Shy (15 page)

I crossed the street to our rival bank and opened a checking account, throwing in all my money, except for a couple of grand which I thought I might need for the upcoming road trip to Indiana. Back on the street, I took a final glance at my old bank and breathed in a healthy gulp of morning air. Turning my back on the last three years of my life, I hopped on the bus, since Frank still had the car, and headed home. And while I headed home, I cogitated.

Three months ago I had a job but no Frank. Now, I had Frank but no job. It didn’t take me long to figure out which scenario I liked best. Jobs were everywhere. Men too, but not like Frank. Even being suddenly thrust among the ranks of the unemployed, I couldn’t find a whole lot to complain about.

Oddly, I couldn’t scrape up much anger at Jerry for setting the wheels in motion for
getting
me fired. In fact, I forgave him completely. Now I was free to help Frank take care of his dad. That topped everything else that was on my plate at the moment. Should I tell Jerry his nefarious plan had backfired? Naw. Let him think he had ruined my life forever, getting me canned and all. It was something he could ponder and regret and feel ashamed about in his old age, never knowing he had actually done me a favor. Can I be a bitch, or what?

Thank heavens I’d had some money in the bank to fall back on. That made all the cogitating and all the figuring and all the snide forgiving considerably less stressful. Even I was smart enough to admit that.

And just to reassure me that
everything
in life doesn’t change at the drop of a hat, back at the apartment God had arranged for Pedro to take a poop on the ottoman.

What a guy. Is God
thorough
,
or what?

F
RANK
and I paid our little old lady neighbor, Miss Wiggins, who also happened to be the apartment manager, two months’ rent in advance. We put our houseplants into her care too, which seemed to bring home to her the fact that we were really leaving, so she cried over us and told us to hurry back and to be sure to keep our eyes peeled because the world was positively
packed
with serial killers waiting to pounce on unsuspecting travelers (she’d seen it on
60 Minutes
). We put a hold on the newspaper, phoned the utility company to give them a heads-up we’d be out of town, then loaded the car with everything we thought we might need on the trip, which was a depressing amount of stuff. We practically made ourselves sick polishing off two gallons of milk so it wouldn’t spoil in the fridge while we were gone, packed up Pedro’s toys, his doggie bed, an industrial-sized squirt bottle filled with spray cleaner, and a dozen rolls of paper towels in case Pedro decided to poop his way across country, and we were on the road by nightfall, worn out before we ever left town.

Taking turns behind the wheel, and driving nonstop, it took us three days to reach the Indiana state line. It also took five and a half tanks of gas, eighteen drive-thru orders of cheeseburgers and fries, six blow jobs (just to keep the driver awake, you know, plus the passenger has to do
something
to stave off boredom), a box and a half of doggie chews, most of the paper towels, and about a quart of spray cleaner to clean off the back seat, which we did exactly twenty-nine times. I counted. Poop? Don’t even ask.

And when he wasn’t pooping, Pedro barked. He barked the whole way.

We rolled up to Joseph Wells’s front gate, unbathed, unshaved, and bleary-eyed with fatigue at the very crack of a rose-red Indiana dawn. Our ears were stuffed with wads of paper towels because Pedro was
still
barking. There was a trail of weary steam dribbling out from under the hood of the Toyota and something in the motor was pecking like a woodpecker. The oil light was flashing as I switched off the ignition. Not a good sign. I figured I had killed my car, and if Pedro didn’t shut up pretty soon he was going to be next.

I looked over at Frank and his face was beaming. I took a moment to appreciate how butch he looked with three days growth of black stubble peppering his face; then he leaned across the seat, gave me a quick kiss on the lips, and practically
sprang
from the car. I don’t know how he did it. I could barely move. My ass seemed to have bonded to the seat cushion.

Frank’s dad was already up when we pulled in the front gate. He was milking the cows, or so Frank said, since he could see a light burning in the barn. Can you believe it? Milking the cows? At five in the morning? Off in the distance, I could see a guy waving at us from the barn door. He had a bucket in his hand.

Golly, I thought, rural America is just like it’s played in the movies. This should be fun.

Then, like a bolt of lightning zapping me in the head from on high, I experienced my first full-blown panic attack about what I was getting myself into here. I grabbed an empty potato chip bag off the floorboard and started breathing into it. In. Out. In. Out. What in God’s name was I thinking? Milking cows at five in the morning? Slopping hogs? Pulling on hip boots and wading through a gelatinous parfait of animal poop before breakfast every day? Frank was right. I
am
a city boy. A city boy through and through. I don’t like animal poop. Pedro notwithstanding. There’s a world of difference between a cute little pile of Chihuahua droppings and the quantity of waste material that squirts out of the back end of a six hundred-pound cow. And I have a low threshold for nausea. I could lap up semen all day, if Frank’s the supplier, but one spoonful of mayonnaise makes me barf. Go figure.

“That’s not Pop,” Frank said, sticking his head back through the car window. I could hear the worry in his voice. “That guy in the barn door. That’s not Pop.”

Frank took off with Pedro hot on his heels. They were both running for the barn while I was still groaning and cussing and trying to peel my cramped foot off the gas pedal and scoot my atrophied ass off the car seat. I had several potential disasters running around inside my head simultaneously. I was worried about Frank’s dad, afraid I was crippled for life since my legs didn’t seem to be working and my ass felt like a lump of lead, upset because Frank was concerned about the stranger in the barn, sorry I had maybe murdered my car by driving it nonstop for three days, still a little bit panicked about being unemployed, and fearful that Pedro would get eaten by a hog or some other cantankerous farm animal before I could limp my way across the barnyard to protect him.

Suddenly, social anxiety disorder was the least of my problems.

And what was that sound I heard in the distance? Chickens? That’s what it sounded like. Chickens. Lots and lots of chickens. This was not good. Unless they’ve been plucked and breaded and run through a deep fryer, I hate chickens. I don’t even like canaries. Little beady eyes. Feathers. Pointy, clackety toenails. Who gives a shit if they can sing? They freak me out. I didn’t even want to
think
about what I would do among an entire herd of chickens.

But more important than all these other disastrous scenarios I found myself conjuring up, there was one that stood out above all the rest. That was this: Just why the hell was Frank now hugging that guy in the barn door if it wasn’t his dad, and why did the guy suddenly look so young and handsome and brawny and why, oh why, did the guy’s hands seem to be inching pretty damn close to Frank’s ass?

That got my blood pumping, don’t think it didn’t. I was out of the car and shuffling my way toward the barn on my numb-ass legs before the cock crowed.

So to speak.

Chapter 9

I
TOOK
a detour on my way to the barn to rescue Pedro from a face-off with a pack of wild dogs, or maybe they lived there: I didn’t know, and Pedro obviously didn’t care
where
they lived, he just wanted to kick some ass after being trapped inside a moving vehicle for three days. He didn’t care how big the dogs were. Or how
many
there were, for that matter. Chihuahuas are kind of stupid that way. Anyway, by the time I scooped him up and made my way to the barn door, Frank was gone. The hugger with the wandering hands was still standing there, watching me approach.

I hated the guy at first glance. To begin with, he was younger than me. It’s easy to hate people who are younger than you. Everyone does it, whether they admit it or not. Secondly, the guy was handsome enough to turn heads in the dark. Blond hair, pale blue eyes, a creamy complexion with rosy cheeks that any woman in the world would happily kill for. He had a buffed-up body that was stuffed very nicely into a pair of faded jeans and a green Dickies work shirt with the sleeves torn off. The guy’s arms were bulging with muscles and smothered in blond hair and his biceps rolled around like croquet balls when he moved. They were yummy. If I didn’t already hate the guy, I would have found those biceps very, very appealing.

He stuck his hand out. The one not holding the bucket. “So here’s the lucky fella.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that, but it didn’t sound too threatening so I took the hand he offered and gave it a cautious shake. Cautious, because I wasn’t sure where that hand had been. On a cow’s nipple, I presumed. Or more than one. I was pretty sure that cows had several. The guy
was
holding a bucket of milk, after all, and standing in a barn door. I vaguely wondered if there was anything like a bottle of hand sanitizer lying around the place.

I was just curious and jealous and pissed off enough at the way this total stranger had hugged Frank two minutes earlier (it certainly looked like they had been in each other’s arms before) that my fears of social contact were pretty well obliterated. I tried to ignore a blob of excrement that had somehow managed to adhere to the tip of my ninety-dollar penny loafer as I wended my way across the barnyard. I wasn’t sure what manner of livestock the excrement exuded from, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Poop is poop, no matter how you slice it. With a concerted effort, I tore my mind away from my damned shoe and pointedly asked, “Um. Who might you be?”

His grip on my hand tightened, but in a friendly way. “Jeff Moody. You’re Tom, right? Frank told me all about you.”

“He did?” I asked, sounding stupid even to myself.

“Yeah. Over the phone. He talks about you a lot.”

Apparently these two had been in communication with each other and I hadn’t even known it. Suddenly, an errant glob of poop on my shoe didn’t seem like such a big deal. It was funny that Frank had never mentioned he had a hunky friend back in Indiana, or that they spoke on the phone on a regular basis, or that the guy looked as good as he did in a pair of faded blue jeans. And judging by the outline of a fine-looking dick etched beneath the worn denim covering his crotch, he was the type of guy who never wears underwear either. Seemed to me, Frank should have mentioned these things. Perhaps not about the dick, but the other stuff would have been good to know.

Moody took it upon himself to fill in the silent, echoing, cavernous hole I had left in the conversation while I pondered these revelations. “I’d like to hate your guts, Tom, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. You’ve been a good friend to Frank, and more than a friend, I guess, but I can’t hold it against you. I
won’t
hold it against you. Especially now. Frank’s going to need you more than ever.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, still sounding stupid.

“To help him take care of the farm, of course. It’s only a one-man job for Joe, but for anybody else it’d take two. Nobody works as hard as Joe does. Nobody would
want
to.” Moody leaned in close. I caught a whiff of spearmint gum. Smelled nice. “Don’t you know what I’m talking about? You look a little lost.”

“Huh?” Apparently I was getting stupider by the minute.

I jumped when Moody slapped himself in the forehead hard enough to kill a cat. I could actually hear his brain ricocheting around inside his brainpan from the impact. “Well, no, I guess you
don’t
know,” he said, more to himself than to me. “How the hell could you? It’s Frank’s dad. He took a turn for the worse last night. That’s why I’m here. He called and asked me to help him out by milking his cows this morning. Joe loves to milk his cows. Talks to them like they’re people. I knew that if he needed help doing
that
, then he was in pretty bad shape. And he was. I wanted to call an ambulance when I got here, but he wouldn’t let me. I hadn’t seen Joe for a few weeks. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I got a good look at him this morning. He must have lost thirty pounds. I’m no doctor, but it looks like cancer to me. Has Frank told you anything about that?”

I shook my head. “Frank knew something was up, but he wasn’t sure what. His dad wouldn’t talk to him about it. Frank suspected though. And yeah, he thinks it’s cancer too. Lung cancer maybe. Where’s his dad now? Where’d Frank go?”

“Joe’s laid up in his bed. I’m not even sure he can walk, Tom. He’s awful weak. I sent Frank off to see him.” Moody set the milk bucket aside and wiped his hands on the sides of his shirt. “Come on. I’ll take you to them.”