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I sat my handbag on my white wicker dresser—a juvenile piece I’d always resented. I don’t know how it survived the transition into the Yellow Room, but my dislike probably played a role in its sticking around. Like the mirror on the stair landing.
Paul lay on the bed, legs crossed over one another, eyes on his phone. He was so guarded around it. He kept it far from my fingers, and it bothered me. Was he still messaging work? If he was so afraid he’d miss something important, why would he drag me back here in the first place?
“You haven’t been home in a long time, Gray,” Paul had told me weeks earlier. “Show up, hug your mother, strike it off the to-do list for another decade.”
I’d pushed back. “If this is about your run, you know Mamma will be supportive. She’ll use her contacts whether we show up this Christmas or not.”
Fingers skittering across the screen of his phone, he’d not answered me. He’d already made his mind, and his silence told me negotiation wasn’t an option. And here we are.
I slid out of my blouse. I didn’t realize he’d gotten up until his hands were on my shoulders.
“I want to fuck,” he whispered in my ear. My skin raised in chilled goose bumps. Not in an erotic way. Between the flight and the wine I’d gulped to white-knuckle my way through it, my temples throbbed. I didn’t want to be touched. And definitely not in front of my dresser mirror.
Paul didn’t seem to want a reply. He’d already undone my pants and pulled them to my ankles. I didn’t stop him, didn’t say no. My thoughts anchored to the two servings of room-temp white wine in my bag. Paul’s horniness, the only thing standing between me and my next drink.
With a burst of hot breath on the back of my neck, he came quickly.
“I can always tell when you’ve been drinking,” he said as he pulled his slacks back up. “You get dehydrated, and it’s like sandpaper down there.”
My cheeks flamed. His remark—the truth in it—pricked my heart like a hot needle. He was right. It was biological. I’d had too much to drink. I’d grown dehydrated.
Stinging comments from Paul used to be infrequent, but each new instance seemed to embolden him. He tested me that way. Pushing me towards some threshold, wearing me down, then moving the invisible line back to push me all over again. There was a time when I’d have erupted in anger, when I’d have demanded an apology at the very least, but probably much more. Now, his digs lingered in my mind like stale cigarette smoke.
I used to care about things. All sorts of things. Now everything was muted. Static-filled. I still walked amongst sharp blades and needle-like hazards, but their edges had been dulled. It was a broken way of seeing the world. A dangerous one.
I collected my purse and stepped out of my pants in silence. In my old bathroom, I twisted the top off one tiny wine bottle, turned it up, and shoved it in the back of a cluttered drawer. Then repeated the process with the other. When I finished, I caught my breath. I kneaded and dug at my chest as though trying to crawl inside myself.
The bath water poured piping hot from the faucet. Mamma may have let some things fall through the cracks, but the water heater wasn’t one of them.
When did it become worth it? When did Paul, the life he offered—and its distance from here—become worth it? The acidity of cheap wine tickled the back of my throat, reminding me that it wasn’t worth it, but my priorities necessitated it anyways.
My priorities. Now there was something to scoff at. I really did used to care about things. The sick, homeless people at the AIDS shelter I volunteered for. Tossed from their families like subhuman garbage. But empathy was replaced by guilt as I’d catch myself watching the clock. While dying people described what life was like before, I’d zone out and count the minutes till I could go home and uncork a sweaty bottle of chilled chardonnay.
The bathwater fizzed as it mixed with flecks of old soap stuck to the sides of the claw-foot tub. The hot water swallowed my body, and my mind stilled as Paul washed off me.
3
Annie
The buzz-sawing songs of the cicadas outside break in rhythmic waves. The kitchen windows, glass bubbled from the passage of too much time, do little to stifle the sound. It’s oppressive. Like Paul.
What does Paul think my death will look like? How will he ultimately choose to do it? Will it be painless? Will it come to me in my sleep in the form of a heavy pillow sunk over my face? Only enough time to start to panic before cold darkness swallows me up?
Or will he make it hurt? Draw it out. Will he want me to know he’s had the last word, after all? That he’s won. Will he get off on the fear in my eyes? Know I’ve seen the hate swirling in his? He came to Elizabeth to find me. Dragged his wife with him, too. I won’t let him win.
When I think about him, and who he really is, it tears me up inside. He gnaws at me like a rat chewing through concrete. Oh yes, rats can chew through concrete. If they’re hungry enough. Desperate enough.
I open a kitchen drawer. A rolling pin. A potato masher. A cheese grater. No. These won’t do. I close the drawer, careful to shut it quietly.
I spy the knife block out of the corner of my eye. A butcher’s knife? A meat cleaver? Honestly, how cliché. Gauche, even. Unlike women more suspicious than myself, I don’t carry mace. I should but I don’t, and now here I am. Searching for self-defense.
I need delicate. The paring knife. That’s delicate. Like me.
A blade no longer than a couple inches. But there are plenty of important things just a couple inches beneath the surface.
4
Nina
Winters in Elizabeth rarely grew cold enough to kill the crickets. They chirped their singsongs from the sullen palmettos in front of Auntie Tilda’s place.
Auntie’s mailbox was a rusted-out mess. I made a mental note to buy a new one the next time I drove to Dale’s Hardware. It’d only been a few days since I last opened it, but it was stuffed like a turkey with letters.
The world had a lot to say to a dying woman.
I started back up the overgrown yard stones to the house. Another note to myself: ask James next door if he’d mow again this weekend. The gutters that ran the length of her tin roof were swollen with pine needles. Maybe James had a ladder to spare, too.
I tugged hard on the front door before it gave. The wood framing buttressing the rickety home had shrunk since summer. Inside, red carpet covered the living room. The last time anyone updated the place, red had been a trendy choice. A tattered recliner, Auntie’s favorite in better times, sat before a TV box. A floral-patterned couch pushed against the room’s long wall. Above it hung a photo of Barack Obama. She’d been so proud to vote for him. “I never thought I’d live to see it,” she’d told me through tears.
In the kitchen, I rifled through her mail. Plenty of bills, but since I’d taken to coming over, the number of past-dues had dwindled. Coupons for the Dairy Queen—I stuck those in my jeans pocket. Two Christmas cards from my cousins.
I paused with disbelieving eyes. And one from Joanna King.
A holly green envelope with a return address label stuck to the corner. The only residence on Atalaya Drive. An embossed “K” in fancy font. I sat the others on the table. I very much wanted to know what Mrs. King had to say to Tilda Palmer.
“Nina,” Auntie called from her bedroom down the hall. Her voice strained. My wristwatch indicated it was time.
“Coming, Auntie,” I shouted, pacing to the fridge. The card from the Kings would have to wait.
I’d gone through the fridge days earlier for spoiled foods, but I hadn’t wiped the shelves yet. A fresh box of baking soda fended off the smell until I found more time. The bottle of liquid morphine sat in the butter drawer.
The police officer in me had scratched a tiny pen mark to indicate the level since I last poured from it. James might be good for mowing, maybe ladders, but I didn’t trust him around Auntie’s painkillers.
In Auntie’s room, a glass hutch displayed dolls and crystal trinkets she’d co
llected over the latter part of her life, but her brass bed had been replaced with the one hospice provided. I pressed the side button to raise her upright.
Sick as she was, Tilda Palmer wore her lined face proudly: crow’s feet by her eyes from years of laughter and the wrinkled brow of a woman who’d handled more than most. A pile of gray hair sat clipped into a bun atop her head. “I’ll keep my hair, if you don’t mind,” she’d said sternly to the doctor.
A fiber-optic Christmas tree a bit taller than a toaster sat on the side table. It threw a spectrum of colors across the darkened room as it changed shades to a motor’s hum.
“Nina.” Auntie smiled. “Anything nice in the mail today?”
“Some Christmas cards. Here, drink up.” I held the measuring cap of morphine to her cracked lips. I intended to fetch Vaseline for those next.
“Who from?” she asked after swallowing.
“Auntie Linda’s kids. Also, Terrance and Valerie.”
“Nobody else?”
Did she expect a card from somebody else? Certainly, not from the Kings.
I took a deep breath. I wanted to lie but couldn’t bring myself to. “Joanna King sent one.”
Auntie cleared her throat with a raspy cough. “Bring it here, would you?”
“Sure.” I walked back to the kitchen table where I’d left the heap of envelopes and plucked out the green one. Auntie started to tear at it, but her eyelids sagged as the morphine kicked in. I opened it for her, and a paper check flitted out, landing on her lap. Written sharply across the payment line were the words “One thousand dollars.” Swooping, elegant cursive said the check was for something Joanna King called “Severance.”
True, Tilda Palmer had worked at Piper Point for decades. It might as well have been the Big House, the way they treated her. For years, she watched over Gray and Charlotte. Cooking meals for that family. But after everything that had happened, she was supposed to be done with the Kings.
I was only nine or ten years old when news of Auntie’s secret recording broke. Joanna’s late husband, Congressman Seamus King, had been knee-deep in Kentucky bourbon after a bruising campaign day. Auntie had tucked a tape recorder in her pocket and made for Piper Point’s library, Seamus King’s dinner tray in hand. The whole country heard what Seamus had screamed at her, but I remembered what she told me perfectly.
“Don’t you ever let someone speak to you like that. Ever,” she’d said, trembling. “If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything.”
She told me it’d only been a single instance, but I never believed her. If it’d been the first time he’d gone off on her like that, she wouldn’t have kept a tape recorder in the pocket of her frock. Auntie had been careful about it. Smart. But why the check?
My cheeks grew hot, and I arched my brow. “How long have you been taking money from them?”
“Don’t mind my matters.” Auntie’s voice was tinged with stubbornness. Cancer wouldn’t wipe that out till the very end. “Sign my name to the back of that check,” she whispered. “Sign it over to yourself, you hear me? I don’t have much, but it’s what I can do for you.”
I stuffed the check in my pocket with the coupons. I had no more plans to argue with a dying woman than I had to cash a check from the Kings.
“You take that check, Nina.” Her eyes closed as she drifted.
I gave her hand a squeeze. “Merry Christmas, Auntie.”
In the spare bedroom, I unfolded the check and sat it on the nightstand next to my badge. “Elizabeth County Sheriff’s Office” arched across the top of the faux gold shield. “Detective Nina Palmer” written below that.
All my things, still unpacked. I’d been checking in on Auntie for weeks, but now that the pain had moved to her bones, it needed squashing more frequently. Bigger bottles with higher doses. I’d sat next to her when the Charleston oncologist laid the facts out bare.
“The incidence and mortality rates of pancreatic adenocarcinoma are roughly the same,” he’d said, glasses resting on his nose.
“And what the hell does that mean?” Auntie asked, eyes narrowed.
“It means just about everyone who gets it passes away,” I told her.
The next words out of Auntie’s mouth came quickly. “No chemo. I’m not going through all that mess just to die a week later than if I hadn’t.”
I didn’t blame her. Neither did the doctor.
But when it became clear that nobody else planned to help, I’d moved into Auntie’s spare room. When the funeral finally rolled around, they’d be bickering over whose flowers sat closest to a dead woman. The one they couldn’t be bothered with when she wasn’t so … dead.
I owed Auntie Tilda. She looked out for me, more or less raised me even when Mom—forever preoccupied with her next husband—was still alive. Now that Tilda was on her way out, helping her was the least I could do.
After pulling on a pair of sweats, I tied my hair back. My stomach growled, and I thought of the fast-food coupon in my pants’ pocket. But the more dusk settled, the more unappealing driving anywhere became.
On the twin bed, I flipped my laptop open across my stomach. I began to type “Netflix” into the web browser but paused. Instead, I opened Wikipedia to polish my memory.
I searched for Congressman Seamus King, scrolling past his biography, his early work for the family business—Charleston shipping. His career in politics. I stopped at the heading labeled “Domestic Staff Controversy.”
Auntie’s check from Joanna King seemed to scream from its new home on the nightstand. The word “severance” had a very real meaning, but it’d been twenty years since Auntie had set foot in that home. At least, I assumed it had been.
Why the hell would Joanna King still be cutting her checks? If not because of a controversy dead for decades, then what else might be worth the trouble and the money?
5
Gray
The pews at Blessed Lamb Baptist could straighten out a spine before the collection plate made a single round. No cushion. Just hard benches to go with all the Good News.
We sang “O Come Let Us Adore Him” as the offering plate zigzagged its way through the pews collecting crinkled bills and loose change. And Mamma’s check, folded in reverse so the amount showed.
A rotund Pastor Calcutt stood as we took our seats. “Welcome all, and Merry Christmas Eve,” he said, tufts of white hair clinging to his lightbulb-shaped head.
Charles Calcutt had been our pastor ever since I could remember and the principal of Elizabeth Baptist School. He’d been forced to resign from the latter position when his affair with my English teacher, Mrs. Grant, came to light.
Mamma had phoned to tell me he’d confessed before the congregation. I’d been away at college. Pastor Calcutt begged forgiveness for his transgressions and, in the spirit of Christ’s love, was forgiven. As for Mrs. Grant, her husband promptly divorced her, and she fled town. I’m not sure what happened to her.
At the time, the notion that their two fates could be so different, so unfair, had angered me, as though the plot from The Scarlet Letter had found a small nook in modern society in which it could unfold again. But that was a different time. Paul was charming then, and I was deeply in love. Surviving, or perhaps even thriving, in the world had seemed doable. A fate like Mrs. Grant’s felt distant. Impossible.
Pastor Calcutt went on, “Such joyous singing. The Lord’s heard us, and he’s smiling, I guarantee it. Before we get down to business, let’s greet one another. Turn to the folks on your left and right and shake their hands. Wander around a bit. Fellowship!”
Hymnal notes rang from the choir piano as chatter and laughter filled the vaulted sanctuary. I turned to Paul as he leaned down to whisper in my ear.
“I love you, Gray Godfrey,” he said. “Don’t you ever forget it.”
I quickly turned to my right and then my left, wondering for whose benefit he’d spoken. It could only be for Charlotte, who sat on my other side, since it sure as hell wasn’t for me.
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“Charlotte! Gray!” A voice rang from somewhere amongst the milling suits and doily-collared dresses. Frances Miles shouldered her way through the crowd. From the looks of it, she still baked herself in tanning beds, and blonde extensions did their best to snuff out whatever dark roots the bleach failed to touch. “I can’t believe it! Both of you together.” She beamed. “Merry Christmas Eve!”
I didn’t recall her twang being so sharp.
“Merry Christmas,” Charlotte and I replied together.
Frances Miles had been a childhood friend to both of us. I didn’t like her now and I wasn’t even sure I’d liked her back then, but friendships in small towns were like family. You often couldn’t choose them.
“Charlotte, I’m so sorry about Will.” She frowned. “I saw your status change on Facebook. I thought about calling.”
“Frances, you remember Paul?” I intervened on Charlotte’s behalf. Paul extended his hand past me, shaking hers.
“Why of course I remember Paul,” she replied. “Even if I didn’t, I’d have television to remind me.” There was a note of envy in her voice that I doubted she meant anyone to hear.
“Y’all are coming to Ruby’s tonight, aren’t you?” she asked, fingering a glittering tennis bracelet around her wrist.
Ruby’s sat on a corner a few blocks west of downtown. The pub was half bar, half dance club, and one-hundred-percent high school reunion. Especially on the nights before Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“We’ve had a long day of traveling,” Paul answered for me.
“Y’all have to come,” Frances pressed. “Everyone’s going to be there. All the out-of-towners.” She looked past me and Paul. “What do you say, Charlotte? You deserve a drink after Will’s mess.”
Charlotte shifted her weight from one heel to the other. That was twice in a minute’s time she’d heard her ex-husband’s name. I felt for her, but I felt for myself more. A few drinks would ease my headache, and Mamma had no doubt locked the wine cabinet before I’d even taken off from Reagan National.