“Yorkshire pudding, that’s it exactly!”
“Nope. It’s rice an’ field peas!”
“Baked beans … with molasses and salt pork.”
“Beaten biscuits. You ain’t never had no beaten biscuits, I bet. Sometime I got to make you some. With red gravy on ’em.”
“Boiled lobster!” Bob says he feels like a boiled lobster, red and hard on the outside, sweet and meaty on the inside. “Um-m-m,” he says, smacking his lips. “There’s nothing as good as that sweet, white, lobster meat sucked out of the hard, red claw and dipped in melted butter.”
They are silent for a few seconds, and then their hands touch, and they lie down beside one another and place mouth, breasts, belly, thighs and feet against mouth, breasts, belly, thighs and feet, and then he moves into her, swiftly and easily.
At nine thirty-five, Elaine’s water breaks. Too early, she thinks. Too soon. This is going to be a quick one, not like the others, and the contractions, now about five minutes apart, are heavy and deep, as if her uterus were a giant fist opening and closing. The pain is cold, not hot, and comes in waves, but it’s not as strong as when the others were born, she thinks, at least not as strong as she remembers. But they were big babies, and Emma was ten days late, and this baby is going to be early and probably small. Another girl, she decides. Oh, Jesus, not another girl, though it’ll be easier if it’s a girl. Easier and nicer. Except for Bob. Where the hell is he? The bastard. Oh, Bob, you bastard, where the hell are you? She grunts and turns to the phone and dials the number of her friend Ellen Skeeter, who, thank God, answers right away.
They shower together, and for the first time Bob sees Marguerite’s naked body, long, dark brown and shining, like polished sandalwood. He soaps her slick back and buttocks, rubs her shoulders and neck with one hand, her ass and the back of her thighs with the other, and when, like a strung bow, she arches backwards and spreads her thighs, he slides his hand into her from behind, one finger, then two, then three, and she gasps, leans forward and lays her weight against the tile wall of the shower, lets the warm water splash over her soapy back, gush between her buttocks and down his stiff, pumping arm. Shoving her ass against him, she drives his fingers deeper and deeper into her body, until her cunt is sucking at his hand, reaching for it and grabbing, letting go, then reaching and grabbing again, farther in each time, snapping and letting go, over and over, deeper and deeper, and then she’s swirling his thick fingers around inside her, twitching them, whirling her ass in wet circles, and soon she starts to moan, low and steady, and flailing one hand back around in search of his prick, finding it, she pulls away from his fingers and jams his prick in, and he grabs onto her thrashing hips and rides, rides, rides, while the water splashes warmly over their faces, shoulders, chests and bellies.
By ten-eighteen, when Elaine arrives at the emergency room of the Winter Haven Hospital and is met by her doctor, swiftly examined and rushed upstairs to a delivery room, she’s deeply into hard labor, and her cervix has dilated sufficiently that the doctor, a gaunt, red-eyed, rumpled Mississippian named Tucker Beacham, escorts her stretcher to obstetrics himself, in case he has to deliver the baby in the hallway. Ellen Skeeter, frightened and excited, joggles along behind the two, calling out to her friend, “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, honey, your chil’ren goin’ be fine. Soon’s I get you taken care of, honey, I’ll call home an’ tell Ronnie to stay right there at your place tonight. Ronnie’ll take good care of the chil’ren till Bob gets home, honey, an’ he’ll tell Bob everything, so don’t you fret, now.”
In the parking lot by the store, Bob kisses Marguerite softly on the lips, says he loves her more and more every day, and steps from her car. “Wait a second,” he says, closing her car door. “Wait till I make sure I can get my car into gear.” He slides into his car, starts the motor and drops the car into reverse. It makes a clunking noise, but it goes in. “
She smiles out the open window of her car and purses her lips at him. “You will soon, honey. Jus’ wait.” Then she spins the wheel and drives off.
Slowly, Bob draws out a cigarette and lights it, inhaling the smoke the way he inhaled the grass, tamping it down into the furthest recesses of his lungs. Grass is great, he announces to himself. Switching on the radio, he fiddles with the tuner until he finds a country and western station, and for a few seconds he listens to Kenny Rogers and Dottie West sing “Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer.”
