‘Can I carry some ice?’ Kyra asked.
‘I guess, but don’t frizzicate yourself,’ George said, and carefully put a five-pound bag of ice into Ki’s outstretched arms.
‘Frizzicate,’ Kyra said, giggling. She began walking toward the trailer, where Mattie was just coming out. John was behind her and regarding her with the eyes of a gutshot beagle. ‘Mommy, look! I’m frizzicating!’
I took the other bag. ‘I know the icebox is outside, but don’t they keep a padlock on it?’
‘I am friends with most padlocks,’ George said.
‘Oh. I see.’
‘Mike! Catch!’ John tossed a red Frisbee. It floated toward me, but high. I jumped for it, snagged it, and suddenly Devore was back in my head: What’s wrong with you, Rogette? You never used to throw like a girl Get him!
I looked down and saw Ki looking up. ‘Don’t think about sad stuff,’ she said.
I smiled at her, then flipped her the Frisbee. ‘Okay, no sad stuff. Go on, sweetheart. Toss it to your mom. Let’s see if you can.’
She smiled back, turned, and made a quick, accurate flip to her mother — the toss was so hard that Mattie almost flubbed it. Whatever else Kyra Devore might have been, she was a Frisbee champion in the making.
Mattie tossed the Frisbee to George, who turned, the tail of his absurd brown suitcoat flaring, and caught it deftly behind his back. Mattie laughed and applauded, the hem of her top flirting with her navel.
‘Showoff!’ John called from the steps.
‘Jealousy is such an ugly emotion,’ George said to Rommie Bissonette, and flipped him the Frisbee. Rommie floated it back to John, but it went wide and bonked off the side of the trailer. As John hurried down the steps to get it, Mattie turned to me. ‘My boombox is on the coffee-table in
the living room, along with a stack of CDs. Most of them are pretty old, but at least it’s music. Will you bring them out?’
‘Sure.’
I went inside, where it was hot in spite of three strategically placed fans working overtime. I looked at the grim, mass-produced furniture, and at Mattie’s rather noble effort to impart some character: the van Gogh print that should not have looked at home in a trailer kitchenette but did, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks over the sofa, the tie-dyed curtains that would have made Jo laugh.
There was a bravery here that made me sad for her and furious at Max Devore all over again. Dead or not, I wanted to kick his ass.
I went into the living room and saw the new Mary Higgins Clark on the sofa end-table with a bookmark sticking out of it. Lying beside it in a heap were a couple of little-girl hair ribbons —
something about them looked familiar to me, although I couldn’t remember ever having seen Ki wearing them. I stood there a moment longer, frowning, then grabbed the boombox and CDs and went back outside. ‘Hey, guys,’ I said. ‘Let’s rock.’
I was okay until she danced. I don’t know if it matters to you, but it does to me. I was okay until she danced. After that I was lost.
We took the Frisbee around to the rear of the house, partly so we wouldn’t piss off any funeral-bound townies with our rowdiness and good cheer, mostly because Mattie’s back yard was a good place to play — level ground and low grass. After a couple of missed catches, Mattie kicked off her party-shoes, dashed barefoot into the house, and came back in her sneakers. After that she was a lot better.
We threw the Frisbee, yelled insults at each other, drank beer, laughed a lot. Ki wasn’t much on the catching part, but she had a phenomenal arm for a kid of three and played with gusto. Rommie had set the boombox up on the trailer’s back step, and it spun out a haze of late-eighties and early-nineties music: U2, Tears for Fears, the Eurythmics, Crowded House, A Flock of Seagulls, Ah-Hah, the Bangles, Melissa Etheridge, Huey Lewis and the News. It seemed to me that I knew every song, every riff.
We sweated and sprinted in the noon light. We watched Mattie’s long, tanned legs flash and listened to the bright runs of Kyra’s laughter. At one point Rommie Bissonette went head over heels, all the change spilling out of his pockets, and John laughed until he had to sit down. Tears rolled from his eyes. Ki ran over and plopped on his defenseless lap. John stopped laughing in a hurry. ‘Ooofl’ he cried, looking at me with shining, wounded eyes as his bruised balls no doubt tried to climb back inside his body.
‘Kyra Devore!’ Mattie cried, looking at John apprehensively.
‘I taggled my own quartermack,’ Ki said proudly.
John smiled feebly at her and staggered to his feet. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You did. And the ref calls fifteen yards for squashing.’
‘Are you okay, man?’ George asked. He looked concerned, but his voice was grinning.
‘I’m fine,’ John said, and spun him the Frisbee. It wobbled feebly across the yard. ‘Go on, throw.
Let’s see whatcha got.’
The thunder rumbled louder, but the black clouds were all still west of us; the sky overhead remained a harmless humid blue. Birds still sang and crickets hummed in the grass. There was a heat-shimmer over the barbecue, and it would soon be time to slap on John’s New York steaks. The Frisbee still flew, red against the green of the grass and trees, the blue of the sky. I was still in lust,
but everything was still all right — men are in lust all over the world and damned near all of the time, and the icecaps don’t melt. But she danced, and everything changed.
It was an old Don Henley song, one driven by a really nasty guitar riff.
‘Oh God, I love this one,’ Mattie cried. The Frisbee came to her. She caught it, dropped it, stepped on it as if it were a hot red spot falling on a nightclub stage, and began to shake. She put her hands first behind her neck and then on her hips and then behind her back. She danced standing with the toes of her sneakers on the Frisbee. She danced without moving. She danced as they say in that song — like a wave on the ocean.
‘The government bugged the men’s room
in the local disco lounge,
And all she wants to do is dance, dance . . .
To keep the boys from selling
all the weapons they can scrounge,
And all she wants to do, all she wants to do is dance.’
Women are sexy when they dance — incredibly sexy — but that wasn’t what I reacted to, or how I reacted. The lust I was coping with, but this was more than lust, and not copeable. It was something that sucked the wind out of me and left me feeling utterly at her mercy. In that moment she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, not a pretty woman in shorts and a middy top dancing in place on a Frisbee, but Venus revealed. She was everything I had missed during the last four years, when I’d been so badly off I didn’t know I was missing anything. She robbed me of any last defenses I might have had. The age difference didn’t matter. If I looked to people like my tongue was hanging out even when my mouth was shut, then so be it. If I lost my dignity, my pride, my sense of self, then so be it. Four years on my own had taught me there are worse things to lose.
How long did she stand there, dancing? I don’t know. Probably not long, not even a minute, and then she realized we were looking at her, rapt — because to some degree they all saw what I saw and felt what I felt. For that minute or however long it was, I don’t think any of us used much oxygen.
She stepped off the Frisbee, laughing and blushing at the same time, confused but not really uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just . . . I love that song.’
‘All she wants to do is dance,’ Rommie said.
‘Yes, sometimes that’s all she wants,’ Mattie said, and blushed harder than ever. ‘Excuse me, I have to use the facility.’ She tossed me the Frisbee and then dashed for the trailer.
I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself back to reality, and saw John doing the same thing.
George Kennedy was wearing a mildly stunned expression, as if someone had fed him a light sedative and it was finally taking effect.
Thunder rumbled. This time it did sound closer.
I skimmed the Frisbee to Rommie. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think I’m in love,’ he said, and then seemed to give himself a small mental shake — it was a thing you could see in his eyes. ‘I also think it’s time we got going on those steaks if we’re going to eat outside. Want to help me?’