Unexpected Dismounts (4 page)

He opened his mouth, obviously to protest, but I said quickly, “You better go get your stuff together. We’ve got to get home so you can finish your homework before we head out with Chief.”

The smile sprang back to his face and he raised a hand to high-five Miss O’Hare.

“Right back at ya,” she said, but he was already on his way down the aisle, one of his “women” Velcroed to each side. Maybe the momentary storm on his face had just been my imagination.

Owen also took his leave, still remarking to everyone along the way at the fathoms which Desmond’s artistic talent reached. Whether they were interested or not.

“So, Miss Chamberlain.”

I turned back to Miss O’Hare. “Please—it’s Allison.”

“Hence the ‘Big Al’ nickname,” she said.

“I’m just grateful it isn’t anything worse.”

“Are you serious? He loves you. But, listen, while I have you alone …”

My antennae sprang up. “This can’t be good.”

“It isn’t ‘bad.’” She grimaced slightly. “I just wish he were doing as well in my class as he is in art.”

“Is he still drawing pictures when he’s supposed to be reading?” I said. “We’ve talked about that. Well,
I’ve
talked.”

“No, we’re okay there.”

“Look, I know he thinks he can charm his way out of anything, so if that’s it, I can …”

She was shaking her head, no easy task with fifteen pounds of tresses to drag along. “Desmond and I have an understanding about that. Don’t tell him, but I sort of like it when he tries to butter me up. Trust me, in this job, his are some of the kindest words I hear all day. I take what I can get.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Two things actually.” She held up a Sharpie-stained index finger. “One, he’s at a disadvantage because he doesn’t have the history background most of the other kids have just by virtue of growing up here. Somehow he missed out on all the field trips in elementary school, and he says his biological mother never took him to the Oldest School House or even the fort.”

“She never took him out of West King Street,” I said. “And it’s been all I can do to get him to the dentist and the barber and the pediatrician.”

She was nodding. “You’re obviously doing a wonderful job with him.”

“Just not good enough.”

I started to rake my hand through my hair and realized too late that I was still wearing my bandanna as a do-rag. I knocked it off the back of my head, spastically tried to catch it, and bumped the heel of my hand against my forehead. I had an immediate visual of a three-inch smear of black ash collecting in the folds of my brow. Erin O’Hare had the good grace to act like she didn’t notice.

“If you have a chance, just hit a few of the historical high spots with him,” she said.

“I can do that. I actually used to be a carriage-tour guide.”

“Then you could probably teach
me
a few things.”

I stopped short of telling her there was a fat chance of that, since I had neither a college degree nor her command of the English language. I was still wondering what
physiognomic
meant.

She was holding up a second finger. “The other thing is Desmond sometimes seems distracted, not by the other kids, but by whatever’s going on inside his head.” She gave a frustrated shrug. “I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but he’ll just seem especially anxious and then he’ll withdraw. It’s only started happening recently, and then other days, he’s his usual outrageous self. Have you seen that at home at all?”

I tilted my head in thought. The only thing similar I’d seen was just a few minutes before, when he saw the drawing of Mr. Eye Patch on the wall.

“Well, in any case,” she said, “it’s something to think about. I only mention it because I know you’re going through the adoption process, and I would hate to see bad grades go against you.”

Speaking of anxious. “Do they look at that?” I said.

“I don’t know, but just in case.”

“I’m on it,” I said.

“If you need anything, anything at all, you know where to find me.” She patted my arm. “But I think you know him better than anybody.”

Was that true, I wondered as I went off to pry Desmond away from his female devotees. Because at the moment, in terms of his bottomless depth, I wasn’t sure I’d plumbed more than a couple of inches.

I planned to run that by Chief, the way I did most things Desmond. I thought that evening’s ride out to the beach—Chief’s way of making up for missing Desmond’s art show—might be the perfect opportunity.

Silly woman.

In the first place, whenever Chief was around, Desmond never let more than a few inches of space exist between them. The minute Chief turned into Palm Row, Desmond was out the side door, over the porch rail, and across the lane to Chief’s parking spot in front of the garage before the man pulled into it. Granted, the street was only four houses long, but Desmond did have getting to the garage in seven seconds down to a science. Or, in his case, an art form.

I joined them at a more sedate pace, carrying Desmond’s gloves, scarf, and toboggan cap.

“I don’t need all that, Big Al,” he said, predictably. “I got my leathers.”

“They aren’t going to keep your fingers from freezing off,” I said, and pressed his gloves into his hand.

He looked at Chief, who was wearing not only gloves but a turtleneck that nearly reached the bottom of his helmet.

“I ain’t no wimp,” Desmond said. “I’m only doin’ this ’cause you won’t let me ride ’less I do.”

“That is absolutely correct,” I said. “You’ll thank me when that ocean air starts biting your face.”

He whipped his head, which now looked three times smaller with the cap pulled over his hair, toward Chief. “You ain’t playin’ with me now, Mr. Chief. We for real ridin’ all the way to the beach.”

“All the way. We can’t ride on the sand tonight because it’s high tide, but we’ll take A1A to Marineland and back.”

“Sa-weet,” Desmond whispered. It was the kind of awe a person usually reserved for rock stars and mountain ranges, neither of which Desmond had ever seen in person. Erin O’Hare was right: He did need to get out more.

Desmond climbed on with Chief and leaned back on the “sissy bar” Chief had recently installed so the kid wouldn’t drop off the back. I had to admit, as I followed them on the Classic out of Palm Row and onto Artillery Lane, that Desmond appeared to be in perfect sync with Chief. He leaned only when Chief and the Road King did, anticipating nothing, and kept his hands clamped to the sides of Chief’s jacket. When they eased over the far side of the Bridge of Lions and into the relative darkness of Anastasia Island, it would have been easy to mistake them for one rider.

Anastasia was a barrier island, shielding the mainland from the brunt of the ocean’s force. As the long curve onto State Road A1A brought the crests of the Atlantic into view, I started to feel a little protected myself, at least from the brunt of the day behind me. Both the beam from the St. Augustine Lighthouse and the glow of the silver-coin moon sparkled on the water, rendering its inky blackness friendly. And I could smell the brine and the fish and the sea grass. One of the things I loved most about riding a motorcycle was breathing in the life scents that were hidden like secrets from people closed up in cars.

It was easy at times like that to feel like I might get this Harley-riding thing down. It hadn’t come naturally to me, the way it had to Chief and Hank and Leighanne and Nita and just about everybody else I knew who’d ever fired up a hog. But tonight I felt confident on the Classic, floating over the causeway south of Pellicer Creek with the Atlantic roiling on one side and the Intracoastal Waterway rippling in relative calm on the other. For a moment I felt more like still water than a restless sea.

Yeah. Until I followed Chief and Desmond into a now-deserted parking area at the Fort Matanzas Monument, rounded the curve, and felt the bike slide. There was no changing her mind. Even as I was going down, thigh meeting the pavement, I wondered crazily what a mini–sand dune was doing this far back from the beach.

Chief squatted beside me. “You all right?”

I had no idea, unless
mortified
was the same as
not all right,
in which case I was half-dead.

“Hey—I said, are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just help me up.”

“Right after I get this bike off you.”

Well, yes, my 760-pound motorcycle
was
halfway on top of me. There was that.

Chief squatted with his back toward the seat, gripped the back fender and the lower handlebar, and raised the whole thing with his butt, at least as far as I could tell, without so much as bulging a vein. That probably took all of about twenty seconds, but by then I’d determined that the only thing hurt was my riding esteem.

“You done took a dive, Big Al,” Desmond said.

“Ya think?” I said.

Chief let down the kickstand and squatted again to look over the bike. “Tell him what happened, Classic.”

I folded my arms so Desmond couldn’t see them shaking. “I used the front brake and not the rear.”

“Kinda weird, huh, how you know what you doin’ wrong but you do it anyway.” Desmond gave a sage, helmet-clad nod. “That happen to me
all
the time.”

Chief stood up and dusted the sand from his gloves. “You bent your back rest, but other than that—”

“My what?” I said.

Chief slanted his eyes briefly toward Desmond and back to me. “Your sissy bar,” he said between his teeth.

“Hey,” Desmond said. “Don’t be callin’ it that, Mr. Chief, sir. I ain’t no sissy. Matter of fact, I could ride without that thing, ’cause I got me some serious balance. Sissies don’t got no balance.”

“Thanks,” Chief said to me.

I needed to brush up on my Harley-equipment terminology.

“Can we just walk down to the beach?” I said.

“She tryin’ to get outta that lecture you ’bout to give her, Mr. Chief,” Desmond said.

He took off ahead of us, bouncing back and forth between the
railings on the wooden walk that wended its long way down to the
dunes. Chief folded his fingers around my upper arm and pulled me along beside him.

“I’m going to get one anyway, aren’t I?” I said.

“One what?”

“Lecture.”

“Yep.”

“I
know
what I did wrong.”

Chief slanted a glance at me. Another one of those mannerisms I could have recharged my phone with. “You don’t want to know what you did right?”

“That would be a first.”

“Once you go into a slide like that, you can’t stop it. So you let it go and go down with it.”

“That’s what I did, all right,” I said. “Will you be less impressed if I tell you I didn’t do it on purpose?”

“Basically, you have to feel the bike, sense what it’s going to do.”

“Feel it,” I said. Wonderful, seeing how my feelings had always been the last thing I could trust.

We reached the first landing on the walkway, just before it turned and buried its last steps in the dune. Below us, Desmond chased the ocean back from the sand and then turned and ran like a spindly-legged fawn to keep it from nipping at his heels. Fortunately, he’d already parked the boots up near the grass and stripped out of his leather pants, but his jeans were water-darkened from the knee down. I could hear his shrieks over the surf.

“I bet you’ve never dumped a bike in your life,” I said, still watching Desmond cavort.

“I’ve had my share of unexpected dismounts.”

I grinned at Chief. “How is it that a lawyer can make the lamest thing sound acceptable?”

“It came in handy when I was a public defender,” he said.

He didn’t grin back. Chief seldom parted with a smile. But the mirth was in his eyes as he gave my face a perusal.

“There are two kinds of riders, Classic,” he said. “Those who
have
dumped a bike, and those who
will
. Now you know which category you fall into.”

Yeah. I’d heard that before.

“So does this mean I’ve reached my quota and I’m good to go?” I said.

“It means you need to stick with me and I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

Yes. Please.

We now had very little moonlight between us, just enough for me to see that Chief was looking at my lips. Close enough to make it safe for me to close my eyes—

“Hey, Big Al! I just seen a shark!”

“Really?” I could feel Chief’s breath on my mouth. “
Really?”

I backed away to lean over the railing. Desmond was flailing an arm toward the black horizon and dancing in the shallows like a marionette with a couple of strings missing.

“How could you see a shark?” I yelled to him. “It’s dark as pitch out there.”

“I seen it! It had a—”

The rest was lost in the crash of a wave that took him down and washed him, sputtering, up onto the beach. Chief emitted a rare guffaw.

“He can’t swim,” I said, and made a move toward the steps, but Chief caught my sleeve. “He’s fine. He’s too ornery to drown.”

Desmond was indeed back on his feet and again gesticulating at imaginary fins. I looked up at Chief, but the moment had passed. It had a way of doing that. One kiss on Christmas Eve was the extent of our physical relationship so far. The way my neck was burning under my scarf … maybe that was a good thing.

“Let’s walk,” I said.

Chief let go of my sleeve and followed me down to the beach, though he might as well have thrown me over his shoulder. Just being on the same planet with the man made me positive he could hear me thinking,
Come over here and—do—something
. His face that near me, his eyes seeing into me that way—it was a miracle I hadn’t crawled inside his jacket, Desmond or no Desmond.

Or not. Because in all truth, I couldn’t. Not with the risk of Chief backing up and saying, “Are you serious? Is that what you thought this was?”

I stumbled into the sand and almost had an—what did he call them?—unexpected dismount right there. We were in serious need of a topic change.

“Desmond!” I called over the wave smashing. “We’re
walk
ing, we’re
walk
ing.”