Disclaimer: The A-Team and all canon characters belong to Stephen J Cannell and Universal Studios.
She was all dressed up pretty to go down to Pam's soda fountain, in her yellow dress with the candy stripes that she got last birthday, and her sandals with the peep toes. They weren't so new as the dress, but she'd made little bows for them so that they'd look like they were the fashion, and her best friend Patty had sworn up hill and down dale that you couldn't tell the difference.
Both of them wanted to get their hair to set the same as Judy Garland's, but Leona liked listening to Frank better than Judy. She'd secretly got his name written under the collar of her blouses. Printed in teeny tiny letters, so Momma wouldn't notice it: F-R-A-N-K.
She wrote Frank's name instead of Jimmy's. It felt safer. But she'd met Jimmy at Pam's, while she was listening to the jukebox, so there was what you could call a connection there. While Frank had sung about his devotion deeper than any ocean, Jimmy had bought Leona enough chocolate ice cream sodas to make her sick and cherry and vanilla coke. He was old, past twenty, but he had blue eyes, and he was always real kind and talked to her in a way that made her feel like a lady.
And after all, she was fourteen now, or would be this time next summer, anyway, and she was nearly grown up.
~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~
She practised walking, ladylike, watching for her long-legged early evening sister across the ground, waiting to flounce the shadow gown that it turned her dress into. It had been different today. Not so sunny. You could smell the rain coming, probably a couple miles off. Sometimes you only had a few minutes to find out how much water a Texas rainstorm was planning to drop. Any time now, the big stretch of the sky, soft robin's egg blue and shot with pink and gold, could turn belly over and start blotting out the blue with those gray clouds.
Jimmy was outside the shop, leaning on the fender of his car. He kept it real polished. Really took care of it, and wasn't that a good sign; didn't that mean that he'd take good care of things when he got married? She'd been thinking about getting married a lot since she met Jimmy. She knew a couple of girls who'd gone and done it, not so much older than her.
He was smoking a cigarette, but when he saw her, he stopped and tossed it down, giving it a grind under the heel of his boot.
"You wanna go riding?" he asked. He opened the car door. He was tall, and his hair was a bright mass against the sky.
"I got to ask Momma," Leona told him.
"Well, you look like a grown gal to me, and the prettiest one in town. Way I see it, you don't need to ask nobody's permission."
The hot vinyl of the seats slid and burned against the backs of her bare legs. She remembered it, later. That, and the way the canopy of the sky kept patching over as they drove, black replacing the blue and more coming all the time; cloud towers building up heavier and heavier over the city, looking to drown it; to bury it. It was funny, what your mind remembered.
And now the light was fading, too. When it did, there wasn't going to be any blue left anywhere.
~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~
When they stopped, she thought it was somewhere near Wayside and 69th. She could hear the traffic up on the bridge and, beneath it, the rush and lap of the bayou. No other sounds, outside of the storm starting to break, spattering the first beads of rain across the windshield. Sitting here in the dark with Jimmy made it seem like they were the last two people who existed, and she suddenly had the thought that she wanted to hold his hand or something, but she was too shy to ask, and she figured it ought to be him who did the asking. He turned his head towards her, and she thought he smiled, like he was reading her mind.
"Makes you feel lonely, don't it, all that dark out there? You ever get lonely, when you're lying in bed at night and you can't see nothing through the window but the dark pushing in?"
Leona thought about it. "Sometimes," she said.
"And you start aching, for something more that what you had."
She didn't quite understand what he meant, but it was okay. He meant something by it, something that was important to him, and he'd picked her to tell it to because he'd thought she would understand. Because, like he'd told her, she was real mature for her age and she needed a man, not a boy, to love her. That made her feel so special that she was suddenly, crazily glad that Jimmy was hers and she was his.
There wasn't near enough light in the car to see much more than silhouette, but she heard the squeak of the seat as he moved, or maybe they both moved some. It didn't make no nevermind. When he lifted his hand and carded his fingers through her hair, Leona took a deep breath and reached up to touch it.
Don't let this end. I don't want this ever to end.
"Sweet doll," she heard him say. Outside, the rain fell harder from a sky that wouldn't be anything now but thunder-black.
She leaned into him, her heart doing little beats and flips. His fingers left her hair and made tracks down her bare arms. Like raindrops down the windows. But she wasn't cold.
And then they slid under her skirt, groping past the folds of cotton and the crook of her legs, reaching for the waistband of her panties.
She gasped, trying to pull away from him, slide away from him, squeezing her knees together. Her hand reached out blindly for something that might have been the door handle, but if she'd decided to try to open it, he was too fast anyway; a shuck of his jacket and he was across the seat, forcing her into the corner and pinning her there, folding her up.
He kissed her, on the mouth, not like she saw Daddy kiss Momma, but like he wanted to do it so bad he couldn't wait another minute. She pushed at him, weakly. She was pushing him, but he was pulling her, opening his belt and fumbling at his pants buttons, clumsy with one hand but needing the other to hold her, and what was he doing, she didn't know what he was doing, because it was all wrong.
He had her dress bunched up to her waist, and now he tugged down her panties, a side at a time, leaving them stretched taut around her knees and cradling his own legs.
"Don't," Leona said. "Please, Jimmy, please, don't -"
He sank the weight of his lower body into her, trapping her with his hips. "You wouldn'ta come out here with me if you didn't want it. You wanted it, same as how I did."
She hurt, then, inside and out, and she began to cry. For the longest time, there were no other sounds in her ears, not the fitful squeak of the seats or Jimmy's raspy breathing, only her own crying, and the rain, hammering on the roof of the car as if it was threatening to bust right through.
~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~
In fall, Momma took her out of school, and she watched the sunsets turn the sky firetruck red and the soft orange glow of a September peach, and the nights, bigger and blacker than it felt like anything could be on Earth. Momma had figured it out, after Leona went two months without a period, and the doctor didn't tell them anything that she didn't already know. Momma had always looked after everything, and she saw no reason to start changing that now.
Once a week or so, out of the corner of her eye, she'd see Daddy glance at her, and a kind of startled look would pass over his face. She knew what he meant. The next time she talked with him, he'd be as cheerful and steady as ever, but sometimes she'd see him out behind the house, just walking in circles, like he was lost in thought, head down and hands shoved deep in his pockets.
He sometimes came and sat out in the yard with her, when she got tired of throwing up and so scared she could scream. The seat of the chair he always used had caved in, but he sat there anyway, his knees angled closer to the roof than out in front of him. As long as Daddy was just behind her, invisible, Leona felt that she could talk, and that neither of them would break apart.
~o~O~o~O~o~O~o~
Christmas came and went. In the spring, the baby came.
When the pain was worst, she said, inexplicably, "Jimmy, I want Jimmy," and shut her eyes to try and see him, just one last time, in her mind, and Momma stroked her hair where it stuck damp to her forehead. But Jimmy was gone, and she knew suddenly that he'd never really been there, not in the ways that mattered.
They moved out to Pasadena, Daddy, Momma, Leona, and the baby. He had two names she liked: Harrison, and Mitchell, after a nice boy back in school. Daddy called him HM, same way he made Leann out of Leona Ann, and Lillimae out of Lillian Mae, for Momma. He was one for nicknames.
It wasn't a real good neighborhood or anything. Refineries, mostly, and a big paper mill that smelled like sulfur. The railroad track made her think of their old house, where she'd listened to the trains rattling on in the evenings since she was little. Daddy spent some time giving the place a lick or two of paint and writing Ellsworth C. Murdock neat on the mailbox. Harrison was a nice baby. He didn't cry much, just spent his time looking around him with his big eyes like he saw a world full of all kinds of wonderful things. Momma helped out with him a lot, and Momma called him HM then, too.
When he started to walk, Leona took him out on the porch right after a thunderstorm, while the rain was still pattering and pinging on the roof, and caught lightning bugs for him in a jar while Daddy watched them.
"Leann," he said, "when you think you got nothing left in the world, you still got family. Just like when they think they got nothing, they still got you. Things come, and things go, and some things are best left buried in the past, and some things stay just as they are. Family always stays, and family's the only thing that counts."
"Yes, Daddy," she said, "I know. I know."