Chapter 9

When they arrived next door, they found out why Lucy had been so insistent that they come over. Mallory and Randy had refused to tell her anything about the trip, saying that it would take all four of them to tell the whole story. They were very excited. All Lucy knew at that point was that they'd gotten two deer. Part of the venison was in her freezer already.

It was already after supper, so they gathered in the family room, and spread out to find a seat. Bob and Lucy sat in recliners. Sam and Randy sat on the couch. Mallory settled into a bean bag chair, leaning back with her legs stretched out and spread apart. Bob was sure she didn't intend to present a delectable ... fuckable ... picture, but she did. He saw Lucy frown at her, but no admonition about sitting like a lady was forthcoming.

Things might have been entirely different had anyone known that, while Mallory was lying there in her negligent pose, her fertilized egg was in the process of implanting itself in her uterine wall. By the next morning, she would meet the clinical, medical definition of being pregnant.

That fact would have gone unnoticed a lot longer, except for the way things turned out that night.

Basically, Mallory got a little too excited, and her brain mixed up some fairly critical words.

It was about half way through the story. They hadn't gotten to the actual kill yet, and had described how Bob taught them to shoot. Maybe it was holding back a large part of that section of the tale that discombobulated Mallory's brain. Finally, she got to the part where she was about to announce that she was the one who shot the first deer.

"We got in the stands, and we were just sitting there, waiting. Uncle Bob had said that would happen, but that we had to pay attention. So I did, and suddenly there was this beautiful deer with antlers, just standing there, so I raised my gun and I shot it!"

"You shot it?" Lucy's eyes were round, and her mouth hung open.

Mallory was, for all intents and purposes, hopped up on drugs. They were natural ones, which her own body manufactured, but she was a little high. On top of that, she was like many other females in western culture who were a little tired of male domination in most things. So she wanted to play up the fact that both she and Sam had been the successful hunters, and not the men. To do that, she bent the definition of "buck fever" to suit her needs. She meant to use the term to identify the men as unsuccessful hunters.

All this happened in the blink of an eye, inside Mal's brain. It was really that natural high that did her in. She was just a little too excited to think straight.

"I sure did! And the next morning Sam shot a doe! It was all us girls, Mom! Uncle Bob said we'd probably get fuck fever, but we didn't! It was the men who got it! They didn't shoot a single deer!"

She waited for a reaction to that. She got one, but it wasn't anything like she expected.

Everybody else in the room just stared at her with wide eyes. Her mother didn't gasp with impressed surprise, but a small gasp came from Samantha's mouth.

"What?" asked Lucy, leaning forward. "What did you say?"

"Which part?" asked Mallory. "I just said a whole lot."

"You sure did."

"Mom, I was just telling you that Sam and I did it!"

"That's not what I'm talking about. Tell me again about this fever."

Sam leaned forward and Randy took a deep breath, but Mallory, in her eagerness to find the response she had been looking for, again spoke rapidly, before either of them could say anything.

"Uncle Bob explained that sometimes new hunters get a deer in their sights but they can't pull the trigger. It's called buck fever. She pronounced the words slowly and carefully, over enunciating them, as it to a child. Then her subconscious screwed her again. Pun intended. "But Sam and I didn't get fuck fever. We were able to shoot when we were supposed to!" She ended with another smile.

There was a sudden curse as Sam was unable to contain a soft, "Ohhhh shit." At the same time, Bob groaned, his voice making a peculiar sliding scale sort of sound as his brain tried to think of a dozen things this all meant at once. Only Randy remained silent. But his jaw dropped and his face assumed a hue close to that of a piece of typing paper.

Mal looked around, primarily at the people who had made the noise. She frowned at Samantha for using that word out loud in front of the adults. That would not be received well. Then she glanced at her brother, who looked like he'd seen a ghost. That didn't make sense so she looked at the adults, to see if there was any visual information available that might help her understand why things felt so tense, all of a sudden. Bob's eyes were closed, and he looked ... worried?

Then she looked at her mother, to see what her reaction to all this was. She found Lucy staring intently at her.

"What kind of fever did you say Bob warned you about?"

Mallory blinked.

"I just told you!" said Mallory, beginning to get angry. "Buck fever!" she said, forcefully.

"That is not what you said, young lady!"

"Of course it is!" grated Mallory, who had completely missed her egregious verbal slips.

Bob couldn't think of anything to say to help the girl. And if he tried, and said the wrong thing, or Lucy sensed he was BS-ing, things would only get worse.

Sam apparently didn't feel it was dangerous to try to help, though.

"It was just a slip of the tongue," she said.

"What slip of the tongue?" complained Mal, who still didn't realize what she'd actually verbalized.

Her mother's face caused Mallory's eyes to stop. She'd never seen that look on her mother's face. It was clear her mom was mad, but she still couldn't fathom why.

"What?!" she yipped, as tension burst out of her body.

Then Randy tried to help, in that fumbling, blundering way that teenage boys often think can somehow make things better. He leaned toward his sister and, sotto voce, said, "You said fuck fever."

Mallory went rigid and her mind froze for an instant as well. The first thing she thought of was that Randy had just said the word "fuck" in a voice that, while soft, could clearly be heard by their mother. That was shoved to the back burner as she contemplated the accusation that she had also said it.

"No I didn't," she defended, immediately.

Sam thought repetition was the key.

"It was just a slip of the tongue," she said again.

Lucy sat up straighter.

"Once, I might accept as a slip of the tongue, but twice? You do not say that word twice by accident."

Bob knew he should do something, even if he didn't want to. Leaving it to the teens obviously wasn't going to work. Plus, an idea popped into his head. That idea, even if developed in a split second, was at least rationally based.

"I bet I know what happened," he said. "You know how you say a tongue twister and it gets all messed up? It was just alliteration. She knew she was going to say fever, and her unconscious mind put an F on the front of the other word too, to match the first letter. You know. Sally sells sea shells?"

Through it all, Lucy's unconscious mind had been assessing the behavior, the body language, if you will, of the others in the room. Now that unconscious part of her mind decided its conclusions were important enough to kick up to a conscious level. Lucy looked around, and the fact that all three of them looked guilty, rather than only her potty-mouthed daughter, impacted her much harder than that simple filthy word that had spilled from said daughter's mouth ... twice.

"What's going on here?" she asked, her voice conveying curiosity now, rather than anger.

"Nothing!" said Sam and Randy at the same time. It was such a typical young person response that it might have been humorous in other circumstances. The problem was that "Nothing!" delivered in that voice meant the exact opposite, and every parent learned that within the three or four years of parenthood.

Oddly, the person in the room who was most calm at that moment was Mallory. Everybody was all upset and that went counter to the purpose of this gathering, which had been to celebrate the admittedly unexpected triumph of the girls. She still didn't believe she'd uttered the phrase that seemed to be responsible for all this uproar but she tried the time honored tactic of complete and utter submission, accompanied by as sincere apology as she could produce.

"I'm really sorry, Mom. It was a mistake. I don't know how that happened."

Lucy responded with the time honored parental stance.

"You said that vile utterance twice, and twice is no mistake!" Lucy said, and then looked around. "Does somebody want to explain to me why my daughter developed a filthy mouth on a simple hunting trip?"

Had anybody had any sort of answer for her, Lucy might have bought it.

But all anyone did was stare at her with guilty looks.

She looked over at Bob, who was sitting very still. "Bob? What the hell is going on here?"

Bob had no plan of any kind.

Lucy's eyes narrowed. He'd been right when he told the teens she could read him like a book. She did that now.

"Bob?" Her voice sounded puzzled. "Why do you look so nervous? And why are you sweating?"

"I don't feel good," he said, his voice still weak. "I think I'd better go."

"I think you'd better stay," said Lucy, her voice now stern. "What the fuck happened on this camping trip?"

All three teens gasped as one. It was the first time any of them had heard a word harsher than "Darn!" issue from Lucy's lips. She wasn't a prude, or Puritanical in her outlook on life, but she had always preached that the use of curse words suggested a lack of education and intelligence in the speaker. It's possible that this expletive, coming from her mouth, was more unnerving than trying to deal with the same word popping out of Mal's. It never occurred to any of them that her use of the same word that had gotten things all out of whack might have been intentional... designed to produce data she could then read with her eyes.

Nobody said anything now, and the silence dragged on until it was broken by Lucy, whose eyes had indeed been rewarded with signs of guilt. The problem was that all four of them looked guilty, not just Mallory.

"Well?"

The body language of all four of them caused the flickering flame of suspicion to burst into a roaring inferno. That part was just a reaction to what she was seeing, her own body responding unconsciously to the unspoken messages being received from the others. The problem was that her conscious mind couldn't imagine any reason for all this guilt that was clearly displayed on the faces of the others. Her frustration about that demanded to be alleviated.

She stood, suddenly, facing Bob.

"Bob, I think you and I need to have a little talk ... in private."

Bob stared up at her and he was almost overcome with the lunacy of the fact that his eyes were drawn to her breasts, which pushed her blouse away from her chest in a way that he couldn't help comparing to her daughter's breasts doing the same thing.

"Bob!" barked Lucy, her voice now loud. All four of the others jumped.

"Okay," he said, levering himself up on weak knees to a standing position that looked slumped ... defeated. Once up, though, he didn't move.

"Bob!" screamed Lucy.

"Okay!" he yelped in return.

He started moving and Lucy reached to grip his elbow in her hand.

"Daddy?" Sam's voice held both fear and warning.

"You three stay right here," ordered Lucy, looking over her shoulder. "Do not move from this spot!"

Then she dragged Bob toward her bedroom, perhaps because she thought of that as the most private place she could interrogate her brother-in-law about this peculiar state of affairs.

"What the fuck do we do now?" whispered Randy.

"Please do not use that word," groaned Sam.

"What word?"

"The same word that got us into this mess," hissed Sam. "The word your sister blurted out!" She glared at Mallory.

"Did I really say that?" asked Mal, a look of horror on her face. Her head tilted, as if she was puzzled. "I actually said ... fuck fever?"

"Oh, it wasn't so bad," said Sam, sarcastically. "You only said it twice!"

"I don't understand," moaned Mallory. "How could that happen?"

"Because you're a slut!" barked Sam, her comment fueled by anger now, rather than teasing conviviality. Her voice sounded harsh, ugly.

A flicker of sudden movement in the peripheral vision of the teenagers caused them all to look toward the hallway Lucy and Bob had disappeared into. To their consternation, Lucy stood there, her face white and tight.

"And why is she such a slut, Samantha?" she growled.

Sam panicked.

"I thought you were talking to Daddy," she gasped.

"You haven't answered my question," said Lucy.

"It's just something I call her sometimes," squeaked Sam.

"And why do you sometimes just call my daughter a slut?" Lucy stepped further into the room. Bob followed, looking a little panicked himself. She unconsciously put a hand behind her and pushed him back toward the hallway.

"It's just a word," whimpered Sam.

"A word like fuck?" All three teens winced. "That's what sluts do, isn't it? Fuck?" Thunder came over Lucy's face. "Is that what you're saying? Are you saying my daughter has sex? That she's literally a fucking slut?"

"No!" squealed Sam. "That's not what I meant." Sheer terror ripped what she said next from her throat. "We didn't mean for it to happen! We didn't plan it!"

Her hands came up to cover her face as she realized the import of what she'd just said. She fell sideways on the couch. Her pony tail flopped onto Randy's thigh.

Lucy turned around to face Bob again.

All she did was shove him with both hands towards her bedroom.

A lot happened in Bob's mind on the twenty foot journey to Lucy's room. He had heard the same thing Lucy had, when she stopped and eavesdropped on what the kids would say once they thought the adults were out of hearing. He understood completely how Lucy could have intuited the truth from the events that had taken only two or three minutes, but seemed to have lasted for hours. Basically, he knew the jig was up. And so, based on the fact that he had no shred of an explanation as to how this could have happened under circumstances she might accept as chance, error, mistake or even serendipity, his brain was prepared only to divulge the truth.

The problem was that he had no idea just how to phrase the truth.

He was willing to take the blame, because he felt he was the one who had stepped over the line. And that willingness caused him to stop thinking about creative ways in which to explain the situation.

Once in Lucy's bedroom, he looked at everything in it except his sister-in-law.

"Sit!" she barked.

His mind tilted as some part of it tried to understand why sitting was necessary. While his mind distracted him from the real issue, he sat. She came to stand in front of him. He couldn't look her in the face, and was horrified to find his eyes pinned on her breasts again. He jerked them to one side.

"Did you have sex with my daughter?" Her voice was low, breathy, but void of any discernible emotion.