Cop Town (2 page)

Don groaned again. His tongue slacked outside of his jaw.

“It’s okay,” Jimmy repeated. Tears streamed down his face. He felt sick and dizzy. “It’s gonna be okay.”

Don inhaled sharply, like he was surprised. He held the air in his lungs for a few seconds before finally letting out a low, baleful moan. Jimmy felt the sound vibrating in his chest. Don’s breath was sour—the smell of a soul leaving the body. The color of his flesh didn’t drain so much as fill like a pitcher of cold buttermilk. His lips turned an earthy, funereal blue. The fluorescent lights cut white stripes into the flat green of his irises.

Jimmy felt a darkness pass through him. It gripped his throat, then slowly reached its icy fingers into his chest. He opened his mouth for air, then forced it closed for fear that Don’s ghost would flow into him.

Somewhere, the phone was still ringing.

“She-it,” a raspy old woman grumbled. “Doctor ain’t never gone get to me now.

1

Maggie Lawson was upstairs in her bedroom when she heard the phone ringing in the kitchen. She checked her watch. There was nothing good about a phone ringing this early in the morning. Sounds from the kitchen echoed up the back stairs: The click of the receiver being lifted from the cradle. The low murmur of her mother’s voice. The sharp snap of the phone cord slapping the floor as she walked back and forth across the kitchen.

The linoleum had been worn away in staggered gray lines from the countless times Delia Lawson had paced the kitchen listening to bad news.

The conversation didn’t last long. Delia hung up the phone. The loud click echoed up to the rafters. Maggie knew every sound the old house made. She had spent a lifetime studying its moods. Even from her room, she could follow her mother’s movements through the kitchen: The refrigerator door opening and closing. A cabinet banging shut. Eggs being cracked into a bowl. Thumb flicking her Bic to light a cigarette.

Maggie knew how this would go. Delia had been playing Bad-News
Blackjack for as long as Maggie could remember. She would hold for a while, but then tonight, tomorrow, or maybe even a week from now, Delia would pick a fight with Maggie and the minute Maggie opened her mouth to respond, her mother would lay down her cards: the electric bill was past due, her shifts at the diner had been cut, the car needed a new transmission, and here Maggie was making things worse by talking back and for the love of God, couldn’t she give her mother a break?

Busted. Dealer wins.

Maggie screeched the ironing board closed. She stepped carefully around folded stacks of laundry. She’d been up since five that morning doing the family’s ironing. She was Sisyphus in a bathrobe. They all had uniforms of one kind or another. Lilly wore green-and-blue-checkered skirts and yellow button-down tops to school. Jimmy and Maggie had their dark blue pants and long-sleeved shirts from the Atlanta Police Department. Delia had her green polyester smocks from the diner. And then they all came home and changed into regular clothes, which meant that every day, Maggie was washing and ironing for eight people instead of four.

She only complained when no one could hear her.

There was a scratching sound from Lilly’s room as she dropped the needle on a record. Maggie gritted her teeth.
Tapestry
. Lilly played the album incessantly.

Not too long ago, Maggie helped Lilly get dressed for school every morning. At night, they would page through
Brides
magazine and clip out pictures for their dream weddings. That was all before Lilly turned thirteen years old and her life, much like Carole King’s, became an everlasting vision of the ever-changing hue.

She waited for Jimmy to bang on the wall and tell Lilly to turn that crap off, but then she remembered her brother had picked up a night shift. Maggie looked out the window. Jimmy’s car wasn’t in the driveway. Unusually, the neighbor’s work van was gone. She wondered if he was working the night shift, too. And then she chastened herself for wondering, because it was none of her business what her neighbor was doing.

Now seemed as good a time as any to go down for breakfast. Maggie pulled the foam rollers from her hair as she walked down the stairs. She stopped exactly in the middle. The acoustic sweet spot.
Tapestry
disappeared. There were no sounds from the kitchen. If Maggie timed it right, she could sometimes grab a full minute of silence standing on the stairs. There wouldn’t be another time during her day when she felt so completely alone.

She took a deep breath, then slowly let it out before continuing down.

The old Victorian had been grand at one point, though the house retained no evidence of its former glory. Pieces of siding were gone. Rotted wood hung like bats from the gables. The windows rattled with the slightest breeze. Rain shot a creek through the basement. There was no outlet in the house that didn’t have a black tattoo ghosted around it from bad fuses and shoddy workmanship.

Even though it was winter, the kitchen was humid. No matter the time of year, it always smelled of fried bacon and cigarette smoke. The source of both stood at the stove. Delia’s back was bent as she filled the percolator. When Maggie thought of her mother, she thought of this kitchen—the faded avocado-green appliances, the cracked yellow linoleum on the floor, the burned, black ridges on the laminate countertop where her father rested his cigarettes.

As usual, Delia had been up since before Maggie. No one knew what Delia did in the morning hours. Probably curse God that she’d woken up in the same house with the same problems. There was an unwritten rule that you didn’t go downstairs until you heard eggs being whisked in a bowl. Delia always cooked a big breakfast, a holdover from her Depression childhood, when breakfast might be the only meal of the day.

“Lilly up?” Delia hadn’t turned around, but she knew Maggie was there.

“For now.” Maggie made the same offer she did every morning. “Can I do anything?”

“No.” Delia jabbed the bacon with a fork. “Driveway’s empty next door.”

Maggie glanced out the window, pretending she didn’t already know Lee Grant’s van was not parked in its usual spot.

Delia said, “All we need is for girls to start going in and out of that house at all hours. Again.”

Maggie leaned against the counter. Delia looked exhausted. Even her stringy brown hair couldn’t be bothered to stay pinned on the top of her head. They’d all been picking up extra shifts to pay for Lilly to go to a private school. None of them wanted to see her bussed across town to the ghetto. They had four more years of tuition and textbooks and uniforms before Lilly graduated. Maggie wasn’t sure her mother would last that long.

As a child, Delia had seen her father shoot himself in the head after losing the family business. Her mother had worked herself into an early grave on a sharecropper’s farm. She’d lost both brothers to polio. She must have thought she’d hit pay dirt when she married Hank Lawson. He wore a suit and had a good job and a nice car, and then he’d come home from Okinawa so shell-shocked that he’d been in and out of the state mental hospital ever since.

There wasn’t much that Maggie knew about her father, though he’d obviously tried to build a life between hospital stays. When Lilly was born, he put up the swing set in the backyard. One time, he found some gray paint on sale at the hardware store and worked thirty-six hours straight painting every room in the house the color of an aircraft carrier. On weekends, he mowed the lawn for as long as it took to drink a six-pack of Schlitz, then left the mower wherever the beer ran out. One time when it snowed and Maggie was sick with strep, he brought her some snow in a Tupperware bowl so she could play with it in the bathroom.

“Maggie, for the love of God.” Delia tapped the fork against the frying pan. “Can’t you find something to do?”

Maggie grabbed a stack of plates and silverware off the counter and took them into the dining room. Lilly was already at the table. Her head was bent over a textbook, which Maggie took as a miracle. The last year hadn’t been so much the burgeoning of thirteen-year-old Lilly into womanhood as a running audition for
The Exorcist
.

Still, Maggie couldn’t give up on her baby sister. “You have a good night?”

“Peachy.” Lilly cupped her fingers across her forehead in a salute to the page. Her hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. The chestnut brown fell somewhere between Delia’s mousy brown and Maggie’s darker hue.

“Peachy sounds good.” Maggie put a plate by Lilly’s elbow. She bumped her with her thigh. “What’re you studying?” She bumped her again. Then again. When Lilly didn’t respond, she sang the opening lines from “I Feel the Earth Move,” punctuating each pause with a bump.

“Stop it.” Lilly tilted her head down even more. Her nose was practically touching the book.

Maggie leaned over to set the other side of the table. She glanced back at Lilly, who had been staring at the same spot on the page since Maggie walked in.

Maggie said, “Look at me.”

“I’m studying.”

“Look at me.”

“I have a test.”

“I know you stole my makeup again.”

Lilly looked up. Her eyes were lined like Cleopatra’s.

Maggie kept her voice low. “Baby girl, you’re beautiful. You don’t need that stuff.”

Lilly rolled her eyes.

Maggie tried again. “You don’t understand what kind of message wearing makeup at your age sends to boys.”

“I guess you should know.”

Maggie rested her hand on the table. She wondered when her sweet kid sister had learned how to throw daggers.

The kitchen door swung open. Delia’s hands and arms were lined with platters of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and biscuits. “You’ve got two seconds to wash that shit off your face before I get your father’s belt.” Lilly bolted from the room. Delia banged the platters down on the table one by one. “See what you’re teaching her?”

“Why am I—”

“Don’t talk back.” Delia dug a pack of cigarettes out of her apron. “You’re twenty-two years old, Margaret. Why do I feel like I have two teenagers under my roof?”

“Twenty-three,” was all Maggie could say.

Delia lit the cigarette and hissed out smoke between her teeth. “Twenty-three,” she repeated. “I was married with two kids when I was your age.”

Maggie resisted the urge to ask her mother how that had worked out.

Delia picked a speck of tobacco off her tongue. “This women’s lib stuff works for rich girls, but all you’ve got going for you is your face and your figure. You need to take advantage of both before you lose them.”

Maggie smoothed together her lips. She imagined a lost-and-found box in the back of a storeroom with all the missing faces and figures of thirty-year-old women.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Mama.” Maggie kept her tone even. “I like my job.”

“Must be nice to do whatever you like.” Delia pressed the cigarette to her mouth. She inhaled sharply and held the smoke in her lungs. She looked up at the ceiling. She shook her head.

Maggie guessed it was coming sooner than she’d thought. Her mother was shuffling the deck before laying down the Bad-News Card: Why are you throwing away your life? Go to nursing school. Be a Kelly Girl. Get some kind of job where you’ll meet a man who doesn’t think you’re a whore.

Instead, Delia told her, “Don Wesley was killed this morning.”

Maggie’s hand went to her chest. Her heart was a hummingbird trapped beneath her fingers.

Delia said, “Shot in the head. Died two seconds after he got to the hospital.”

“Is Jimmy—”

“If Jimmy was hurt, do you think I’d be standing here talking about Don Wesley?”

Maggie took a mouthful of air, then coughed it back out. The room was filled with smoke and cooking odors. She wanted to open a window but her father had painted them all shut.

“How did it …” Maggie had trouble forming the question. “How did it happen?”

“I’m just the mother. You think they tell me anything?”

“They,” Maggie repeated. Her uncle Terry and his friends. They made Delia look downright forthcoming. Fortunately, there was an easy way around that. Maggie reached inside the stereo console to turn on the radio.

“Don’t,” Delia stopped her. “The news can’t tell us anything except what we already know.”

“What do we know?”

“Drop it, Margaret.” Delia tapped ash into her cupped hand. “Jimmy’s safe. That’s all that matters. And you be nice to him when he gets here.”

“Of course I—”

A car door slammed in the driveway. The windowpanes shook from the sound. Maggie held her breath because it was easier than breathing. Part of her hoped it was their neighbor coming home from work. But then shoes scuffed across the carport, up the back stairs. The kitchen door opened, but didn’t close.

She knew it was her uncle Terry before she saw him. He never shut the back door. The kitchen was a non-room to him, one of those things women needed that men didn’t want to know about, like sanitary napkins and romance novels.

Though the day had barely started, Terry Lawson reeked of alcohol. Maggie could smell it from across the room. He swayed as he stood in the dining room doorway. He was wearing his police sergeant’s uniform, but the shirt was unbuttoned, showing his white undershirt. Tufts of hair stuck up from the collar. He looked like he’d slept in his car with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s trapped between his knees. Which was probably where he was when he heard about Don Wesley on his radio.