Baby, You're Mine

In the window, Phoebe’s ghostly reflection watched him, blurred with her movement as she vanished.

He let his hand drop to his side and turned to face his empty kitchen. At the front of the house, the screen door slapped shut, a soft, summer sound. He followed her out to the porch.

“Cooler out here,” she said, sinking onto the swing.

“Your daughter all right upstairs?” He turned off the porch light, plunging them into darkness for a moment until their eyes adjusted to the night. “If she’s miserable with the heat, let me know, okay?”

“Bird’s fine. She fell asleep the minute her head hit the pillow. She’s had a full day. She won’t move until morning.” She paused. Like pale birds, her hands beat against the darkness, disappeared behind her. “We’re not hothouse flowers, Murphy. We can stand the heat In or out of the kitchen,” she added wryly. “I’m sorry. I made a mess of your kitchen, didn’t I? You should have let me clean it up.”

“You were busy.”

In the dim light, he thought she seemed like a spirit that would vanish if he blinked. Or breathed.

Like pumping bellows, his lungs shuddered, whooshed.

Her bare foot rested on the swing seat, her chin on one bent knee. Barely moving the swing, she glided it to and fro with her other foot. In a cloud of curls her hair swooped forward, concealing her face, and with each slow movement of the swing, that apple scent carried to him. Her shampoo. She’d changed into clean shorts and a top the color of a house he’d painted last fall.

Ecru. Yeah, that was the color. No wonder she’d seemed ghostly, insubstantial in the windowpane. All that creamy white, like those pale night-blooming flowers with the scent that pervaded the summer nights and dreams of his youth. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smelled those flowers, but thinking about them now, he thought he caught a hint of their languorous scent in the air.

He folded himself into the wicker chair opposite her and waited, letting the night sounds and scents fill the space between them. For the first time since he’d driven up his driveway and seen her, laughing and drenched, joking—the butterfly girl he remembered—she was quiet. Diminished.

He didn’t mind the silence. Silence was restful, easy. For long moments Phoebe nudged the swing in a hypnotic rhythm that came damned closed to lulling him asleep.

Would have, too, except that the flash of her leg in the night shadows would have kept a dying man awake.

And he was very much alive.

The firm curve of her calf flickering in the dim light with her movement entranced him. As did the push of her pale toes against the dark wood. Hypnotized, he couldn’t look away from the shiny gleam of the colorless polish on her toenails as she flexed her foot.

“We used to sit out on the porch on summer nights. Remember?” She slowed the swing, shifted.

Her shape shimmered in the moonlight, and he wanted to reach out, grasp it. Hold it still. He tucked his hands flat under his armpits. “Yeah. I remember.”

“Why did we stop?” Her voice was wistful and the hairs along his arms lifted, shivered.

“Like you said earlier, we grew up. We changed.”

“You wanted to park on the fingers in the bay and neck like crazy with all those girls who tied up the phone line every night.” The swing moved faster, stirring a swoosh of air around his ankles.

“Not all of them.” Remembering some of those nights, Murphy felt a smile edging his lips.

“Oh?” The swing banged against the wall with her hard push against the floor. “I didn’t realize you’d missed any.”

“Keeping tabs on me?” Irrationally, the idea intrigued him.

“Not me. But I heard talk,” she said virtuously. She curled both legs up onto the swing, let its motion carry her.

“No good comes of listening to gossip, you know.”

She blew a raspberry. “You’re the last person to try and play the saint, Murphy. That self-righteous air doesn’t work for you.”

“Ah, well.”

Bent, her legs created mysterious shadows that dried his mouth. He shifted uncomfortably. “And you left for college. Didn’t seem like anybody had time to drink lemonade and swing on the porch after that.”

“You left first.” She leaned forward, her hair catching the moonlight and trapping it. “You joined the army.”

“College would have been wasted on me.”

“Oh, Murphy, you could have gotten a football scholarship if you’d wanted. If you’d studied. Mama and Pops would have helped you in a second. You know they would have.”

“I wasn’t a student Don’t have the temperament for it. Sitting in class all day made me crazy. Anyway, it was time I left. Your folks were wonderful to me, but I needed to make my own way.”

“Nobody wanted you to go, Murphy. You had other choices.” Soft as a feather, her voice floated in the darkness to him. Across from him, her face was a shimmer of pale.

“Maybe.”

He’d had to leave. He’d seen one too many moonyeyed boys hunkered down on the porch floor next to Phoebe while she laughed and giggled with them. Next to those lighthearted boys, he’d felt like an old man, their easy assumption of privilege foreign to him.

They had the right to come courting at Phoebe Chapman’s door, and if the sight of them triggered a slow, treacherous burn, well, hey, tough for him. The Chapmans had given him everything good he had in life. He had no right to want more, to lie awake waiting for some hormonally overloaded Manatee Creek boy to bring Phoebe home from a date in his daddy’s expensive automobile.

There would be the roar of a car up the driveway, the idle rumble of the engine, and then the motor would be turned off.

Silence.

And long, quiet moments while he waited for the slam of the car door, the bang of the screen door, her quick steps running past his bedroom door.

Of course he’d had to leave.

Years later in the army he finally understood that the scorn existed only in his mind. Those golden boys of Phoebe’s youth had been only kids, some of them struggling like him. He was the one who’d kept his distance. Erecting a wall of toughness, he’d made sure no one got a chance to look down on him. That sense of being an outsider? It had all been inside him, not them.

He hadn’t liked learning that truth about himself. Not at all.

“Why haven’t you gotten married, Murphy? To one of those shiny-haired girls with the sexy voices? I kept waiting for Mama to send me a note that you’d finally done the deed.” Her restless motion sent the swing careening to the side. “But you haven’t.” Soft, soft like her silky scarf, her voice brushed the air, trailed along his skin.

“I’m not a marrying kind of man, Phoebe,” he said heavily, not liking the direction of the conversation.

“Not a college guy, not a marrying man. What are you then, Murphy?”

“A man who’s comfortable with his life. Who likes what he does.”

“You don’t want someone in your life waiting for you to come home? The aroma of a good dinner cooking? Someone to share your thoughts with? You don’t want any of that? You have everything you need?” There was distance in her voice, distance in the way she pulled back into the arms of the swing, and the poignancy in her tone. “But isn’t there anything else you want?”

“Besides my pickup and my house? Reckon I could use a good huntin’ dawg, sweetpea,” he drawled, “but I don’t hunt.” He wanted her clever brain turning in a different direction, away from him and his choices. “Been thinking I might get a dog, though. Dogs are easy.”

“Dogs need walking. They’re pack animals. They like company. They’re not easy.” Again that annoyance rippled in her words. “And they sniff you.”

He laughed. “A cat then. Shoot, sweetpea, I’ve known a cat or two that almost talked.” He meant it as a joke, but the thought had been nudging him ever since he’d bought the house. He’d been thinking for a while it would be nice to have some warm, living creature waiting to greet him at the door, but a creature that didn’t disrupt his life, didn’t expect anything of him. “Maybe I’ll get a cat, one of those big, old Maine coon cats. A guy kind of cat. Uncomplicated.”