For Good (8 page)

Kristen woke early after a night of disjointed dreams: Marydale on the side of a desert road. Marydale in her kitchen serving Thanksgiving dinner to an empty table. Marydale lecturing in a hall at Cascadia Law School. She showered quickly but stared into the bathroom mirror for a long time. Her hair hung in limp wet strands around her face. She looked pale. She kept thinking about the gap in Marydale's smile. Had the tooth been pulled? Had someone punched her? Had anyone cared? She wanted to drive back to the house on Gulch Creek Road, fling her arms around Marydale, and yell,
What were you thinking?

Instead she dressed in the suit Grady had told her to
soften up
. She was at his office before he arrived, waiting in the parking lot of the low, squat office park. She didn't let him get through the door.

“I need to talk to you,” Kristen said.

“Don't tell me you've agreed to that postponement Hersal and I asked for,” Grady said with the confidence of a man used to angry, early-morning visitors. “Because we're ready now. We're going to court.”

Behind him, the windows were painted silver, the words
DOUGLAS E. GRADY, ATTORNEY AT LAW
stenciled on the scratched surface.

“I don't give a shit about the postponement.”

“Hersal will be glad to hear that.” Grady jingled something in his pocket. “Will that be all, Ms. Brock?”

The two scrawny trees in the parking lot had lost their leaves, and the air held the chill of an early winter.

“You didn't tell me about Marydale Rae,” Kristen said. “Was it some kind of a power play? Did you think it was funny?”

Grady bowed his enormous white hat.

“I know you don't like me,” Kristen went on. “You
tolerate
me. You don't want city people coming into your town and your court, but what happened to professionalism? We're
colleagues
.” She spit the last word at him.

“You'd better come in,” Grady said.

He jiggled the key in the lock for a long time. Inside, the space was devoid of decorations. Grady motioned for Kristen to follow him into the back office. He took a seat behind a heavy metal desk.

 “I think you've got me figured wrong,” Grady said. He pointed to a chair in front of the desk. “Sit.”

Kristen stood.

“Despite your personality,” Grady said with a leisureliness that made her want to sweep the files off his desk onto the floor. “And your general youth, I like you. You're not as stupid as most people.”

“You said Marydale Rae was a ‘rocky road to travel,'” Kristen said. “What was that? Driving directions? She's been convicted of
murder
. I'm the deputy DA. I was living with her. You knew that, and you didn't think you should tell me as a professional courtesy?”

“I said Marydale needed a friend.”

“Me?”

“Aldean Dean is her only friend. He's a good man, but that's no role model for a girl like Marydale. She's not going to marry him and live in the Pull-n-Pay.” When Kristen said nothing, he added, “Her parents are dead. She's an only child. She's a pariah. Sure, Frank at the diner will give her a job if she works under the table. He likes felons that way.”

“She killed a man.”

Grady looked up at her with bland concern. “You just learned that?” He set his hat on the desk beside him. “You just learned that.” This time it was a statement. He sighed. “People don't tell that story as much you'd expect. The Rae women…they're special. Marydale's mom, she was—” He rubbed the back of his neck. “People around here would say she was a good Christian woman, but it was more than that. She made old men feel young again. Children loved her. Drunks stood up taller when she walked into a room.”

“What about…?”

Kristen couldn't bring herself to say Marydale's name. It was Ms. Rae, the defendant, the inmate, the felon. Not Marydale with her white dog and her sunflowers and her feet hooked around the rails of the porch, leaning back so she could see the stars.

Grady chuckled. Kristen wanted to slap him or leave or cry.

“Marydale always was her own woman,” he said. “She was special, too.”

“And so you let me jeopardize my career, maybe my safety? Because she was special? Do you want everyone in jail right now to wait another six months while they recruit another deputy prosecutor because Boyd Relington's busy drinking whiskey with Ronald Holten or whatever he does all day? I don't see a big brain trust around here.”

Grady held up his hand. “Kristen.”

She glared at him.

“Do you know why I came out of retirement?”

Grady motioned to the chair. Kristen remained standing.

“I had a nice trailer out at Coos Bay. Fishing every day. I could see the elk in the parcel behind my place. Then I heard about what happened to Marydale, not the stuff up at the barn with that boy, not what she did, but what happened right here.”

“What?”

“Marydale didn't have any money.”

Grady rubbed his hands over his knees, as though easing an old pain. It occurred to Kristen that he was old. She hadn't seen it before. She hadn't really noticed anything but his enormous hat.

“Her father had died. Her mom had died. She'd sold off most of their herd to pay for her mother's cancer. Marydale ended up with some public defender fresh out of law school. I think he wanted a murder on his résumé because he refused to plead down to manslaughter. He didn't even suggest self-defense, which is what it was.”

Kristen saw Marydale standing in the kitchen, her beautiful face wrecked by grief.

She sat down.

“Her attorney should've been able to walk in there and say, ‘For God's sake, look at her,' and walk away with a not-guilty verdict.”

“There must have been a jury.”

“People around here don't like the gays. There's no one here talking about marriage equality.” Grady put the words in quotation marks. “But Marydale Rae…” His gazed passed Kristen toward the door. “My grandfather was a sharecropper in Iowa. Corn mostly. Before they had all these insecticides. He said sometimes there'd be a plague of locusts, and they'd eat up everything. And there'd often be one farm or one valley where the wind would blow or the rain would fall just right, and the bugs wouldn't touch it. They'd just pass right over. Marydale was like that…for a while.

“Everyone knew she was a queer. She didn't hide it. I mean she did, but you can't hide anything from anyone, especially when there wasn't a girl in town who hadn't at least thought about kissing Marydale Rae. But she got brash about it after her father died. She was running that ranch, ran it as good as any man could've. She was born to that land, and she was a good Christian. She'd help anyone in a second, took care of her mother till she passed.

“Mrs. Rae died in her arms. Preacher found them there together, Marydale just sitting up against that headboard with her mother in her arms. And they asked why she hadn't called anyone, and Marydale just said, there wasn't any hurry, ‘'cause God had already come and taken care of everything that mattered.' People just couldn't hate her for being gay.”

“What about Aaron Holten?” Kristen asked.

“The thing about those locusts…you didn't want to be the farm they left alone, the only one to make it.” He shook his head slowly. “First they'd say God spared you; then, just as quick, they'd say you'd made a pact with the devil. I've seen the Holten women in court, swearing up and down they ran into a wall. It runs in families. There's a lot of mothers in this town who've seen their girls go off with a Holten boy and cried over it.

“When Marydale killed him, I think…some people hated her because she did it, and some people hated her because they hadn't done it themselves. Some of them just hated her because they owed the Holtens so much money; they couldn't not.”

“Didn't she appeal?” Kristen felt the sweat beneath her arms and between her legs.

“Don't know why not,” Grady said. “She was too shook up, I guess. I heard about it too late. But that's why I came back, so no one ever had to take a shit-shoveling public defender again, because I can tell you one thing: if I'd been her lawyer, she'd be free.”

The next days passed in slow procession. Kristen thought about Marydale constantly, but she entered the Almost Home from the back so she wouldn't risk seeing her coming out of the Ro-Day-O Diner.

Donna called one evening while Kristen lay on her motel bed, letting the blue glare of the television wash over her and drinking Poisonwood from a plastic cup.

Two of the new hires at the Falcon Law Group had been let go. A third was on her way out.

“You're going to hate me,” Donna said, “but I gave Mr. Falcon your name. I know you don't want to do big firm, but I'm lead on this energy-drink patent case.”

“And somebody needs to take over the Lubbock divorce,” Kristen finished.

She took another sip of the whiskey. Neither the taste nor the alcohol seemed to affect her, or perhaps there was already something numbingly intoxicating about the monotony of the motel, the television commercials, and her thoughts.

“It'd just be for a little while. I told them I'd help find a replacement for the family-law side. It's a big part of our business.”

Our business.
Donna had edged ahead in whatever race they were running to whatever golden future they'd respectively imagined on the other side of attorney general or Falcon law partner.

“Our clients need to know they can come to the Falcon Law Group for anything, big or small,” Donna went on. “I think it'd be an amazing opportunity for you, Kristen.”

“I can't just leave my work here.” Kristen felt like someone else was speaking for her. “I'm shaping the lives of this community. They count on me and what I can do for them.”

“Shit. I know,” Donna said. “It was worth a try though.”

But in court, Kristen could barely keep the addicts straight. It didn't matter. Every case was the same. Someone got drunk. Someone got high. Someone borrowed a car without permission, which counted as auto theft, but Kristen felt no satisfaction in the guilty verdicts.

“It just gets worse with the rodeo,” Grady said, as they exited the courtroom Friday afternoon. “You talk to Marydale yet?”

Kristen glanced around. The hall was empty, but nothing was private in Tristess.

“You know I can't do that,” she said. “I could lose my job.”

“Your job.” Grady waved vaguely in the direction of the courtroom. “My job.”

At the end of the week, the rodeo came to town or the town became the rodeo. Kristen couldn't tell which. Tristess was busy and vacant at turns. Main Street was empty. The parking lot of the Almost Home was packed. From the walkway outside her motel room, she could see the sparkle of the Ferris wheel and hear the jingle of carnival music.

Every single person she saw asked if she'd been to the rodeo. The answer was no. She didn't even bother to lie and say she was going soon. She couldn't shake the feeling that she should be going with Marydale. She should be walking under the Ferris wheel with Marydale. She should be listening to Marydale's stories and passing an ice-cream cone back and forth with the intimacy of a kiss.

And every night and sometimes during the day, even in court while Grady was droning on about sight lines and radar calibration, she argued with Marydale in her mind.
You had an obligation to tell me.
It was like briefing a difficult case. She just had to get the words right, and it would be true.
I have to uphold the law. My job requires that I uphold the law.
She tried again and again, but her imagined Marydale never answered back, and her silence became its own castigation.

Marlen “Pops” Dean died a good death. Marydale could tell the thought was on everyone's mind as the people of Tristess filed into the Fellowship Hall of the Victory Waters Pentecostal Church. Aldean stood at the door, shaking hands, looking handsome in the same black suit he had worn to Marydale's mother's funeral and to the prom. And although he had choked up as he delivered his eulogy from the pulpit, he grinned at her from over the shoulder of buxom Lucy-Anne Beeker. Grieving Aldean Dean in a pressed suit was every straight girl's dream. Aldean pretended to squeeze Lucy-Anne's tight, black-clad ass.

You dog,
Marydale mouthed, but she felt indignant for Pops.
Really?
she added.

Once the last of the receiving line had filed in, Aldean hurried to her side.

“I can't believe this is happening,” he said. He wasn't talking about Pops. “Old John said he'll buy it. Cash.”

“I know. I heard.”

“Old John says he's been wanting to buy the Pull-n-Pay for years, said he thought I'd want to sell, but out of respect for Pops and all…” He looked like the boy she remembered from the sod forts of their childhood. “And I found this industrial park north of Portland, right on the water. They'll even rent me a little houseboat. It's only five hundred square feet, but I swear, with all Pop's junk, that's about all the space we had in the trailer. You'll love it. It's by this bridge that's built to look like one of those big French churches Mr. O'Rourke was always going on about in humanities.”

She felt herself tearing up.

“Hey.” Aldean wrapped his arms around her. He didn't smell of cigarettes. “How long do you have to keep your nose clean? Three years? It's been at least one. That's two more, and your PO will let you transfer your parole. You're missing out on all the hard work. By the time you get there, we're going to be making the best whiskey in Oregon, and all you have to do is show up.”

She hadn't told him about Kristen. It didn't seem fair to mix her tragedy with Pop's death and Aldean's excitement about Portland. She knew he would stay if she asked. If she said,
Don't leave me. I can't live here without you, without her, without anyone
, Aldean would stay, but that was a kind of prison, and she knew too much about prison to wrap a cage around him.

“It's going to be amazing,” she said. “Aldean, you're going to do it.”

The preacher's wife hurried up to them with an apron in hand.

“We've got the Lord's bounty of food in the kitchen,” she said, waving a hand in front of her flushed face. “And not nearly enough hands. I thought since you worked at the diner…Aldean, can we steal her?”

In the kitchen, the women talked about what a good boy Aldean was, waiting until his Pops died before moving to the city. A few of the women even patted Marydale on the back and said it was a shame about her mom dying so pretty and so young, bless her, and Marydale's father, too, although you kind of expected it with a man like that who lived rough for his age.

“They're with the angels now,” they all concluded with satisfied smiles. “But it'd sure have been nice to have your mother guiding you up, wouldn't it, Miss Marydale? How many times did you win that rodeo contest?”

They all knew, but she said, “I'm sorry, ma'am, I can't remember.”

And in some ways it felt like she really couldn't remember, because it couldn't really have been her. Instead she remembered the day Gulu had pulled her behind a utility box on the far corner of the grounds. They sat, huddled between the gray metal and the inner fence.

You know what day it is?
Gulu had asked, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette with the last match in a battered matchbook.

Marydale had said,
No. What day is it?
all the while looking around for the guards who would surely catch them.

Last day for you to file an appeal on that case of yours.

What?

Don't you know about the statute of limitations? It's run out now. But you don't mind, do you? 'Cause you didn't ask for one.

My attorney said I couldn't get one.

You can't now.

Gulu had drawn in a deep drag of smoke, the tiny cigarette burning down to an ember. Then she had taken Marydale's hand, turned it over to expose her wrist, and pressed the ember into her skin.

You're one of us now, Scholar.

When the reception was finally over, the women urged Marydale to take a restaurant-sized pan of leftover tuna casserole.

“Because you don't have nobody to look after you out on that farm,” the preacher's wife said, which prompted another round of how beautiful Marydale's mother had been and how sad it was that she died so young, leaving Marydale without anyone to take care of her. “But don't keep the pan. Bring it back,” the preacher's wife added, as though stealing baking pans was her particular MO.

“I will make that my number one priority,” Marydale said.

The women didn't seem to hear the bitterness in her voice, and Marydale pretended it wasn't there as she hugged them, leaning down until she was bent almost in half.

It was after dark when Marydale returned to her house. She bumped the truck door closed with her hip, the enormous casserole in her hands. It wasn't any heavier than a tray at the Ro-Day-O, but her arms shook. She was tired. The pan smelled of hot mayonnaise and fish. And she smelled like hot mayonnaise and fish. And she had Jell-O on her sleeve. And Aldean was leaving. And the sweet, exquisite moments she had shared with Kristen were as meaningless as a shooting star, just a brief glitter that no one else saw because it existed for only the split second it took to disappear.

She looked up. Someone stood in the shadow of the porch. Marydale whistled for Lilith, who bounded out of her kennel on the side of the house, but Lilith wasn't growling, and a moment later she was circling the porch, wagging her tail. Kristen stepped out of the shadows into the moonlight. Her dark-framed glasses stood out against her pale skin. She was wearing a suit, and her white blouse glowed. Standing at the edge of the steps with her hands clasped before her, she looked like a woman at a train station, both waiting and departing.

The pan grew heavier in Marydale's hands. She wished she had come home with someone, maybe Lucy-Anne Beeker with her enormous breasts heaving their grief for Pops in a low-cut dress. As it was, she had a pan of flaccid bow ties. She ran her tongue over the space where her tooth had been knocked out, feeling the sharp edge. In the back of her mind, her mother said,
There's no excuse to let your looks slide.

She set the casserole on the hood of the truck, straightened, and placed one hand on her hip.

“You forget something?” Marydale called out.

Kristen hesitated. “You should have told me.”

“You should be more careful who you sleep with.” Marydale strolled toward her. It was all she could do to keep the tears out of her voice. “You just don't know, even in these small towns.”

“I'm serious,” Kristen said. “I could have lost my job.”

Standing on the stairs, Kristen was taller than Marydale, and Marydale felt like Kristen had always been taller, although of course that wasn't true. It just seemed like Kristen had always been farther away than she realized.

“You didn't do anything wrong,” Marydale said, “unless being a lesbian is wrong, but you said that stuff doesn't matter in Portland.”

“I'm not a lesbian. I don't know what I am. And it matters that you're a felon. It matters what people think. If you cared about me, you would have thought about that.”

Kristen's voice was strained. She kept pushing at her glasses.

“I should have told you.” Marydale took a step closer so that she was standing on the step right below Kristen. They were so close she could see the fine weave of Kristen's shirt. “Maybe I didn't want you to know. Maybe I didn't care if you knew. Maybe I wanted to fuck you before you found out, because I knew you'd be gone as soon as you did.”

She wanted to fall into Kristen's arms, to tell her about Aldean leaving and the ladies in the kitchen and how tomorrow none of them would look at her. Even when they ordered, they would stare at the menu with their hands clasped in little arthritic fists.

“You want me to say you were never here? Is that what want? Okay, I'll say it. I don't know you. I don't know what people said about us, but it's all lies.” Marydale tipped her chin up.

Kristen stepped back, tripping a little on the step behind her.

“You've never been alone,” Marydale added.

“Of course I've been alone.”

“Not like I have.”

She reached up to touch Kristen's cheek, but Kristen turned away and stepped down off the stairs. She didn't stop until she was standing in the drive a few feet away.

“I don't know what to do,” Kristen said. Her voice trembled, but Marydale pretended not to hear.

“Go back to court. Go back to Portland and find a lawyer boyfriend.”

Marydale didn't look back as she let the door close behind her. She didn't turn on any lights. In the kitchen, she stood at the sink, her hands braced against the cool enamel, staring at the dark silhouette of the oak tree outside. She heard Gulu's voice in her head,
You cry too much, Scholar,
and her mother's voice,
You can be pretty or you can be lucky.

Behind her, another, gentler voice said, “Are you okay?”

“Go away.” She felt Kristen's hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off. “You're right. I should have told you, but you were never going to stay.”

“I talked to Douglas Grady about your case,” Kristen said.

“Douglas Grady?” Marydale tried to place the name.

“He's the public defender.”

“Not mine.”

“No. Not yours. He said your lawyer didn't do his job.”

“Everybody hates their public defender.”

“Douglas thinks you were innocent.”

Marydale felt very tired. “No one is innocent.”

“Do you want to tell me now?” Kristen asked.

Marydale traced the edge of the cracked enamel sink with one finger.

“What part?”

“Any of it. All of it.”

The house creaked around them. Lilith snuffled in her bed beneath the kitchen table.

“I was happy,” Marydale said finally, her back still to Kristen. “My parents were part of a cooperative that sold free-range beef to all the big grocery stores out in Portland.” She turned, but she couldn't look at Kristen.

“And you were gay?” Kristen asked.

“My friend Aubrey, she was, too, I thought. She came out to me after my mother died. We were always talking about the future, how we were going to go to college together. I was going to be a counselor, and she was going to be a nurse. We'd work in the same hospital. But then she started talking about who we were going to marry, like it was this choice we were going to make together. I could have Aaron, and she'd take his cousin Pete. Or we could wait a year and marry the Grossman twins when they graduated. I said I wanted to marry her.

“She went along with it for a while. Then one night she got really serious. She told me she'd started seeing Aaron Holten. He was Ronald Holten's nephew. They're the biggest Holtens, the ones with all the land. She said I needed to ask out his cousin Amos or his stepbrother Marcus. I thought she was dumping me, but she thought that we'd always be together, except we'd have husbands. I said I didn't want to sneak around behind some boy's back. Aaron was a jerk, but Marcus was a nice guy. I didn't want to do that to him, and I wanted
her
. I tried to explain that it'd be different in college. People wouldn't care. She just said Aaron wouldn't care. She said what we did didn't
count.
” Marydale crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself tightly. “She said she'd even tell him just to prove it to me.”

“Did he care?” Kristen asked.

“He started following me.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“He said no one could find out about me and Aubrey. He said if I got close to her again, he'd kill me and he'd kill her.”

“Oh God, Marydale.”

“I begged Aubrey to leave him, but she wouldn't, and I stayed away from them both after that. But that year at the rodeo”—Marydale stared at the wall—”he won everything, and everyone kept calling us the king and queen. They said he should dump Aubrey and go out with me. We had to ride on the float together, and I remember sitting there, waving to everyone, and I just wanted to cry. That night there was a big thunderstorm.” She could smell the lightning, the first drops of rain hitting the dust. Her heart beat faster, and an old fear rose up in her throat. “I had to get back to milk the cows. I still had two cows. I was out in the barn. I heard a truck. I got scared, and I climbed up into the loft.”

She saw Aaron: his sharp jaw, his freckles, all sandy-blond and handsome. They had sat together at the sixth-grade lunch table. The other kids had chanted
Mary and Aaron sitting in a tree…

“When we were kids, Aaron said he was going to marry me.” She knew she was losing the chronology of the story. “I don't know why I was so scared that night. I didn't really think he'd do anything, but I hid behind the bales. I knew it was Aaron before I even saw him. He was looking for me, real systematic, like mucking a stall, getting something done just by doing it. Then he started yelling that I was a dyke and he was going to show me what a real man was. I yelled at him to stop, for someone to help, but there was no one out here. And he started climbing up the ladder to the loft, and I picked up this bale, and I threw it down near him, just to show him that I could.”

Marydale thought Kristen touched her arm, but she couldn't feel it.