The Steep and Thorny Way(81)
“I forgive you,” I said instead. “I know in the woods, when I was hurrying you to get dressed, I said I didn’t. But I do.”
He stiffened his jaw and gulped with a swallow I was able to hear. With a voice that came out as a sigh of relief, he breathed the words “Thank you.”
I laid the palm of my left hand on the leatherette seat between us. The man across the street hammered away, and another car whooshed by, whizzing a hot gust of air past my face.
“You swear you’ll take me to jazz clubs?” I asked.
“I swear.” He spread his hand over mine. “We’ll have a rollicking good time.”
“That would . . .” My voice caught in my throat. “That would be the bee’s knees.”
We both snickered at my use of goofy modern slang, and then Joe slid across the seat and wrapped both his arms around me. I pressed my cheek against his shoulder and closed my eyes, and we sat like that in his Model T for a good long while, out in the open where anyone who hated us could have seen us, but we just didn’t care.
I breathed in the clean scent of his shirt, and he cupped a hand around the back of my head, and I relived it all—our plotting in the woods, our escape through the darkening trees, the encounter with the Wittens, the Klan, the cross, the torches, the noose. He squeezed me close against him, nestling his face in the crook of my neck, and I passed through all that darkness and came out to a place warm and safe and bright with sunlight. A place in which I sat in a car with a friend, with the sun shining down on my head and loving arms clasped around me.
JOE DROVE US PAST THAT FALLEN OAK AGAIN AND steered us through the sites of both his accident with Daddy and mine with Sheriff Rink. We didn’t say one word to each other; we just blasted through the ghosts of the wreckage.
He and Uncle Clyde helped carry me back into the house and parked me on the sofa with my half-drawn pencil sketch still waiting for me.
Joe leaned down and kissed the top of my head. “I’ll see you in Seattle.”
I grabbed his hand. “Stay true to yourself, Joe. Always. No matter what happens. Please, promise me that.”
He opened his mouth, as though about to say something in response, but then he nodded and stood upright.
He left our house, and an empty hollow spread throughout my chest, even though, deep down, I knew I’d see him again. Our tale did not end in tragedy.
TWO WEEKS LATER, MAMA AND UNCLE CLYDE PACKED as many of our belongings as possible in the Buick, and we locked up Mama’s family’s beautiful yellow house. Uncle Clyde would be back in less than a week to arrange for the transportation of the furniture, as well as to try to rent out the place so we wouldn’t need to sell it just yet—in case the laws changed and the Klan died down in the near future. No burning crosses sprang up in our yard, and no one bothered us in the middle of the night, but at church we heard rumors of continued Klan congregations.
I sat in the backseat of the car, crammed between the heat of the traveling bags and the bulk of our bedding, with my cast sticking out at an awkward angle over pillows and blankets. In the front seat, Mama held a crate of kitchen supplies in her lap, with other dishes and toiletries rattling around her ankles. After cranking the engine to a start, Uncle Clyde wedged himself in, beside a pile of winter coats, in front of the steering wheel. He drove us down the driveway, past leaves the shade of banned Paulissen wine.
Over my shoulder, the house’s canary-colored siding and my bedroom window disappeared behind the trees. I no longer saw the porch where I had lounged on the swing and the rails and sipped lemonade with Laurence and Fleur in the afterglow of our adventures. My throat thickened.
“Can we please hurry to Fleur’s?” I asked Uncle Clyde before he turned onto the highway. “Just to see for sure?”
“I telephoned her mother once more last night,” said Mama over the hum of the engine. “Polly still wasn’t sure she wanted Fleur heading up there.”
“I don’t want her stuck in this place if Elston doesn’t get any better. Please”—I grabbed hold of the seat in front of me—“let’s at least stop by to check. I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye.”
Uncle Clyde steered us up the drive to Fleur’s house, and this time we didn’t see any gangs of armed and glowering boys huddled around the old Ford truck. My stepfather pulled the sedan beside the parked and empty vehicle, and we all turned our faces toward the house.
“I’ll get out and talk to Polly,” said Mama, shifting toward her door.
“No”—Uncle Clyde grabbed her arm—“wait.”
A second later, Laurence pushed open the screen door and blew out to the porch with the metal thwacking shut behind him. He leaned his elbows against the porch rail and rubbed his chin against his left shoulder, as though his face itched. He didn’t look any one of us in the eye.
I shook my head, confused. Fear shot though my gut. Paranoia of another Klan ambush turned my breathing shallow.
A moment later, the screen door whisked open again, and Fleur traipsed outside, lugging two canvas suitcases and a bouquet of flowers the pale pink of spun sugar. I sat up straight and watched her skip down the steps of the porch with a cherry-red cloche covering her yellow hair.
Her mama came out behind her and called out, “Just through August, and then you’re to come back home.”