sitting on his narrow bed looking down when Barbara Jean walked into the room with the gift box in her outstretched hands. She rushed over and sat beside him. She said, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t get over here any sooner.” She was going to explain about the Jacksons visiting until late, but he looked up then and she stopped talking.
Chick had a red-and-blue bruise on his chin and his lower lip was split. She didn’t need to ask who had done it. She said, “Why’d you go over there?” and then immediately wished she hadn’t said it.
She reached out and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He tried to pull away at first, but then he relaxed and laid his head against her neck. He talked quietly in her ear.
“I ran into my brother’s girlfriend, Liz, this morning. She said Desmond had been talking about how he wanted me to come back home. She said he’d been in a good mood for a while, not drinking as much and stuff. Plus, Liz’s got this little girl. She’s not my brother’s kid, but she calls me Uncle Ray. And Liz said her daughter was asking why her Uncle Ray didn’t come see her over Christmas.” Chick shrugged. “She asked me to come by for supper. So, I went.
“Desmond was already pretty drunk when I got to the house, but he was joking and kidding around like we used to do sometimes. Then he lost it halfway through supper. He’s like that. Changes real quick.”
From years with Loretta, Barbara Jean knew how a drunken meal could go all crazy with no warning. One sip too much and a switch inside got flipped from off to on, and then things went bad fast.
“Nothing really started it, but all of a sudden he was yelling at Liz that she was a whore and was cheating on him. He threw his plate at her, so Liz grabbed her kid and took off before he could throw another one. Then he started in on me. He said he heard a rumor that I was working for a—a colored man.”
Chick said it in a way that made it clear to Barbara Jean that “colored man” hadn’t been the term his brother had used.
“Desmond said he wasn’t gonna let me shame him in front of his friends. And then he started swinging.”
“I’m getting better, though,” Chick said. He raised his hands and showed her his scraped and bleeding knuckles. “I got in a few good ones myself this time.” He tried to smile and grimaced because of his busted lip.
All the air seemed to go out of him then. He pulled away from Barbara Jean and stared down at his hands as they rested in his lap. Shaking his head, he said, “It’s all shit. It’s all just a bunch of shit.”
She reached out and lightly stroked the bruise on his chin, remembering how the touch of his fingers had forever transformed the belt buckle scars on her arm into a smiling face. She kissed his mouth, avoiding the swollen part of his lip. She kissed him again and again. Then she put her hands on his waist and carefully pulled his T-shirt up over his head. There were more bruises on his chest and on his skinny arms and she leaned over and kissed those, too.
Chick put his hands on the sides of her face and kissed her now. Then he reached down and began to unbutton her blouse.
They undressed each other as if they had been doing it for years, no fumbling or rushing. And when they were both naked, they slid beneath the covers of his bed.
Barbara Jean was more experienced than Chick was. But her knowledge of intimacy had come too early and under bad circumstances, courtesy of evil men. She realized from the moment that she and Chick pulled the blankets over their bodies that this was as different from those other times as it could be. And that difference made it seem like her first time, too.
They wound themselves together over and over again, in a blur of arms and legs, lips and hands. When, finally, they were so ragged from exhaustion that they could do no more than lie with their mouths inches apart, each inhaling the other’s breath, Barbara Jean forgot all about the passing of time and fell asleep in his arms under the pile of tangled linens.
When Barbara Jean awakened, he was gone. She sat up in the