by Karen Pullen
I wiped the sweat off my face and filled Merle’s water bowl. It was Saturday night, ten o’clock, party time. I added seltzer to a half-glass of wine, drank it, poured another, and stuck The Big Sleep in the DVD player. Perhaps the wine, Bogie and Bacall, an incomprehensible plot, and some racy talk about horses would erase the image that kept floating into my consciousness, the image of a twisted corpse in a beaded satin wedding gown.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
Sunday Late Morning
“You’d think at my age I wouldn’t feel so much,” Fern muttered as she forked hay into the donkey pen. Hillary and Bill, her inseparable jack and jenny, gently nosed her with their white muzzles. She rubbed their foreheads, their coarse hair. She didn’t want to work, couldn’t stand to look at the half-done painting on her easel, a field of tulips, all yellow except for one stray red one. So blurry and boring she couldn’t face it.
“It’s the death of that girl,” Fern whispered into Bill’s white ear. “Same age as Grace was, you know.” She steeled herself for the familiar wash of grief that still, after twenty-two years, dragged her under an ugly gray quilt of sadness. “Can’t you guys help me think about something else?” Busywork would lift her mind, or at least tire her out. She should take the screens down and put up the storm windows. She should wash the rocking chairs, still coated with summer’s drab yellow pollen. She could bake—Ricky had asked her over for dinner tomorrow and he loved her bread. The appeal of should and could was weak, though, and when she saw her answering machine blinking she felt grateful for the distraction. She pushed “play.”
The first message was from Tricia Scott.
A week earlier, Fern had met Tricia at the art gallery where Fern showed her paintings. They’d hit it off despite their surface differences: Fern, an impoverished feminist, and Tricia the well-off evangelist. But Fern recognized a spark in Tricia, a certain twinkle that said appearances weren’t everything and she didn’t take herself too seriously. Furthermore, Fern didn’t judge people based on their bank account. She bartered paintings for dental services, sewed her own clothes, and charmed her many men friends into performing maintenance and repairs, a recurring need at her hundred-year-old farmhouse, a tin-roofed frame building with knob-and-tube wiring and antique plumbing. When Stella had once suggested Fern might sell her farmhouse and sixty acres right on a state highway, in order to create a nest egg so she could move into a cute little apartment in town, Fern had told her, “I have all I want. Poor is wanting more than you have.” Then she’d turned away so she wouldn’t have to watch Stella roll her eyes.
But Fern wasn’t immune to the lure of cash. The point of her gallery show had been to sell her work, attract new students, and contract for commissions. Meeting Tricia Scott had been the frosting on the gallery sales cake. Tricia looked affluent. Though her dyed-black helmet hair was dreadful, she was dressed like no one Fern knew could ever dress, in a lime-green silk suit with a thick silver coil necklace. Tricia bought a painting of a sunset casting a farmhouse shadow across a field of mown hay, declaring that it reminded her of her grandmother’s house. She asked if Fern ever painted people, and Fern showed her photographs of portraits she’d worked on. And on the spot, Tricia had commissioned her to illustrate the cover of her new book. “It’s one of those books for executives. In this case, Christian executives.”
Fern had wondered, but did not ask, what the difference was between a Christian executive and any other executive. Perhaps the book would spell that out. “I’d be delighted and honored to illustrate the cover. I’d need to read the book.”
“My son’s getting married on Saturday, and your farmhouse painting will be my gift. Can you come, bring a guest? One o’clock, Rosscairn Castle B&B. I’ll see you there and give you a copy of my book.” Then Tricia had dashed out of the gallery and into a blazing red convertible driven by a man with an unfortunate comb-over. Their shellacked hair was wrong for a convertible, Fern mused.
Yesterday she had gone to the wedding with Stella, and it ended so hideously that she couldn’t approach Tricia about the book or the commission. But in her message today Tricia’s voice sounded calm and controlled, explaining she was going out of town for a few days and wanted to make sure Fern had a copy of the book. She’d stop by soon.
The second message was from Jax Covas, the delightful one-eyed man she’d met yesterday. “Buenos días señorita! Do you remember me, the pirate from Guatemala? And chicken-coop builder? I am coming this afternoon to measure. Ciao!” Fern laughed softly. Jax would cheer her up, and planning the chicken coop would be fun.
Message three was from Stella, saying she’d be over later and would make dinner for them both. Fern’s heart beat a little faster with a burst of joy at the sound of her voice. She loathed everything about her granddaughter’s work: the stupidity and paranoia of the people Stella associated with, the guns they so idly flaunted. She went to bed every night praying for Stella’s safety to any gods that might be listening.
Better get ready for visitors, Fern thought. She headed upstairs for a shower.
Tricia Scott stood in the doorway, holding a large black binder. Fern scanned her face, looking for the imprint of the tragedy but seeing only a shadowing beneath her new friend’s eyes, a bit of tension around her mouth. “Come on in,” Fern said, biting back an apology for the shabbiness of her home. Tricia looked so expensive, in tailored navy slacks, yellow sweater, and colorful silk scarf, surely not purchased at the thrift shop. She was thin and pale, and her hard black hair aged her.
“How are you? And your son?” Fern asked.
“My son is distraught of course. My daughter is with him today. I’d be there but we have speaking engagements in Colorado and are flying out this afternoon.” Tricia’s voice was controlled, her expression deadpan. Botox, Fern thought, her forehead’s smooth as glass. But how does she feel, or not feel—perhaps there’s a trick to keeping grief at bay. Fern encouraged her to sit at the kitchen table and gave her a glass of tea.
Glancing at her watch, Tricia accepted the drink. She tapped the binder, labeled JESUS ON THE JOB. “Unfortunately, I have a deadline. How quickly can you work?”
“What are you thinking of for the cover?” Fern asked.
“The Lord Himself.”
“The Lord being . . .” Fern did not want to have to paint a portrait of God. Michelangelo had been there, done that.
“The Lord Jesus, of course.”
When you make your living as a visual artist, and your living is so scant you’re dependent on your men friends for dinner invitations, you don’t turn down a commission. As she leafed through the binder, not for an instant did Fern think she might not want her name attached to the cover illustration of Jesus on the Job. The book exhorted employers to start the day with morning prayer, conduct Bible study in the lunchroom and insert Christian goals in the mission statement. Fern did flinch a little at the more activist paragraphs but suppressed any flicker of doubt, even though there was a clear disconnect between her view of Jesus’ message and Tricia’s interpretation:
Make your views known. Boycott businesses that market to, or are run by, gays. Don’t let your tax dollars support schools that hire gays, or libraries that have books about them. You won’t be liked by all. You might lose a few customers. But those are worldly desires, not the Lord’s service. You must sacrifice for the moral recovery of our nation! Christ is coming to earth with a sword. Onward, Christian soldiers!
Fern turned the pages and found more of the same, aimed at alcohol, divorce, juvenile delinquency, abortion, immorality. “Intolerance as a virtue? What happened to love and forgiveness?” she asked.
“Tolerance is weakness and compromise,” Tricia said flatly.
Fern nodded, studying Tricia’s thin face, every mascara’d eyelash perfectly separated, wondering how such tribal notions had ever lodged themselves in her brain. Then she moved on. What did Tricia want? You had to please the client. “I can do this,” Fern said. “You
see Jesus as a leader, almost like a general.”
“Exactly! Surrounded by his troops.”
“I usually paint portraits from life, or a photograph. I’ll have to do a little research.”
“Use your imagination. You’re a very creative person, I can tell.” Tricia waved her arm to encompass Fern’s living room, dominated by a boxy kerosene space heater. The walls displayed Fern’s paintings as well as the works of her artist friends, an eclectic grouping: realistic paintings of ducks and fields and hydrangeas mingled with collages, Pollack-like acrylic drips, and cubistic abstracts. “I like old houses.”
“My great-grandparents built this house, in 1903, when their son—my grandpa—was a baby. Six generations have lived in this house.” When she said it like that, Fern forgot about the termites and peeling paint and felt proud of her inheritance.
“Not to be nosy but do you have a son? You brought your granddaughter yesterday, didn’t you? The SBI agent, Stella Lavender. She has your last name.”
Fern shrugged. “I never married. And my daughter Grace never married. And that was fine with me.” She knew she sounded defensive, but she didn’t want Tricia to think she was ashamed.
“Sounds brilliant.” Tricia made a wry face. “I’ve been married twice. My first husband was Mike’s father. He was a pillar of the community, a church deacon. We practically lived at the church. And that was the problem.”
“How so?”
“It was a hothouse of suppressed emotions. The preacher constantly reminding us of sin, sin, sin, until it’s all we thought about. You know, like how diets backfire? All you can think about is fried chicken.”
“Did someone eat some fried chicken?”
Tricia sniffed. “You might say. My husband fell in love with the church secretary. It happened really fast. He moved out, the church secretary left her husband, I took my babies and moved back home with my parents.”
“That must have been tough.”
“I should have done like you, moved into my own place. But I thought I needed a man. Along came Scoop and here we are. He’s just like my first.”
“Ah, you see,” Fern said, “marriage is unnatural, in my opinion.”
“I’m like, ‘la-la-la-la-la, I won’t ask, you don’t tell.’ I’m too tired to divorce him at this point. I bet the men are all over you, aren’t they?”
Fern laughed. “The older ones are. I like men. I love men, actually. I just don’t want to be owned by one.”
“Here comes one now,” Tricia said. They could see a white Lexus rolling into view outside.
“Jax Covas. I just met him yesterday.”
“Oh yeah, Jax. He’s some pal of Scoop’s. Well, I have to skedaddle. Thank you so much.”
Fern watched Tricia pick her way carefully down the porch steps—those steps really should be roped off, they were so bouncy—and thought about what Tricia had revealed: stuck in her comfort zone, writing books to make money, miserably married. What Fern wanted to know, and hadn’t a clue about: what did Tricia feel about Justine’s death?
She watched Jax Covas speak briefly to Tricia then stride across the driveway. He had to be one of the most attractive men ever to knock on her front door. He was trim—no paunch or sag—and his smooth olive skin contrasted with his white hair, cut very short. Trickling down his face was a thin white scar, partly covered by the black patch over his left eye. He looked like a pirate, a respectful and courtly pirate, as he presented her with a dozen yellow roses just barely open and delicately fragrant.
“You are lovely today,” he said, kissing her hand. “Alas, I have only an hour. My phone stays in the car and I am yours. Where shall we begin?”
The dance of courtship? Or measuring for a chicken coop? Fern decided on the latter, though the former was definitely on her radar. They walked over to her shed, a ramshackle structure of weathered boards.
“We have chickens in Guatemala, when I was a child. I know about chickens. Along there we put a vine arbor for shade.” He pointed to the long wall of the shed. “A fence around it all, to keep chickens in, foxes out. Inside, nesting boxes. You will have eggs by the dozen.”
“I can sell them.”
“I repair the roof. And I will dig a garden space in that corner. The chickens will eat the bugs and fertilize the vegetables. Organically.”
“You’ll do all that?” Fern was thrilled. She imagined her eyesore of a shed transformed by a flowering vine arbor, a lush garden of peas, tomatoes, and squash vines. She expressed her appreciation the best way she knew: she moved into his arms and playfully kissed him on the mouth. He seemed unsurprised, as though women threw themselves at him every day. He pulled her closer, fitting his hands onto her hips. So it begins, she thought, humming as she looked into his one carbon-black eye.
“You trade kisses for promises,” Jax said, “I expect a very nice reward when I finish building.”
They were startled apart by the sound of a car rolling up the graveled drive, squeaking as it bounced in the ruts. Fern peered around the corner of the shed and saw Stella’s Civic. “It’s my granddaughter,” she whispered. She leaned against him, absorbing his warmth, breathing in his faintly cinnamon smell. She heard the donkeys greet Stella with their “haw haw,” and the screen door bang as Stella went into the house to look for her.
“I will get to work,” Jax said. “Fern’s chickens will live here very happily.”
As he made measurements and took notes, they talked. Jax told her he’d moved here recently for his business; he was delighted at the opportunity because he got to see his granddaughters who were being cared for by his ex-wife. He pulled out his wallet and showed her a picture of six-year-old twins with identical gap-toothed smiles. Fern exclaimed she’d raised her granddaughter, too. It seemed they had more and more in common.
He made a sketch in his notebook and she approved it, offering to pay for the materials. He waved his hand. “We discuss after.” They walked to his car. Seeing Stella through the screen door, Fern introduced them. Stella nodded hello but Fern knew she wasn’t much interested—Jax was just another man lured into Fern’s sticky web.
“I will be back with materials,” Jax said, kissing her cheek.
His phone begin to chime. “You see, it is ridiculous, my business.”
As his car lurched down the ruts of her drive, Fern realized she didn’t know what his business was. It didn’t matter. He was going to build her chicken coop, and then, well, they would see.
Stella was sweeping in the kitchen. “This flooring was here when you were born, I bet.”
“I think you’re right,” Fern said. The pink-specked linoleum wore like concrete. “It’s older than the stove”—two of the burners didn’t work—“and the fridge,” which chose that moment to cycle off with a great shudder.
Stella bent down with the dustpan. “Someday I’ll replace them.”
Fern felt a surge of affection for Stella and held out her arms for a hug. “You okay? Any word on what happened to Justine?”
“We won’t hear for a few days. Who was that guy? You met him yesterday, right?”
“He’s going to build me a chicken coop.”
Stella gave her a look. “Chickens?”
“He has to fix the roof first.”
“I do like a man with a tape measure.”
“Who knows how to use it,” Fern giggled.
“You hungry? I brought some bread and I’m going to make soup.” Stella took celery and carrots out of the fridge and began to chop onions.
“That detective yesterday. Did you know him?” Fern asked.
“Anselmo Morales? No.”
“He has nice shoulders.”
Stella slid the onions and celery into a pan to brown in olive oil, then added water and kidney beans. “You have any potatoes?”
“Where they’ve always been.” Fern pointed to the closet. “He’s eye candy.”
“He’s smart and ambitious.”
“You like him?”
&
nbsp; “What’s not to like? He’s very good at his job.” The water was boiling and Stella turned down the heat. “I know where you’re going with this conversation. You wonder why I don’t have a dozen boyfriends like you do, or even just one. Well, I wonder, too, sometimes, when I have a minute to think about it.”
“You know what I mean. Do you like him.”
“Do I like him. I haven’t given it much thought, Fern, since I just met him. I didn’t inherit your talents. I can’t paint like you do and I can’t attract men like you do.”
“You attract them, they just don’t stick.”
“I want to give you a really hard pinch right now.” Stella tasted the soup and added salt. “What else can I do?”
“Sit down and tell me about your work. Are you being careful, darling?” Violence had taken Fern’s only child and she was consumed with worry about Stella’s safety.
“My work isn’t that dangerous. It’s not really different from a roadside produce market. They’re selling drugs and I’m buying. We exchange a few words and some merchandise for cash.”
“They’re high. Aren’t they crazy? Hopped up?”
“Usually they would like to be hopped up. They aren’t, that’s why they are selling, to get money.”
“Do you make arrests?” Fern knew arrests were more dangerous.
“No. I’m undercover.” Stella didn’t go into the details but Fern knew arrests of low-level dealers would turn some of them into informants, drilling a tunnel to the big dogs.
Stella ladled the soup into faded, chipped Fiestaware bowls. Fern couldn’t look at them without thinking of her mother, who had bought the dishes piece by piece in the fifties, the only “bought new” items in the decade. Lavenders were scroungers.
