“That’s really sweet,” she says, looking at the picture one more time before putting the phone away. “Unfortunately, we don’t have any babies here that need cuddling.” She hugs her arms around herself, ripe for cuddling.
I give her my best grin, mirroring her body language and kind of hugging my arms around myself. “How’s Johnny?” I use only his first name, proving that I do know him.
“Johnny Allman…” she whispers.
I nod, drawing my phone from my back pocket. She shared. I may as well, too. Pulling up our text log, I set the phone down on top of the desk in front of her eyes, should they be interested.
“Shut up! You know him,” she continues at a whisper, her eyes hungrily taking in personal conversations between Johnny and me. “My boyfriend loves his music.”
I lean over the desk, leaning over her leaning over my phone, and promise, “Two VIP tickets. Backstage passes. One for you and one for your boyfriend.” Bet he would love her for that! “Tell Johnny that ‘Ace’ is here. He’ll want to see me.”
“I can’t,” she says. “Believe me, I want to. Backstage!” she almost squeals, imagining what it would mean to her boyfriend to meet Johnny. “But they have him so guarded, we can barely get in.”
“Can I help you?” A man in scrubs, “Charge Nurse” etched on his badge, charges behind the desk. He looks as accusingly at the young nurse as he does me.
“He’s, um, here to…” she begins.
“I couldn’t get a peep out of her,” I interject. It’s not her fault. Who could resist VIP tickets for love. “Maybe you can tell me how Johnny’s doing.”
“Are you family?” he challenges.
“So I’ve been told,” I smart off.
He doesn’t buy it either, but at least he finds some courtesy. “Sorry, kid, patient information is confidential even to some family members. You have to be on the list.”
“Can’t you just tell me if he’s gonna be okay? A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” And what am I gonna do if he says no.
“I know you.” Johnny’s pencil-necked stage manager, phone in his bony fingers and tapping away, walks through the double doors and stops at the desk. “I’ll take care of it,” he says to the charge nurse. Then he smiles at my shiner and says, “Looks like that mouth of yours finally caught up with you.”
I smile back, satisfied that that is exactly what someone like him would say. Someone who could never settle a contest started with words with his own fists.
“How’s Johnny? His family wants to know.” It won’t get me anywhere with this guy. But I enjoy the taunt.
“Johnny doesn’t have any family. Where’s the guitar?”
The guitar my father broke and burned. The one Johnny was supposed to recoup, making good on that promise. “Let me see him and I’ll give it to you.” I promise what I cannot produce.
He smirks—his lips as thin as his neck—throwing his head toward the end of the long corridor in the direction of Johnny’s room. “Get by them, and you can see him.”
That’s a contest even I couldn’t settle. The same thick-necked handlers who towered beside Johnny on the couch at the VIP backstage event in Knoxville currently tower outside his room.
“You had your fifteen minutes. No fans. If you’re that concerned, join the vigil at the Rupp.” He shows me the Instagram picture—hundreds, maybe thousands, standing shoulder to shoulder with glow sticks. Funny, he was posting the fan-appreciating pic while belittling me.
“Just tell me, is he gonna live?” Pencil-neck! “If he’s awake, tell him I’m here. Let him decide for himself if he wants to see me.”
“No fans,” he stands his waifish ground.
“I’ll be back…with DNA results.” No I won’t. What would I want the results to say. But the power of the threat is all I have in this moment.
I pass two troopers in the hallway of the ER, making my way to the exit. They’re staties. I can tell by their hats.
I keep my profile—the good side—to them, nod and keep walking. Did pencil-neck call them on me?
Outside the exit, Shelby waits. She loops her arm inside mine, legs not carrying us fast enough to the Jeep.
“It’s not like he’s that well-known. It’s illegal to visit him in the hospital?”
“They’re not here for you,” she whispers, like we’re still inside. “Destiny overdosed. Or tried to, it seems. Something tells me they’ll be headed to Poke County after they talk to her mom. Miss Patterson won’t see that visit coming either.”
“Miss Patterson?” Again with that woman.
“When I was at her house, there was a box of syringe containers. The same kind of container that Destiny had pills in at Hot Brown.”
Mason was right. “The fairy godmother’s a drug dealer?”
“Not a blatant one. A discriminate one, maybe. Apparently she sells pills prescribed to herself to people who are already on them. Maybe when they run short on their own prescriptions?”
“That has to be illegal.”
“Only if you get caught. I think she’s about to get caught.”
“Why on earth would she do that when she runs around half the time saving addicts.”
“Maybe she figures they’re going to get the pills anyhow. If they want them badly enough. At least hers are ‘prescription.’” That little spot—her thinking spot above her nose and between her brows—creases, attempting to find the sense in such logic. “Maybe she needs the money. I always wondered how she kept everything afloat, everything she does and gives away for free. It’s sad. She really does need help. Maybe…that’s why…she did it,” Shelby says, convinced there is no “maybe” about it by the time she finishes her statement.
“Did what?”
“My father must have found out. That’s why Enisi ran her off with a gun…”
In Miss Patterson’s defense, Enisi’s liable to run anyone off with a gun.
“She was giving…selling or bartering with my mother for pills. Or with Grandpa. The cases of pop, the syringe container of pills in his sock drawer.”
Bartering. “The Ibanez. Your dad’s Ibanez. The one Miss Patterson sold to Miss Piper. That’s what my mom was getting at.” That’s what Mason was getting at in his last conversation with Pop.
“I cried the day Miss Patterson drove off with it in her Caddy. It was the only thing left of him in the house. My mother said she wouldn’t miss it. It was one of her ‘triggers.’”
“And the fairy godmother pulled it…” I say, dumbfounded. It was at her charitable, plump little finger that Mason met his demise? He never had a chance. He couldn’t have seen it coming. No one could’ve. “My god, I wish I could change it, fix it, unknow it for the both of us.” At the very least, I wish I had never found that secret note square.
I pull her to me, my lips meeting the top of her head. How has the beautiful mind beneath not cracked. She overthinks the smallest things. This is huge.
She overthinks being close to me right now. I can feel it—in her resistance to fall into me. I can hear it in her conflicted moan that she wants to be here yet doesn’t want to be here.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the note. I didn’t know what to make of it at first. And then when I tried to tell you, the words wouldn’t come. But you have to know that I had no idea about any of this.” The fallout from one secret note square hidden in one guitar for eighteen years unfolded all of this. Fucking origami!
“It doesn’t matter. You were only hiding the truth from yourself.” She bunts her head from side to side into my chest, one more kittenish purr, before pushing away from me altogether.
The chaos of the night’s events winding down draws my attention to the most minor yet consequential detail. Sans her usual running attire, coat open, she wears a sweater that wants to be as pretty as she is but doesn’t stand a chance. The neck of it low enough to bring attention to the fact that she is not wearing my eclipsed heart near hers.
She said she’d never take it off.
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My gaze fixated on the missing necklace, it takes Shelby next to nothing to notice that I notice its absence. “I had to take it off to get through security to visit Grandpa.” She shrugs. “I guess I’m so used to not wearing jewelry that I didn’t think to put it back on.” Her hand already in her coat pocket jingles the chain. But she doesn’t offer it up to be put on, the way she did the night I gave it to her.
My fingertips want to trace where it used to be. My lips want to brush the necklace back on—every link, every jewel—where it should be. Where the diamond that represents love, trust, new beginnings, apparently no longer exists.
Going through with DNA testing didn’t require a court order, as Wren thought it might.
Johnny survived. The first person he asked for was me—Shelby. The unborn child he wrote the poem to.
Ace went to him instead.
With their common interest in music, Johnny must be over the moon to discover that it is Ace who is his child.
The spiteful side of me hopes learning this hurts Johnny more. What would he have missed by walking out on me. Walking out on Ace, he missed out on his prodigy.
My mother and Ace’s father proved to be the most stubborn.
“It’s prudent to know for medical reasons…and for sanity’s sake,” Wren said.
“For sanity’s sake, I don’t want to know.” Maisy and Boone both argued.
It doesn’t change anything, we all agreed. Even though it may change things for Johnny.
It’s one swab of the cheek. Wren lead us all through the procedure. We send the swab of cells off to the lab, and the lab sends back individual results. If you don’t want to know, don’t open your results. Throw them away, burn them up. Or keep them, in case you ever do want to know. Whatever is in your heart.
What is in my heart?
The fewer people who know, the better.
I had to tell Enisi. I owed her that much.
“What do you want the results to say?” she asked, sitting knee to knee and hand in hand and eye to eye with me.
That I am his. I couldn’t say those words because of the lump lodged in the back of my throat. The fear of whatever the results do reveal, it won’t be that Mason is my father. Or anyone’s father. Combining both Miss Patterson’s tattoo record and my mother’s assertion, his DNA likely won’t even factor into the results.
“I don’t need results to tell me that he lives in you.” She squeezed my hands more firmly. “You are welcome in my home, sogainisi.” My son’s child.
I clung to her, the only thing left of the man who loved me as his own when he didn’t have to.
A siren blazing through the hollow broke our embrace. “They’ve been at it for days, cracking down on the elders. Apparently the Patterson woman ain’t the only one peddling pills to pay bills.”
“Should we put the tinctures away? Out of sight, somewhere safe.”
“Let them come,” she said, that aquiline nose of hers as righteous as it could be. “I have nothing to hide.”
Grayson and I meet at a diner on the outskirts of Lexington.
Maybe I could get a job here. Hot Brown has been closed with Miss Patterson detained. The remainder of my savings, the part that my mother and Billy Don didn’t find and squander, is diminishing without a job to maintain it.
If Miss Patterson’s absence from the community is affecting me this way, it has to be affecting others the same way. What have we done. She really did more good than harm. Didn’t she?
“We’ve never run into this scenario before. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around it,” Grayson talks with his hands. “I mean, in my line of outreach, I know this is a growing problem—elders selling prescription meds to pay bills, make ends meet. People act surprised. I mean, whom do they think a surplus of medication is prescribed to? The aging, with health problems. But Imogen?”
That may not be the worst she has done. I keep the thought to myself.
“Not only does it soil her reputation, it doesn’t look good for UCAN. How are people to trust us, believe in us, when one of our own is peddling the very pills we are trying to get people off.”
“Will the Poke County chapter close, indefinitely?” They’ll wash their hands of it and move on, move out of Appalachia the way everything promising does.
“It’s too early to say. However, the Poke County chapter only exists because of Imogen.” He shrugs. “Apparently, we should’ve allocated more resources to her for the chapter so she didn’t have to pitch in financially or feel pressured to sell her meds to do so.”
“It’s not UCAN’s fault,” I sympathize. Or maybe it is. Big city organization, throwing change at the backwoods, how can that possibly solve anything. “She had too many irons in the fire. Her soup kitchen alone had to be costly to sustain. Maybe we’re the problem, people like me.”
He waits for me to clarify. Although I can read it in his eyes. Am I comparing myself to “them.” The way he did that night at the dorm party.
“Anyone who could help leaves. We abandon them.” Rather than staying and being the change we want to see in our community, we break away and enmesh ourselves in already thriving communities. Until…“They have no community left.” No wonder Appalachia wants to keep her children home.
My eyes settle on the Shelby Mustang, dull but full of promise, sitting beside his fully blossomed Aston Martin in the diner parking lot. If only people were as easily fixed and community as easily built as cars.
“How far would the Shelby get us? You said she’d bring $40K, or better.” That would provide a buffer to keep Hot Brown and the soup kitchen up and running, employing some in the hollow and feeding even more families.
“You would do that?” His golden eyes marvel at me, displaying a mix of admiration and self-reproach, doubting that he would do the same. “You can’t do that.”
After all, Grayson did help me find my mother a suitable rehab program without selling the Shelby. One that would allow her to pay off any outstanding balance over time after she completes her inpatient portion and finds a job in her outpatient portion, accountability a close second to admission and acceptance in recovery.
“Besides, with Imogen out of the picture, who would run it?” he says. “Maybe the judge will be lenient with her, considering her community service. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks.”
It’s worse. Chances are she’ll die in jail. Guilt creeps up my spine. It’s unthinkable what she did. But the thought of her—our fairy godmother—rotting away in prison is equally unthinkable.
“What if I ran it?” I say as non-committal as my shrug.
“You would do that? You can’t do that.” He sounds like a parrot. “What about college.”
“Could I do both?” What the hell is in my heart.
Down the hallway and into Johnny’s inpatient physical rehabilitation suite—his next stop after making it out of the ICU—I whistle a few lines from his latest single “Up in Flames”:
Pictures, love letters, sheets we slept in. Soaked in better days, saltwater, and gin. It was here forever, now it’s gone. Nothing left worth keeping, stand back and throw it on. Bonfire and whiskey, going out the way it came. We never looked better, baby, going up in flames.
The single, obviously about the end of a relationship, is in this moment symbolic of what happened to the results that were addressed to me—straight from the mailbox and into the fire.
“Burnt ’em up, huh,” he says, catching the significance of the whistled tune.
If I can have all of these people in my life, does it matter who’s who, technically, biologically. I do not want to know. However the DNA spliced, “I’m not calling you ‘Daddy.’” I grin.
“Good. Don’t.” He grins back, before pursing and pressing his lips to a handheld rehab-looking device and inhaling. “Good god,” he groans on the exhale.
I wince for him, having endured a few bruised ribs of my own from the fights. His are bruised with two fractures. An arm and a leg each in a cas
t from breaks, I reckon neither of them give him as much trouble as his ribs. The most troubling is the shave he required, initially bleeding from both his head and his face. His signature hippie hair and beard that took all of his twenties to establish was unestablished in twenty seconds. A little over three weeks’ growth, he might have half an inch to show for it. He looks like a soccer player, not a musician.
“David Beckham,” I say.
“My ass,” he says, subconsciously reaching for a beard that isn’t there.
“Give it some time.” He will heal and his hair will grow. They told him the most productive thing he can do is be patient.
“I ain’t got time. I got a schedule and a band. A band that has mouths to feed and bills to pay. I can’t let ’em down. And that’s where you come in.” His gray eyes sear into mine with the intensity of a frontman, asking if I am up for the challenge. “It don’t pay as good as big-name acts, but it’s a living. A good opportunity for a kid just starting out.”
Me? “The fans pay to see you.” I swallow hard, clearly not up for the challenge. A few gigs at local pubs does not an Americana star make. There had to be thousands of people at that concert in Knoxville. A person has to build up to that level. The stage fright alone, they’d chew me up and spit me out.
“Oh, they’ll get me.” Another good-god groan follows as he splints a pillow around his rib cage, supporting a deep breath. “Ain’t nothing wrong with my pipes.”
Just the ribs through which the pipes breathe. “If you can’t talk to me without hurting, how are you gonna sing for them?”
“Adrenaline,” he says. “Once I’m on that stage and the crowd is depending on me, the ribs won’t mean a thing.”
Once he comes down off that rush, he’ll feel them! The same thing happens after a fight, pain magnified by ten.
“The one thing I can’t get around is this million dollar arm.” He chuckles, numbing the pain of the truth. “Doc said I’m looking at six to eight weeks to get out of the cast and then months of rehab to regain whatever’s lost from nerve damage. If it can be regained.”
Just Shelby Page 26
