by K. C. McRae
Shirlene kept an eye on everyone’s plate, ready to pass more food to anyone who looked like they were running low. Lauri sat next to her, wearing a loose skirt and top as her nod toward maternity wear. Harlan sat across from Merry, who kept peppering him with questions about the particulars of running the hardware store. Kate O’Neil perched next to her husband, Jack, a quiet, thoughtful sort who Merry took an immediate liking to.
“I’m glad Anna came back,” Shirlene said. “She’s kind of a ditz, but that clinic needs all the help they can get right now.”
Merry nodded, but didn’t say anything, rubbing the inside of her elbow where Anna had jabbed at her veins like she’d been playing darts.
“All this has been terrible for WorldMed, though,” her aunt continued. “The head office is in an uproar, and all the packaging facilities have been shut down. I just can’t believe such a good organization has to suffer like this.”
Merry took a bite of potato salad. “The murders aside, I don’t think either Olivia or Barbie realized how … how, evil stealing those drugs was. Imagine all those kids that dealer in Billings sold to. And the people all over the world who didn’t get drugs they needed.”
“How could they not know?” Shirlene asked.
Merry shrugged. “Hard telling.”
“No compassion,” Shirlene said.
“No empathy,” Kate said.
Lauri cocked her head at them for a moment, then shrugged and took a bite of fried chicken. Speaking around it she said, “They aren’t very nice people, that’s all.”
twenty-six
Air still cool from the darkness whispered around Merry, less than a breeze in the predawn light. The ornate cinerary urn she carried weighed more than it had a right to. Mama hadn’t been a large woman to start with, and now she was just ashes and a few tiny bone fragments.
She’d awakened early with the knowledge of what to do with her mama’s ashes, and lay staring at the square of lighter dark that defined her bedroom window until it turned to gray. In the past months, she’d considered several options, rejecting them all. She’d even talked Frank Cain into taking her up in his Piper Supercub. But when they’d returned to earth, she still had the full urn on her lap. It hadn’t felt right. And it needed to.
This morning in the early hours, less dream than memory, it had come to her in that fog between sleeping and waking. Merry had been at the awkward age between girlhood and womanhood, thirteen and starting the eighth grade. She’d come home from school early due to a teacher-planning day but hadn’t found Mama in the house or yard.
Drawn by a clank from the workshop, she found Daddy working to patch yet another piece of their aging equipment. He greeted her with a grunt, and grunted again in response to her question.
“She got some damn fool idea about it being a nice day for a picnic. Wanted to go over to the back meadow to eat, for God’s sake. Told her I had work to do and to go on ahead. S’pose she did.” He turned back to the broken blade on the hay mower.
Merry remembered being angry that Daddy so readily dismissed Mama’s desire to go on a picnic. Thinking back, he’d no doubt been right about having work to do, because there had always been work to do. Work that had soured him for so long that the bitterness of it had become more comfortable to him than the company of his own wife.
She’d headed down to the back meadow, so called because the field, always aglow with wildflowers in the spring, fell beyond a narrow belt of trees eight hundred yards behind the house. A very few tenacious October blooms sprinkled the early autumn grass, and along the edge, aspens held out the last of their green and yellow and orange-streaked leaves to the sun. Her mother sat beneath the multiple hues of greens and golds, a sandwich wrapper and empty 7-Up can beside her. She heard Merry approach and turned.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. We got out of school early is all.”
She looked puzzled for a moment, and then she smiled. “I’d forgotten. Did you eat lunch before you came home?” She bent to pick up the plastic bag and empty can.
“I ate. Mama? Are you okay?”
She smiled. “I’m fine.”
“Something’s wrong.” Mama’s eyes looked wet, and her expression seemed … wobbly. “Is it because Daddy wouldn’t go on a picnic with you? I bet he just didn’t know …”
She interrupted Merry with a laugh. “No. I’m not surprised your father can’t put down his tools long enough to eat a sandwich with me.”
“Then why do you look so sad?”
She went still for a moment, then cocked her head and turned her gaze on Merry as if trying to gauge something deep inside her.
“I’m not sad. I’m just too happy for my own damn good.”
“I don’t understand.”
Mama held out her arms, sandwich bag in one hand, green metal can in the other, and turned three hundred sixty degrees. One wrist brushed the top of a fireweed gone to seed, and bits of fluff floated up into the air. Her gesture took in the expanse of meadow, the breeze shivering the gold-dollar leaves of quaking aspens, the snowy clouds piled high into the sky above the foothills, the brilliant blue Stellar’s jay chukking from a pine branch.
Merry had forgotten as she grew older, even now was only beginning to remember. But at thirteen, standing there in the tiny back meadow with Mama, she’d understood, and Mama had seen it. Holding hands, they’d walked back to the house.
Now October had rolled around yet again. Autumn had been Mama’s favorite season, a time of abundance, of transition, of settling in. From the meadow, Merry watched the sun rise, her exhalations creating thin clouds around her face. Veins of tangerine spread into the pale sky. Violet clung to the undersides of the clouds to the north, intensifying to drastic magenta where the cumulus bunched and folded in on itself.
She waited until daylight glittered across the fine frost on the grasses and weed stalks, and the show of colors dissolved from the sky. Then Merry opened the lid and waited for a breeze. When it came, she tipped the vessel and let her mother shift and swirl into the bright morning air.
the end
about the author
K.C. McRae grew up in the West and earned degrees in philosophy and English from Colorado State University. She’s had jobs ranging from driver’s license examiner in Wyoming to localization program manager for Microsoft. She also writes the Home Crafting Mystery Series as Cricket McRae. Shotgun Moon is her first mainstream western mystery. For more information about K.C. and her books please visit www.cricketmcrae.com.
Author photograph by Kevin Brookfield.
