“I’ll go tell Jimmy to skedaddle.”
My ma crashes into me with a big hug that slaps all sorts of flour and sticky dough residue all over my clothes. Then she looks up into my eyes with her own beaming ones. “Your daddy’s gonna be so pleased to see you when he gets back tonight!”
Two minutes later, I’m walking up to Jimmy’s truck. “G’damn, it’s about time,” groans Jimmy impatiently, his legs propped up on the dashboard just as I predicted they’d be, an elbow hanging out of his window. “I’m melted halfway to nothin’ sittin’ out here.”
Just leaning back like that, he looks like he’s posing for the cover of some “Good Ol’ Boys You Can Drool Your Whole Body’s Supply Of Water Over” magazine. He has the drop-dead gorgeous face of a country boy dropped from Heaven itself, and the toned, slender body of a runway model. It isn’t so hard to imagine.
I sigh. “Sorry, man. I’ve gotta cancel. My ma’s so excited to see me, I should stay here and keep her company. My pa’s not comin’ home ‘til late tonight from a long job in Fairview, and I—”
Jimmy’s face is all wrinkled up with frustration. “Dude, we were gonna throw ball with my bro. And what about my mama’s big supper she was plannin’ for us? Jacky-Ann’s already makin’ it.”
My ma hit the nail on the head. I smirk. “Sorry, buddy. We gotta wait ‘til tomorrow to hang out.”
He’s about to throw me something else sassy and annoyed when my ma’s sweet, singsong voice comes out of the living room window, which she’s flung open wide: “Hey there, Jimmy-boy!”
In an instant, Jimmy’s legs are swung off the dash and he’s straightened his posture. “Hi, Mrs. Parker, ma’am!” he calls out, his tone traded instantly for something chivalrous and polite.
“Sweetheart, you can call me Patricia, you know that!”
“Yes, ma’am, Patricia!”
“Don’t go bein’ a stranger this summer!” she calls back.
“I won’t, ma’am, Patricia!”
She smiles, waves at him, then pulls shut the window and disappears into the house.
Jimmy turns his eyes onto me. “You know my mama’s gonna be pissed. She likes showin’ off for you every time you come over.”
“Just tell her I gotta spend time with my own ma this summer, too. She’s …” I lean in closer, as if she might actually overhear me somehow from inside the house. “… a bit more clingy than usual.”
Jimmy cranks on his engine. It coughs and sputters irritably, like it resents having to drive even one more inch today. That tired old red truck is long overdue to crap out and be put to rest.
“Better grab your stuff, Bobby my man, before I take off with it all.” Jimmy tips his threadbare cap at me.
After I lug my bags and backpack out of the bed of his truck, my heart breaks and falls through the gaps in my ribcage like shards of peanut brittle as Jimmy Strong gently backs out of my driveway. With another cough of the cranky engine, he rumbles off, disappearing slowly around the long, wide bend of my street.
I stand in the driveway staring after him under the hot early-summer sun, beads of sweat slowly crawling down my forehead and back. For a second, I honestly consider pulling out my phone and calling him right up, telling him I’d changed my mind and my ma can just wait another day or two to spend time with me. But sense keeps me rooted—or just the memory of that look my ma gave me when she thought I’d already had one foot out the door to run off to the Strong ranch with Jimmy—and I refrain from acting on the impulsive thought. I’ve resigned myself to actually spend time with my loving parents tonight like a good boy who’s fresh home from college for another long, uneventful summer in Spruce.
And so help me, Jimmy Strong can dang well wait.
2
JIMMY
There was this moment back in January, right after Bobby and I returned to campus from a short winter break in Spruce, when I caught the poor bastard choking his chicken in our dorm.
I get it. We’re two horny twenty-year-olds, closed up in a tiny room without a scrap of privacy to even entertain a girlfriend—or boyfriend, in his case. It’s inevitable that this would happen.
But I’d just come back from a class on human sexuality—some psych course I had to take to fulfill an honors credit—so my mind was in a particularly strange place already when I pushed open that sad, beige door, and saw what I saw.
Namely: Bobby Parker, on the floor, on his back, with his legs spread as far apart as they go … and he’s naked.
Well, except for a pair of white socks on his feet with red rings around the tops of them, bunched up, one half hanging off.