With Woods, we decided to kiss the way we decided we would save the Harvest Festival or blow up a sock. Thoughtfully, strategically, antiseptically. It was simple because it was always somewhere I knew I might land. With Janie Lee, this is all so new. There are other barriers. Do we really want to go there? Risk changing the fundamental nature of our friendship? She isn’t Gerry. I’ll have to see her regularly. There could be residue if this shakes out poorly. And do two names, across from each other on Einstein, mean anything?
As far as she knows, I’m buying a hundred acres beneath Molly the Corn Dolly and living here until I have an actual tombstone. She specifically cited future plans in another city as a reason things with Woods wouldn’t work out. By her own ideals, I am a bad choice. Why do this now?
But I know why. We’re curious. I’m fixated on the idea of What if? We may never get another moment when we are this open. And although I am afraid it will change us, Woods and I are doing just fine. Courage begets courage.
“All right, Miller. Let’s do this thing,” I say.
Neither of us needs a definition. She does not give me a chance to change my mind. In a familiar way, she moves closer, pushes the mallet until it falls off the table and bounces under the saw. She twirls a piece of my hair around her finger.
I duplicate her action, touching her hair, and then her earlobe. She’s always touching, petting, stroking, and cuddling. I am none of these things.
The moment to bail arrives. She stares at my hand, aware. Stares at my mouth, aware. The tip of her tongue is poised on her bottom lip. The violin hangs between us. History is between us too.
“Billie?” My name is a question.
I carefully slip the bow and violin away and set them behind us. Her UGGs bump against my boots; her fingers, still tangled in my hair, touch my earlobe, once, twice, three times. “You love me,” I say, because that part of us is not in question.
Her cheeks are flushed. Mine must be too.
“I don’t know how I love you, only that I do, and I can’t not,” she says.
“Me too,” I say quietly.
My face is against her hand now. I am not the one who moved. I am not the one who has her thumb on my cheek.
“Kiss me?” I say, choosing to only move my boot a fraction closer to her.
I want her to make this choice so I will not look back at this moment and feel as though it was forced. And unlike Woods, she breaks the barrier between us first.
I am being kissed.
It is mostly mouth and no tongue—a quartet of lips and softness. She is all melody. My job is to harmonize. I hear the Irish ballad Davey played on the way home from Nashville. She has a merry and somber mouth. Just like the music.
We are still kissing.
I compare her to Gerry. Gerry kisses like the world will end soon. Janie Lee kisses like the world was born this morning.
We are still kissing.
I am living a moment the Spandex Junkwagons have gossiped about. That my father fears. That scares me. A lightning bolt from heaven doesn’t strike.
I am okay. I am grateful.
I am trembling. I am praying.
It is me who breaks away. Me who wipes her spit from my mouth.
Her fingers are stuck in her pockets; her hair is stuck to her lip. Casual as ever, I tuck it behind her ear. She half-grins, and rubs her cheek against her shoulders as if she can clean the red from her cheeks. Then she is busy dusting garage molecules from her violin and returning it to the case.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
Someone clears a throat.
It is not me. It is not Janie Lee.
26
Dad and Tawny Jacobs stand at the open door of our garage, arms burdened with newspapers—a donation for the Daily Sit, promised the day I picked pecans on her farm. It was a kindness I had not expected her to offer. Certainly not one I predicted would arrive at ten thirty p.m. on the Friday night I was kissing a girl.
She must have parked in the circle drive out front while I was malleting.
She says nothing. Bless her. After lowering her stack of newspapers to the couch, she says, “See you Sunday, Brother Scott,” and dismisses herself. I hear her pull onto River Run Road over the sound of me kicking my own ass.
I also swear I can hear my father’s heart banging against his rib cage from across the garage.
He collapses on the steps leading inside, hands steepled, fingertips stroking the bridge of his nose. The rest of him is immobile. Janie Lee looks at me.
“I think you’d better go home,” he tells her.
It is amazing she didn’t say this herself. Amazing she didn’t run screaming away.
Her violin case appears to weigh forty million pounds. Pausing at the garage door, she mouths, “I’m sorry,” and I hope she means for being caught, but I am unsure. When she reaches the end of the drive, Dad presses the lit orange button above his shoulder, lowering the garage door, trapping us.
I am bathed in fluorescent light and humility.
He’s wearing fur moccasins he keeps on the rug by the front door for errands. They make no sound on the three wooden steps or the concrete. Made no sounds on the sidewalk earlier. If he’d been wearing his wing tips, I would have heard him.
Five steps. He crosses the garage and stoops to pick up the mallet and sets it on my worktable, as if returning at least one thing to order will help. When he arrives before me, I flinch as though he might strike. He does nothing with his outstretched hands. They stay between us like he means to lay hands on me and pray.
My own arms are limp celery, falling at my sides. I squeeze the fabric of my athletic pants, work it between my fingers, waiting on judgment.
He sniffs, and I can’t keep myself from saying, “Dad, it’s not what—”
“I don’t care what it was.”
His tone is even, which is worse than if it were rageful.
“We—”
“Stop. I need to think.” A tear hangs on his chin. “I’ve put up with ridiculous schemes. Footballs in the sanctuary. Church fires. But this, this is . . . something else. And Tawny . . .” He groans. Props himself against the freezer, body shaped like a C, unseeing. “You know. You know things at church are precarious. You know we’re under a microscope.”
“Dad, you can’t think I could have known that you and Tawny would walk in right then. That wasn’t about you or church.”
“Billie, that’s what I’m saying. You can’t predict anything. I asked you, I specifically asked you, to rein it in.”
I nod that I understand.
The warning continues. “I think you just bought us a one-way ticket out of town.”
“Dad—”
“If Tawny takes what she saw public, I can’t get you out of this.”
I am grasping at straws. “What about the Corn Dolly? What if I turn it around?”
He laughs. Please don’t laugh, I think. This is my life, I think.
My cell buzzes from across the room. It must be Janie Lee.
I want to tell him I love Janie Lee. That I always will. But that I have not had enough experience to trust my heart. That I still want to kiss Davey, who wants to kiss Thom, who is probably somewhere kissing Gerry. That I am hopelessly confused.
I am open. I am closed. I am terrified. It comes out like: “Dad, I’m not pursuing Janie Lee—”
“No, you’re not.”
“You’re forbidding me?”
He exhales. “No, I’m begging you, for once in your life, to think about someone other than yourself. Do you hear me?”
I kissed her. I think I would kiss her again, but . . . I’m not sure. As much as I wanted this thing to happen, I wasn’t prepared to enjoy it that much and feel so uncertain at the same time.