(no subject)
This is some more bullshit I wrote. I think it's called The Reckless Thing but I dunno.
I never done a reckless thing in my whole life, she says as she presses her cheek against the bare skin of his shoulder. He smiles at the ceiling when the frizz of her graying hair tickles his throat.
That so? Never?
It is so. Hear that? Never. Not even as a girl. Never stole my daddy’s truck, never even pinched so much as a jar of pickles from the market.
Why’s that, do you think?
He runs the broken skin of his thumb along the meat of her upper arm, seeing symbols in her freckles. The sighing breath she sends down his body makes his naked belly twitch.
I don’t really know. I wanted to make Mother and Daddy happy. Whenever something bad came up, like the girls wanted to go get drunk with some boys, I thought about what they’d think, my parents. If I thought they wouldn’t want me to, I wouldn’t go.
And what do you think they’d think of me?
He can feel her face crack into his favorite indulgent smile. He watches his hand move with her soft giggle.
Oh can’t I just hear it! D’you know what I hear? I hear, oh, what a thing to do! Jenn, you’re a woman grown, and this boy is barely old enough to be your own son. And Teddy! Poor Teddy, your husband, oh Jennifer, what a mockery you’re making of that man! He’s a doctor, don’t you realize!
By now the motel room is alive and electric with the crackling sparks of her hoarse laughter. Jenn rolls herself away from his arm and doubles over at the foot of the cheap bed, a woman possessed.
God if they were alive I’d never hear the end of it! Mother would think you were around for Juniper! Juniper, my daughter!
He sits up, amused by the sight of Jenn’s fit, watching the makeup-stained folds around her eyes disappear. He pushes the mess of sandy blond hair out of his face.
I’m going to write a book about you, he says. When Jenn’s shoulders are released from custody she crawls up the bed and pins the slender young man beneath her, her rump on his lap, and her feet slide up underneath the pillows.
Oh, Marty. This time her sigh is different. Marty, my little author man. She brushes his face with her short fingers. She never bothers to remove the dull silver ring on her left hand.
No, I’m going to. I want to. A book, about you.
Another fit of hysteria threatens to escape her wide smiling mouth, to shoot out the space between her two square front teeth.
Well if you do, then you be damn sure to put in there-to put in there that my husband, the doctor, isn’t even a doctor at all! My mother fell in love with a chiropractor.
Marty grins and tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear.
I’ll be sure to. Marty leans in to kiss her, and she is lost again in the perfect smoothness of his young skin, happy to exchange one possession for another.
She doesn’t believe him about the book. She won’t for years after he’s gone, until she holds the living, breathing weight of Marty’s printed words in her thick hands. She will be standing behind the cash register at Molbak’s. Her customer will pull the book out and set it down to make room in her purse to root around for her wallet, a pig looking for truffles. Jenn will pick it up and see The Reckless Thing by Martin Leonard, and she will fill the store with her unchecked, deafening laughter.
She’ll never read it, of course, but when the people who know her do, they will look at her with that light they get in their eyes just before they ask her about that book by that Martin Leonard guy.
Oh, that, she’ll say like she’s gotten this question a million times. That is just a story.