Page 34 of And Still Her Voice
In the morning, I anxiously waited to talk to River about my curse. I stood in the kitchen with Mary, Indigo, and the others getting ready to make bread. I would tell him everything I hadn’t the night before, including how I’d killed Dilbert, but then a young man stumbled in.
“What’s your name?” River asked the stranger, his hair freshly cropped like a Marine jarhead. “Tony. Tony Hatchet.”
Indigo offered him some bread. “When we’re finished, you can come help me over at the free store around the corner,” she said.
River poured two cups of tea, handed me one, and sat on a stool at the counter.
“Thank you.”
“Awfully quiet this morning, Honey Moon. You okay?”
I liked my new name. “Yeah, just thinking about stuff.” I took a sip of my tea.
“Well, I’ll leave you to your thoughts,” he said, picking up a newspaper, something my father would do when Mom wanted to talk. I wanted to talk, but it would have to wait. There were too many people around.
In the meanwhile, the girls set out the ingredients on the big table to make the bread. I looked around, thinking about my sisters at home and how, except for Baby Josie, I’d been enviousof them for so many reasons—because they had a bond with each other, because they’d been able to go to school. But I was more jealous of Maggie because by age fifteen, she’d already been kissed at least a thousand times. Even Patty had a boyfriend. At first, I’d been eager to hear how their day went at school. But when they started sharing about all the cute boys and bragging about their crushes, my envy grew into an inside-out sort of rage. As I spread some flour onto the table to make some dough, I wondered why I had to stay home. Why couldn’t I go to school like the normal kids? Stupid questions are when you know the answer. I grew to hate Grandma Phoebe even more. My anger eventually drove my sisters away. Every afternoon, they’d tiptoe past my bedroom to do their homework. When they’d go down to play, I’d slip into their rooms to steal their school books and read about things Mom, with her limitations, couldn’t teach me. Soon, I also read their journals about all the silly stuff, including how Patty was going to marry Ted and they were going to have three children. Unfortunately, all the reading I’d done couldn’t teach me how to read people, much less how to read boys.
I slapped the dough, thinking how I didn’t understand the relationship between a man and a woman, much less making out. Before hitting the road, I’d never been kissed. I’d watched my parents kiss. I’d watched them fight. Sometimes, it seemed they’d fight only to end up kissing and then they’d disappear up the stairs.
I thought about when Dilbert planted that gross kiss on me and I’d felt a fierce repulsion. “For that alone, he deserved to die,” Grandma whispered.
“Oh my God, Phoebe. Get out!”
River peered at me probingly. I waved my hand over my head. “Oh fly. Get out!”
Last night when I kissed River, it felt nice, but I didn’t feel any sparks or fireworks like I’d imagined, like I’d read about inWuthering HeightsorAnna Karenina. I wanted the passion I’d seen on the big screen, like inCasablancaorGone with the Wind, the way they stared into each other’s eyes as if they could see into each other’s souls. I watched Indigo walk out of the kitchen and gasped when a man about mid-twenties came in.
“Hiya, Everett,” Indigo said on her way out the back door. “See you later.”
Everett looked like Jesus—the white one, not like the one at Cristo del Rey Church—slender face, full lips, and straight nose. I instantly felt like a sparkler being waved around on the Fourth of July and then suddenly shameful, for if he was Jesus, I shouldn’t be feeling the feels where I felt them. I squeezed the dough, taking a deep breath before slapping it down onto the wooden tabletop. Pressing the heels of my palms into the dough, I pushed and pulled, mechanically. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed his dusty brown sandals inching closer.
“Who have we here?” he asked. My heart jackrabbited inside my chest. I took a deep breath, getting ready to respond, but nothing came out of my mouth as I gathered the dough into a ball to stuff into the two-pound coffee cans.
“This is Anna,” Mary volunteered for me, thankfully. “Anna, this is Everett Grady. He runs the operation.”
His eyes lingered on me, his face easing into a grin. I smiled sheepishly, drowning in his clear eyes, the color of the water I imagined he walked on. He extended his hand, and I reached out, quickly retracting mine when I noticed the glove of white flour. I dusted off on my apron. He then took my hand in his like a hand sandwich. “Welcome.” A current of electricity rushed up my arm, circled my heart, and then pooled into my—as Grandma called them–“nether regions.”
Maybe it was only chemistry on my part, but I imagined what Mary Magdalene might have felt when first encountering Jesus. “My Lord, may I wash your feet?” I yanked my eyes away fromhis, calmed by the sight of a spray of freckles splashed across his nose. I couldn’t imagine Jesus had freckles.
I tried to blow the hair out of my burning face, but when that didn’t work, I pushed my hair with the back of my hand, but then like a benediction, he swiped my forehead. There must have been flour on my brow. I felt my face flush redder than cayenne pepper, my whole body burning even hotter. I wanted to stretch the ball of dough over my head and then jump into the oven.
Mary checked the stovetop as River pulled out a loaf of bread from the oven and then dumped it down on the table.
“Careful there, boy,” Everett said.
River glowered at him. You could cut the tension inside the warm kitchen with a butter knife, but I didn’t think Everett even noticed River storming out.
***
In the living room later that night, people gathered, smoking and drinking up what Everett had to say. Standing in the doorway, sipping some wine from a jelly jar, every once in a while, I’d catch him looking up, as if searching for one of his lost sheep. And then as Everett was on the tail end of his tale—something about fascism and how we had no business in Vietnam—he locked eyes on me and beamed. He was like the fisherman throwing out a line and I was the little fish being lured by a shiny object. When he finally came over and touched my shoulder, I was hooked, but then someone pulled out a tambourine, someone else a guitar, and then River grabbed my hand. “Anna plays piano. I heard her over at Steinway’s. She’s pretty good.”
I glared at River and he shrugged his shoulders, palms up.
“Steinway’s?” Everett said. “You mean the place where that guy croaked.”
“It was in this morning’s paper,” River added, as if it were old news.
My stomach contracted like I’d just been whacked by a bat. Too bad I wasn’t a ball getting hit out of there. News sure traveled fast. Everett grinned. “You must be a killer piano player. Show us what you got.”
