Mean Season. Heather Cochran

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СКАЧАТЬ to simpler, shorter conversations, and even then, he might not follow. Max would turn to me, since I was often around, to ask if I thought Beau Ray had understood something, or to try to figure out where my brother was taking a thought.

      They were talking about airplanes once, I remember. This was a few years after the accident. The three of us were sitting in the backyard when Beau Ray had suddenly looked up and pointed.

      “What’s that?” Max had asked, as Beau Ray traced his finger across something in the sky.

      I looked up. “That airplane? Is that what you’re looking at?”

      Beau Ray nodded.

      “Where do you think they’re going?” I asked him.

      “Hawaii,” Beau Ray said. He had watched a travel program a few days before with a piece on the various Hawaiian islands and the tourists who were flocking to them.

      “I don’t think that’s headed in the right direction for Hawaii,” Max had said, squinting upward. “I think it looks to be headed east of here. Maybe D.C. or even Europe or something.”

      “Hawaii,” Beau Ray said, sounding certain.

      Max looked at the plane again, before it disappeared beyond the trees. He gave a little shiver, the kind you’d miss if you weren’t watching closely.

      “You okay?” I asked him.

      “I’m not much on planes,” he said.

      “You ever been on one?” I asked him. I hadn’t.

      “I don’t think flying’s for me. I like sticking nearer to the ground.”

      “Max is taking the bus,” Beau Ray said.

      “The bus?” Max asked. “What bus?” He looked at me, lost.

      “To Hawaii,” Beau Ray said. “Everyone is going to Hawaii.”

      “I don’t get it.” Max still looked confused, but I smiled.

      “That’s one long bus ride,” I said to him. “Be sure to pack a lunch.”

      Some folks might have viewed Max Campbell’s fear of flying as a weakness, but not me. I liked him just as much for his fear, and counted myself lucky to have been sitting nearby when he’d admitted it. I liked knowing that he wasn’t about to go flying off somewhere, that I could count on him being around. Sure, maybe someday he’d disappear down the road in a car, like Vince had, but at least it would take him longer to pull away from Pinecob. Hop on a plane, and you could end up anywhere.

      Not that Max was going anywhere. By the time of Judy’s phone call, it seemed like he was almost always at the Winn-Dixie (he was an associate manager by then), and I would stop to talk with him whenever I went in. Max had been married for a little while, to a girl named Charlene who had once won the title of Miss Junior West Virginia in a beauty pageant. She’d blown in from the Northern Panhandle, and then blew out again, only a year after their wedding. It shook him something wicked. Judy’s phone call about Joshua Reed came maybe a year after Charlene had up and left, when everyone was still whispering about the torch Max carried, not dating and holding out hope she’d one day come back.

      As I said, Max didn’t seem too excited about my news, but Martha, the weekend manager was beyond ecstatic. She told everyone. I was surprised she didn’t announce it over the loudspeaker. By the end of the weekend, it seemed that everyone in Pinecob knew that I was going to have dinner with Joshua Reed—and maybe even be in the movie!

      Chapter 3

      Dinner in Virginia

      “What do you look like, Leanne?” Judy asked me. “It seems so funny to have to ask that, but I’m sure that the mental picture I’ve got is wrong. You live in L.A. long enough, and your sense of what people look like and what people are like gets all screwy.”

      So I told her how I’m pretty tall for a girl and on the skinnier side of average and about my hair being halfway between red and brown, and that it was sort of feathering past my shoulders those days. I said I was white, since I realized that she might not know, except that Leanne Gitlin always sounded like a white girl’s name to me.

      “But if I’m meeting you at the restaurant, won’t I recognize Joshua?”

      “Oh, of course. I just wanted to try to get a picture of you in my mind. Why did I have you as a bottle blonde, I wonder? I’ve got to run. I’ve asked that the driver be at your house at six forty-five. We’ll see you at the restaurant.”

      And then I was there.

      Before then, I was in the car that came to pick me up, which was a lot nicer than any car I’d ever ridden in, even the one my ex, Lionel, bought new from the dealership. And before the car came, I was getting ready, and trying to figure out what to wear. Sandy had left for the beach the day before, so she couldn’t help me, but we’d pretty much decided on a sundress that I thought looked like one on the cover of the Vogue I saw in the salon where I got my hair cut. Except that my dress had red flowers on a white background, not yellow, and mine was cotton and faded a little and I think the one in the magazine was silk and was surely brand-new.

      I looked in the mirror as I waited for my nail polish to dry. I’m pretty enough—people always say I’ve got good bones—but I’d never been pretty in the way of my sister, Susan. Even after she had three kids, strangers would still tell Susan how beautiful she was—like she might not have known, like they were the first to notice. People had never done that to me, although guys did cross bars to talk. Or at least, they crossed to talk to me and Sandy, but Sandy usually rolled her eyes and turned away, so I was the one who ended up in discussions about rebuilt car engines or Judas Priest vs. Motley Crüe. I’d nod and smile, and by the end of their talking, they’d look at me and say, “you know, you’re real pretty.” But by then, I was always unsure if it was because I’d been listening to them yammer on, or because they were tired of talking and wanted to make out, or because maybe, just maybe, I was pretty in the first place. Girls like Susan and Sandy and Max’s ex-wife Charlene didn’t have that to contend with.

      I stared into the bathroom mirror. I dug through my makeup bag and wondered whether blue or green eyeshadow would look better against brown eyes. I put on a kiss of lipstick, then wiped it off.

      I wore a lot more makeup in my teens than I was wearing at twenty-five. At thirteen or fifteen, makeup felt like magic. Wave the mascara wand, and suddenly I’d look older, more like the senior girls with their long, polished nails and cigarettes. Add lipstick, and I could imagine being the sort of girl that boys in my class whispered about, with her curvy way of walking by that would make even a football star press against the wall to let her pass. Add blush, and I might even start to resemble Brennie Critchett, who was prom queen back when I was a sophomore.

      Of course, when I got older, I realized that there were a lot of things mascara couldn’t change or fix. Maybe if I’d been the prom queen, I’d have felt differently.

      I blinked at my reflection in the mirror of the narrow upstairs bathroom. At the same age, Joshua Reed had a publicist and a fan club and a fan club president. Of course, not everyone can have such a life, or there’d be no one to run the registers at the Winn-Dixie. But I worried a little about the discrepancy between the girl in the mirror and the folks she’d meet in a few hours time.

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