At Risk

by Judith E. French

  She cooked sauce in a heavy copper pot that had been passed down from her great-grandmother Clarke and only God knew how many more greats. The pot was far bigger than Liz needed, but it was a fixture in the old kitchen, resting when not in use in a place of honor on top of a built-in, countertop-high wooden cupboard. Above the kettle were open shelves, as nicked and scarred by the passing years as the other woodwork in the kitchen. Once painted yellow, the bull pine had achieved a dark patina that Liz thought perfectly matched the faded redbrick floor.

  Neither the kitchen nor the copper pot found favor with Amelia, but the spacious old room with exposed beams and deep fireplace suited Liz fine. When she’d married Russell, they shared a new apartment on the third floor just outside of Wilmington. The kitchen had been all electric, tiny, and equipped with the latest appliances. The dishwasher was the only thing she missed here at the farm. Washing dishes had never been a favorite chore, and in every apartment or condo she’d occupied after the divorce, the first thing she asked was whether there was a dishwasher. Here, dishes were washed and usually air dried in the fifty-inch, double granite sink under the casement windows that overlooked the water.

  Liz hummed as she dropped sliced mushrooms and a pinch of cinnamon into the spaghetti sauce. Stainless-steel state-of-the-art dishwasher or not, she wouldn’t trade her kitchen for Amelia’s modern one. And she wouldn’t swap Clarke’s Purchase for any house she’d ever seen. With all its sloping floors and creaking stairs, this was home. She wasn’t about to let trash like Cameron Whitaker or Wayne Boyd run her off her farm.

  For the first time, she thought about what it would be like to have another child. Katie hadn’t been able to grow up here, and she was almost on her own anyway. Chances were, she’d never come home to live in the old house. And if Katie didn’t, who would?

  But Jack had told her that he was sterile.

  Liz took a clean spoon, dipped it in the sauce, and blew it cool. A little more pepper, she thought. She’d have at least four quarts when it was done. Thank God for freezers. She’d freeze what was left and think about having some of her students over for spaghetti before finals. They could relax, stuff themselves, and go over a few points she wanted them to remember.

  A baby? Was she totally out of her mind?

  Jack couldn’t father a child, but maybe Michael could . . .

  What was she thinking? Had the shock of Tracy’s murder affected her sanity? But Sydney’s adopted twins weren’t two yet, and Sydney was only three years younger than she was. It wasn’t as though she were a senior citizen. Clarke women reached puberty late and kept their ability to have children until nearly fifty. She had at least four, maybe six or seven years of fertility left, but she’d never expected to hear that biological clock ticking again.

  “I’ve been inhaling oregano,” Liz muttered to Heidi. “I skipped lunch and I must be light-headed. It’s temporary insanity. A plate of spaghetti, and the thought will never darken my head again.” She stirred the sauce with a long-handled wooden spoon and began to sing a shameless ditty her father had taught her when she was little.

  Shadows of twilight stretched across the back yard, but the sweet scent of wisteria and the brassy scolding of a Carolina wren drifted through the open window. Liz leaned on the granite sink and let the last remnants of tension drain out of her neck and shoulders. She stood there for several minutes, feeling at peace for the first time since Tracy’s death.

  . . . Until her reverie was broken by the phone.

  She considered running upstairs to check Caller ID or just letting voice mail pick up, but she thought it might be Jack. He’d said not to expect him until nine, but she took the chance and answered.

  “Liz!”

  Russell. She almost hung up without speaking to him, but her temper got the best of her. “Do I have to change my number to get you to stop calling?” she asked.

  “Liz, please. Listen to me. I really need—”

  “I don’t care what you really need. I am not going to help you. What do I have to say to make you understand? No, Russell. There is nothing you could say that would influence my decision. For Katie’s sake, can’t we be civilized about this?”

  Russell’s voice was thick. He’d been drinking and was about to burst into tears. His nose always ran when he cried, and thoughts of it were more than Liz wanted to consider. “Please, Liz. You don’t understand. This is—”

  “This is good-bye, Russell. And if you call me again, I’ll start leaving sheep heads in your mailbox or calling your creditors and telling them to blacklist your name.” She hung the phone up, spent two minutes obsessing about what a pest her ex was, and began to set the table.

  “We will not allow Russell Montgomery to ruin our evening, will we?” she said to Muffin, the cat, who sat on a step halfway up the back stairs glaring at the German shepherd. “Russell and Cameron and Wayne Boyd will all have a special corner in hell, and we will not give them the dignity of any more consideration.”

  When the napkins were folded, candles arranged in their pewter holders, and the salad prepared, Liz put a bottle of wine in the refrigerator to cool and arranged the fresh flowers she’d bought at Sam’s Club in a blue granite-ware pitcher.

  She’d showered when she’d come home from Michael’s, but she needed to put on some makeup and find something special to wear. She was looking forward to dinner, but even more to what was inevitable afterward. This time, she and Jack would make love in her bed, on clean sheets, with no worry about privacy or time constraints.

  A night of good food, laughter, cool wine, and hot sex was exactly what the doctor ordered. Everything else could wait until tomorrow.

  Chapter Ten

  Tiffany turned the key again. This time, the motor didn’t make that ee-ee-ee sound—meaning the battery was as dead as a used condom. “Damn! Damn!” She slammed the wheel of her 1987 land barge with her fist. “Damn piece of shit!” She winced as the nail on her right index finger snapped off at the quick.

  “Hell!” Was it bleeding? The nail hung by a fragment and hurt like the dickens. She bit the remainder of the attached nail between her teeth, chewed it off, and spat it out. “Great, just great.” These were her nails too, none of those fake jobs. The missing nail would take months to grow out, and she’d just done them this morning. Three coats of Plum Pearl Lustre!

  Tiffany grabbed her purse, her cigarettes, and the two-liter bottle of Code Red she’d just picked up at Dora’s Stop’n’ Shop, climbed out of the aging hardtop, and slammed the door. The catch didn’t hold, and the door swung open a few inches—as usual. “Shit!” She wasn’t in the mood. Leaving the door ajar, she began to walk south.

  Route 9 was a desolate blacktop that snaked through marsh, woods, and overgrown farm fields along the shore of the Delaware. Nothing but salt water and mudflats on her left—Tiffany wasn’t certain where the river became bay—and empty wetlands on her right.

  Two crotch rockets shrieked past, going eighty if they were moving at all. She hated the cheap foreign motorcycles. Give her an honest Harley any day. Her favorite cousin, J.J., had gotten creamed on one of the slick imports the first month he’d owned it. He’d hit a tree going ninety, and his brother told her that there wasn’t enough left of J.J. and the red bike to fill a bushel basket.

  Tiffany had to scramble into knee-high grass to keep from being run down as the motorcycles passed. Bastards! They didn’t care who they killed so long as they had their thrill ride. One dead squirrel on the road, and they’d be shit on toast. Damn if they’d take her with them.

  It would be dark soon, and Aunt Carol’s doublewide was a good five miles away, maybe six. Her aunt had to be at work at the Harrington Slots by nine. Tiffany had been late to watch the kids twice this week, and if she was late again, Aunt Carol would fire her. Without this job, the electric in the trailer would go the way of the telephone: Shut off for nonpayment.

  She cursed Kenny with every step. He’d sworn the old Caddie was a steal despite the pukey
two-tone paint job. Claimed that the odometer reading of 86,432 miles was for real, not rolled over! Swore that the battery was cherry! “Piece of shit,” she muttered again. “He can put the Caddy where the sun don’t shine!”

  The damn soda was getting heavy, and it was hard to carry without a bag, but Tiffany hated to abandon it along the road. She hadn’t opened it yet, and the Code Red had been on special. Plus she’d been lucky enough to find a fifty-cent coupon in the parking lot, and when could you get two liters for eighty-nine cents at Dora’s Stop’n’ Shop? Hell’s bells, Dora hiked everything practically double. The last time Tiffany ran out of tampons, she had to pay $2.79 for a little sample pack that would have been a buck at the Big Wall.

  Tiffany wished she’d thought to lock the Code Red in the trunk. She could drink some, but it was warm. Nothing worse than warm soda unless it was flat soda. And if she drank it, suppose she had to pee? What was she supposed to do, hide in the poison ivy? Hell, on this godforsaken road, she wouldn’t even have tires on the Caddie when she got back—and she was worried about two liters of Mountain Dew?

  The waistband on her jean shorts was tight, and the straps on her new wedge sandals rubbed her heels with every step. The shoes were white imitation leather and already grass-stained. She’d had to hide tips from Kenny for three weeks to buy the shoes. Had to lie and tell him her mom had bought them for herself and found out they were too small. A damn shame when a girl couldn’t buy sandals with her own money without taking crap from her old man. Like she wasn’t working two nothin’ jobs, and him still looking for something right.

  Her sister had warned her that Kenny was trailer trash who managed to get his lazy ass fired from two perfectly good jobs in the past six months. Maybe Amber was right. Maybe she should start sockin’ a little bit away every week until she could buy her own wheels. Then she could crash with Amber or Aunt Carol until she saved money for the deposit on a place of her own.

  If she had a cell phone, she could have called Aunt Carol or even Pops. Her granddad would come rescue her—if he wasn’t sleeping off a six-pack. What she needed was one of those voice phones, the kind you didn’t need to punch in numbers but could just say “Home” or “Carol’s,” not the cheap-ass one Kenny had bought her for Christmas and then smashed against the wall when he found out you had to pay every month to use it.

  As she crossed a concrete bridge over a muddy creek, another car rounded the bend toward her, and Tiffany moved over against the wall. The car slowed and came to a stop. The driver leaned across and rolled down the front passenger window.

  “Need a lift?”

  Tiffany considered brushing him off, but he looked normal, not some perv. Haircut, shaved. Cute, too. “My car died on me,” she said cautiously. “You got a cell? Maybe you could call my aunt to come get me. It’s not a pay call.”

  “Sorry. No phone.” He turned off the ignition. She saw that he had an open can of Bud in one hand. “How far is your car? Maybe I could do something with it.”

  “Yeah, push it off into the swamp.”

  He chuckled. “That bad, huh?”

  “You don’t want to know.” A mosquito drilled into her left thigh, and she slapped it. It was still light enough to see the smear of blood on her bare leg.

  “Ouch,” he said. “Gonna be a bad year for them. I told my wife to spray the kids good when they go out to play.”

  “Got a wife, huh?” Tiffany wondered why every working guy in the state was already taken. Maybe the good guys were invisible unless you had special eyeglasses, like 3-D ones, and if you didn’t own them, all you could see were jerks. If anybody needed a pair, she did.

  “Mosquitoes are nothing to fool with,” he said. “They keep talking about shit you can get from mosquito bites. Lyme and sleeping sickness.”

  “I think that’s ticks,” Tiffany leaned on the open window and glanced around the interior. The car was clean. No trash, no smell of pot. Nothing on the front seat but a cooler with five unopened beers. She was suddenly thirsty.

  “I could call somebody for you when I get home,” the guy offered. Then he appeared to notice her looking at the beer. “Thirsty?”

  “I wouldn’t say no to a cold one,” she admitted, lifting one foot to ease the pressure on her heel. She knew she must have a blister. She reached down and touched it. Yeah, a blister. She could feel the gooey bubble.

  “Help yourself. I’m Jim Carny. My wife and I just bought a house outside of Delaware City. Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s a seventies bi-level with a little wooden bridge on the lawn.”

  He smiled, and she noticed that he had good teeth. Really white, as if he had just used those strips. He didn’t look like a guy who’d paste paper strips on his teeth at night. Maybe he was just born with nice, straight teeth. Lucky bastard. She had a mouth full of cavities and no money to get them filled. Not that she was anxious to climb into a dentist’s chair. She hated dentists with a passion.

  “The bridge doesn’t go anywhere yet,” he said.

  “Bridge?”

  “On our front lawn,” he reminded her. “Terry’s got this cutout of a boy with a fishing pole in front of the bridge. But her heart’s set on one of those fish ponds, the kind where you dig a hole and lay plastic over it to fill it with real water.”

  “Terry’s your wife?”

  “Yeah. She’s a checker in the new Super G in Bear.”

  Another mosquito circled. Tiffany swatted it away from her face. “I really need to get to my aunt’s,” she said. “I’m supposed to watch her two foster kids tonight while she’s at work. One’s twelve, and Aunt Carol should be able to leave them alone. But the kids aren’t wound too tight, and the state’s funny. They’ll take them away if she doesn’t do everything just right. It’s only about four miles back that way. Could you . . .”

  “No problem. Hop in. I’d have offered, but I didn’t want to come on like some . . . Hell, I could be a serial killer, for all you know.”

  “Right.” Tiffany laughed. “And so could I. Remember that woman in Florida who was shooting and robbing guys along the interstate? They made a movie about her.”

  Jim’s expression sobered. “Whoa.” He held up an open hand. “I’m just on my way home from work. I’m not looking for anything—”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” Tiffany said, unlatching the door and moving the cooler to the floor so she could get in. “No guns, no knives. But I warn you, I do have a warm bottle of Mountain Dew, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

  He laughed and she laughed with him, breaking the tension. “Roll up that window, if you don’t mind,” he said. “No sense letting all the mosquitoes in.”

  “I’m Tiffany Henderson,” she said, doing as he asked. Once the window was up, she popped the top on the Bud. She took a sip. The beer was cold and wet, and it went down easy. “I really appreciate this.”

  “So you baby-sit for your aunt regularly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like kids, do you?”

  “Not particularly. These two she’s got now are real hellions. You know how foster kids are.”

  “Trouble, I guess. They probably get moved around a lot.”

  “No wonder. If they were mine, I’d probably run out on them too. The oldest one’s real weird. Likes to play with matches. That’s the main reason my aunt can’t leave them alone.”

  “Good of her to take them in, though.”

  “Yeah, I guess. The state check comes regular. Pays her rent.” Tiffany’s foot struck something, and she glanced down.

  “That in your way? Sorry.” Jim reached down and lifted what looked like a black briefcase off the floor and tossed it on the backseat. He started the car and drove across the bridge. “It’s a laptop. A computer,” he explained.

  “That little thing?”

  “My wife’s. She does all this e-mail stuff with her friends. I think it’s a waste of time, but then, I don’t even know how to turn the damn thing on. Usually she uses this car, but it needed gas, so she took m
y truck this morning.”

  “I don’t know nothing about computers,” Tiffany said. “I was thinkin’ about gettin’ my GED, study typing and stuff. Get a job in a bank, or maybe some doctor’s office. Sit on my ass all day.” She relaxed a little and fastened the seat belt. The little compact still had a new-car smell. She could see herself behind the wheel of one of these. Probably got good gas mileage. Anything would be better than the land barge. When it was running, she couldn’t get more than ten miles to the gallon on it. “Where do you work?”

  Jim turned into a farm lane and backed onto the road. “The county. Soil service.” He put the vehicle in drive and recrossed the bridge.

  “Oh. Are they hiring? My boyfriend’s looking for a job.”

  “They might be. The county always needs summer help. The pay isn’t bad, but no benefits for temporary workers.”

  “That’s okay. Kenny hasn’t had a job with health coverage yet.” Tiffany kept well over on the seat next to the door. Jim kept his hands on the wheel and drove at a reasonable speed, not too fast and not too slow. “Honestly, I appreciate this,” she said. “You saved my life.”

  “No trouble. Just don’t tell my wife. She’s pregnant with our third child, and she gets a little jealous if she thinks I’m looking at a pretty girl.”

  Tiffany smiled and took another sip as a warm glow spread through her chest. She’d been with Kenny for two years, ever since she’d quit high school in her senior year. He hadn’t called her pretty since the first few weeks they’d lived together. She sat up a little straighter and crossed her legs. So long as Jim wasn’t coming on to her, she didn’t mind showing off her best asset.

  “Uh-oh.” Jim took his foot off the gas and turned the wheel hard right. The car rolled off the hardtop and down a steep incline.