Homecoming Queen, page 28
“Oh, no, don’t even think about it,” Eneida said. “It’s been such a pleasure.” She didn’t mention that the pleasure wasn’t only being with the child. The pleasure was in entertaining herself by snooping, speculating, and fantasizing.
Kenyon awoke to delicious smells of cooking food. She was a little confused at first but quickly remembered that her mommy was right next door. She was happy that she’d been allowed to sleep in her pretty shoes. Clutching her veil with one hand and holding out the other to admire the bright pink polish Miss Eneida had painted on her nails, she galloped to the kitchenette to check out breakfast. It looked very promising. Her mommy fixed cold cereal in the morning because they were always in a hurry.
“Bom dia, Kenyon.” Miss Eneida, standing at the stove flipping over a round, flat thing in a pan, cheerfully greeted her.
“Bom dia, Miss Eneida.” Kenyon mimicked, hopping up into a chair at the table.
“Very good. Muito bom. We may as well get you speaking proper Portuguese as soon as possible. Now, would you like some bacon for breakfast?”
Although quite certain she never had that before, Kenyon said, “Yes, please.”
“That’s ‘sim, por favor.’”
“Sim, por favor.”
“Muito bom. Oh, you and I are going to have so much fun.”
Miss Eneida showed Kenyon how to pour syrup all over the panquecas, and let her drink coffee. Kenyon didn’t like that stuff, but it was fun to drink out of a big person’s cup. Gobbling down the chow, she thought that maybe she better come over there every night, but then realized she’d start missing her pink princess bed, the one Uncle Sonny had given her. Maybe she could just come over for panquecas and coffee every morning.
As that idea took shape in the little girl’s mind, Mack and Llayne were next door scrambling to get him showered, dressed, and out of there before Kenyon came home.
She kissed him at the door. “Oh, Mack O’Brien, you have no idea what you’ve got yourself into. We’re going to do this a lot.” She laughed heartily.
“Promise?” he said.
Sometimes he was tender and sometimes he was a wild man, liking his sex slightly on the dangerous side, which surprised Llayne considering he’d announced his candidacy for the State Legislature. He wanted to represent the Lansing district and had the endorsement of the incumbent who was retiring after twenty years on the floor. Mack’s present boss, Congressman John Harrington, also gave his blessing. So, it would seem it was time for him to be careful.
Apparently, that thought never crossed his mind. They were at the campus library so she could study. Spring semester mid-terms were coming up and it was important that she prepare. So far her grades had been great and she didn’t want to slack off.
She’d even achieved a measure of notoriety in her Soap Opera Production class, where class members produced, wrote, directed, and acted in a semester-long soap opera that was aired daily across campus. Gone With the Breeze had become a student favorite. And she was the head writer and star actor.
Miss Eneida had given her some great ideas for story-lines taken from Brazilian tele-novellas, and Llayne loved playing the part of Harlett O’Hara, the nascent, long-lost cousin of that other O’Hara belle. Every day Llayne’s face glared out from TV sets all over campus, so she was recognized everywhere she went at Michigan State.
Already that evening on the way to the library, three students had commented to her about it. “Hey, Harlett O’Hara! Groovy, man!” “Miss Harlett! Is it really you?” and “Ain’t you that broad on TV?”
That was what got Mack going. She was innocently trying to study when he said, “Miss Harlett, let’s go into the janitor’s closet.”
“Why, Mr. O’Brien. What kind of girl do you think I am?” she mocked in her exaggerated southern accent.
“I know what kind of girl you are. That’s why I want to go into the closet with you.”
“Now, Mr. O’Brien, you wild Irish rogue, you promised that if I brought you to the library you’d be quiet so I could study.” She wagged a finger at him.
“We can be quiet in the closet. In fact, we’ll have to be, unless we want to get arrested.”
That did it. She couldn’t resist the challenge, and he knew it.
He got up first and went across the hall to slide behind the door marked “Janitor’s Closet.” She waited a minute, making certain no one was watching, then followed.
They discovered that they could make love without a peep.
The clickity-clack of the train wheels and the farmland scenes whisking by outside the window excited her. She’d never been on a train and she’d never been to Chicago.
He couldn’t believe she’d never been outside of Michigan except for that one quick trip to Indianapolis to pick up Kenyon. It thrilled him to be able to introduce her to the fabulous Windy City. They’d peruse the Field Museum, see the sights from the Sears Tower, stroll down Lake Shore Drive to take in the view of Lake Michigan, window shop along the Miracle Mile of Michigan Avenue, eat at Mulligans Public House on Roscoe Street, dance at the Rush Up on Rush Street, and make love in their room at the Clarion Hotel. He had the perfect weekend planned.
Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the wide, clean Amtrak seats, they didn’t bother to talk, being totally comfortable in one another’s presence as they trekked toward their fun destination. It was only a matter of time, however, before their sexual energy started to feed on itself, magnifying and careening off the confining walls of their bodies like an ion in an atom splitter.
“I can’t wait to get to our hotel room.” She’d meant it rhetorically as she nudged his neck with her nose.
“Why wait?” he asked, grinning his sly, cockeyed grin. “There’s nobody nearby.”
That made her laugh out loud. “Nah ah. This is where I draw the line. I’m not doing a thing - not one little thing - here on the train.”
He sighed. “Okay. If you say so. But are you sure? Not even one little thing?” He fondled her breast.
“Oh dear lord. I have to get away from you.” She laughed and put up her hands as she stood. “I’m going to get a pop. Want anything?”
“Yeah.” That grin again. “You know what I want.”
“You’re a sex maniac. Do you know that?”
“Yeah. I know that. Aren’t you lucky?”
“Yes. Yes indeed.”
She walked away with a jaunty swagger, accentuating her swaying hips, intentionally driving him crazy. Remembering a move from a stripper at Bronco Buck’s, she tossed a come-hither look over her shoulder, licked her finger, tapped it to her behind, and hissed. She was hot!
Mack chortled as he ran a hand over his eyes and peeked between his fingers to watch until she disappeared into the next car.
“What a woman.” He shook his head in disbelief and let out a low whistle. Llayne Robertson had been well worth waiting for.
CHAPTER 39
Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson soothed Mack’s nerves as he sped away from his office, their mellow voices emanating from the radio, “Sometimes heaven, sometimes hell.”
He’d been partial to country-western music ever since Vietnam and at the moment he needed his songster buddies to calm him down. The disastrous meeting he just had with his new political advisor had really pissed him off. After one brief consultation, he fired the guy’s sorry ass. He’d have to handle his campaign for the state legislature on his own.
Running the meeting over in his mind, he stewed over what the dickhead had said. First, he’d wanted to know everything about Llayne so he could ascertain whether she’d be an asset or a hindrance in the campaign. Mack had ended up telling the guy he didn’t give a fuck what he thought. He was marrying Llayne in June and that was that.
The stiff, conservative man had frowned and tried to give him a stern lecture about the importance of disclosure so he wouldn’t be hit with any surprises while running for office. He already knew that the candidate’s fiancée had been a war protester and a belly dancer and found that disturbing.
He’d said, “And worse yet, she plays a harlot on campus television. She must quit the show.”
“It’s a class,” Mack had corrected him, “and she’s not quitting. Besides, it’s funny as hell. The students love it.”
“Maybe so, Mr. O’Brien, but these students can’t help you. Most of them are too young to vote. And the ones who can vote are such hippies they don’t care.”
The asshole had the balls to insult his fiancée and his constituents, and suddenly Mack had found pleasure in thinking of how the guy would shit bricks if he knew Llayne had once worked in a strip club, let alone that she gave birth to an illegitimate baby. But those things, which she confided to him in trusting confidence, would never be known, not if he had anything to do with it. They couldn’t drag that information out of him with thumb screws. So much of what that advisor interrogated him about was nobody’s business and had nothing to do with the campaign or his ability to lead.
Besides, Mack was too savvy not to have an alternate plan in mind. Should any of that information ever become public, he’d use a novel approach for politics. He’d tell the truth. She’d been a desperate college kid who’d been taken advantage of by an older professor. He’d bank his career on being able to turn that into voter sympathy. But hopefully, it would never come to that.
“Now,” the advisor had said, “we already anticipate trouble from your former fiancee, Senator White’s daughter. She’s promised to go public with how badly she believes you treated her. Her most recent quote is, ‘He dumped me like yesterday’s trash the minute that trashy dame came along.’ She’s a real loose cannon. Can’t you do something to mollify her?”
Mack had sat there, not answering, thinking of Sarah Jane White, so beautiful and yet so vacant. He’d long since realized he’d become engaged to her because he yearned to settle down and have a family, not because he’d loved her. It’d been a mistake he realized the moment he read about Lex’s unfortunate death and had fallen all over himself to see Llayne, who still had no idea he broke his former engagement after seeing her again, not before. Sarah Jane had been an irate viper about it.
“No,” Mack said to the advisor, “there’s nothing that can be done about Sarah. We’ll work around her.”
“She would’ve been the perfect politician’s wife,” the fool made the mistake of saying. That was when Mack kicked the piss-ass punk out of his office and stormed outdoors to seek refuge in his truck with its singing cowboys.
Dust flew as he raced down the country road with the windows open, whipping his tie off as he drove and unbuttoning the top three buttons of his shirt so he could get some air. Four miles out of town and past his own stone farmhouse, he continued a mile further, turned onto another dirt road, drove another mile, and came to a small, fieldstone church. He pulled up in front, turned off the engine, and sat there admiring the place in silence, letting its peacefulness wash over him. The sight of it calmed his frazzled nerves.
It was a charming, aged house of God, well over a hundred years old. Each of the side walls contained three stained glass windows of colorful shards of glass soldered into simple, spiral flower designs. They would have been much less expensive than the traditional religious stained glass windows depicting Bible scenes but were equally inspiring, in Mack’s opinion, contrasting beautifully with the gray stone walls. The original congregation of farmers built the church with their own hands but must have pooled their meager resources to purchase the windows, which would have been brought in from a city, probably Detroit, by horse-drawn wagon. What a precarious trip that must have been.
He took a long, deep breath, felt rejuvenated, and considered that before him was a typical farm community church like so many that dotted the Michigan countryside. They were pieces of history he adored. He genuinely loved the state of his birth and had made it his personal quest to serve it and its people, finding in that mission the excitement he’d sought all his life.
Llayne understood his deep feelings toward that patch of the earth, the mitten of the lower peninsula and the upside-down lady’s boot of the upper peninsula that made up Michigan. The name itself was an Algonquian word meaning great water. Great water certainly surrounded it, all right, with shores on four of the five Great Lakes.
Every time he thought about it he was amazed at how the state had become settled. Of course, there had been the Native Americans first - Algonquian tribes like the Chippewas, Menominees, Ottawas, and Potawatomis; and the Iroquois tribe, the Wyandots - all of whom had been sorely mistreated by the government. He wanted to help them, at least what was left of them.
Then the French fur traders and missionaries had come, then the “English,” who actually consisted mostly of Irish, Scots-Irish, Dutch, German, and Polish immigrants who’d been encouraged to move west by elite East Coast officials, most of British heritage at that time, who didn’t want such “rubble” in their cosmopolitan coastal cities.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, those immigrant farmers had toiled with mules and crude tools to clear the land of forests filled with pine, maple, oak, and white birch trees, and of the gray stones so common in the area. Melting glaciers had deposited the rocks and carved out the Great Lakes on their journeys southward in prehistoric times. Once the fields were tillable, the farmers had been practical, using the wood in the interiors and the stones for the exteriors of their farmhouses, out buildings, barns, and churches.
During the present time, a church like the one in front of him seemed remote, but back then it would have been the central gathering place in the area. No more than a dozen farm families would have been needed to fill the place. No one would have been able to travel to town in the oppressive winter weather, so during that season the church would have been their only social hub. Mack was amazed and proud that those pioneers had succeeded in supporting one another as they eked sustenance out of that tough ground in tough northern weather. No wonder their church had been so important to them.
He shook his head, recalling how that obnoxious political advisor had recommended that he start attending church regularly because it would look good to the public. He’d always attended church before going to war. That was something one did because of a call from the soul, not because of how it would appear to others.
He got out of his truck and stood there taking in the soothing holy place. A large lawn rambled around the building to meet a cemetery with eroded, mossy headstones that stretched to the woods in back. The church and yard were in good repair, still having a small congregation, with a minister from town coming out each Sunday for an early service before he returned to his big church for a later service.
Mack went to the plainly carved, oak, double doors and found them unlocked. People around there still trusted one another. Inside it was cool and musty smelling, with muted rays of afternoon light filtering through the antique windows. The back wall behind a wood altar that supported a two-foot-tall wooden cross, also contained a stained glass window like those on the side walls. The cross cast a majestic shadow in front of the tinted prism of floral light.
He walked about halfway up the aisle, the pine floor welcoming each footstep with a salutary creak, and sat down, reverently running his hand along the back of the pew in front of him. More than a century ago someone’s hands, probably a farmer’s, had painstakingly made that pew.
He put his hands together, cleared his throat, and lowered his head in prayer. “Dear God, I know I haven’t talked to you in a good long while. That’s why I think it’s time for me to make amends. I don’t know if you remember me from the war in Vietnam, but I took your name in vain a lot. I also prayed to you a lot, but I’m pretty sure you didn’t hear me.
“Anyway, I haven’t been in touch since, and I want you to know how much I appreciate the blessings you’ve given me recently. This woman and this child who have been put into my care are blessings like none I’ve ever known.
“And, Lex, I have no doubt you’re up there. I want to thank you, too, my friend, for the wonderful gifts you’ve given me in Llayne and Kenyon. I know that if you were here, they would be yours now and forevermore. I’m so very sorry for what happened to you. But seeing that it did happen, and seeing that your two girls are willing to accept me into their lives, I promise you that I will do everything in my power to provide for them and protect them until the end of my days.
“You and I know what it means for soldiers to look out for each other, to depend on each other, to have each other’s backs. That I will do for you, just as I know you did for so many others with your kindness and generosity.
“I don’t know if it was divine intervention or my own stupidity that put you and Llayne together, but you were so good to her. Thank you for that. You know, I put off my feelings for her in college, telling myself she was too young for me and she wasn’t ready for a man like me. Now I know how well I lied to myself. I wasn’t ready for her. But I am now. I want you to know that. She has given me new energy, new life, new purpose.
“Tomorrow we will say our marriage vows here in this church. But Lex, I’m making a vow to you right now: I promise to love and cherish Llayne and Kenyon for the rest of my days.
“Amen.”
Bathed in absolute peace, he slowly raised his head. A bright beam of light pulsated through the stained glass window behind the altar as Mack O’Brien’s face took on a aura of awe, reflecting the surge of renewed faith he felt that there was a God.
Fifteen minutes later, after allowing himself to silently sit on the pew and assimilate what seemed to him like generations of love and support emanating from the old place of worship, he went outside. With his face to the sky, he said, “Oh, by the way, God and Lex, if either one of you fellows can help me learn patience, I’d appreciate it. It’d be good if I didn’t lose my temper and beat the living daylights out of some ignorant asshole during my campaign, like I wanted to do with my former campaign manager.” He gave them a salute and hopped into his truck to drive home.
