“I thought you said you bought bagels for breakfast,” I murmured sleepily.
“I did. But then I saw this tasty little ear just laying here…”
His unshaven cheek brushed mine as he kissed my neck, then moved on to my shoulder and from there to my breasts.
Air-conditioning had us snuggled under a heavy comforter but flames began to kindle along the length of my body and small brushfires erupted wherever his hands and mouth touched. I turned in his arms and stoked the flames that were building in his own body while the fire between us grew and raged and blazed white-hot until we were consumed by wave after fiery wave and came together in a blazing conflagration that left us lying naked on top of the comforter, breathing in cool drafts of frigid air.
His long thin fingers traced the features of my face. “I missed you.”
“Me too, you,” I said inanely as our lips met again.
It had been way too long. Things keep coming up: his job, my family, his teenage daughter, my political commitments—judges do a lot of after-dinner speeches. A dozen different obstacles had kept us apart since the middle of May, but this late June weekend was ours. I’d driven down to New Bern Friday night and got to his cabin perched above the Neuse River while it was still light enough to see small boats heading upriver after a day of fishing in the Pamlico Sound.
We’d spent most of yesterday in bed, making up for lost time, and though today was Sunday, church was not on our docket.
He pulled the comforter back over us and we lay twined together in post-coital laziness. The whole day stretched before us. Later we would shower, make coffee, have honeydews and toasted bagels on the deck.
But not now.
Now was the afterglow of tenderness and sweet intimacy.
And then the damn phone rang.
Kidd sighed, took his hand from my breast and reached for the receiver.
I lay quietly against his chest, almost certain that it would be Amber, Kidd’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She must be slipping, I told myself. Normally, her radar lets her catch us in the middle of making love, not at the end.
From Kidd’s casual grumbling, I know that she usually goes five or six days in a row without calling.
Unless I’m in town.
He’s always so happy to hear her voice that he doesn’t seem to notice how her calls pick up when I’m down and I’m too smart to point out this recurring coincidence.
But this time he wasn’t speaking in his indulgent-father tones.
“Just fine,” I heard him say with country politeness. “And you?... That’s good... Yes, she’s right here.”
He handed me the phone. “Your brother Andrew. Sounds serious.
My heart turned stone cold and a silent prayer went up—
Andrew’s nine brothers up from me. He hates any show of emotion and while he did plenty of catting around in his own day, he’s like the rest of the boys in wishing I’d quit mine and settle down. Even so, despite his relatively recent respectability, he’d never take it upon himself to confront me head-on about my love life. I could think of only one reason why he’d call me here.
(
“What’s wrong, Andrew? Is it Daddy?”
“Daddy?” My brother’s voice came gruffly over the line. “Naw, Daddy’s fine. It’s A.K. He’s really stepped in it bad this time, Deb’rah.”
A.K. is Andrew’s oldest child by his third wife. He’s seventeen now and will be a senior in high school this fall if Andrew and April can keep him from quitting. Unlike his sister Ruth, A.K.’s not much for the books. Too near like Andrew used to be, from all I’ve heard.
“What’s he done now?” I asked apprehensively. I’ve been on the bench long enough to see some of the messes a seventeen-year-old can step in and A.K.’s already dirtied his feet a time or two.
“I swear I feel like taking my belt to his backside. He knows better’n this.”
His paternal exasperation couldn’t mask the worry coming to me through the line.
“What’d he do?” I asked again.
“You know old Ham Crocker?”
I said I did, even though Abraham Crocker must have died around the time I was born.
“Well, A.K. and a couple of his buddies sort of busted up his graveyard Friday night.”
“
“They got hold of some beer and I reckon they got drunk enough to think it was funny to knock over the angel —you know the one on Ham’s mama’s grave?—and then Charles or Raymond, one had a can of spray paint. A.K. swears he didn’t do no writing, but he’s charged same as the others.”
“Charged?”
“Yeah. Bo Poole sent a deputy out to bring him in this morning and me and April don’t know what to do. John Claude’s gone off to Turkey.”
