“They’re nice fellows, very quiet about their own relationship and about the relationships of some of their guests.” He looked up from his coffee cup. He was blushing a little, but also smiling. “This isn’t a hot-sheet joint, if that’s what you’re thinking. Farthest thing from it. The rooms are nice, the prices are reasonable, and the little restaurant down the road is a-country fare. Sometimes a gal needs a place like that. And maybe a man does, too. So they don’t have to be in such a hurry. And so they won’t feel cheap.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Very welcome. Mimi and I had many pleasant evenings at the Candlewood. Sometimes we only watched the TV in our pajamas and then went to bed, but that can be as good as anything else when you get to a certain age.” He smiled ruefully. “Or almost. We’d go to sleep listening to the crickets. Or sometimes a coyote would howl, very far away, out in the sage. At the moon, you know. They really do that. They howl at the moon.”
He took a handkerchief from his back pocket with an old man’s slowness and mopped his cheeks with it.
I offered my hand and Deke took hold.
“She liked you, although she never could figure out what to make of you. She said you reminded her of the way they used to show ghosts in those old movies from the thirties. ‘He’s bright and shiny, but not all here,’ she said.”
“I’m no ghost,” I said. “I promise you.”
He smiled. “No? I finally got around to checking your references. This was after you’d been subbing for us awhile and did such a bang-up job with the play. The ones from the Sarasota School District are fine, but beyond there…” He shook his head, still smiling. “And your degree is from a mill in Oklahoma.”
Clearing my throat did no good. I couldn’t speak at all.
“And what’s that to me, you ask? Not much. There was a time in this part of the world when if a man rode into town with a few books in his saddlebags, spectacles on his nose, and a tie around his neck, he could get hired on as schoolmaster and stay for twenty years. Wasn’t that long ago, either. You’re a damn fine teacher. The kids know it, I know it, and Meems knew it, too. And that’s a
“Does Ellen know I faked my other references?” Because Ellen Dockerty was acting principal, and once the schoolboard met in January, the job would be hers permanently. There were no other candidates.
“Nope, and she’s not going to. Not from me, at least. I feel like she doesn’t need to.” He stood up. “But there’s one person who
“Yes,” I said, and Deke nodded as if that took care of everything.
I only wished it did.
Thanks to Deke Simmons, Sadie finally got to find out what it was like to make love after sundown. When I asked her how it was, she told me it had been wonderful. “But I’m looking forward to waking up next to you in the morning even more. Do you hear the wind?”
I did. It hooted around the eaves.
“Doesn’t that sound make you feel cozy?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to say something now. I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable.”
“Tell me.”
“I guess I’ve fallen in love with you. Maybe it’s just the sex, I’ve heard that’s a mistake people make, but I don’t think so.”
“Sadie?”
“Yes?” She was trying to smile, but she looked frightened.
“I love you, too. No maybe or mistake about it.”
“Thank God,” she said, and snuggled close.
On our second visit to the Candlewood Bungalows, she was ready to talk about Johnny Clayton. “But turn out the light, would you?”
I did as she asked. She smoked three cigarettes during the telling. Toward the end, she cried hard, probably not from remembered pain so much as simple embarrassment. For most of us, I think it’s easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid. Not that she had been. There’s a world of difference between stupidity and naïveté, and like most good middle-class girls who came to maturity in the nineteen-forties and-fifties, Sadie knew almost nothing about sex. She said she had never actually looked at a penis until she had looked at mine. She’d had glimpses of Johnny’s, but she said if he caught her looking, he would take hold of her face and turn it away with a grip that stopped just short of painful.
“But it always
John Clayton came from a conventionally religious family, nothing nutty about them. He was pleasant, attentive, reasonably attractive. He didn’t have the world’s greatest sense of humor (almost none might have been closer to the mark), but he seemed to adore her. Her parents adored
