A Bad Day for Pretty

by Sophie Littlefield

  Well—house wasn’t exactly the right word. Stella burned rubber the rest of the way to the parking lot that Hardesty Sewing Machine Sales & Repair shared with the China Paradise restaurant. Roseann Lau, China Paradise’s grumpy owner and cook, had invested in an apartment building a while back and moved into its ground-floor rooms, adding “ill-humored landlady” to her résumé and leaving the diminutive apartment at the back of the restaurant empty until Chrissy moved in.

  It had been simple enough to set up a plywood ramp to the back door while Chrissy was still in a wheelchair, and now that the girl was up and about, she had begun scouring off the decade’s worth of grease and smoke that had wafted from the front restaurant back to the little apartment.

  As Stella turned down Third Street toward the shop, she was relieved to see there was still power in the neighborhood. Felled branches and uprooted bushes and all manner of debris littered the streets, but so far she’d seen only a few upended trees and none, thankfully, blocked traffic. By morning, judging from the looks of this storm, there would be crews out with chain saws and chains, dragging off chopped-up tree trunks; pickups with ropes tied to their hitches extracting evergreens from picture windows; folks with their sleeves rolled up, hauling junk out of caved-in garages and sheds.

  She was relieved to see that nothing worse had happened. It wasn’t rational, but tornadoes always left her unsettled and anxious, the memories from the past lodged somewhere deep where time couldn’t erase them.

  Stella’s sister Gracellen had called Stella shortly after she and her husband moved to California years ago. “Stella,” she exclaimed, “they get a little three-point earthquake out here and they act like it’s the end of the world. When somebody’s china falls off the shelf, it makes the evening news!”

  Stella shared her sister’s astonishment. Sure, the west coast occasionally had a genuine earthquake disaster, like Loma Prieta in ’89. But Stella and her classmates hadn’t spent their elementary school careers huddling in the school basement during tornado drills for nothing: a single Midwestern tornado season could kill more folks than several decades of earthquakes along the west coast.

  In the news, they were just numbers. Three dead in eastern Ohio. Four killed in flash floods along the Mississippi.

  In ’66, the tornadoes took a single victim, but Stella hadn’t forgotten.

  She rounded the corner into the parking lot, and there, in all its squat cinder block glory, was Hardesty Sewing Machine Sales & Repair. China Paradise was still standing as well, though the Dumpster behind the restaurant had tipped over and garbage had blown across the lot. A broken umbrella, spines snapped and bent, was splayed against the wheels of Chrissy’s old, beat-up Celica. Stella pulled in next to it and cut the engine, and rolled her window down far enough to peer out.

  A light burned in the living room of Chrissy’s apartment. Stella couldn’t make out any movement behind the sheer curtains, and she debated whether or not to bother the girl. If Chrissy and Tucker had managed to get to sleep during the storm, it might be better to let them catch up on their rest. On the other hand, if Stella went home now, she would be up all night worrying.

  Go on a vengeance quest with a person, stand shoulder to shoulder battling the bad guys, go down fighting while she loses consciousness at your side—experiences like those tended to bring you mighty close to a person. And her towheaded sideways-grinning new-tooth-drooling brat, too, for that matter.

  Before Stella could make up her mind whether to stay or go, the door to the apartment was flung open and Chrissy Shaw stood with her arms folded across her chest, blond curls springing out crazily around her china-pale face, lacy pink camisole incongruously pretty over baggy gray sweats with prosper h. s. panthers printed down the leg.

  “Get on in here, Stella, ’fore you drown your badass self!”

  Stella hesitated, her face pelted by stinging bullets of rain. “You sure you’re up for company, sugar?”

  “You ain’t hardly company,” Chrissy said, rolling her eyes. “And I ain’t puttin’ on any fuss for you neither. You can fetch your own durn beer and fix your own sandwich, but I sure would like you to get on in here and explain what you’re doin’ at my house ’stead of gettin’ yourself properly laid by that lawman of yours.”

  THREE

  Sheriff Goat Jones leaned in close and brushed his damp, incredibly smooth-shaved cheek against Stella’s.

  “Mmm, hmm,” she purred. “That’s the way I like it.”

  But then for some reason he took one of his size 13, shined-up black service shoes and toed her right in the painful part of her bum hip. Even as he ran his silky-smooth cheek along the top of her nose, he dug harder at the poor worn-down joint.

  Then he kicked her.

  “Damn it, Goat!” Stella yelped, and opened her eyes.

  She found herself staring into two very large, unblinking pale blue eyes set into a cherubic little face with a drool-dampened chin.

  Before she could react, Tucker leaned in close and put his forehead flat on her face and mumbled something that sounded like Sow. He hadn’t managed Stella yet—he was sticking to one-syllable words for the moment.

  As charmed as she was to find Chrissy’s little boy trying to scramble up onto the couch with her, Stella was disappointed to discover that the whole Goat thing had been a dreamy illusion.

  She looked down and confirmed that it hadn’t been Goat’s shoe at all that was causing searing pain up and down her leg, but Tucker’s overlarge toy truck, which he’d somehow managed to haul up and drop on top of her, despite the fact that it was nearly as big as he was. The sharp edge of the yellow metal truck bed poked painfully into her flesh, even through the pile of blankets and quilts that Chrissy had dug out of the closet for her last night.

  “Hey, little T, how are you, precious?” Stella said, yawning and setting the truck on the floor. She scooped the boy up for a snuggle. “Listen, let’s just forget that whole ‘damn it’ thing. Sometimes Auntie Stella says bad words by accident. But that doesn’t mean you have to.”

  She slowly eased up to a sitting position as Tucker wiggled out of her arms and disappeared under the blankets. She tried to work the stiffness from her neck and back with a series of shoulder rolls, which caused some suspicious popping noises. She was too old to be sleeping on couches. After last night’s tossing and turning, she’d probably have to put in some time later on her own firm Sealy Posturepedic to catch up on her rest—if her house was still standing. At least there probably wouldn’t be any customers in desperate need of sewing machine oil or dressmaker’s chalk today; the Home Depot was likely to be the only store in town experiencing a run on supplies.

  “Sow … Sow.” Tucker popped his head out from the covers, his grin sprouting dimples.

  “Oh, so there you are, you li’l nubbin,” Chrissy exclaimed, coming around the corner holding two big mugs of coffee. As she set the mugs down and scooped up her giggling boy, Stella’s phone, which had slipped out of her purse and lay on the floor beside the couch, started up its terrible racket.

  Tucker’s little face screwed up, and he looked like he was getting ready to wail.

  “Aw, now, give it a few years,” Stella said, seizing at the thing and stabbing the answer button. “When you’re a big boy, you’ll think that’s the music of the heavens. Probably be skateboarding holes in my driveway, too. Y’ello?”

  The voice on the other end launched into a stream of sobbing and run-together words, and Stella sat up a little straighter. A work call, then. Dang—she needed her reading glasses, which were undoubtedly back home on the kitchen table, and her notebook, which was still in the Jeep where she’d left it when she washed up last night with the storm. Speaking of which: Stella glanced out the single window in the apartment’s narrow little living room and saw cerulean skies dotted with a smattering of cotton-ball clouds.

  Wasn’t that just always the way? Her daddy used to say that the day after a tornado brought the sun running to make up for
lost time, and today certainly seemed to prove the rule. Golden September sunlight streamed through the glass and sparkled up the surfaces of the room’s simple furnishings, glinting off Tucker’s and Chrissy’s matching white-blond curly mop tops.

  Well, lovely as the new day might be, her caller evidently had more pressing concerns on her mind.

  “Now slow down, hon,” Stella said soothingly, thinking back over her most recent clients, trying to figure out who might have met with some new and upsetting type of setback. The thing was, there hadn’t really been much in the way of new jobs lately. With Stella out of commission for a few months, her side business had gone into a holding pattern. Ladies who’d been working up to the idea of taking decisive action against their no-good, wife-smacking, covenant-breaking mates had heard about Stella’s misfortune—everyone in town knew that Stella wasn’t in any kind of shape to be winding up the justice machine—and had no choice but to dial back their determination for the moment.

  When you were a beat-up wife, suffering in silence was generally a familiar strategy. Stella had done it herself plenty often before she’d finally snapped and taken Ollie out. The thing about a mean and hateful man was that he’d keep. Wasn’t like, if the gals had to wait a few more weeks for Stella to get back in full fighting form before they could embark on their quests for vengeance, these crappy husbands were going to go transforming themselves overnight into doting soul mates. No, these guys pretty much stayed true to type, never varying much from their agenda of hurtin’ unless some sort of major upset came along to knock them off their sorry feet.

  “Honey, who is this now?” Stella asked, cradling the phone close against her ear so the wailing voice wouldn’t carry. It was instinctive, trying to shield little Tucker from this sad aspect of her business.

  “It’s Neb,” the voice wailed. “I mean this is Donna, Donna Donovan—”

  “Donna!” Stella exclaimed. “What in heaven’s name—? Did Neb do something—?”

  “No, no, he hasn’t done anything,” Donna interrupted. “Don’t think that for a minute. But we need you. He needs you. Can you get on over to the fairgrounds fast?”

  “Has something happened to Neb?” Stella asked.

  Nebuchadnezzar Donovan was the lone exception on the roster of men who’d been on the receiving end of Stella’s professional attentions—the one man whom she considered to be fully rehabilitated after what had turned out to be a fairly brief probation.

  Of course, he hadn’t been a typical parolee, either. Neb wasn’t guilty of smacking Donna, his bride of twenty-five years, but his sudden and nearly devastating conversion to cultlike religious fundamentalism a little over a year ago had made Donna desperate enough to hire Stella to talk some sense into him.

  “Nothin’s happened yet,” Donna said, her voice taut with worry, “but Sheriff Jones came by around six and picked Neb up and said something had come up down at the demolition derby track at the fairgrounds, that he needed Neb’s help with. After a while when he didn’t come home, I got worried and I called him but he had his phone off, ’cept around seven thirty here comes a call from the sheriff’s phone—I got that caller ID—and Neb tells me Goat’s only let ’im have the one phone call to let me know not to wait breakfast for him, so I says is something wrong and Neb says no in a way that makes me pretty sure he means yes, you know? Something is definitely wrong over there, Stella.”

  “Okay,” Stella said, thinking fast and rubbing sleep out of her eyes. Chrissy was in the apartment’s minuscule kitchen breaking eggs into a bowl, and Tucker had wandered off carrying one of the hot pink rubber clogs Stella kicked off the night before.

  One of the little-known facts about Neb Donovan was that he’d battled an OxyContin addiction. This was before his whole come-to-Jesus phase and after an especially bad, prolonged battle with a disk in Neb’s back that slipped far enough to send him into a world of exquisite hurt, the kind that required frightening quantities of pain medication to be tipped down his throat like so many Nerds candies. His back healed, but by then Neb had developed an unseemly fondness for the little yellow pills.

  Neb had done most of his Oxy-popping out at the track, a convenient location, since he was the year-round maintenance man at the fairgrounds.

  “Has he been at the track working this week?” Stella asked. With the Sawyer County Fair only weeks away, Neb’s job would be kicking into high gear, getting everything ready for the thousands of visitors who would come from all over the state to converge on Prosper, champing at the bit for a full day of corn dogs and midway rides and prizewinning pickles and hogs.

  “Oh my, yes. But them organizers got him hopping around busier than a tick on a cat’s back, with their last-minute schedule changes and what-all, he ain’t come home on time in weeks, I swear they have no idea what it takes to…” Donna’s voice trailed off, and Stella heard her sniffle.

  “Donna? You okay, honey?”

  “Do you—?” Donna coughed gently and cleared her throat a couple of times until she got herself under control. “Do you think he might be into the Oxy again?”

  “I don’t think so,” Stella said, but in truth she had no idea. Oxy was a deadly habit, cheap and available enough out in the sticks that rural folks could develop a troublesome taste for it. And besides, it wasn’t really sheriff department business to round up unfortunate junkies—unless they’d done some sort of additional crime-committing while they were high as a kite. “Do you want to meet me at the track and we can see if we can talk to Neb in private and find out what’s going on?”

  “I don’t want to go over there,” Donna said quickly. “How’s that gonna look—like I’m checking up on him. If they don’t already think he’s using again, they will then. If you go, it can be like, you know, you just heard about the fuss and were curious and what-all.”

  “Okay, give me ten minutes to get myself put together here, and I’ll head over and see what I can find out.”

  “Oh, would you?” The relief in Donna’s voice was palpable.

  Stella promised again and hung up, then heaved a huge sigh. “Chrissy, that was Donna Donovan. The sheriff’s hauled Neb out of bed and got him over at the fairgrounds and won’t let him go home. I’m sure it’s nothing, but Donna’s fit to be tied and I told her I’d run over there and check on things. I don’t suppose you could fry me up something in the next two minutes, do you? Oh, and can I borrow your toothbrush?”

  “That’s disgusting,” Chrissy said as Stella folded the quilts and blankets and stacked them in a pile at the end of the couch. “But I suppose you ain’t got a lot of choice ’less you want to breathe dragon breath on that man of yours. Which I don’t guess is gonna help you get laid. But what do I get outta fixin’ your breakfast, I’d like to know?”

  Stella ducked into the little bathroom but left the door ajar. The apartment was so small that she could keep talking to Chrissy in the other room without raising her voice. “How about, I don’t know, a fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonus if you come work for me full-time?”

  Chrissy snorted with laughter. “No chance, you ain’t got that kind of money. Besides, I ain’t goin’ criminal, not with this boy to raise up all by myself. I’m perfectly happy running the sewin’ shop and you can carry on all your lawbreakin’ high jinks without me.”

  Stella grinned to herself as she finished brushing her teeth and splashed some cold water on her face. It was funny how much she’d come to rely on Chrissy, and not just to take over part of the workload.

  She opened the medicine cabinet and helped herself to Chrissy’s hairbrush.

  “Yes, you can use my makeup,” Chrissy called. “Seein’ as you’re going to be visiting with your boyfriend an’ all. Just go easy on the blush—you always put on too much and then you end up looking like a old tramp.”

  Stella, who’d already picked up a Maybelline quad eye shadow in fetching shades of gold and pink and burgundy, frowned at her reflection. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she muttered. Not her any
thing, now that his wife or ex or whatever the heck she was had shown up. Visions of Brandy’s casual little wave as Stella let herself out—flicking hair spray–stiffened waves of blond hair over her shoulder and mouthing buh-bye, now with a pout that had to have been collagen-assisted—caused a heartburn-like pain to lodge in her chest.

  Stella jammed the eye shadow quad back onto the crowded shelf and slammed the cabinet shut. “And if I want to look like a tramp, why I’d just like to see anyone try to stop me.”

  The judicious silence that followed suggested that Chrissy had decided to keep her opinion to herself, a rare enough event. Hell, Stella hadn’t meant to snap at her—but that comment had stung. Since she and Noelle had resumed cordial relations, Stella asked her daughter for help in the personal-grooming department, and she thought she had been making progress. Still, cosmetics—an industry she had supported as enthusiastically as anyone in her younger years—had certainly changed in the last decade or so while her attention had been elsewhere, and reentry was proving a little more difficult than she’d expected.

  She left the bathroom, pointedly ignoring her reflection. “Can I borrow a T-shirt or something?”

  “Yeah, whatever you can find in the dresser.”

  Stella sorted through stacks of neatly folded tops until she found one with a minimum of embellishment—a pink T-shirt that was mostly plain besides a dainty little drawstring neck. Stella slipped it on and wadded her old one into a ball, then shoved it in her purse.

  Chrissy popped out of the little kitchen, holding a paper plate.

  “This here can be yours,” she said, “but not unless you let me get them Comcast guys out to the shop. I cain’t stand that connection speed no more, Stella. It’s slower’n molasses in January.”