Careful What You Wish For Read online

  I stared into his eyes, which were the color of root beer and unfathomably deep. His hair was reddish brown, sun-streaked and pulled back in a ponytail. I memorized the angles of his cheekbones, his nose, his mouth. I liked the way his skin felt under my finger-tips. I drank him in as if I was dying of thirst, and I surely was.

  I also ended up telling Jake that I was a lawyer in Philadelphia but that I hated it and wanted to quit—a thought I had never put into words before. He said he understood that because he used to have a job he didn’t like too, and he used to be somebody else, but now he was Jake and he rode with an outlaw motorcycle gang called the Bandidos. He also told me an awful lot about his motorcycle, which he seemed to love as much as a cowboy in the Old West would have loved his horse.

  Then he kissed me, his lips a little salty with sweat and his mouth tasting of beer and lime. My head started spinning and didn’t stop. I said I couldn’t believe I was sitting there kissing him in a roadside bar outside of Laredo. He said he couldn’t either and that he had a better idea, and that’s how we ended up at the motel for the best sex I ever had in my entire life.

  Wait a minute, that’s not the whole story. The total experience was much more than lust in the Texas heat. Jake and I fit together in a way that I had never experienced before. The way I felt reminded me of a couple I knew who realized they were soul mates on the first date. They started living together that same night. By the time I was introduced to them, it was ten years later, and they were still crazy about each other. That’s how it was with Jake and me—

  Or it would have been, if this voice in my head hadn’t kept whispering: This can’t work. He’s a biker, an outlaw. I’m a lawyer. This is just sexual infatuation. This is crazy. This can’t work, over and over like a mantra. The whole time my heart kept telling me it felt so right. And Jake was telling me that too, saying stuff like, “This is so amazing. I can’t believe I met you.”

  “Me too,” I said, “me too.”

  But it was I who pulled away, not Jake. It was I who sat up in bed sometime around nine that night and wrapped my arms around my knees. I didn’t want to leave and I wanted to tell Jake that I loved him, but that was too nuts—or so the little voice in my head warned. So instead, I shut my eyes and whispered, “Um, Jake, this has been great. You’ve been great. Unbelievable, really. But I’ve got to be leaving now. I have a red-eye flight back to Philly.” I opened my eyes and looked over at him.

  Jake was propped up on the pillows, his hands behind his head. A wave of sadness seemed to pass over him like a shadow. He started to say, “I wish—” and I thought he was going to tell me not to go, but he didn’t. He stopped midsentence. Then what he said was, “Yeah, sure. You’re right. You have to go. I’m not in a place you can be right now.” He reached out and gently turned my face toward his. “Maybe someday things will be different, but now, yeah, you got to go.”

  Jake dropped me off at the car rental office, and I was going to give him my business card at the last minute, but I didn’t. I stood there in the humid Texas night, my heart breaking in two, telling me not to leave, while he kissed me one last time. The touch of his lips made me want him all over again. Then he took my hand, looked into my eyes, and said, “This sounds sort of dumb…anyways, I’m going to say it, Ravine.” He said my name right and he said it slow, Rah-vine, not Rah-veen, which is how it looks. “In another time, another place, I’d ask you to stay. To marry me. But it’s here and now, so I wanted to say I’ll never forget you. And somehow, I promise you, if you need me, I’ll be there. If fate is kind and it’s supposed to happen, I’ll find you, and be the kind of man you would want me to be, because right now—for a lot of reasons—I’m not.”

  Then he winked at me and rode off into the night on that bike, leaving me sort of dazed in front of the rental car place. And no, I didn’t try to find him after I discovered I was pregnant, but I did think about seeing him again almost every single night.

  Now look at me. I was living in a “fixer” of a Pennsylvania farmhouse, with a six-and-a-half-month-old baby, no job, and less than a thousand dollars in savings. I had exchanged the urban diversity of Philadelphia for a rural slice of northeast Pennsylvania where many people lived and died without ever venturing farther than the creaky old coal towns of Wilkes-Barre or Scranton. The teenagers had little to do here besides raise hell and explore the joys of sex in the back-seats of Chevys. Sometimes the girls got pregnant and found themselves stuck here with little hope. But most of the young people left to find better-paying jobs and a different life.

  I had been one of them. I had changed from a gawky, earnest college student who packed a Samsonite and went off to Penn State into a high-powered attorney who ordered lattes and was on her way to making a million dollars a year. But the joke was on me. What I had found wasn’t what I had been looking for at all. Now here I was back in the place I had started. I had gone full circle. I was starting over. Maybe this time I could get it right. Yeah, sure I could—maybe with the help of a miracle or two.

  Mostly I worry about raising a little boy without a father. It’s not that I’m a bad mother, because I really think I am a doggone good one, but I worry that if I meet somebody one day and get married, will he really love Brady like his birth father would? I believe in my heart that a boy needs a man around, so I worry about that too. My own father died a long time ago, and my mother didn’t remarry. And speaking of my mother, I wasn’t home five minutes when I heard her pickup truck pull into my driveway.

  Chapter 2

  My mother means well, I know that. A farm girl with a no-nonsense outlook on life, Clara Bishop Patton hid an eccentric streak behind her practical exterior. After all, she did name me after a town—the tiny Pennsylvania hamlet of Ravine where she and my father had pulled off the interstate to get lunch the day I was conceived. My mother was “no spring chicken,” as she put it, and hadn’t gotten pregnant in nearly twenty years of marriage. She attributed her unexpected fertility to the homemade “piggies” and perogies she’d ordered at a little Polish place.

  My mother was a rock in any crisis, and I had moved back to my hometown to be near her and my other relatives—there were dozens of them, mostly all Pattons—right before the baby was born. I wouldn’t have made it without her, especially through the dark, seemingly endless days of Brady’s colic. Don’t ask. I was so sleep-deprived that in another century I would no doubt have thrown myself down a well.

  I look a lot like my mother, so I am told. We both have the same pug nose that’s too short and tilts up at the end. We both have slate blue eyes, and once upon a time her hair was a light, nearly white blond like mine. Our temperaments, however, are polar opposites. A retired high school teacher, my five-foot-three-inch mother made hulking football halfbacks tremble in their seats with simply a glare. She never got ruffled by anything. In fact, when I phoned her to break the news that I was pregnant, she said without a hint of emotion, “I thought you said you didn’t want to have children.”

  “That’s not true,” I snapped. “I was on a career track. I said I didn’t want children until after I made partner. Plans can change, you know,” I finished in a tight voice.

  “Yes, I know,” she answered with a brief hint of unexpected softness. Then she continued as if she were a loan officer and I was applying for a mortgage. “Do you plan on telling the baby’s father? Or did you use a sperm bank?”

  “No, and no.” I felt aggrieved. I hadn’t expected my mother to get all starry-eyed and mushy when she found out she was going to be a grandmother—she’s not a mushy person—but I had been hoping for some show of enthusiasm on her part.

  “Okay then. Your grandfather’s house on the old farm is empty. He always wanted you to have it. Why don’t you come back to Noxen?”

  I hesitated. It was exactly what I’d thought she’d say. I had looked at all my options and decided that was the best one of the bunch. I had no one in Philadelphia except some business friends. I couldn’t afford to keep my a
partment. I knew nothing about babies or being a mother. I was smart enough to know I needed the best help available—and that was Clara.

  But as I have already mentioned more than once, I had deep reservations about the “coming back to Noxen” part. Noxen is an old, small rural town where rusted-out cars sit on cement blocks in the front yards and the inhabitants are so interrelated with cousins marrying cousins that the whole county tells “Noxen jokes” such as:

  Question: “Why can’t the police solve crimes in Noxen?”

  Answer: “Because the DNA is all the same and there are no dental records.”

  It didn’t help that maybe five years ago one of the Krantzes—a family of farmers who live on the flats down near the highway—was caught having an affair with his favorite sheep, and it was all over the newspapers that the SPCA had him arrested. I’ve had to put up with snickers my whole life when I tell anybody local where I’m from.

  It’s not fair. If you overlook the junk in some of the front yards, you will see that Noxen is nestled in a beautiful valley with a wide bubbling creek running through it. A quaint hundred-year-old post office still operates on Main Street, and the postcard-perfect Methodist church with its white wooden steeple perches on a green lawn along Route 29. On the worn mossy stones of the church’s graveyard are the names of my ancestors who died fighting for liberty in the Revolutionary War. Life’s not fair, as they say, so I finally responded to my mother’s offer of my grand-father’s house by whispering softly, “I’d like that.”

  Right now, however, I balanced Brady on my hip while I peeked out the window and watched my mother wrestle a big box out of the back of her ten-year-old Ford pickup. Fiercely independent and proud of her self-sufficiency, she doesn’t take kindly to offers of help, so I let go of the curtain and went over to open the front door while she marched determinedly up the front walk with her package.

  “What’s that, Ma?” I asked.

  She shot me a smile. “Just what you need. A Diaper Genie.”

  Now I need a lot of things, but a Diaper Genie wasn’t even on my list. “A what?” I asked.

  Noticing that I hadn’t closed the front door, she did, muttering something like, “You’d think the girl was brought up in a barn,” under her breath, then saying louder, “It’s a device to help you dispose of the diapers without the stink. I mean, with your ‘poopaphobia’ and all, it’s perfect.” She chuckled as she reached out and took Brady from my arms and gave him a face full of kisses.

  My mother thinks it’s hysterically funny that I can’t handle strong smells. I never could. I’d be gagging for days when the farmers around here spread manure on the fields in the spring. I have used every deodorizing additive on the market in my cat’s box, which is one of those litter pans with the odor-shield hoods. Even so, pooper-scooping was a daily challenge. And nothing, but nothing, had prepared me for dirty diapers.

  When Brady was a newborn and being breast-fed, I managed to change his diapers by holding my breath. In those first blissful weeks, I even thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad. But once Brady started on solid foods I found myself hanging my head out of the bathroom door trying not to retch. Recently I’ve taken to using swimmers’ nose plugs, which really help. That’s supposed to be a deep dark secret, although I’m pretty sure my mother is spreading it all over town.

  The big problem is that garbage pickup out here in the boondocks happens only once a week. A seven-day buildup of dirty diapers was making me act like a lunatic. I had a green garbage bag which I privately referred to as the old bag of shit stashed in the ram-shackle chicken coop out back, but dragging the bag down to the road for the Monday morning pickup was almost more than I could bear.

  Suddenly I was very interested in this device called a Diaper Genie. “Really? No smell?”

  “Yes, really,” my mother answered. “Your Aunt Loretta told me all about it. You put the used diaper in the top, where it’s then deodorized and stored until you empty the container. You never have to touch it again—and you never have to smell it again,” she assured me. “But look, I have to run. Cal Metz and I are running the Thursday Bingo Bonanza at the Kunkle Fire Hall, and I still need to get to the Weis Market. Let me know how this thing works for you,” she added and handed Brady back.

  Cal Metz and I? My mother had mentioned the retired landscaper a few times this past month. Cal, a poetry-writing ex-hippie of the sixties, used to own the Mums & Roses Garden Center. Now he devoted his time to saving the planet and had started a side business selling compost toilets. She even asked me if I minded his coming to Thanksgiving dinner this year. It crossed my mind that after umpteen years of widow-hood, my mother had a boyfriend. But I didn’t say what I was thinking. I said, “Thanks, Ma,” and leaned over to give her cool, wind-reddened cheek a kiss. As she turned to go I added, “I really appreciate this. The Diaper Genie might change my life.” I laughed. I didn’t know how true those words were about to become.

  I waited until I gave Brady his lunch and put him down for his nap before I took another look at the Diaper Genie. The first thing that I noticed—and it really annoyed me—was that the box had already been opened. Right away I realized that my frugal mother had picked up “a bargain” that somebody else didn’t want. Since she had mentioned Aunt Loretta, I guessed this had been a duplicate baby shower present from when my cousin Margie was pregnant last year. With some relief I noticed that the Diaper Genie looked new and unused when I pulled it out of the box.

  The Diaper Genie was a white plastic cylindrical device that stood about twenty inches high. I couldn’t wait to get it set up, even though fatigue was making my movements clumsy. I needed a nap as much as Brady did, and perhaps more. I’m not a happy camper when I’m sleep-deprived, so when the directions said the lid was easy to open, and it wasn’t, I felt really and truly out of sorts.

  I gripped it as hard as I could and turned. It wouldn’t budge. I tried getting my fingernails under the edge. I twisted and pushed. I couldn’t see any reason why the lid was stuck, and I was beginning to swear and see red. Finally I straddled the thing, held it with my knees, and found some leverage as I gave a mighty heave on the rim—and I fell arse over tea-kettle as the top sprang open. I landed with a thump on the carpet right on my behind.

  I put my hands over my face and thought that this was turning out to be a really bad day. As tears leaked between my fingers, I felt sorry for myself for a minute, then realized crying wasn’t going to help. I sniffed, blinked, and pushed my hair back behind my ears. I glanced toward the ceiling and took a deep breath. That’s when I noticed, up there above me, a white tendril of smoke curling from the open Diaper Genie.

  Holy shit! I thought. The frigging thing’s on fire!

  With my heart beating at least a thousand times a minute, I scrambled to my feet ready to call 911. But as I reached for my cell phone, I noticed that the white “smoke” was more like a thick mist and it was curling up from a dark brown bottle that had rolled out of the Diaper Genie and it’s cork had fallen out. As I watched, it began to form into a human shape. What the hell? I thought. I must be even more tired than I’d realized. Then I heard a sound, something like Poof! followed by the tinkling of little brass bells.

  Suddenly a cocky-looking young guy in ragged khaki shorts, dusty combat boots, and a faded khaki shirt, unbuttoned to expose his bare muscular chest, stood in front of me. I could see that the unruly hair beneath the upturned brim of his slouch hat was a sandy blond. He had a tattoo of a kangaroo on his right forearm. He wasn’t conventionally good-looking—his nose was too hawklike and his face a bit too long—but he had bright blue eyes in a deeply tanned face and a wide, sensual mouth. He was leaning back against my living room wall, his arms folded, a lazy smile on his face.

  As I stared at him, he winked at me, and said, “Thanks, lady,” with a strong Australian accent.

  I pinched myself hard, figuring I was either dreaming or had hit my head when I fell. That’s it, I’m hallucinating, I thought. The p
inch accomplished nothing but to give me the beginnings of a bruise. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. The stranger was still standing in my living room grinning at me.

  As fear cascaded over me like a bucket of cold water, I looked around the room for something to use as a weapon. All I could spot was the TV remote, so I snatched it up and held it out in front of me. “Don’t you dare come a step closer or I’ll let you have it!” I yelled.

  The guy raised one eyebrow at me and didn’t move.

  “Who the hell are you?” I yelled. “And what are you doing in my living room?”

  “Well, now, lady”—it sounded like “li-dee” when he pronounced it—“I’m Gene. At your service,” he said with exaggerated formality. With that he pushed off the wall to stand up straight, and I noticed he had to be six foot two or better. He swept his hat off with a flourish and bowed, although he didn’t act in the least bit servile. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He slapped the hat back onto his head and said, “As to ‘who the hell I am’—I’m a genie, of course. I’ve been trapped in that there bottle, and because you popped my cork, so to speak”—he winked at me again—“I now must grant you three wishes before I’m free. That’s the tradition, y’know.”

  “You have got to be kidding! Do you really expect me to buy that?” I screamed at him. “What are you, some kind of pervert? How did you get in the Diaper Genie? How did you get in my house?”

  “Hey, lady, let’s set the record straight,” he said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t get here under my own steam. Somebody brought my bottle here, and you let me out. Until you make three wishes, I can’t leave. I have to serve you. Believe me, after sixty years in a bottle, I have other things I’d rather be doing. So why don’t you cool off, master,” he said in a mocking tone. “Or should I call you mistress?” he added irreverently.