Vote Then Read: Volume I

by Carly Phillips

  With a great grunt, she pushed again. The rain barrel stayed put.

  “Mama, why don’t I help you with that?” I asked, starting toward her.

  She waved a hand at me. “I can do it, Maggie Mae. Just give us a second.” She took a deep breath and stared down at the barrel with immense hatred. “I’ll admit, this is the kind of thing that makes me wish I still had a man around. Say what you want about Alan, but he did help me take care of the place, the goddamn bastard.”

  I blinked. That was new. My whole life Mama called herself a church-going woman. Despite her more unsavory habits, she always said things like “heck” and “dag nabbit,” but now apparently had a mouth like a sailor.

  As if the mild profanity inspired her, Mama gave one last almighty push and managed to reposition the barrel correctly under the spout. She swiped a handkerchief across her forehead under the fringe of carefully dyed brown bangs. The bones of her wrist pressed knobby through the skin. We were both thinner than we should have been.

  With a sigh of relief, she weaved her way back to the deck.

  “Let me look at you, baby girl,” she said as she shucked her gloves onto a bench and turned to face me.

  She was a tall woman, with thin legs her best friend, Barb, always said looked like a stork’s. Her worn gardening pants that looked like they were probably Alan’s or some other lover’s hung loose on her hips. She reached out to take my hands, holding my arms open like a bird’s wingspan. Her familiar touch, which I hadn’t felt in so long, was electric.

  “You’re too thin, Margaret,” she noted as she perused my spare frame. “I think you need a cookie. Or four.”

  I pulled my arms back and held them around my ribs. I was several inches shorter than her, but we had the same delicate bone structure. She used to say I must have gotten my insides from her and my outsides—the skin that was tanner than not, the deep brown eyes, the unruly dark hair—from my father. Hard to say, considering I had no idea who the man actually was. But yeah, a few pounds gained or lost showed more on me than it did on her.

  “You’re one to talk,” I retorted. “You must have lost, what, twenty pounds? Thirty since…everything?”

  “And we weren’t exactly big women before, were we?” she agreed with a sad nod as she sat down in one of the chairs. “Well, that’s what having dirty, lying, good-for-nothing shitbags around does to you, don’t it? Sucks the life right out of you.”

  I sank into the chair beside her. I didn’t know the whole story about what had happened with Alan—one never really did with Ellie Sharp. I’d never met the man, only heard the stories at first of how he’d wooed her, taken her to expensive dinners and on expensive trips, and slowly convinced her to share just about everything she had with him before he’d up and left. Everything but the house. I didn’t know if Alan was as bad a guy as Mama made him out to be. Maybe he just got tired of living with a drunk. Or maybe he was something worse.

  I closed my eyes, breathing in the warm, familiar air of the lake. Mama wasn’t wrong. I did feel like the life had been sucked out of me. I felt like a shell of myself, and had for years now.

  Mama looked at me sadly. She didn’t know the whole story that had happened with Theo, but she knew enough. Had heard my choked sobs over the phone. Had shared a few hushed phone calls with Calliope.

  “I hate that you know what this feels like, but I’m glad you’re here.” She reached out and patted my hand. “You’re safe now, honey. We both are. Just have to keep tellin' ourselves that until we can believe it.”

  Suddenly, I felt exhausted. The fatigue of the long car ride, the frantic goodbye to the friends who shoved wads of ones and fives in my pocket to help me get here, the fear at every gas station and rest stop that Theo would show up with some new threat, even if he was still in jail for what he did. But really, it was the loss that weighed me down the most. The loss, the complete and utter loss, of everything I had built since striking out on my own. The music—my music—was gone.

  All of it came crashing down at once. A lone tear dripped down my cheek, quickly followed by more. It had been so, so long since I truly felt safe.

  “That showcase-thing was just a few weeks ago, wasn’t it?” Mama asked, still gripping my hand.

  I sniffed back a few tears, recovering quickly. We’d never been huggers, Mama and I. Talk it out, she’d always say. Get it out, and let it go.

  “Yeah,” I sniffled. “It was.”

  “And he showed up, did he? That’s what finally sent you home?”

  I shook my head. “N-no. I just thought he did.”

  She already knew the story. I’d told it to her on Saturday when Calliope, my manager, and I were packing everything I owned. Four years prior, I’d met Theodore del Conte, son of Max del Conte, CEO of Del Conte Entertainment, which owned one of the biggest independent labels in the world. We met at one of my shows—my biggest show to date, actually, where I’d had the luck to sub as an opening act for a major artist. Theo had been there with his father and began tracking me. We met a few months later, and he quickly consumed my life. He accompanied me on the short tour, then whisked me back to New York. In less than two months, I went from being just another starving artist in the city to being Theo del Conte’s girl, from sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three other women to living in his loft in Soho. I would have done anything for him. And he knew it.

  Things were good for a while. But then they turned bad quickly and lasted much longer. It had started with a shove here, a grab there, and then progressed to much, much more. So much that when I did finally manage my escape, I had enough documented evidence to press charges. It took me close to a year in court and a completely depleted savings account, but I won. Theo was behind bars. But that didn’t stop me from seeing him everywhere I went. Or forgetting so much of who or what I had been before him.

  The showcase was supposed to be my grand reentry into the scene. I still had some notoriety as Theo’s ex-girl. People came to see me the same way they would come to see a car wreck, but Calliope said it didn’t matter. They were there. Theo was not. There was no one left to threaten me. Ruin me.

  Until, of course, I did that myself.

  “Just as I was about to start, I saw him,” I said to Mama. “I was already a mess. I fell on my way to the club—tripped on the sidewalk. Nerves. My wrist was already hurting, and it reminded me of one of those times when he—you know. And then, Mama, I know he’s in jail. I know he’s locked up. But I swear, I saw his face, and, Mama…God…y-you know?”

  I focused on breathing through the stutter that had emerged over the last four years. I couldn’t cry. There was no crying in this house. When I was little that was a sure way to get a smack on the ear. So I sucked in air and hissed it out. Mama just nodded and murmured her agreement. She knew. Of course she knew.

  “I—I just froze,” I whispered. “My hand slipped. I screwed up. The biggest night of my career, and I messed it up because I was scared. And now…it’s over.”

  “Maggie, come now,” Mama put in. “It was one show. I’m sure with time you could get somethin’ else together. Call the men back, have them come watch you again.”

  “No, Mama,” I replied lamely. “You don’t get another chance like that.”

  It was supposed to be a night about celebrating the fact that I had moved on from the man who had torn me down, bit by bit, for years. But instead, I’d had to watch all of my dreams tumble down around me too.

  Mama tapped a fingernail on the wood armrest. “Hmmm. Well, we’ll see.”

  I gave her a grim smile, and she tilted her head to the side, as if checking me over for something she’d missed.

  “People come around,” she said kindly. “You did.”

  I didn’t want to tell her that I wouldn’t have come unless I’d had no other choice. That I had wanted to keep my promise—hold her to sobriety or stay out of her life. But principles are luxuries for people with money, like valet parking or fancy French cheese. I didn’t
have time for them anymore. I just needed to be home.

  “Oh, honey, come on. Let’s get you settled. You look like you need a nice long sleep, and then you’ll want to see the lake. Barb and Jimmy are coming with the boat for a cocktail cruise, and we’ll have just the thing to brighten you up.”

  I leaned my head back in the chair and stared up at the sky. Mama chattered on, but all I could think about was that she was doing the same thing she always did: solving her problems with friends. Parties. Drink. But instead of fighting it, trying to talk her out of it like I used to, I was far too tired to care.

  2

  Chicken shit really, really stinks. It was one of the things I’d managed to block out in the last six years, but now that I was ankle-deep in the stuff, the memories of just how much I’d always hated mucking out the coop were vividly clear.

  “Shit!” I yelped as a big glop of it fell down the top of my boot. “Oh, gross!”

  In return, I received a loud cluck from the ringleader of the brood, which sounded suspiciously like laughter.

  “Oh, shut it, Glinda,” I snapped at the busty bird, named for the rosy tips of her mostly white feathers that made her look like she was wearing a bubblegum-pink gown. That, combined with the jaunty pink comb crowning her head, recalled the good witch from The Wizard of Oz.

  Unlike her namesake, however, Glinda was most certainly a force of evil. Having done her very best to thwart every attempt to clean up the coop, she’d burrowed into the dirt and shit at the bottom of the building. I had to lock her in the area normally reserved for new chicks while I shoveled the last of the mess into the compost barrel. A few more scoops, and I was done.

  It was the fourth large chore, along with cleaning the gutters, fixing some of the Adirondack chairs, and straightening the wood pile, that I’d done on the property that day. Mom wasted no time putting me to work once I asked what needed to be done while she left for her morning appointments at the salon. Unlike me, she hadn’t totally given up on her dreams, and the reality was, she needed to make some money now that she didn’t have her boyfriend’s income to live on. So it was back to cutting hair for her while I stayed home, knee-deep in chicken crap.

  It wasn’t really the restful sanctuary I had hoped for, but even if the work was hard, it was familiar. At the end, I could see exactly what I’d achieved.

  I tossed the last shovelful into the composter, then spread fresh hay at the perimeter of the outdoor caged area and inside the coop. After I freed Glinda to chase the other birds, I headed back down the hill to put away the shovel and cool off in the lake.

  Down on the main dock, I stripped off my sweaty work clothes until I was just in my sports bra and underwear, then tugged my dark brown hair from its ponytail and dove into the water. It was warm again for the beginning of June—more like July or even August. “Global warming, even if some of these yahoos out here don’t believe it,” Mama said with a snort the night before. Global warming or not, the water felt perfect as I swam out to the floating dock by the five mile per hour marker. Both our docks were floating a little crooked—they had waterlogged buoys that need to be replaced. Also on the list.

  I took a few laps between them, then climbed onto the floating one and lay on the warm wood slats, gazing up at scattered white clouds.

  The lake was quiet. The water was fairly still, even in late afternoon, with only a few boats here and there rippling over its surface. Come the weekend, people from Spokane and Coeur d’Alene would bring their boats and jet skis, which would echo everywhere and cause larger waves from their wakes to crash against each shore. But just then, I could close my eyes and listen to the sound of an occasional fish jump and the distant cry of the osprey nesting in the hills.

  “Maggie Mae!”

  And, apparently, my mother, back from work already.

  I tipped my head back toward the main dock, where Mama waved and held up the basket of eggs I had just brought down from the coop.

  “Can you take the eggs to the store?” she called over the water. “And get some baking stuff too while you’re at it? I’m all out.”

  I lay back down and sighed up at the clouds. No rest for the weary.

  “Margaret!”

  “I’m coming!” I yelled back, then rolled off the dock and into the water to start my next task.

  Newman Lake boasted one teeny store located at the far end of a small marina where vacationers could store their boats. It was about a mile from the house—an easy walk this time of day, especially when the weather was starting to cool for the evening.

  “Well, look at what the cat dragged in!” Cathy, one of the owners, greeted me from behind the counter that stored both fishing bait and ice cream sandwiches.

  “Hiya, Cathy,” I said as I leaned over the counter to accept a hug.

  Cathy was maybe ten years older than me, and started living at the lake full time when her father died and left her the store. Since she had gotten a divorce just before that, it was strangely good timing, despite the loss. I might not have been back for six years, but that didn’t stop Mama from giving me all the gossip.

  “Look at you, honey,” Cathy said as she combed a few fingers through my hair. “You finally figured out what to do with this hair of yours. It looks lovely.”

  I patted self-consciously at the long, mostly straight waves drying down my back. My natural hair, which was curly to the point of unmanageable, had earned me a lot of crap over the years. Despite the fact that my mother was a hairdresser, my hair had been the bane of both our existences through most of my adolescence. It wasn’t until I moved to New York, met Calliope, and let her escort me to a hair salon uptown that I finally learned how to take care of it the right way. To get ready for my showcase, I had sprung for a keratin treatment a few weeks ago, but it was already starting to wash out a bit, and in a few weeks, I’d be back to ignoring my hairbrush and using Moroccan oil treatments.

  It took me that long too, to really understand myself as a woman of color in the first place. My whole life, people would ask me what I was. Where I was from. But if my hair was straightened or I had on the right makeup, sometimes they wouldn’t. On the outside, I looked a lot like my mom in the face. We had the same light skin, though mine had more than a touch of brown in it, the same deep brown eyes, though mine were a little darker, the same button nose and full lips, though mine were just a little more pronounced. But where her hair was a light brown that verged on blonde and was manageably wavy, mine was a darker brown mass of curls. I didn’t look white, and I didn’t look black or Hispanic, or whatever was responsible for half my genes. I just looked…different.

  She didn’t say it, but other people did. Illegitimate. Bastard. I was born out of countless one-night stands, out of hundreds of careless nights. The only thing either of us knew for sure was that my father wasn’t white, though that didn’t narrow it down much. And everyone around us made sure I knew it.

  These were the things Mama never knew. It was hard enough helping my mother recover from her hangovers without complaining about the way kids at school called me Simba because of the way my corkscrew curls stuck out around my face. And I definitely didn’t tell her about the times some of them, even with their parents not five feet away, called me the n-word. Wetback. Chink. Whatever seemed to occur to them that day—they were never very original.

  No. I definitely didn’t tell her about that. But it was one of the main reasons why Newman Lake, even if it was where I grew up, never quite felt like home. And Cathy’s touch, though it was intended to be kind, only reminded me of that.

  “Lemme guess,” Cathy said. “Ellie's out of baking soda again. I swear, I’m going to gain another twenty pounds with all the cookies she brings by the house.”

  I nodded. Mom did have a habit of baking, especially when she got a little tipsy. It was a bittersweet thing. When I was a kid, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to the smell of chocolate chip cookies. I’d be excited, because what kid doesn’t like cookies, but dr
ead it at the same time, because I knew I’d find her passed out on the couch. I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew she was done and the house wasn’t going to burn down.

  I also ate a lot of burned cookies.

  “I’ve got some eggs for you too,” I confirmed. “Mama said you’ve got a bunch of buyers these days.”

  Cathy eagerly took the carton from me. “Yes, ma’am. All these young couples out from Seattle for the summer. Would you believe they’ll buy a carton of eggs for six whole dollars? I swear, you put organic on anything, people will pay double for it.”

  I chuckled. She had no idea. Cathy’s eyes would have probably fallen out of her head if she saw what some of the grocery stores in New York charged for “premium” produce.

  “Hey, Cath, what’s this?” I picked up a neon-pink flyer from the stack sitting on a clipboard next to the cash register.

  “Oh, that’s for the new triathlon event the inn is starting this year. Don and Linda Forster are trying to bring in some more tourists, I guess. Their boy—you remember Lucas, don't you, hon?—got the bug for marketing last year.”

  I nodded back and turned away to avoid her knowing look. Of course I remembered Lucas. Lucas was my first boyfriend. The one who took my virginity in my room one lonely night while Mama was at the bar. For so long, Lucas was the one who kept me safe. When we were in high school, he was the type of guy people wanted to be around—a pickup truck driving, football-playing golden boy, and so when I was with him, people wouldn’t call me names. I stopped being the one “colored girl” in our class and became Lucas Forster’s girlfriend. It traded one limited identity for another, but the latter was far preferable.

  And then I got my scholarship to NYU and left him and Newman Lake behind. I hadn’t meant to break his heart, but deep down, I think I always knew I would. Because as much as Lucas Forster had been in love with me, it hadn’t been enough to keep me here. Now he was just one more person I hadn’t seen in six years. We hadn’t even spoken once since I left.