Flowers?
When Fifty thinks no one is looking, his lips part in a smile. I am unsure whether he was a dick to rile Davey up, or because Fifty is Fifty. Based on that knowing expression, I’m leaning toward riling. “You really believe you can save the festival?” he asks Woods.
“Absolutely.”
“Want to bet on it?” Fifty asks.
Everyone oooohs, knowing exactly what he’s going to say. Janie Lee rockets a pillow at his head, and says what he wants to hear. “Robert Fifty Tilghman, if we raise two thousand dollars on KickFall, I solemnly swear to you the whole Hexagon will walk Vilmer’s Beam.” Janie Lee is a master at knowing who responds to what. Woods is nodding at the approach. At her strategy. Maybe he’s nodding at more than that.
Fifty pops up to full height. “No shit, J-Mill?”
He has advocated relentlessly for this particular group activity every time we’re in sight of the barn. And often when we are not. All because Fifty was out of town the weekend we were stupid enough to walk it in middle school, and he has been hell-bent ever since.
“No shit,” Janie Lee says.
Woods adds to Einstein, ADDITIONAL STAKES = $2000 OR HEXAGON WALK VILMER’S BEAM.
Game on.
8
You really shouldn’t do that in sunglasses,” Janie Lee says.
That is operating my band saw, which is technically Dad’s band saw, but the ability to turn it on is nine-tenths of ownership.
“I belong to a small tribe of people who don’t like to do anything without sunglasses,” I tell her. My clear safety glasses are elsewhere, and I’m too focused to stop. We have fifteen minutes before Davey picks us up for Service Projects: Super Saturday, and I intend to make the most of them. God knows I’ve had no time to work this week.
“You’re going to belong to a small tribe of people without thumbs,” she warns.
I pshhh this notion. The garage door is up. Light lazes about like it has nothing better to do than disrupt shadows, and I’ve already stripped down to a tank top because where there’s light, there’s heat. And where there’s Billie, there’s sawdust.
“You should teach me sometime.”
Before she arrived, I discovered the Daily Sit was in need of an interior frame to be structurally sound. Since she’s longing for an invitation, I say, “Come here to me,” and Janie Lee snaps her violin safely away and places it near the door where she won’t forget it later. Then, we are standing at the saw, me dressing her in sunglasses—they’re a little too small—looking uncertain, adorable. Maybe even excited.
I place a scrap of wood in her hands while she complains. “Billie, be careful with me. I’m shit for this work.”
I circle her like a dad teaching a kid to hit a baseball, and together we run wood through the saw. A fine spray of pine coats the front of her sweatshirt and my glasses. She runs the line straight. I flip the switch to off, clear the board, and wipe her glasses clean. She is dusty and lingering, as if she’s forgotten everything except me and the two-by-four. I force her to smell the tips of her fingers. “Smell that?” I ask.
Freshly sawed art. Perfect lines. Ahhhhh. After inspecting the raw edges of the wood and assessing how it will fit into the larger picture of the Daily Sit, she says, “For all the times your ideas get us in trouble, I’m still in love with your brain.”
I like it when she says stuff like this. Mainly because she’s one of those annoying people who doesn’t start things she can’t finish and yet we get on so charmingly. “Shoot, Miller, don’t get gooey on me. I’m only training you up for your gerontological punishment.”
I knock rogue sawdust from the front of my shirt and from hers. I imagine what would happen if this were Woods and her in a half-lit garage. If that flick of the wrist across her chest might become more. Maybe a hand in the small of her back. Palm touching soft skin. Yes, I think it would.
Janie Lee returns my glasses, resettles herself on the freezer, and continues the conversation. “I highly doubt Tawny Jacobs will need me to saw anything.”
“The dreams of small children?” I suggest.
“She’s not that bad. We had a good week.”
This is a very Janie Lee way to feel. Tawny’s the only woman in Otters Holt to be nominated ten times for the Corn Dolly and never win. Way back when, she baked pies and gave away whole Snickers bars for Halloween. But now, she’s Otters Holt’s very own Miss Havisham.
The entire youth group got called in to trim trees and pick pecans at Tawny’s after school on Thursday. Her husband has been dead for sixty years, and she manages forty-one acres alone. If she weren’t such a mean old biddy, I’d slap a sash around her chest that said Feminist of the Year. Every acre, save the one with her “homestead,” is buried under a canopy of fruit-and nut-producing trees.
I’ll say one thing for her. She is the owner of the best white perimeter fences in the whole damn county. Miles and miles of fences made for racing. If you’ve never raced fences with a best friend—on anything with wheels—you really haven’t lived. Mash, Woods, Fifty, and I once hijacked two zero-turn mowers from Big T and raced them down the lane like it was the Indy 500, all while Tawny shook her broom on the front porch. The four of us have done quite a bit of living. Janie Lee, for the most part, has done quite a bit of watching. She doesn’t go fast. Or honk her horn. Or throw gravel. Or hijack mowers. Not anymore.
She cheers for us and has 911 at the ready.
“You might have had a good week. She told me that dressing like a man attracts wanton attention,” I say.
“What did you say to that?”
“Well, I wanted to tell her that if Jesus wore a skirt, I could wear pants.”
“Billie—”
“I said wanted to. Don’t worry, I thanked her kindly for the insight.”
“How were things with Grandy?” she asks.
I low whistle. She didn’t go easy on me. Tuesday after school, she sent me up the attic stairs to bring things down. “Just a little sorting,” she promised. Forty-three boxes were given to Goodwill, although a few bearing “art supplies” landed in my garage. I did find a tin of Christmas cookies from 1999. Mash ate one on a dare. “I’m happy to say he didn’t throw up,” I tell Janie Lee.
We discuss the other assignments, how they’re off to a rip-roaring success. How we feel as though we might be turning the tide regarding the opinion of Community Church Youth Group. It’s a perfectly good conversation, until she mentions asking Woods to the Sadie Hawkins dance. I keep my commentary to a solitary statement. “You better be sure, because if you ask him, it changes everything.”
“And that’s why I haven’t said anything yet,” she admits. “There should be a manual for all this relationship shit.”
“Truth,” I say, lowering my glasses. I cut three more two-by-fours before Janie Lee interrupts me.
“Are you ever going to finish that thing?” She indicates Guinevere.