Cross Current - Kling Christine - Страница 27

B.J. almost fell out of his chair, he was laughing so hard.

“What the hell was that?” I said before taking another swig of beer.

“You picked the one that Sagami’s refers to as the kamikaze roll.” He took a deep breath and tried to make his face look serious. “They’re not all hot like that. Try another.”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

B.J. was trying so hard to control his laughter, but his chest and shoulders kept bouncing as more chuckles burbled to the surface.

I finished the beer, then crossed back to the table and proceeded to drown the rice and noodles on my plate in soy sauce. I pushed the grains of rice around my plate, not eating and not talking. I refused to look up, even when I heard his chair scrape back and B.J. came up behind me and put his fingers on my shoulders. Ever since I was a little girl with two older brothers, I’ve turned very cranky whenever anybody teased me, which was fairly often.

His fingers pushed deep into the tense muscles on either side of my neck, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress the little shiver that ran up my back. The heat from his touch traveled down my arms and made my fingers tingle. Actually, my fingers weren’t the only part of me tingling. He alternated deep muscle massage with a feather touch on my neck.

I knew I should tell him to stop. He wasn’t playing fair. We were supposed to be taking a break, but when I opened my mouth to speak, he ran his hands down my arms, and all that came out were two sharp little gasps for breath. I turned, looked up at him, and then closed my eyes.

I was the first one to push back and break away from the kiss.

“B.J., I—”

He walked around the table, sat, and, smiling, filled his plate with the colorful rolls and began to eat with those precise bites of his, the careful chewing. He was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with some kind of surfer logo on the front. The fabric set off his teak-colored skin. I watched him fork the last bite of a roll into his mouth, watched his full lips as he chewed.

I was still trying to catch my breath and make the aching go away, and he acted as though nothing had happened.

“Good sushi, huh?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with the message that he was enjoying every moment of my misery.

Why was I pushing this man out of my life? Okay, so he ate weird food. But otherwise, what was the problem? That he wanted to start a family? I thought of Joe, yearning to retrieve his lost family. And then there was Collazo. Geez, I sure as hell didn’t want to end up like Collazo. Was my life alone with my dog and my boat really such a great life?

That was it: The answer was yes. I enjoyed my river, my routines, my rhythms. That was how I defined myself. Sometimes, when making love to B.J., it felt as though I disappeared. I became pure sensation—and it scared the hell out of me. What if I gave in to that, and the me I now know turned into something else? And worse yet, if I let that happen, and B.J. did as B.J. had always done, what would I have left after he went away?

He wiped his mouth carefully with his napkin, crumpled it, and tossed it onto his plate. I glanced down at my still-folded napkin on the table. Oh yeah, I thought. I kind of forgot about that. It’s not something I worry about when it’s just me and Abaco. I wiped my own mouth.

“What’s all that stuff?” B.J. pointed at the gear in the corner of the living room.

“Pit’s in town,” I said, glad that we had found a neutral subject to discuss so my heart rate could ease back to normal. “He dropped that off here this morning, talked to the gardeners, and left me a note. Then took off to go windsurfing. Typical, huh?”

He nodded. “It’ll be good to see him. How long is he going to stay?”

I shrugged. “You never know with Pit. I’m sure it won’t be long, though.” I got up from the table and walked over to the pile of gear. “I have a feeling he’ll be asking me to store some of this stuff.” I pointed with my shoe at the green foot-locker. “Like this, for example.”

“Yeah, too much for traveling the way he does. Not his style.” He got up from the table and began to clear the dishes.

I dragged the footlocker out into the middle of the room and sat on the floor next to it. “He said he’d been storing this over at his old girlfriend’s. I think she got tired of having his junk around.” I ran my hand over the top of the trunk. “I haven’t seen this trunk in years. I remember it was in the garage at the house after Red died, but I didn’t know Pit had taken it. There was so much stuff to be dealt with, I guess when this disappeared, I never even noticed.”

B.J. came over and sat on the floor next to me. He rested his hand on my thigh, and I jumped a little. “This was your dad’s?”

I nodded, started to say yes, but my throat seemed to close on the word. It’s funny how you just never knew when it was going to hit you, that feeling in the center of your chest of missing someone so much. There were lots of times I could talk about my dad without feeling the slightest bit of sadness, and other times when I just wanted to see him again and couldn’t speak without my voice getting tight and my eyes going all blurry. I swallowed and blinked and started again. “When we were kids, Pit and I used to sneak out into the garage and pull this trunk down and get into it even though we weren’t supposed to. Mostly, Red kept his mementos from the navy in here, uniforms, old letters, and photos and stuff. He didn’t really want his kids getting into it, which, of course, only made it all that much more attractive to us. One time we even tried on Red’s uniforms.”

I reached for the brass latches and tried to loosen them. The metal was corroded, green with flaking brown bits. The hinges screeched as they gave way and both latches opened. The smell of musty books, damp wool, and mothballs triggered another montage of memory as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. I saw my father, back when he seemed so big, bellowing at us, telling us to stay out of the garage, out of his trunk, away from his tools and all his gear. My father, who fell apart after Mother died, until one day when there was no more food in the house and Pit was crying because Maddy was beating on him. That day Red had come into my room and taken me and my brothers to the Winn Dixie and bought boxes of macaroni and cheese and cans of soup. He learned to cook and clean and wash and made us do our share and brought some order to the house and our family and our lives.

And then I saw the three of us, his grown children, so lost that morning after his death. When, by two in the afternoon, all the paramedics and cops had gone, and they had taken his body away, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We wandered from room to room, out to the dock and then to the garage, and back into the house, not one of us knowing what to say or do for the others, each of us so alone in our loss and unable to imagine our lives continuing without Red.

The footlocker was only about half-full, just as I remembered it. It didn’t look as though Pit had disturbed the contents. I wondered if he had ever opened it or if he just took it out of the house and stored it at Tina’s, unopened.

I reached in and ran my fingertips over the navy wool of the peacoat, remembering how silly Pit had looked wearing the huge thing. He’d never had the shoulders of his father. Maddy was built more like Red, while Pit had the slim build of our mother.

“You’re lucky,” B.J. said. “I never knew my father. When I was young, I used to make up stories about him—my father, the hero. My mother was a Polynesian dancer, and I spent lots of time in dressing rooms reading books, making up my own stories.” He pointed to the contents of the trunk. “Your dad really was a hero in the navy, and then saving boats and lives with his tug.”

“Yeah, he was.” I paused to get my voice under control.