Between, Georgia

by Joshilyn Jackson

  She rolled her eyes. “My three best friends in all of life and my hateful cousin Jeannie have each spent four hundred bucks on apple-green taffeta bridesmaids’ dresses. And what’s my mother going to do with two hundred plates of dilled salmon? It’s not like I had a choice.”

  “I could sue you. I could maybe have you arrested,” I said.

  “That has to be some kind of fraud.”

  “You got paid,” she said. “As for the rest, I don’t care, but can you wait, please, and sue me on Monday? I kinda have a lot going on this weekend. And P.S.? I don’t care if I have to drag you back to Athens by your hair. I love him with all my whole heart. You have to accept that he loves me and not you, and do you have any idea what my dress cost? It’s Vera Wang, okay?”

  Staring at the tiny, angry creature who was now shrieking about the nonrefundable deposit at the reception hall, I didn’t know whether I should sink to the floor and laugh myself sick or slap her upside the head and start a cataclysmic catfight.

  Bernese snorted. “If you think Nonny is the only reason the divorce is taking so long—whoa, has that man got you snowed.”

  “Oh yeah, blame the victim,” Amber DeClue said. To me she said, “Are you coming peacefully? Or is this going to get ugly?

  You have to leave right now and drive like hell or you’ll miss it.

  My daddy doesn’t even know Jonno was ever married, much less still is. You have to come fix this or I will have to kill you, because Jonno has to be divorced or a widower by six P.M. on Saturday, do you hear me?”

  I glanced over at Mama and Genny, standing together in the doorway to the den. Genny’s eyes were so round I could see white all the way around her irises, and her hands were a blur as she speed-signed. Mama’s face was closed, unreadable.

  “X. Machina,” I said.

  Amber DeClue looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

  “Jonno’s band?” Bernese asked.

  “Yeah, that’s his band,” I said. “It’s slang, like a pun I don’t get on ‘deus ex machina.’ ”

  “They’re changing it,” said Amber. “I told him that was a dumb name. They’re going to be called Kicktown now.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Why are you babbling on about Jonno’s band?” Bernese’s voice was sharp with impatience, but Mama didn’t ask. I’d had an hour-long conversation with her once, trying to explain the band name, and she knew what I meant.

  “It means ‘god in the machine,’ ” I said. “It’s a device from Greek theater, and they used it when a play got too complicated to ever work itself out. An actor dressed up like a god would come down on a machine and fix everything with magic and end the play.”

  Bernese jerked a thumb at Amber. “And that’s her? She’s the god in the machine? Because I think that sounds a little bit blas-phemous. This is more like ‘adulterous whore in the machine.’ ”

  “Hey!” Amber said.

  “No, it’s not her. It’s more like her being here at all.” I was talking to Bernese, but I was looking over at Mama. She was perfectly composed, her hands reading Genny’s flashing signs as Genny tried to keep up. Then Mama was nodding.

  “Are you going to go?” Amber demanded.

  To Genny I said, “Tell Mama this doesn’t mean I’m going to let Fisher down. Tell her to please trust me and not do anything drastic.”

  But Mama signed, You can’t choose to get a machine god. One happens or doesn’t.

  “What does Fisher have to do with this?” Bernese said.

  Amber stamped her foot. “You are going to miss it if you don’t go right now.”

  “I’m coming,” I said to Amber. “But you’re driving me.”

  “Me?” said Amber.

  “You want me to go?” I said, and she nodded. “Then you are driving me. I’m not done with you. I haven’t even started with you. And yeah, okay, I’ll go to Athens now. Maybe by the time we get there, I will have decided if I’ll walk into that courtroom, but you don’t even get that unless you take me there. I get this hour with you. Nothing’s free.”

  Bernese was already opening her big mouth to argue with me, but I cut her off. “Try to make it right with Fisher for me. I won’t have my car, so it might be past her bedtime before I can get home.” To Genny I said, “Tell Mama I am choosing this,” and I watched her sign it into Mama’s hands.

  Mama knew I was watching, and she signed directly to me: You aren’t choosing. It’s a push. You’re just falling over.

  And then, comfortable with the pacing in her own home, she let go of Genny’s hands and walked back into the den, her fingers trailing lightly along the wall as she traced her path.

  CHAPTER 17

  IF I COULDhave flown out of my own head, taken my consciousness up high enough to make Between a topical map below me so that I could see Mama and Fisher and all my family spread out below, tiny and frail, I never would have left them. But I couldn’t see the future. I couldn’t see anything. Perhaps nurture hadn’t given me the ramrod will that seemed to be standard Frett issue, but nature had certainly granted me the blinding Crabtree temper.

  I was angry with Jonno and his floppy doll who’d appeared whining on my doorstep, furious with Mama, enraged with myself. So I got in the canary-yellow BMW convertible that was parked in front of the house and left.

  Amber DeClue tore onto 78, already breaking the speed limit.

  She drove hell-bent for Athens, and beneath my anger, I worried she would splatter us both all over the highway. Surely she wouldn’t want to show up for her wedding to my husband covered in scabs or, worse, dead. A bray of bitter laughter welled up in my chest, and I pressed my fingers hard into my temples to keep it from escaping. I was halfway to hysteria, and I was making my husband’s fiancée drive me to my divorce. There was so much wrong with that, I couldn’t begin to process it.

  Amber’s soft hands gripped and worried the steering wheel, and she was leaning toward it with her spine rigid and straight. It was as if she believed relentless good posture made the car go faster.

  The top was down. Of course it was. Amber was a top-down kind of girl. She’d pulled a scrunchy off the gearshift and secured her hair, but mine was torturing me, whipping around and getting in my eyes and mouth. By the time we got to Athens, I’d look like a fiery Medusa. Silence had swallowed up the car, except the white noise of the wind. I felt no obligation to break it.

  Amber kept sneaking sideways glances at me. “Quit staring at me,” she said. I didn’t respond, and a few moments later, she added, “You’re giving me nerves. I swear, I’m going to end up running us off the road.”

  I blinked twice and found it was difficult to stop watching her.

  I wanted to look at her, to try and get some sort of idea of what or who she was. The girl I met at the interview had been a false front, and maybe this wee virago was a false front, too. The BMW said “daddy’s girl.” So did the fat gold bracelet around her wrist, clunky with charms. I picked out a ballerina, a graduation cap, a key. Her nails were professionally manicured, and her glossy brown hair was streaked with caramel and gold. I’d noticed before that she looked too expensive to have a job at Bibi’s, but I had been too worried about Mama to ask myself the right questions.

  It finally occurred to me to check her left hand. Sure enough, she was wearing the big diamond I had seen her twirling at Bibi’s.

  The stone had to be almost two carats, set in white gold or maybe platinum.

  “Jonno gave you that?” I said, indicating the ring.

  She shrugged. “It’s a family ring.”

  “Yeah, your family’s, maybe.”

  “It was my gramma’s, okay? It’s special to me, so Jonno didn’t mind using it.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  She looked at me and said, “Why are you picking on me about my ring? Quit staring holes in me, you’re making my stomach sick.” She wobbled up onto the shoulder and jerked us back.

  “Shit! I told you!”

  I turn
ed to face forward, keeping my eyes deliberately off her.

  We were on a stretch of highway that offered nothing to look at but plowed cotton fields on either side of us. “So in Jonno’s version, I’m the only one dragging my feet, huh?” This time she did not answer, but in my peripheral vision, I could see her hands still kneading the steering wheel like dough. I went on, “It doesn’t seem that way to me, but maybe there’s some truth to that. We could have been divorced six months ago if I’d stayed out of bed with him long enough for him to believe I meant it when I said we were finished.”

  She said, “Don’t you bad-mouth him to me.” She was very fierce, and her voice was filled with righteous conviction. She flipped on her sound system. She had a CD in, some faux-punk boy band I didn’t know, and she jacked up the volume to six. She had to yell so I could hear her over the wind and the music. “If you’re making me drive you so you can have some time to try to poison my mind against him, I already see through that.”

  “You don’t want to hear about my frying pan? You want to leap straight into the fire?” I looked at her again. I couldn’t help it.

  “So you’re trying it anyway? Fine. Trying just shows you still want him, and if he’s an asshole, why would you want to keep him? And anyway, hello, he loves me. That must kill you, and I can even feel sorry for you, because if I lost him, I’d totally lie down and die. I can feel bad for you or whatever, but I am telling you up front, if you trash-talk him and pretend like he’s cheating on me, I’ll pull this car right over and slap you backwards. And I fight dirty. I pull hair and I bite. You don’t want to start with me.”

  Her fingers had gone white on the wheel, but she hadn’t once looked away from the road since she turned on the music. I reached over and flipped it off, then said over the whistling air,

  “You don’t look to me like the kind of girl who’s ever been in a fight.”

  She darted another sidelong glance at me. I saw her square her shoulders and willfully firm her trembling mouth. She said, “I told you to stop staring at me. If the question is whether or not I’m prettier than you, let me help you out. I am. Much.”

  A sharp bark of laughter escaped me. I sat back in my seat, looking out of the windshield at the flat expanse of the fields.

  “You’ve got a pair, as my aunt Bernese would say. How old are you, anyway?”

  “Twenty,” she said. She sounded as if she begrudged me the air it took to let me hear the word.

  “So was I,” I said. “When I married him. Ten years ago.”

  “That won’t work, either,” she said.

  “Then I’ll leave it at this. A man who cheats on his wife with you will cheat on you when you are his wife.”

  She braked, angling toward the shoulder. “Do you need me to kick your ass? Seriously?”

  “Go ahead. Give it a try,” I said. “I think I’d like that. But if you pull over, we’ll miss the hearing.”

  “Dammit!” she said, and stomped on the gas again. We lurched forward until we were back up to eighty-five, and then she set cruise control. “Stop talking to me. Really.”

  “You don’t get to decide what I do and don’t do. You want me in Athens? This is what it costs you, and since you’re having sex with my husband, it’s pretty damn cheap.”

  “I didn’t know he was married,” she said.

  “Really.” I made my voice drip disbelief.

  “I didn’t! Well, not at first I didn’t. And by the time I did, it was too late. We were in love. And it was, like, our love was bigger than that.”

  “Bigger than what?” I asked.

  She waved one hand airily and then put it back on the wheel.

  “Bigger than rules. Bigger than whatever happened before it. Bigger than you.” She was filled with such certainty, she sounded almost casual. She was so young, and all at once I was sorry for making her do this. She wasn’t a match for me by half. Knowing that, I felt some of the anger loosen in my chest and then let go.

  On a hunch, I leaned down and dug around under the seat.

  Sure enough, my fingers found the edge of one of Jonno’s endless supply of coverless paperbacks. I pulled it out. Ken Kesey’s Sailor Song. I paused, holding it. I had intended to read my way to Athens, but the physical presence of the book shook me. The book proclaimed, louder than anything Amber had said, louder even than the ring, that Jonno had been here.

  I shoved it back under the seat. I didn’t need a talisman to tell me what I already knew. Then I realized I already had one. I dug around my purse until I found my empty pill bottle. I glanced at Amber. Her eyes were on the road, so I slipped the pill bottle under the seat after the book. A message to Jonno that I had been here, too.

  I sat back and stared out the window, watching the car eat the miles between me and the end of my marriage. The fields gave way to Georgia-pine wilderness, and then to townlets and sub-urbs that lined the path into Athens. I was content, for the moment, to be driven. I suspected that the girl beside me would drive Jonno, too, metaphorically speaking. She was so single-minded in her version of love. If he’d been using me in the role of clinging bitch-wife to buffer himself from the string bean of willful possession sitting next to me, he would not have that lux-ury much longer.

  We pulled off 78 and headed toward downtown Athens.

  Amber drove directly to the courthouse. She must have been there recently, applying for a marriage license. It couldn’t have gone well. We came up to the corner before the courthouse, and she pulled over, flipped on her hazards, and put the BMW in park.

  “You’re here,” she said. She looked at her watch. “We made it.

  Plenty of time.” She kept her gaze resolutely ahead, but as I stared at her profile, I saw another tremor hit her mouth. She pressed her lips together, stopping it. “Are you going to sit here in my car until you miss it?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re leaving?”

  She shrugged. “I’m supposed to have a dinner with my bridesmaids tonight. I have to go iron my hair. I have to dress and pretend none of this whole afternoon happened.”

  “How am I supposed to get back to Between?” I asked.

  “Not my problem,” she said. Her voice had an edge of rising hysteria. “You are a very weird person, do you know that? It’s completely freakish, having me drive you here. That’s not normal.

  You are not normal. I can’t drive Jonno’s wife around the night before my wedding, okay? It’s making me upset.”

  “By the time I need the ride home, I won’t be his wife,” I said.

  “Get. Out. Of. My. Car!” She was borderline hysterical. I suddenly felt so sorry for her that there wasn’t room for feeling much else. It was a relief.

  I opened the car door to get out, and that was when I saw Jonno. He was coming down the sidewalk toward us. As I climbed out of the BMW, our eyes met. He came to a halt so abruptly, he almost overbalanced. His mouth dropped open, and then he went leaping wildly to the right, off the sidewalk, flailing his arms and then dropping behind some bushes. I couldn’t remember a time when I had seen him so graceless.

  I looked down at Amber. She hadn’t seen him. She felt my gaze and asked, “Are you ever going to close the door?”

  “Good luck,” I told her, and I stepped away and slammed it.

  She was already driving off as I walked toward the trembling bushes, shaking my head. Funny how the world worked; the last time I’d seen Jonno, I’d been crouched in some bushes beside his house, hiding from him.

  Jonno peeked out as Amber accelerated, then he crouched again. I watched until the car had safely turned the corner, and then I said to the bush, “Olly olly, oxen free.”

  He peered over the top. He had enough class to look the smallest bit ashamed. “Hi.”

  “That doesn’t seem to quite cover it, does it?” I said.

  226

  “Was that . . .”

  “Amber?” I said. “Sure was.”

  Jonno stood up and joined me on the sidewalk, brushing at his fad
ed Levi’s. The courthouse was behind us, a squatty white building with too many square pillars. There we stood in our jeans, rumpled and uncertain, quailing in front of it.

  “Are you really going to marry that child?” I asked.

  Jonno shrugged, embarrassed. “Are you really going to divorce me?”

  “Do you want me to?” I asked.

  He looked at me quizzically. “No, dumb-ass. Of course not.”

  “And yet. You have an Amber.”

  He looked down at his steel-toed boots. They were chocolate-brown lace-ups made of distressed leather, the cool-guy version of a workingman’s boots. “She came after you had kicked me out.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “Comforting to know you aren’t marrying the one who gave me syphilis.”

  His boots were apparently divulging unto him the untold secrets of the universe. At last he raised his head, staring past me up the street where her car had gone. He said, “Her dad works for Geffen.”

  “Hello, hello! Here’s everyone all together!”

  Jonno and I both started. Our divorce lawyer had joined us without our noticing. He was a genial little man, as pink and plump as a cherub. Every time I’d seen him, he’d been hugely and, it seemed to me, inappropriately cheerful. He stepped between us and put out a hand, ushering us toward the courthouse.

  “We’re running the smallest bit late,” he said, urging us forward at a tidy clip. For a moment I thought my machine god might actually be him. He certainly knew how to process us 227

  through the blocky building. And it felt like we were in the clutches of a large machine as he walked us through the clots and streams of milling people. There seemed to be a pattern, as if the air had currents that shifted us and set our course.

  He led us through metal detectors and stairwells to a dingy courtroom where our marriage could be unraveled in a businesslike and tidy fashion. Dismantling a marriage, it seemed, was an abrupt and definite process that involved sitting on a bench, standing when called, and watching a bored judge stamp signed papers. It felt entirely surreal.