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CHAPTER 15
1
At ten o’clock on that Sunday morning, I jumped into the Sunliner and drove twenty miles to Round
Hill. There was a drugstore on the main drag, and it was open, but I saw a WE ROAR FOR THE
DENHOLM LIONS sticker on the door and remembered Round Hill was part of Consolidated
District Four. I drove on to Kileen. There, an elderly druggist who bore an eerie but probably
coincidental resemblance to Mr. Keene back in Derry winked at me as he gave me a brown bag and my
change. “Don’t do anything against the law, son.”
I returned the wink in the expected fashion and drove back to Jodie. I’d had a late night, but when
I lay down and tried to nap, I didn’t even get in sleep’s neighborhood. So I went to the Weingarten’s
and bought a poundcake after all. It looked Sunday-stale, but I didn’t care and didn’t think Sadie
would, either. Picnic supper or no picnic supper, I was pretty sure food wasn’t the number one item on
today’s agenda. When I knocked on her door, there was a whole cloud of butterflies in my stomach.
Sadie’s face was free of makeup. She wasn’t even wearing lipstick. Her eyes were large, dark, and
frightened. For one moment I was sure she was going to slam the door in my face and I’d hear her
running away just as fast as her long legs would carry her. And that would be that.
But she didn’t run. “Come on in,” she said. “I made chicken salad.” Her lips began to tremble. “I
hope you like . . . you like p-plenty of m-may—”
Her knees started to buckle. I dropped the box with the poundcake inside on the floor and grabbed
her. I thought she was going to faint, but she didn’t. She put her arms around my neck and held tight,
like a drowning woman to a floating log. I could feel her body thrumming. I stepped on the
goddamned poundcake. Then she did. Squoosh.
“I’m scared,” she said. “What if I’m no good at it?”
“What if I’m not?” This was not entirely a joke. It had been a long time. At least four years.
She didn’t seem to hear me. “He never wanted me. Not the way I expected. And his way is the only
way I know. The touching, then the broom.”
“Calm down, Sadie. Take a deep breath.”
“Did you go to the drugstore?”
“Yes, in Kileen. But we don’t have to—”
“We do. I do. Before I lose what little courage I have left. Come on.”
Her bedroom was at the end of the hall. It was spartan: a bed, a desk, a couple of prints on the
walls, chintz curtains dancing in the soft breath of the window air-conditioning unit, turned down to
low. Her knees started to give way again and I caught her again. It was a weird kind of swing-dancing.
There were even Arthur Murray footprints on the floor. Poundcake. I kissed her and her lips fastened
on mine, dry and frantic.
I pushed her away gently and braced her back against the closet door. She looked at me solemnly,
her hair in her eyes. I brushed it away, then—very gently—began to lick her dry lips with the tip of
my tongue. I did it slowly, being sure to get the corners.
“Better?” I asked.
She answered not with her voice but with her own tongue. Without pressing my body against hers,
I began to very slowly run my hand up and down the long length of her, from where I could feel the
rapid beat of her pulse on both sides of her throat, to her chest, her breasts, her stomach, the flat tilted
plane of her pubic bone, around to one buttock, then down to her thigh. She was wearing jeans. The