skin. The vein, large and pronounced, started at his knuckle, spread to his wrist, and then moved along the length of his arm until it ended at the crease of his elbow. His arm, flexed as he pumped the gas, looked strong, and Michael wondered what it would feel like. Would it feel like his own arm or like something completely different? Something much better.
Absentmindedly, Michael touched his forearm; it was smooth and hot. He traced his own much smaller vein with his finger and he could feel his pulse, rapid, restless, new, and he wondered if beneath R.J.’s lazy demeanor his pulse was just as quick. Or was Michael the only one who felt speed underneath his skin?
The click of the gas pump ended all speculation. Michael shot a quick glance to his grandpa, who was staring out at the land, busy smoking his third Camel in an hour, since his grandmother refused to allow him to smoke inside the house. As always his mind, like Michael’s, was elsewhere.
Michael heard the snap as R.J. returned the nozzle to its cradle, the quick tick-tick-tick as he closed the gas cap, and the slam as he shut the cover of the gas lid. And just as he turned to look out his window, hoping to catch a whiff of R.J.’s scent as he walked around the car to collect the cash from his grandpa like he always did, R.J. decided to change the rules. He squatted down next to Michael’s window and peered into the truck.
“That’ll be twenty-seven fifty,” R.J. said in his usual low hum.
This was a surprise. Underneath his skin he felt his pulse increase, but Michael had learned not to show the outside world what was happening inside him and so his expression remained calm. Just another bored teenager sitting in a truck with his grandpa on a hot August Saturday morning. But he was much more than bored; R.J.’s face ignited curiosity.
Unable to turn away, Michael soaked it all in. Up close, Michael could see that there were a few more beads of sweat on R.J.’s forehead, lingering there, not yet ready to take the trip down his face. While Michael’s grandpa reached into his front pocket to pull out his cash, R.J. rested his chin on his forearm and closed his eyes. His eyelashes were like a girl’s, long, delicate, with a beautiful upcurl to them. Michael had the urge to run his finger through them as if they were strings of a harp. Like most of his urges, he repressed it.
How many freckles were on his slender nose? Six, eight … before Michael could finish counting, R.J. brushed his cheek against his arm, wiping away any telltale signs of perspiration that had remained, and looked up directly into Michael’s eyes. His mouth formed a smile and then words, “Hot today, ain’t it?”
Keep looking bored, Michael thought, uninterested, so no one will suspect. “Yeah,” Michael said, nodding his head.
“Gonna be a scorcher today,” Michael’s grandpa said, “but ya can’t trust those weathermen to know nothin’.”
R.J.’s face retained its expression, no change whatsoever. Was R.J. suppressing what he really felt too, or did he agree with Michael’s grandpa? “Can’t really trust anybody,” R.J. said. “Can ya, Mike?”
That sounded odd to Michael’s ears; nobody called him Mike. He wasn’t a Mike, it didn’t fit, but maybe it could be the name that only R.J. used. That would be okay. Michael cleared his throat and then replied, “Guess not.”
“Here.” Michael’s grandpa thrust some bills in front of Michael, and R.J. reached out to grab them. A beat later, Michael reached forward to grab the money and pass it along to R.J., but he was too late. Or maybe he was right on time? His fingers brushed against R.J.’s forearm and he discovered that R.J.’s skin was just as smooth as his, but much hotter and firmer than his own. Michael mumbled “sorry,” but he was drowned out by his grandpa’s command, “That’s twenty-eight there, Rudolph; credit me fifty cents next time.”
Rudolph. Michael’s grandpa was the only one who called him by his real name. Sounded more inappropriate than calling Michael Mike. But Mike and Rudolph? That had an exciting sound to it. Michael didn’t see R.J.’s patronizing smile; he kept his gaze down at the fingers that had recently touched his skin, but he did hear him. “Will do, sir.” He didn’t look back up until he heard the motor running and heard his grandpa shift the car into drive. He turned to catch one more glimpse of R.J.’s face, but he had stood up and all Michael could see was his hand stuffing the cash into the frayed pocket of his jeans. And then there was a breeze.
R.J.’s T-shirt lifted and for a moment his hip flank, sharply defined and smooth, was exposed. Michael thought it looked like a small hill on an otherwise flat plain where he could rest his head, maybe dream a little. As the truck pulled away, Michael looked through the rearview mirror, but the breeze had died and R.J.’s T-shirt covered that interesting piece of flesh. Later that night, Michael would remember it, though, because no matter how hard he tried, he just knew it was something he wouldn’t be able to forget.
After Michael helped his grandpa bring the cans and bottles to the recycling center, there were other errands to run. Had to pick up a new fog light at Sears that he would later be forced to watch his grandpa install in his mother’s car because she turned a corner too sharply and busted hers; then they had to drive over to the Home Depot to get a new toilet chain that Grandpa would watch Michael install in the downstairs bathroom; and of course it wouldn’t be Saturday if his grandpa didn’t play the Nebraska Lottery.
“Up to a hundred seventy million this week,” the redheaded cashier informed them.
“If I win, you and me’ll bust outta here,” Grandpa said.
“My bags are already packed!” the redheaded cashier chortled. Even though the cashier was roughly forty years younger than his grandpa and still what locals would call fine-lookin’, Michael had no doubt that if his grandpa came back next week waving a winning lottery ticket, she would hop in the Ranger to drive off with him to parts unknown. Weeping Water was not the kind of town that instilled loyalty in its residents, unless they had nowhere else to go.
But Michael did have some place he could go. He had started his life somewhere else, he was born someplace far, far from this town, where he could be living right now. But his mother had put an end to all of that. Why?! Why had she ruined everything? No. No sense blaming her now; the damage had already been done. He would just spend the rest of the day imagining how far from here he would travel if he were lucky enough to win the lottery.
When all the dinner dishes were washed and put away and his grandparents were sitting in their own separate chairs in front of the television, he finishing an after-dinner beer, she finishing yet another knitting project, Michael sat on his bed rereading A Separate Peace, one of his favorite novels, some music that he vaguely recognized filling the space of his room. Before he finished chapter one, his mother knocked on his door to ask the same question she’d been asking all summer long.
“Heya, honey, aren’t ya going out tonight?”
Grace Howard had once been a beautiful woman. So beautiful that she won a series of beauty pageants culminating in Miss Nebraska, which meant that she could fly to Atlantic City to participate in the Miss America contest. Pretty big stuff for any town desperate for some notoriety, incredibly huge stuff for a town like Weeping Water. She didn’t crack the top ten, but she did catch the eye of a young college student on vacation from England. Against the vehement protests of her parents, Grace nixed a return to Nebraska and instead flew to England with Vaughan. She had never done anything so spontaneous or rebellious in her entire life. Three months after the contest, she and Vaughan Howard got married on his family’s estate in Canterbury, roughly an hour southeast of London. Vaughan was her winning lottery ticket. Until she decided to rip it up into little pieces and return home, dragging her crying toddler with her.
“No, I need to finish this before school on Monday,” Michael lied with just a glance in his mother’s direction.
“But it’s the last weekend before school starts back up.”
Don’t remind me, Michael thought. “I know, that’s why I have to finish.”
His mother was in his room now, which meant that either she wanted to discuss something or she was incredibly bored and had exhausted all conversation with her parents. “Can’t believe you’re a sophomore already; my little guy’s gettin’ to be a man.” She was standing in front of the oak bookshelf, looking at the spines of all the books Michael had read and would most likely read again. They were his escape. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out. “I hated to read when I was your age; still can’t concentrate long enough to get through a magazine article.”
From behind, Michael’s mother still looked youthful. Her brown hair was full and fell an inch or two below her shoulders, her arms were taut and hadn’t yet gotten flabby, and her hips still held their curve. It’s when she turned to face Michael that he saw age had crept into her face prematurely. Michael knew that a thirty-seven- year-old woman shouldn’t look like that.
“You know Darlene’s daughter?”
