Wavering Convictions

by Erin Dutton

  “I don’t want to trouble you.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  She filled the freezer and the canned-goods cabinet. After her mother’s stroke four years ago, she’d tried to buy her mother produce and lean meats, encouraging healthier eating. But the next week, she wound up throwing away the soft and soggy vegetables and expired meats. At least the frozen dinners wouldn’t spoil when her mother ignored them in favor of random meals like a can of beans or a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of processed cheese dip.

  Shirley had been lucky to not have lasting effects from the stroke. However, her doctor had warned that if she didn’t change her ways, a second stroke was much more likely.

  “Do you want to stay for dinner?” Shirley meant, did Ally want to make her dinner? She’d had a long day and just wanted to go home, eat a bowl of soup, and go to bed.

  “Sure. I can do that. Spaghetti okay?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she pulled a box of pasta and a jar of tomato sauce out of the cabinet. At least Shirley wasn’t picky when someone else was cooking. From the spice rack, Ally grabbed garlic powder, onion powder, and red-pepper flakes. She could handle a jarred sauce if she doctored it up a bit. As she fixed the food, she prepped herself for an evening eating off a plate in her lap while Shirley zoned out to the latest episode of whatever procedural crime drama she was hooked on now. Maybe it would be that one with the hot, lesbian detective her friend Kathi was always raving about.

  Chapter Three

  “How are you doing?” Inga dropped into the chair next to Maggie’s desk.

  “Busy.” Maggie didn’t look away from her computer screen.

  “Maggie.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Inga covered Maggie’s arm, stopping her mid-type. “How are you really?”

  Maggie sighed and sat back, using the motion to politely ease her arm away from Inga. She’d never been a very tactile person, but she’d become less so since the robbery.

  “I just need to keep working. You know, to keep my mind off things.”

  “Sure. That makes sense. How did things go in court yesterday? I’m sorry I missed you when you got back, but my meetings ran crazy long.” Inga either didn’t get the hint that she didn’t want to talk or chose to ignore it.

  Maggie considered telling her about meeting Ally, just to keep from talking about why she really was there. Inga would love to hear that Maggie was attracted to someone. And she couldn’t deny she was—attracted. Ally was sexy and confident. She’d surprised Maggie with her chivalry when she insisted on walking her to her car.

  But she didn’t have much additional information about the case anyway. And she needed to let Inga know about the new court date. “The case was continued until Friday. The DA said I don’t have to go if you can’t spare me.”

  “Nonsense. Do whatever you need to do. We can manage. Especially on a Friday. Did you see him at all?”

  “Inga—”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve just never known anyone who’s been through anything like this.”

  “Yeah, well, much as I love being a novelty for you—”

  “Maggie, you know that’s not what I mean. I want to support you. You’ve been so different since this happened, and I don’t know what you need.”

  She wanted to shout that of course she was different. Who wouldn’t be? She could tell Inga to just leave her the hell alone. Or perhaps more satisfying, she could stand up and storm out. Instead, she just shrugged and said, “How could you, when I don’t even know.”

  Inga seemed hurt that Maggie hadn’t come up with some suggestion of how she could miraculously make things better. She stood and hovered near Maggie’s desk. “Let me know if I can do anything.”

  Maggie nodded, lacking the energy for anything more. When she heard the door close, indicating that Inga had retreated to her office, she slumped in her chair, letting her head rest on the back. Alone, she couldn’t hold back the tears that filled her eyes. She swallowed a sob, refusing to completely lose it while at the office. She would wait until she got home and then would curl into a ball in the center of her bed and cry herself to sleep.

  * * *

  “Becker, give us a hand with this,” the site foreman, Reuben, called.

  Ally abandoned the section of wall she was framing and took a spot on a wall that was ready to go up. She and three other guys muscled it up and held it until it had been secured in place.

  “Thanks.” Reuben walked with her as she returned to her framing. “How’s Carey doing?”

  “He’s in jail. How do you think?” she snapped, then sighed and rubbed the back of her neck. “Sorry. It’s pretty rough right now.”

  “I didn’t want to fire him. We need all the hands we can get.”

  “I know.” She grimaced, knowing he wouldn’t like what she was about to say. “I need to come in late Friday, too. His case got pushed. I should be able to make it here by afternoon.”

  “I’ve already stretched us thin by letting you off yesterday. I have to be able to count on y’all to meet our deadlines.”

  “From what his attorney says, this should be it for a while. I’ll work extra hard in the afternoon.” She didn’t need the lecture again. If they fell behind, the whole job was off. The guys responsible for the plumbing, electrical, Sheetrock, and flooring all relied on carpentry to get the walls and trusses up.

  “You could make it up to me by signing on for the next couple of houses.” Reuben didn’t like the deal she’d worked out with their boss. He preferred to have more control over his crew. But with the current housing growth, the company had more work than they did crews to handle it.

  “Sorry, man. I’ve got plans for the summer.” In three weeks, she’d be done with this particular job. After living frugally for almost a year, she’d saved up enough to take some time off and focus on her furniture. She patted his shoulder. “I should get back to work. Our foreman’s kind of a hard-ass.”

  She didn’t wait for his response before she returned to her section of framing. Ally and five other guys made up one of three crews the company employed. They were spread out over three different homes in the same subdivision, a new development of small cottage-style homes.

  The only other two women in the company were on a job site down the street from her. Ally had dated one of them. But she and Kathi had been better off as friends. And their status was cemented once Dani was assigned to Kathi’s crew. Kathi and Dani had been inseparable ever since, and Ally kept them both as good friends.

  She slipped a wireless earbud into her right ear and started her favorite playlist. To be safe, she left the other ear open so she could stay aware of the job site around her. The other guys talked and joked while they worked. Ally used to enjoy her work, when Carey worked alongside her. Reuben had done what he had to when he fired Carey. Ally didn’t blame him. But building houses had never been her passion. And not being able to help Carey figure things out had soured her on the work even further. But until her hobby / business took off, she was stuck in these subdivisions framing cookie-cutter boxes for middle-class families.

  By lunchtime, they’d finished the exterior walls and were ready to move on to the roof trusses. She removed her earbud, not risking her safety as they climbed in elevation. The afternoon sun came out, and the weather warmed enough for her to shed the sweatshirt she’d worn against the cool, early spring morning.

  Shortly before six, she headed for her truck. After she unlocked the toolbox in the back of her truck and dropped her tool bag inside it, her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she pulled it out. Kathi and Dani wanted her to meet them for a drink. She begged off, citing exhaustion, then had to promise they would hook up that weekend. Though she wouldn’t admit it to them, their concern for her wasn’t misplaced. Between Carey, her mother, and work, she often didn’t know how she held it together.

  Dani insisted she needed to get out there and date. But at the end of the day, she didn’t have enough energy left fo
r a relationship. She couldn’t give sufficient time to another person. If asked, she would deny that her mind had wandered to Maggie several times today. She’d tried to picture Maggie at work. She had described a desk job. Did she have an office? Or did she spend her day in a cubicle? Maggie had looked great in that suit, but maybe she didn’t dress that way every day. Surely an office job for the city didn’t require anything more formal than business casual. Somehow, she suspected Maggie would take care with her appearance.

  She’d wondered if she would run into her again someday. Or if Maggie would ever decide to use the number she’d pretty much forced on her.

  She drained the excess water from her small cooler, then placed it in the bed of her truck. She didn’t need to spend any of her precious time thinking about Maggie, because she’d lay odds that Maggie wasn’t thinking of her.

  * * *

  Maggie checked her locks, the knob, the deadbolt, and the security bar lock she’d insisted her landlord install this week. He’d made her pay for it, but she didn’t care. Though she lived on the second floor, she tested the windows, imagining a shadowy figure leaning a tall ladder against the wall beneath her window before forcing his way in. That’s just stupid, Maggie. Like any thief would pass up the ground-floor apartments and go to the trouble of toting around a large ladder to break into her place.

  Fighting her urge to recheck the locks, she brushed her teeth and washed her face. Then she put on her favorite nightshirt and crawled into bed. The switch she’d left on in the adjoining bathroom spilled light into the bedroom. She’d been leaving the television on in her bedroom, to avoid hearing the night sounds in her apartment, real and imagined. But the noise of the TV only disturbed her already restless sleep, so she graduated to just the bathroom light to chase away the shadows.

  She stuck her arm out and grabbed her phone off the nightstand, then tugged the covers back up around her shoulders. Every night seemed to get worse. At first she’d relived the robbery in vivid detail whenever she closed her eyes. After that, her dreams grew muddier and gave way to full-on insomnia. She’d been surviving on scattered sleep that probably didn’t amount to a couple of hours a night.

  She’d climbed into bed early, hoping to find some rest. Tomorrow morning, she needed to be in court again. But after a mindless hour on Facebook and playing word games on her tablet, she was still not tired. She considered turning on music, but every sound seemed amplified tonight. Her looming attendance in court tomorrow no doubt had her more keyed up than usual. Judging by the clomping noises from above, her upstairs neighbor hadn’t retired for the evening yet.

  Hunkering down in the dim light, she scrolled through her contacts. Inga would pretend Maggie hadn’t awakened her. But since she’d adopted an infant, Inga slept when the baby did. Inga would listen patiently while Maggie skirted the real problem. She couldn’t bring herself to talk in detail about the robbery, afraid doing so gave the incident more power. But she also felt like she was being a bit of a baby. She should be able to move past this.

  With a swipe of her finger, she rolled past Inga’s number. Her mother would listen and—she quickly calculated the time difference—it was still a decent hour to call her in Indiana. She’d phoned her the day after the incident but hadn’t let on how scared she’d been. She didn’t mention the gun, and her mother had assumed she was referring to a purse-snatching. Letting on now that she was traumatized felt silly.

  Scrolling back, she considered and rejected several other friends. They’d all expressed concern when they first heard what happened, but had quickly moved on and clearly expected her to do the same. She paused when she reached the B’s. Ally Becker. Ally had forced her to take her number. Sure, she probably meant in case she reconsidered a date. But since that wasn’t happening, couldn’t Maggie call just to talk? If Ally didn’t seem receptive, she had nothing to lose. She might never see her again anyway. Before she could rationalize too much, she pressed the Call button.

  “Shit.” She almost hung up, but the call had gone through. Her number would appear on Ally’s caller ID, and she didn’t want that embarrassing moment when Ally called her back.

  “Hello?” Ally’s low, soft voice vibrated in her ear, clearly questioning who would call her after nine o’clock, not terribly late, but certainly past the acceptable telemarketer threshold.

  “I’m sorry for calling at this hour.”

  “No problem. Who is this?”

  “Maggie Davidson. We—um, we met at the courthouse earlier this week.”

  “Yes. Of course. How are you, Maggie?”

  “This is stupid. Not you. Me. I shouldn’t have called.”

  Ally was quiet for several seconds. Did she want to agree? Maggie didn’t know her well enough to picture her expression. “Why did you?”

  Maggie didn’t hear judgment in her words, only gentle curiosity. Should she make up something and hurry off the phone? She didn’t want to.

  “I wanted to talk. To someone. I mean, I have other people I can talk to. I’m not some lonely, pathetic woman with no one to—” Miraculously, she found a way to stop her rambling.

  “I can talk. Or, rather, I can listen. If that’s what you need.” Ally didn’t address the rest of her bumbling. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m nervous about all this court stuff. This will probably sound dumb, but I haven’t discussed what happened to me with anyone. Except the police and that guy from the DA’s office, of course. And I thought, since you’re a relative stranger who isn’t connected to the case, maybe I could—”

  “Tell me.” Ally’s smooth alto made her feel like she could say anything.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Maggie activated the speakerphone, because having Ally’s voice that close to her suddenly felt intimate. She set the phone on the bed beside her and rolled to her back, talking more to her ceiling than to Ally. “I was late leaving work that night. The parking garage was more empty than usual.”

  She laid out the timeline of events, struggling to keep her tone emotionless so Ally wouldn’t know she was trembling from the inside out. She didn’t need to close her eyes to recall the details. In fact, she was afraid to.

  “The gun—it was silver, and—I don’t know why this is so hard. I’m going to have to say all this in court eventually.” She took a deep breath and began again. She stuttered through the timeline, glossing over the fear and skimming the part where he put the gun in her face. She finally ended with the Good Samaritan who’d called the police for her.

  “Maggie. I’m so sorry.” Ally sounded devastated. She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. He didn’t—this guy didn’t hurt you—physically, I mean, did he?”

  “A few bruises, but I’m okay.” The mottled discoloration around her wrist had just recently faded. No one at work had questioned why she didn’t take off her long-sleeved sweater even while inside the office. Her knees had ached where she’d fallen on them for a couple of days afterward, but she owed some of that to the fact that her body didn’t bounce back like it had when she was younger.

  She thought Ally whispered something, but she couldn’t hear her through the slight distortion of the speakerphone. “What?”

  “Oh—uh, I said, thank God. That you weren’t injured.” Ally drew in a breath so deep Maggie heard it through the phone.

  “I’m sorry to dump this on you. The prosecutor says I shouldn’t have to testify in General Sessions Court tomorrow, so I have lots of time to get used to telling my story before the criminal trial. But it helped to say it all aloud, you know.”

  “Absolutely. I’m glad I could be here for you.” Did Ally sound more impersonal now, as if placating a stranger? Maybe. But they were strangers, weren’t they?

  “I’m sorry for dumping my sob story on you. I’m usually a strong person. But this whole thing shook me.” Maggie rubbed three fingers against her forehead and down between her eyes. The strain of holding back her emotio
ns while she talked had started a headache there.

  “That’s understandable. What can I do to help?”

  “You’ve already helped. Thank you.”

  “Do you want to talk some more about it?”

  All that remained was to work through her feelings of insecurity, and she didn’t need to lay all her weaknesses out for Ally right now. “I don’t think so.”

  “Should I let you get some sleep, then?”

  Maggie scoffed. “Not likely.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  “Some.”

  “Okay, then. We’ll stay on the phone as long as you need.”

  “That could be all night.” Maggie laced her words with a chuckle, but she only half joked.

  “I’m here for as long as you need.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  Maggie rolled to her stomach and stared at the phone as if she could see Ally’s expression. She could recall Ally’s face, her warm eyes, and the way she’d eased Maggie’s discomfort in the café. But picturing them in the café didn’t relax Maggie. “Where are you now?”

  “At home.”

  “Describe it to me.” Maggie thought Ally might not play along, so she rushed to explain. “I want to picture you there, so I’ll feel better about being this vulnerable.”

  “I like you vulnerable.”

  “Well, I don’t. Distract me and tell me about your place.”

  “It’s a ranch-style home in Madison. I know it’s not trendy, but I’m an almost-forty lesbian, so I’ve reached the age where I don’t have to care what’s in or not.”

  “We can tackle that statement later.”

  Ally’s laugh sounded lighter than Maggie expected, and she tried to remember if she’d heard it before.

  “Back to the house. I bought it two years ago, and it’s about halfway renovated. I work on it in spurts, so I’m waiting for inspiration to strike before I tear apart another room.”