“Stole a car,” he said nonchalantly. “Just for a joyride.”
“Was that when you had your fight with your father?”
“Who told you about that?”
“KathyAnn.”
“Yeah, I had a real fistfight with my father. I didn’t do well. He nearly broke my cheek bone, in fact, but I wouldn’t stop until he backed off. He knew he had to kill me to get me to stop, and that’s when he told me to get out and stay out, winch is just what I did. He never wanted me anyway. I wasn’t just an accident, I was a train wreck as far as my father was concerned.”
He finished the beer in his glass and poured another. I stared at him long enough for him to widen his eyes and say, “What?”
“I’m living a lie here,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not here with my sister. I’m here with my mother. She makes me say she’s my sister because she wants music people to think she’s younger than she is.”
“Oh. Then that story about the plane crash…”
“I just made that up on the spur of the moment to tell Kathy Ann something.”
“Well, what about your father?”
“Your father could be my father for all I know,” I said. His eyes widened more. “No, I’m kidding, but not as much as you think. My mother can’t be sure who made me. She was high on something at a wild party, and she says she was with more than one man the same night.”
“Wow,” Keefer said.
“That seems to be a popular word around here, or maybe just around me.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind,” I said. I finished my beer. “I guess you and I are more alike than I first thought, only you’re lucky. You got away.”
“Got away? To this?” He looked around the room. “No, ma’am, this isn’t luck. It’s a stopover on the way to something better, I hope.”
I held out my glass and he filled it again.
“What made you want to come to see me after all this?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“You mend things that are banged around, dented, and broken, don’t you?”
He laughed, and then he looked at me long and hard before leaning over to do what I wished he would from the moment I saw him sitting in a pool of sparks.
He kissed me.
And I kissed him back, harder and longer than I had ever kissed anyone.
In my mind the sparks were flying all around us.
7
Honeymoon Fantasies and Strike Two
“You sure you want to get mixed up with the likes of me?” Keefer asked before he kissed me again.
“I could ask you the same question,” I replied. He liked that.