Skipped Parts

tried to stop her. I offered to leave my family.”

He looked as if he might cry, which was the last thing I could deal with at the moment. Living with Lydia makes you susceptible to vulnerability. I’d reached enough-is-enough. “They’ll push Rodney out in the snow with no pants,” I said.

Stebbins raised his head. “Maybe I should save him.”

“Maybe you should.”

20

Maurey showed me how to make a tent out of the blankets so you can read by flashlight and eat graham crackers without your mother finding out.

“But Lydia doesn’t care if we leave the light on and read and eat all night,” I said.

“This is how I’ve always done it. There are certain things you should sneak around to do, even if no one cares.”

“Like reading?”

We sat cross-legged, facing each other, with the books and graham cracker box between us. Maurey’s book was The Black Stallion’s Filly. She’d been on a horse-fiction kick ever since the botched abortion. I was working on Tike and Tiny in the Tetons by Frances Farnsworth, Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre, and the back of the graham cracker box.

Hank loaned me Being and Nothingness. He said it would help me understand life and Lydia.

“Do you understand Lydia?” I asked.

“I’m better with life.”

I spent twenty minutes on the table of contents—“Chapter Three, Knowledge as a Type of Relationship Between the For-Itself and the In-Itself”—and decided I was still a kid after all.

“You’re getting crumbs in the sheets,” Maurey said.

“I thought we were supposed to get crumbs in the sheets. If we didn’t want to crumb the sheets, we’d be in the living room, on the couch.”

“You’re losing your sense of play, Sam.”

“What play?” Maurey was wearing the white nightie and the flashlight light made her new breasts and the undersides of her cheekbones glow while the rest of her stayed shaded.

I wanted to talk more than read. “Is your real name Maureen? Hank said Maurey is short for Maureen.”

“Merle.”

I flipped the light beam up at her face. “Merle?”

“Short for Merle Oberon. She was a movie star in the thirties or forties or sometime when Dad used to see movies all the time. He thought she was the perfect woman.”

“Was she?”

“I’ve seen photographs; she had a face like Charlotte Morris.”

I had trouble with the picture. “You’re named after a beautiful woman who looked like Chuckette?”

“Chuckette’s pretty.”

“If you like a dinner plate with eyes.”

Maurey dug in the box for another cracker. “Our TM Ranch is named for a cowboy star named Tom Mix. Dad’s his second cousin’s son or something like that. He saw Tom Mix once in San Francisco.”

This was considerably more interesting than Being and Nothingness. “What was Buddy doing in San Francisco?”

“Art school at Stanford.” Maurey reached over and with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she opened my pajama fly.

I ignored her, but, boy, did I have hopes. “Buddy’s a cowboy. He couldn’t be in art school.”

“Cowboys aren’t stupid, Sam. They just like being alone and outdoors.” Maurey held the graham cracker in her right hand and made a fist, then she let the crumbs sift through her fingers into my pubic area. She said, “Now there’s a sense of play.”

“I’ll show you play.” I dived on her and she shrieked. We rolled around, all tied up in each other and the blankets while I stuffed crackers down her nightgown and she crumbled into my hair. I got her a good one, right up the nose. Amid the giggling and mock screams, we rolled off the bed and crashed to the floor where I came out on top. She looked at me with crumbs in her eyelashes and smiled.

I stared into her blue eyes for a long time, then dipped in for the kiss.

“No,” Maurey said.

“No?”

“We’re having fun, Sam. Don’t spoil it.”

I sat up. “I don’t understand. You kiss Dothan Talbot all the time and he’s a jerk.”

“I kiss him because he’s a jerk. I like you. I can’t kiss you anymore.”

Cracker crumbs trickled down my balls and into my bottom crack. “I’m nice to you, we sleep in the same bed, you’re having our baby, but you can’t kiss me because you like me?”

“Right.”

“And you can kiss Dothan because you don’t like him?”

“I like him, in a different way.”

I reached over and dusted the cracker crumbs out of her eyebrows. “Do you think the fall hurt the baby?”

Maurey sat up next to me. “I hope not.” We sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor, staring at the log wall under my desk. One of the logs had a whorl knot with bark around the outside of the circle. I wondered if Lydia heard the crash. Probably not; it was after midnight.

“Sam,” Maurey said. “I’m sorry you want something that I don’t. I’d like to give you what you want, but you’re important to me now. What with the baby and things all a mess with Dad, I need you too much to risk anything more than friendship.”

She put her hand on my knee. After a while, I covered her hand with mine. We laced fingers and she gave me a little squeeze.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I don’t either.”

“Shit.”

“I’m crumby. Want to take a shower?”

***

Wednesday evening as the three of us walked into the White Deck, Maurey stopped and stared off toward Kimball’s Food Market.

She said, “They’re going to Jackson to church.”

“Who?” I didn’t see anything other than a white Chevelle with the engine left running.

“That’s Mama’s car,” Maurey said.

Annabel came out of the grocery store carrying a single brown paper bag, followed by Petey in his dark suit that made him look like a miniature hit man. Annabel was wearing a purple print dress with yellow leaves on it and a hat.

Petey stopped and pointed toward us. I could hear his high-whine voice but not the words. Annabel looked at us a moment, then opened the back door and set in her sack. She said something to Petey as she moved around the Chevelle and got in the driver’s side.

“That’ll be Dad’s beer and this month’s Redbook,” Maurey said. “She always buys that stuff on the way to church.”

The passenger door opened from the inside and I could see Annabel gesturing for Petey to get in the car. He pointed one more time, then he climbed in and they drove off away from us.

Maurey stared after them. “How does she dare show herself in church after what she’s done?”