Chapter 9

Another couple left Granger that day, to travel to another town and spend some time together.

Sal, looking obviously groomed, picked Jill up and drove her to Wichita, to a restaurant that was as different from the Wagon Wheel as Dom Perignon is from Mogen David.

Jill, of course, was delighted to be wined and dined like this, even though poor Sal looked so uncomfortable in his suit. That he had gone to this extent meant a lot to her. That he was obviously uncomfortable in the sumptuous surroundings of the ritzy restaurant, and that he had done this for her, made her want to wiggle.

The meal was fantastic. While Sal might be ill-fitted to this kind of place, he knew food. She accepted his recommendation for a menu item, and let him order for her. She found it to be delicious, even though she wasn’t sure what it all was.

“I wish I could cook like this,” sighed Sal, leaning back, when they were done.

“I like your cooking,” said Jill. “You make the best chicken fried steak in the county.”

He smiled. “It’s not quite up to par with this.”

“I would have been just as happy if you’d fixed me chicken fried steak, and some of those potatoes you fry up so perfectly,” she said.

“Thanks,” said her former boss. “You want to take in a movie?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you want to do, then?”

“How long have I known you?” asked Jill.

He looked surprised, and frowned. “I don’t know. Four or five years?”

“I’ve known you that long, and I’ve never seen your house. I don’t even know where you live.”

“It’s just a house,” said Sal.

“Maybe,” she said, folding her napkin and putting it on her plate. “I still want to see it, though.”

Jill looked over at Sal as he drove them back to Granger. He was like a little boy, in many ways, sweet and bashful. It had been a complete surprise to her when he had asked her to dance that night in the square. He had obviously worked up his courage to cut in and dance with her. That was one reason she had wanted to dance with him again. She’d found alomost immediately that dancing with him felt ... comfortable. That was another reason she kept dancing with him.

She had always viewed Sal as a big teddy bear kind of guy, who blustered, but didn’t really mean it, who teased, but never cruelly. All the time her belly had swelled, before she quit the diner and went to work with Christy, he had never once asked her about it, or made any comments. While others had looked askance at her, or frowned, or left smaller tips (or no tip), he had treated her like he always had.

“Can I ask you a question?” She spoke softly.

“Sure.” His eyes glanced at her briefly, but then went back to the road.

“Why did you ask out a single woman, who had a child out of wedlock?”

“I think ‘single woman’ is the operative part of that situation,” he said, smiling.

“Most men wouldn’t be interested in a woman who had a child like that.”

“Steven’s going to be a great kid,” said Sal. “He has a great mom.”

“That’s another thing,” said Jill. “All the time I worked for you, you never showed any interest in me.”

He looked at her longer this time, and laughed.

“Are you kidding? I was flirting with you all the time.”

“Yeah, but that was just...” Suddenly, she wasn’t sure what that ... just was. “You never asked me out or anything.”

“You were kind of mad at men,” he said. “I didn’t think you were interested.”

“I wasn’t,” she admitted. “Not then.”

“Then, when you got pregnant, I knew you really were still interested,” said Sal. “But it was too late, then.”

“No it wasn’t,” said Jill. “That man ... it’s difficult to explain ... but he doesn’t have a claim on me.”

“Then he’s an idiot,” said Sal.

He pulled into his driveway, which suspended the conversation. His house was a small two bedroom place, with clapboard siding, probably in excess of fifty years old. It was well used, but neatly kept.

“I wasn’t planning on visitors,” he said, as he helped her out of the car. “I’m kind of a messy housekeeper.”

“I’m not here to judge your housekeeping,” she said.

He stopped. “Why are you here?”

She was standing closer to him than most people find comfortable, but she wasn’t uncomfortable at all.

“I’m not quite sure yet.”

He didn’t know what that meant, but took her inside, bending over to pick up a couple of things off the floor, once they got inside. One of them was a bright purple pair of boxer shorts, with little dinosaurs on them. He flushed pink as she looked at them.

“How cute!” She giggled.

“They were on sale,” he mumbled.

On impulse she snatched them out of his hand, and held them up.

“They were made for a man, not a little boy,” she noted.

He grabbed at them, but she jerked them out of his reach. He reached around her, as she laughed, and tried to keep them away from him. She twisted in his arms, putting her hands ... and the shorts ... behind him.

Then, again on impulse, she kissed him.

While Jill was kissing her former employer, at his house, Bobby and Betty were at the farm, mowing the yard. Mowing had been a two-person job for years, mostly because the labor pool at the farm had been big enough that lots of chores were viewed as multiple-person chores.

In this case, Betty was pushing the mower, while Bobby pulled weeds, and trimmed around trees with an old fashioned weed whip. These days a “weed whip” is a motorized string trimmer. The original had a wooden handle about three and a half feet long with a metal blade of some sort at the end. It was operated by swinging it back and forth, letting the momentum of the blade whip through the blades of grass.

His shirt was off, and his arms swung back and forth in a smooth rhythm, as he made golf-like swings with the tool, lopping off taller grass with each swing. Bits of grass clung to his sweaty torso.

Matilda brought a tray loaded with glasses full of ice cubes, and a pitcher of lemonade out of the house, just as Betty leaned over and pushed the metal spring that cut off the mower by grounding the magneto to the engine.

Now that Linda had moved out completely, things were quieter than ever. Suzie had elected to stay in Manhattan, and work a summer job there. Mirriam was at work.

The twins had talked many times about their big brother since finding out about his sexual exploits. Having been exposed to the limited joys of sex, by Chuck, and not having many men to choose from in the small town, they were a bit frustrated. They loved their jobs, and college held no special call to them.

But the fact was ... they were horny. And they knew that their big brother had had sex with at least three of their sisters.

That knowledge affected them in mysterious ways. They had never thought of Bobby as a possible sexual partner. To be truthful, they hadn’t actually thought of anybody other than Chuck as a potential sexual partner. They hadn’t actually set out to become sexual beings. It had just happened. They had been swept up in the winds of emotion and passion, and let those winds carry them along. They also knew that what Bobby had done was called incest.

Yet, knowing that it had happened still didn’t make it seem real to them. As they looked back on things, Mary, Bev and Linda had always acted completely normal. There had been nothing that advertised the fact that they let Bobby do to them, what the twins had actually seen him doing to their mother.

Even what they had seen with their own eyes didn’t seem real. That was because, both before and after that night, their mother had seemed completely normal to them. The next day, when they saw her, she was just ... Mamma.

Their impression of “incest” just didn’t match with what they had experienced in real life. Nothing had blown up. Nobody had been irate or unhappy. The babies were all as normal as could be, and the twins loved everybody involved.

It was that normalcy that affected them more than anything else. Think about it like this: For centuries masturbation had been forbidden, considered a sin, and believed to cause terrible afflictions in those who practiced it. As time went by the third leg of that proscription suffered first. Hair did not grow on palms, and neither did warts. People began to drift away from organized religion, so moral objections began to mean less. Simply forbidding it had never worked, and knowing that others do this thing... lots of others ... makes the blanket prohibition lose even more force. This is not to suggest that incest is on the same level as masturbation. It’s not. But the proscription to incest can fail to work in the same ways as it has failed to work concerning masturbation.

In a way, that’s what happened to the twins. They saw no ill effects from the behavior, practically everybody was doing it, and nobody was trying to make it stop. As they stood, two of them sweating heavily, and all of them drinking iced lemonade, Matilda stared at the muscles on her brother’s shiny, wet chest. Chuck had muscles ... but not like these. She remembered Chuck’s weight on her, as he lunged and rutted. Bobby looked heavier.

“Are you ever going to fuck us, like you fucked Mary and the others?” she asked suddenly.

Bobby snorted, in the middle of swigging lemonade, and two drips appeared in his nostrils. Other than that, he didn’t show the shock he felt at the sudden question. For whatever reason, perhaps because of the difference in their ages, he still thought of the twins as “little girls”. He took a look at Matilda, and noticed there wasn’t anything “little” about her anymore. His glance shifted to Betty, whose shirt was clinging to her torso. When had she grown those breasts? Then his mind caught up with things.

“I didn’t fuck them,” he said, suppressing the urge to cough. His nose was still full of lemonade. “I made love with them.”

“Isn’t it all the same thing?” Matilda was very pragmatic in her general outlook.

“If you fuck someone, you do something to them,” said Bobby. “If you make love, you do something with them.”