Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,6

gently stroking my hair as he studied my face. His eyes ticked back and forth, like he was divining signs of our future together in my features. He looked so serious that it began to make me uncomfortable.

“Why’d you ever ask me to dance?” I asked him finally.

“What?”

“That night at the Freshman-Senior Dance. Why’d you pick me?”

He thought about this for a moment.

“After my mom died, it was like everyone was afraid to talk to me. Like I was contagious or something. I remember you used to look at me so pitifully—like you were the only one who knew how hard it was.

“One morning—you probably don’t even remember this—one morning you smiled at me. I was coming on the bus and you were sitting in the back, watching me. You made this crooked kind of half-smile, like you were trying to cheer me up. It lasted maybe only half a second. You probably don’t even remember it. But it made me feel a whole lot better that day.”

I did remember.

“And so that’s why I asked you to dance that night. I just never—” He stopped.

“What?”

He hesitated, moving his lips like he was working up to say something.

I prodded him with my knee. “Say it.”

“I just never … I never in my life thought I could get so lucky.”

At a time like this it’s not the words so much as the sentiment. This one came deep and true from inside him, and he was offering it to me, handing it to me, like something unspeakably fragile and precious. And him trusting me like that opened up something inside of me.

Understand that before that night Tim and I had done little more than kiss. They were good kisses, to be sure. But I’d been brought up Baptist, and things learned in Bible school, no matter how absurd, have a way of sticking with you. And Tim, of course, was too polite to ever push himself on me. But that night everything was just so perfect that there wasn’t any question of right or wrong, good or bad.

I helped him take off his barn jacket, his sweater, and his blue jeans. Tim was shy about his body, so I had never even seen him without a T-shirt before. His build was still that of a teenager’s—a little bony, slender, and perfectly smooth. As he helped me off with my clothes, he grew in confidence, until eventually we were divested of all shame and lay marveling at one another’s features. That evening before the fire, transformed by trust and love, we were both as young and beautiful and flawless as God had intended.

Probably I shouldn’t be telling you this. But people can say whatever they want about what we did next. They can call it whatever they like, they can sell it and profane it however they want: I know that what we did was a good thing. And I know that no matter what anyone says, teenagers are fully capable of loving one another. At a certain age, teenagers may even be the most capable: before their minds are poisoned by hurt and doubt, before the world steps in with its age-old hates and prejudices to destroy whatever childhood notions of love still linger in their hearts.

I won’t embarrass you with the details—you know well enough what I’m talking about. Let me just say that, together on the rug that night, we discovered a sympathy for one another that bordered on the divine. Call it our marriage. What was mine became his, and what was his was mine. Where had we learned to do all that? From no one. From our own God-given instincts. At the end, I remember, I cried a little. Tim whispered promises until I felt reassured. Sighing, laughing, wrapped up in each other’s arms, we didn’t see the headlights sweeping the walls of the parlor or hear the footsteps crossing the front porch before my parents stepped into the room and found us.

The scene that followed was so ugly that even now I remember it as a hellish red blur. My mother screamed and covered her mouth. My father let out a string of obscenities. I scrabbled to hide myself behind the sofa while my father hauled Tim up from the floor and began beating him. Gripping his skinny arm in one hand, he slammed punch after punch at his head. “Hold her back!” he ordered my mother when I tried to stop him. She caught me by the