“Thank you.” Charlie drank some of the ginger ale while the girl neatly repacked the contents of her purse.
The girl said, “Those stains on your blouse will come out with a mixture of a tablespoon of ammonia, a quart of warm water and a half a teaspoon of detergent. You soak it in a bowl.”
“Thank you again.” Charlie wasn’t sure she wanted to soak anything she owned in ammonia, but judging by the badges on the sash, the girl knew what she was talking about. “How long have you been in Girl Scouts?”
“I got my start as a Brownie. My mom signed me up. I thought it was lame, but you learn lots of things, like business skills.”
“My mom signed me up, too.” Charlie had never thought it was lame. She had loved all the projects and the camping trips and especially eating the cookies she had made her parents buy. “What’s your name?”
“Flora Faulkner,” she said. “My mom named me Florabama, because I was born on the state line, but I go by Flora.”
Charlie smiled, but only because she knew that she was going to laugh about this later with her husband. “There are worse things that you could be called.”
Flora looked down at her hands. “A lot of the girls are pretty good at thinking of mean things.”
Clearly, this was some kind of opening, but Charlie was at a loss for words. She combed back through her knowledge of after-school specials. All she could remember was that movie of the week where Ted Danson is married to Glenn Close and she finds out that he’s molesting their teenage daughter but she’s been cold in bed so it’s probably her fault so they all go to therapy and learn to live with it.
“Miss Quinn?” Flora put Charlie’s purse on the counter. “Do you want me to get you some crackers?”
“No, I’m fine.” Remarkably, Charlie was fine. Whatever had made her stomach upset had passed. “Why don’t you give me a minute to clean myself up, then I’ll join you back in the rec room?”
“Okay,” Flora said, but she didn’t leave.
“Is there anything else?”
“I was wondering—” She glanced at the mirror over the sink, then back down at the floor. There was something delicate about the girl that Charlie had not noticed before. When Flora looked up again, she was crying. “Can you help me? I mean, as a lawyer?”
Charlie was surprised by the request. The girl looked nothing like her usual juvenile offenders who’d been caught selling weed behind the school. Her mind flashed up all the nice, white-girl problems: pregnant, STD, kleptomaniac, bad score on the SATs. Rather than guess, Charlie asked, “What’s going on?”
“I don’t have a lot of money, at least not yet, but—”
“Don’t worry about that part. Just tell me what you need.”
“I want to be emancipated.”
Charlie felt her mouth form into a circle of surprise.
“I’m fifteen, but I’ll be sixteen next month, and I looked it up at the library. I know that’s the legal age in Georgia to be emancipated.”
“If you looked it up, then you know the criteria.”
“I have to be married or in active service in the military or I have to petition the court to emancipate me.”
She really had done her homework. “You live with your father?”
“My grandparents. My father’s dead. He overdosed in prison.”
Charlie nodded, because she knew that this happened more often than anyone wanted to admit. “Is there anyone else in your family who could take you in?”
“No, it’s just the three of us left. I love Paw and Meemaw, but they’re…” Flora shrugged, but the shrug was the important part.
Charlie asked, “Are they hurting you?”
“No, ma’am, never. They’re…” Again, she shrugged. “I don’t think they like me very much.”
“A lot of kids your age feel that way.”
“They’re not strong people,” she said. “Strong in character.”
Charlie leaned back against the counter. She had left child molester off her list of possible teenage-girl problems. “Flora, emancipation is a very serious request. If you want me to help you, you’re going to have to give me details.”
“Have you ever helped a kid with this before?”
Charlie shook her head. “No, so if you don’t feel comfortable—”
“It’s okay,” Flora said. “I was just curious. I don’t think it happens a lot.”
“That’s for a reason,” Charlie said. “Generally, the court is very hesitant to remove a child from a home. You have to provide justification, and if you really looked into the law, there are two other important criteria: you have to prove that you can support yourself without your parents, and you have to do this without receiving any aid from the state.”
“I work shifts at the diner. And my friend Nancy’s parents said I could live with them until I’m out of school, and then when I go to college, I can live at the dorms.”
The more Flora spoke, the more determined she sounded.
Charlie asked, “Have you ever been in trouble?”
“No, ma’am. Not ever. I’ve got a 4.0 GPA. I’m already taking AP classes. I’m on the Principal’s Scholars list and I volunteer in the reading lab.” Her face turned red from the bragging. She put her hands to her cheeks. “I’m sorry, but you asked.”
“Don’t be sorry. That’s a lot to be proud of,” Charlie told her. “Listen, if your friend’s parents are willing to take you in, it might be that you can work out an arrangement without the courts getting involved.”
“I’ve got money,” Flora said. “I can pay you.”
Charlie wasn’t going to take money from a troubled fifteen-year-old. “It’s not about money. It’s about what’s easier for you. And for your grandparents. If this goes to court—”
“I don’t mean that kind of money,” Flora said. “After my mama was killed in the car accident, the trucking company had to set up a trust to take care of me.”
Charlie waited, but the girl didn’t volunteer details. “What kind of trust?”
“It pays out for things like where I live and medical stuff, but most of it’s being held until I’m ready to go to college, only I’m scared it’s not going to be there when I’m ready to go.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Paw and Meemaw are spending it.”
“If the trust says they can only use the money for—”
“They bought a house, but then they sold it for the cash and rented an apartment, then they took me to the doctor and he said I was sick, but I wasn’t, and then they got a new car.”
Charlie crossed her arms. “That’s stealing from you and defrauding the trust. Those are both very serious crimes.”
“I know. I looked that up, too.” Flora stared down at her hands again. “I don’t want to get Meemaw and Paw into trouble. I can’t send them to jail. Not like that. I just want to be able to…” She sniffed. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I just want to go to college. I want to be able to have choices. That’s what my mama would’ve wanted. She never wanted me to get stuck where I didn’t want to be.”
Charlie let out a steady stream of breath. Her own mother had been the same way, always pushing Charlie to study harder, to do more, to use the gifts of her intelligence and drive to be useful in the world.
“She was good to me,” Flora said. “My mama. She was kind, and she looked after me, and she was always in my corner, no matter what.” Flora wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry. I still miss her is all. I feel like I need to honor her memory, to make sure some good comes out of what happened to her.”
It was Charlie’s turn to look down at her hands. She felt a lump in her throat. She had thought more about her mother in the last five minutes than she had in the last month. The longing for her, the desire for one more chance to tell her mother what was on her mind, was an ache that would never go away.
Charlie had to clear her throat before she could ask Flora, “How long have you been thinking abou
t emancipation?”
“Since after Paw’s surgery,” the girl said. “He hurt his leg three years ago falling off a ladder. He couldn’t go back to work.”
“He’s addicted to pain medication?” Charlie guessed, because the Pikeville jail was filled with such men. “Be honest with me. Is it pills?”
The girl nodded with visible reluctance. “Don’t tell anybody, please. I don’t want him to go to prison.”
“That won’t happen because of me,” Charlie promised. “But you need to understand that putting this in motion is a public thing. You won’t be a protected minor anymore. Court records are out there for everybody to see. And that’s not even the hard part. In order to prepare a petition supporting your request for emancipation, I’ll have to talk to your grandparents, your teachers, your employer, your friend’s parents. Everybody will know what you’re doing.”
“I’m not trying to do it on the sly. You can talk to anybody you want to, today even, right now. I don’t want anybody to get into trouble, like go-to-jail trouble. I just want to get out so I can go to a good college and do something with my life.”
Her earnestness was heartbreaking. “Your grandparents might put up a fight. You’ll have to be blunt about why you want to leave. You don’t have to mention the pills, but you’ll have to tell a judge that you feel they’re not good guardians for you, that you would rather be on your own than have to live with them.” Charlie tried to paint a picture for her. “You’ll all be in court at the same time. You’ll have to tell a judge, in the open, in front of anybody who wants to hear, that you are unable to reconcile with them and you don’t want them in your life in any capacity.”
Flora seemed to equivocate. “What if they don’t fight it? What if they agree with it?”
“That would certainly make things easier, but—”
“Paw has other problems.”
Charlie’s mind went straight back to the abuse issue. “Is he hurting you?”
Flora did not answer, but she didn’t look away, either.
“Flora, if he’s hurting you—”
The door opened. They both startled at the furious look on Belinda’s face. “What are you two rascals doing hiding out in here?” She had tried to make her voice sound light, but there was no hiding her distress. “I’ve got a whole room full of girls back there with nothing to do but drink punch and talk about how dry my cake is.”
Flora looked at Charlie. “It’s not what you’re thinking.” There was a note of desperation in her voice. “I mean it. It’s not that. Talk to whoever you need to. Please. I’ll make a list for you. Okay?”
Before Charlie could answer, Flora left the bathroom.
“What was that about?” Belinda asked.
Charlie opened her mouth to explain, but she got stuck on Flora’s desperate tone, her insistence that what Charlie was thinking was not what was actually happening. But what if it was? If the girl was being abused by her grandfather, that changed everything.
“Charlie?” Belinda asked. “What’s up? Why are you hiding out in here?”
“I’m not hiding, I was—”
“Did you throw up?”
Charlie could only concentrate on one thing at a time. “Did you make that frosting from scratch?”
“Don’t be stupid.” Belinda squinted her eyes, as if Charlie was an abstract painting. “Your boobs look bigger.”
“I thought your sorority taught you how to deal with those feelings.”
“Shut up,” Belinda said. “Are you pregnant?”
“Very funny.” The only religious thing in Charlie’s life was the schedule by which she took her birth control pills. “I’ve been spotting for two days. I’m cramping. I want to eat candy and kill everything. I think it’s just a bug.”
“It better be a bug.” Belinda rubbed her round belly. “Enjoy your freedom before everything changes.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“You’ll see. Once you start having babies, that perfect, loving husband of yours will start treating you like a milk cow. Trust me. It’s like they think they have something over you. And they do. You’re trapped, and they know that you need them, but they can walk away at any time and find somebody younger and tighter to have fun with.”
Charlie wasn’t going to have this conversation again. The only thing that seemed to change about her friends with children is that they started treating their husbands like jerks. “Tell me about Flora.”
“Who?” Belinda seemed to have forgotten the girl as soon as she left the room. “Oh, her. You know that movie we saw last month, Mean Girls? She’d be the Lindsay Lohan character.”
“So, part of the group but not a leader, and not particularly comfortable with the meanness?”
“More like a survivor. Those bitches are next-level cruel.” Belinda sniffed toward the handicap stall. “Did you eat bacon for breakfast?”
Charlie searched her purse for some mints. She found gum instead, but the thought of the peppermint flavor made her feel queasy again. “Do you have some candy?”
“I think I have some Jolly Ranchers.” Belinda unzipped her purse. “Ugh, I should clean this out. Cheerios. How did those get in there? There’s some mints. Oreos, but you can’t—”
Charlie snatched the bag out of her hands.
“I thought you couldn’t do milk?”
“Do you really think this white crap has milk in it?” Charlie bit into an Oreo. She felt an instant soothing in her brain. “What about her parents?”
“Whose parents?”
“B, keep up with me. I’m asking about Flora Faulkner.”
“Oh, well, her mother died. Dad, too. His parents are raising her. She’s a cookie-selling machine. I think she went to the ceremony in Atlanta last—”
“What are her grandparents like?”
“I’ve only been doing this for a minute, Charlie. I don’t know much of anything about any of those girls except they seem to think it’s easy to bake a sheet cake and throw a party for twenty snotty teenagers who don’t appreciate anything you’ve done for them and think you’re old and fat and stupid.” She had tears in her eyes, but she had tears in her eyes a lot lately. “It’s exactly like being home with Ryan. I thought it would be different having something to do, but they think I’m a failure, just like he does.”
Charlie couldn’t take another crying jag about Belinda’s husband right now. “Do you think that Flora’s grandparents are doing a good job?”
“You mean, raising her?” Belinda looked in the mirror, using her pinky finger to carefully wipe under her eyes. “I dunno. She’s a good kid. She does well in school. She’s an awesome Girl Scout. I think she’s really smart. And sweet. And really thoughtful, like she helped me get the cake out of the car when I got here, while the rest of those lazy bitches stood around with their thumbs up their asses.”
“Okay, that’s Flora. What about her grandparents as human beings?”
“I don’t like to say bad things about people.”
Charlie laughed. So did Belinda. If she didn’t say bad things about people, half her day would be spent in silence.
Belinda said, “I met the grandmother last month. She smelled like a whiskey barrel at eight o’clock in the morning. Driving a sapphire blue Porsche, though. A freaking Porsche. And they had that house on the lake, but now they’re living in those cinder-block apartments down from Shady Ray’s.”
Charlie wondered where the Porsche had ended up. “What about the grandfather?”
“I dunno. Some of the girls were teasing her about him because he’s good looking or something, but he’s got to be, like, two thousand years old, so maybe they were just being bitches. You get teased about your dad all the time, right?”
Charlie hadn’t been teased, she had been threatened, and her mother had been murdered, because her father made a living out of keeping bad men out of prison. “Anything else about the grandfather?”
“That’s all I’ve got.” Belinda was checking her
make-up in the mirror again. Charlie didn’t want to think in platitudes, like that her friend was glowing, but Belinda was a different person when she was pregnant. Her skin cleared up. There was always color in her cheeks. For all of her prickliness, she had stopped obsessing about the small things. Like she didn’t seem to care that her watermelon-sized stomach was pressed against the counter, wicking water into her dress. Or that her navel poked out like the stem on an apple.
Charlie would look like that one day. She would grow her husband’s child in her belly. She would be a mother—hopefully a mother like her own mother, who was interested in her kids, who pushed them to be intelligent, useful women.
One day.
Eventually.
They had talked about this before, Charlie and her husband. They would have a baby as soon as they had a handle on their student loans. As soon as her practice was steady. As soon as their cars were paid off. As soon as her nerdy husband was ready to give up the spare bedroom where he kept his mildly expensive Star Trek collection.
Charlie tried to do a running tally of how much the Emancipation of Florabama Faulkner would cost. Filing fees. Motions. Court appearances. Not to mention hours of Charlie’s time. She could not in good conscience take funds from Flora’s trust, no matter how much money was left in it.
If Dexter Black paid his bill, that might almost cover the expenses.
She heard her father’s voice in her head—
And if frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their tails hopping.
Belinda said, “Why are you asking all these questions?”
“Because I think Flora needs my help.”
“Wait, is this like that John Grisham movie where the kid gives Susan Sarandon a dollar to be his lawyer?”
“No,” Charlie said. “This is like that movie where the stupid lawyer goes bankrupt because she never gets paid.”
2
Charlie kicked the vending machine in the basement of the courthouse. The glass rattled in the frame. She kicked it again. The bright yellow pack of Starburst shook on the metal spiral, but did not drop down.
Her shoe was already scuffed from puking in the bathroom. She raised her foot for another kick.
Last Breath Page 2
