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The thing that struck me hardest about the way he gave me this instruction was that he didn’t seem to consider that I might want to do something else—something other than what he thought I should do. He had issued his command in the obvious knowledge that he knew precisely the right thing for me to do, and any different idea I might have would be simply foolish in comparison.
It brought a new wave of heat to my cheeks, and a new crease to my brow. I nodded quickly and turned away with the flowers, suddenly wanting Cal not to see how easily he could bring that flaming red embarrassment to my pale complexion.
Shelly and Jake were sitting at the kitchen table shucking peas. Terribly conscious of Cal’s eyes on my back—it seemed like I could hear each of his footfalls on the farmhouse’s old floorboards—I walked to the table with the flowers out before me, in both hands until I realized I must look like a bridesmaid, or a bride. I hastily dropped one hand.
“Look at those!” Shelly said.
“Aw, you shouldn’t have, Cal,” Jake said in an easy, joking sort of voice I hadn’t heard him use before. “But you know I love wildflowers.”
“Jake!” Shelly said, reaching across the table to give him a little jostle on the shoulder. “Don’t make fun.”
Time stood still for the second time in about a minute. Something about the scene—a girl, her foster parents, her handsome, older suitor—evoked a new conflict inside me. Part of me yearned for it just to go on like this, so that I could forget all about the shitty life I had thought I would have, in the city, scrapping and scrabbling for anything worth having. Another part screamed that I needed to run far, far away—that any rational, modern young woman would already have found a way to escape into the cornfield and make her way back to civilization.
They’re pretending to be normal, I told myself furiously. But that doesn’t change the fact that Jake whipped you and Shelly dressed you this way. It doesn’t change the fact that they fucked in front of you, and made you watch.
I turned around to look over my shoulder at Cal, suddenly wondering what he would think if I told him about what had happened last night. Maybe he would help me escape. Maybe he would escape with me. Little bursts of fantasy seemed to be exploding every which way in my head.
Cal had stopped about two feet behind me—near enough that I felt he was close but not so near that I felt threatened. My suitor was definitely there, though, behind me. Solid, and so big: bigger than Jake, even, I realized. The easy smile on his face made the breath catch in my throat.
I turned back to Shelly, and I felt myself give in to it—to the scene, the idea—while at the same time the other, defiant part of me yelled that I hadn’t seen the last of it.
“Ma’am?” I started, making sure I got that out of the way first and didn’t forget it. “Is there a vase I could put them in?”
“Sure, honey,” Shelly said. “You can get a jar from the cabinet next to the fridge.”
I went to the cabinet, feeling the warmth come and go in my cheeks seemingly with every step. I felt lightheaded and disoriented, as if instead of meeting the older man the New Modesty Authority had seen fit to make me date, I’d just stepped off a roller coaster. What felt like a billion conflicting impulses seethed in my mind and my body, and as I opened the cabinet and stared at the three empty mason jars there on the bottom shelf, the feeling of detachment and observation took hold of me again.
The simple idea of Cal Perkins—a gorgeous, mature man with a steady job and a neatly trimmed light brown beard—seemed to send me off into outer space. Not because of anything I would have called romantic, if someone had asked. Not according to my idea of romance, anyway… or maybe, really, the idea of romance I had had yesterday, up until about five o’clock in the evening, when I had arrived at Jake and Shelly’s farmhouse.
No, Cal… the big, strong man standing behind me, who had started exchanging pleasantries and light gossip about the citizens of Grasskiln with the Carpenters… my date, who had the right, if he chose, to… to correct me… who had brought me the wildflowers in my hand that belonged in one of the jars in the cabinet… he seemed to represent all of it, all the mortifying, helplessly arousing, crazy-seeming things about the life it seemed I had no choice but to lead in this little town.
“Grace?” I heard Jake say, his impatient tone indicating that it must be the second or third time he had called my name. A shudder went through my body as I came back to myself from the reverie of detachment and I became aware of the flowers in my right hand as my left reached into the cabinet, my fingers on the rim of a jar where they had apparently been for longer than I realized.
I turned my head over my shoulder.
“Yes, sir?”
The words came automatically, and when I heard my voice say them, as if it were completely natural for me to call the man in charge of me sir, it only added to the unreality of the scene for me.
“What are you getting up to over there? Get a move on.”
Fire blazed up in my face. It got much worse a second later.
“She’s a little forgetful, seems like,” Jake told Cal, “and a bit sassy. Nothing a few good lickings won’t cure.”
CHAPTER 17
Grace
“Jake had to whip her last night,” Shelly said, so matter-of-factly that I nearly mistook her words for something that had to do with the flowers, or a sparkplug in the pickup truck. When I processed what my foster mother had said to my new suitor, a chill went up and down my body, only to give way to a full body blush like I had never experienced—despite having blushed more in Grasskiln already than I ever had in my life to this point.
My fingers were trembling, but I had to do something, move, look busy. The possibility dawned on me that I might be headed for a situation like Cora’s with Mr. and Mrs. Davis, where my foster father would decide to show my suitor the proper way to curb my poor behavior. I kept my back to the table, thankful that I didn’t have to look at them, and they couldn’t see me. I took the jar out of the cabinet at last and moved to the sink, trying to look as natural as I could while walking sideways along the length of the counter.
I thought I could feel all their eyes on me, especially Cal’s. I suddenly wanted to see the expression on his face so badly I had to force myself to pay attention to the jar, and the sink, and the water that flowed into the makeshift vase when I turned on the tap.
“Cal,” I heard Jake say, “why don’t you and I go into the office for a moment to talk about Shelly’s and my expectations for your courting Grace?”
The jar had overflowed, because although my eyes remained fixed on it, I hadn’t actually paid attention to the water. My pounding heart and my twisting stomach had pulled all my focus.
