Read Online Club Storyville by Riley Lashea - Free Book Online

Ariel across the way, and Daddy and Scott at the table’s ends. Nan’s wheelchair taking up so much space, Ariel wasn’t quite across from me, but, facing my way as she was, I thought she would be forced to see me. Amazingly, though, every time they glanced her way, Ariel managed to avoid my eyes as if they weren’t in front of her.
    After the night of the meteor shower, before our fateful day in the garden, I would often turn to find her watching me, a soft smile coming to her lips when I caught her, as if she knew it was okay to look. I should have known then what the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach meant, but, not wanting to know, I chose to pretend it simply didn’t exist.
    Sitting there at the dinner table, all I wanted was for Ariel to look at me that way again, as if she liked finding me close by, but, like Adam and Eve, our sins from the garden would forever follow us it seemed. Any chance we had at paradise was gone.
    Ariel was uncomfortable even being in the room, I could tell. She had come at Nan’s command, and would have liked to have been just about anyplace else. If spoken to, she responded, at appropriate places in everyone’s stories, she smiled, but she never told her own - feeling, perhaps, she had none safe to tell - and those fleeting smiles that came to her lips were fake.
    With such focus on Scott and Jackson, no one else noticed Ariel’s silence, or perhaps they just thought it appropriate in the context of a family dinner where she wasn’t an immediate member.
    That didn’t stop Jackson from going on, though. As Daddy asked questions about the Army’s accelerated training and where they would go when they shipped out, Jackson was as quick to respond as Scott, and the rest of us left them to their discussion, even Nan keeping her thoughts largely to herself.
    It wasn’t until Mama went to collect dessert, and Daddy volunteered to help in my place, that Jackson turned his attention fully on me. Throughout the evening, he’d kept me in the circle of his responses, looking to me for reaction when he shared a story he thought would get a laugh, but left with only Scott, Ariel and Nan, Jackson turned in his chair, his hand reaching out to rest on the back of mine, and it was reflex to pull away as his knee touched my thigh.
    “You haven’t said much,” he said, and I realized he had registered my silence as I had registered Ariel’s.
    “I’m just listening,” I responded as his leg bumped mine again in the limited space beneath the table. Noting with some dread the accidental touch didn’t feel like a tenth that of Ariel’s, I wished it would feel like more, that I could make it feel like more.
    “Scott read me some of the letters you sent him at Basic,” Jackson smiled. “You always make him laugh.”
    “I’m glad,” I glanced beyond Jackson to Scott’s humored gaze. “I mean to make him laugh.”
    “I don’t have any brothers and sisters,” Jackson went on, and his gaze felt overly intent upon me. “Just my parents. Their letters are always about how worried they are about me, but how proud they are, about how they hope the war will end before we have to go.”
    “Will the war ever end?” Nan could hold her tongue no longer, and I wondered if she could tell I was uneasy or if she had just kept her opinion to herself too long.
    “It will when we get our hands on Hitler,” Jackson responded with utmost confidence.
    “Don’t count on it, Son,” Nan said, coughing as she lifted her snifter from the table, and I realized the small brandy she had requested had loosened her tongue along with the phlegm in her chest. “There will always be someone to fight.”
    “Maybe there won’t.” Scott’s hopeful response didn’t change Nan’s opinion, and, with a disbelieving shake of her head, she threw back the rest of the brandy like a thirty-year-old shipman.
    “I was thinking...” Jackson turned his attention back to me when it was clear Nan would say no more.