Though Don wasn’t searching for a woman, one found him. “What you need, Mr. Don?” Jonnie said to him. “You had all you want, Mr. Don?” Just like that every time he stepped foot in the tiny restaurant, until she finally dropped the mister altogether. Don knew what Jonnie was doing, feeling out her power, seeing if she could make an old man light up just because she wanted him to.
Friday was fried fish day, good croakers with crisp cornmeal overcoats on their itty-bitty bodies and black rubbery skin. Mae and Jonnie sold sandwiches every Friday, and the line ran out the door and into the yard. Men and women, but mostly men, crunching and spitting little bones all up and down the pitted road. Don was eating at Sisters like usual, standing in the yard when the Martin sisters, real sisters, less than a year apart, started to sing two-part harmony, “His eye is on the sparrow, I know he watches me.” Generations of Martins sang in churches, soul bands, and then back to churches, but how unusual for them to break into song just like that. Don loved the combination of their high rich voices, their almost identical faces, and their sweet bow-lipped mouths opening at the same time. He had nothing against the Martins. Not really. James had spent too much time with Sylvia. Don was almost grateful to James for being Sylvia’s friend, for loving her in ways Don didn’t know how to. He pretended he knew nothing about Sylvia and James’s relationship, if you want to call it that. He wouldn’t give Sylvia the gift of revenge. He wasn’t a saint.
Don listened while he ate the hot sauce-soaked white bread with the greasy fishy taste of the fresh catch. Jonnie told him later how she watched his face that day. How sad and unloved he seemed, she said. If Don’s face looked sad, he couldn’t help it. Don wanted to tell her that people take the insides of themselves, put it on someone else’s face, but it wouldn’t do any good to tell her that. There are things you learn from words and gestures, the sad human mistakes of others, and there are things you can only get through the bitter taste on your own smooth tongue. “What were you thinking,” she asked him later. “Nothing,” he said, which was true, but she believed that she and Don had shared their first secret moment.
Later that same day, Don took Jonnie to his home, a tiny rented trailer in the back of Sammie Park’s yard. They were both shy. Don had been with girls since he was fourteen and women not long after that. He knew sex wasn’t what you think. Women are all afraid they’ll look bad, have people laughing and shaking their heads because they put themselves on the line, body and all, to believe in something. The idea that they might get ill-used made them crazy. Even a mild woman will break every dish in the house if she whiffs betrayal. Don had seen it too many times. But Jonnie didn’t want to know any better than to believe.
Jonnie sat cross-legged on Don’s ancient couch. Don thought she looked like a spider with all those spindly arms and legs, in her tiny T-shirt, shorts creeping up her high tail. He felt dirty looking at her slight body and tried to watch her mouth, concentrate on what she was saying. But Don couldn’t shake that Jonnie looked like a child. He’d never hurt a child, a fact even his wife, who mostly hated him, wouldn’t deny. Did people see him with Jonnie and think he was leeching the life out of her? He was just another old man hooked up with a young woman foolish enough or low enough to say yes?
“How old are you?” Don said with as much tenderness as he could, but he realized he sounded harsh.
Jonnie laughed, but she sensed that inside this innocuous question was a test she couldn’t pass. “Old enough.” She said, trying to sound playful, but ending up sounding like a pouty child.
Don wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear or what age would stop the magic, fix the image so they had to stop exactly where they were. There was nothing wrong with sitting with a young woman, even a beautiful one, even one he desired. Nothing in the world had happened that couldn’t be backed down from, explained away as a moment of silly weakness. “No, baby, how old?”
Jonnie hesitated, played at cleaning her fingernails. “Twenty-four if you need to know.”
Don thought of Devon and what a nice match this girl would have been for him. He imagined Devon bringing her home. He imagined himself jealous and maybe proud of that beautiful body his son would roll over to every night. Devon and Jonnie in this very room, Devon’s hand on her warm brown belly. Jonnie smiling at him with all her teeth. Good God this girl was too young for his son. The thought almost made Don shudder. “Go on home.”
Jonnie laughed but looked scared. Don was a grown man with grown children and she had the power to frighten him. Love is tenacious, the crabgrass of emotions, it will grow anywhere, hold on in the smallest crack of desire. Even Jonnie knew that, but she wanted Don to be full up with her, consume his thinking, his desires, so much so that he couldn’t remember to be wary and sad.
Jonnie rolled the T-shirt up and over her head, slowly tried not to think about a striptease, tried to forget about her body being nearly flat everywhere except for an inexplicable roll of fat below her bra. She stood to wriggle out of her tiny shorts, tried not to notice that Don had modestly turned his head. Jonnie wanted to show Don that she was confident, not somebody’s piss-ass child at all, but she wished she had hips to show him, big legs and a full backside, a body that would make him sure about anything.
“Want to see my birthmark?” Jonnie turned her leg, her inner thigh pointed in Don’s direction, to a dark amoeba-shaped mark the size of a silver dollar that looked like a splat of used chewing tobacco or spilled acid on her otherwise slick amber skin.
“Ugly, ain’t it?” Don said.
Jonnie looked around for her shoes. Don laughed, but he wasn’t sure what to do. He never meant to hurt her feelings. Young women often don’t know when a thing is hurtful or just laughably true, nothing to be done about it.
“It is ugly but you’re not supposed to say that.” Jonnie smiled. She slid her feet into run-over sneakers and turned the corner to the kitchen.
Jonnie’s behind eased out of her high-leg underwear as she walked. She pulled the elastic leg hole from one of her cheeks, like she and Don had known each other all their lives. “You want a drink,” she calls, her head hanging out of the refrigerator.
“No, baby,” he said. The common domestic gesture, Jonnie’s eager face questioning, eased his mind some. “Yeah, bring me one.”
She seemed to be staying.