by Dan Padavona
He pushed forward, and she moaned into his shoulder. His dangerous little secret. His rose, alluring yet riddled with thorns that would tear flesh if he gripped it too tightly.
Sunbeams through the bedroom window illuminated motes of dust, which danced in delight as the cot began to knock against the wall. As the worn bed springs sang to an increasing tempo, he felt her quiver. His body shook, and they were joined together in one moment of glory.
Then he was done.
Katy Lawrence collapsed against the mattress, the long curls of her dark hair fanned out across his pillow like a shawl. She smiled at the boy, but there was no contentedness in her eyes.
Over his shoulder she could see the cheap digital alarm clock next to his television. It read 12:23 pm. There was a time, she recalled, when she marked the day by what class she was skipping. But it had been over a year since she walked into Storberry Central School.
She was seventeen years old and still in the ninth grade. Not that any teacher knew she was a ninth grader, for she attended school so rarely that she was never missed after she quit altogether. Her father never noticed, or never cared. And her mother...well no one had seen her in thirteen years.
The boy of the month was Jeff Branyan. She liked him all right. Jeff liked her more than he cared to admit, even to himself.
He was athletic and fair featured, the perfect combination for a boy to win popularity in high school. Two years ago he threw the winning touchdown pass on homecoming weekend, then he deflowered a pretty sophomore girl named Cheryl (or was it Sharon?) in the backseat of his black Camaro. Back then success came easy to him. Everything came easy. He didn't need a girl like Katy then.
Jeff was twenty now and too dull for college. He had tried. He even attended a two-year school for a semester before he realized he was in over his head. He returned home and worked construction for a summer, knowing full well how ashamed his folks were. Johnny Quarterback. Now Johnny Loser.
He had taken a full time position at the Last Stop, but the pay was barely enough for his tiny apartment. Sometimes he wondered if Bruce Springsteen had him in mind when he talked about glory days, or if his life was too pathetic for even ole Bruce to sing about.
A wind gust pushed the broken Venetian blinds forward, and the room filled with sunlight. The blinds clanged against the window pane like a tin wind chime, and came to rest again.
“That was incredible,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” she said, and stared at the clock.
She is already planning her escape, he thought to himself.
“You need to be somewhere?”
Katy shrugged her shoulders. She didn't desire to see him again today, but she didn't have anywhere to go either. Staying in one place made her uncomfortable, even a bit claustrophobic. There was always another boy to bunk with, so why let the grass grow under her feet?
It had been five days since she had been back to the trailer. She knew her father was asking around by now, trying to find her, and that eventually she would have to return. Otherwise, he would get the police involved.
“No plans. Not really,” she said.
“I gotta work two to ten. I guess you can hang here while I'm gone. If you want.”
He didn't like the idea of her being there while he was away. Not that he believed that she would take anything. She wasn't like that. Hell, what was there to take anyhow? But he also couldn't tell her to come back after ten just so that they could have another go.
“No thanks.”
“So are you going to come by later?”
Again she shrugged her shoulders, and he grew frustrated. He knew it was just a matter of time before she disappeared, as she always did. Sometimes she went back home. He wasn't stupid enough not to know that most times she found others like him. With her looks, and her willingness, there was never a shortage of temporary roommates.
“Fine,” he said, and threw back the bed sheet. “Where the hell do you go all day anyhow?”
“Why do you care?”
“It's just a question.”
Her head turned away from him, and Katy stared out the window through a break in the blinds.
“It's gonna be that way then?”
Jeff kicked the bed sheet off his feet and lay naked on his back. He didn't know why she frustrated him so. What did he care what she did all day, or who she was going to be with next week? That was her business, not his. Jeff sighed and walked to the bathroom, as Katy watched the blur of cars passing through the blinds.
He closed the door but left it unlocked, then turned the faucet to warm and stepped into the shower. As the water cascaded down to his chest in sheets, he closed his eyes and dipped his head under the stream, feeling the water pour through his hair and down his face. He poured liquid soap onto his hands – and wouldn't his buds love to know that not only did he sleep with the weird chick from the trailer park, but that he also washed with a girly-smelling soft soap – and lathered until his body was covered in a foam of white. Then he rinsed and lathered again.
It was always a relief to clean himself after being with Katy Lawrence, even if it didn't make him feel good to think it.
He sighed and resigned himself to another long evening at The Last Stop. If she came back afterward, fine. If not, he'd walk to the Red Lion Tavern and have a beer. If someone else was paying, maybe he'd have three.
Jeff felt clean again. As the soap washed down his body to his feet and circled the drain, gurgling as it descended toward the sewers under Storberry, he shut off the faucet, pulled back the mold-spotted shower curtain, dried off, and wrapped a towel around his hips.
The mirror over the sink was clouded with fog. He barely reflected through the murk, like a ghost beyond the glass. Tendrils of mist floated past his vision.
He ran a comb through his hair and mused how he would explain Katy Lawrence to his friends if they ever found out. Maybe it shouldn't matter. If they didn't like her, too bad. What shit did he give what anyone thought about him now?
He would ask her to stay, maybe even tell her that he worried about her. He owed her that much.
When he opened the door, she was already gone.
Five
The big clock on the Storberry Savings Bank read 1 pm. The digital readout cycled to the temperature: 78 degrees.
The days were longer than the nights now, and if you lived there you began to notice the telltale signs of summer's approach. It was there when the south wind carried the sweet smell of purple aster and bellflower off the meadows into Storberry and when the marsh marigolds exploded in brilliant yellows. And then you knew that the heat of summer was not far behind.
In southern Virginia summer ignored the meteorological calendar and arrived the first week in May. Sometimes earlier. Once it came to stay it would not leave until October, sometimes not until the last Halloween pumpkin was carved and glowering at passersby.
You knew it arrived when the gray stratus of winter washed away to the north, and the prevailing wind shifted to southerly carrying gulf moisture through the Carolinas and across the Virginia border. You knew it when shorts and a t-shirt were warm enough for night walks, when the daytime humidity was so thick you were sure you could grasp it in your hands and wring it out like a sponge, and when thunderstorms rose out of massive cumulonimbus and raked the countryside with winds strong enough to bend trees to the soil.
In summers when storms do not come, the sun bakes every drop of moisture out of the soil until all that remains are infertile hummocks of dust, which take to the wind and choke the air. Crops are laid to waste, and banks foreclose on the family farm.
Intuition told Greg Madsen that summer would come early to Storberry this year. He could not know if it would be a harsh or prosperous year; only that the long days of summer were close.
He watched the Lawrence girl hasten south along Main Street. She had come out of the apartment buildings across the street from the Sweet Nothings Café. Madsen knew she had been with the Branyan boy again. He also knew that the
Lawrence girl had to be watched. She had dropped out of school. She shoplifted when she couldn’t afford necessities. And she slept in too many beds.
He kept an eye on her, not to catch her in the act, but because he cared. He couldn’t think of a worse home to grow up in than the Lawrence home. Madsen had arrested her father, Dell, multiple times for public intoxication, brawling, and on one memorable occasion for public nudity outside The Watering Hole. But his greatest crime, the one Madsen had no jurisdiction over, was the toxic environment he raised his child in.
At least Dell had stayed. The mother had left them a long time ago—disappeared in the middle of the night, or so the story went, never to be seen nor heard from again. Madsen could understand a marriage breakup—they happened all the time. But to abandon your child was unfathomable. It was a hell of a load to dump on a kid. Katy’s regression was both predictable and tragic.
The sound of chatter swelled behind him as the door to the café swung open. Cool air conditioning spilled down the steps and across his calves, and then the door closed.
At 32 years of age Madsen was young for a chief. He arrived in Storberry a decade prior straight out of college, and encountered a department composed of officers long on experience but short on ambition. There were six full time officers and three part timers who filled in on the desk and worked an occasional beat.
When his police radio crackled to life, he was alerted to a stalled car at the corner of Main and Jensen. He was riding his bike today, saving the department a few dollars in gas and taking advantage of the gorgeous day. There wasn’t much he could do to revive a stalled car, but he could stay with the driver until a mechanic arrived.
As Madsen rode southward with traffic on Main, he hopped the curb seeing the blinking hazard lights of a rusted Subaru at the corner. The Lawrence girl was on the opposite sidewalk about twenty yards ahead, her long curls bouncing behind her.
He kept an eye on her until she ducked into the Red Lion Tavern. The owner Chuck Kingsley would be on the bar today, and Madsen knew Kingsley was an honorable man and would never serve Lawrence. But he also knew she would find someone to go home with. As he found himself wishing that she had stayed with the Branyan kid, Doug Masterson, arguably the second-most disreputable man in Storberry next to Katy’s father, followed the girl into the tavern with his eyes glued to her. The tavern door closed, and Greg felt a sense of anxiety as he lost sight of her.
Jeff Branyan wasn’t going anywhere in life, and he’d probably bounce between dead end jobs like The Last Stop forever. Madsen had once considered talking the kid into joining the department. He was strong and athletic, and Madsen’s instincts told him that Branyan’s street smarts dwarfed his IQ. He might make a fine cop with a little refinement.
Lawrence could do much worse than Branyan. He would treat her decent, and she would leave him for someone who wouldn’t.
Six
Renee Tennant unrolled the driver’s side window of her hatchback and pulled out of the Storberry Public Library’s parking lot. It was after 3 pm, and the student help, in the form of Jen Barrows, had arrived to tend to the library.
She had grown up in a small town in the northwest corner of the state, graduated from West Virginia with a degree in American history, and later found another small town to call home. Renee sometimes wondered if Storberry was her attempt to take a mulligan on her childhood.
Her father had been a steel worker, and her mother stayed at home. It was a conservative household. Perhaps not conservative in a political sense but in a traditional sense. She had one sibling – an older brother named Kevin who was an all-state basketball and baseball star. As far as Renee was concerned, her parents had one child, and that child was Kevin.
Renee drifted through her teenage years like a phantom – never seen or heard, even if her presence was suspected. The family would sit in the living room after the dinner dishes were put away, and Renee would say, “I made Honor Roll this quarter,” and Dad would say, “Did you know Kevin is leading the league in assists?” And Renee would say, “I’m thinking of trying out for the school musical this spring,” and Mom would reply, “Will it interfere with your brother’s baseball games? We can’t be two places at once. And did you know your brother won the game with a double and—”
And she could forget asking for the car on Friday night, because Kevin needed it to go out for pizza with his friends, or to pump Betty Lou Grayson’s tires at the lake.
Yet Kevin treated her well. He was not responsible for the actions of his parents, and she was mature enough to recognize it. He watched out for her, took her under his wing whenever possible, and showed more interest in her activities than either parent had.
When Renee began dating, he sat her down and told her that she didn’t have to go as far as some boys expected. When the Crasnick boy spread a rumor about Renee on a park bench after a school dance, Kevin explained the meaning of life to the boy in the locker room and ended the lesson with a salvo to the solar plexus. The rumors died with one punch.
But she remained a phantom in her own home.
The local library became her respite. Sometimes she walked to the library after school and read until dark. She liked the low hum of the light fixtures and the feel of the dog eared pages. The smell of the paper vaguely reminded her of vanilla.
The checkout cards in the book backs told their own tales. Mr. Gamble, the biology teacher who read teen romance. Jennifer Norris, the cheerleader who found comfort in horror. Bill Turrey, the 250-pound linebacker who read Twain and Dickens with ferocity.
Kevin went to the University of Pittsburgh on a full athletic scholarship to much fanfare. Two years later, Renee garnered multiple academic scholarships and nobody noticed. Except Kevin.
Make lots of nice friends, dear, study hard, and here’s your bags…
Yeah, and I won’t let the door hit me in the ass on my way out.
Now she was seven years out of college and happy to be running a public library of her own.
She followed Court Street northward, and as she turned right on Standish and increased her speed to the 40 mph limit, apple and cherry blossoms lit both sides of the road in splashes of color. The colors raced past the side windows like paint streaks. She released the auburn curls from her pony tail and let the warm wind catch her hair.
There was a large-lidded Rubbermaid box and a shovel stuffed into the hatchback's trunk. It was a perfect day to get her garden started, and the Moran farm always had leftover manure plowed into piles for the town to take.
Just before Standish veered and became Spruce, the big red barn appeared on her left. She recognized the redheaded farmhand in the driveway as Randy Marks, who knelt fixing a wheel to the horse trailer. Her heart sunk when she didn’t see the manure pile.
“Afternoon,” she said, waving to Randy.
“Miss Tennant,” Randy said with a courteous nod.
Renee climbed out of the car and shut the door. She had changed into a pair of cutoff jean shorts and a t-shirt in her office, and donned a sun hat. The boy didn’t notice the sun hat because he was looking at her legs.
“Usually there is a pile here for the taking?”
“Yes ma'am,” Randy said without lifting his eyes. “There was last week. We have more out back. Let me get Mr. Moran.”
As Renee leaned against the car, she pushed herself up to sit on the hood. She could see Moran through the open barn doors. He chewed on a carrot while he patted down a horse at the pasture fence. The man bit off a piece for the horse, who took it from his clenched teeth, and this made her grin.
As Evan Moran walked through the barn entrance with a smile, she realized that he wasn’t as she had imagined. It was common knowledge that Moran was a former teacher and college educated, but it still surprised her how little he looked like a farmer. She thought he looked more like a young college professor.
“Evan Moran,” he said and shook her hand.
“Renee Tennant.”
“You wer
e looking for some compost supplies, I take it?”
“If it isn’t any trouble.”
“None at all. Let me push the pile out to the front, and you can take whatever you need. There’s plenty.”
“Thank you Mr. Moran, and I’m sorry to give you extra work.”
“Well it’s a crappy job but someone has to do it, har har,” he said as he walked back through the barn. “And call me Evan.”
She laughed, and it broke what little ice existed. She already felt comfortable talking to him, like she had known him for years.
“Ah yes, a comedian and a gentleman,” she shouted back to him.
He faded into the shadow of the barn’s interior, and then the light through the back doors rendered him anew.
Evan drove a small tractor from behind the barn and pushed the pile to the front. Afterward they shoveled as much as they could fit into the container.
“I hope you don’t think I’m prying. I’m curious why you left New York for our little town,” she said.
“You’ve been doing your homework.”
“People talk.”
He considered his answer before he spoke.
“I suppose I could say that I didn’t want the farm in someone else’s hands. And maybe there is some truth to that,” he said, and then paused. “It’s hard to say why. Call it unfinished business, if you like.”
“And now you are Farmer Evan.”
“I suppose I am. It’s a good life. No boss looking over your shoulder, no school boards or unions to wrestle with. And I’m outside on a day like today, and I can use manure to attract pretty girls.”
She laughed and shook her head at him.
“Like flies?”
“Hardly.”
Together they lifted the container into the back of her car.
“I was just about to call it a day and get cleaned up. Could I buy you a cup of coffee?”
“Make it tea and you’ve got a date,” she said with a smile.
“That would be fine. How about an hour from now at Sweet Nothings?”
“I would like that,” she said. She considered him for a moment and said, “You’re a breath of fresh air around here, Evan Moran.”
