“So. Morgan. Are you new to our area?” a guy about Henry’s age to her left asked. His name was Erik or Aaron or something like that.
Morgan cleared her throat. “I’ve lived here all my life. I actually live in the home where I was raised.”
Trying to be agreeable, Aaron or Erik said, “With the economy the way it is, it’s a good thing for young people to live with their parents longer. It makes it easier for grown-up children.”
“My parents are both dead.” Morgan shoved a large bite in her mouth and hoped the conversation was over.
Aaron or Erik said, “I’m sorry.”
Then Sandy cut in. “Morgan’s mother died not quite a month ago. You remember the Alzheimer patient at the Prairie Flower who froze to death?”
“That was your mother?” Ruthie, who sat directly across from her, said.
Still chewing, Morgan nodded. All the conversation had stopped, and everyone was looking at her. She squirmed a bit in her chair.
Aaron or Erik quietly laid his hand over hers. “How are you doing?”
Morgan swallowed and said, “I’m back to work. That’s progress.” She laid her napkin on the table, scooted her chair back, and said, “Will you excuse me?” She stood and rushed out of the dining room, down a short hallway, and into the bathroom.
Grateful that she didn’t cry, she sat on the edge of the bathtub, taking deep, slow breaths. She would tell Sandy she wasn’t feeling well, apologize, then leave. It was true. Her guts were in a knot. After a few minutes passed, she stood and opened the bathroom door, and Chelsea was blocking her way.
“Why didn’t you tell me your mother died?”
“When did I have a chance?”
“You should have stopped me. You should have made me listen.”
Morgan said, “Not my talent.”
“I reacted over history. All I could think was that I wouldn’t put up with that nonsense again. I doubt if many women my age are baggage-free. But it’s no excuse.”
Glad for a chance to explain, Morgan said, “I went to the bar to find comfort. I actually thought you might be there. When you weren’t, well—Tanqueray is another kind of painkiller. I regret the way it turned out. I’m sorry.”
Chelsea said, “I behaved like an idiot. I’m sorry too.”
“I forgive you. So what do we do now?”
“We need to get to know each other better,” Chelsea said.
“How about dinner sometime?”
“How about dinner now? The table is set. The food is cooked, and there’s a cake.”
Morgan nodded and let Chelsea take her hand and lead her back to the dining room. Cake. Why did it have to be cake? After the last few weeks, Morgan was sure she’d never eat cake again. But by the time it was passed, she’d forgotten her aversion and asked for an end piece.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lois always had trouble sleeping when she wasn’t home in her own bed with Sophie next to her, but she finally did. She dreamed of Vietnam, of Maggie Newmar, of Nghuy Tran, and of a tiny baby wrapped in a camouflage T-shirt, lying in a Ringer’s lactate box. She dreamed of the day she met Sophie and of bringing their grandson home from the hospital. She dreamed on about Florida, about warm winters and walks on the beach with Daisy. In her dream, the dog was transformed. She ran ahead of Lois sniffing every bit of seaweed, every shell. The lazy cats slept in the shade of a canvas awning. She and Sophie would live out their days in peace and comfort the way they had always planned.
*
Just twelve miles south of the landfill where Curry’s body had been found, an abandoned railroad trestle connected the banks of the Des Plaines River. At dawn the following morning, Morgan walked from her car, through a wooded area, past the barricades, and onto the bridge. Chipped and broken pieces of cement lay beneath her feet. The rails were glazed with ice. She could detect light below some of the creosote-treated railroad ties.
The farther out she walked, the stronger the wind became. It whipped her coat open, and she pulled it close around her and grabbed the freezing side-rail to steady herself. The sky to her right was pink and gray with sunrise. In the distance, a car with its headlights still burning crossed another bridge.
Near the center of the trestle, she stopped and looked down. The brown river boiled and churned far below. From beneath her coat, she raised the M-16 and held it out over the water. Then she let go and watched it fall, turning end on end, seemingly in slow motion. By the time it hit the fast-moving water, the splash was barely audible.
The walk back to her car seemed longer and more treacherous. But she put one foot in front of the other because that morning she had a date to sled down a hill.
*
Later that morning, Sophie Long crossed the Georgia state line into Florida. Daisy hadn’t taken well to traveling, so they’d stopped in Tennessee and bought a new kennel. She slept there now. In the passenger seat, Lois snored softly. One of the cats was curled up in her lap, and her round, black-rimmed glasses sat on the bridge of her nose a little cockeyed.
The End
About the Author
Award-winning Midwestern writer Martha Miller is the author of Skin to Skin: Erotic Lesbian Love Stories, Nine Nights on the Windy Tree, Dispatch to Death, and Tales from the Levee. Her stories, reviews, and articles are widely published in anthologies, magazines, periodicals, and newspapers. She’s written and had four plays produced at Mid-America Playwrights Theatre, and she has won several academic and non-academic awards for her writing, including the Raymond Carver Short Fiction Award and an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship. She loves to read and she loves basketball. She teaches writing part time at a local community college and lives a quiet life with her partner Ann and two dogs and two cats.
Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
Darkness Embraced by Winter Pennington. Surrounded by harsh vampire politics and secret ambitions, Epiphany learns that an old enemy is plotting treason against the woman she once loved, and to save all she holds dear, she must embrace and form an alliance with the dark. (978-1-60282-221-4)
78 Keys by Kristin Marra. When the cosmic powers choose Devorah Rosten to be their next gladiator, she must use her unique skills to try to save her lover, herself, and even humankind. (978-1-60282-222-1)
Playing Passion’s Game by Lesley Davis. Trent Williams’s only passion in life is gaming—until Juliet Sullivan makes her realize that love can be a whole different game to play. (978-1-60282-223-8)
Retirement Plan by Martha Miller. A modern morality tale of justice, retribution, and women who refuse to be politely invisible. (978-1- 60282-224-5)
Who Dat Whodunnit by Greg Herren. Popular New Orleans detective Scotty Bradley investigates the murder of a dethroned beauty queen to clear the name of his pro football–playing cousin. (978-1-60282- 225-2)
The Company He Keeps by Dale Chase. A riotously erotic collection of stories set in the sexually repressed and therefore sexually rampant Victorian era. (978-1-60282-226-9)
Cursebusters! by Julie Smith. Budding-psychic Reeno is the most accomplished teenage burglar in California, but one tiny screw-up and poof!—she’s sentenced to Bad Girl School. And that isn’t even her worst problem. Her sister Haley’s dying of an illness no one can diagnose, and now she can’t even help. (978-1-60282-559-8)
True Confessions by PJ Trebelhorn. Lynn Patrick finally has a chance with the only woman she’s ever loved, her lifelong friend Jessica Greenfield, but Jessie is still tormented by an abusive past. (978-1- 60282-216-0)
Jane Doe by Lisa Girolami. On a getaway trip to Las Vegas, Emily Carver gambles on a chance for true love and discovers that sometimes in order to find yourself, you have to start from scratch. (978-1-60282- 217-7)
Ghosts of Winter by Rebecca S. Buck. Can Ros Wynne, who has lost everything she thought defined her, find her true life—and her true love—surrounded by the lingering history of the once-grand Winter Manor? (978-1-60282-219-1)
Who I Am by M.L. Rice. Dev
in Kelly’s senior year is a disaster. She’s in a new school in a new town, and the school bully is making her life miserable—but then she meets his sister Melanie and realizes her feelings for her are more than platonic. (978-1-60282-231-3)
Call Me Softly by D. Jackson Leigh. Polo pony trainer Swain Butler finds that neither her heart nor her secret are safe when beautiful British heiress Lillie Wetherington arrives to bury her grandmother, Swain’s employer. (978-1-60282-215-3)
Split by Mel Bossa. Weeks before Derek O’Reilly’s engagement party, a chance meeting with Nick Lund, his teenage first love, catapults him into the past, where he relives that powerful relationship revealing what he and Nick were, still are, and might yet be to each other. (978- 1-60282-220-7)
Blood Hunt by LL Raand. In the second Midnight Hunters Novel, Detective Jody Gates, heir to a powerful Vampire clan, forges an uneasy alliance with Sylvan, the Wolf Were Alpha, to battle a shadow army of humans and rogue Weres, while fighting her growing hunger for human reporter Becca Land. (978-1-60282-209-2)
Loving Liz by Bobbi Marolt. When theater actor Marty Jamison turns diva and Liz Chandler walks out on her, Marty must confront a cheating lover from the past to understand why life is crumbling around her. (978-1-60282-210-8)
Kiss the Rain by Larkin Rose. How will successful fashion designer Eve Harris react when she discovers the new woman in her life, Jodi, and her secret fantasy phone date, Lexi, are one and the same? (978- 1-60282-211-5)
Sarah, Son of God by Justine Saracen. In a story within a story within a story, a transgendered beauty takes us through Stonewall-rioting New York, Venice under the Inquisition, and Nero’s Rome. (978-1- 60282-212-2)
Sleeping Angel by Greg Herren. Eric Matthews survives a terrible car accident only to find out everyone in town thinks he’s a murderer—and he has to clear his name even though he has no memories of what happened. (978-1-60282-214-6)
Dying to Live by Kim Baldwin & Xenia Alexiou. British socialite Zoe Anderson-Howe’s pampered life is abruptly shattered when she’s taken hostage by FARC guerrillas while on a business trip to Bogota, and Elite Operative Fletch must rescue her to complete her own harrowing mission. (978-1-60282-200-9)
Indigo Moon by Gill McKnight. Werewolves Hope Glassy and Godfrey Meyers are on a mercy mission to save their friend Isabelle after she is attacked by a rogue werewolf—but does Isabelle want to be saved from the sexy wolf who claimed her as a mate? (978-1-60282-201-6)
Parties in Congress by Colette Moody. Bijal Rao, Indian-American moderate Independent, gets the break of her career when she’s hired to work on the congressional campaign of Janet Denton—until she meets her remarkably attractive and charismatic opponent, Colleen O’Bannon. (978-1-60282-202-3)
The Collectors by Leslie Gowan. Laura owns what might be the world’s most extensive collection of BDSM lesbian erotica, but that’s as close as she’s gotten to the world of her fantasies. Until, that is, her friend Adele introduces her to Adele’s mistress Jeanne—art collector, heiress, and experienced dominant. With Jeanne’s first command, Laura’s life changes forever. (978-1-60282-208-5)
Breathless, edited by Radclyffe and Stacia Seaman. Bold Strokes Books romance authors give readers a glimpse into the lives of favorite couples celebrating special moments “after the honeymoon ends.” Enjoy a new look at lesbians in love or revisit favorite characters from some of BSB’s best-selling romances. (978-1-60282-207-8)
Breaker’s Passion by Julie Cannon. Leaving a trail of broken hearts scattered across the Hawaiian Islands, surf instructor Colby Taylor is running full speed away from her selfish actions years earlier until she collides with Elizabeth Collins, a stuffy, judgmental college professor who changes everything. (978-1-60282-196-5)
Justifiable Risk by V.K. Powell. Work is the only thing that interests homicide detective Greer Ellis until internationally renowned journalist Eva Saldana comes to town looking for answers in her brother’s death—then attraction threatens to override duty. (978-1- 60282-197-2)
Nothing But the Truth by Carsen Taite. Sparks fly when two top-notch attorneys battle each other in the high-risk arena of the courtroom, but when a strange turn of events turns one of them from advocate to witness, prosecutor Ryan Foster and defense attorney Brett Logan join forces in their search for the truth. (978-1-60282- 198-9)
Maye’s Request by Clifford Henderson. When Brianna Bell promises her ailing mother she’ll heal the rift between her “other two” parents, she discovers how little she knows about those closest to her and the impact family has on the fabric of our lives. (978-1- 60282-199-6)
Table des matières
Synopsis
By the Author
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
About the Author
Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
Retirement Plan Page 30
