by Jeff Abbott
“Of course, Jordy, but we must present a united front. I’ve gone to the county courthouse and found out who all owns the land these Yankees are after. It’s you, me, Bob Don Goertz—” (Here she harrumphed—had the gossip about my relationship with Bob Don reached her? We had made no formal announcements, but Junebug, Candace, and a few others in town knew.) After clearing her throat, she continued: “Dee Loudermilk, and your uncle Bidwell.”
I groaned at the thought of meeting with that group. First of all, let me clarify that Bidwell Poteet is no longer my uncle, although I may call him that just for purposes of torture. Uncle Bid redefines the term small-town shyster. He is possibly the least ethical lawyer produced by the Texas education system, which has never been shortchanged when it comes to producing lousy lawyers. But I liked Dee Loudermilk—she was the mayor’s wife, and although her husband was deadly dull, I enjoyed Dee’s wry sense of humor. I dreaded the thought of Bob Don and Bid together. Bid enjoyed bad-mouthing Bob Don (in his ever so subtle fashion—as subtle as a skeeter bite on the end of your nose).
“Is this really necessary, Miss Twyla? Maybe Lorna and this Greg Callahan will change their minds about buying the land if they see the town’s not behind them.”
“Hardly.” Miss Twyla huffed. “They’ve already offered me an obscene sum for my acres.”
An obscene sum? I could use that and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’d given up a lot, career-wise, to return to Mirabeau, and librarians don’t get paid diddly. Sister wasn’t exactly opening up a numbered Swiss bank account with her earnings at the End of the Road truck stop either. I felt uncomfortable enough with letting Bob Don hire a part-time nurse to take care of Mama. Condos on the river didn’t sound so bad.
“I have taken further action.” Miss Twyla stood and opened the door to my office. “Nina, please, join us.” She widened the door slightly to admit a young woman.
My first thought was: Oh, God, she’s one of those hippie herbalists. Mirabeau’s had their share. These folks (generally women) come out to small towns like Mirabeau and set up shop selling herbs to the few tourists that wander off Highway 71 and stop in Mirabeau. God knows the locals won’t buy their botanicals; those folks who don’t believe in herbal medicine won’t touch them and those who do know where to find them in the surrounding countryside.
The woman looked a bit older than me, perhaps in her midthirties. She was plain and her attire didn’t help much in my opinion. Her garb—a long, shapeless beige dress—gave her the look of a modern-day shepherdess. A series of sand dollars, shells, and beads ensconced her thin, dark throat; she could have decorated a beach all by herself. Her coal-black hair was cut short and not stylishly. The dark hue of her complexion suggested Hispanic ancestry, and her black eyes gleamed with intelligence behind wire-rim frames. She greeted me with an earthy smile.
“Jordy, this is Nina Hernandez. She’s an environmental activist from Austin. Nina, this is our town librarian, Jordy Poteet. Jordy also owns some of the land that those Yankees want.”
I felt Nina Hernandez’s eyes coolly assessing me, as though measuring me for some internal scale of worth. She gave my hand a two-handed shake. “I hope that you will stand firm, Mr. Poteet. Folks like Intraglobal Development will stop at nothing to get what they want.”
“Intraglobal?”
“I take it that Miss Twyla has told you about Wiercinski and Callahan being in town.”
“You make them sound like foreign agents,” I said.
Nina sank into a chair next to Miss Twyla. “Don’t underestimate these people. I’ve dealt with Callahan before. He’s cool, ruthless, and determined to win.” I wondered if she could be described the same way. The intense gleam in her eyes screamed Type-A personality, even if she was a tree hugger. “We already suspect that they’ve been in touch with your uncle and with the mayor’s wife.”
“Already? How long have these folks been in town?” I asked. Lorna stalking Mirabeau, possibly exchanging gossip with my friends and family—horrible thought. I hope she spoke kindly of me.
“Wiercinski just arrived this morning. Callahan’s been here two days, staying at the Mirabeau B. Lamar Bed-and-Breakfast” Nina jerked her head toward Miss Twyla like an officer commending a private. “We can thank Miss Twyla here for ferreting out that information.” Miss Twyla looked inordinately pleased with herself. I had to admit that Nina chose her allies well.
“Now, Mr. Poteet, we’ll have to mobilize to fight Intraglobal. Callahan will certainly be rallying the forces of irresponsible development to combat us.” The beads around her neck jangled gently, in odd counterpoint to her strident tone.
Miss Twyla told Nina that I was to meet with Lorna this evening. Nina eyed me like someone prodding Daniel into the lion’s den.
“I don’t know much about Wiercinski,” Nina said, half to herself, “but she’s got to be tough if Callahan hired her. He chews broken glass for dinner. Now, what you’ve got to do, Mr. Poteet, is—”
I don’t usually interrupt folks, but for her I made an exception. I smiled. “Look, Ms. Hernandez. I’m sure your concern for Mirabeau is genuine. But I’ve known Lorna Wiercinski for a long time. I will listen to her business proposition and then make my own decision.”
She stared at me like I’d leaned over and spat in her face. “I suppose you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but let me assure you—”
“Ms. Hernandez, I don’t take kindly to outsiders coming into Mirabeau—whether to buy land from us or talk us out of selling it—and then thinking we’re a bunch of hicks who can’t think independently and need to be told what to do.” I stood and nodded at Miss Twyla, who was looking a mite uncomfortable. “I’ll be glad to talk to you, hear y’all’s side, after I’ve talked to Lorna.”
“Lorna? Already on a first-name basis with the enemy, are you, Mr. Poteet?” Nina’s smile faded.
“Yes, ma’am, I am.” I wasn’t about to admit to having slept with the enemy. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to evaluate both sides. Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I have work to do.”
Miss Twyla gathered her purse close to her. “Jordy, the meeting’s at eight tonight. At my house. I certainly hope you will be there.”
“I’ll consider it, Miss Twyla.” I watched as the two women left, marching arm in arm to defeat the forces of development. That was all Miss Twyla needed: another cause.
I sat back down at my desk, but between thoughts of Candace and Lorna, I didn’t get much work done.
* * *
Much to my surprise when I got home, Sister was getting ready to work a rare late shift. She had promised to cover for a friend. At the truck stop, Sister cooks the kind of comfort foods that truckers run speed traps for: chicken-fried steaks, catfish, thick jalapeño cornbread, butter beans with chunks of ham. It’s amazing that her twelve-year-old boy Mark and I aren’t fatter than hogs. I found her in the kitchen, sticking a pan of chicken enchiladas in the stove.
I leaned down and kissed the top of her head. She straightened and forced a smile. “Hey. Your arm feeling better?” She’d been terrorizing the hospital staff into taking excellent care of me. And now that her shock over my close call had subsided, she’d turned to her usual pastime: teasing me.
“If you were sleeping in your own bed, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt.” She yanked her white cook’s uniform straight and ran a hand through her thick blonde hair. She’s still one of the prettiest women in Mirabeau, with her high cheekbones and determined mouth, but she doesn’t seem interested in getting hooked up again. After the rotten way her husband abandoned her, I wasn’t surprised. “Good thing your hooter didn’t get blown off. ‘Course, small targets tend to survive.”
“Very funny.” I enjoyed having Sister tease me again. She’d suffered a shock, weeks ago, when I’d had to tell her about Mama and Bob Don. I suppose that technically we were only half sister and half brother now, but when you’ve been raised together you don’t feel much different about each other. P
lus, I wasn’t about to start calling her Half Sister. Just doesn’t sound right, you know.
I quickly filled her in on what had happened with Lorna and Nina Hernandez. Sister’s lovely green eyes widened. She’d heard enough about Lorna when I lived up in Boston.
“That’s what you get for dating a Yankee, Jordy,” she admonished me.
“I beg your pardon?”
Sister looked at me like I was the town idiot. “For God’s sakes, you were the one that complained Yankees were kind of brusque and rude and made fun of your accent That just shows how unpleasant they can be. Well, this Lorna YMCA-or-whatever-her-name-is gets hold of a nice Southern boy who’s been raised right and is more than presentable. I’m sure you treated her nicer than any of those Yankee fellers ever did. Why wouldn’t she track you down and tree you like a coon?”
“Lorna’s not the tracking kind, Sister.”
“She’s here, ain’t she?” With that, Sister sailed out of the room in triumph. “You and Clo can eat those chicken enchiladas for supper. Mark’s staying at his friend Randy’s tonight. I’ll be back at eleven.” The porch door slammed behind her.
I pulled a cold bottle of Celis from the fridge and shook two Tylenol out of a bottle. Gulping them down, I sipped the beer.
“You sure are stupid, taking those with alcohol,” a voice rumbled behind me. I put on my best smile and turned to face my own house’s gentle ogre.
Clo Butterfield watched me, her beefy dark arms folded across her ample chest. Her black face was set in half stern disapproval, half amusement. Her salt-and-pepper hair was set in an improbable perm. I shook the little bottle of capsules at her.
“It doesn’t say anything about that on the bottle,” I said defensively.
Clo snorted, deep and low like a bull scrutinizing an amateur matador. “Ever-body knows you don’t take drugs with alcohol. Didn’t they teach you nothin’ at college?”
I pointed with the bottom of my beer bottle at the oven. “Sister left some enchiladas cooking in there for our dinner.”
“Thanks, but I got a nose. I can smell ‘em.” She frowned at my arm and my sling. “Can’t believe the foolishness in this town, some idiot blowing up mailboxes. Come on upstairs. Let me look at your bandage, see if it needs changing.” I followed our angel of mercy up the stairs, her white uniform tight across her heavy body.
“How’s Mama?” I asked.
“Fine. Same as when you left here.” If Clo disapproved of my nocturnal wanderings to Candace’s bed, she wasn’t going to say so outright. I followed her down to Mama’s room, and we both stood in the doorway, looking in on my mother, trapped inside her private, shrinking world.
She sat in her bed, a colorful quilt made by her own mother tossed lightly across her legs. She didn’t seem to feel the July heat. Clo had just washed and combed Mama’s hair, and she looked like a small child, fresh from an afternoon swim in the creek. She stared, like a blind person would, at the small color television on her dresser. She couldn’t stand the volume turned up loud, so the Channel 36 news anchor whispered his late-breaking stories to her uncaring ears. Her hand moved repetitively across the quilt, caught in a loop of echoes she could not break. My throat doesn’t tighten anymore when I see Mama like this. I’ve learned to play the waiting game of Alzheimer’s, reluctantly acknowledging that she will never recover and waiting for the day when she breathes her last. I sometimes hope for it so I can have more memories of her as she was, rather than have them supplanted by memories of the shell she is now.
In the past Mama would have been on her feet in a moment, demanding to know why my arm was in a sling, comforting me far beyond my need for it, doctoring me herself, making me laugh at her worry, smothering her little boy with a nearly irritating level of attention. Now she stared at me, through me, no more seeing the sling on my arm and her nurse standing next to me than she did air itself.
Clo spoke to her in a far gentler tone than she’d ever used with me or Sister. “Anne, Jordy’s come home for supper.”
Mama didn’t even nod. She glanced at me as though I were a bothersome stranger and turned her attention to the television. My throat tensed. Mama’s not even talking as much as she used to, when her babblings were annoying and I’d have to hold my patience to keep from pulling my ears off. Now the silence she offered was worse, like the quiet of a grave. I went over to her and gently squeezed her hand. She kept watching the screen.
Clo was undeterred. “I’ll feed you your supper in a minute, Anne. I’m gonna take a look at Jordy. He hurt his arm out fighting organized crime.” I smiled, but Mama did not. Today she was uninterested in my adventures.
With Clo following, I went to my own room. Her ministrations did not take long. She examined my stitches critically, made a noise in her throat, cleaned the wound with an antiseptic wipe from her nurse’s bag, and put on a fresh bandage. “This damn world. Some say folks like your mama are crazy, but someone who blows up mailboxes, they the loony ones.” She pressed the bandage onto my skin. “Weren’t you scared?”
“I was too surprised. Now, today, that was scary.” I told Clo about Lorna’s reappearance in my life, Candace’s disapproval, and my rocky meeting with Miss Twyla and Nina Hernandez.
“Dating Yankees. Don’t you know better than that?” she finally opined.
“You don’t think I was celibate all that time up there, do you?” I eased my arm into a fresh shirt.
“I think what you need, boy, is a little celibacy. Do you some good. Then you don’t have womenfolk arguing over you. Celibacy never killed a man.”
“Well, I have a feeling that if Candace has her way, I’ll be home alone for weeks to come.”
“Builds character,” Clo rumbled. She patted my good shoulder and moved toward the door. “I’ll go get Anne’s dinner.”
“Speaking of Yankees,” I ventured, “my old girlfriend’s coming over tonight. Apparently she has a business proposition for me.”
“I’ll just bet she does.” Clo nodded. “Monkey business, most likely.”
“I think I’ll invite her to dinner. Sister made enough enchiladas for us all.”
Clo didn’t argue. “Let me know if your shoulder bothers you any. You staying here tonight?”
I pondered the possibilities. “Yeah, I am.” I didn’t imagine Candace was particularly aching to have me climb into her bed. Plus I needed some time to think.
The doorbell rang. I hate it when your past catches up with you.
CHAPTER THREE
LORNA STOOD BEHIND A BIG BOUQUET OF brightly colored flowers—a gift for Mama. The introductions were quick and to the point. Clo sized up Lorna and the flowers, made polite noises, and excused herself to go feed dinner to Mama up in her room. Lorna still wore her business suit (and looked as uncomfortable as anyone in a suit in the dead of Texas summer would be). She stood in the middle of the living room, shifting from foot to foot, casting her eyes over the white wicker furniture, the mural of family photos that covered one wall, and the antique coffee table that seemed to hold a patina of dust as part of its finish. I offered her a beer and she accepted.
“Thanks for the flowers,” I said, my voice sounding awkward. “It was real thoughtful of you.” I headed into the kitchen.
“You’re welcome. The old homestead isn’t exactly what I thought it would be,” she called to me as I knelt before the fridge, getting a couple of brews.
“What did you expect?’ I called back.
“A ranch, maybe, like in Giant. Not all these trees and greenery and rivers. God knows it’s hot and humid enough. Where’s the tumbleweeds and the dust devils?”
“You’re too far east, Lorna. Texas is big, remember? Not all of it looks like the backlot of a John Wayne movie.” I returned to the living room and caught her giggling over an old school picture of me; I was smiling with my two front teeth noticeably absent.
‘Toothless wonder with a cowlick. You look like Dennis the Menace,” she said, her clipped Boston accent flattening the v
owels and cutting words abruptly. I hadn’t heard anyone talk like her in quite a while, and memories started crouching, ready to spring. I pushed them back.
I handed her a cold bottle of Celis beer and she raised it in toast. ‘To seeing you again,” she said softly. I quickly clinked my bottle against hers, unsure if I should return the toast. We settled on the couch.
She sipped cautiously and made a face. “What’s this?”
“Belgian-style beer. Brewed in Austin,” I said.
She sipped again, held the beer in her mouth, shrugged, and swallowed. It was an action so typical of her that I felt we’d been apart mere minutes rather than months. I forced my eyes away from her and stared at Mama’s empty chair until she spoke.
“Beljun-staaaahl beeeyur,” she repeated, laughing. “My God, I don’t mean to razz you, sweetie, but your accent’s gotten wicked thick. You sound like an extra from The Dukes of Hazzard.”
“Did you pahk the cah out by the yahd?” I parried, imitating her Boston tones. “I didn’t realize that was the King’s English dripping from your tongue.”
She laughed good-naturedly, a booming, hearty sound. Lorna never did do anything halfway. “You’re ragging back. The old Jordan. I guess your little Scarlett O’Hara didn’t castrate you after all.”
I shrugged, enjoying the banter despite myself. “She doesn’t want to lose a good thing.”
“She’s cute—I’ll give her that. I thought she might stamp her foot and say ‘fiddle-dee-dee,’ but she must be made of sterner stuff than I gave her credit for.” She sipped at her beer. “If I’d only had a camera to capture your expression when you saw me. Sorry if I shocked you, but you know I always like to make an entrance.”
“You always prided yourself on surprising me, Lorna. And thanks for the book donation.”
She laughed again. “You know I’m devoted to fine literature. And you still surprise me, Jordan. Staying here.” She glanced around the room. “Don’t get me wrong. Your mother’s home is quaint. Are you really happy living here?”
