Bodark Creek - 42. Chapter 42

“This is like the old days,” I told Martin one morning. “Except instead of me having babies and our nieces getting married, our sons’ wives are having the babies and our daughters are finding husbands.”

“Someone’s always finding a husband around here,” Martin said. “Pat and Joann shouldn’t be any different.”

Maybe not, but Joann still surprised us. First, she started dating Rodney. Then she kept dating him.

“How can you be serious about someone named ‘Rodney?’” Pat asked her. I think she was kidding, but she might also have been trying to back Joann down.

“You can’t go by name,” was all Joann said.

“But you can’t even call him ‘Rod,’” Pat went on. “It sounds like a bad joke. Especially when you think of the kind of guy Rod is.”

“He’s fine,” Joann insisted. And maybe he was to her. But to the rest of us, Rodney was a kind of a cowboy.

“A cowboy on a motorcycle,” Del called him.

“Hot Rod,” Neal said. And it stuck.

“What’s Hot Rod doing lately?” Dougie would ask when he’d come by. Or “Where’s Hot Rod taking my niece tonight?”

“There are so many nice boys in town,” Rosalind mentioned. “Why did Joann pick him?”

Martin mainly laughed. “I like Rodney,” he told us. “Maybe he doesn’t look the way you want. And maybe he’s a bit rude. But I like him better than Bobby.”

“That’s because he’s not so good-looking,” Rosalind said. “You never trusted Bobby because of that.”

Martin didn’t answer, so we knew she was telling the truth. And it’s not that Rodney was in any way bad looking. He just didn’t seem to care.

“You want to take a shower before dinner?” Del would ask him on a Sunday.

“Nah, I took one a couple days ago.”

“Well, the bathroom’s free.”

“Aw, you guys worry too much about smelling like soap. All that scrubbing’s gonna make your hair fall out.”

That was something Rodney didn’t have to bother about. He had a lot of hair. Del and Neal were both clean-shaven, and so were Martin and my brothers. Walter once had a mustache, but I couldn’t remember when that last was. But Rodney had a mustache and a beard. And sometimes you couldn’t tell where the beard left off and the rest of him began.

“He could at least button up the top of his shirt,” Rosalind complained.

“He doesn’t find much reason.”

“You could tell him to.”

“Martin won’t because he doesn’t want to get Joann angry. And Del jokes about it, but Rodney jokes right back.”

“Well, he’s the hairiest man I’ve seen. And it’s all so dark.”

“You can’t blame him for that,” I said. And I guess it was my way of admitting that I liked Rodney, too. But I was always happier seeing Bobby. And he stopped by almost every weekend to pick up the children.

“Daddy!” Paul would scream when he saw Bobby’s pick-up.

“Daddy!” Lilah would yell as Bobby came onto the porch. Joann always tried to be out when Bobby came by. She could talk to him when she needed. But she tried to avoid that as much as possible.

“We’ll be at my folks’ house,” Bobby would say. “I’ll have these squirmers back tomorrow.”

“Joann may be here,” I’d tell him.

“Good,” he’d answer, and he’d be grinning. That always gave me the feeling that he missed Joann more than she missed him.

“Is he dating anyone?” I asked Pat. They were old friends, so I thought she might know.

“He never says.”

“I wonder how long it’ll be before Bobby runs into Rodney? And I wonder what he’ll say?”

“What can he say? Bobby gave up his rights when he divorced Joann.”

“They divorced each other,” I pointed out. “They both wanted it.”

Though when Joann went to get married again, she did it the same way she did before. She and Rodney went off for the weekend and came back with the news.

“I didn’t figure there was reason to make any fuss,” she told us. “After all…”

She didn’t finish that and didn’t need to because it was something we all knew. Joann had been staying with Rodney more nights than I could count. She’d put Paul and Lilah to bed and wait until they were asleep. Then she’d drive off.

“You know you can always find me,” she said. “I’ll be home ten minutes after you call.”

After she got married, Paul and Lilah moved to Rodney’s. “Is that legal?” I asked Del, who knew about these things. “Doesn’t Bobby have any say?”

“None that I can figure,” Del said. “And I don’t think he cares. He won’t be paying alimony anymore. Just something each month for the kids.”

“So maybe he’ll start dating,” Pat said.

“Bet you’d like that,” Neal joked. “I’ll bet you wouldn’t mind if he started dating you.”

Sometimes I could swat Neal, though it was a long time since I’d spanked anyone. Joann didn’t feel it was right even to punish Paul and Lilah.

“It teaches them good from bad,” I said.

“It’s old fashioned,” she replied. And since they were her children, it was her decision.

Still, I didn’t like Neal making fun of Pat. We all knew how much she wanted to be married, but there was nothing gained in pointing that out. Besides, she would have been a terrible wife for Bobby.

“Why?” she asked. “Don’t you think I’m pretty enough?”

“It’s not that at all,” I said. I always had to say nice things to Pat about her looks. She was as pretty as Joann, but not in the same way. So she didn’t have the confidence.

“I’m not even the bright one,” Pat complained. “Joann’s just as smart as me, and she’s even finished her schooling. I only keep promising to finish my nursing classes.”

“If you didn’t work so hard,” I’d tell her, “you’d have time to finish school.” She had one more year to get her full RN. “And if you didn’t work so much, you might have a night to go out.”

“I have to work,” she explained. “The other nurses have families and children. I’m supposedly the one with free time.”

“Maybe she’ll meet a doctor,” I told Joann.

“She’ll probably catch a cold,” Joann joked. “Besides, doctors are as bad as the dentists I work for. They make awful husbands.”

But Pat did meet someone, or so we heard. She was very quiet about it. “I don’t want to say anything because that might ruin it,” she told me. Then she wouldn’t say anything at all.

“Who is it?” I asked Joann. “The town’s small enough town. It’s probably someone we know.”

“You didn’t know Rodney,” Joann pointed out. “He didn’t grow up here.”

“Then you know who she’s dating?”

Joann was as silent as her sister.

“Who?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you,” she admitted. “Not if Pat doesn’t want me to. I mean, it’s nobody bad. No one you won’t like. I think.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, it’s someone Pat was introduced to. Introduced to by Rodney.”

“So now we’re gonna have two Hot Rods in our family,” Neal joked. “Great.”

“It’s not what they do for a living,” Joann said. “It’s how they get around.”

“Where does he work?” Neal asked. “Like Rod? At the VA?”

Rodney was an x-ray technician in the same building where Joann worked. That’s how they met.

“Does this other boy work for the VA, too?” I asked.

“He’s a little old to be a boy,” Joann corrected. “In fact, he’s a little old in general. But not any older than Daddy is from you.”

Pat was thirty. The man she was dating was forty-two. And he was married. He was in the middle of a divorce, but he was still married.

“Everyone gets divorced these days,” Pat assured me when we talked.

“Did Pat meet him after he started the divorce?” I carefully asked Joann.

“Yes,” Joann said. “What kind of person do you think Pat is? Don’t you have any faith in us?”

I had complete faith. I was just always surprised. And once Eddie met us, we all liked him. And he was nothing like Rodney. They just both rode motorcycles.

After Eddie got divorced, he and Pat had a big wedding at the church. Well, it was smaller than Del and Neal’s weddings, but bigger than anything Joann had managed. And while Joann was getting married again, and Pat was getting married for the first time, Susan and Val were having their babies. They had their first ones almost together.

“It only makes sense,” Del said. “Neal and I got married at the same time.”

“But that was a four years ago,” Dougie joked. “What have you been doing all this time? And do you both check with each other before getting into bed?”

“Dougie,” I said. “There are children around.” Paul and Lilah were playing on the floor.

“They don’t know what I’m saying,” he added. “Probably think I mean ‘sleeping.’”

“You’re making it worse.”

But Susan had a little girl, and Val had a little boy. The girl was named after Susan’s favorite aunt. The boy was named for my daddy.

“Del and I talked about it,” Neal explained. “We agreed that the first one to have a son got to use granddaddy’s name.”

“I’m all right with this,” Del said. “It’s only fair.”

It may have been fair at the beginning, but it didn’t work out that way. Because not too long after Pat married Eddie, Neal and Valerie got divorced. And she took their son and moved to Abilene, where we practically never saw them again.

“I don’t know how this happened,” Neal said, miserable one night. He still had the house next to Del and the insurance office, but he’d taken to eating and sleeping back with us. “I was being a good husband. I did everything that was expected. Why does Del have all the luck?”

“What are you talking about?” Martin asked. And I was just as confused

“Del’s taller. He’s better looking. He got to fight in Korea. He gets all these great business ideas. And his marriage is doing fine, where my wife ran off with a man who came in to buy insurance.”

Martin and I didn’t know where to start, though we knew Neal was just feeling bad about himself. “Maybe it is bad luck,” Martin began. “At least the part about Valerie and the insurance man. But even if Del has the ideas, you’re always the one who works to make them right. He couldn’t manage without you.”

“Well, if I hadn’t been slaving so hard for Del, Val wouldn’t have had time to sneak around.”

“She wasn’t sneaking,” Susan told us later. “She just fell in love.”

Susan was the one who knew Valerie best, because they worked so much in the office together. But she hurt Neal by telling him the truth.

“Val loved me,” Neal almost cried.

Susan couldn’t answer.

“And now she’s even taken the baby,” he went on.

By that point, Danny was nearly two years old. But for a long time Neal called him ‘the baby.’”

“It’s just another way to feel bad,” Del said.

Del also told Neal to “Stop tearing yourself up.” But all Neal would say was, “The guy knows more than I do. He lives better. And every time I go to see Danny, it all gets pointed out to me.”

To help Neal a little, Del and Susan named their first son Daniel, too. “That way you’ll always have a Danny around.”

It helped a bit. Though Susan warned, “It might get confusing, when the two boys actually meet.”

That turned out not to matter, because Valerie and her new husband soon moved to El Paso. “The law says they just have to stay in Texas,” Del reported. “Though sometimes Texas is too damned big.”