Chapter 11

The second Friday in December was the last day of school until after the Christmas vacation. The kids would not return until the third of January. It was stressful for Erica, because the performances were scheduled for the last week in January and the sets were not done yet. The ones that were finished were so beautiful they made her heart ache. Tabitha Jenkins had become the de facto supervisor of the finishing of the artwork on the sets. Not only did she draw out the scenes on the flats, and number them for painting, she taught other kids how to do the painting itself, blending things together, where needed, to achieve one effect, and other techniques that brought the flats to breathtaking life, at least to Erica’s eyes.

Another problem was that the kids knew their lines, for the most part, but most of them delivered them in a flat, emotionless way that made it obvious that some memorized speech was being given. Erica had no idea how to get the emotion that was needed out of the kids, and was also afraid they’d forget what they did know over the break.

As a result, she was a bundle of nerves when she talked to Bobby that night. She shared her concerns with him and almost got angry when he said “It will all work out.” What stopped her rage was what he said next. “You’re doing a fantastic job. I know you’ll pull it all together.”

“How?” she moaned. “Only five frames are done. There are two whole sets left to build!”

“I’ve got time,” he said. “You and I could build one tomorrow.”

“But all four sides have to be painted,” she objected. “And when the kids come back, we need them to be working on roles, not sets.”

“We’ve got more than two weeks left before the kids come back,” he said. “We can get it done in that time.”

“Really?” She felt hope.

“Sure,” he said. “With Granger’s number one women’s libber and number one handyman working together, we can do anything.”

Ordinarily, Erica would have bristled at the slang name he had called her, but her relief at wanting to believe him kept her mouth closed.

“Okay,” she said. “Do you really have the time?” she asked.

“I’ve got enough time to do this,” he said, sweeping his arm around. “We can work a little faster without the kids being here,” he said. “Explaining things to them, and correcting their mistakes takes a lot of time. To be honest I’d rather do it myself than supervise them, but that’s what you wanted, so that’s what I’ve been doing.”

“You know what you just did, don’t you?” she asked, her ingrained feminist beliefs surging to the surface. “You just said that only a man can do something the right way.”

“Not even close,” he argued. “What I said is that I can do it faster. They’ve done a great job on this stuff. It just took longer, that’s all.”

“But you think you can do it better,” she insisted.

“Yes,” he said. “But isn’t that just the truth? I have more experience than these kids. My skills are better developed. Put me in a room of some men ... and about half a dozen women I can think of ... and I wouldn’t be able to say that anymore.”

Erica hated it when he won an argument like this. And she knew he had just won the argument. She couldn’t deny his reasoning. And he’d even included women in his list of people who were just as good at this kind of thing as he was.

“How’s Will doing?” he suddenly asked, breaking her train of thought.

“Wonderful,” she said.

“Really?” He looked surprised.

“He’s adjusting very well,” she said carefully.

“Did you talk to him about meeting Jake?”

“Not yet,” she said. “It’s only been a couple of weeks.”

“I mentioned it to Jake and Tilly, and they’d be thrilled to have you guys over during the holidays.”

“I’ll talk to him tonight,” she said, more to get him off her case than really meaning it.

“Great,” he said. “You can tell me what he thinks tomorrow, and I can take you over to meet them during a break.”

She sighed, realizing he’d painted her into another corner.

That night, as Erica lovingly stroked her brother’s stiff penis, she thought of Bobby. That reminded her of his offer.

“Bobby said to say hi,” she said.

If Will thought that was an odd thing for a woman to say while she was masturbating her brother, he didn’t say so.

“He wants to introduce you to another disabled man.”

“Why?” asked her brother.

Their masturbatory session, this night, was a bit more relaxed. The frantic urge to reach a climax wasn’t there, and both of them were just enjoying being naked together and the touching that was going on.

“This man is in a wheelchair too,” she said. “Bobby thinks that the two of you could be friends.”

“Is he a vet?” asked Will.

“Bobby didn’t say,” she said.

“I don’t know,” said Will doubtfully. “You know how people look at me.”

“I know how they look at me too,” she said, abandoning his penis and standing to dangle her breasts over his face. “I have to put up with it, and you can’t hide in this house forever.”

His hand came up and caressed the side of her breast. It was the first time he’d ever touched her, and she froze.

“So beautiful,” he whispered. “They make me wish I was a baby, and you were my mommy.”

Her mind jangled and she stood back up.

“Pay attention here,” she said, putting her hands on her hips.

“I am,” he said, staring at her breasts.

“I’m going to take you to see these people,” she said, as a surge of big sisterly bossiness bubbled up to the surface of her thoughts.

“People?” he asked.

“He’s married,” she said.

“Somebody married a cripple?” he asked. She could hear the disbelief in his voice.

She went back to her knees and reached for his penis.

“You never believed a woman would do this for you again ... did you!”

He groaned as she stroked him rapidly. “Nooo.”

“I love you. I love you enough to do this for you. Why couldn’t some other woman love another man like you enough to do it for him too?”

Her hand stopped moving, though she didn’t let go.

“Okay, okay, just don’t stop!” he moaned.

“You’ll go then?”

“Yes,” he said. “Now will you keep going?”

“Men!” she spat. “All they think about is sex.”

By the time he had to take over for her, to finish, her fingers were already pulling at the loose skin at the opening of her sex. She continued to do that as she stood and put her nipple over the tip of his penis.

They groaned their release together.

She had another dream that night. It didn’t wake her, but she remembered it vividly when she woke up the next morning. In the dream she was on her knees, stroking the penis in front of her. Her breasts were naked and lying on the edge of the bed, beside the hip above which her hand slid up and down the rigid column of man flesh. She was smiling in her dream, waiting for that man flesh to fountain its warm offering, so she could have another glorious orgasm. In her dream, she was able to make it spurt all by herself. She heard the groan that signaled it was about to happen and rose, to rub her tingling nipple over the shiny head of the penis that would make her feel so good any second now. Then, as it spurted and she felt the thrills, she looked up at the face of the man on the bed.

That face was Bobby Dalton’s

The dream was still vivid in her mind as she entered the school. It was eerily quiet in the halls. She’d had to get a key, since no one else would be in the building during the vacation. Even in Granger they locked the school at night. She left the door unlocked, so that Bobby could get in when he got there. It wasn’t until she approached the auditorium doors that she heard the banging of a nail being driven home, and knew the man whose face had been in her dream was already there. She felt flutters in her belly at the thought of seeing it again, this time for real.

All this turmoil confused her. Bobby had asked to be her friend. That alone had been odd and somewhat mysterious, because he had acted just like that ... a friend. Other than the few times his eyes fell on her breasts, there was no indication at all that he had any sexual thoughts about her. Why, then, did she have them about him?

She was wearing what she thought of as her “work clothes,” and rather than engaging Bobby in conversation, she just walked in and asked what needed to be done. He greeted her and put her to work using the radial arm saw to cut the two by fours that would be nailed together to make the two sides of the frame he didn’t already have laid out on the floor. He was working on a forty-five degree brace in one corner, and told her the lengths needed from memory.

She struggled with the sixteen feet long two by fours and laid three of them out on the table of the saw, automatically checking it to see if they were straight and un-warped. One of the boards she’d picked up had an slight twist in it and she took it back to the shelf to pick another. She glanced at Bobby, who was on his hands and knees, measuring something with a tape measure. The jeans he was wearing were tight over his backside and she caught herself standing there, staring at it.

Flustered, she turned away and the end of the board she was carrying ran into one of the tree sets. She stopped to make sure she hadn’t damaged anything, and then went back to the saw. They were using forty-five degree miter joints at the corners. Then bracing was put in each corner on the inside, using half laps that had to be cut and chiseled by hand, but which ended up making the frame the same thickness all the way around. Vertical struts or studs, as Bobby called them, were butt joined to the top and bottom of the frame so that, when canvas was stretched over it, there would be some support behind the canvas. Bobby had chosen to use dowels on the ends of those studs, instead of flat metal pieces, which would have had to lay on top of the wood, unless more time consuming chisel work was done to keep them from being what Bobby called “proud,” which meant sticking up above the surface of the wood.

What that meant was that the frame pieces had to be cut first and laid out to make sure everything fit, because once the bottom of the frame was attached and the glue in the dowel holes set, it wasn’t coming apart again. Bobby called it “dry fitting.”

She needed three eight-foot-long boards, with forty-five degree miters on each end. To save time, Erica lined up the two sixteen footers and, using a measuring tape, calculated where to cut them in the middle with them laid side by side so that she’d only have to make one pull of the saw to end up with four eight-foot boards, each already having a forty-five degree miter on one end. She thought she was being clever because she’d seen Bobby do this, but he hadn’t explained it to her.

The problem was that the saw table was only four feet long and there was enough of each board hanging off of it that the boards wanted to tip. She had to press down on them and push them against the fence to keep them in place. She reached for the switch and turned on the motor and then reached for the handle that would pull the motor and saw blade across the boards.

Strong hands suddenly clamped onto her waist and pulled her backwards. She yelped in surprise and the boards tipped. Her back ran into what felt like a brick wall that had padding on it. A hand left her waist and reached to flip the motor switch off.

She turned, feeling the hand on the left side of her waist slide across her back and stared into blue eyes that were only inches from her own.

“What are you doing?!” she tried to demand.

“Saving your fingers,” he said. She could smell his breath. It smelled like syrup to her.

“What are you talking about!?” she said.

He had her turn around.

“Set it up again,” he said.

“I already had it set up,” she complained.

“Just set it up again.”

She did. She hadn’t taken the time to make a pencil mark where the actual cuts would be made. She’d just held everything in place and used the tape to get it where she wanted it. She did that again.

“Okay,” she said, her voice tight.

“Don’t move,” he said.

He went around behind the saw and turned the crank that she knew raised and lowered the motor, and the saw blade with it. Then he came back around the saw.

“Watch,” he said, standing next to her.

He reached for the handle and pulled the motor towards them. The blade was much too high to cut the boards, and slid over them. To her horror it also slid over the tips of two of the fingers on the hand she was holding the boards against the fence with.

“But it didn’t look like that would happen!” she gasped.

“Now set it up and use a combination square to make a line, like I showed you,” he ordered.

She was shaken by what she’d just seen, so didn’t argue with him.

“Good,” he said, as she did the calculations again to cut both boards in the right place with just one cut. “Now the line.”

She used the square and a pencil to draw the diagonal line across both boards and then put them back up against the fence. The only way she could get the boards to lie flat was with her fingertips across the line she had just drawn.

“When you’re going to cut long stock like that,” he said. “Ask for help, okay?”

He went to the ends of the boards and held them up so she could move her fingers to one side of the line. Gritting her teeth she turned on the saw and made the cut. It was suddenly quiet as she turned the saw off.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Sorry I had to break my word,” he said.

“What?”

“I had to touch you. You told me never to touch you again.”

She examined his voice and his face, because she thought he must be making fun of her, but he was completely serious.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said.

“It’s what you said,” he responded.

“You touched my breasts last time, not my waist!”

“I’m sorry about that too,” he said. “I should have thought of something else.”

She remembered what he’d said, back then, about whether he should have slapped her instead. She knew he’d been right. She had been freaked out about Will, and he had jerked her out of that and made her face the issue.

“I might have overreacted a little bit,” she said.

“Well anyway, I promised, and I’m sorry I broke it.”

“Oh for Pete’s sake, Bobby!” she snapped. “You saved my fingers! And I was only talking about touching me sexually anyway!”