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The Kind of Women People Are Afraid Of(continued) There was the sound of breathing... of the wind... and after a while,
the growl of engines on the road. We stood. Solemnly, Joey extended
her hand. Lorna placed her hands over Joey's. I put mine over Lorna's.
It felt like a grip of power. By the time the pickups roared into Lorna's driveway, we were sitting
around the fire. I couldn't tell if I was thrilled or terrified, but
I was ready. Light blasted the room — they'd aimed their headlights at the
house. "Boys will be boys," said Joey, straining for ease. A horn roared: HONK! HONK! HONK! Others joined in. Part of me screamed, RUN! Another part said, Breathe... They're
just like Frankie and his pals. That was the part I listened to. Thank god for Joey. She got up and opened the door. In a moment between
blasts, she shaded her eyes from the headlights and yelled, "Hey
guys, cut it out!" like she was scolding a kid. I wanted to cheer.
She left the door half-open, came back and sat down. After another round of honks, headlights went out, truck doors slammed,
gravelcrunched... they were in the house! I couldn't breathe. I can handle this, I kept repeating,
the way I handled Frankie's friends. A tall, rangy guy with a Yankees cap pulled low, barged in and looked
wildly around as if expecting to find a dead cow. "Nothin' but
a bunch of old bags," he snarled over his shoulder. He was just
a kid, not much past his teens. "You can come in," I said, "but leave that kind of talk
outside." Wow! I thought. I'm doing it. The others, all about his age, herded in like bulls, stinking of beer
and sweat. "If you fellows can behave," said Lorna, "we can all
sit down over a nice cup of coffee and you can tell us what this is
about." That threw them. It was as if they'd expected to be in Rambo
but wound up in The Waltons instead. They looked at each other.
At Lorna. At each other again. Joey announced she'd make the coffee. On her way to the kitchen, she
gave me a we-got-'em-and-they-don't-know-what-hit-'em wink. "Hey," she called from the kitchen, "would a couple
of you guys come here and take some chairs out to the living room?"
And they did. They actually did. I nodded to a boy with a sad, pasty face. "How about you getting
the cups?" "Lorna?" Joey called from the kitchen. "Got any cookies?"
There was a lot of bustling and busyness. When it was over, everyone
was seated around the living room, drinking coffee and passing bowls
of graham crackers and homemade fudge. I wouldn't say it was comfortable,
but then you can't expect young guys to be comfortable with older women.
"So what's this about?" Joey began. The guy in the Yankees cap asked if we'd heard about the cow. When
we said we had, he hemmed and hawed, then blurted out, "Folks are
saying maybe it was you who done it." We said folks maybe thought that because they didn't know us, but that
we were as riled up about it as everyone else. Then all of us —
including the guys — agreed that no one wants someone around who
could do such awful things. After a while, an acne-scarred boy who kept biting his nails asked
if we had any beer. The poor kid looked so nervous. "No beer,"
I said, "but there's more coffee." He stood up. "No thanks, ma'am." The others got up too and shuffled toward the door. "Hold on," Joey called. She stuffed leftover crackers and
fudge into a plastic bag and handed it to the acne-scarred kid on his
way out. "That's for all of you," she said. "Share
it." What a nice touch. Gravel crunched, truck doors slammed, headlights flared, and the cavalcade
receded back the way it had come. The three of us laughed and cried and hugged each other. "Such nice boys," said Joey, oozing sarcasm. "Actually," said Lorna, "they sort of really were." I said that was because we brought out the best in them. "And vice versa," said Lorna. Joey turned on me. "Next time watch what you think." She was blaming me again — but maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was
trying to be helpful. Or she was stuck in an angry view of the world.
Or had to project her own shortcomings on someone else. Who knows? "You know," I said, "I'm really going to try to do that."
And then I grabbed them both for another hug.
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