Chapter 7
Justin
“ Y ou boys are so sweet,” Mrs. Gordon says with a smile.
Boys.
Everyone standing here is thirty years old or older.
That doesn’t matter. Mrs. Gordon remembers when our parents were born. Her face is filled with wrinkles, and her hair is white as snow, and at the same time, she’s as sweet as her kind ways.
“Thank you for making certain the fire is out,” she says. “If you’re sure you’ll stay, I can go to bed.”
“It’s getting late,” Ricky says.
“And cold,” I say, seeing the heavy coat draped over her slumped shoulders. “We promise, Mrs. Gordon.”
She reaches for my hand.
I look down, feeling the coolness of her touch. “Bruce and I have been blessed to have all the men and women of Riverbend in our lives.”
“I think it goes both ways,” I say. “I can’t imagine Riverbend without you or your farm.” Yeah, maybe thoughts of the Dunn farm have me feeling sentimental.
Shaking her head, Mrs. Gordon’s eyes grow moist as she speaks. “Your dad and his dad before him would help us back in the day, come by before we asked. Sheers boys have always been good ones and hard workers.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
She turns to Ricky. “Same for the Dunn family. We’re all staples of this land.”
Ricky smiles and nods.
Mrs. Gordon moves around the fire, speaking to each one of us, telling a story about someone in our family. When she comes back to me, her smile is intact. “Good night, boys.”
“Good night, Mrs. Gordon,” we reply in unison.
“May I walk you to the house?” Harvey Russel asks.
“No.” She waves him off. “The day I can’t walk this farm is the day I sell.” She pursed her lips. “And that’s not happening anytime soon.”
For a moment we stand silently and watch as the elderly woman makes her way toward her house. Without a doubt, Mrs. Gordon is a pillar of Riverbend. She and Bruce were friends with my grandparents. While the Gordons never had children, each generation has embraced them as family.
The five of us turn back toward the fire.
To the side, there are five-gallon buckets filled with water lined up, ready to douse the remaining flames.
Everything else from the party has been cleaned up.
The tables are down and most of the chairs are gone.
We have a small ring of stadium chairs around the smoldering remains of the bonfire.
As people left, they took their dishes home. Even the large pig roaster is gone. The men who brought it here early this morning drove it back. One day, cooking the pig will be the responsibility of me and the men with me while the next generation will take care of the bonfire.
Before our group dwindled down to five, everyone worked together to gather the trash and put it in the back of Harvey’s truck.
Harvey is two years older than Ricky and me.
His family owns the junkyard west of Washington.
He’ll take all the trash to the dump in the morning.
The kegs are in the back of my truck. The tailgate is down, and there is still beer left to drink.
Nick Dancy finishes his beer and sighs. “I’ll hang around here if any of you need to get home.”
Two years younger than me, Nick was in Kandace’s class. He owns a plumbing business in Washington. His parents moved to Tennessee a few years back. While he doesn’t live in Riverbend anymore, he’s one of our regular returns.
“I have no place to be,” I say, flopping down in a stadium chair. While I’m looking at the glowing embers of the fire, my mind continually circles back to the woman near the pond. Each time it does, I feel my cheeks rise. It’s crazy, but I’m almost afraid to talk about her.
Was she real?
I have nothing to show for our encounter.
No phone number.
No name.
And at the same time, with only one kiss, I feel different.
If I told Ricky my thoughts, he’d think I am either insane or drunk. Maybe both.
Truth is that the only beer I drank was before I went on that walk.
That could mean she was a hallucination, or that BK made me drunk in a whole different way.
That kiss was unbelievable. I’ve heard that a first kiss should be special.
In reality, I’ve had more than my share of uncomfortable first kisses.
Those times when noses bump, we turn our faces this way and that, or the awkwardness that comes when one person is tentative and the other isn’t. Just plain unpleasant.
Those are the times you tell yourself that it will get better. Let’s be honest, it’s because worse isn’t really a way you want it to go. Nothing ever came of those relationships. If a kiss doesn’t work, how could more?
In the hour or so since BK slipped away to her friend’s car, I’ve tried to come up with something that was wrong about our encounter, some reason to forget what was the best kiss of my life.
I can’t find one thing.
Thinking about her feisty dialogue, the way she dished it out and took it, her outward beauty, and the melody of her laugh all combined together makes me grin.
Recalling the sweet taste of her lips has more of an effect on my mood than drinking ten beers.
We shared a spark that I can’t recall feeling before.
Ricky goes to my truck and fills two cups with beer and brings one to me. Handing it my way, he says, “Here. You seem…distracted.”
Distracted.
I can’t mention the sale of his farm in front of the other guys, so I simply shrug, put the cup on the ground by my chair, and looking over at Nick, I change the subject. “Who were you talking to tonight? That redhead.”
“Jill Kohlberg.”
“Oh,” I say with my eyebrows raised. “Not ringing a bell, but she’s not bad in the looking-good department.”
Nick laughs as he stretches out his legs, moving his boots closer to the fire. He turns to Ricky. “You remember her, don’t you?”
Ricky seems as dazed as the rest of us as he too stretches out his legs and peers up at the star-filled sky. “Yeah. I saw her tonight. She’s one of the squealing girls who were always underfoot.”
“Right,” Nick says, “she hung out with Devan.”
“Hmm.” I try to recall the girls at Ricky’s house. To be honest, I can’t. They were nothing more than kids to me. And then I remember that Ricky said Devan is graduating from Ball State in another month. I turn to Nick. “Is there something maybe brewing between the two of you?”
He shakes his head. “She’s too young for me. But more than that, the engagement ring on her finger is a big neon hell-no sign.”
“Little Jill is getting married?” Ricky says with a hint of a question. “I wonder why Devan hasn’t said anything.”
“How often do you talk to your sister?” Harvey asks.
Ricky shrugs. “Once in a while.” He laughs. “It’s weird. She doesn’t seem like a little kid anymore.” He leans forward and lowers his voice. “At breakfast this morning, Cory told me he reached out to her to fill the seventh-grade science position at the middle school.”
“No way,” I say. “How can Devan be old enough to teach?”
“Weird how it happens,” Ricky says. “I mean, I saw Jill. Almost didn’t recognize her.”
“Was Devan here?” Nick asks.
Pressing his lips together, Ricky shakes his head.
“No. If she didn’t cancel the interview with Cory, she probably came to town and left.
Like I said before, Mom doesn’t expect her to move back.
I’m kind of shocked she even went to the interview.
Hell, I meant to ask Cory how it went and forgot. Maybe she didn’t.”
“Who is Jill marrying?” Galvin, the fifth of our group, asks. Galvin is a year older than Ricky and me and lives in town—in Riverbend—but commutes to Bloomington where he is a chef at an upscale restaurant on Lake Monroe.
“Todd Blakely,” Nick replies.
Everyone makes noises as I try to recall Todd Blakley, and then it hits me. “Wasn’t he the one who shit his pants in elementary school? Even everyone at the high school was talking about how the whole bathroom stunk.”
After we all laugh, Nick nods. “That was him.”
Ricky grins my direction. “If I recall, Justin, you had to spray your pants with the hose because you didn’t give it a shake, and you had an embarrassing wet mark.”
I kick dirt his direction. “You swore to never mention that.” Even though I act mad, I take everyone’s laughs because Ricky is right. I was in that weird middle-school age and panicked. My plan worked. Only my closest friends knew what happened. “What’s Todd Shit Pants up to these days?”
You would think we were a bunch of old ladies gossiping, not men in their thirties.
“Finishing up his MBA in Indy,” Nick says. “Obviously, Jill has learned to overlook his childish mishap.”
Galvin turns toward the large barn.
The structure is mammoth. I’ve helped fill it with straw and hay. I’ve also had a few happenings in the hayloft. I’d suspect over fifty percent of Riverbend at least made it to second base in that barn.
“Did you guys hear something?” Galvin asks.
I make another quick glance and turn away. “Creaky wood and wind.”
“Or maybe someone is giving up their V card,” Ricky says.
I scrunch my nose. “I’m not the voyeur type.”
“It depends,” Galvin says. “There’s this one girl on pay-per-view...”
The conversation takes a drastic turn as Galvin and Nick expand upon the fetishes that keep their interest and those that turn their stomachs. I’m not listening. Instead, I’m back to the pond, to BK and me lying on my jacket, to the sounds of her moans.
Shit.
I stand, hoping no one notices my semi-erection. It sure as hell wasn’t the talk of vibrators and anal fisting that made my circulation reroute. “I’m ready to douse this fire.”
“Thank God,” Ricky says.
Harvey agrees.
Each one of us lifts a bucket. The fire hisses and steams as the embers take on the water.
I stack the buckets and carry them toward the barn.
The heavy door creaks as I push it open.
For a second, I think I hear something up in the loft.
Standing still, I listen. My thoughts go to BK.
I consider calling out but know it’s stupid. She wouldn’t be there.
Could she be with someone else?
Why does that upset me?
I don’t hear anything else. The only sounds are those of the guys outside and the chirping of crickets. I take a moment and look out the large opening in the roof and see the stars.
With a sigh, I put the buckets in a supply room and make my way back out of the barn, closing the door behind me.
Ricky is waiting. He keeps his voice low. “Fuck, sometimes Galvin and Nick can get…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to.
I nod.
There are details of things I’ve done in private or in a hayloft—I think of BK—that never need to be shared. If I had a girl of my own, I’d be at home taking care of her, not droning on endlessly with friends about something I saw on the porn channel.