Between, Georgia (6 page)

The girl standing beside me looked like another college kid, a skinny, doe-eyed thing with golden-brown hair that fell in random waves past her shoulders. She was so daisy-fresh and dewy she was practically dripping. She had long tanned legs, as thin and awkward as a fawn’s, and she tipped her weight from one to the other, swaying as she sized me up.

I said, “Ms. DeClue?” as she was saying, “Are you Nonny?” She flushed and added, “I mean, Mrs. Overmilk?”

“Frett,” I said.

“What?” She took a tottery step backwards.

“My last name is Frett.”

She tucked her hair behind one ear and said earnestly, “But I specifically asked—I mean, I requested Nonny Overmilk.”

“That’s my married name,” I said. “I go by Frett now.”

“Oh! So you got divorced?” Her big eyes widened.

“Where is . . .” I glanced down at my sheet. “James Leeds?”

“Oh, not here yet. Maybe we should go sit and wait a little?”

“So you’re conducting the interview?” I asked. She seemed too young and too uncertain to be given the responsibility, but she nodded and then turned around and began threading her way through all the tables, working her way across the room. I followed her. She was wearing a short, sleeveless linen dress, expensive-looking. It wasn’t something I would wear to scoop ice cream. Her arms were so thin that her elbows looked bigger around than her biceps. We sat in an oversize booth in the back. A yellow leather backpack sat as a placeholder on the table.

She stopped in front of the table, and I slid into one side of the booth. She didn’t sit, but moved so she was standing in front of my bench, blocking me in. I had to look up at her when she spoke. “Nonny. That’s an interesting name. What’s that short for?

Wynona?”

I shook my head. “It’s not short for anything.”

“Oh. So that’s, like, your whole name? Nonny?” She picked up one foot nervously and then set it down again in exactly the same place.

“Yes.” I glanced at the time display on my phone. It was just past three o’clock. “Shouldn’t you sit down? So you can see when Mr. Leeds arrives?”

“Oh. Sure.” She sidestepped and then slid into the booth across from me.

Her habit of prefacing everything with a breathless “oh” was starting to wear on my nerves, which caused me to feel irritated with myself. Athens was a college town, so I worked with a lot of college kids, and I usually liked it. Nothing that was bothering me today had anything to do with Amber DeClue, and I knew I shouldn’t take it out on her.

She was looking at me with moist brown eyes, nervous and diffident. I shifted in my seat. Her expression was expectant, almost encouraging, as if she had sallied forth with the whole “Is it short for Wynona?” bit and was waiting for me to do my part to main-tain polite conversation. I looked away, watching the boys behind the counter scoop out double-dip cones and grab wrapped sandwiches from a cooler behind the counter.

After a couple of minutes, Amber said, “So that seems like a pretty neat job, translating for deaf people.”

I said, “I like it.”

“Does it pay okay?”

“It’s fine,” I said. I did not look back at her, but in my peripheral vision, I could see her big eyes focused on my face. I didn’t want to be rude to her, but I also wanted to avoid forming even a tenuous social bond. If she got comfortable chatting with me, she would be far more likely to address herself to me rather than James Leeds during the interview.

After another few minutes, she spoke again. “Overmilk. That’s a weird name, huh? Is that why you went to Frett? Except that’s kind of a weird name, too. So, but you didn’t say you were divorced?”

“No, I didn’t say,” I said. “I’ll wait another thirty minutes, but if he isn’t here by then, I’m going to have to go. You can reschedule through the agency if you still want to interview him.”

Her eyebrows came together. I waited, but she sat looking helplessly at me, her hands coming together to fiddle with an alarmingly large diamond solitaire on her ring finger. At last she asked, “So you think I should call him or something?”

“I’m not really supposed to advise you,” I said. “I’m only here to interpret.”

She turned sideways in the booth, scooting down and hanging her legs over the side. She crossed them at the knee, dangling her sandal off of her heel and swinging her leg. The sandal swayed hypnotically, balanced on her toes. Her toenails were painted sea-foam green.

“I’m not going to call him,” she said at last, turning those giant eyeballs back my way.

“All right,” I said. I sat another few minutes. Normally I’m comfortable with silence, but she never seemed to look away from me. Her gaze was earnest, and her little body was so restless, bouncing on the edge of the booth, her leg swinging more and more violently until the sandal was clapping against the sole of her foot. She was probably the owner’s daughter, or maybe fiancée—the solitaire was on the proper hand. Either way, she was dressed more like a princess than a junior manager, and I suspected she had never conducted an interview before. Or perhaps she had but was nervous about interviewing a deaf person.

I said, “This is going to be easy. When James Leeds comes, pretend I’m not here. Talk to him, not me, and ask him all the things you asked the other applicants. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

She shrugged and said, “So, if you’re not divorced, why are you going by Frett now? Because of, like, feminism or whatever?”

“No,” I said. We sat for another few minutes.

“I don’t think he’s coming,” she said. She clambered out of the booth and stood at the end of my long seat, blocking me in again.

“You’re not really allowed to talk to me? Is that it? I mean, even though he didn’t show up, you’re supposed to sit there totally silent?”

While she was talking, my phone began to vibrate, purring in-sistently against my purse. I held up one finger and looked at the display, expecting to see Mama’s number. It wasn’t a number I knew, but I could tell by the area code that the call was coming from Between.

“Could you excuse me for a moment?” I said.

She shrugged, annoyed, then took a step backwards and turned to the side, showing me her ski-slope nose. She was still standing close enough to block me in. I shook my head and then answered my phone.

“Nonny?” It was Bernese, but her voice was so hard and desperate I almost didn’t recognize it.

“Bernese? Are you okay?” I said. “Is Mama okay?”

“Stacia is going to be fine,” said Bernese. “It’s Genny, and may those Crabtrees rot in hell. It’s Genny. It’s our Genny.”

“The Crabtrees?” I said, confused. “What do the Crabtrees—

Bernese, what happened?”

“The Bitch got out,” Bernese said. “That Crabtree Bitch got out, and she ate your Genny up.”

CHAPTER   4

IT WAS NEVER a question of
if
one of the Crabtrees’ Dobermans would get loose and go after Genny. It was
when.

Those animals were just this side of wild and mean straight through. They had been trained as guard dogs by Ona’s oldest boy, Lobe. He’d employed some half-assed Crabtree methodol-ogy, probably a booklet found among the impulse items they kept by the register at the Loganville Piggly Wiggly:
30 Days to
Deadly Dogs.
Add in general Crabtree carelessness, and apply these factors to a swinging gate held closed by a long chain that had to be wrapped three times around the posts before it was pad-locked. It was the algebraic formula for doom.

Genny was deathly afraid of any animal that came up higher than her knee. She was especially afraid of big dogs. Of course, she was also afraid of hospitals. And loosely wrapped Halloween candy. And crosswalks and Jehovah’s Witnesses and self-serve gasoline pumps and anything with more than six legs, particularly squid. But the acrid smell of her fear was probably the thing that sent the dogs into apoplexy whenever they caught a whiff.

And it was only Genny they didn’t like. The dogs didn’t mind even Mama, and she was Genny’s twin. Fraternal, but they had become more and more similar as they aged. Genny had always been prettier, but the differences had faded over the years, especially after Mama became completely blind and Genny started choosing her clothes. After their sixty-plus years of living together, a stranger would have a hard time telling Eugenia and Eustacia apart. They were short, plump ladies with strong Native American features that looked somewhat incongruous in their small, pale faces. Every day Genny put their black-and-white-striped hair up into identical tidy buns, powdered their noses, and pinked their cheeks with liquid rouge.

It boggled my mind to consider how tiny the delineation in their genes must be, and yet my bold mama, who had the soul of a pirate, came into the world stone deaf and with eyes that would fail her soon after she turned forty. Genny, on the other hand, was physically healthy but so timid and racked by nerves that I doubt she would have left the womb at all if Stacia had not gone first. But externally? They looked practically interchangeable.

The dogs, however, had no trouble differentiating, especially the alpha dog. The female. The one Aunt Bernese had christened “the Bitch.”

Bernese had called her the Bitch for so long that the whole family had picked it up, in spite of the fact that the Fretts usually only cussed if it was biblical. That is to say, they’d use “hell” to mean the literal place and “ass” to mean donkey. They’d all say “whore,” especially if it was followed by “monger” or “of Baby-lon.” None of them would dream of calling a person a bitch, or even use the word as a verb, but they’d refer to the Crabtrees’ alpha dog as the Bitch while standing in the vestibule of The First Baptist Church of Between.

The whole town was so inured to it that not even Pastor Gregg raised an eyebrow when we used that word in relation to that particular dog. Nervous little Genny had a spun-sugar heart. Her standard-issue Frett Steel Spine was bogged down in taffy. She was the pet of the family, if not the whole town, and any dog who didn’t like Genny was a bitch, and God already knew it, so there wasn’t much cause to ease up on the language.

Those dogs, the Bitch especially, more than didn’t like her. The Bitch wanted her dead.

The day the Bitch got out, Mama and Genny spent the morning on Between’s town square, up in Mama’s studio. The studio was on the second floor of a large Victorian house, the downstairs of which Bernese had turned into a museum featuring Mama’s dolls and her own prized caterpillars. The rest of the upstairs was storage where Mama kept her boxes and boxes of porcelain doll heads lined up neatly on bookshelves. Mama was in the storage room, running her fingers across the Braille labels, still trying to pick one. Genny was in her sewing area, getting fussier and hungrier by the minute.

Bernese had built that studio for Mama and Genny long before Ona Crabtree ever thought about owning guard dogs. At first Bernese had planned to tear out most of the wall that faced the landing and replace it with plate glass. That way, tourists who were visiting the dollhouse portion of the museum could come up the stairs and watch Mama work on the kind of outsize, tac-tile sculptures she currently favored. But the very idea had activated the fragment of Frett gumption at Genny’s core, and she’d put her little fat foot down.

“You’ve already got mile-high pictures of us downstairs, Bernese, and that’s about enough,” she said. Her voice got higher and higher as she spoke. “Stacia and I won’t sit in a cage and scratch like monkeys for whatever philistines come here to nose-pick and google.”

Genny signed rapidly into Stacia’s hands as she was speaking, and before she had gotten too wound up to stop herself, Stacia’s own hands were churning the air. Genny added, “And Stacia says if you put that window in, she and I won’t work here. Period.”

That ended it. The wall stayed a wall, and the staircases were roped off with velvet cord.

Now Genny was wishing there was a window. She’d been drooping around the studio all morning, and the air was beginning to taste stale and used. She went to the storage room and signed
Lunch! Lunch! Lunch!
until Stacia agreed to stop head-hunting. They gathered up their handbags, and Genny slipped her shoes back on. She had high blood pressure, and her feet tended to swell, but she wouldn’t give up her size-six shoes.

The front door of the museum was kept locked; tourists paid admission at the store, and Bernese personally took them over.

Genny and Stacia let themselves out onto the square, and Genny relocked the door behind them.

Between’s town square was the working definition of pictur-esque. It was so tidy and bright, with a burbling center fountain surrounded by riotously colored flower beds filled to bursting with seasonal blooms. Beyond that, a thick green lawn of preter-naturally healthy grass grew in cheerful spikes. A cobblestone walkway ran in front of all the shops and crossed to the fountain on the diagonal.

The square was lined on three sides by rows of connected shops, all fronted in warm, peachy brick with crisp white trim.

The First Baptist Church of Between sat on the corner closest to the highway. It was a textbook country Baptist church, with a tall steeple and bells that tolled the hour in happy tones.

The other three corners each sported a large Victorian house.

The first one contained Bernese’s museum, and next was the Marchants’ bed-and-breakfast. On the last corner, Isaac Davids lived in a buttery-yellow house with tons of gingerbread and pale lavender trim. His law offices were downstairs. Laughing gar-goyles peeked out over the eaves, and a tower on one side was topped by a weathercock.

It would have been faster for Mama and Genny to cut across the square. Grace Street began catty-corner to the museum. But Genny had an errand, and they wanted to see what was cooking at the diner, so they made their way around the square’s perime-ter. They passed the Dollhouse Store; they could see through the big front window that Bernese was with a customer.

Henry Crabtree’s bookstore was in the shop right beside Bernese’s, and Genny and Mama stopped there. Genny had ordered a book of quilt block patterns, but Henry told her it hadn’t arrived yet. He was one of the few people left in town who were around my age; most residents of Between were over fifty. Henry was my close friend, and he was good to my family and watched out for Mama and Genny on the weekdays when I was in Athens.