Chapter 33: Honeypie

February

Monday morning, when I pull into Peyton's driveway, she's waiting at the window, probably praying that Patrick Mahomes won't start crying again. I think it's been a long weekend with little Homie.

            "Hey, Mamma." I take carrier from her and fasten it into the back seat.

"What's the earliest we can return them?" she asks as she hops in.

"I think she said she'd be there at 7am."

She looks her phone. "6:45. Perfect. Not a minute later."

"I take it things didn't get much better with Homeslice?"

She tells me all about Saturday night—after we'd gone to the movies, and I dropped her home. She'd paid Emma some of her Christmas money to babysit. As soon as she walked in the door, Emma thrust the screaming robot baby into her arms.

"According to Emma, thirty bucks isn't near enough compensation," she says flatly.

Peyton spent the rest of the night trying to figure out what he needed. She gave him a clean diaper. She changed his clothes. She fed him. She burped him. She swaddled him. Nothing worked. Finally, she stuck him in a closet and closed the door. She could still hear him crying, so she piled all her dirty clothes on top of him.

If he's equipped with a camera, she's screwed.

But the funniest part of all of it was that she kept thinking she could still hear him. She said it was like something out of a Poe story, whatever that means.

"But this was the 'Telltale Robot Baby,' she says, "so it was even scarier."

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, she grabbed him out of the carrier and paced the floor with him, bouncing and shushing, just like I'd done. She was afraid he'd start crying again if she put him back in the carrier, so she walked around the house, holding him.

"Until my mom found me," she says. "I think I was delirious by then. She made me a peanut butter and jelly."

"I love a midnight PB&J," I say.

"Yeah, and she toasted the bread. So, the peanut butter was all nice and melty."

"The best," I say. "What did your mom say about that fact that you were wandering around the house in the middle of the night?"

"Oh, you'd be surprised. Since Pax died, you can find any one of us up wandering around at 2 a.m. I think it's just a thing."

I just nod. I can't even imagine.

"But she was good, actually," Peyton continues. "We had a good talk."

"About what?"

"Oh, things about my dad. About Pax and me as babies. Emma. I think I'm too hard on my mom sometimes. She seems so sad."

Right on cue, Homeboy starts wailing. "You've got to be kidding me," Peyton says. 

She grabs a bottle out of the diaper bag and climbs into the back seat. She sticks the bottle in his mouth, and he stops crying.

"Can I ask you something, kind of personal?" She says out of nowhere.

I glance at her reflection in the rearview mirror. "Sure."

"Your family. You guys are happy now?"

"I mean, yeah. For the most part. No family is without its issues." I look back at the road.

"How did you get through that bad time?" She asks.

I take a deep breath and exhale slowly. "After about a year of my dad's drinking, my mom realized he wasn't going to get better. She couldn't get through to him. Things just got worse, and she asked him to go."

"Worse how?"

"Just worse. She had to protect us, so she did. She told him to leave, that she could run the ranch all by herself."

"Did she?"

"Yeah, she and Jesse."

"And how old were you?"

"When the drought hit? I was eight or nine. A few months later, he wasn't around. Then he came back about a year later."

"A year?"

"Yeah. Took him that long to figure out he was about to lose everything. His wife, his kids, his land, his business. He had to hit bottom pretty hard before he would pick himself back up." In the rearview mirror, I see her caressing the top of Homie's head.

"And you guys all forgave him?" She asks, not taking her eyes off the bottle fixed in the little robot mouth.

"That took time. He broke a lot of trust. Not so easy to fix trust, once it's broken."

She's quiet for a while. "But it's fixed now?"

"Yeah, you know," I exhale. "It's all in the past. We've all moved on. Except maybe for Joe. For Joe, the past is very much alive. Think that's what keeps him on the road."

"With the rodeo?" She asks.

I nod.

She gazes at me in the rearview.

"What does he do, in the rodeo? Ride the bucking bronco?"

I turn into the school lot, park, and sit there with the engine running. "I think he does do some of that for fun, yeah. But his main job is what people call a rodeo clown."

"He's a clown?"

"Yeah, but he's not like the barrel clowns. He's a bullfighting clown."

"What's the difference?"

"Barrelmen are the ones who entertain the crowd. Bullfighters distract the bull to protect the rider after he's fallen."

"Sounds dangerous," she says.

"It is. It takes skill, athleticism."

"And bravery," she says.

"Joe's always been the type to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. He doesn't seem to fear anything. I guess that's courage. Or maybe just stupidity," I say.

But as we're walking into school, I can't stop thinking about Joe. When we were growing up, I used to get so frustrated with him. He never just laid low or kept his mouth shut. When my dad started drinking, lashing out at us, Joe became even more rebellious. It was like he'd purposely antagonize my dad. I always thought it was because he wasn't very smart, or just wanted attention. But I've been thinking about some things Peyton told me about her brother, about how she feels guilty for trying to outshine him all of those years. She told me once that she sometimes felt like she needed to perform, to take the pressure of all those expectations off Pax.

I'm starting to see that Joe was kind of doing the same thing.

My dad was the bull.

And I was the rider that Joe was protecting.

*****

After we return the babies, I walk her down the hall to her locker. I lean against the metal doors as she twists the combination. People are just starting to arrive.

"So...what do you want to do tomorrow?" I ask.

"Tomorrow? What's tomorrow?"

"Um...Valentine's Day?"

She stands there paralyzed. "Valentine's Day has never really been on my radar."

"Welp," I say. "It's coming, Thomas. Antennas up."

"The last time I got a Valentine from a boy was in fourth grade when every kid in the class gave every other kid a card with candy."

"Good. Low expectations." I grin. "So, is there anywhere you want to go? Anything you want to do?"

"Just hang out, like usual. Enjoy being childless."

"Sounds like a plan."

*****

The next morning, I tell her I can't drive her to school—said I had some business to take care of on my way.

When she walks down the hall to her locker, she has to do a double take. I've wrapped her entire locker in white paper with red hearts all over it.

She looks like she might be getting a little sick.

Everyone is staring and pointing at it, snickering. She stops in front of me to open it as quickly as she can.

When she looks up, I'm there holding a bouquet of red and white tulips. I hand them to her, and she just stands there with the flowers hanging head-first down by her side. She watches in horror as I get down on one knee.

People are starting to circle around us.

I unroll a pink poster-board. It's covered in hearts and little footballs. Scrawled out garish silver glitter are the words:

#34, you've intercepted my heart. Will you be my Pick-Six Princess at Senior Prom?  

"It's a Promposal!" Somebody shouts.

"Chaplin just asked Thomas to prom..." Someone else whispers.

She looks dizzy, like she might faint. She's gazing around at all the faces and then back down at me kneeling there with a shit-eating grin on my face.

"Uh...Okay," she says.

The whole hallway full of students bursts into applause. I stand up to give her a hug, but her arms are pinned to her side. I wrap my arms around her whole body and pick her up off the ground. When I set her down, she's still pretty flustered.

"You okay?" I ask.

She nods, in a daze.

I'm not quite sure I expected this response.

*****

By the time lunch rolls around, I'm kind of annoyed. I mean just a little excitement would be nice. A slight smile, or hug, or something. But no. Deadpan. Practically unconscious.

As I'm trudging down the hall, I hear Cash and his mob laughing about something, so I immediately take stock of the surroundings.

Something rustles in the janitor's closet, the door propped slightly open.

Lord, please don't let some poor freshman be in there without pants on.

I creak open the door and see familiar eyes flashing at me through the dark. 

"Psst. Chaplin," she whispers.

"What the fuck?"

"Over here," she whispers.

"Yeah, I know you're over there." I smile. "The question is, what are you doing there?"

"Nothing."

She pulls my belt loop to her, wrapping her arms around my neck. She sighs as my mouth meets hers in the almost pitch-dark. My hands are on her—her hips, her waist, back down to her hips again. And hers are on me. I can't get enough.

I grab her by the waist and lift her onto the counter. When I lean into her, she wraps her legs around me. Oh, honeypie. Girl, don't you stop.

It's off-the-charts insane physical chemistry. Or maybe it's physics. Magnetic. Electric. I finally pull myself away, breathing hard.

"Jesus, Thomas. You're killing me."

"I'm sorry," she says. 

"Don't be sorry."

"Okay, I'm not sorry."

I kiss her forehead. "You're so bad."

"That's what they say. But I just wanted to, you know, thank you properly. For what you did out there earlier."

"Well..." I say smiling. "It was my pleasure."

Even in the dark, I know she's smiling back.