“Abbeville,” the driver continued. “Dothan. Then, it depends where you’re going.”
“Panama City Beach,” Dee explained.
“Okay, then you’ll transfer in Tallahassee.”
God, another transfer. Dee hoped to never set foot on a Greyhound bus again after all of this.
“Thank you,” Dee replied and sat back. She watched the slumbering old money mansions on Eufaula’s main drag blur past her as the bus moaned and buzzed beneath her, moving as fast as it felt like going, unconcerned about where or when it was delivering her, or anyone else.
In Tallahassee she’d have to wait eight hours for the bus to Panama City. It was absurd; the two cities were only an hour and a half away from each other by car, but it was a poor person tax. Instead of having to spend money, you had to waste your life away inside a Greyhound bus station, and then again on the damn bus while it seemed to stop at every town with a traffic light.
There had been a time where Dee would have had every option in the world at her disposal when it came to transportation. Private jets, helicopters, boats, luxury cars— the thought of riding on a bus would have been comical. She’d known people who wouldn’t have recognized what a Greyhound bus even was.
“You can pay to take a bus?” they’d probably say. “Why on earth would anyone do that?”
Perhaps trading in her Maybach for a Greyhound was more of a lateral move than her ego allowed her to believe. The two vehicles cost roughly the same amount of money, and any comfort she lost was made up for in anonymity. A bright yellow convertible sports car tended to draw attention.
A bus with a dog on the side? Not so much.
Dee Beckett had once been Delilah Goodacre, star of the police-procedural, “The Good Cop,” for one season until she’d been replaced for refusing to pay the sexual-favor dues that the head of the network required.
The show went on and was wildly successful with the younger new “actress” in Dee’s role, a job Dee knew entailed much more than just delivering lines and looking pretty.
It had been years before the #MeToo movement, but even that wouldn’t have saved her from getting blacklisted after she kicked the show’s lead, Emmett Evans, in the balls right in front of the head of the network.
Everyone in Hollywood knew the games were still played the same, but now everyone was protected by non-disclosure agreements and under-the-table settlements.
Still. It had been the first of many tragedies Dee would face in the years to come.
But she couldn’t think about that now, or she’d have a nervous breakdown.
Dee had left Los Angeles with $500 in her bank account. She’d used $247 of it on this bus fare. She’d survived her trip on vending machine snacks and cans of Diet Coke.
She’d arrive in Panama City with $225 left to her name if she resisted the siren song of the Coke machine in the Tallahassee station.
The one thing about slow transportation is that it gives you a lot of time to think about things. And Dee Beckett had plenty to think about.
Now that she was nearing her final destination, she had to start crafting what she would say to her sister when she showed up on her doorstep.
Meg Beckett was eleven months older than Dee and fit the stereotype of older, meddling, bossy sister to a capitalized T.
They hadn’t spoken in a decade, not since…
Dee waved away the past. No. Couldn’t think about that right now. The last thing Dee wanted was to be angry when she showed up. Whether Dee liked it or not, she needed her sister. And dredging up the past would make things even more difficult.
There was almost zero chance Meg would let Dee past the front door, but if there was even a sliver of a prospect that Meg might show her only sibling mercy, Dee needed to increase that possibility as much as she could. Dee needed to be unassuming and grateful. Contrition was her only hope.
Because Dee had nowhere else to go.
And for the first time in Dee Beckett’s life, at least since she was a little girl requesting Santa bring her a pony for Christmas, she’d have to ask for something and not know if she’d be able to get what she wanted.
In other words, Meg was Dee’s only chance of somehow getting out of the very big mess she’d gotten herself in.
Meg lived on the west end of Panama City Beach. Dee begrudgingly ordered an Uber to take her from the bus station in Panama City to her sister’s flat-roofed concrete house on Derondo Street, the one their father bought back when his girls were in high school. Dee imagined the wicker furniture and wood-paneled walls of the living room and shuddered. Knowing Meg, it would all be the same.
Meg held onto things, even when they were dated. Maybe even especially then.
The Uber wasn’t cheap, but Dee had been afraid to call her sister and ask for a ride. It was too easy to reject someone over the phone, and Dee couldn’t afford that possibility.
The Uber driver had been the chatty sort, a skinny man from Calloway, the section of town where Dee used to buy her weed when she was a teenager.
He kept changing the radio station and insisted on driving with the windows down instead of using the AC.
“Helps me with gas mileage,” he proclaimed, as if Dee should be impressed.
All she’d wanted was a quiet ride, so she could think about what she was going to say to Meg. She was exhausted, starving, stressed, and needed a bit of quiet to collect herself, but the Uber driver wouldn’t stop talking, even when she clearly wasn’t replying or laughing at any of his remarks.
“You know,” he commented as they crossed the Hathaway Bridge from Panama City to Panama City Beach. “You look so familiar to me.”
“Well, I did live here for a while,” Dee responded, avoiding his beady eyes in the rear-view mirror while trying to keep her tone flat and indifferent. But he was one of those types who didn’t take hints, so she knew it was pointless.
“No, I mean, like have I seen you on TV or something?” His eyes were on her now, and she noticed one of them was clearly made of glass. There was no life in it, it remained stationary while his other eye darted around a bit, the lid hanging low.
“No,” Dee lied. “You definitely wouldn’t have seen me on TV. Probably just around town. My family moved here when I was in high school.”
Of course, he probably had seen her on television, though it had been a while since anyone recognized her. At one time she would have been thrilled at the acknowledgment.
Not anymore.
He dropped her off in Meg’s gravel driveway with one, final leering stare.
As he drove away in his Toyota Camry, she watched him go and suddenly wished he’d stay; if only just to idle nearby for a bit in case things went bad. He looked like the sort that would know where to take her if her sister spurned her and refused to let her in— he seemed like the kind who knew just where people went when they had nowhere else to go.
But, instead, she watched his car get smaller and smaller as it drove down Front Beach Road, on to the next passenger, one who might not mind the windows being down or the fickleness of his radio station preferences.
Two
Meg hated when Mercury was in retrograde.
It meant all kinds of shit was going to throw her off, but she could never have expected what would be waiting for her on the front stoop that afternoon.
Her daughter, Jessa, had insisted she had a stomach ache that morning and couldn’t go to school. Meg was too busy stressing about meeting with the health inspector at the motel to fight her on it, though she’d doubted the veracity of Jessa’s ailment when Jessa had immediately requested her mother take her to McDonalds for lunch later.
“I thought you were sick, Jessa,” Meg sighed as she swiped dirty laundry off her teenaged daughter’s floor. “You know, it’s not okay to fake being sick. It’s terrible karma.”
“My stomach really was hurtin’, Mama,” Jessa protested. “I can’t help that it feels better already. I mean, most moms would be happy. What if it had bee
n norovirus? Or colon cancer?”
Meg rolled her eyes. “Sounds like it was your social studies test you didn’t study for. Now that’s a real killer from what I hear.”
Jessa opened her mouth to deny it, but quickly closed it.
“I’m sorry.”
Jessa was not only a lousy liar, but she was never able to commit to one for very long. A typical ninth-grader, but the best kind because it meant she really did feel bad when she screwed up.
“You can’t keep doing this crap,” Meg reprimanded as she stuffed Jessa’s dirty tank tops and underwear into a plastic laundry basket. “You can’t run from things or pretend they’re not happening.”
“I’m not!” Jessa exclaimed, following her mother as she went into the living room where the tiny closet that housed their stacked washer and dryer was. “I was just giving myself some extra time. You know?”
“Then take advantage of it,” Meg snapped. “Get your ass in that bedroom and study. If you don’t get an A on that test, I’m going to be extra pissed. If you’re going to skip, make it worth it, Jessa.”
Jessa nodded and slowly retreated to the bedroom that had once belonged to Meg’s sister Dee.
Sometimes Meg looked at Jessa and could have sworn she was looking at the ghost of her sister. The two of them looked so much alike that it was scary. They even walked alike; a slow saunter as if nowhere could be important enough to be in a hurry.
Meg shook the thought away. Dee was not someone she thought of if she could help it; mostly because it made her either really angry or profoundly sad.
Or, on the hardest days, both.
The inspection hadn’t gone great. Meg returned home around noon to check on Jessa and to grab a quick lunch.
The motel was the bane of Meg’s existence, the great albatross she carried, and lately she wasn’t sure why she bothered.
It was called The Siesta Motel and it had been in her family since the 1950s, when Panama City Beach had been a Floridian secret, before the skyscraper condos and twelve-dollar cocktails at Margaritaville. Her grandparents had run it while her own parents met, married, and settled in Apalachicola, seventy miles away down US-98. Her father owned a tupelo honey business and her mother worked on nearby St. George Island as “The Beach Nanny,” hiring herself out as a babysitter for visiting families. Sometimes that meant watching little ones on the beach while mom and dad retired to their house. Sometimes it meant hanging out in the house with the kids, so the grownups could enjoy the beach, go out on a fishing charter, or have a dinner that didn’t include menus that came with crayons.
When Meg and Dee were in high school, their grandparents died within a year of each other, leaving the motel to them. It coincided with their mother leaving their father for another man.
A man who owned a handful of rental properties on St. George Island.
As it turned out, a bad man.
A lot happened in the span of six months, and none of it was great.
Her father took over the motel during the heyday of MTV Spring Break and Meg and Dee thought they’d won the lottery when they realized they got to be part of all that action and fun. They’d been wild girls whom their father struggled to tame, but he’d tried his best.
They all had.
A decade ago, things had gotten ugly between the sisters. They’d always been close, but then… Well. The incident happened, Dee fled, and the girls hadn’t spoken since.
Whatever information Meg learned about Dee came through their father who had tried, in vain, to get them to reconcile, never giving up or losing hope that their brokenness could be mended.
“You’re sisters,” he’d tell Meg. “There’s nothing unforgivable when it’s your family.”
A year ago, he’d passed away— suddenly— on a day that Meg had tried her best to forget any and all details of. As usual, it had been just her to deal with it. The funeral. The estate.
Dee hadn’t even bothered to come back for her own father’s funeral.
Meg doubted she could ever forgive her sister for many things, but now she knew there was just no chance. Dad deserved better.
Still. There weren’t many days that went by where Meg didn’t think of Dee.
As much as she didn’t want to.
Three
Meg planned on heading back to the motel to supervise the 3 pm check-ins. She was almost done eating when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it!” Jessa called from her bedroom, which was closest to the front door. Meg was in the kitchen, finishing up what felt to her like the most tragic grilled cheese sandwich she’d ever burnt on the stove.
Cooking had never been her forte.
“Look to see who it is first!” Meg reminded her, swiping a paper towel across her mouth to wipe away the crumbs.
Meg walked toward the living room, brushing the food remnants off her polo shirt, the one with The Siesta Motel monogrammed on her left boob, when she heard Jessa’s voice greet whomever was on the other side of their door.
“Aunt Dee?”
Meg stopped cold in her tracks.
There was just no way Dee was on their doorstep right now. It wasn’t possible.
Jessa hadn’t seen Dee since she was four years old, but of course she knew what her aunt looked like; most of the country did, especially around these parts. Dee Beckett was listed under the Notable People section of Panama City’s Wikipedia page right under some Olympic swimmer from the early ‘80s.
“Hey, Jessa.”
That voice was unmistakable. Meg and Jessa’s eyes met, neither knowing quite how to proceed.
“Can I come in?” Dee asked. “Is your mom home?”
“Yes, I’m home.” Meg’s voice was cold. “Jessa, go to your room.”
“But…” Jessa said, motioning to Dee, who had entered the house now for the first time in at least ten years. “It’s Aunt Dee!”
Jessa, bless her heart, was not in the know about the past. She’d often asked about why they didn’t speak to Aunt Dee, and Meg never said a word about the reasons. She didn’t need to involve her daughter in the messes of the past. Jessa represented her clean slate, after all.
“Go. You’re already on my bad side, girl,” Meg said, pointing to Jessa’s room which was only feet away.
Jessa relented, but gave Dee a small smile as she walked back to her bedroom, which irked Meg even more.
As soon as Jessa closed her door, Meg allowed her anger to come out. Quietly, so Jessa wouldn’t be alarmed.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Meg hissed, signaling Dee to walk with her toward the back of the house, as far out of Jessa’s earshot as they could in a 1200 square foot, one-story house.
“It’s a long story…” Dee was uncharacteristically subdued. Her infamous bravado was gone, at least for now. Meg couldn’t tell if it was an act though.
Dee wouldn’t have shown up after all of this time without an agenda. That was how her sister was. How she’d always been.
“Well, I don’t have time for long stories,” Meg replied as she swung open the back-screen door that led to a small deck badly in need of refinishing.
In another life, the two sisters sat on the railings of that dilapidated deck and told each other all their secrets, while passing a menthol cigarette back and forth.
That seemed like it had happened in the timeline of an alternate universe at this point— as if it never really happened at all.
“I’ll try to keep it short.” Dee sighed, and Meg noticed her hands were shaking. Hands that hadn’t seen a manicure in a long time, Meg also noted. The polish was chipped, and the skin was chapped. Her beautiful sister looked so different, which of course was understandable. They were in their late 30’s now and everything was catching up to them; the drugs, the wild abandonment of their youth, their hours in the Florida sun without sunscreen. Hell, they’d used baby oil of all things, as if they were soliciting melanoma, the way only idiots who think life is a never-ending carnival ride do.
�
��I’m in trouble, Meg,” Dee said, unable to look her sister in the eye. “The really bad kind. And I need a place to stay for a while. You know I wouldn’t show up if I wasn’t desperate.”
“How lovely to know I’m what defines your idea of desperate,” Meg responded, but her head was spinning.
Of all the damn days for Dee to show up. She wished Jessa was in school; it would make it easier to throw Dee out and have Jessa never be the wiser about it.
“It’s not like that,” Dee continued. “I didn’t mean… it was a bad choice of words. Meg, I’m nervous, cut me a tiny bit of a break here.”
“Never.” Meg was glaring at her now. “I want you out of here. The answer is no to whatever you’re asking. Especially if you’ve brought trouble with you. I want no damn part of whatever you’re running from, whoever’s chasing you, or whatever game you’re playing, Dee.”
Meg walked toward the back-screen door, expecting Dee to follow her through the living room and straight back to where she came from. Meg assumed some sleek, black SUV was waiting for her outside and she could go on to someone else, because Dee wasn’t conning her sister.
Not again. Not after what happened last time.
Instead, Meg was shocked to hear something she didn’t know if she’d ever heard before coming from her sister, at least not since they were kids.
She turned around to find Dee had fallen to her knees on the knotty wooden floor of the deck and was sobbing into her hands, the kind of sobbing you can’t fake.
Dee was in real despair.
And now Meg really was scared. If her sister was willing to let her see her this way, it meant she was telling the truth.
Dee Beckett had come here not to con, not to manipulate, and certainly not to get anything from Meg, who she had to know had nothing left to give her.
Her sister had shown up here because she truly had nowhere else to go.
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