Dancing With Velvet (25 page)

Celeste pushed him away so she could see his face. “Is that what this is all about?”

“If I took a blood test to prove I’m not his father, would you change your mind?”

“A blood test could show you might be his father.”

“It won’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I don’t know. I just am.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference. You don’t throw away a child like a worn-out toy.”

“I said we’d find him a good place.”

“Where? With your mother? Back with his grandmother? In an orphanage?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. We’ll have our own children, Velvet.”

“Oh, Kent.” She turned and began to walk back to the celebration.

“Velvet, please…don’t go. Stay here with me. We can work things out.”

“Not if it means losing Jonny.”

“But you don’t mind losing me?”

She didn’t turn around. “I think I’ve already lost you, Kent.”

****

“Them fireworks was swell,” Jonny observed as he put on his pajamas.

“
Those
fireworks
were
swell,” Celeste corrected. “Go brush your teeth. It’s late.”

“Why do I have to have a babysitter in the summer? I’m eight now.”

“Not quite. Besides, you like Patty.”

“Sure I like her. She lets me ride my bike and takes me to the park and…”

“And being here with you lets her earn some money.”

“You could pay me to be good by myself.” He glanced up at Celeste from beneath the lock of blonde hair that always seemed to grow out the day after he’d visited the barbershop.

“You
are
good, Jonny, but I don’t like to leave you here all day by yourself.”

“Maybe next summer when I’m almost nine?”

“We’ll see.”

“That means no.”

“Not necessarily.”

“So does that.”

“You know me pretty well.”

Jonny crawled into bed and pulled up his blue bedspread imprinted with cowboys on galloping horses. “Sure. We’re a team, you and me.”

“A team?”

“Yep. Like the Bobcats. You know, the football team at the big school.”

“The high school.”

“They won a lot of games this year.”

“Right.” Celeste kissed his cheek. “Now go to sleep.”

“Okay. Can I have Krispy Flakes for breakfast tomorrow?”

“I guess so.”

“Can I ask Patty to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch?”

“Yes.”

“Can you not hide the cookies?”

“No. Go to sleep.”

“’Night, Mom.”

Celeste turned off the light. “’Night, Jonny.”

When she went to close and lock the front door, Kent stood on the porch. “I need to talk to you, Velvet.”

“Kent, it’s late, and…”

“Please.”

She unlatched the screen. “I’ll come out on the porch.” She didn’t add,
so Jonny won’t hear us
, but she knew he understood why she didn’t invite him in.

“I’m sorry about tonight,” Kent said, folding himself down beside her on the steps.

“I’m sorry about a lot of things, Kent. I wish I could make you understand about Jonny.”

“I don’t want to talk about him. I just want to know if you still love me.”

“You know I do. Maybe more than ever.”

“Then tell me how you can love a person and not want to be with them.”

“I don’t know.”

“You said you thought you’d already lost me. What did you mean?”

“I just don’t feel like we see things the same way anymore.”

“Only one thing.”

“Jonny’s not a thing, Kent. He’s a little boy. He calls me ‘Mom.’ ”

“And you let him?”

“Why not?”

“I can think of a million reasons why not.”

“I wish you’d at least meet him.”

“No.”

“All right.”

“You don’t know what it’s like for a man to be slapped in the face like that.”

“No, I’m not a man, so I don’t think like one. But I do know there’s a difference in how we look at things.”

“When Claudia told me she was…you know…I didn’t believe her at first. When he was born, Mrs. Peters called Mother and told her, and she crawled all over me. I told her I wasn’t the father, but when I counted back, well, I knew I could be. Claudia even said she was going to the police and tell them I forced her. She didn’t, because they knew her. Everybody in town knew her. Nobody was going to believe that I made her do anything she didn’t want to.” He dropped his head in his hands.

“Then she started talking about us getting married, and I told her a flat no. She left for a while after that. I started working for the plumbing supply company, so I didn’t see her around for a long time. When she came back, she got a job waiting tables in a little bar on the edge of town. She even told me once that she took the baby with her and wanted to know what I thought about
my son
being raised in a bar.”

He lifted his face and stretched his legs in front of him. “She just kept on and on, wanting me to marry her, trying to get me to fall for her line again. Then she turned up in San Angelo and went after you. She had some nerve going to my CO and…” He brought his fist down on the porch floor between them. “If she’d left well enough alone, if I hadn’t driven her back to town…”

“It was an accident, Kent. Bad brakes. Icy patches on the road. You can’t keep blaming yourself for that.”

“And then her mother dumped the kid on you.”

“It was the best thing that could’ve happened to him.”

“It was a life sentence. For both of us.”

“I don’t look at it that way.”

“All my life, I’ve had to jump when someone hollered, and ask how high on the way up. I’m damned if I’ll raise Claudia’s bastard! But that’s what you’re holding over my head. Accept him or lose you.”

“That’s what my father had to do.”

“And look how it turned out.”

“It’s not going to be that way for Jonny.”

“Then find him a good home and…”

Celeste stood up. “He has a home, Kent. I’m going in now. It’s late, and I have to work tomorrow.”

Without waiting for him to reply, she turned off the porch light and closed the front door. Then she leaned against it, thinking she was going to cry, before she realized that the pain in her heart was too deep for tears.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Celeste thought Jonny grew overnight that summer. She watched the newspaper for sale ads and scoured the bargain basement at Hemphill-Wells. Her Christmas layaway at Cox-Rushing-Greer was, of necessity, smaller than usual.

The war crawled on until August. There was talk of invading Japan at the cost of a million casualties. Then it ended in a literal flash. “The bomb” was on everyone’s lips. Jonny used his marbles to annihilate a small ant bed in the back yard and renamed his model airplane
Enola Gay.
Mrs. Lowe said they’d keep the Canteen going as long as there were boys waiting to go home.

Celeste didn’t hear from Kent. Sometimes she felt overwhelming anger that kept her too tense to rest, and some nights she cried herself to sleep. Dreaming of the blue velvet curtain seemed to be a thing of the past.

When Jonny started third grade the first week in September, Celeste told him he could walk home from school by himself, cautioning him about not deviating from his route or talking to strangers. She gave him a keychain with a key for the back door. She thought he swaggered a lot like General MacArthur when he went next door to show it to Mrs. Aikman.

At the end of the second week of school, Celeste came home from work to be greeted by the announcement that “Some soldier guy was here looking for you, Mom. He said to give you this.” Celeste told Jonny to set the table and went to her room to read the note he’d handed her.

Dear Velvet,

I’m being discharged next month, and I’d like to see you before I leave. I’ll call you tonight at eight-thirty. You’ll know it’s me, so if you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t have to answer the phone.

Kent

After supper, trying not to think of the inevitable confrontation with Kent, Celeste called out Jonny’s spelling words for the following week. He insisted on staying a week ahead, even though he never minded getting behind in arithmetic. “I can do it in my head,” he argued. “I don’t see why I have to line up all those numbers and put in the pluses and the take-aways and the lines and the carry-boxes.”

Have I heard that somewhere before? I think so, but I can’t remember who said it.
“When I think of a good reason, I’ll tell you.”

“Okay.”

She read another chapter from
Robin Hood
and sent him to the bathtub. He made a show of dragging his feet, complaining that he didn’t see why he had to take a bath on Friday night when he was just going outside to play on Saturday and get dirty all over again. “Go,” she said, swatting his backside with the book.

She was listening to him splash and sing “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer” when the phone rang.

“Velvet?”

“I’m here.”

“Can I see you before I leave?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe we could have dinner. I think there might even be a dance at the Roof Garden on Saturday night.”

“I’ll have to ask Mrs. Aikman if she can watch Jonny.”

“He doesn’t look like me.”

“No.”

“He asked what my name was, and when I told him it was Kent, he said that was his middle name.”

“He knows what his name is, Kent, but he doesn’t know anything about you.”

“That’s good.”

“I’m not sure it is, but I just answer his questions as he asks them.”

“So he’s asked about his father?”

“Not really. He tells his friends he doesn’t have one. I guess they draw their own conclusions.”

“What do people think about you?”

“Nothing. I told the school and anybody else who asked that I have guardianship for a friend who’s overseas. My family and Veda know the truth. Besides, if I’d been pregnant nine years ago, it would’ve caused a local scandal.”

“So everybody knows about me.”

“Not everybody. Mr. Thomas knows. I couldn’t lie to him.”

“You’ll understand if I say I’d just as soon he didn’t.”

“I did what I felt was the right thing, Kent. What anybody else thinks doesn’t matter.”

“You wouldn’t have said that a couple of years ago.”

“Circumstances have changed, and I’ve had to change with them.”

“Well, look, see if you can get a babysitter. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll pick you up about six on Saturday. And wear the blue velvet dress.”

“It’s really a winter dress. I’d melt in it in September.”

“Wouldn’t want that to happen. I’ll see you.”

“See you.”

****

Before she could talk to Mrs. Aikman, a friend from Jonny’s Sunday School class invited him to spend the night. “Ricky’s dad’s taking us to the Texas to see Johnny Mack Brown, and we’re gonna sleep outside in the backyard in a real tent,” Jonny informed her for at least the fifth time, while he stuffed his pajamas into his empty school bag.

Celeste took them out, refolded them, and put them back, then added clean underwear and his Sunday pants and shirt. She handed him fifty cents. “This will buy your ticket and some popcorn.”

Jonny put the coin in his pocket. “It’s gonna be just us guys tonight. His mom’s staying home with his sister.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yeah, pretty swell.”

She walked him to the curb, where Ricky and his father waited in the car. “Be good,” she said, kissing the top of his head. “I’ll see you at church tomorrow.”

He hopped into the back seat. “Sure, Mom, see ya.”

Kent arrived just as the car drove off. “Was that the boy in the car?”

“He’s spending the night with a friend.”

“So things worked out.”

“He’s never spent the night away from home before.” Celeste picked up her purse. “I’m ready.”

While they ate dinner at the Cozy Café on Chadbourne, Kent told her he’d applied for money to go back to school. “I’m pretty old to be starting out, and it’ll be six or seven years before I get my law degree.”

“But you’ll have what you want.”

“Not everything.”

She dropped her eyes and concentrated on her baked chicken. “You’ll meet someone.”

“You sound like you don’t care.”

“Of course, I care, Kent.”

“Then why are you being stubborn about things?”

“You’re not being stubborn, too?”

“Maybe I am, but you can’t expect me to take a kid I don’t even know and pretend he’s mine when he’s not.”

“We’ve been all over this,” she interrupted him.

“It seems to me that two people who love each other could work things out.”

“Not when the third person involved ends up getting hurt.”

“I don’t want to see him hurt, Velvet. I’m not a monster.”

“I know you’re not, but you’re not connected with him the way I am, either. You haven’t watched him grow and change. He’s not the same little boy I found shivering on the sidewalk in front of my house two years ago.”

“You’ve had to make a lot of sacrifices.”

“Not really, just figure things out, that’s all.” She put down her fork. “Where are you going to school?”

“UT in Austin, I guess.”

“What does your mother say? Isn’t she expecting you to come home?”

“I guess it took the war to make me cut the apron strings, but I’m done with all that. She’s all right. Neil checks on her. He’s trying to get her to sell that big house and move to a smaller one or to an apartment. She’d be better off, and she’ll realize that eventually.”

“I’m going to have to make some decisions, too. When I moved back home, it wasn’t going to be forever.”

“Are you having trouble making ends meet?”

“Not really. The interest on the money Daddy had invested pays the taxes every year, and he had a savings account. Coralee’s been sending me money out of that for utilities. But it won’t last forever, and it would be a stretch to pay those, too, on top of groceries and clothes for Jonny and me. I can do it if I have to, though. Mr. Thomas would let me fill in downstairs on Saturday afternoons to earn a little extra.”