Karen wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear from anyone. Confirmation that Dahlia and her team sucked? Ranting and raving about movies ruining their fair town? Stories about how unprofessional everyone had been? Instead, Karen flitted about Paradise Valley, hearing sadness at best, absolute disbelief at worst. Meadow Hobfield called Hibiscus Films a bunch of cowards for not delivering on their film. Dr. Brandelyn Meyer expressed lament that she had missed the fuss. Anem Singer gasped in horror, right there in the middle of the supermarket, and exclaimed that showing up in an interview was the only thing she had to look forward to all year.
But nobody was more upset than Christina, who had been more sullen than usual around her mother. Karen determined it was for reasons similar to Anem’s. What excited a young woman more than being on TV? Not that Karen would have signed off on Christina’s appearance for a million dollars. Her daughter didn’t turn eighteen until next spring. She could deal.
“Whew,” Xander said late one evening, when the mosquitos buzzed in the yard and crickets chirped in the woods behind their house. “You’d think you had gone into her room and broken all of her toys.” That came hot on the heels of another minor blowup between mother and daughter. Karen had asked Christina to take care of the dinner dishes, but all Christina wanted to do was scowl at her mother and fly into her bedroom. “What did you do, Mom?”
“Me? Who said I did anything? She’s the one who got in trouble.” There was no point grounding Christina. She already suffered enough, since most of her friends skipped out of town in July to go to camps, relatives’ houses, and places like Disneyland. She spent most of her days lying in the backyard, earbuds in and sunglasses on her face.
“Does this have to do with that filmmaker? I’ve overheard Christina on the phone saying she was going to kiss your butt to that Dahlia woman. You know, the cute lady who…”
“Why are we talking about her?” Karen snapped. “Don’t remind me about that.”
“Oh ho ho.” Xander silently volunteered to do the dishes in his sister’s stead. Karen knew her son didn’t do this out of the goodness of his own heart. He’d find a way for Christina to repay him. Probably in the form of mowing the lawn. “I’ve hit a sore spot. Must be because she had the hots for you, Mom.”
Karen snapped her head around the moment the dishes hit the sink. “What?”
“I mean, I was joking, but also repeating what I’ve heard everyone around town saying.”
If there was one thing to make Karen jerk back in her seat, it was that. “Dahlia did not have ‘the hots’ for me. She’s straight, for one thing. That was one of the reasons it was painfully obvious it wasn’t going to work out. For her project, I mean. She didn’t have the eye for what she needed to film.”
“Say what you want, Mom.” Water sprayed against the dishes. A few flecks of water landed on Karen’s lap. She didn’t care enough to move. “I overheard some of the ladies who frequent Paradise Lost saying you two had ‘hilariously good’ chemistry. There was a betting pool about whether you two had hooked up or not. Guess I broke a few wallets when I said you hadn’t, and I would’ve known.”
There were a hundred things for Karen to home in on there, but the one glaring thing was, “What in the world were you doing at a bar? You’re not twenty-one. Don’t get me in trouble with the authorities, please.” It was bad enough having the sheriff drag a drunken Xander home while he was in high school. The last thing she needed was him getting an alcohol supply from the gay bar. If she was connected to its closure…
“Would you relax?” Xander laughed at his mother’s pinkening cheeks of maternal rage. “I didn’t go inside. I was talking to people outside of it. It’s not that far from the library, you know. I see people coming and going!”
Karen pressed her fingers to her temples. “While you’re doing this, I think I’ll check on the garden.”
“I already watered the plants today.”
Karen didn’t care. The point wasn’t to encourage the growth of her plants or make sure the grass wasn’t too brown. It was to get some peace and quiet from her nosy, angry children who couldn’t stay out of her business. Honestly, nothing was going how she expected it. Could she get a mulligan on the month?
She barely acknowledged her own superfluous attractions to Dahlia Granger. The thought a woman like that had been attracted to her wasn’t only ridiculous, it was moot! Dahlia was gone. There was no film. Everyone could go back to their lives, thank you very much.
Yet as Karen crawled into the hammock her children had strung up that summer and closed her eyes, she couldn’t stop thinking about Dahlia’s own accusations that a certain mayor was attracted to her. I thought she was stereotyping me as a predatorial lesbian. What if…
Crazy chemistry, huh? No point thinking about it. Dahlia was straight – and a terrible match. She was also gone, never to be seen again. Karen needed to think about her responsibilities to the people of Paradise Valley. That meant purging her lonely thoughts from her brain and moving on with her life.
Yet… what if? What could have been? What might have happened, had they not been at each other’s throats from the moment Karen received complaints?
Nothing would have happened, you idiot. They were both too strong-willed. They had different alliances. One was openly bisexual, and the other – if queer at all – was so far in the closet she couldn’t find herself in there.
Not to mention that familial history… no, Dahlia’s biases were too great. It would have never worked out between them. There was no point thinking about it. She was gone!
Karen squeezed her eyes shut. She’d give up half of her approval rating if it meant getting Dahlia’s coy smile and self-confident strut out of her mind. Let alone the way she heaved equipment over her shoulder or talked like she had everything figured out.
Bah! The hammock swung from the force of her thoughts. Soon, Karen would end up on the ground, but not until she had scowled so hard that she almost gave herself a heart attack.
Chapter 16
DAHLIA
The van creeped down Main Street, the throngs of people cramming into the road keeping volunteers busy as they directed traffic through cones and flashing red lights. The giant banner hanging across the east entrance welcomed all visitors to Paradise Pride. Anyone simply trying to pass through was better off taking an alternate highway, although it was too late to turn back now.
“My word,” Rachel said from the passenger seat. She hung her head and arm out the window, taking in the warm summer sunshine with the breadth of her sunglasses. “You girls ever seen something like this before? A small town with a Pride this big? We hit the damn jackpot! Michaela, you got the camera ready?”
Dahlia eased on the gas pedal as she came up to a STOP sign in the middle of Main Street. The woman holding it wore a bright yellow vest, but her demeanor and age suggested she didn’t do this for a day job. She didn’t seem to recognize Dahlia in her driver’s seat, but the filmmaker certainly recognized her. It was Sally Greenfield, the town deputy’s nosy housewife. Hardly recognize her without the brood of kids clinging to her blouse. Dahlia had interviewed both the deputy and her wife in their home, but most of it amounted to, “We really love the weather here. Ain’t it lovely? Good place for raising kids.”
“Fourth of July wasn’t this crazy.” Dahlia naively assumed that simply because there was no Pride Parade like they had in Portland, that the main thoroughfare would be clear for use. Yeah, I should have known better. Only one lane was open. The other was filled with booths, pop-up shacks, and entertainment. The local bluegrass group, which had regaled spectators during the Fourth of July celebrations, had a small platform in the middle of the booths. The banjo had rainbow streamers flowing from the neck and the fiddlers wore matching tank tops advertising their sexualities. The woman on the right had a bright pink LESBIAN tank top while the one on the left sported a purple BI AND FLY. Rachel thought it so funny she had her camerawoman point the equipment in that direction.
> Rachel, like Dahlia, had her own company filled with subcontractors. Unlike Dahlia, Rachel went out of her way to scout female talent. Better if they were queer in some way and on board to make documentaries and short films about the experience. Rachel had nearly fallen over in glee when Dahlia asked her if she liked to head up to Paradise Valley for a spell. Things never moved quickly in filmmaking, but they somehow cobbled together plane tickets and funding to stake out lodging in a neighboring town at the last minute. Rachel’s crew could only afford to bring one main camera. All other filming of Pride was done on iPhones.
Dahlia stayed out of it. Her job was to bring Rachel and her crew here for introductions and to show them around a bit. The only thing? Everything had happened so last minute that there was no time to phone city hall. Especially when Paradise Valley was hard at work on Pride.
While Rachel, Michaela, and the other girl were taken in by the spectacle of small town Pride done with a giant rainbow bang, Dahlia looked up and down the street for a decent place to park. Unfortunately, all the parallel parking on that one side of Main Street was filled. City hall boasted its usual farmer’s market and took up that precious parking. The library was willing to look the other way if people not using the (closed, naturally) facilities parked there for a festival, but all that was left was handicap parking. Dahlia finally had to risk it at the supermarket, which carried the usual tow warnings. She made sure to park as far away from the store as possible. That was the easiest way to avoid a tow. I’d pop in and buy something to make things a little easier, but that Anem girl might recognize me… Dare Dahlia risk it? She already suffered the possibility somebody might recognize her before they were done here for the day.
She warned Rachel’s crew that people might be suspicious of a film crew carrying a visible camera. Luckily, Michaela had a way of tucking it beneath her arm and making it a little less conspicuous. There was no boom mic. Any sounds picked up would be pure ambience. If it made it into film, it would probably be sound tracked with fill-in music or an interview playing over the scenes of Pride. All that mattered was that they got something. Should this go ahead as a collaborative effort, they would use the film from before to fill in some of the gaps. Otherwise, Dahlia was prepared to sell her reels for the hopes of breaking even on production costs.
Rainbow colored balloons waved in the air. Children shrieked as they ran between adults’ legs and delighted in traipsing upon the closed highway lane. Vendors called out their wares and music filled the air. This has to be the biggest small town Pride in America. It made sense that Paradise Valley would be the place, but Dahlia was shocked to see the scope of it when compared to Fourth of July earlier that month. Rachel commented that she had never seen so many lesbian-oriented booths in her life. “The big city prides are sausage fests, if you know what I mean. You’re lucky if you see a booth by a lesbian business owner anymore. This, though? This is like Heaven!” There were still plenty of booths for the gay men about town and the tourists who chose this weekend, but the women on Rachel’s crew were constantly distracted by T-shirts, jewelry, and candles that claimed to smegll like “your favorite, womanly scent” when burned. Michaela dared Rachel to buy one and see what it really smelled like. Dahlia pretended she had no idea what she was talking about.
It honestly looked like the average American summer street fair. Except there were plenty of reminders that this was a town founded with certain principles. Every time they turned around, the crew beheld the faces of the founding members of both the original compound and the town that came fifteen years later. Dahlia’s original research told her that there was a “Paradise Days” festival that occurred around the first of October to commemorate the town’s official founding. Don’t see much difference now. Except this highlights how gay they were.
She hadn’t thought much of it, besides as an interesting footnote. Yet Rachel and her crew were in constant awe that they got to be here on this day. When they reached the end of the booths, Rachel turned to Dahlia and said, “Thanks so much for arranging this, Dahl. I don’t think you know how much it means to us to cover something like this.”
Dahlia looked at the happy smiles on the crew’s face as Michaela focused her camera on her coworker wearing a giant “pussy hat” on her head. The parents snapping at their children behind the crew didn’t care about blatant displays of knitted genitalia. They were more concerned about little kids getting underfoot or wandering into traffic. They’re not like this in my city. Parents agog that Pride wasn’t as “family friendly” as they were told. “Look, Herbert, a dick!” It was one of the reasons Dahlia had never really attended Pride in her city. That… and because she figured it wasn’t really for her.
“Do you think the mayor will have time for us to meet her today?” Rachel asked. “I’d love to get that ball rolling so we can maybe start real filming next month.”
Dahlia took in more sights from Pride. In another life, she could be enjoying it without the stress of filming a documentary. Not that I really am now. I’m helping them out. She had a new project to start as soon as she was home. What was it? She didn’t know yet. Sometimes, Dahlia had no idea what she was working on until it came time to roll the cameras.
“I don’t know where she is.” Dahlia caught the eye of someone sitting on a bench outside of Heaven’s Café. “We can ask around. The mayor is very… ubiquitous on days like these.”
They approached the couple lounging on the bench, one enjoying a coffee in a to-go cup while the other repeatedly jammed her plastic straw into a red and fruity Italian soda. Dahlia only vaguely recognized them. She had attempted to interview local EMT Ariana Mura for her spots about staff and services in town who also upheld the “vision” of Paradise Valley. Surprise, surprise, I latched onto every butch woman in town. She barely paid any mind to Ariana’s girlfriend, a young woman who looked a few hundred dollars more expensive. In Portland, Mikaiya Marcott would be considered butch without question. Here in the sticks, however, she had quite the competition. But if there was one thing Dahlia learned, it was that there was no competition among these women. Not unless they were pounding beers at the bar or seeing who could make the most popular quilt square at the craft fair. Good ol’ boring small town shit.
“Have either of you seen Mayor Rath around?” Dahlia asked the couple, hoping neither Ariana nor Mikaiya recognized her. “We really need to talk to her.”
They exchanged glances. Mikaiya sucked on her straw. It was her girlfriend, Ariana, who answered. “Think I saw her down at the city hall booth. Kissing babies and such.”
Kissing. Babies. That had to be a joke. The driest joke in town.
“Thanks.”
The crew attempted to stay back and talk to them. Dahlia motioned for Rachel and the others to follow her to the far end of Main Street, near the city hall where the city government had erected an orange tent. From the outside, it looked more like an information booth and visitors’ desk. As they got closer, however, Dahlia realized that Karen sat in a folding chair behind a plastic table.
She immediately saw Dahlia coming.
“Hello, Karen.”
The mayor blew off the man that had been talking to her. With a shrug, the middle-aged fellow wandered off and rejoined his party. Karen put on her best stoic face before looking back up at Dahlia. If she noticed the all-female crew, she didn’t let on. “Dahlia. How… lovely to see you again. I see you have brought a camera with you. Planning to make good use of those permits you had?”
“I’ve dropped the project,” Dahlia plainly said. “Instead, I’ve recommended it to some colleagues of mine. I know this is sudden, but I’d like to introduce you.”
“Hi! Rachel Gibson, Pink Dew Films.” Rachel’s hand whipped across the table to shake the mayor’s. Karen looked askance at it before slowly taking it. “I’m so excited to be here. My crew and I have a great interest in your place here. All of us are queer, by the way. Well, lesbian, really, except for Michela there with the camera. She’s p
an.”
Tension left Karen’s face. “Is that so? Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Gibson. I’m sorry, but… allow me to get someone to cover me here, and we can talk out back.”
Dahlia kept her distance while Rachel and the others gave more formal introductions and explained the situation. I hope she’s taking my advice. Dahlia had told Rachel to play up her personal life. “Part of my fuckup,” she had said to Rachel, “was not acknowledging I needed to be closer to these people. Not as a friend or commentator, but by actually being one of them.” All Rachel was able to say in response was, “Could’ve told you that, Dahl. Why do you think we were so keen to join you in the first place?”
Karen was the same caliber of excited smiles that she had been when Dahlia first approached her. If only I had been more appreciative of her smile back then. Dahlia wasn’t in the business of figuring out that side of herself. She could barely acknowledge a possible attraction to the mayor, and she had no idea if it was a mild crush or something real. Not that it mattered now. Karen wanted nothing to do with her. Dahlia had blown her chance. Why? Because she had a chip on her shoulder from childhood?
Rachel swung around and had a whispered meeting with her crew. Karen chose that moment to look in Dahlia’s direction. It was a mild invitation to come converse with her.
“So… how’s the guy who had the health problem doing? Aaron, was it?”
Dahlia snorted. That was certainly one way to break the ice. “He’s doing fine. Already back out filming a commercial for some car company.”
“Glad to hear it. Some of the folks around here were worried about him.”
“Really?” Dahlia allowed a laugh for once. “People knew about that, huh?”
“Word travels quickly in a town like this. In fact, if you hadn’t approached me, I probably would’ve heard about you being back within another five minutes. Some people can’t help themselves. They have to be the first to tell you.”
July Skies Page 12
