Chapter 16 #2
He’s calculating, brows lowered. Finally, he runs a hand over the lower half of his face, mustache and stubble rasping.
“What am I getting into here?” he asks. “Is Leland just your ex-husband, or is he a statutory rapist? Because I’ve got a quick and easy lead nose cure for the latter.”
I shake my head, rattled. “No, I was eighteen when we met. I just got pregnant real fast. He married me before we had Landis.”
His jaw works.
“How old are you?” I ask, desperate to get the spotlight off me.
“I’ll be forty this summer. Old enough to be your father.”
“Only if you got started real young.”
“Only about as young as you did.”
I gasp, and he leans back, popping his door open and stepping onto the curb. He reaches past me and takes a pistol and holster from the middle compartment. There’s no response in me. I’m getting tired of going back and forth.
I watch as he stands at the edge of the road and fastens the holster around his upper thigh, buckling it to his belt. Then, he reaches out like he’s going to slam the door.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
He looks at me, eyes blank in the overhead lights. “Gonna go urinate in the ditch,” he says, and does slam the door.
My blood pressure is through the roof. I cross my arms over my chest and don’t move a muscle while he’s gone. My God, if he isn’t the strongest concentrate of Appalachian male I’ve ever met.
I’ve never known a man from the mountains who didn’t have sass coming out of his damn ears. Jensen has it in spades.
The door opens. He gets in, and starts up the engine. We’re quiet as he rolls back on the highway. It’s quiet—after our burst of conversation. We both have some thinking to do.
The road we’re on cuts through the mountains. They get thicker and taller as we go. Then, I think from the flashes I can see in the headlights, the flora changes. It’s more familiar, tangled vines coating the ditches.
My heart picks up. I stretch my neck, trying to see into the dark.
“Did we cross the border?” I whisper.
“Yeah.” That single word is so tense.
I turn around, and his forearm is like iron, knuckles pale on the wheel.
“We’re in Pike County?” I press.
He shakes his head. “Harlan.”
Something settles over me that I can’t name—a painful longing, a hollow in my heart. He’s struggling with something too. I leave him be, keeping quiet until he pulls off on the side of the road.
We’re outside a strip motel, a neon sign advertising hourly booking. He gets out, not bothering to hide the gun on his thigh. As we cross the parking lot, I see his eyes like searchlights, just roaming. I keep close.
There’s a woman at the desk, young, with dyed black hair piled on her head, a tattoo of a butterfly on the side of her neck. She looks us over, chatting about the weather, and pops her gum. Jensen is tighter than a bow as he pays in cash and takes the key.
He leads the way to a room a few doors down. We go inside, and I turn on the single lamp by the bed. He locks the door. Everything feels different than I remember, like somebody went through my house while I was gone and rearranged everything. Or maybe, I just grew up.
I turn to face him. “You okay?” I whisper.
His tanned skin is dewy with sweat. I can make out the pulse between his collarbones where his shirt is soaked.
“I never wanted to come home again,” he rasps.
There’s no room now for the snappy replies we’ve been trading all day. He’s shaken to his core, eyes haunted.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The clock over the bed moves. There’s a watercolor painting of Jesus on the face, looking down on us, one palm up, the kind that comes a dime a dozen at thrift shops. Jensen looks at the window, paisley curtains stiff with starch, and up at the clock, then back to me.
This feeling is something Leland would never understand, something he never wanted to understand. But Jensen understands.
He knows the Jesus clock isn’t just a clock.
It’s the distant memory of being a kid in these hills.
The getting by but barely. It’s scraping together pennies to get an ice cream from the cooler in the dollar shop.
It’s my hair standing on end, wondering if I’m going to hell every Sunday morning.
It’s a hot gravel road leading to a two-bedroom at the end of it.
It’s becoming an adult and realizing everyone older was so broken, all the time, just barely holding it together.
It’s being on the other side of that and seeing it all with grown up eyes.
Somebody coughs outside, breaking the spell. He blinks, wiping his sweaty face with his palm.
“You take the bed,” he says.
He’s drawing a line in the sand. I understand, but it hurts.
Numbly, I start pulling off my boots and jeans.
The chair scrapes across the floor, then hits the door as he jams it below the knob.
I slip out of my bra, leaving me in my shirt and panties.
I’ve never been able to sleep in my clothes, otherwise I would.
I crawl beneath the covers, not looking at him.
“Della,” he says.
I lift my head. He’s standing at the end of the bed.
“We’ll get your kid back,” he says.
I’m so close to tears. “Thank you,” I whisper. “Please sleep with me.”
He doesn’t move.
“Sleep with you?” he says finally. “Or sleep with you?”
I start to speak, but he leans his knee on the bed. Cowed, I slide to my back. He moves his body over mine, and his mouth dips. Hot breath skims over my lips, but he doesn’t kiss me.
“That clock on the wall,” he says. “We had one like that when I was a kid.”
We’re not alone in the room anymore. Jensen’s ghosts are standing all around us, watching how our mouths almost touch. I lay my palm on his chest. It’s hot and damp.
“I feel something for you,” I say. “Nothing changed for me.”
He doesn’t speak.
“Please sleep with me.” I push the sheet down and take his hand, pressing it to my chest.
He looks down at where his palm sits between my breasts. Then, he pulls back. “I’m not sleeping tonight,” he says. “You sleep. I’m going to sit in that chair and make sure no one comes through the door.”
He withdraws, tapping the lamp to turn it out. The chair creaks. My eyes adjust slowly as I sink into the musty sheets. He sits in profile—his head is leaned back, one knee cocked, one leg extended.
There’s a gun in his hand, rested on his thigh.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The clock is the only sound in the room. I watch him until I can’t stay awake any longer, and he never moves from that chair.