Freedom [146]
In his gratitude, he peeled down her jeans and rested his closed eyes against her underpants, and then these, too, he pulled down so he could press his shaved lip and chin into her scratchy hair, which he noticed that she’d trimmed for him. He could feel one of the cats clambering onto his feet, seeking attention. Pussy, pussy.
“I just want to stay here for about three hours,” he said, breathing her smell.
“You can stay there all night,” she said. “I have no plans.”
But then his telephone rang in his pants pocket. Taking it out to shut it off, he saw his old St. Paul number and felt like smashing the phone in his anger at his mother. He spread Connie’s legs and attacked her with his tongue, delving and delving, trying to fill himself with her.
The third and most alarming of her disclosures came during a postcoital interlude at some later evening hour. Hitherto absent neighbors were tromping on the floor above the bed; the cats were yowling bitterly outside the door. Connie was telling him about the SAT, which he’d forgotten she was even going to take, and about her surprise at how much easier the real questions had been than the practice questions in her study books. She was feeling emboldened to apply to schools within a few hours of Charlottesville, including Morton College, which wanted midwestern students for geographical diversity and which she now thought she could get into.
This seemed all wrong to Joey. “I thought you were going to go to the U.,” he said.
“I still might,” she said. “But then I started thinking how much nicer it would be to be closer to you, so we could see each other on weekends. I mean, assuming everything goes well and we still want to. Don’t you think that would be nice?”
Joey untangled his legs from hers, trying to get some clarity. “Definitely maybe,” he said. “But, you know, private schools are incredibly expensive.”
This was true, Connie said. But Morton offered financial aid, and she’d spoken to Carol about her educational trust fund, and Carol had admitted that there was still a lot of money in it.
“Like how much?” Joey said.
“Like a lot. Like seventy-five thousand. It might be enough for three years if I get financial aid. And then there’s the twelve thousand that I’ve saved, and I can work summers.”
“That’s great,” Joey compelled himself to say.
“I was just going to wait until I turned twenty-one, and take the cash. But then I thought about what you said, and I saw you were right about getting a good education.”
“If you went to the U., though,” Joey said, “you could get an education and still have the cash when you were done.”
Upstairs, a television began to bark, and the tromping continued.
“It sounds like you don’t want me near you,” Connie said neutrally, without reproach, just stating a fact.
“No, no,” he said. “Not at all. That might potentially be great. I’m just thinking practically.”
“I already can’t stand being in that house. And then Carol’s going to have her babies, and it’s going to get even worse. I can’t be there anymore.”
Not for the first time, he experienced an obscure resentment of her father. The man had been dead for a number of years now, and Connie had never had a relationship with him and rarely even alluded to his existence, but to Joey this had somehow made him even more of a male rival. He was the man who’d been there first. He’d abandoned his daughter and paid off Carol with a low-rent house, but his money had continued to flow and pay for