Between, Georgia (25 page)

I gaped at her. This was one of the many reasons I hadn’t gone into detail about why I was divorcing Jonno. Jonno had been permanently and publicly renamed. Worse, Bernese was such a be-hemoth that I often forgot that when she did decide to turn, she could do it on a dime. And heaven help the people standing in her path when she decided to go in the new direction.

“Lou came straight over from school with Fisher and parked in the lot behind the church, so you’ll need to walk down there. I don’t know why he didn’t park here and walk himself. He knows I can’t drive a stick shift. But this way you can pop your head in and explain to Fisher when you’ll be back. She’s already in a froth, but I told her to quit sulking. Y’all can do your movie night tomorrow. Here are your keys—you better get going.”

I was still sitting in the chair with my mouth hanging open, catching flies. Mama was signing, but I couldn’t peel my eyes off Bernese, so Genny interpreted. “Bernese? Stacia says to tell you to keep your big butt out of it.”

I glanced their way in time to see that Genny’s cheeks had pinked, and she was signing as an aside to Mama,
Do you have to
talk ugly?

“Someone’s got to make the girl see sense,” said Bernese.

Mama signed,
Nonny? Forget Bernese. Forget what I want, too.

You decide.

“What’s she saying?” Bernese asked Genny, but Genny had seen that I was watching Mama’s gracefully arching hands and had not interpreted.

“She was talking to Nonny, not you,” Genny said primly.

“You make me crazy,” Bernese said. “You tell Stacia every stinking thing that happens in a room whether someone is talking to her or not, but now you won’t tell me what she’s saying to Nonny?”

Genny said, “No one’s stopping you from learning to sign.”

Mama was rapid-fire signing to me while they argued.
This isn’t
like the dogs. I can’t do this for you. If you don’t want the divorce,
then say so. If that’s true, you still need to get on the road to Athens.

Go get Jonno and fight for him. But don’t act helpless and pretend it
isn’t a choice. Pick—either finish it or make him treat you better.

“Nonny, what is she saying?” Bernese demanded.

I ran to the sofa and knelt by Mama, signing into her hands,
I
am done with Jonno, but maybe today is not the day. There is so
much going on here, Genny’s still very hurt, Ona Crabtree’s on the
warpath, and there’s Fisher and Bernese. I can get the court date
rescheduled—

Mama pushed my hands away, shaking her hand no.

“Are you weaseling out?” Bernese said. “Are you seriously thinking about keeping that diseased piece of crap?”

“Shut up, Bernese,” I said. I reached for Mama, but she pushed my hands away again.

Mama signed,
Do you think I care about this stupid day in court?

This is about you. You were “working on” moving the dogs when the
dogs needed to be gone, period. And now you are “working on” getting shut of that man. And tomorrow you’ll be “working on” helping
Fisher. You can’t change Bernese, you’ll say. But I know you can.

Maybe you will, maybe you won’t, but don’t say you can’t. You are
welcome to throw happiness away with all your hands and stay with
Jonno until you dry up and die or until he brings something home
that will kill you. It’s your love life. But how much longer can Fisher
wait while you “try” and “work on it” and fuss around not doing
anything? How long before Bernese breaks her?

She folded her arms and stuffed her hands under them. She had said her piece, and she wasn’t giving me the opportunity to explain my way out from under her gospel.

“I hope she’s telling you to get your butt on the road,” Bernese said, and then the doorbell rang.

I immediately thought, “Henry,” and ran to get it.

“Nonny!” Bernese called after me, but I ignored her and flung the door open. It wasn’t Henry. It was a girl I didn’t know, although she looked terribly familiar. She was slim and big-eyed, a dewy little thing in peach capri pants and strappy sandals, standing nervously on the porch, wringing her hands. When I opened the door and she saw my face, she stared at me and her expression changed from nervousness to sheer, ugly rage.

“Are you kidding me?” she screeched. “You are actually here?”

When her mouth twisted up, so angry, I knew her. I didn’t see how I could have forgotten that hateful face, watching me so avidly when Bernese called to tell me Genny was hurt. She’d been sitting across from me in a red leatherette booth at Bibi’s Real Ice Cream, enjoying my life as if it were a daytime drama. I searched my mind for her name and found it. She was Amber DeClue, the girl who had booked me through my agency for an interpreting job that had never quite happened. Now she was standing on my mother’s doorstep in Between, glaring at me with the same expression I had seen when I drove away and left her poking vi-ciously at her cell phone.

She reached up and grabbed handfuls of her long hair, one hunk on either side of her face, and clutched at it. “Jonno said you’d be here. Jonno said you’d never give him the divorce. But I thought for sure you couldn’t possibly be such a bitch.”

“Jonno?” I said to her, my eyes narrowing.

Bernese came into the foyer, Mama and Genny trailing behind her. Mama was following the wall with one hand while Genny signed madly into her other.

“Who’s this?” Bernese said.

Amber DeClue answered before I could. “I’m Jonno’s fiancée.”

Bernese raised her eyebrows. “Jonno has a fiancée
and
a wife?

How very modern.”

“He isn’t supposed to still have a wife, now, is he?” Amber snapped at Bernese, and then her gaze flipped back to me. “But here you sit, blocking him again.”

“Me?” I said. “
I
am blocking
him
?”

“If you don’t show up this time and finally get your mess all finished, what am I supposed to do? Huh? Our wedding is this weekend.”

I took a step back, off balance, as if she’d pushed me. “Married?” I said. “Jonno can’t get married this weekend.”

“He can, too,” Amber insisted. “My mama’s lawyer worked it out, and we got the license. Our minister will sign it if Jonno brings the proof he got divorced.”

“Stop talking,” I said, holding up one hand. Things were starting to make sense. Of course she was somehow rolled up with Jonno. There had never been an interpreting job. She probably didn’t even work at that ice-cream parlor. All she’d needed to book me was a valid credit-card number, and then she’d gotten to scope out the wife in neutral territory at a time when I didn’t have my guard up. I could feel my lip curling. I had known something was off. Her expensive shoes and jewelry, her oddly pushy conversation, her endless questions about why I was using my maiden name.

“Calling my agency, booking me like that, I don’t think that’s even legal,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “My three best friends in all of life and my hateful cousin Jeannie have each spent four hundred bucks on apple-green taffeta bridesmaids’ dresses. And what’s my mother going to do with two hundred plates of dilled salmon? It’s not like I had a choice.”

“I could sue you. I could maybe have you arrested,” I said.

“That has to be some kind of fraud.”

“You got paid,” she said. “As for the rest, I don’t care, but can you wait, please, and sue me on Monday? I kinda have a lot going on this weekend. And P.S.? I don’t care if I have to drag you back to Athens by your hair. I love him with all my whole heart. You have to accept that he loves me and not you, and do you have any idea what my dress cost? It’s Vera Wang, okay?”

Staring at the tiny, angry creature who was now shrieking about the nonrefundable deposit at the reception hall, I didn’t know whether I should sink to the floor and laugh myself sick or slap her upside the head and start a cataclysmic catfight.

Bernese snorted. “If you think Nonny is the only reason the divorce is taking so long—whoa, has that man got you snowed.”

“Oh yeah, blame the victim,” Amber DeClue said. To me she said, “Are you coming peacefully? Or is this going to get ugly?

You have to leave right now and drive like hell or you’ll miss it.

My daddy doesn’t even know Jonno was ever married, much less still is. You have to come fix this or I will have to kill you, because Jonno has to be divorced or a widower by six P.M. on Saturday, do you hear me?”

I glanced over at Mama and Genny, standing together in the doorway to the den. Genny’s eyes were so round I could see white all the way around her irises, and her hands were a blur as she speed-signed. Mama’s face was closed, unreadable.

“X. Machina,” I said.

Amber DeClue looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

“Jonno’s band?” Bernese asked.

“Yeah, that’s his band,” I said. “It’s slang, like a pun I don’t get on ‘deus ex machina.’ ”

“They’re changing it,” said Amber. “I told him that was a dumb name. They’re going to be called Kicktown now.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Why are you babbling on about Jonno’s band?” Bernese’s voice was sharp with impatience, but Mama didn’t ask. I’d had an hour-long conversation with her once, trying to explain the band name, and she knew what I meant.

“It means ‘god in the machine,’ ” I said. “It’s a device from Greek theater, and they used it when a play got too complicated to ever work itself out. An actor dressed up like a god would come down on a machine and fix everything with magic and end the play.”

Bernese jerked a thumb at Amber. “And that’s her? She’s the god in the machine? Because I think that sounds a little bit blas-phemous. This is more like ‘adulterous whore in the machine.’ ”

“Hey!” Amber said.

“No, it’s not her. It’s more like her being here at all.” I was talking to Bernese, but I was looking over at Mama. She was perfectly composed, her hands reading Genny’s flashing signs as Genny tried to keep up. Then Mama was nodding.

“Are you going to go?” Amber demanded.

To Genny I said, “Tell Mama this doesn’t mean I’m going to let Fisher down. Tell her to please trust me and not do anything drastic.”

But Mama signed,
You can’t choose to get a machine god. One
happens or doesn’t.

“What does Fisher have to do with this?” Bernese said.

Amber stamped her foot. “You are going to miss it if you don’t go right now.”

“I’m coming,” I said to Amber. “But you’re driving me.”

“Me?” said Amber.

“You want me to go?” I said, and she nodded. “Then you are driving me. I’m not done with you. I haven’t even started with you. And yeah, okay, I’ll go to Athens now. Maybe by the time we get there, I will have decided if I’ll walk into that courtroom, but you don’t even get that unless you take me there. I get this hour with you. Nothing’s free.”

Bernese was already opening her big mouth to argue with me, but I cut her off. “Try to make it right with Fisher for me. I won’t have my car, so it might be past her bedtime before I can get home.” To Genny I said, “Tell Mama I am choosing this,” and I watched her sign it into Mama’s hands.

Mama knew I was watching, and she signed directly to me:
You
aren’t choosing. It’s a push. You’re just falling over.

And then, comfortable with the pacing in her own home, she let go of Genny’s hands and walked back into the den, her fingers trailing lightly along the wall as she traced her path.

CHAPTER 17

IF I COULDhave flown out of my own head, taken my consciousness up high enough to make Between a topical map below me so that I could see Mama and Fisher and all my family spread out below, tiny and frail, I never would have left them. But I couldn’t see the future. I couldn’t see anything. Perhaps nurture hadn’t given me the ramrod will that seemed to be standard Frett issue, but nature had certainly granted me the blinding Crabtree temper.

I was angry with Jonno and his floppy doll who’d appeared whining on my doorstep, furious with Mama, enraged with myself. So I got in the canary-yellow BMW convertible that was parked in front of the house and left.

Amber DeClue tore onto 78, already breaking the speed limit.

She drove hell-bent for Athens, and beneath my anger, I worried she would splatter us both all over the highway. Surely she wouldn’t want to show up for her wedding to my husband covered in scabs or, worse, dead. A bray of bitter laughter welled up in my chest, and I pressed my fingers hard into my temples to keep it from escaping. I was halfway to hysteria, and I was making my husband’s fiancée drive me to my divorce. There was so much wrong with that, I couldn’t begin to process it.

Amber’s soft hands gripped and worried the steering wheel, and she was leaning toward it with her spine rigid and straight. It was as if she believed relentless good posture made the car go faster.

The top was down. Of course it was. Amber was a top-down kind of girl. She’d pulled a scrunchy off the gearshift and secured her hair, but mine was torturing me, whipping around and getting in my eyes and mouth. By the time we got to Athens, I’d look like a fiery Medusa. Silence had swallowed up the car, except the white noise of the wind. I felt no obligation to break it.

Amber kept sneaking sideways glances at me. “Quit staring at me,” she said. I didn’t respond, and a few moments later, she added, “You’re giving me nerves. I swear, I’m going to end up running us off the road.”

I blinked twice and found it was difficult to stop watching her.

I wanted to look at her, to try and get some sort of idea of what or who she was. The girl I met at the interview had been a false front, and maybe this wee virago was a false front, too. The BMW said “daddy’s girl.” So did the fat gold bracelet around her wrist, clunky with charms. I picked out a ballerina, a graduation cap, a key. Her nails were professionally manicured, and her glossy brown hair was streaked with caramel and gold. I’d noticed before that she looked too expensive to have a job at Bibi’s, but I had been too worried about Mama to ask myself the right questions.