by Maddy Barone
“My daughter-in-law grows the mint in her herb garden,” Mr. Gray said chattily. “She dries all kinds of herbs to keep over the winter.”
Lisa tried to reply politely, but aborted words turned to sobs. “What did I do wrong?” she wailed. The handkerchief she clenched was Dane’s, and she wanted to throw it into the fire, but they didn’t have tissues in this rotten place.
“Nothing, really.” Mr. Gray patted her arm sadly. “Eddie just saw the PopNation article from the summer of 2014.” He paused delicately.
“The one about me supposedly running around on Brent,” Lisa spat. “That was lies! Brent made it up himself just to get publicity.” Lisa crumpled the handkerchief and thumped a fist onto her thigh. “Did Eddie believe it?”
Mr. Gray looked sad. Maybe guilty? “He may have, in the heat of the moment. But he’ll get over it when you explain.”
“Will he? I’ve never seen him angry. He’s furious! Is it because of this challenge? Eddie told me it’s against the law to steal someone’s wife.”
“Well…” The old man rubbed a hand through his scanty white hair and dropped into his recliner. “Dane didn’t steal you. He challenged Eddie. That’s different. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Of course, Dane had no valid reason to challenge Eddie.”
“What on earth would be a valid reason?”
“Things have changed in fifty years.” The spoon clinked against the old man’s cup as he stirred sugar into his tea. “Women don’t always have the same rights they did in your day. A woman doesn’t always get to choose who to marry.”
“That’s awful! But you didn’t say what would be a valid reason for a fight.”
“Well, a father can give his daughter to the man he chooses, not the man she loves.” Mr. Gray looked down into his tea with a frown. “A challenge can be issued then, and whoever wins gets to be her husband. If the duel between Dane and Eddie had taken place and Dane won, then you would have been Dane’s wife.”
The tea mug he had given her was wonderfully warm. Lisa clenched it in cold hands. “What if I didn’t want to be Dane’s wife? Don’t I get a say?”
“No. This isn’t the Times Before. Like I said, women don’t always have much say nowadays, especially if they don’t have a father or brothers to look after their interests. Hopefully, a father or brother arranges things so the woman is happy. But a woman without male relatives doesn’t have anyone to speak for her. For instance, you don’t have male relatives here to look out for you.”
God, she hated it here. “This world is so crazy! It’s like Women’s Lib never happened. It doesn’t make sense and it’s not fair!”
Mr. Gray’s smile twisted. “I won’t argue about the not fair part, but it does make sense. Forty years ago, only one in three hundred people was a woman. It was a bad time.” His watery blue eyes unfocused as he paused. “People are people. Everyone has good and bad in them. Back then, the bad was magnified. Sometimes a person had to do hard things just to survive. My wife and I walked here from Omaha. Along the way, I learned a lot about how far men will go to get what they want.”
Lisa stared at him. “You walked from Omaha? How far is that?”
Mr. Gray shook his head. “A couple hundred miles. Took us all summer. Might have been less, if we hadn’t had to hide from other people. We made the mistake once of going to a farm to spend the night. It was practically a fort, with a fence around it made from old cars and other junk, and men with shotguns guarding it. At first they told me to get lost. But then they noticed Kylie was a woman and they let us in. There were around thirty men living there, but no women. First they tried to buy Kylie from me. Then they tried to kill me. We had a hell of a time getting out of there.” His eyes were distant, remembering the past. “Other places were like that too.”
“Oh, my God,” said Lisa weakly.
Mr. Gray shook himself. “After that, we avoided people until we came here to Kearney. Ray Madison’s dad was the mayor then. Marty Madison was a hard man, but he tried to make it safe for everyone, especially women. If a man bothered a woman in the slightest way, he was hung. Trials were quick, and sentences were carried out immediately.”
Lisa put her mug down. “That’s horrible!”
“Yes, but it was effective. Kearney is one of the few places where women are safe. From the moment we walked through the gate, Kylie was called Mrs. Gray and treated like a lady. You know how it was in the Times Before. Everyone called everyone by their first names, even if you just met them. It’s not like that here, not anymore. Putting some formality into place sets boundaries. Calling a woman Mrs. Madison reminds us she’s taken and shows respect.”
Lisa stared into the fire. “Shows she’s a possession,” she muttered. “Bought and sold by men.”
“No.” The old man considered. “Well, I guess you would see it that way when Ray had to trade goods for you. But in Kearney, you’ll be respected not only as a woman but also as Eddie’s wife. Other places, one woman marries several men, or the women are shared by all the men in a community. Here, it’s one woman for one man, and marriage is sacred. Ray Madison isn’t quite as harsh as his father was, but a man who misbehaves is likely to be whipped at the least if he bothers a woman. In the last thirty years or more, other towns have made similar rules. From what I’ve heard, this part of Nebraska is considered puritanical.”
“Except for Bride Fights?”
If the old man heard the sarcasm in her voice, he didn’t mention it. “Seems crazy to you, I suppose, but it’s pretty normal here. It’s an accepted, organized way to find a woman with no protection a good husband. Lowlifes aren’t allowed to enter a Bride Fight. We have one every five or ten years or so.” His voice gentled. “Has it been so bad, being married to Eddie?”
Lisa sighed. “Until this afternoon, no. I like Eddie. I think I could love him. But he scared me just now. You know him. Does he have a bad temper?”
Mr. Gray busied himself with the teapot on the table beside his chair. “Well, he does,” he admitted. “But it never lasts long. This is just a tempest in—” He lifted the teapot with a smile. “—a teapot. Can I pour you another cup?”
Lisa handed her mug over. “It’s not my fault. Dane came up to me and wanted to see my phone. I showed it to him. That’s a lot different than me wanting to marry him! I don’t want to marry him. I don’t care what happens, I won’t marry him.”
“Sugar?” When Lisa nodded, he carefully dropped a sugar cube into the tea. “Let me tell you about the cultural mores concerning women and marriage.”
Lisa accepted the tea and stirred. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“If a man challenges a husband and kills him, he gets to keep the woman, regardless of her feelings. If the woman’s brothers or cousins don’t like the challenger, they can back the challenger down by making it a big fight instead of one on one. A challenger could be facing half a dozen men or more instead of just the husband. You don’t have a bunch of relatives to step in, so Dane maybe thought he could win you.”
Lisa sipped the tea, wishing it was something stronger. “Asshole.”
“I’ve been teaching Dane about the Times Before for twenty-five years. The library is also the area’s school, and I’ve been the teacher here since I first came to Kearney. Dane is smart, good-looking, and takes good care of his own little community. He would make someone a good husband.”
“Not me!”
“No, not a woman who is already in love with her husband.”
Lisa slanted a glance at the old man under her eyelashes. She wasn’t in love with Eddie. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him. She wrapped her still cold hands around her cup, feeling like a little girl lost in a big parking lot full of tall cars. She couldn’t find the way home. All the cars looked like Eddie’s cold face when he’d kicked her phone battery and turned away from her. “Eddie hates me,” she whispered.
“No, he doesn’t. He’s a little hurt right now. I think if you talk to him, it will be all right. Bigge
st mistake couples make, I think, is not talking to each other about what’s important. You need to tell him how you feel.” He took a sip of tea and then grinned. “Imagine. Me giving love advice to Lisa Anton! Fifty years ago I never expected to even see you, and here we are.”
Time to change the subject. Lisa said brightly, “So, you were alive back then. I mean, in the Times Before?”
“Yes, I’m about four years younger than you.”
Lisa closed her eyes. That meant he was twenty-four. Or she was seventy-eight. She pretended her shudder was because she was cold.
“I was working on my master’s in library science at Purdue when the nukes hit. Chicago was destroyed. Luckily I was far enough away to miss the worst of it. You could still get the news on TV for a couple weeks in some places, but the terrorists waged cyber warfare, and about everything that depended on computers crashed. And after the plagues started up, there was no one left to clean up the computer worms, and the newscasts and newspapers stopped going out.”
“Plagues.” Lisa shuddered. Had Eddie spoken of them the night before the Bride Fight? “What were the plagues like?”
Mr. Gray’s cup froze on its way to his lips. “You’ve heard of the Black Death in the Middle Ages? One-third of Europe dying in three or four years? Entire villages wiped out?”
Vaguely. History hadn’t been her favorite subject in school, but she nodded.
“The Woman Killer Plague packs a one-two punch.” Lisa was reminded of Eddie’s voice taking on the tone of a schoolteacher the night before the Bride Fight. She recognized now he had been imitating Mr. Gray. “First it attacks the respiratory system. One survivor told me it starts out like the flu. In the first few hours the sufferer will have a headache, muscle aches, fever. Within twelve to twenty-four hours, the fever spikes to dangerous levels. Many die, but some recover. Those who survive Phase One, but don’t recover, go into Phase Two, which is almost always fatal. The virus evolves to attack the smooth muscles in the body, like the bronchi, the esophagus, the stomach, and the uterus. Within only a day or two, the victim dies.”
Lisa put her mug down to wrap her arms around herself. “Oh, my God.” She wasn’t sure if the cool, clinical recital of facts was easier to hear than an impassioned speech or not. “How many died?”
“Who can say for sure? Without long distance communications to verify numbers, I can only guess. But when Kylie and I came to Kearney in 2017, there was a population of less than nine hundred actually living in Kearney, and fewer than one hundred of those were women. In the Times Before, the population of Kearney was around 34,000.” He shrugged. “Do the math.”
Math hadn’t been her favorite subject either, but she didn’t need to be a mathematical genius to know the majority of Kearney hadn’t survived. “Thank God I missed all that.”
Mr. Gray nodded. “If you’d been in California, you would have died. In January of 2015, an earthquake broke most of California off, and it sank into the ocean. We didn’t hear about it for almost a year. News travels slowly these days, but it does travel. When Texas was hit by the asteroid a couple years later, we felt it, but we didn’t know what it was until the traders came through a few months later. A million acres of farm land were destroyed by the asteroid’s fires. If you talk to the folks from Odessa, you’ll find out they think it’s God’s judgment, like Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Plagues. Earthquakes. Asteroids. How many shocks could one woman take? Lisa took deep breaths to control her tears. “Minnesota? Please tell me Minnesota is okay.”
“As far as I know, there were no natural disasters in Minnesota. I heard southern Minnesota was hit hard by the Woman Killer Plague a couple years ago.”
“It’s still around?”
Her voice must have shown her horror, because Mr. Gray patted her arm again. “Sure, we have outbreaks every decade or so, but not like fifty years ago. And we can handle it now. As soon as we get word a case has been confirmed anywhere in the area, all the women are put into quarantine. We don’t risk our women.”
Great. Lisa didn’t want to have to go into quarantine, but the plague sounded like a horrible way to die. Mr. Gray rambled on, talking about his life before and after 2014, of his students, and the public reading of Tom Sawyer he had given last summer, and Lisa listened politely. Reading the classics out loud must count as exciting entertainment nowadays.
She was relieved when Eddie returned, but his face was the cold face of a stranger when he thanked Mr. Gray for babysitting her and told her to follow him. “Eddie—”
“Don’t speak to me right now,” he said curtly. “Follow me.”
Lisa was intimidated, but gripped her hands to still their shaking. “Eddie, I’m not your dog. We need to talk.”
He turned on her with a snarl. “Not now. Just follow me, or I’ll drag you.”
“Fine. Lead on.” That probably came out a little too sarcastic. Too bad. How could this arctic stranger be the same man whose tongue had pushed her to orgasm this morning? She waved a weak good-bye to Mr. Gray and walked behind Eddie all the way back home. A few hours ago they had walked this way hand in hand. Now she was trailing him like his slave, and her anger grew with every step, nearly drowning the fear. In the cruelly competitive world of modeling, Lisa Anton had been known for her good manners, generosity, and general niceness. She was fast losing all three right now. When they got home, she was going to lay down some rules for Eddie to follow.
*
Eddie felt his rage begin to cool as they passed his father’s house. He was glad of it. Lisa’s betrayal hurt him, but he didn’t want to hurt her back. Not physically, at least. He kept seeing those pictures in his mind of his wife with all those other men. Especially he kept seeing the picture of her lying naked in a reclining chair, laughing while another man sucked on her toes. He had sucked her toes last night! She had teased him into it, and the way she had sighed and giggled had made it as pleasurable for him as it had apparently been for her. Damn her.
His sister Bree ran down the back steps of their parents’ house. “Eddie!” she called. “You’ll never guess what.”
“Not now, Bree!” he snapped, striding past her without a pause.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Lisa shrug apologetically at Bree. That made him angry because it made it seem he had something to apologize for. He opened the door to their house and gestured Lisa in. She went into the kitchen and hung her purse over the back of a chair. She sat down at the table, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him with cool inquiry. That expression re-ignited his ire. He clenched his fists and paced in front of her to calm his flaring temper. She said nothing, looking at him with such unruffled calm that a suppressed growl hurt his throat. But he forced himself to use a quiet voice.
“Would you care to explain what you were doing with Dane?”
She pursed her pink lips. “I was showing him my phone.”
“Really.” Eddie almost managed to keep his voice steady. He paced four steps to the left, four steps to the right, over and over. “And that’s why he decided he wanted to challenge me for you?”
Lisa’s eyes followed him across the floor and back. “I don’t know why he did that. I didn’t want him to.”
The pain boiling up in his heart made him pace faster. “How many husbands have you had?”
She lifted her open palms up like an offering. “Only one. You, Eddie. I’ve never been married before.”
He stopped and whirled on her, shouting, “But you’ve been with other men! The things we do in bed you’ve done with them!”
“Yes.” Lisa’s voice was small but steady.
“Oh, God.” His clenched fists pressed against his forehead, and his heartbreak quivered in his voice. “Why? Lisa, why?”
He saw her cheek twitch as if she were biting it. “Eddie, it was different then. Everybody did it.”
“So it didn’t mean anything to you? You gave yourself away because … it felt good? You were bored? You were lonely?” He saw her c
ringe slightly at his rising voice and jerked his temper back. “Why, Lisa?”
“First of all, that is in the past. It has nothing to do with you. In the Times Before, a woman could be with any man she wanted. I didn’t do anything wrong. I made love with men I felt something for. I thought they loved me too.”
“What about Brent?” He spat the name. “He loved you. And you let another man suck your toes.”
Her cool façade cracked. She sat up straighter in the chair. “No. That was a lie. He never loved me. He used me. And the picture in the magazine? That was not me. Brent hired a man, and a woman who looked a little like me, and let the paparazzi know—anonymously!—where they could be found. I was in the Caribbean at the time, but I was not with a man!”
“Brent lied? Why would he lie? It would make him look like a weak fool who couldn’t keep his woman satisfied.”
Lisa made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “I wish I could have thrown that in his face. It would have been true too. Brent!” Bitter disgust dripped off the name. “No, he broke the story so people would feel sorry for him. Poor, faithful Brent, whose girlfriend turned out to be cheating on him. Except the truth was she really loved him and thought he loved her. You know what he got out of the deal? A reality TV show. And a lawsuit. I was stupid to file the lawsuit. It would probably just get him higher ratings.”
Eddie couldn’t follow half of what she said, but he understood the bitterness in her voice well enough. His own anger still burned like a sullen coal inside him. “But Brent wasn’t the only man you were with. There were many.”
“So?” Lisa’s eyes were angry when they met his. “That was before I ever knew you.”
“You liked it,” he accused.
“Of course I liked it. I like sex. Haven’t you noticed?”
The embers of his anger burst into flame at her taunt. He hardly knew what he was doing when he yanked her up out of the chair and pinned her against the kitchen wall. It was only when he heard the snarl rumbling in his chest he realized how close he was to the forbidden change. He ran a quick tongue over his teeth, relieved to find them unchanged. A glance at his fingertips reassured him his claws hadn’t popped out. He thumped his forehead into the wall beside her face.
