I told Emmy he went by just Hammer now, and came over to help with things Mr. Peg had got too old for, like gutters. He was basically a Peggot grandson, even though technically not all that related. I told her I was basically one too, raised by them as far as the more solid parts. I admitted that for the longest time I’d thought Mrs. Peggot was my real mammaw.
Emmy put her eyes square on mine. It scared me almost, getting looked at like that. “You’re wishing she really was, aren’t you?” she said. “Then they’d have to adopt you.” She kissed her finger and touched my cheek.
“They probably wouldn’t, though.”
I wanted her to say I was wrong, but she rolled on her back, looking at the ceiling. I watched her thinking it over. I’d never had that close a look at another person’s face before. She had brown-sugar freckles and a little silver line through one eyebrow where she said a cat scratched her. The tiniest furrow plowed through her eyebrow hairs, never to grow back.
She rolled back to face me. “I don’t know. They didn’t legally adopt either one of us. For Matty they’re just guardians. His mom is still his mom.”
“Not that she’s doing much about it in Goochland,” I said. “No offense to anybody.”
But Emmy was off someplace else, thinking of her own messed-up past. I was pretty shocked of it. Given the Peggots being so decent. “Having both of us was too much,” she said. “Think about it, he’s a newborn and I’m a toddler. Poor Mammaw. She really needed Aunt June to take over with me. I never gave it much thought till lately, but I mean, who does that? Take over raising your dead brother’s two-year-old, while you’re still in nursing school.”
June Peggot, was the answer. The Peggots had brought in the trailer next door so she could have her own place with Emmy and still be all one family while June finished up school. That was the same trailer that soon would be Mom’s, then Mom’s and mine, after June got her hospital job and moved with Emmy to Knoxville. Emmy’s bad-news real mom still would turn up at the Peggots’ every so often, threatening to go to court and get Emmy back. She was in no position now as an IV drug user, homeless etc., but that didn’t stop her from showing up in the middle of the night, banging on the door, raising Cain to see her kid. The Peggots kept quiet about Emmy being in Tennessee so she wouldn’t go after June and try to steal Emmy back. That’s why the big secret. But Skank Mom had finally agreed to sign Emmy over for good. Amen and hallelujah on Aunt June finally winning the mom war.
I asked how that felt, given away by her real mother. Emmy said she had all the mom a person could want. She didn’t care if she ever laid eyes on the other one again.
The upshot of all this talking was me getting pretty much in love with Emmy. She was beautiful and like a grown person. In the daytime we didn’t let on. Hanging out with her and Maggot, I tried to be normal, but sometimes said things to impress her. Like how the other foster boys thought my cartoons were good. And the football hero Fast Forward that was my friend. She just said something polite, but Maggot chimed in on how awesome this guy was. I’d forgotten Maggot knew him from that time they came to the farm. This got Emmy interested to the extent of saying she’d like to meet this famous Fast Forward.
So we played it cool, and I wondered if the other was real or just some after-hours game she was playing. But then she would let me sit on the couch with her while she was reading, and under the blanket her feet would touch my feet. She’d look up from her book and smile at me and, oh man. Utterly wrecked. Back in the summer she’d announced the one time about us getting married, which was kid shit. Like somebody giving you Monopoly money and saying “Here, go buy a house.” But now all I had to do was think of Emmy, her face or her toothpaste smell, and it would give me these waking-up feelings as regards the guy downstairs. Not kid shit. At night we’d be talking and I’d get obsessed on kissing her, even though not having the nerve. It was her finally that did it. She asked if I wanted to go to second base, which of course I did, except for not knowing exactly where that base was located. I’d heard different things. I said okay, and she took my hand into the neck of her gown and put it on her chest. Nipple and everything, warm and soft. Christ. Now I had a whole new body function to be terrified of doing on accident, from being that mixed up and happy at the same time. But I held it together. I just told her I loved her and that kind of thing. I told her whenever she moved back to Lee County, we could take walks together with Aunt June’s dog Rufus.