Between, Georgia (26 page)

It finally occurred to me to check her left hand. Sure enough, she was wearing the big diamond I had seen her twirling at Bibi’s.

The stone had to be almost two carats, set in white gold or maybe platinum.

“Jonno gave you that?” I said, indicating the ring.

She shrugged. “It’s a family ring.”

“Yeah, your family’s, maybe.”

“It was my gramma’s, okay? It’s special to me, so Jonno didn’t mind using it.”

“I bet,” I said.

She looked at me and said, “Why are you picking on me about my ring? Quit staring holes in me, you’re making my stomach sick.” She wobbled up onto the shoulder and jerked us back.

“Shit! I told you!”

I turned to face forward, keeping my eyes deliberately off her.

We were on a stretch of highway that offered nothing to look at but plowed cotton fields on either side of us. “So in Jonno’s version, I’m the only one dragging my feet, huh?” This time she did not answer, but in my peripheral vision, I could see her hands still kneading the steering wheel like dough. I went on, “It doesn’t seem that way to me, but maybe there’s some truth to that. We could have been divorced six months ago if I’d stayed out of bed with him long enough for him to believe I meant it when I said we were finished.”

She said, “Don’t you bad-mouth him to me.” She was very fierce, and her voice was filled with righteous conviction. She flipped on her sound system. She had a CD in, some faux-punk boy band I didn’t know, and she jacked up the volume to six. She had to yell so I could hear her over the wind and the music. “If you’re making me drive you so you can have some time to try to poison my mind against him, I already see through that.”

“You don’t want to hear about my frying pan? You want to leap straight into the fire?” I looked at her again. I couldn’t help it.

“So you’re trying it anyway? Fine. Trying just shows you still want him, and if he’s an asshole, why would you want to keep him? And anyway, hello, he loves me. That must kill you, and I can even feel sorry for you, because if I lost him, I’d totally lie down and die. I can feel bad for you or whatever, but I am telling you up front, if you trash-talk him and pretend like he’s cheating on me, I’ll pull this car right over and slap you backwards. And I fight dirty. I pull hair and I bite. You don’t want to start with me.”

Her fingers had gone white on the wheel, but she hadn’t once looked away from the road since she turned on the music. I reached over and flipped it off, then said over the whistling air,

“You don’t look to me like the kind of girl who’s ever been in a fight.”

She darted another sidelong glance at me. I saw her square her shoulders and willfully firm her trembling mouth. She said, “I told you to stop staring at me. If the question is whether or not I’m prettier than you, let me help you out. I am. Much.”

A sharp bark of laughter escaped me. I sat back in my seat, looking out of the windshield at the flat expanse of the fields.

“You’ve got a pair, as my aunt Bernese would say. How old are you, anyway?”

“Twenty,” she said. She sounded as if she begrudged me the air it took to let me hear the word.

“So was I,” I said. “When I married him. Ten years ago.”

“That won’t work, either,” she said.

“Then I’ll leave it at this. A man who cheats on his wife with you will cheat on you when you are his wife.”

She braked, angling toward the shoulder. “Do you need me to kick your ass? Seriously?”

“Go ahead. Give it a try,” I said. “I think I’d like that. But if you pull over, we’ll miss the hearing.”

“Dammit!” she said, and stomped on the gas again. We lurched forward until we were back up to eighty-five, and then she set cruise control. “Stop talking to me. Really.”

“You don’t get to decide what I do and don’t do. You want me in Athens? This is what it costs you, and since you’re having sex with my husband, it’s pretty damn cheap.”

“I didn’t know he was married,” she said.

“Really.” I made my voice drip disbelief.

“I didn’t! Well, not at first I didn’t. And by the time I did, it was too late. We were in love. And it was, like, our love was bigger than that.”

“Bigger than what?” I asked.

She waved one hand airily and then put it back on the wheel.

“Bigger than rules. Bigger than whatever happened before it. Bigger than you.” She was filled with such certainty, she sounded almost casual. She was so young, and all at once I was sorry for making her do this. She wasn’t a match for me by half. Knowing that, I felt some of the anger loosen in my chest and then let go.

On a hunch, I leaned down and dug around under the seat.

Sure enough, my fingers found the edge of one of Jonno’s endless supply of coverless paperbacks. I pulled it out. Ken Kesey’s
Sailor
Song.
I paused, holding it. I had intended to read my way to Athens, but the physical presence of the book shook me. The book proclaimed, louder than anything Amber had said, louder even than the ring, that Jonno had been here.

I shoved it back under the seat. I didn’t need a talisman to tell me what I already knew. Then I realized I already had one. I dug around my purse until I found my empty pill bottle. I glanced at Amber. Her eyes were on the road, so I slipped the pill bottle under the seat after the book. A message to Jonno that I had been here, too.

I sat back and stared out the window, watching the car eat the miles between me and the end of my marriage. The fields gave way to Georgia-pine wilderness, and then to townlets and sub-urbs that lined the path into Athens. I was content, for the moment, to be driven. I suspected that the girl beside me would drive Jonno, too, metaphorically speaking. She was so single-minded in her version of love. If he’d been using me in the role of clinging bitch-wife to buffer himself from the string bean of willful possession sitting next to me, he would not have that lux-ury much longer.

We pulled off 78 and headed toward downtown Athens.

Amber drove directly to the courthouse. She must have been there recently, applying for a marriage license. It couldn’t have gone well. We came up to the corner before the courthouse, and she pulled over, flipped on her hazards, and put the BMW in park.

“You’re here,” she said. She looked at her watch. “We made it.

Plenty of time.” She kept her gaze resolutely ahead, but as I stared at her profile, I saw another tremor hit her mouth. She pressed her lips together, stopping it. “Are you going to sit here in my car until you miss it?”

“No,” I said. “You’re leaving?”

She shrugged. “I’m supposed to have a dinner with my bridesmaids tonight. I have to go iron my hair. I have to dress and pretend none of this whole afternoon happened.”

“How am I supposed to get back to Between?” I asked.

“Not my problem,” she said. Her voice had an edge of rising hysteria. “You are a very weird person, do you know that? It’s completely freakish, having me drive you here. That’s not normal.

You are not normal. I can’t drive Jonno’s wife around the night before my wedding, okay? It’s making me upset.”

“By the time I need the ride home, I won’t be his wife,” I said.

“Get. Out. Of. My. Car!” She was borderline hysterical. I suddenly felt so sorry for her that there wasn’t room for feeling much else. It was a relief.

I opened the car door to get out, and that was when I saw Jonno. He was coming down the sidewalk toward us. As I climbed out of the BMW, our eyes met. He came to a halt so abruptly, he almost overbalanced. His mouth dropped open, and then he went leaping wildly to the right, off the sidewalk, flailing his arms and then dropping behind some bushes. I couldn’t remember a time when I had seen him so graceless.

I looked down at Amber. She hadn’t seen him. She felt my gaze and asked, “Are you ever going to close the door?”

“Good luck,” I told her, and I stepped away and slammed it.

She was already driving off as I walked toward the trembling bushes, shaking my head. Funny how the world worked; the last time I’d seen Jonno, I’d been crouched in some bushes beside his house, hiding from him.

Jonno peeked out as Amber accelerated, then he crouched again. I watched until the car had safely turned the corner, and then I said to the bush, “Olly olly, oxen free.”

He peered over the top. He had enough class to look the smallest bit ashamed. “Hi.”

“That doesn’t seem to quite cover it, does it?” I said.

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“Was that . . .”

“Amber?” I said. “Sure was.”

Jonno stood up and joined me on the sidewalk, brushing at his faded Levi’s. The courthouse was behind us, a squatty white building with too many square pillars. There we stood in our jeans, rumpled and uncertain, quailing in front of it.

“Are you really going to marry that child?” I asked.

Jonno shrugged, embarrassed. “Are you really going to divorce me?”

“Do you want me to?” I asked.

He looked at me quizzically. “No, dumb-ass. Of course not.”

“And yet. You have an Amber.”

He looked down at his steel-toed boots. They were chocolate-brown lace-ups made of distressed leather, the cool-guy version of a workingman’s boots. “She came after you had kicked me out.”

“Oh, good,” I said. “Comforting to know you aren’t marrying the one who gave me syphilis.”

His boots were apparently divulging unto him the untold secrets of the universe. At last he raised his head, staring past me up the street where her car had gone. He said, “Her dad works for Geffen.”

“Hello, hello! Here’s everyone all together!”

Jonno and I both started. Our divorce lawyer had joined us without our noticing. He was a genial little man, as pink and plump as a cherub. Every time I’d seen him, he’d been hugely and, it seemed to me, inappropriately cheerful. He stepped between us and put out a hand, ushering us toward the courthouse.

“We’re running the smallest bit late,” he said, urging us forward at a tidy clip. For a moment I thought my machine god might actually be him. He certainly knew how to process us 227

through the blocky building. And it felt like we were in the clutches of a large machine as he walked us through the clots and streams of milling people. There seemed to be a pattern, as if the air had currents that shifted us and set our course.

He led us through metal detectors and stairwells to a dingy courtroom where our marriage could be unraveled in a businesslike and tidy fashion. Dismantling a marriage, it seemed, was an abrupt and definite process that involved sitting on a bench, standing when called, and watching a bored judge stamp signed papers. It felt entirely surreal.

I had expected something solemn, maybe even beautiful. Like a wedding, only backwards. Or maybe I had expected to drift into the divorce, a natural progression of one slow thing after another until there we were at an end, finished with each other.

It struck me as ironic that I’d caught Jonno cheating when we were trying to make a baby. I’d married him mostly because I’d thought we already had. We hadn’t been dating even a year, and it didn’t seem possible that the result of all the astounding sex we’d been having could be a pregnancy. He was my first love, and sex seemed like something we’d invented. At nineteen, I knew how reproduction worked in theory, but it had never occurred to me that there could be an application. Anyway, we’d been careful.

I’d been meticulously careful. After all, I was raised a Frett. So sex with Jonno was a lot of things, but it had never seemed like a viable way to procreate until the month my period didn’t show.

I told Jonno in the same way I would have told him any other mildly interesting but improbable scientific fact: An ant can live underwater for fourteen days, Jonno, and I am six days late. He had shrugged, calmly, and said, “Maybe you should pee on a stick?”

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“I can’t be pregnant,” I said.

“Sure you can,” he said, and that made it a little more real. I felt the first stirring of panic. He saw my eyes widening and grinned at me. “Don’t sweat it, Gig. If the line goes pink, we’ll get married. I mean, hell. I love you, right? And you love me. No big deal.”

So we’d gone to Walgreens and gotten a First Response. This was back when Jonno was living with his old band in an ancient rental house that probably should have been condemned. The den smelled permanently of feet, and one of the bedrooms had a gaping hole in the floor that led into the kitchen. Jonno called it Chez Crap. It had two bathrooms, and the one Jonno used was less revolting than the other, though not what I would call clean.

But we went there because I didn’t want anyone in my crowded dorm to catch on to what I was doing.

The bathroom was built long and narrow, and Jonno came in with me and boosted himself onto the counter to sit by the sink.

I made him close his eyes and run the water. When I was done, we set the test down by the sink and stood over it, staring, for three minutes. We watched the test line slowly fade into being, getting deeper, going almost red. The window that would indicate a pregnancy stayed purely, blankly white.

“There you go,” said Jonno.

“All right, then,” I said.

That might have ended it, except he added, “We could get married anyway, Gig. If you want to.”

“All right, then,” I said again. Even then nothing would have happened if I hadn’t called my family and told them that Jonno had asked me and I had said yes. Mama kept asking if I was sure this was what I wanted, but all Bernese heard was “wedding.” All 229

three of her boys were married, but the weddings had been planned by the brides and their mothers. Lori-Anne was only eleven, a weedy-looking, sullen child who claimed she would never marry because boys were revolting.

Jonno and I were tugged bonelessly along in the huge wake of Bernese’s planning. She had Pastor Gregg marry us outside by the fountain in the middle of Between’s town square. My dress was a winter-white raw-silk shift, very simple. I’d worn short white gloves and a hat I now found embarrassing whenever I looked at the pictures. Genny’s idea, that hat. Jonno wore a lightweight blue summer suit bought for the wedding and never worn again.

The entire town was there, Mama pressing her lips into a flat line, Genny sniffling into her hanky. Lou walked me down the aisle and Bernese sat with Isaac, presiding like the queen bee.