Time Wounds All Heels

"Like you."

"I like to think so. I like to think that if I ever ran into Kenny again, I could apologize and he would accept my apology."

"You were never able to find him?"

"He had left school before the official end of school. He'd done all his end-of-year tests and passed so he didn't need to come back. I went back to his mother one more time but she would never talk to me again. Then the next year she moved away too and no one ever heard from her again. The few friends he had said they didn't know where he'd gone. They might have been lying, but they would never have talked to me. Everybody knew what I'd done."

"So you gave up?"

She shook her head.

"No, not really. I kept the word out that I'd like to talk to him if anyone ever heard from him. But, I couldn't do much more. It got to the point that – Johnny felt bad about it later. But he'd never admit we were wrong. He insisted until the day he died that it was Kenny's fault for being so stupid and that any man would have stayed and fought for me if he'd had that big of a crush on me.

"So, after awhile it did seem like I was betraying Johnny. That by searching for Kenny, I was telling Johnny he had been an asshole, that it was really all his fault because he started things. I did love him, Johnny changed. I was prejudiced because I loved him but I know he became a better person. He just never could admit that he felt guilty about what had happened. Johnny was here in my life and Kenny was gone."

She reached out and covered his hand, which rested on the seat between them, with her own.

"The worst part is that I never knew. He might have gone out and killed himself, although I doubted that because somebody would have told me. Or he could have gone into the Army and got himself killed. Or he could have moved to California and married and raised six kids and became rich. Who knows?"

She flicked the interior light of the van on.

"I always wondered where he went to, where he vanished to and why he never came back."

She fixed her gaze with a laser's intensity on the dark haired man who sat across from her.

"Where did you run to, Kenny? And why didn't you ever come back?"

He smiled.

"When did you figure it out?"

"Just a few seconds ago, but I've had a funny feeling about you all day long. You made me feel - unsettled. I didn't know what it was. But the longer you were around and I saw you with people, the more I knew that I knew you from somewhere. But it never occurred to me who you really were."

"This is who I really am, Jessie - Robert Kincade - Times-Union reporter, divorced husband. Former Palatka boy."

"How can it be you? Your name is changed. You don't look the same. You're taller. You aren't the same. You don't act the same. When Jimmy showed up and could have beaten poor Hubie to a pulp, or when I went out to talk to Jimmy, you could have run, but you stood your ground. Kenny wouldn't have done that - he didn't do that."

He took the hand she had placed over his and raised it to his face and ran it over his face like a blind woman 'seeing' another's face.

"My name is Kenneth Robert Kincade - formerly Kenneth Robert Bishop. I moved to Sacramento to live with my uncle, my mother's brother Dave. Mom moved out there the next year and a couple of years later while I was in college she met and married Lawrence Kincade. He was a really good guy and I liked him. So when he was dying of cancer a few years later, he asked me to take his name, so it wouldn't vanish from the earth. I became Kenneth Robert Kincade, but I go by Robert now."

The smile turned into a grin.

"I was never that short, Jessie. You're five-six, I was five-seven. I just looked short compared to Johnny. While I was in college I shot up another five inches. So, six feet, and my face? It looked pretty bad but you'd be surprised what dermatologists can do today with acne. I had to pay for a little surgery, but I got a normal face back. And I wear contacts. I still have glasses for reading, but when I'm out in public I use contacts."

She lowered her hand from his face and bit her lower lip.

"You must have been laughing hysterically on the inside all this day. Ugly duckling turned into the swan comes back to enjoy a private little joke on yesterday's Golden Girl. Not so golden anymore, am I? When were you going to spring it on me? Were you going to wait until you got ready to leave tonight to tell me? Or were you just going to walk away again? Leave me ignorant and let me go on the rest of my life never knowing the truth, letting me live with guilt for the rest of my life?"

"No master plan, Jessie. I didn't know who you were. I knew nothing of your life since I left. I never wanted to know, to tell you the truth. I got over you, but the memories still sting. It was all a wild coincidence that we even met. I was never supposed to do the Wheel Chair Lady story.

"A guy named Harry Bass, a really good but a little strange, old time reporter was assigned.

But another reporter, our main police reporter, Carl Cameron, decided to get married a week or so ago to the woman he loved. She's an Assistant State Attorney up in Jax and they had been together on and off for over a year and then they broke up because Carl and his lady were incredibly stupid. But they finally wised up and tied the knot.

"He was willing to give up a honeymoon, but he told the brass that he was taking this weekend off to be with his new bride and if they didn't like it, they could fire him. I know you've seen his name. He's a damned good police reporter, but he's a better writer. Some of his stories have gone GLOBAL. They weren't going to fire him over a weekend, and Harry had always been the number two police reporter, so they made him take Carl's job for the weekend. And I got stuck with Harry's assignment."

Robert/Kenneth reached out and ran his thumb along the line of her jaw.

"That's why I knew it had to be fate, meant to be, when I walked out back of the church and you turned around in your chair.

"I didn't know anything about you. I didn't know Johnny was gone. When I heard the name I figured you were still married and probably had a passel of kids – teenagers now – running around. I stayed for the story, and because I was curious."

"Why didn't you just spit in my eye and turn around and go back and tell your bosses someone else would have to do the story?"

He gave his head a little shake.

"Because reporters – good reporters – don't do that. You take whatever story they give you and you finish it. You never quit on a story. And....because...I don't hate you Jessie."

"Why in the world wouldn't you?"

He held his hand up to her, palm out, made a fist and then turned his thumb up.

"First off, because it wasn't the end of the world, Jessie. It was a mean thing to do, but I've seen a lot worse things since I left Palatka. I was hurting – really hurting – when I left Palatka, but by the time I was nineteen and out in Sacramento, I'd grown three inches and got contacts, and a lot of the acne had cleared up. More importantly, I'd gotten laid."

He raised his index finger.

"Secondly. It's been TWENTY YEARS. No matter how bad I was hurting, nobody stays angry for 20 years. Unless they're psychotic."

"Third, because I haven't been a saint. After I left Florida and went to school out in California and learned how to talk to girls, I slept with women I had no desire to ever see again and then vanished, wouldn't return their calls, avoided them until they gave up. I'm not making apologies for what I did. I was just a horny young bastard being guided by my cock."

"Fourth, because you have to know this. You're still a beautiful woman but, if you had been the bitch I once thought you were, I would have done my story, not pushed you for a meal, and walked away with you never knowing any different. But you're not the same girl you were. Just like I'm not the same guy. You said that "Time Wounds All Heels." That's true, but the reverse is true as well. Time does heal all wounds."

"Finally, Jessica Longmire, I owe you."

"You owe ME? I don't understand."

"Kenny Bishop probably wouldn't have stood up to Jimmy at the church. Kenny would have thought about it until it was too late to do anything. Or he would have walked away and told himself it wasn't his fight. The way I told myself that day that there was no point in even talking to you because you had Johnny and you would never have looked twice at me. I gave up without even trying."

"My Uncle Dave had done two tours in Vietnam in the late 60s. He lost an arm at Khe San in 1968. He had been a Marine. About two months after I got to Sacramento he took me bar crawling and we met a pretty girl in a bar. There were two big guys that had their eyes on her and when my uncle started moving in on their action, they got really pissed. They warned my uncle to get lost and he told them to get fucked. I didn't do much except get my scalp lacerated by a beer bottle and my Uncle broke some ribs and couldn't walk right for nearly a year. I found out later the girl had been the girlfriend of one of the guys and was just using us to make him jealous."

"I asked him as we were walking out of the ER room at 4 in the morning why he'd nearly gotten himself killed fighting over a woman he never had a shot at. He sat down in one of those uncomfortable plastic chairs they have in waiting rooms and he told me something I've never forgotten."

" 'You never run, Kenny', he said, 'Whether you're facing a thousand North Vietnamese Regulars, or two big assholes in a bar, you never run, not if you're a Marine, or a man. You stand and fight.'

"What if you lose, or get killed," I asked him.

" 'Then you lose, or you die. But there are worse things than dying. Worse things than losing. Not trying, not fighting when you know you should fight, that's worse. Because if you live you know you did the right thing. And if you die, you don't have anything to worry about. But if you run, you have to live with that for the rest of your life.' "

"That's the way he lived his life. He got killed a couple of years later trying to come to the aid of an old lady who was fighting with a mugger over a purse with $24 in it. The mugger pulled out a knife and stabbed my uncle through the heart. He was dead before he hit the ground. They never found the mugger, but I know if my uncle had ever come back, he'd have told me he didn't mind the way things turned out."

"I've never run from anything since. Guys or women or trouble. I face it head on. And I know I'm that way because I ran from you to Sacramento and I met Uncle Dave. If not for you, I don't know who or where I'd be today."

Robert Kincade sat up straighter in the van.

"It was 20 years ago, Jessie. We were different people. I'm glad things worked out so we met today. I've thought about you, some, over the years. Couldn't help it. I can't say that you've had a real good life, but you've made a good life. You're a better person than I ever thought you were. I knew you were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen but I didn't know you were a good person inside."

"Thank you, Ke- Kincade. I mean, really thank you. You don't know what this means to me. You can't ever know how many hours I've spent regretting what I did. Now, knowing that I – I didn't ruin your life – it's the best gift anyone ever gave me."

"You're welcome."

The two sat in the silence punctuated by soft moans, sudden groans and exclamations.

"So, I guess this is the point at which we wrap up the interview, and the conversation, and you go back to Jacksonville to do whatever you do on a Sunday and get ready for my story, and I go to church services tomorrow and go back to my life."

"Is that what you want to do, Jessie?"

"What I want to do is get down on my knees at a service tomorrow and thank God for his mercy and apologize for doubting his wisdom and glory. I've spent all these years feeling guilt and a weight on my heart and asking God how he could have allowed me to destroy you. I had forgotten that God has his own plans and purposes and we can never really see His purposes. What happened all those years ago led us to this night."

"I know you may not be religious or be a believer but, to me, this could not be anything but God's plan playing out. How else to explain the chain of events that led to your coming here today, my discovering Martha, my ceiling coming down on this one night when you were there to save me?"

"Coincidence? It does happen. People get married and their assignments get shifted. People die. Ceilings come down."

"But," he said, "I wasn't asking what you were going to do tomorrow."

She gave him a curious look.

"What I mean," Kincade said, picking her hand up off the seat and squeezing it in his own, "is what you really want to do TONIGHT?"

She stared into his eyes and then switched off the interior light. It was easier to talk to him in the dark.

"Are you talking about what I think you're talking about?"

"Didn't you say that you owed me?"

She just stared at his familiar, unfamiliar features outlined in the ghostly light of the moon.

"I...I can't believe-"

"I said I had changed, Jessie. I'm not that scared little boy that ran away from you 20 years ago with my tail between my legs."

She licked her suddenly dry lips.

"I know you're not the same. But.."

He was closer to her in the seat and she could smell his sweat. He hadn't showered. But he wore deodorant. It wasn't a bad smell. It was a male smell. And in this moment, everything between them had changed.

"If you really think that you don't owe me anything, if what you did hasn't really weighed on your conscience all these years, then take me back to my car and we'll go our separate ways."

He was close enough that she could smell his breath, and the onions and the hamburger should have been unpleasant, but it made her for a moment want to grab his mouth and bury herself in it. She hadn't been this turned on since she was a teenager. Her nipples were hard and itchy, the center of her tingled enough to remind her that, although she had lost sensation from the waist down, her vagina still had full sensation.

Yet still, she wanted to turn away from him and hurl herself out of the van. If she still had the power to run, she would have run from him. She was incredibly turned on, and incredibly saddened at the same time.

She wanted to say, "Why couldn't you have stayed the man you were all day today? Minute by minute I was falling for you. You wouldn't have needed to do this. I would have given myself to you if I'd never known who you were. You didn't have to blackmail me. Also, the boy that Kenny was could never have done this. I can't believe this, but he was a better person than you."

But what she said out loud to the man who had been Kenny Bishop felt like a surrender, and goodbye.

"If that's what you want, Kincade, you're right. I owe you. I'll drive you back to my place now."

He slid back over to his side of the seat and said, "We have one stop to make first. If I remember Palatka as well as I think I do."

As she pulled out of the parking lot, instead of turning back to drive into Palatka, he told her, "Turn right," and she crossed the bridge into East Palatka. She had absolutely no idea what he was doing and she didn't feel like talking to him. Maybe it was booze. Maybe condoms. Who knew.

As they headed out 17 they passed the closed Farmer's Market and the still open but almost deserted Highway Patrol Station that patrolled this part of Northeast Florida. Then as they approached the blinking lights of the two-story high DewDrop Inn, he said, "Pull in here."

It was crowded because the DewDrop was always popular on Friday and Saturdays. There were a couple of pool tables in the back, cards and other gambling had always gone on but been overlooked by the cops on the second floor, sandwiches were served until the break of dawn and there was a dance floor that couples had been hooking up on since long before the term 'hooking up' had been invented.

"Why are we here?"

"Just come in and hold the questions, Jessie. Like you said, you owe me."

She wondered how she could have been so wrong.

She rolled in behind him and while he had to tap on shoulders and maneuver around, as soon as the first couple of people saw her in the chair, the crowds melted away and there was a path to a table near the edge of the dance floor.

A wave brought a waitress, who had been talked out of aborting the little boy whose name was now tattooed on her left arm. Miss Jessie had convinced her to take the plunge into the unknown and keep a child when she had no idea how she would care for him. Deanna stood in front of Miss Jessie and the stranger in her nearly non-existent costume and said, "A long time since you've been in here, Miss Jessie. What can I bring you and your friend?"

"Bring me a Bloody Mary and a virgin Rum and Coke for Miss Jessie," Kincade said.

"That okay with you, Miss Jessie?"

When she got a nod and Kincade reached for his wallet, she simply shook her head and said, "No charge for Miss Jessie or her friends."

After the waitress had left, Kincade reached over to whisper through the canned music and chatter, "Don't run off with anybody until I get back. Got an errand to run."

And he was gone.

She thought for just a moment of turning and making her way outside and back to her home. Let Kincade find his own way home. Let him be pissed. Let him make her look as bad as he could. She couldn't' feel any worse than she did right now. And it wasn't as if he was asking her to do anything she hadn't done plenty of times before. And he was an attractive man. And she had felt the tug of desire earlier.

But he was destroying a vision of who she had thought he had become.

She was sipping at the Virgin Coke with four cherries in it when he walked back over to the table and sat down. The buzz was getting louder as the live band was coming back to the stage.

"I don't know what we're doing here, Kincade. If you want to enjoy some fantasy of a date with me, why bother? You've going to get the real thing in a few minutes. Why bother with this. Let's just get this over with."

"Why don't you enjoy your drink and a few minutes of music. Then we'll go."

The band, "Shades of Knight", was a six-man group with two guitars, a keyboard player, a drummer and a tall blonde singer who was already sparking fights between guys and their dates.

After a few minutes the crowd had begun to settle down and the singer, named White Lightning, leaned over into his mike and said, "Everybody having a good time? Any girls want to go home with the band tonight, show of hands."

There were dozens of hands and good natured catcalls.

"Just kidding guys, All of us up here are married. Sorta...sometimes. Anyway, we were going to start off with something classic by Lynyrd Skynyrd. But we've got a special request tonight and I hope you'll let us play these couple of songs before we return to our regular stuff."

He turned to his band and said, "Okay guys. Go."

As the band moved into the first song Jessie could tell a lot of the younger crowd had no idea what it was but the older ones knew and started to move in their chairs as "Take on Me" began.

Kincade stood and held out his hand.

"Can I have this dance."

"What?"

"I arranged for the band to play a few songs from our time. Could I have this dance?"

She looked from him to the band to the partiers who were sitting or standing at their chairs but not moving onto the dance floor.

"What – I can't-"

"You said you owed me, Jessie. We didn't get even one dance 20 years ago."

"No."

"I thought you were a woman of your word. One dance tonight, maybe two, and your debt is paid."