Between, Georgia (22 page)

“Don’t be silly, widget,” I said. “We all want you home. Now, let me go talk to the nurses, please.” I darted back out the door and up the hall so fast it was shamefully close to running.

I had slipped into an odd comfort zone, assuming that Genny’s and Mama’s injuries meant I would have to miss the hearing. As bad as the last few days had been, and as much as I wished the Bitch had never escaped or even existed, it had been something of a relief to shove Jonno to the back of my mental closet. Our divorce was the last thing of any substance that would take place between us, and it was comforting to pack off the moment to a misty afternoon in an undefined future. I wanted the divorce with all my heart. I did. Only I wasn’t sure I wanted it tomorrow.

It seemed like it might be easier to wean myself off Jonno in slow stages instead of trying to quit him cold turkey. Although some people—my mother, for example—might say that I’d had a year to wean myself. Then she’d ask how that was working out for me.

Dr. Crow did want to keep Genny another day, but I reminded him Bernese was a retired RN who lived right next door. He agreed to let Genny go home. There were two women sitting at the nurses’ station, and their faces lit up when he said I could take Genny. I was sure the minute I was around the corner, they were giving each other high fives. Genny in a bad phase was a handful and a half, and I had no doubt she’d all but kept her thumb permanently clamped down on the call button since she’d woken up.

I drove back to Between with Genny reclining in my cramped backseat. Just from being with Mama, Genny’s color was better.

Mama had one hand wedged back between the seats, touching her. This wasn’t only because Genny was hurt; they were usually in physical contact, even when they weren’t talking.

Mama home alone with me had been a little disconcerting. I was so used to seeing Mama and Genny, Genny and Mama. I was struck now by how tiny they seemed, how frail, in their bandages, gingerly holding hands. Watching them made both their extra-ordinary connection and their simple human frailty more real to me than it had ever been, and I felt a flash of longing for someone who was mine like that. I didn’t want to be so alone.

There had been something real growing underneath my friendship with Henry. It had been there when he kissed me, but I hadn’t been truly aware of it until I killed it in the junkyard. I’d mortally insulted him, and he had made it clear that he was on the other side of this ugly war. And that left me what?

Jonno? There was always Jonno. It seemed there always had been. I had a dizzying desire to skip the hearing tomorrow and then blatantly not reschedule. Jonno would be happy to drift with me in this limbo and see what happened. Drifting along and seeing what happened was practically Jonno’s middle name.

Looking at my mama and Genny, I was reminded that Jonno, whatever his faults, had always understood what these women were to me.

Jonno had known—we both had—that a day would come when there would be only one of them, and no matter who was left behind, she would immediately come to live with us. It wasn’t negotiable. I couldn’t bear to think of Genny living afraid, or for Mama to be isolated inside her own head.

When I left the acceptance letter for my scholarship to graduate school, two states away from my family, sitting unanswered until the deadline for accepting it wandered past and escaped me, Jonno hadn’t judged me or said I was too dependent. He never minded that I left him every weekend, sometimes three- and four-day weekends, to be with them. And with that thought, the longing for him was wiped away as quickly as it had come, leaving behind the beginnings of a bleak headache. Jonno probably never minded because it had made me very easy to cheat on.

If it didn’t happen tomorrow, I would have to get another court date, one I might even show up for. I would divorce him, and then I could settle down to live the rest of my life, alone, probably, because what man wants a thirty-year-old woman with one and a half mothers, one deaf-blind and the other so neurotic she was less than four baby steps from flat crazy. After Mama and Genny both passed, I would shuffle around in my house shoes, living on Cream of Wheat so I could afford to feed all nine thousand of my cats, who would no doubt eat me after I died. But hey, at least my mother up in heaven would be happy I had finally gotten off my ass and done something definitive. If I couldn’t murder dogs with cheerful abandon, I could at least follow through on my divorce.

I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to spend the day playing step-’n’-fetch-it for Genny, who was hurting and out of sorts.

Mama went to her room, and I could hear the clack and clatter as she pounded the Braille keyboard on her TTY. She was probably on the phone talking smack about me with one of her friends in Atlanta.

When the typing stopped, I wanted to go to her, but Genny didn’t give me a moment to breathe. She needed me to pet her hair, she wanted to eat only the kind of soup we were out of, and the remote for the TV in her bedroom started acting squirrelly. I was up and down the stairs hunting new batteries and screw-drivers, and when my minor surgeries had failed, I stood by the TV flipping through every channel five times, hunting for
Trad-ing Spaces.
Then Genny realized she had the remote set to VCR.

She switched it to TV and settled in to channel-surf. I went to make her some tea to keep from strangling her.

At about noon, we heard Bernese out in her driveway bellow-ing, “Lou! Lou! Bring me the stinking walk-around phone.” I leaned over Genny’s bed to peer out the window. Bernese was standing by her car, staring down at the mutilated tires. When Lou did not appear, Bernese remained rooted in the driveway, howling, “Phone! Phone!” with the O drawn out into a primal howl, as desperate for it as if she were Marlon Brando and the phone, Stella.

“What’s happening?” said Genny.

“Nothing good.”

I helped Genny sit up, bracing her back with pillows so she could watch out the bedroom window. I went and got Mama.

She sat by Genny, who gave her a play-by-play as the drama in Bernese’s driveway unfolded.

Lou must have crept home while I was picking up Genny, and he had apparently decided to pretend he hadn’t noticed the tires and let Bernese discover them on her own. Now he appeared with the phone, and she snatched it from his hand and dialed, then stood in the yard yelling into the mouthpiece. Lou orbited her like a panicky satellite.

After a few minutes, we saw Isaac Davids come walking elegantly down from his Victorian on the square, swinging his cane.

Moments later, Bernese’s pet sheriff, Thig Newell, drove up with his lights flashing, and five minutes after that, two cops from Loganville showed up. The menfolk all milled about in the yard while Bernese paced around and around her car in a posture so predatory it looked as if she were stalking it.

Mama signed,
You should go check on her.

I was spared that, because just then the crowd dispersed. Lou went in the house, the Loganville cops left, and Isaac and Bernese got in the sheriff ’s car with Thig and drove up Grace Street toward the square.

That afternoon, when Mama had gone to have a lie-down and Genny was exhausted to the point of tears, Lou came by and added Fisher to the mix. He asked me to keep an eye on her so he could go run some errands for Bernese.

“How are you going to run errands with seven slashed tires?” I asked him.

“Oh, and Bernese said to ask you can I borrow your car.” Lou looked flushed and pop-eyed, so I took pity on him and passed over the keys.

Fisher was grumpy and hyper all at once. She couldn’t be still, and she wouldn’t stay out of Genny’s room as long as I was in there. She kept banging into Genny’s bed and jarring her until I settled Genny in with
Days of Our Lives
and a smoothie and took Fisher downstairs to color while I cleaned the house. But Fisher wouldn’t stay at the kitchen table, either. She followed me from room to room, tangling herself in the vacuum’s cord and getting between my feet, tripping me.

She said, “Can I sleep over?” After I somehow managed to swallow the words “Sweet Lord, no!” that were trying to burst out of me, I managed to say, “You know Grandma won’t let you on a school night.”

Fisher didn’t answer, just kicked at the banister.

I added, “And you need to stay in your bed tonight, wormy.

Okay? Grandma has had a very hard day, with the cars and all, and you don’t want to upset her any more.”

Fisher gave the banister another good whang with her foot.

“Maybe you should take me to my grandma now. She’s with Mr.

Isaac. He could teach me secret Jewish things, and then I wouldn’t tell you.” Her lip was sticking out so far, a good-size bird could have perched on it and ridden to town.

“Fish, your grandma’s having kind of a hard time lately. You know how she’s been extra cranky?”

Fisher gave me a vigorous nod. She knew.

“I’m trying to fix that, okay? I’m going to try and get her to stop being so cranky and act like normal, but I need your help. I need you to not do things you know make her crazy. I don’t want her to come check your bed tonight and see you gone.”

“That’s dumb. She knows I only go downstairs or next door.”

“Sometimes you walk all the way down to the square and sleep upstairs at the store.”

“It’s not far to the store,” Fisher said.

“Fish, it’s not safe. You have to walk right”—I stopped myself abruptly and finally said—“near the exit from the highway. And cross the street by yourself. Grandma sees your empty bed and panics. If you won’t panic her tonight, then I promise you, I will help your grandma not be so cranky all the time. And you can stay over here with me all weekend like always, and tomorrow we’ll rent movies and stay up really late, okay?”

“Grandma says I can’t stay with you probably at all tomorrow.

She says you have to go to Athens and you won’t be back till late.”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t think I’m going.”

She peeped up at me sideways from under her bangs. “We can get any movie I want?”

“Any PG or G,” I said.

“And eat kettle corn?”

“Until we’re sick,” I said, flipping Bernese’s
Get Fit, Kid!
lunacy a mental bird. “But only if you help me by being sweet and not freaking out your grandma.”

At last she said, “Okay.”

Genny was calling me again. Fisher and I trailed back upstairs, and the afternoon wound endlessly on. Lou came back at about five, no doubt sent to snatch Fisher before I could feed her any actual dinner. Bernese probably had a nice plate of raw bran steeping in carrot juice at home. Mama and Genny were both sleeping.

“Do you think you and Fisher could stay here?” I asked Lou.

“I want to let Mama sleep, but someone needs to be around in case Genny wakes up first and needs something. And Lou, I really need out of here.”

“Sure thing,” Lou said.

I stuffed the book I was reading into my purse and practically fled the house before Lou could change his mind. I thought I would head up to the diner and get some dinner, read a chapter or two, maybe take a walk after.

It felt strange to walk past the parts yard and not have the dogs come charging toward me. I still had that familiar wobble of un-ease in my belly. I kept expecting to see them materialize in my peripheral vision.

As I passed the gas station and came up to the crosswalk that would lead me across the street and onto the square, I saw Bernese stomping down the cobbled walkway past the Marchants’ bed-and-breakfast. At the same time, Ona Crabtree emerged from one of the antique marts and walked up the sidewalk toward the diner.

Directly across from me, on the other side of the center gardens and fountain, Henry came out of Crabtree Books.

He turned around and saw Bernese and Ona about a heartbeat before they saw each other. They were walking in opposite directions, on opposite sides of the square, and as their eyes met, I felt it as a reverberation that spread up from the earth’s core and made the ground shudder under my feet. Neither of them stopped moving, but neither of them took her eyes off the other.

On the surface, it was simply two ladies of a certain age glaring balefully at each other across the green expanse of the square’s lovely lawn and butterfly garden. But for me, it was like watching two icebergs pass each other. Under the surface, shelves and blades of ancient ice ground against each other, splintering as they passed. Bernese was radiating her fresh rage over Genny’s injuries and this latest assault on her tires. Ona’s gaze dripped pure, cold poison, fueled by her ancient bruises as well as her recent losses, laying thirty years’ and three dead dogs’ worth of blame squarely at Bernese’s splayed feet.

They moved forward, eyes locked, each on her own side of the square. They came even with the center fountain, and at the same moment, they slowly turned their faces forward and continued past each other. I realized I had stopped breathing, and I sucked in a huge gulp of air that tasted oddly frigid, in spite of the fact that it had to be 80 degrees outside. Ona went into the diner, and Bernese saw me and cut the last corner, coming across the lawn and then to the end of the crosswalk to meet me.

“You going to get some supper?” she said.

I nodded. “Lou and Fisher are sitting with Genny.”

“Glad to see you’re getting out. I know Genny’s probably driven you bat-crap.” She continued past me up Grace, heading for home.

My eyes met Henry’s across the square, and by unspoken assent, we started walking toward each other. I crossed the street and walked directly across the grass, meeting him by the fountain.

“Want to come back to my place and get drunk?” said Henry Crabtree.

“God, yes,” I said.

CHAPTER 15

HENRY LOCKED THEfront door of the bookstore behind us. The overhead lights were off, and we wound our way through the stacks using the fading sunlight that was coming through the display window. By the time we got to fiction and literature, I was having trouble seeing where I was going. I put one hand on Henry’s shoulder and let him lead.