s out of the house heading back to the school, and I’m at the sink with the container of fallen raspberries. Could I just wash them and be okay? I consider one that still sits in my palm, looking plump and soft and perfect.
I pop the raspberry into my mouth and chew for two and a half seconds—two and a half seconds of tasty, beautiful bliss.
Then I spit it out and shake my head. “Nope, can’t, sorry.” I take all the rest of them to the trash.
Later that evening with the sun dipping behind the rolling fields, I’m in the bleachers, plastic smile in place, with the excited hum of the town around me yet again.
No less than twelve people personally come up to me to say how sweet it is that I attend all of my husband’s games.
I don’t correct any of them, despite having missed several last year.
One woman, a friend of my mama’s, even said, “You are the luckiest man in the world!” I smiled back at her and was about to thank her when Joshua sprang forth and asked me if he could get a hotdog from the concession stand.
I gave him some cash and told him to knock himself out, and off he went.
The woman looked about ready to cry happy tears right then, finding the little interaction with my son to be too adorable for words.
We get that a lot.
I guess it just hits differently lately, seeing how happy people look when they glance at us.
Tightening the chokehold of our marriage around my neck.
Joshua’s sitting next to me now, drawing in a blank sketchpad, one of several things I got him for his birthday.
He’s taking after Marcus lately, who’s active in the Art Club at Spruce High, but like Joshua’s last seven things he was “totally crazy about”, I can’t say how long this obsession will last. We still have a set of electric blue roller skates from his “king of the rink” phase last winter that he wore once before we stuffed them away in a closet to be forgotten.
“We need to meet up next Saturday to taste some cakes,” says Nadine, who has taken a seat with Jacky-Ann on my other side and is gripping my thigh so tight, I can feel my toes losing blood.
She’s really dead-set on our team winning, despite excitedly discussing the vow renewal.
“I’ve got several in mind, too many, but y’know me, I have this tendency to—HEY!
PICK UP YOUR PACE! MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!—be a little overbearing with planning these sorts of things.
Please, Billy, sweetheart, don’t hesitate to tell me to back off.
One word, and I’ll back off and hand you the reins, cross my heart. ”
I highly doubt that’s true, but her saying it is enough of a sentiment to make me smile. Even if her bubbling enthusiasm is, admittedly, one of the things driving me the most crazy lately. Other than rogue raspberries. “Thanks, Nadine. I appreciate it.”
“You make my son so happy. I mean, how else can I possibly repay you?”
The more she talks, the tighter her grip gets, and the heavier my heart sinks. I can’t even imagine how differently these past few weeks would’ve been had Tanner not cut me off at that one Friday family dinner.
This woman has made her sons the center of her whole life.
I’d forever be the villain if I dared to break her son’s heart.
“No repayment’s needed,” I assure her.
Or would have, had she not shouted out: “MOVE YOUR BOOTY! YOU GOT THIS! YOU—Oh, shit on a windshield, this damned game is so close, I’m about to vomit.
” Her eyes are wide and crazed as she studies the field.
“We’ve gotta get ourselves a touchdown or else.
” Then she proceeds to cup her hands around her mouth to shout and whistle at the team some more.
I notice our older son Marcus has since left us to go hang with his high school friends elsewhere in the bleachers, further down closer to the field.
He’s blossoming faster than I can keep up with.
I don’t even know all his friends’ names.
Is he dating someone? Shouldn’t I know? Where the hell’s my head?
“Don’t worry,” I assure Nadine just as her hand returns to its vice-lock grip on my poor thigh.
I’m going home with a bruise in the shape of my mother-in-law’s hand tonight, I just know it, and if that isn’t the perfect poetic justice to my awful behavior lately, I don’t know what is.
“Tanner has his lucky clipboard and I’m here, so it’s basically a mathematical certainty we’ll win. ”
Boy, have I never so quickly eaten my words.
Not fifteen minutes later, Spruce High experiences the end of its first game of the season.
A crushing last-second loss.
Sadness pulses in every face around me. I feel glances, lots of them, either to inspect my face for crushing disappointment, or to blame me.
I’m not a superstitious guy.
But I already know it’s my fault.
I did something to offend the football gods that rule small Texas towns.
I caused this.
Joshua slaps shut his pad. “I suck,” he announces, oblivious to the game, tossing his pencil aside and sulking.
I stare at him. Then at the scoreboard.
Then finally at Tanner, whose heavy eyes are scanning the bleachers as if looking for something. He peels his hat off his head, letting it hang from his grip, then throws his eyes to the stars as if an answer awaits him somewhere up there.
You and me both, I think to myself, throat tightening.