Sweet Cherry Pie

by J. D. Monroe

  Her heart humps her windpipe like a lovesick Chihuahua. She hesitantly puts the phone on speaker. “Sorry, I just woke up, and I’m a little confused. Did you say my mother asked to see me? Are we talking about the same person? Harmony Pierson, hasn’t said a single word in ten years? Same crazy bitch?”

  “Y-Yes, ma’am,” Myers says. “Her doctor is thrilled with the breakthrough. The report says she woke up the other day and asked for breakfast, then asked to see her daughters. She said it was extremely important.”

  Impossible. Completely and utterly impossible. Her head spins slightly, like she’s just crossed the line from tipsy into drunk. “Did she say anything else?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. We’re not typically open for visiting hours on the weekend, but we’re willing to make an exception in this case.” Myers sounds excited, and Charity can only envision that she’s imagining a tearful reunion, a glowing testament to the power of love. The poor woman is destined for crushing disappointment. Life’s a bitch that way.

  “I’m kind of out of commission right now,” Charity says flatly. “Not sure I can make it.”

  Long silence, pregnant with judgment. After all, what kind of daughter wouldn’t want to see her mother? “Ms. Pierson, it would be good for your mother’s mental state to see you, especially with this breakthrough.”

  Charity slumps back on the bed and rests one hand on her burning forehead. “Ms. Myers, my mother isn’t there because she had a nervous breakdown and needed some hug-it-out, Kumbaya bullshit therapy.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Check your files,” Charity says. “I’m sure there’s some nice color pictures in case you can’t figure out what she did to book her stay in your fine establishment. Considering what she did, believe me when I tell you that I don’t give a good diddly damn about improving her mental state.”

  Myers is silent for a long stretch. “If you change your mind, please feel free to call my office. I’ll help arrange it. Sooner would be better than later.”

  “Well, the nice thing about a life sentence is that there’s no real hurry, is there?” Charity says. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Ms. Pier—”

  She violently jabs the End button and tosses the phone to the foot of the bed, then curls her legs up under herself. Without thinking, her hand goes to the metal cross around her neck, thumb easing into the worry-smoothed center.

  Her dad used to do the same thing. His hunts always started in the kitchen, where he sat on a creaky barstool at the counter. Phone cradled against his stubbled jaw, he’d take notes with his right hand while his left worried at the cross, fingers tracing every crevice and edge of those two nails. Some good it did him.

  Her eyes sting faintly at the memory of him. She thought Harmony was out of her life for good. She certainly hasn’t forgiven or forgotten what happened, but it’s behind her now, a looming shadow that she only has to see if she turns back. Yet now Harmony’s gone and put herself squarely in her path, so that no matter which way Charity turns, she’s there. The mere thought of staring into those cold blue eyes makes her heart race.

  How is this possible?

  Easy answer: it isn’t.

  As far as anyone knows, Harmony hasn’t said a word since Charity put a bullet in her temple ten years ago. She still doesn’t know how the woman survived that shot. She chalks it up to terror affecting her accuracy, and Harmony being forged from pure, steel-edged meanness tempered in the devil’s own furnace. Give her that same shot today, with ten years of simmering anger to guide her hands. Harmony would have made three body bags rolling out of the Pierson house that night.

  And Patience. Did Myers call her, too? Is there some unspoken social more, a rule in the etiquette book that says thou shalt call thy estranged sister about thy murdering mother?

  That answer comes fast and unwelcome like a sucker punch. She knows she should, but she knows with equal certainty that she won’t. Not with how things ended between them. Besides, Patience hasn’t called her, so they’re equally guilty there.

  It doesn’t make sense. Why now? What changed? A thousand questions crowd her mind. No answers follow, but she has one certainty, tempered and polished by eight years in the trenches: ain’t nothing good.

  6. COMPROMISE

  THE BAR IS EMPTY—for once—at eleven in the morning. Mike’s up the road at Sam’s Club, filling the back of his truck with frozen hamburger patties and cheap toilet paper. The jukebox blares an uninterrupted stream of Aerosmith’s greatest hits while she slices lemons and limes into neat wedges. Dissecting citrus with the tiny knife is the closest she’s gotten to hunting in nearly a week.

  She’s howling “Dream on” with Steven Tyler when her ass starts vibrating. She leaves her most recent lemon victim lying lifeless on the wooden cutting board and yanks her phone out of her pocket. Her stomach sinks as she reads the caller ID. 984—North Carolina again. It seems her plan to simply forget yesterday’s call isn’t going to work out.

  “Hello, Ms. Pierson? This is Casey Myers again,” the now-familiar voice says.

  “Look, I told you yesterday—”

  “Yes, Ms. Pierson, I recall,” Myers says brusquely. “But the situation has changed.”

  Charity squeezes her eyes shut. Because Harmony always gets what she wants, and even prison hasn’t changed that. “How so?”

  “I had another visit with your mother this morning. When she learned you wouldn’t be visiting, she became extremely agitated and then threatened to harm herself if you didn’t come. She insists this is a matter of life and death.”

  “Well, of course it is,” Charity says. Her legs feel shaky with anxiety and anger. She squeezes a hapless wedge of lime into pulp, wishing it would transfer to Harmony through some kind of citrus voodoo. “So you’re blackmailing me on behalf of my mother?”

  Myers sighs. “I understand your position.”

  “Do you? Is your mother also incarcerated for brutally murdering your father? Is there a secret club I didn’t know about?”

  “Ms. Pierson,” Myers says sharply. “I’m simply asking that you visit. It would grant you both some closure and help begin the rehabilitation process.”

  “Rehabilitation—” Charity laughs. “You know, never mind. Have you called my sister?”

  “I tried,” Myers says. “I haven’t gotten a response yet.”

  That seals the deal. As much as she doesn’t want to see Harmony, she doesn’t want to be in the dark. If Harmony’s on the verge of an earth-shattering revelation, she’s not about to let Patience find out first. “All right. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thank you, I truly—”

  She hangs up and contemplates her pile of lemon wedges. Her last memory of Harmony is a blood-splattered living room and the sinking realization that her life as she knew it was over. She watched blankly as they loaded her seizing mother into an ambulance, fighting to keep her alive while the rapidly cooling bodies of her victims lay on the floor. The coroner rolled out with Dad and Uncle John an hour later, in no particular hurry, and that was the end of the world as she knew it, and she was pretty damn far from feeling fine.

  There was even a hairy moment where the police suspected it might have been Charity’s doing, especially with the way Patience wailed over Harmony as they rolled her out. As far as Patience was concerned, Dad and John were an afterthought. But Harmony had been elbows-deep in Dad and John’s blood, and John had a handful of her hair tangled in his ragged fingers. Whatever Patience thought, Charity pulled the trigger to protect the two of them from the same fate, and there was no judge east of the Mississippi who would have suggested otherwise.

  Now, almost ten years later, her mother wants to see her, and Jesus in heaven only knows why. Is it to tear her a fresh asshole for doing her damnedest to kill her? Harmony had it coming ten times over, but that wouldn’t deter her mama’s righteous wrath. The real kicker of it is that it’s Harmony, so no matter how off-the-wall, crazy-pills wrong she is, she’ll s
till manage to make Charity into the real bad guy here. Because according to Harmony, family trumps all, and blood can cover over any wrong.

  She doesn’t want to care if Harmony hurts herself, not after what she did that dark summer night. But she does care, dammit. And she’ll be damned if she’s going to let Patience get there first and let the two of them start banding together again like the old days. She doesn’t want to give Harmony the satisfaction of jumping when the bitch says jump, but she also doesn’t want to give Patience any more fuel for her self-righteous fire. She’s near certain Harmony won’t do a damn thing to herself, because the thing she loves most is herself. But ten years in prison may well have pushed the woman over the edge, and Charity refuses to be the one left holding the pieces if her mother takes matters into her own hands again.

  Fucking family.

  She’s still debating with herself when Mike comes in with a thirty-pound box of hamburgers over one shoulder. It takes them half an hour to unload the truck bed full of supplies and cram everything into the big chest freezer in the back room.

  When they finish, he makes them each one of his legendary BLTs, which are excessive on the B and virtually non-existent on the L and T, just the way she likes it. She draws a couple of ice-cold beers and pulls up a stool at the corner of the bar. Mike wolfs down half his sandwich, then pushes away his plate and says, “What’s up, Cherry-girl?”

  She freezes with a salty strip of bacon hanging from her lip. “Hrm?”

  He dabs his mouth delicately. “Been a bartender for fifteen years. You got something on your mind sure as I’m standing here.”

  She takes a long drink of her beer and wishes it was a hell of a lot stronger. “Got a call from the prison. Harmony’s talking.”

  One bushy eyebrow quirks up faintly, and that’s all Mike gives away. If he’s got an opinion about his dear cousin Harmony going all Lizzie Borden, he’s never let on. “She have anything interesting to say?”

  “Demanded I come and see her.”

  “Well, I’ll be. I can’t imagine Harmony demanding anything,” he says with a dry chuckle. “You gonna go?”

  “Can’t,” she says. “Nowhere near fixing my truck.”

  “Bull. Shit.”

  “What?”

  “You just don’t want to go,” he says. “Borrow mine for the day. It’ll take you, what, three hours to get up there?”

  “I couldn’t—”

  “You could call me in the middle of the night to tow your little ass here from Atlanta, but you can’t borrow my truck?” Mike smirks and takes another bite of his sandwich. “Like I said. Bull. Shit.”

  “You know I never liked you.”

  “Lies and slander,” he replies. “Get up tomorrow and go see your mama.”

  7. DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  IT SHOULD TAKE ABOUT THREE HOURS to get to Raleigh, but she keeps finding reasons to stop. By the time she crosses the city limits, it’s been four hours, three bathroom stops, and at least two near one-eighties to go right back where her happy ass came from.

  The North Carolina Correctional Institute for Women sits in the middle of Raleigh. There’s block after block of houses, cars lining the narrow street as normal as apple pie and ice cream, and then boom, the prison bursts up like a surprise zit on prom night. The low brick sign at the front entrance could be for a hospital or an army base or anything else perfectly normal.

  She’s driven up this way a hundred times, watching as her sister Patience walked, alone, up to the visitor’s entrance. She can find an artery-busting burger, a fishbowl-sized margarita, and a place to sleep off a buzz within a ten-minute drive. But she has never done this, no matter how much guilt Patience laid on her. Her sister could say but she’s our mother until she was blue in the face. Charity said all she had to say that night.

  Until now, that is.

  She has never emptied her pockets of contraband—anything sharp, flammable, or otherwise suspicious—and stowed it in the backseat. She has never composed herself, checking her face one last time in the mirror, applying a fresh coat of mascara with a hand that betrays her by shaking ever so slightly.

  She has never walked up to the desk and said these words in a trembling voice: “I’m here to visit Harmony Pierson.”

  There is a process of verifying her identity, and she feels sorry for the unlucky guard who has to pat her down. Despite the cool weather, she’s sweating buckets through her thin button-down shirt. They give her a lesson in the rules of prison visitation. They tell her Casey Myers is out of the building for some reason. She barely hears the words through a fog of apprehension, because all she can think is I’m about to look my mother in the eye.

  A guard walks her into the visiting room, where a handful of families visit in quiet huddles around plastic tables. The walls are painted a minty toothpaste green that brings hospitals to mind, and the chairs are all bolted to the floor. Probably makes them a lot harder to throw across the room. One corner of the room is carpeted with a dingy preschool train-track rug. A handful of dog-eared kids’ magazines litter the floor alongside one of those wooden contraptions with the beads on bent colored wires. Seems like an awfully depressing way to spend a childhood, but then, hers wasn’t exactly the model of functionality.

  For a week at a time, she and Patience would stay with a family friend while Harmony and Andy hit the road for a job. When they were little, they thought their parents were just traveling, but Charity still remembers the day Harmony sat both of them down and told them what Mama and Daddy were really doing on all those trips. She had nightmares for a year straight, and she was only eight years old the first time when Christina showed her how to seal off the house with salt and holy water, muttering about her good-for-nothing mama. Charity’s third grade teacher thought she had an impressive, if slightly morbid, imagination when she started telling stories about haunted houses and dug-up graves. Her penchant for storytelling dried up once Patience told her they’d come and put Mama in jail if they heard Charity talking like that.

  Well, she got it half right.

  “You can sit wherever,” the guard says.

  She takes a table and sits with her back to the wall, where she can see both entrances to the room. Her heart pounds so hard it feels like it’s going to back up into her windpipe and choke her. She needs a weapon stronger than her sharp tongue, preferably something heavy, sharp, or explosive. The last time they were face-to-face, it was over the mutilated corpse of Charity’s father, Andy, and it ended with Charity putting a near-perfect shot into her mother’s skull. She did what she had to do, but she certainly doesn’t want to hear what Harmony has to say about it.

  What the hell? She’s brawled with a hungry revenant armed with only a butter knife and a cigarette lighter. One crazy human under the watchful eye of a well-armed guard shouldn’t scare her.

  Shouldn’t.

  Does.

  Metal scrapes and keys jangle. A guard on the other end of the room opens the door for the guest of honor.

  The woman who shuffles into the visiting room is not her mother. Shapeless tan scrubs hang off her skinny frame, which is a good thirty pounds skinnier than it should be. Her strawberry blond hair is shot through with gray, cut short and neat to her chin. Her skull is asymmetrical, indented slightly on the left from the surgery to bring her back from what should have been a kill shot. Even her gait is unsure, not the hip-switching strut that made everyone turn to watch Harmony Pierson walk into a room. Charity’s guts go loose and shaky as she watches her mother’s slow approach. Every step feels like an accusation.

  She wipes her palms against the knees of her jeans, leaving dark streaks on the pale brushed denim. This was a mistake.

  “You have fifteen minutes,” the guard says, nudging Harmony’s shoulder to make her sit down in the plastic chair opposite Charity. He retreats to the corner of the room next to a soda machine, but his eyes never leave Harmony.

  Harmony brushes out the wrinkles in her top, then folds her hands
deliberately on the table in front of her. Her nails are gnawed down to the quick. In her twenty-six years, Charity has never seen her mother without flawless nails, always painted her favorite shade of red—Scarlet Harlot.

  Harmony finally looks up. When her gaze meets Charity’s, it feels like an injection of ice water directly into her heart. Harmony’s eyes are empty and cold, blue ice floes drifting in murky depths. Her left eye is slightly off-kilter, and the corner of her mouth tugs down faintly.

  I did this. I destroyed the legend.

  How many times did she watch her mother painting those nails red, thinking how beautiful and strong she was? She spent more nights than she could count huddled up with Patience on the shaggy living room carpet, listening to Harmony’s heavily embellished stories about ghouls in the backwoods of Kentucky and old Civil War ghosts that haunted Lookout Mountain. When hunters passed through Aran Valley, they always stopped by the house for her advice, like she was a redneck good luck charm. That’s my mama, she’d think as the scruffy strangers sat on their big plaid couch, listening as Harmony held court.

  And she ate it up like biscuits and honey when Harmony told her and Patience that they were special girls, that hunting ran in their blood, same as it did hers. Of course, Charity got older and butted heads with Harmony more, but she still admired her mother’s grit and skill, though she didn’t worship the ground Harmony walked on the way Patience did. Even after everything that went down, there was never a doubt in Charity’s mind that she’d carry on her mother’s work one day.

  “How’s my baby?” Harmony asks. Her voice is raspy, like she’s been smoking two packs a day for the last ten years. “God, you grew up to be so beautiful.”

  She reaches out, hand going for Charity’s face. Charity recoils and reaches instinctively for the knife that should be sheathed at her back. “Don’t.”

  Harmony sighs and refolds her bony hands. “Your hair got so long.”

  “It’s shorter than when I was a kid,” Charity says, tossing it over her shoulder emphatically. Than when I did my best to kill you. “What do you want?”