Free Fiction Monday: Cowboy Grace
January 24th, 2011 | Add a Comment
After receiving a great shock, Grace, a CPA who has always lived a cautious life, decides to sell her business and move west, not realizing that the man who bought her business embezzled from it. Her departure looks like guilt, and suddenly Grace, who only wants peace and quiet, has a price on her head. Included in the World’s Finest Mystery And Crime Stories of 2004, “Cowboy Grace,” also received an Edgar Award nomination for Best Short Story of the year.
A story by USA Today bestselling writer, Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Available for 99 cents on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and other e-bookstores.
Cowboy Grace
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
“Cowboy Grace,” copyright © 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“Every woman tolerates misogyny.” Alex said. She slid her empty beer glass across the bar, and tucked a strand of her auburn hair behind her ear. “How much depends on how old she is. The older she is the less she notices it. The more she expects it.”
“Bullshit.” Carole took a drag on her Virginia Slim, crossed her legs, and adjusted her skirt. “I don’t tolerate misogyny.”
“Maybe we should define the word,” Grace said, moving to the other side of Carole. She wished her friend would realize how much the smoking irritated her. In fact, the entire night was beginning to irritate her. They were all avoiding the topic du jour: the tiny wound on Grace’s left breast, stitches gone now, but the skin still raw and sore.
“Mis-ah-jenny.” Carole said, as if Grace were stupid. “Hatred of women.”
“From the Greek,” Alex said. “Misos or hatred and gyne or women.”
“Not,” Carole said, waving her cigarette as if it were a baton, “misogamy, which is also from the Greek. Hatred of marriage. Hmm. Two male misos wrapped in one.”
The bartender, a diminutive woman dressed wearing a red and white cowgirl outfit, complete with fringe and gold buttons, snickered. She set down a napkin in front of Alex and gave her another beer.
“Compliments,” she said, “of the men at the booth near the phone.”
Alex looked. She always looked. She was tall, busty, and leggy, with a crooked nose thanks to an errant pitch Grace had thrown in the 9th grade, a long chin and eyes the color of wine. Men couldn’t get enough of her. When Alex rebuffed them, they slept with Carole and then talked to Grace.
The men in the booth near the phone looked like corporate types on a junket. Matching gray suits, different ties — all in a complimentary shade of pink, red, or cranberry — matching haircuts (long on top, styled on the sides), and differing goofy grins.
“This is a girl bar,” Alex said, shoving the glass back at the bartender. “We come here to diss men, not to meet them.”
“Good call,” Carole said, exhaling smoke into Grace’s face. Grace agreed, not with the smoke or the rejection, but because she wanted time with her friends. Without male intervention of any kind.
“Maybe we should take a table,” Grace said.
“Maybe.” Carole crossed her legs again. Her mini was leather, which meant that night she felt like being on display. “Or maybe we should send drinks to the cutest men we see.”
They scanned the bar. Happy Hour at the Oh Kaye Corral didn’t change much from Friday to Friday. A jukebox in the corner, playing Patty Loveless. Cocktail waitresses in short skirts and ankle boots with big heels. Tin stars and Wild West art on the walls, unstained wood and checkered tablecloths adding to the effect. One day, when Grace had Alex’s courage and Carole’s gravely voice, she wanted to walk in, belly up to the bar, slap her hand on its polished surface, and order whiskey straight up. She wanted someone to challenge her. She wanted to pull her six-gun and have a stare-down, then and there. Cowboy Grace, fastest gun in the West. Or at least in Racine on a rainy Friday night.
“I don’t see cute,” Alex said. “I see married, married, divorced, desperate, single, single, never-been-laid, and married.”
Grace watched her make her assessment. Alex’s expression never changed. Carole was looking at the men, apparently seeing whether or not she agreed.
Typically, she didn’t.
“I dunno,” she said, pulling on her cigarette. “Never-Been-Laid’s kinda cute.”
“So try him,” Alex said. “But you’ll have your own faithful puppy dog by this time next week, and a proposal of marriage within the month.”
Carole grinned and slid off the stool. “Proposal of marriage in two weeks,” she said. “I’m that good.”
She stubbed out her cigarette, grabbed the tiny leather purse that matched the skirt, adjusted her silk blouse and sashayed her way toward a table in the middle.
Grace finally saw Never-Been-Laid. He had soft brown eyes, and hair that needed trimming. He wore a shirt that accented his narrow shoulders, and he had a laptop open on the round table. He was alone. He had his feet tucked under the chair, crossed at the ankles. He wore dirty tennis shoes with his Gap khakis.
“Cute?” Grace said.
“Shhh,” Alex said. “It’s a door into the mind of Carole.”
“One that should remain closed.” Grace moved to Carole’s stool. It was still warm. Grace shoved Carole’s drink out of her way, grabbed her glass of wine, and coughed. The air still smelled of cigarette smoke.
Carole was leaning over the extra chair, giving Never-Been-Laid a view of her cleavage, and the guys at the booth by the phone a nice look at her ass, which they seemed to appreciate.
“Where the hell did that misogyny comment come from?” Grace asked.
Alex looked at her. “You want to get a booth?”
“Sure. Think Carole can find us?”
“I think Carole’s going to be deflowering a computer geek and not caring what we’re doing.” Alex grabbed her drink, stood, and walked to a booth on the other side of the Corral. Dirty glasses from the last occupants were piled in the center, and the red-and-white checked vinyl table cloth was sticky.
They moved the glasses on the edge of the table and didn’t touch the dollar tip, which had been pressed into a puddle of beer.
Grace set her wine down and slid onto her side. Alex did the same on the other side. Somehow they managed not to touch the table top at all.
“You remember my boss?” Alex asked as she adjusted the tiny fake gaslamp that hung on the wall beside the booth.
“Beanie Boy?”
She grinned. “Yeah.”
“Never met him.”
“Aren’t you lucky.”
Grace already knew that. She’d heard stories about Beanie Boy for the last year. They had started shortly after he was hired. Alex went to the company Halloween party and was startled to find her boss dressed as one of the Lollipop Kids from the Wizard of Oz, complete with striped shirt, oversized lollipop and propeller beanie.
“Now what did he do?” Grace asked.
“Called me honey.”
“Yeah?” Grace asked.
“And sweetie, and doll-face, and sugar.”
“Hasn’t he been doing that for the last year?”
Alex glared at Grace. “It’s getting worse.”
“What’s he doing, patting you on the butt?”
“If he did, I’d get him for harassment, and he knows it.”
She had lowered her voice. Grace could barely hear her over Shania Twain.
“This morning one of our clients came in praising the last report. I wrote it.”
“Didn’t Beanie Boy give you credit?”
“Of course he did. He said, ‘Our little Miss Rogers wrote it. Isn’t she a doll?’”
Grace clutched her drink tighter. This didn’t matter to h
er. Her biopsy was benign. She had called Alex and Carole and told them. They’d suggested coming here. So why weren’t they offering a toast to her life? Why weren’t they celebrating, really celebrating, instead of rerunning the same old conversation in the same old bar in the same old way. “What did the client do?”
“He agreed, of course.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Is that it? Didn’t you speak up?”
“How could I? He was praising me, for godssake.”
Grace sighed and sipped her beer. Shania Twain’s comment was that didn’t impress her much. It didn’t impress Grace much either, but she knew better than to say anything to Alex.
Grace looked toward the middle of the restaurant. Carole was standing behind Never-Been-Laid, her breasts pressed against his back, her ass on view to the world, her head over his shoulder peering at his computer screen.
Alex didn’t follow her gaze like Grace had hoped. “If I were ten years younger, I’d tell Beanie Boy to shove it.”
“If you were ten years younger, you wouldn’t have a mortgage and a Mazda.”
“Dignity shouldn’t be cheaper than a paycheck,” she said.
“So confront him.”
“He doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. He treats all the women like that.”
Grace sighed. They’d walked this road before. Job after job, boyfriend after boyfriend. Alex, for all her looks, was like Joe McCarthy protecting the world from the Red Menace: she saw anti-female everywhere, and most of it, she was convinced, was directed at her.
“You don’t seem very sympathetic,” Alex said.
She wasn’t. She never had been. And with all she had been through in the last month, alone because her two best friends couldn’t bear to talk about the Big C, the lock that was usually on Grace’s mouth wasn’t working.
“I’m not sympathetic,” Grace said. “I’m beginning to think you’re a victim in search of a victimizer.”
“That’s not fair, Grace,” Alex said. “We tolerate this stuff because we were raised in an anti-woman society. It’s gotten better, but it’s not perfect. You tell those Xers stuff like this and they shake their heads. Or the new ones. What’re they calling themselves now? Generation Y? They were raised on Title IX. Hell, they pull off their shirts after winning soccer games. Imagine us doing that.”
“My cousin got arrested in 1977 in Milwaukee on the day Elvis Presley died for playing volleyball,” Grace said. Carole was actually rubbing herself on Never-Been-Laid. His face was the color of the red checks in the tablecloth.
“What?”
Grace turned to Alex. “My cousin. You know, Barbie? She got arrested playing volleyball.”
“They didn’t let girls play volleyball in Milwaukee?”
“It was 90 degrees, and she was playing with a group of guys. They pulled off their shirts because they were hot and sweating, so she did the same. She got arrested for indecent exposure.”
“God,” Alex said. “Did she go to jail?”
“Didn’t even get her day in court.”
“Everyone gets a day in court.”
Grace shook her head. “The judge took one look at Barbie, who was really butch in those days, and said, ‘I’m sick of you girls coming in here and arguing that you should have equal treatment for things that are clearly unequal. I do not establish Public Decency laws. You may show a bit of breast if you’re feeding a child, otherwise you are in violation of — some damn code.’ Barbie used to quote the thing chapter and verse.”
“Then what?” Alex asked.
“Then she got married, had a kid, and started wearing nail polish. She said it wasn’t as much fun to show her breasts legally.”
“See?” Alex said. “Misogyny.”
Grace shrugged. “Society, Alex. Get used to it.”
“That’s the point of your story? We’ve been oppressed for a thousand years and you say, ‘Get used to it’?”
“I say Brandi Chastain pulls off her shirt in front of millions—”
“Showing a sports bra.”
“— and she doesn’t get arrested. I say women head companies all the time. I say things are better now than they were when I was growing up, and I say the only ones who oppress us are ourselves.”
“I say you’re drunk.”
Grace pointed at Carole, who was wet-kissing Never-Been-Laid, her arms wrapped around his neck and her legs wrapped around his waist. “She’s drunk. I’m just speaking out.”
“You never speak out.”
Grace sighed. No one had picked up the glasses and she was tired of looking at that poor drowning dollar bill. There wasn’t going to be any celebration. Everything was the same as it always was — at least to Alex and Carole. But Grace wanted something different.
She got up, threw a five next to the dollar, and picked up her purse.
“Tell me if Carole gets laid,” Grace said, and left.
Outside Grace stopped and took a deep breath of the humid, exhaust-filled air. She could hear the clang of glasses even in the parking lot and the rhythm of Mary Chapin Carpenter praising passionate kisses. Grace had had only one glass of wine and a lousy time, and she wondered why people said old friends were the best friends. They were supposed to raise toasts to her future, now restored. She’d even said the “b” word and Alex hadn’t noticed. It was as if the cancer scare had happened to someone they didn’t even know.
Grace was going to be forty years old in three weeks. Her two best friends were probably planning a version of the same party they had held for her when she turned thirty. A male stripper whose sweaty body repulsed her more than aroused her, too many black balloons, and aging jokes that hadn’t been original the first time around.
Forty years old, an accountant with her own firm, no close family, no boyfriend, and a resident of the same town her whole life. The only time she left was to visit cousins out east, and for what? Obligation?
There was no joy left, if there’d ever been any joy at all.
She got into her sensible Ford Taurus, bought at a used car lot for well under Blue Book, and drove west.
***
It wasn’t until she reached Janesville that she started to call herself crazy, and it wasn’t until she drove into Dubuque that she realized how little tied her to her hometown.
An apartment without even a cat to cozy up to, a business no more successful than a dozen others, and people who still saw her as a teenager wearing granny glasses, braces and hair too long for her face. Grace, who was always there. Grace the steady, Grace the smart. Grace, who helped her friends out of their financial binds, who gave them a shoulder to cry on, and a degree of comfort because their lives weren’t as empty as her own.
When she had told Alex and Carole that her mammogram had come back suspicious, they had looked away. When she told them that she had found a lump, they had looked frightened.
I can’t imagine life without you, Gracie, Carole had whispered.
Imagine it now, Grace thought.
The dawn was breaking when she reached Cedar Rapids, and she wasn’t really tired. But she was practical, had always been practical, and habits of a lifetime didn’t change just because she had run away from home at the age of 39.
She got a hotel room and slept for eight hours, got up, had dinner in a nice steak place, went back to the room and slept some more. When she woke up Sunday morning to bells from the Presbyterian Church across the street, she lay on her back and listened for a good minute before she realized they were playing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” And she smiled then, because Jesus had been a better friend to her in recent years than Alex and Carole ever had.
At least Jesus didn’t tell her his problems when she was praying about hers. If Jesus was self-absorbed he wasn’t obvious about it. And he didn’t seem to care that she hadn’t been inside a church since August of 1978.
The room was chintz, the wallpaper and the bedspread matched, and the painting on the wall
was chosen for its color not for its technique. Grace sat up and wondered what she was doing here, and thought about going home.
To nothing.
So she got in her car and followed the Interstate, through Des Moines, and Lincoln and Cheyenne, places she had only read about, places she had never seen. How could a woman live for forty years and not see the country of her birth? How could a woman do nothing except what she was supposed to from the day she was born until the day she died?
In Salt Lake City, she stared at the Mormon Tabernacle, all white against an azure sky. She sat in her car and watched a groundskeeper maintain the flowers, and remembered how it felt to take her doctor’s call.
A lot of women have irregular mammograms, particularly at your age. The breast tissue is thicker, and often we get clouds.
Clouds.
There were fluffy clouds in the dry desert sky, but they were white and benign. Just like her lump had turned out to be. But for a hellish month, she had thought about that lump, feeling it when she woke out of a sound sleep, wondering if it presaged the beginning of the end. She had never felt her mortality like this before, not even when her mother, the only parent she had known, had died. Not even when she realized there was no one remaining of the generation that had once stood between her and death.
No one talked about these things. No one let her talk about them either. Not just Alex and Carole, but Michael, her second in command at work, or even her doctor, who kept assuring her that she was young and the odds were in her favor.
Young didn’t matter if the cancer had spread through the lymph nodes. When she went in for the lumpectomy almost two weeks ago now, she had felt a curious kind of relief, as if the doctor had removed a tick that had burrowed under her skin. When he had called with the news that the lump was benign, she had thanked him calmly and continued with her day, filing corporate tax returns for a consulting firm.
No one had known the way she felt. Not relieved. No. It was more like she had received a reprieve.
The clouds above the Tabernacle helped calm her. She plugged in her cell phone for the first time in days and listened to the voice mail messages, most of them from Michael, growing increasingly worried about where she was.
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