Fiona Range

by Mary McGarry Morris

Facing the street, they stood together on the top step. His hands were in his pockets and he shuffled his feet to stay warm. She hugged herself against the cold and told him how everything just kept falling apart no matter how hard she tried. He apologized for last summer as well as the incident with Dexter Carey’s car, and for any other way he’d messed up her life.

  No, she said, it was her. Nobody else but her. “And the worst of it is never feeling anything. I mean, I know up here,” she said, touching her temple. “But that’s where it begins and ends. It’s like this really quick process.” She tried to laugh. “And then I don’t give a shit, which is probably why I never learn my lesson, huh?” She peered up at him, then had to look quickly away from his sad half smile. “We’ve had this conversation before, right? Like a hundred times maybe in the last fifteen years? Oh, God!” She groaned in disgust. “What the hell am I doing out here with you? Of all people!” She threw up her hands and turned in a frantic little circle. “Am I nuts? I must be! What the hell else could it be?”

  “Aw Fiona.” He picked up a chip of paint and flicked it onto the sidewalk. “Shit, I know just what you’re going through. I do! You see, the thing is, you’ve gotta find someone like I did. Like I found Sandy. Someone who needs you. Someone you’ve really got to make it for.”

  “Oh Jesus!” She burst into teary laughter. “Someone like Sandy! Yah, a cheap ticket to total disaster.”

  “But that’s what you need.”

  “Well that would be you then, Todd,” she said as she reached up and pulled his head down and kissed him. He put his arms around her. She squirmed against him. She needed to feel something. She wanted the burning to ignite behind her eyes, the breathlessness in her lungs like drowning, and deep in her groin the desire to hurt and to be hurt, please, please, please, but all she could feel, all she could think and feel and hear and smell was loathing for him, but most of all for herself now as his cold hands clawed her back, then slipped under her waistband. She opened her eyes. “Todd!” She tried to pull away, then closed her eyes again. “Why am I doing this? Why?”

  He touched the side of her face, then her chin, his fingertips tracing her mouth. “You know why. We both do, don’t we, baby? We always have. We always will,” he murmured into her hair.

  “No, that’s not—,” she started to say as the door opened.

  Sandy looked out, then ran past them down the stairs, sobbing with her fist at her mouth.

  “Shit! Oh, shit!” Todd cried, chasing her down the steps and around the corner.

  The next morning, Chester was glumly chopping red peppers. He dropped them into the omelet sputtering in his black frying pan. A heavy-lidded nod passed between them, but neither one spoke. The last week had been difficult since Chester had rejected Stanley Masters’s offer. Maxine worked with the rejuvenation of one who’s just been told the positive biopsy had been a mistake, while out in the kitchen Chester dragged himself from stove to sink with weighted sighs, eyes casting about in panic as if he felt the walls shrinking around him.

  As much as Fiona hated doing it, she would apologize to Sandy, explaining that she had been upset and that Todd had only been trying to comfort her. She took a deep breath, then tied her apron on her way into the dining room. It was filling up rapidly. “What the hell?” she muttered when she saw Sandy taking orders from the six rugged men jammed shoulder to shoulder into the largest booth. They cut trees for the Begler Company. They always asked for Fiona, who knew exactly how each one liked his eggs and who had decaf instead of regular. Fists clenched, she watched them joke with Sandy, who kept grabbing her sides and doubling over the table with laughter. “That little bitch,” Fiona muttered and stormed toward the table, as shocked by the eruption of rage as by the giddy relief it gave her.

  Ponytail bouncing, Sandy hurried by with their slip.

  Fiona turned abruptly and followed her into the kitchen. She snatched away the slip.

  “What’re you doing?” Sandy cried, grabbing for it.

  “That’s my party. I always wait on them, and you know it,” she growled.

  “You weren’t even here!” Sandy protested.

  “I was out here talking to Chester.” She could feel his eyes on her back.

  “How was I supposed to know that?”

  “Let’s see now,” she said, scratching her head. “Maybe you could’ve looked. That would’ve helped.”

  “They said they were in a hurry.” Sandy looked to Chester, who continued ladling pancake batter onto the grill.

  “Look, just get off it, will you, Sandy? I know what the hell this is all about!”

  “What do you mean, Fiona?” Sandy demanded, spinning around to face her. “Why don’t you say what you really mean!”

  Fiona forced a smile. “Believe me, I do. I always do that,” she said, desperate to stay in control.

  “No, because you’re so jealous—”

  “Jealous! Yah, right!” She rolled her eyes and pretended to laugh.

  “And that’s why you were all over Todd last night, because you’re so goddamn jealous you—”

  “Listen to me, you stupid little dip!” She grabbed Sandy’s arm. “Todd Prescott’s going to ruin your life if you—”

  “You tramp, that’s all you do is ruin lives! You can’t stand seeing people happy. You’re poison, that’s all you are, and everyone knows it!”

  Fiona shoved her. Sandy tripped and started to fall, then caught hold of the shelf post. The pots and pans clanged into one another.

  “Fiona!” Chester warned, scurrying around the bench.

  “Bitch,” she spat. “You stupid little bitch.” She grabbed Sandy’s ponytail and yanked her head back.

  Chester snared her wrist. “What’re you doing? What’re you trying to do?” he snarled, squeezing her wrist until she let go. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m sorry.” She backed away with her hand out. He kept walking toward her. Sandy ran into the dining room, holding the back of her head. “I’m really sorry, Chester.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” he demanded, his face red with rage, fists clenched to his chest.

  “Nobody. That’s who I am. Nobody. Nobody!” she hissed.

  “Well I got news for you, so’s everybody. So the fuck what!”

  “You going to fire me?”

  “You want me to?”

  “I don’t give a shit what you do.”

  “But you want me to, don’t you? You’d like that. That way everything falls into place, doesn’t it? And you don’t have to lift a finger to change anything. It just keeps getting shittier and shittier, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh Jesus, listen to you! Like you’re really in charge around here, aren’t you?”

  “I do what I have to, and I don’t let disaster and jackasses run my life.”

  “Yah, right!” She rolled her eyes.

  “So you decide. You want to stay, then stay. You don’t, you don’t.” He gave a weary laugh. “But I’ll tell you one thing, it’s not going to affect my life one way or the other. Because I’ve had it up to here with you and your crap,” he said, hitting the bottom of his chin with the back of his hand.

  She started past him and his arm shot out to block her.

  “But you decide now. I want to know right now.”

  “Okay! I quit.” She untied her apron. “There,” she said, flipping it into the air, relief eddying through her as it swirled down onto the floor. “You happy?”

  “No! Are you?” he shouted after her.

  She jumped into her car. She had made the right decision, and it felt good to have somewhere else to go, to be on her way to the courthouse. She seldom came to Collerton, though it bordered Dearborn. A small city that had given refuge to generations of immigrants seeking work in its mills and homes in its sturdy tenements, Collerton had always seemed a grim, tired place to her. Uncle Charles liked to say its pulse might be a little fainter now, but its life force was still the same: opportunity and hope. A shadow dar
kened her window and she looked up amused to see two young Hispanic men whiz by on child-size bicycles. Across the street three teenage girls pushed baby strollers over the wide concrete bridge that spanned the Merrimac River. The old textile mills, many of them empty, some covering whole blocks. loomed over the city streets. Farther along were entire neighborhoods of three-deckers. Dotted among them were weed-choked vacant lots where abandoned buildings had burned, then been leveled by the city. As she waited for the light to turn she glanced over at a car being repaired curbside by two men. The engine lay on the hard-packed strip of dirt between the sidewalk and road.

  Uncle Charles had been born and raised in Collerton. His father had been a mill worker, his mother a department store clerk. Their two-family home had been modest, but always meticulously maintained. Sometimes after church Uncle Charles would drive through his old neighborhood while he lectured them all on the value of perseverance and honest labor. To a stranger his tale of the millhand’s son becoming a judge might have seemed boastful and self-serving, but anyone acquainted with Judge Hollis knew how deeply he revered his parents’ values that had made his own success possible. The last time Fiona had seen his house it was a fish-and-chips shop, but then a few years ago Uncle Charles had seemed pleased to announce its latest transformation into a Vietnamese grocery store and tailor shop. Whenever she saw the plain little house she couldn’t help comparing it to the gracious home a few miles away in Dearborn where her mother and Aunt Arlene had grown up. Once when Uncle Charles had been angry for yet another misdeed, he had told Fiona he would not tolerate such behavior in his house. She had delighted in reminding him that it was not his house, but her mother’s as well as his wife’s, and therefore as much hers as his.

  She parked behind the courthouse, then hurried inside. The corridors were jammed with people. Spanish and English conversations rose in a dissonant babble that was at once comical and agitating: lawyers with briefcases, court workers shouting out names, sullen defendants, nervous litigants, sweaty-faced children, a wailing infant, and here now blocking her way a court officer trying to placate a sobbing young woman whose pregnant belly strained against her Patriots sweatshirt. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him.

  “He’s going straight from here to prison, and the only ones he can see is family.”

  “But I told you, I’m family. I’m his wife,” she cried.

  “And I told you he’s already seen his wife,” the officer said with a weary smirk.

  “But this is his baby,” she said, hefting up her enormous belly with both hands. “This is his family. This!”

  “I’m sorry,” the officer said. “But there’s nothing I can do.” He smiled at Fiona. “Can I help you?”

  She said she was on her way to see Judge Hollis. The Judge was in the middle of a trial, he said, stepping away from the woman. He asked if it was something he could help her with.

  “You bastard,” the woman erupted. “You’re protecting him, aren’t you? That’s what you’re doing!” she screamed before pushing past everyone to the front door.

  “No, I’ll wait in his office then,” Fiona said, watching her go.

  “Hey. I know you,” he said, squinting. “You’re . . . I know, wait a minute, don’t tell me now. I know, you’re . . .”

  “Judge Hollis’s niece,” she said.

  “Oh!” He grinned. “Leona, right? I’m Pete. Yah, Jimmy Leonard’s party. You thought my name was Dick.”

  “Oh, sure. Pete!” She tried to smile. “Well, I better get up there,” she said, heading for the stairs.

  “I didn’t know you were the Judge’s niece,” he called up after her. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  Both the outer office and waiting room were empty. She was flipping through a travel magazine when the door flew open.

  “Fiona!” Uncle Charles rushed in, black robe billowing in his wake. “What is it? Is everything all right? They just handed me this note.” His hand shook as he held it out, and she realized how upset he was. He hurried her into his office, then pressed a button on his phone and told someone he would return in thirty minutes.

  She had forgotten how small his office was. The larger offices came with seniority, and though Judge Hollis had been sitting in the Collerton District Court for sixteen years, he preferred keeping his original office. She glanced around, both pleased and chagrined to see her high school picture on the same top shelf with her cousins’ college graduation portraits.

  She apologized for alarming him. The note, she tried to explain, had been the court officer’s idea. Actually she would have enjoyed watching whatever trial he was presiding over.

  That, he told her, would have been even more startling—to look up and see her sitting there. “You must have come straight from work,” he said, gesturing at her uniform. He glanced at his watch. “But it must still be breakfast.”

  “It is. And that’s why.” She gulped nervously. “You see, the thing is, I want a job, a better job, a really good job, and I was hoping maybe you could help me. Find one, that is.” She sat rigidly on the edge of the chair.

  “But you have a job, right?” he said, watching closely.

  “Well, yah. That is, I did. But not now. I’m not at the coffee shop anymore.”

  “Since when?”

  “Well, let’s see . . . I uh—”

  “Since what?” He angled his wrist to show her the watch face. “A half hour ago? Forty-five minutes? What happened? What did Chester do, fire you?”

  “No, he didn’t fire me!”

  “Then what did you do, quit?”

  “Well, I—”

  “What did you do, just walk out in the middle of the morning rush?”

  “Yes, but you don’t understand. I—”

  “What’s to understand, Fiona? Isn’t this standard procedure? You don’t like something, so you just quit, right?’

  “No, what you don’t understand is I want to make something of myself. I’m thirty years old, and I don’t want to be a waitress in a coffee shop for the rest of my life.”

  He studied her for a long, uneasy moment. “So what do you want to be?” he finally asked, folding his hands at his chin, a foreboding gesture that always unnerved her.

  “Well, I don’t know.” She glanced around the cluttered office, the stacks of law books and thick folders, like his somber pose, making her feel foolish and insignificant. “I’m not really sure, but maybe something with the court. You said once I might be good at it, remember?”

  “Good at what? What do you mean?

  “Well, you know, like a file clerk or something like that. I don’t care,” she said with a shrug. “Anything! Whatever jobs there are. I’m real flexible,” she added with a laugh that seemed to resound with his stare.

  “There aren’t any jobs right now,” he finally said. “And for every position that comes up there are thirty, forty, fifty qualified people waiting on the list.”

  “Oh, well, all right. That’s okay. I just thought . . . “Her voice trailed off weakly. She’d thought he might be able to help her the way he’d helped Jack. She regretted coming here. She’d made the mistake of thinking the same loyalties and platitudes applied to her as they did to his children, and now she’d have to pay the familiar price: his weary castigation, his dour expression, the humiliating lecture, the heaviness she would drag around for days, the weight of all her failures.

  “You don’t think, Fiona. That’s your trouble, you just explode, and then you need someone to pick up the pieces for you.” He leaned closer and looked at her. “Things haven’t been right for a long time with you, have they? And from what I’m hearing lately, they don’t seem to be getting much better.”

  “What do you mean? What’re you talking about? What things?” she demanded, half out of the chair.

  It was clear he knew by her fury not to elaborate. “Actually I’m flattered that you’ve come here, that you still trust me.”

  “I want to know what things you’r
e talking about,” she said.

  “Why? What’s the point?”

  “The point is, things get taken all out of context, and people lie and exaggerate, especially when it comes to me. I’m starting to feel like some frigging magnet for trouble and I’m sick of it!”

  “Really? Well, would Lee Felderson be lying or exaggerating about you telling her to go to hell when you crumpled up your test and threw it at her?”

  “I didn’t throw it at her.” She closed her eyes and groaned. “Don’t tell me she came running to you with that.”

  “Ginny told me.” He sighed. “Do you know why she gave you a D, Fiona? Why she had to?”

  “Yah, because she didn’t like my frigging attitude.”

  “Because you didn’t finish the test. You skipped the whole last page. She tried to call you. She’s even written you letters, but you reach a point and you just stop caring, right?”

  She was stunned. She had never even looked at the back page. Well, still—it wasn’t her fault. And why had she given her a D? Instead of playing mind games, Lee Felderson should have said something and given her a chance to make it up.

  “I used to think it was our fault, Aunt Arlene’s and mine. I used to think we’d failed you somehow, and now there’s all this business about Patrick Grady. You even went to his house the other night, Fiona.” He shook his head and lowered his voice to a pained whisper. “After I specifically asked you to leave him alone.”

  She jumped up. “That’s none of your business, Uncle Charles! That’s my business, my decision to make!”

  “No. Because he came to me again about it. He wants you to leave him alone.”

  “Really? Well I don’t care anymore what he wants or what you want!” She opened the door. “Why should I? Why the hell should I?”

  “Fiona!”

  It took all of her willpower not to slam the door. She hurried down the stairs. Just as she turned on the landing a man came around the corner with a metal bucket and rolls of paper towels in his arms. As they collided the paper towels flew up in the air.

  “Hey! What’re you doing?” Patrick Grady growled, chasing his bouncing roll down the stairs.