Between, Georgia (9 page)

I hung up after nine rings and dialed Ona Crabtree at home, but I got her machine. The sooner I could talk to her, the more likely it was that I could preempt whatever mayhem she was setting in motion. I left my cell phone number and added, “Please don’t do anything, anything, until you see me.” I tried her at Crabtree Gas and Parts but got only her youngest son, Tucker. He promised to have Ona call me back, but I wasn’t counting on it.

He sounded stoned out of his tiny mind.

I called my agency and cleared my work schedule and then went next door and enlisted my neighbor’s teenager to take care of Lewis, the cat. Lewis was technically Jonno’s, but much like the size-twelve red Converse high-tops under my bed and the pair of Jockey briefs in my top drawer, Lewis hadn’t quite moved out of the apartment yet.

I called Jonno again as I got ready to go, but no one picked up.

I knew he had that late gig at the Rox Box, but I needed to be on the road well before then. I went down to my car, made sure the top was securely up, and got in. I meant to drive straight to the highway, but on the way to 78, I found myself making a turn that would take me to Boyd’s house.

Boyd was X. Machina’s percussionist. Not the drummer. He got cranky if you called him a drummer. Jonno had been crashing at Boyd’s for about a year now, ever since I kicked him out.

At this point it was safe to say he was living there. Jonno’s Impala wasn’t parked in front, but I stopped anyway. I made my way up the rickety porch steps and rang the bell.

No one came. Boyd’s moped was on the porch, chained to the rail, but he could be off with Jonno, prepping for the gig. I stepped over and peered through the window.

The windowsill was lined with Chianti bottles and plastic toys from Happy Meals. Boyd was twenty-eight years old, and he lived on Happy Meals and Chianti. The bottles blocked half my view, but the window above them was clean enough to see through. This was probably due to Jonno, who had been known to wave a bottle of 409 around. But the place was decorated in a style best described as Early Piles of Crap.

The floor was littered with drifts of folded laundry and boxes of CDs. An amp was sitting in the middle of the floor next to a giant brass hookah that had been used as (among other things) a candleholder. It was coated in multicolored wax drippings all down its tarnished neck and belly. The only light came from a forty-watt bulb screwed into an ancient floor lamp with a stained-glass shade. The TV was off, and I couldn’t see any light coming from the kitchen or the back hall.

The dimness mixed with the clutter made the house seem ex-otic to me. All the quasi-dank places Jonno frequented had an air of mystery about them; when I was growing up, the cans of soup on the lowest shelf of the pantry had to stay in order, and the door to my room had to be closed unless it was “fit for company.”

All the Fretts were meticulous to the point of mental illness, but Genny and Mama had, by inclination and necessity, taken it further, until order was a religion.

Nothing ever changed in their house. I knew that when I walked in their door in a few hours, the same square table would be by the front door, with the same dusty blue vase in the same spot, still sporting a decades-old spray of plastic gerbera daisies. A willow-pattern china bowl sat empty beside the vase. When I brought Mama home, she would immediately drop her keys in it.

I straightened up. I was anxious to be on the road, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave without seeing Jonno. I decided to give him fifteen minutes. They might be out on a quick clove-cigarette run for Boyd.

There was a permanently damp upholstered love seat on the porch. I sat down, immediately sinking a good eight inches. I rooted under the cushion next to me for one of the coverless paperbacks Jonno shed like cat hair wherever he went. I found one near the back and pulled it out.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance.

I scrunched down to read in the fading afternoon sunlight, but I couldn’t get my eyes to focus on the words. I pulled in a deep breath, my first since I had talked to Bernese. The porch smelled of Jonno. Not like him personally, but like the air around him. It smelled like a place Jonno would be. I wanted him there so badly, although if he did show up in the next few minutes, I wasn’t sure what I would say.

Except that was a lie. I knew what I wanted to say. I said it anyway, even though he wasn’t there. “I’m so angry,” I said. “I’m so angry, so angry,” and saying it at last made me able to feel it.

Down in the pit of my stomach, I could sense how it had grown beneath my initial panic, creeping along my bones like a vine, filling me and twining down through all my limbs, spreading up through me and binding me.

The anger was a living thing, separate from me but so deep, so basic, that it had been working its way through me as unnoticed as my blood, circulating to its own fierce rhythm. The words on the page wavered and danced. I threw the book down beside me so my hands were free to beat at the sagging cushions. I uncurled, drumming my feet hard against the porch.

Out loud I said, “It was an accident, a stupid accident, the dog got out by accident,” but the anger burst out through my skin, enveloping me, and I wanted to tear up Ona Crabtree, all the Crabtrees, even though I knew anger this hot and violent was coming from the genes I shared with them. I wanted to pull their careless arms off, rip at their throats. Tears were coursing down my cheeks, and if I was right, if it was war, I was at least very clear about which side I was on, even though no one had intentionally set out to hurt Genny, and Bernese had with malice aforethought shot that hell-spawned dog.

It quieted as quickly as it had come storming through me. My stomach unknotted and my limbs stilled. I gulped, scrubbing at my eyes and panting. I sat a moment longer, letting it recede. I could feel the anger in me still, contained and waiting, as much a part of me as my freckles or the need for neatness I had learned at Mama’s knee. But I was so spent I could not have gotten up and walked away if the porch had been on fire.

I wished I could simply lie here, paralyzed, until Jonno came home to pet my hair and touch me. I didn’t know what to do with this body, so angry and so limp. I did not know how to sit or stand or run in a way that would let me be this frightened and grieved, this angry, and so exhausted by my anger that my vision was wavering. I needed Jonno to appear and artfully arrange my limbs into an appropriate pose. As I imagined him bending me, shaping me, I could feel the ghost of something sexy trying to rise in me, and for a moment I was absolutely certain that he would come, that my need for him was strong enough to summon him.

So I still hadn’t given up the fantasy: Jonno as he should be.

And me as well. An almost-me. A me that wasn’t. The woman I could have been if I had been born a Frett instead of being an adopted Crabtree, if I hadn’t married so young, if I had taken the scholarship offered me and gone on to graduate school in North Carolina, if Mama and Genny and, later, Fisher hadn’t needed me so close.

I could never be her. She would be my age now, thirty, but established and professional, with her black hair secured in a braided bun. Mama’s biological daughter would have a lovely wide mouth and half-moon eyes, and she would have to wear heels so her colleagues did not tower over her. She’d be in a museum somewhere, far away from dogs and Crabtrees and divorces.

I saw her in my mind’s eye, poring over thick books, picking through the Civil War relics she’d unearthed. She sorted them into clean, cotton-lined boxes. Then I saw Jonno arrive, and he was a grown-up. He had grown-up things like a suit and a basic sense of personal responsibility. He took her in his arms.

They moved together and became unbridled together. They forgot how pretty they were. They lost time. They lost the world around them. They fell to the floor in between the regimented rows of glass display cases. There they became a melded heap of beast: panting, sweaty, unbeautiful.

It was crap, absolute crap. I could flop here in a pile all night if I let myself, weeping over woulda-coulda-shoulda, but half the things I so regretted were things I could not change. I’d been born what I was, and if I had been her? That other woman? Then I never would have picked Jonno in the first place. What Frett would choose a baby in a lovely man’s body who treated sex like art and her like crap? Once he left the bedroom, the chaos Jonno spread was beauty-less and anything but clean. But the fantasy had managed to survive ten years of marriage and a year’s worth of on-and-off divorce proceedings. And here I was, shaking myself into exhaustion with a violent rage and then running for sol-ace to a man who was all manner of bad for me.

It was exactly what every other Crabtree would have done.

I was instantly disgusted with myself. My family needed me, and here I sat. I couldn’t get the hell away fast enough.

Literally.

As I boosted myself out of the depths of the love seat, I saw Jonno’s Impala making the turn around the corner. My heart leaped up into my throat and pulsed wildly, practically hitting my gag reflex with every beat. He would see me any second, and before I could think it through, I put one hand on the porch railing and jumped it, tumbling into the loamy earth behind Boyd’s scraggly hedges. I squatted there, panting.

The only thing I could imagine that could be worse for me than seeing Jonno would be having him see me crouching like a lunatic stalker in his bushes. I gathered the skirt of my long dress and crept around the corner of the house, scrabbling along the base of the wall like a rodent.

I sat up and pressed my back to the wall of the house, then peered back through the bushes, poking my nose out around the corner. I had a clear view of my Mustang, parallel-parked across the street between two other vehicles, almost opposite Boyd’s front door. If Jonno noticed it, he would recognize it instantly as mine. He thought it was hilarious that I was so in love with a restored muscle car when the Frett in me drove exactly three miles over the speed limit and never put the top down.

The Impala turned into the driveway and pulled up on the other side of the house, disappearing from view. I prayed that Jonno and Boyd would not notice my car. The big houses on this street had all been hacked up long ago into apartments, and the junky student cars lining both curbs were good camouflage.

I heard the doors of the Impala opening and slamming, and then a jumble of male voices. They sounded like they were argu-ing. As they came around to the front of the house, Boyd was saying, “No, because if we end on the G, it’s an upswing, like this hopeful half step up.”

“Hope sells,” said Jonno.

“Whatever, dude, that’s not what the song’s about. If we end that way, it’s a contradiction. It’s like the music is saying they might make it.”

I heard their boots clomping against the wood of the porch and held my breath.

“Maybe they will,” Jonno said.

“Dude, come on,” said Boyd, and then the door banged shut behind them.

I stood up abruptly and noticed I still had Jonno’s book clutched in one hand. I let it fall into the dirt. I struggled out as silently as I could from between two of the bushes and headed for my car, running away, running toward home.

CHAPTER 6

THE EXIT FOR Between was about five miles before the Loganville exit on Highway 78. Between is built around that highway, midway between Athens and Atlanta. There’s nothing there except the town square and a couple of small neighbor-hoods. The whole town probably would have died out by now if my mama and Bernese hadn’t been born there. The Fretts (especially Bernese, who managed Mama’s finances) had practically created Between’s economy. Their tithe paid the lion’s share of the pastor’s salary, and their taxes paid our part-time ornamental sheriff. The shops and restaurants on the square survived because Bernese had also turned Between into the creepiest tourist attrac-tion in the South. Her museum, half devoted to her exploitation of my mother’s work and half to her own interest in butterfly farming, was highly rated in all of those offbeat travel books for weirdos. In one book, her museum got more stars than the Cadil-lac Ranch.

In spite of Bernese, Between didn’t rate its own hospital. Genny and Mama were at Loganville General. But I got off onto Philbert Street anyway and drove past the square to turn onto Grace Street. I needed to check on Fisher, and I also wanted to make sure Uncle Lou had been able to get Bernese out of jail. It was not yet seven; Mama would still be wrapped in a soothing blanket of Ativan.

The sun was going down, and all the downstairs lights were on at Bernese’s house, spilling out of the windows onto the immaculate lawn. Bernese lived in a blue-gray frame house shaped like a saltine box. A rocking-chair front porch was tacked on like an afterthought.

In the fading daylight, I could see Fisher squatting down in the grass by the gravel drive as I pulled in. I knew Lou or Bernese would be checking on her, watching from the window, but it made me nervous. She looked so small, a living ball of everything dear to me, exposed and alone outside.

I didn’t think Ona would want anything to happen to my Fisher. But if Ona was mad enough and drunk enough to call her brother or his crazy-ass sons over from Alabama, she’d be unleashing something on my town and my family that I doubted she could control. Surely she wouldn’t call them. Not without talking to me first.

I parked in the driveway. I didn’t know if Bernese was inside or still down at the jail, but I took a moment to dig down to the bottom of my purse and make sure I had my empty bottle. It was an amber plastic cylinder, safety-capped in white. If Bernese was home, I might need it.

I climbed out of my Mustang and shut the door. Fisher didn’t look up as I approached her. She stayed staring down at the lawn, resting on her short, sturdy calves. She was wearing her favorite pajamas, yellow with butterflies on them. She’d built a cairn of white driveway stones in the grass and put a fat magnolia leaf on top. She was meditatively poking the leaf with a frayed toothpick.

“Hey, Woolly-Worm,” I said. She still didn’t look up. She poked again at the leaf, rocking on her haunches. “Does anyone know you’re out here?” She still wouldn’t answer, so I tried a different tack. “What are you doing with the leaf there, Fisher?”