“I thought he might like to show it to you. Larry and I went back to his house after…you know. Felix wouldn’t go in. I think it hurt too bad to see it empty.”
Ava wanted so badly to ask what you know meant. For years she’d wondered. What was the awful thing that had wounded Mercy so deeply? The words were on her tongue before she checked them. No, she reminded herself. If Mercy wanted her to know, he’d tell her. She would ask, would put her arms around him and promise her support, but asking Evie felt like a betrayal. Gossiping behind his back. She’d never treated him like that before; she wasn’t going to start now.
“A box full of what sort of stuff?” she asked instead.
Evie shrugged. “Old pictures. His personal things off his bookshelf. We packed up the things from his room we thought he’d like to keep. Just junk, probably.” She smiled at Ava. “But it’s his junk.”
Maggie took a deep breath and realized she was shaking. She hated that she was shaking. Fuck this shit. Fuck it.
The entire side of Ava’s pretty black truck, from headlight to taillight, was spattered with eggs. Rotten eggs, going by the smell. Bits of shell clung to the trailing, globular yolks that ran in slow motion down the paint.
When the first one hit on her way down Main, she’d thought it was a rock kicked up by the truck in front of her. But then the volley had begun. High school kids, under the watchful eye of one of their fathers, had egged her car, the utility trailer, and even poor Harry, who’d been riding behind her, and wearing the cut that had drawn the attention of the protesters.
She turned to him now that they were safely parked in her driveway. “Harry, honey…”
His helmet, cut, gloves, and boots were glossy with egg whites. The goo dripped from his sleeves. There was splatter on his face, over his sunglasses, smeared, where he’d wiped it away so he could see to ride.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It coulda been worse. It coulda been rocks.”
Her stomach tightened at the idea.
Ghost came out of the house, Collier in his wake, and Maggie fought to mask her surprise.
Ghost’s eyes skipped over the truck, and she could see the anger building in him, the leaping pulse in the vein at his temple. “Where did this happen?”
“On Main.”
He glanced at her and under the staggering fury, she read the apology in his eyes. He hated that this had happened to her; he blamed himself, for being the sort of husband who drew censure and attention.
“You were with her?” he demanded of Harry and Carter.
Carter said, “Yes, sir.”
“It was kids,” Harry rushed to say. “I don’t think they meant to hurt anybody.”
“No?” Ghost said. “Ava’s little boyfriend, he was just a kid. Look how that went.”
“Everybody alright?” Collier asked.
Maggie took another of those hated shaky breaths. “Yeah. Just a little eggy.”
Ghost came to her side, pulled her into a much-needed hug.
“It makes me so damn angry, is all,” she said, as his strong arms made the tremors worse; knowing she could lean against him always made her more vulnerable.
“I know,” he said. “Me too.”
When she stepped back, Ghost said, “Aidan and Tango are on their way. I told Collier that Jackie could come have dinner with us.” His eyes told her he would explain later.
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s fine.”
“Tell your little kids they can stay too.” He gestured to Harry and Carter. “I don’t want them going anywhere alone.”
Because right now, it wasn’t a city at the outlaws’ mercy, but the other way around.
“Christ,” Mercy said, sinking down onto the sofa and letting his head flop back. “Learn to take a fucking hint.”
Ava smiled. “They missed you.”
He snorted. “Right now, that’s not a mutual feeling.
She laughed.
After an early dinner, and another round of drinks, they’d finally managed to get Larry and Evie out the door. Mercy was just back from walking them to their bateau. Ava had breathed a huge sigh of relief to see them go out the door, but Mercy’s theatrics were cute enough to keep her from feeling too robbed.
Mercy sat up, leaning forward to brace his forearms on his thighs. He’d put on a white t-shirt for dinner, and taken his hair down; she loved it loose like that. “What are you doing?”
She sat cross-legged on the rug, looking through the box Evie had brought. She was fizzing with excitement as she walked her fingers through packets of photos, little figurines whittled from wood, old paperbacks, old shell casings and fishing lures, little odds and ends. She pulled out a small cassette player and a handful of tapes with handwritten labels.
“Your old mix tapes,” she said, grinning, as she held one up to the light.
For one quick flash, his expression was sad and vulnerable, then he smoothed it over with the usual bravado. “Somebody call the Smithsonian,” he said. “She found my old mix tapes.”
Undeterred, she read the label. “Good Stuff.” She gave it a little shake. “What’s on here?”
“Dunno. It’s been, like, a thousand years.”
Ava slid the tape and player across the carpet toward him. “Go plug it in.”
He gave her a petulant frown.
“Pretty please?”
He heaved an overdramatic sigh and picked them up, dragged his feet like it was a real effort as he went to the nearest wall outlet and got everything set up. There was that fuzzy sound of the cassette beginning to turn, one she hadn’t heard in a long time thanks to iPods and CDs. And as he resumed his seat on the couch, the solemn opening chords of “Rooster” filled the cottage.
“Alice in Chains,” she said, allowing herself a moment to enjoy the first vocal notes of the song. “This is the good stuff.”
“There’s nothing worth a damn in there,” he said, as she returned her attention to the box.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
He sank back against the sofa with a face that made her want to laugh.
“You know everything there is to know about me,” she said, carefully opening a yellowed photo packet. “Why can’t I…” The pictures slid out into her palm. “Oh, Mercy,” she said quietly, transfixed.
It was him – of course it was, the only child of a single father – too tall, all knobby knees and elbows, his hair cut short, his face soft with boyhood. His father, standing beside him, an arm around his shoulders, looked so much like Mercy did now, as an adult. There was no mistaking the parentage. A handsome, lean-faced, big-shouldered man, a shade darker than his son, more of that Cherokee blood in his veins than in Mercy’s. They stood on a pier, and hanging beside them from a strong pulley was a dead gator, strung up by its tail.
“What?” Mercy asked, voice sharp and displeased.
“It’s you.” She laid the picture carefully on the carpet. Beneath it was a shot of what had to be his grandmother: frail, wrinkled little thing, white hair streaming across her shoulders, small gnarled hands busy over a knitting project. “You family.” The next was a small house made of tar paper. It was just a shack, really, on the water’s edge, a rusted truck parked in the weeds at the back door. “Is this the house you grew up in?”
When he didn’t answer, she lifted her head.
His eyes were dark, angry, defensive, his jaw tight. He didn’t like this.
“Do you not want me to look?” she asked. “I can put them away.”
She watched him wrestle with himself a moment, hands clasping together and clenching until the veins stood out in his wrists.
Ava began to slide the pictures back into their envelope.
“No,” he said. “Look if you want to.”
She gave him a soft smile. “You know I won’t love you any less because of anything I see in a picture.”
He exhaled noisily, forcing his hands flat on his thighs. He glanced away. “Yeah.”
“You wanna come loo
k with me?”
Maybe that’s a bad idea, she thought, when he stared at her. But then he got up and came to lower down to the rug beside her, lying on his stomach at her hip, propped up on his elbows.
“Yeah, that’s the house,” he said of the top photo in her hand. “Ready for the cover of Southern Living, huh?” he asked wryly, his smile ashamed and wistful all at once.
“It’s not about what a house looks like, but how much the people who live in it love each other,” she said, and watched his face twitch with acknowledgement. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head, his hair silky against her lips. “Here.” She set the photo on the carpet with the other two. “What’s this?”
“I brought a pie,” Jackie said when she appeared at the back door, Littlejohn in tow. She held up the pie plate with a chastened expression that let Maggie know it was a peace offering in more ways than one. “It’s cherry.”
Maggie took a deep breath. “It looks great.” She opened the door wide. “Do you mind helping me set the table?”
Jackie looked relieved. “Sure.”
“Do you need any help?” Littlejohn asked as he stepped in and carefully removed his boots.
“No, sweetie,” Maggie assured. “Get you a beer and go hang out with the guys.”
Once she’d secured the deadbolt, she turned and saw Jackie pulling down plates. They’d cohosted so many dinners that each knew the other’s kitchen as well as her own, where everything was kept, which napkins would be best for each occasion, which places at the table the boys preferred (it usually reflected their positions around the table in the clubhouse chapel). Maggie realized she didn’t trust Jackie anymore, not the way she always had, and the notion saddened her in a way the thrown eggs that afternoon hadn’t been able to. So often, it was the club against everything outside of it. If you couldn’t trust one another, who could you trust? What a horrible thing internal politics were.
“There’s seven of us?” Jackie asked.
“Nine.” Maggie went to pull the silverware.
They set the dining room table, since the kitchen wouldn’t hold that many of them. Aidan and Tango showed up right as the food was being laid out, bearing Jack Daniels and a bottle of Pino Grigio for Maggie.
Aidan gave her a sideways hug. “Heard you got egged.”
“Yeah.” She smiled. “Nothing a little soap won’t fix.”
He snorted in disagreement.
No one seemed surprised to see Collier. When they were all seated, and the serving platters were passed around, Maggie felt herself sagging in her chair, suddenly tired and anxious. She caught Ghost’s eye, from his place at the head of the table, silently asking a half dozen questions.
She recognized his responding look: he needed her support right now. He needed her to be the queen of the castle, solid and ready to catch him when he leaned against her.
She straightened. Queens didn’t slouch.
There was a whole history of Lécuyers spread out on the rug. Early photographs of Mercy’s grandparents, when they were in their twenties: his grandmother smooth-skinned, black-haired and beautiful, tiny even then, cinched tightly into her white wedding dress. His grandfather had been very tall and very thin, handsome, with a blade-like nose and a headful of pale hair. There was a gentleness to the austere lines of his face, a sweetness she saw in Mercy. It was from his grandmother that the ferocity had come, her black eyes chips of unforgiving obsidian.
She knew the story, but he repeated it to her anyway: how Louis Lécuyer had come to the Deep South from Quebec, searching for a warmer, more profitable life. He’d met Nanette Raintree during a brief stay in Georgia. She’d been working as a seamstress for a tailor, and Louis had stopped in to have his favorite coat mended.
“You have the prettiest little fingers,” Mercy recalled his grandfather’s first words to his grandmother. “Have dinner with me, chéri.”
Louis had faced the fragility of his dreams in Louisiana: there would be no riches and fine houses for his family. But he’d made friends with the swamp, and he’d opened a small store on the waterfront, one that he would eventually sell to Lew’s father, passed down to Lew.
There were photos of Larry and Evie, younger and unlined, and of other family friends, all of whom Mercy had lost touch with after his father’s passing.
And then, at the bottom of the stack, a photo Ava had been hoping to stumble across. A pretty blonde woman in a flowered cotton dress, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the tar paper house, a blanket-wrapped baby in her arms. An old photo, older than the shots of Mercy as a teenager. A strained, unhappy look on the woman’s face. Tuft of black hair on the baby’s head.
“Your mother,” Ava guessed, and his expression proved her right: a reflection of the woman in the photo, detached, displeased.
He made a sound in the back of his throat. “Dee.” He nodded. “Poor Daddy. He thought all a whore really needed to turn her around was love. He was wrong.”
Ava sat back on her hands, a little stunned.
As if sensing it, Mercy glanced up at her. “I mean a real whore. For money.” His smile was mocking. “I’m probably lucky I wasn’t born with HIV.”
She groped for something to say.
He glanced away from her, toward the photo in her hand. “Anyhow, she’s got it now. She’s dying, Larry said. That’s why Evie wanted to go walking and get you out of the house, so he could tell me I need to go see her, one last time, before it’s too late.”
Ava swallowed. “How long do they think she has?”
“A couple weeks. A couple days. Who knows. Her organs are shutting down.”
“We should go see her, then.”
“We?”
“Yeah. I’m coming with you.”
“Nope,” he said, pushing up onto his hands and getting to his feet. “Absolutely not.”
“Mercy.”
Her tone brought him up short halfway back to the couch. He turned to her as Audioslave droned in the background. His brows lifted.
“Mercy,” she repeated, “I’m not asking you to unpack all your baggage. I’ve never asked you that, because I know you don’t want to. But your mother’s dying, and when you go to see her, I’m going with you. Because I’m not the kid you protect anymore. I’m your wife, and I’m going to support you.”
He folded his arms. “And that’s just how it is?”
“Yeah, it is.”
He walked back to her slowly, socked feet quiet across the carpet. His stride looked like a predatory stalk. “How do you think you’re gonna get there?”
She felt a smile flickering at the corners of her mouth. “The same way you get there.”
“Hm. That’ll be kinda hard considering you’ll be tied to the shower curtain rod when I leave.”
“Gosh, I married the sweetest man.”
He snorted as he lowered to the rug in front of her, crouched so she only had to tip her head back a little to meet his eyes. “You knew what you were getting into.”
“So did you,” she shot back. Then, softening. “What are you so afraid I’ll think?”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “You don’t understand how badly I hate that woman. I don’t want you to see…that side of my blood.”
“Why not?” she pressed, gently.
“Because she destroys people. That’s what she does. And I don’t want you within fifty miles of the bitch.”
“She can’t destroy me,” she said, shaking her head. “And she can’t change the way I see you.”
He took a deep breath. “But it could make you rethink having kids. You won’t want a baby that’s related to her, not after you know…everything.”
Channeling her mother, she gathered one of his big hands up in both of hers and squeezed. “Mercy. Sweetheart. Trust me – your mother isn’t part of the equation. Let me be there for you. I think you need it.”
He glanced away, swallowing. She saw his grandfather in his profile, the handsome Frenchman who’d claimed some dist
ant relation to a French lord. She saw his grandmother in the harsh line of his mouth. Quietly, he said, “Dee’s where the rage comes from. I get that from her.”
“And that rage has kept you alive. And protected the people you love.”
Awful attempt at a smile. “Not all of them, though, not all of them.”
He was on his feet again, going to the bed and falling back across it, staring up at the ceiling.
Ava sighed and started packing his memories away. This had been a bad idea. One she wished she could take back.
“I need to clean your shoulder,” she said, dying for a safe topic.
“It’s fine.”
“Nuh-uh. Shirt off, please.” She stood and stowed the box on top of the desk in the window, and went to the kitchen for the first aid supplies. When she went to the bed, she was thankful to see that he’d complied, sitting up, and shirtless.
She set the alcohol and bandages on the quilt and peeled back the tape on the old covering. She frowned. “This should look better than this by now.”
Its edges were red and oozy still, little broken red vessels moving out away from the wound beneath the skin. The bullet hole had a dark look to it that she didn’t like.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he said.
“Liar.” His skin twitched as she ran her finger around the outside of the wound. “It hurts like a bitch.” On impulse, she pressed her hand to his forehead. “You don’t have a fever, do you?”
He looked insulted. “Yeah, but it’s not up there.” He plucked her hand up and moved it, pressing it over the fly of his jeans. “That’s the only place that’s overheated, baby.”
She wasn’t in the mood for cheap come-ons. She pulled her hand away, and picked up the alcohol. “Nice try. I’m still worried about this. It just looks…raggedy.”
“How scientific, Dr. Lécuyer. Prescribe me something.”
“Smartass.” But she was smiling. “At least let me clean it out.”
“Do I get a treat if I do?”
“Yes.”
“That bastard.” Ghost flicked his cigarette away across the dark yard. As dry as the grass was, it’d probably smoke a little hole in the turf, and Maggie would chew him out.
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