* * *
LATER, AFTER the lunch rush was over, there were still some customers in no big hurry. The old farmers had been replaced by a new set of old farmers and a new set of courthouse secretaries sat talking in a booth. Six or seven others were scattered among the other booths or at the counter. There was plenty to do now, so Edie O’Leary did not notice right away that Sheila Hacker sat at the counter, close by the register, with her hands flat on the table. She was nibbling at the ring in her lip and staring out across the courthouse square.
“Can I get you something, honey?”
“Can I just sit here?”
“Honey, it’s a restaurant.”
The girl looked left and right, then pressed her hands even tighter to the countertop, so Edie turned on her heel, poured a cup of coffee, set the cup in front of the girl and asked, “Are you hungry?”
“I didn’t bring my purse.”
“Hold on,” said Edie. She went back to the kitchen, pulled out a plate, and prepped an order of the meat loaf special. She set it in front of the girl and went on about her business. The secretaries were ready for their bill, the new old farmers wanted pie, and the half dozen others wanted some of this or some of that. When she finally got back to the girl, she had her fork in hand, but she had not eaten more than a nibble off the corner of the meatloaf and had barely put a dent into the mashed potatoes.
“You all right, honey?”
“I’m just nervous, is all.”
“They ain’t charged you yet, honey. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
The girl pondered this a moment. She looked up, nibbled at the ring in her in her lip, then asked, “How did you do it?”
“Do what, honey?”
“How did you get clean? How did you get off the drugs?”
Edie looked around. No one else was listening. It was an opening, a chance to carry the message. She leaned closer. “Honey, they court-ordered me to treatment,” she said. “Or else I probably would still be out there. Or dead. I lost my kids and everything, just like Maggie. But I’d probably still be out there.”
The girl nodded, but she kept one eye on the door.
“It worked, but I had to let it work.”
The girl drummed her fingers on the counter. She looked again to the window.
“The court got me in the door. But I had to want it more than I wanted to get high.”
One of the new old farmers raised his coffee mug to catch Edie’s eye. Edie glared him down.
“Cause if you don’t want it,” she said to the girl, “it’s not gonna happen. First couple times I went to rehab, I didn’t really want it. I still wanted to party. They tried to tell me what was up, but I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t wait to get out and get high again. I knew the OxyContin was eating me alive, but I didn’t care. But this last time . . .”
The girl interrupted. “I heard you was the one to get Maggie Boylan started on Oxy.”
“Who told you that?”
The girl looked away.
“Okay,” Edie said. “It don’t matter.” She thought for a moment. If she knows that, what else does she know?
The old farmer had raised his cup again and the secretaries had risen and were headed for the register.
“Hold on, babe,” Edie said. She rang up the secretaries and took their money. She poured the farmer’s refill, cleared the secretaries’ table, and scooped up their morsel of a tip. She hesitated a moment before she turned back to the girl. After all, she thought, if I got Maggie started on Oxy and Maggie got the girl started, which was likely, then I’ve got a hand in whatever happens from here on out. The thought was as troublesome as any she had ever had. So she busied herself with bussing the tables. She carried the dishes back to the kitchen, said her short prayer, and came back out to face the girl.
But the girl was gone. Quick as that, the girl was gone.
* * *
AT TWO in the afternoon, the new old farmers were still in place, each of them working through a third or fourth refill. A couple of teenagers skipping school, a couple truckers on a break—that was all. Everyone was talking quietly, one of the old farmers might tell a joke and the other one laugh, but for half an hour, it had been quiet as the moments before church.
It was quiet enough to set Edie O’Leary to thinking again: It’s a hard thing, she thought, to set a thing right once you’ve set it wrong. For Maggie Boylan had always been a wild one, but she had never been so wild and never so lost and devious, never so spare of flesh and so all out at the bones before Edie O’Leary, high and heedless, had shared with her that first OxyContin.
And then Maggie Boylan herself blew in the door. She marched straight up to Edie and pounded a bony fist on the counter.
“Where is she?”
“You mean that girl you brought in?”
“I mean that little metalmouth bitch that, yes I brought her in here this morning, and I need to know where the hell she went.”
“I don’t know, but Maggie, I told you I saw trouble coming.”
“Well, there’s gonna be more trouble soon as I find her. If I can catch her before a cop catches me, that’ll be the end of it right there.”
“Maggie, what is up with you? One minute you’re willing to go to jail for the girl and the next you want to kill her.”
“What’s up with her is what you need to ask.”
“So what’s up with her?”
“That sheriff scared her good enough that she decided to give me up so they’d let her go. So she ratted me out, that’s what happened. She flat-out lied on me. She told the cops I did that break-in. And now they’re looking for me.”
“Maggie, you lie down with dogs . . .”
“I know, you get up with fleas. So tell me what happened to that particular fleabag bitch I’m looking for.”
“She left here about an hour ago.”
“Which way?”
“Maggie, I don’t know. I looked up and she was here and I looked away and she was gone.”
One of the new old farmers pointed out the front door of the Grill. “She went left out the door looking like a scared rabbit.”
“She ought to be scared,” Maggie said. She turned to leave.
“Maggie,” Edie said.
“I ain’t got time,” Maggie said. “I got to stop this little lying bitch.” She slammed the door behind her and started up the street to the left.
* * *
AT THREE in the afternoon, Edie O’Leary told the old farmers, “I’ve been here ten hours without a break and I’m ready to go home.”
The cook was on his way out the door and the owner was on his way in. Edie called to him, “Stavros, when you gonna get me some help in here?”
“You find somebody who will do the job,” he said in his heavy Greek accent. She started to bus the plates from the truckers, but Stavros said, “Put it down. I got it from here.”
Edie did not argue. She counted up her tips and left the cook his share, then gathered her purse, sweater, and jacket. She took out a cigarette and her lighter and had the cigarette on her lips as she came out the door and onto the steps. She paused on the front step to light up the cigarette and let the nicotine massage her troubled nerves. She exhaled and let the wind take the smoke away. It was a January wind with the bitterness of a January wind and it carried with it the sound of voices from across the square. The words were baffled and rendered half-unreadable by the gusts, but she recognized them as curses and she recognized the voice as the voice of Maggie—oh my God, she thought—crazy Maggie Boylan with her hands cuffed behind her, her eyes narrow with rage, Tim Weatherstone at one arm and another deputy at the other and to the side, the sheriff himself, watching like the smug sonofabitch that he was.
At a word from the sheriff, the deputies began to steer Maggie toward the jailhouse on the other side of the square, but five steps in, Maggie balked and would not be budged. She glared toward the courthouse steps and her curses suddenly became more urgent and precise. For c
oming down the courthouse steps was Sheila Hacker. For just a moment, Sheila stood, struck deer-blind by Maggie and her curses. But quickly she spat out a string of curses of her own, turned, and scuttled back into the courthouse.
The deputies found their traction and dragged Maggie away. But still, she cursed. She cursed the girl and her lie. She cursed the deputies right and left. She cursed her luck and the day she was born. She cursed the whole world around her until they shoved her through the jailhouse door.
Edie O’Leary dropped the butt of her cigarette and crushed it under her toe. The others from around the square who had been watching now turned to talk with each other. In a moment, the wind drove them all off the square and Edie O’Leary was left alone in the cold to trouble out what she had once set wrong and now could never set right.
All This Craziness
COREY HACKER leaned out over her porch rail and peered once more up the road and into the dark.
“She’ll come home when she wants to come home,” her husband said from the door. “Come on in before you catch your death of cold.”
“Hush,” she said. “Wait a minute.” Her voice was sharp. Sharper than she intended, but there it was. She was lean as an axe handle and her eye was sharp as her words. She cut him a look with the blade of her eye, hoping he would back off.
“Let her go,” he said. “She’s grown.”
“She’s not grown.”
“She’s twenty-two years old. She’s grown. She can do what she wants. I did what I wanted when I was twenty-two. And so did you.”
And look where it got us, she wanted to say. Donald was a preacher now, but he had been in a biker gang when he was younger and he had the scars and the tattoos and the crookedleg limp to prove it. She had left her first husband for this man and his tattoos—the scars and the crushed leg came later. She remembered that and took her sharp eye away.
“She’s still a baby to me,” she said.
“She had her own mind when she was a baby,” he said. “Even before all this craziness.”
Craziness: Sheila, her daughter, her only, her hope and her heart, the child of her own crazy youth. The girl had taken to running the roads late of a night, making all the wrong decisions with all the wrong people, running afoul of the law and good sense. She had dropped the college scholarship and picked up the wild boyfriend, the wild moods, the tattoos and the piercings, and the OxyContin, the crazy cause of it all.
“I thought she quit for good this time,” her mother said. “I really thought for sure she would quit.”
“You don’t need to wait out here anyway,” Donald said. “You’ll hear that muffler long before you see any headlights.”
“In and out of treatment, how many times? In and out of jail? You’d think she would have learned from all we went through. And now this business of testifying against her so-called best friend. You’d think,” she said. “You’d think she’d start to see it.”
He said nothing to that. He held the door open and waited.
She noticed the silence and thought, he knows something and he’s not about to say it. It set her to pondering in the backyard of her mind.
She peered over the porch rail one more time, then followed him into the house. He was right; it was the dead of night, it was the dead of winter. It was too late, too cold to be watching for a set of headlights that might not come at all.
He told her goodnight and limped off to bed. “I’ll be up directly,” she told him. She had to be at work first thing; she needed to get some sleep. But first, she settled into a kitchen chair. She loosened her hair from its clips and bands. She took a brush from the pocket of her gown and began to brush her hair. It fell nearly to the floor and she brushed it out and brushed it out and then put the hairbrush down, pulled her hair back, divided it into three strands, then wove the strands into a long, thick braid.
He knows something, she thought. He’s been talking to that courthouse crowd and he knows something but he won’t say what he knows.
And she would have asked, but by the time she came to bed, her husband had fallen asleep with his Bible collapsed in front of him and his big hands splayed out like fallen pillars.
* * *
SHE SLEPT, but she did not sleep long. At some time before dawn, she heard the ragged rumble of the muffler coming down the road and up the drive, then a shuffle and a stumble and a whisper of voices and she got up to check.
Sheila and her wild boyfriend stood in her bedroom in front of her dresser, stuffing clothes and cosmetics into a duffel. A backpack and a spangled purse, already filled, waited by the door. They were working in the light of a small study lamp. So when Corey turned on the overhead light, they both stood startled, half blind, and blinking.
“What the f—!” The boyfriend saw who it was and broke off.
Her daughter did not. “Ma! What the fuck? Are you trying to blind us?”
“What’s going on?”
“Can you tell?”
“It looks like you’re packing to leave.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“Your dad’ll not be happy.”
“Donald’s not my dad.”
“He’ll do till you find you a better one.”
“I got to go, Ma. Maggie Boylan’s gonna kick my ass if she sees me.”
“She’s gonna see you at five in the morning?”
“Not yet, but she will.”
“Because you testified against her?”
“She’s trying to say I lied on her.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Did you tell a lie on Maggie Boylan?”
“Did Donald tell you I did?”
“He never said a word. I just want to know. Did you lie on Maggie Boylan?”
“Ma, I can’t believe you’re even asking me such a thing.”
“Did you?” The notion had festered and now she needed to know.
“I’m not going through this all over again.”
“All I did was ask. And you can’t give me a straight answer. That says a lot.”
“It says I’m tired of you and your nosy questions.”
“As long as you’re living under my roof, I got a right to an answer.”
“Ma, I got to go. Maggie’s looking for me. And when I’m gone, you can keep your roof for yourself.”
“Donald’s here. He’s not gonna let you come to any harm.”
“Donald’s gonna say, let her suffer the natural consequences.”
“Maggie Boylan’s not a natural consequence.”
“No, she’s a natural disaster and I got to get out of the way.”
Corey nodded toward the boyfriend. “You got all the disaster you need right there. He’s a one-man catastrophe.”
“Ma, don’t start.” She emptied the last drawer into the duffel and hitched it to her shoulder.
“Let me see your eyes,” Corey said. “I want to see does he have you on something.”
“Ma, I’m not your little girl anymore.”
“Let me see your eyes.”
“Ma, no.”
The mother squinted up her own eyes to see better. She even turned the beam of the study lamp on her daughter’s face. “Let me see,” she said. Her word and eye were sharp again.
“Come on, Ronnie, we got to get out of here,” the daughter said.
The woman stepped to block her daughter’s path.
“Ma! Have you gone totally crazy?”
The boyfriend looked from mother to daughter with eyes big as dollar coins.
“Corey, let her go.” Donald was limping down the hall.
“Ma, I swear. If you don’t get out of the way, I’m gonna knock you right down the stairs.”
“I want to see your eyes.”
“Let her go,” Donald said. “Just let her pass.”
“Do what he says, Ma. For once in your life, do the sensible thing.”
Her husband took her by the shoulder and started to guide her backw
ard out of their path.
She didn’t fight him; she knew she had lost this battle long ago.
“Go on,” Corey said. “There’s nothing ever gonna be right in this world. You might as well be wrong with the rest.”
“This is crazy,” said the daughter. “This whole family is crazy.”
“If you leave,” the mother said, “you ain’t coming back.”
“If I leave, you’re right. I’m not ever coming back. I don’t want to ever come back to this crazy house.”
Corey started to flare back; the words were right at the gate of her teeth. But she knew there was nothing more to say. She let her husband pull her back further down the hall. Sheila and Ronnie lifted the duffle and the backpack and trundled them down the stairs.
Corey turned away. She shrugged her husband’s hands off her shoulders and stared away where she could not see them leave.
They stood in the hall for several long minutes as the girl and her boyfriend stumbled their plunder down the steps. They heard the trundle-thump at each step, then the creak of the porch boards, and the throaty roar of Sheila’s perforated muffler as they scratched and rumbled out the drive and down the road.
“I thought you was gonna fix that muffler,” the mother said.
“There’s a lot of things I ain’t yet fixed,” he said. They stood in the dark hall and talked of mufflers and rain gutters and all manner of things in need of fixing.
They spoke in a hush, at a bare whisper, though there really was no need.
Probation
MAGGIE BOYLAN sat in her place and glared at the judge as hard a glare as she dared to give. But her glare was nothing to the judge. He kept his eyes on the papers laid out on the bench and he nodded as the lawyers—her lawyer on one side and the prosecutor on the other—said those things that lawyers say when they’re deciding someone’s case.
Maggie Boylan Page 7
