by Paula Boyd
Glad she’d mentioned that. “You have spray, right?”
“I still have some of the old kind, the stuff that actually worked before they watered it all down. You can’t buy the good stuff anymore.”
No, you couldn’t. And if you’ve never had chigger bites, well, take a stroll through the Texas weeds with bare legs. You’ll be a fast believer in bathing in DEET, DDT or something equally toxic before you do it again. And by the way, hairspray, alcohol, nail polish or any other home remedy you’ve been told about does not make them either die or crawl out of the hole they’ve dug in your skin. But go ahead and give it a shot. The sting is a good distraction.
“After I take a look around out back,” I said. “I’m going to drive up and talk to Bob Little. Do you want to go with me?”
“He’s probably not even home,” Lucille said, fiddling with her purse. “Besides, I told you he’s as much in the dark about all this as I am. He’s just getting bullied, that’s all. I don’t think you need to be bothering him about it all. He’s had a hard enough time with everything as it is.”
It was beyond odd that she didn’t want me to talk to Bob Little—the one person who knew what was going on and why. “I know you had to talk to him about what was going on back there. What did he say about it? Is it drilling or what?”
Lucille frowned. “Like I told you, he got into something he ought not have, and he signed some papers that he thought were just for an inspection and appraisal of the property. But somehow, whatever he signed allowed them to come in and do all kinds of things. All I know is that it’s real bad and he’s real sorry he didn’t shoot them the first time they drove up the driveway. He was trying to do a good thing and it just turned out real bad.”
“I’d like to see the agreement he signed if he’d be willing. If he really wants out of this, maybe I can help. It would also help me know better how to deal with your situation.” I nodded to her purse. “Call him.”
Lucille begrudgingly took out her phone and dialed. “See, I told you, he’s not at home.”
“Try his mobile phone, assuming he has one.”
“Everybody on the planet has one, Jolene.” She dialed again and waited then flipped her phone closed. “He’s not answering there either,” she said, relief in her tone and her face. “I suppose he’s out somewhere. Probably turned his phone off too, tired of people bothering him.”
“You know, I haven’t been up to his place since I was a kid. I’d really like to see the view again. I think I’ll just drive up there anyway. Maybe he’ll be back by then.”
“No,” Lucille said, entirely too quickly. “We can’t do that.” She stuffed her phone back in her purse, shoveling around like she needed to make room for it, which she did not. “He locks the gate, what with all the snoopers we’ve had around. We wouldn’t even be able to get in.”
My own phone rang and I knew immediately that it was Jerry. About time, too.
“Hi,” I said, anticipation, invitation and promise of consummation all rolled up into one word. It took about two seconds for my hot plans to go up in smoke. Three more seconds and the winds were blowing toward decidedly pissed. From what I could tell, I wouldn’t be seeing Jerry at all tonight, much less doing anything else. Some police chief was in town and he had to deal with him about something, it was very important, blah blah blah. If he managed to get free, he’d do something or other later, blah blah blah. I’d quit listening because not only had my plans for a romantic evening gone down in flames, I got the feeling he was lying to me. “Fine, Jerry.” Okay, I know it wasn’t the mature reaction, but it was the one I had. “Whatever.”
“Jolene, I’m sorry. I really am. I’ll make it up to you.”
I wanted to believe him. I really did. But I’d played the fool before with my lying ex-husband as well as the jerk I fell in love with after him, and I’d vowed never to do it again. It wasn’t Jerry’s fault. He’d never ever treated me the way those other two men had, but the triggers were obviously still there. It was that old feeling again, the one that started with a stab in the gut then a sharp rip all the way up to my heart. Gutted like a fish was the best way I could describe it. I’d felt that about ten times a day with the last guy I’d fallen for. I’d never felt it with Jerry before. Never. But I felt it now. “Jerry, I have to be straight with you. You know what I’ve been through. I’ve had two men who lied to me repeatedly and told me that I was wrong for having the feelings I had that told me they were lying.” Yes, it was a little hard to follow, but he was getting the point. “I’m having that feeling now.”
Silence. Looong silence.
Oh, this was so not good. Zing. Gutted again. “It’s fine, Jerry,” I said, hearing the hurt tinged with anger in my own voice and not knowing how to hide it. “I’ll just talk to you later.”
“Jolene, honey, listen.” He paused then said softly, “I’m not like him, Jo. You have to believe that. I do have to meet with this guy tonight and I really can’t tell you any more than that. Your instincts are good, and I’d explain if I could, but I can’t yet. Trust me. Please.”
Oh, how I wanted to. I really wanted to. “I have to talk about this with you later.” Emotion knotted in my throat, making it really hard to talk. “I have to go. Bye.” As I clicked off the phone, I thought I heard him say, “I love you.” Well, I’d heard that before too.
Mother fished around in her purse and pulled out a package of tissues and handed me one. “I don’t’ know what all that was about, but Jerry Don is not a liar. I’m just sure you’re wrong about whatever you’re thinking.”
She was always sure I was wrong about something, maybe everything, but in this case, I really hoped she was right. I wiped my nose. “I just know what I feel.”
“That’s just old garbage that should have been long burned and buried, but you know how you are, you hang on to things long past the time they should have been let go of.” Lucille handed me another tissue. “Now, let’s go to the cemetery.”
Huh? What had she said? “The cemetery?”
“Well, yes, I haven’t been there in a while and I don’t suppose you have either.”
“I really don’t think a trip to the cemetery is going to make me feel better.”
She shrugged. “It might.”
“Only if you dig a hole beside Dad and leave me in it.”
“See there, you’ve got your smart mouth back, you must be feeling better already.”
No, I wasn’t. It had been a long time since I’d had that particular feeling—the fish gutting one. But any time it cropped up, it meant, without exception, that someone who held my heart in his hands was lying to me or doing something that would somehow cause me pain. Even when I let the guy convince me I was wrong about what I was feeling, it always, and I mean always, turned out that I wasn’t. I might not have gotten the details exactly right, but the feeling was never wrong. At least Jerry hadn’t tried to tell me that what I was feeling was wrong. In fact, he’d told me I was right. And he’d asked me trust him. Of course, I’d heard those words before too. “Dammit,” I said, belatedly realizing I’d said it aloud.
“You’re making too much out of it and you very well know it. Now, snap out of it, we need to go get flowers.” Lucille opened her purse and dug around inside, searching for something. “I had a coupon for that hobby store that you always insist we go to, the one that has those great big flowers you like.”
Yes, cemetery flower shopping is a passion of mine. “I assume you’ll want to go get a cherry-limeade first,” I said, knowing that the cemetery ritual required it.
“And a hamburger and onion rings. You know how your dad loved onion rings.”
Lucille had developed this little routine right after my dad died to distract me and wear me down until we were at the cemetery before I knew what was going on. I was on to her now, but it apparently still worked. And, in my current mental state I couldn’t think of a reason not to go, although I was really sure there was one.
The food
and flower gathering stops took longer than usual since Lucille couldn’t make up her mind about anything, including the size of her drink (she finally went with large since it fit best in the cup holder). She eventually found her coupon, and after extensive deliberations, we came out of the store with enough flowers to cover a float in the Rose Parade.
After arriving at the cemetery, I set the sacks by the marker, pulled out a handful of big flowers and started the de-tagging process.
Mother bent over the brass vase and started removing the faded spring flowers from the Styrofoam cone. “Jerry Don’s not like that dumb Danny or that other one that I told you was a mistake from the very beginning. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on him, but you wouldn’t listen to me.” She shook her head and tossed the old flowers aside. “Even when he pulled that first dumb stunt, I tried to tell you again, but you just wouldn’t see it. It was real clear to me what you’d gotten tangled up with.”
“I know, Mother, I know.” She was right, no point in denying it or trying to explain it.”Everybody saw who he really was but me.”
“You better pay attention to what I’m telling you this time. It’ll save you some grief.” She stood and dusted her hands. “Now, you fix up the new ones.”
I did as I was told and knelt down by the vase, keeping an eye out for fire ants. I started with the tall orange gladiolus stems and white calla lilies.
“Jerry Don is a good man,” Mother said, gathering up the old flowers and putting them in a sack. “He and I have our disagreements, but they’re mostly because he just doesn’t understand about certain things. Not his fault, really, and I generally don’t hold it against him.” She shook her head and clucked her tongue. “But for goodness sakes, Jolene, he’s the county sheriff, not God. He can’t just reschedule crimes and such so he can go on a date with you.”
I knew that, sort of. “It wasn’t a crime or a case; it was some police chief that was in town for some reason or other that he had to deal with. That’s all he’d say about it.”
“But you don’t believe him.”
I filled in around the tall stems with white daisy clusters and stuck in some silver sparkly stick things that Lucille had insisted on. “I know he wasn’t telling me the truth about it. I could feel it.”
“Well, I think you’re jumping to conclusions. Things can look one way when they’re really something else entirely.”
“Yeah, believing that is what got me in trouble before.”
“That was different. You knew good and well that you couldn’t trust either one of them as far as you could throw them, they showed you that over and over again, but you just ignored it. Jerry hasn’t ever done any of that, now has he?”
I made a final adjustment to my floral creation and stood. “No.”
Lucille patted the top of the arrangement then turned to walk to the car. “Glad we got that done.”
I grabbed the remaining sacks and trash and followed her.
Once we were on the road, she said, “We all have our reasons for doing what we do, Jolene. Somebody else might think we’re crazy, or even mean.” She dabbed a tissue on her nose, sniffling just a little. “But if they knew all the facts, well, they’d realize they might’ve done the same thing if they’d been in the same spot. You remember that.”
“I will.” As I turned onto the highway back to Kickapoo, I realized the sun was setting fast right along with my opportunity for daylight reconnaissance of the mesquite patch. I also remembered what I should have been doing instead of spending half the day on the cemetery ritual. “It’s going to be dark before long and I’d really like to meet with Bob Little before it gets any later. Why don’t you try calling him again?”
“No point in that. Even if he is home, it’ll be too late by the time we get there. Bobby goes to bed early. It would be best if waited until in the morning.”
Why did I get the feeling that had been the plan all along?
The sun had just dipped out of sight when we pulled up to Mother’s house. However, there was still plenty of light to see the Bowman County Sheriff’s white Expedition sitting in front of the house.
My eyes filled with tears yet again, only this time I wasn’t sad. I pulled the Buick into the garage then hurried out to meet Jerry, who was also coming toward me.
“I told you I’d come,” he said, pulling me to him. “I can’t stay, but I wanted to see you.”
He explained about the police chief who was there because of some top secret something and getting something or other arranged. He couldn’t tell me much about it, but said he would later and everything would be okay.
Truth is, I didn’t really care what he had to do, what mattered to me was that he’d driven all the way over from Bowman City because he wanted to see me. That mattered a lot. I mattered to him.
Jerry didn’t know how much longer it was going to take, but said he’d call later. “Jolene,” he said, kissing me deeply one more time. “Trust me.”
God help me, I did.
As Jerry drove away, I caught a glimpse of a curtain swaying. It was no great surprise that my mother had been watching the whole scene. Lucille is and always will be Lucille. However, there had been some odd—perhaps even borderline compassionate—behavior on her part at the cemetery. To begin with, she’d gone easy on me, giving me only a brief version of “how could you be that stupid” and really limiting her use of “I told you so.” In addition, I am pretty sure she also gave me some actual usable motherly advice, which is just plain weird.
As I turned and walked toward the house, I realized that I was feeling good about things with Jerry. I trusted him.
On the other hand, regardless of whatever bonding moment might have occurred with my mother, trusting her was still completely out of the question.
Chapter
Five
I awoke to the sound of gunfire.
It took a few seconds to figure that out, of course, but only a few, as gunfire tops the list of things likely to occur when I am in the general proximity of my mother.
It still startled me. Okay, it terrified me. I did not grow up with this sort of thing. Really. The woman has not been a geriatric road warrior all her life, only since she hit about seventy, which coincided rather closely with the sudden death of my father. Neither of us took it very well, but I’m pretty sure Lucille lost her freaking mind. The current situation—specifics unknown but definitely involving bullets—would tend to support that theory.
It is important to note that I assimilated this jumble of thoughts rather quickly— and while racing through the house to the front porch to see firsthand the full extent of the crisis. I stumbled into the living room and flattened myself against the wall by the front door, police-style, then stuck my nose around the doorframe and peeked out.
There, at the edge of the porch, in all her glory and bathrobe, was my mother and her Little Lady. No, her “Little Lady” is not a cocker spaniel. It is a laser-sighted 9 mm Glock, which at the moment was rapidly blowing holes into the side of a white four-door compact sedan.
Between shots, I heard a high-pitched shriek that sounded something like “stop” or “don’t shoot” or some other phrase that my mother was sure to ignore.
Since the shooting was decidedly a one-way affair, I stepped into the doorway to get a better view and tentatively grabbed the latch of the glass storm door. In an oversized tee shirt and not much else, I didn’t feel particularly motivated to wrestle her for the gun, and telling her to stop was a waste of good air. As I mulled over other impractical options such as buying a stun gun and simply going back to bed until she got bored, I noticed an odd sound. Silence. Reverberating Silence. The gunfire had stopped. My ears, however, were ringing like a church bell.
Mother turned toward me, dropped out an empty clip from the pistol and said, loudly, “I’ve got three full clips in my top left dresser drawer, the one with my underwear. You run get them, Jolene. And hurry up about it,” she yelled. “He might get away.”
; I had serious doubts about that—not about what was in the underwear drawer—but the getting away part. Before I could ask any questions or voice my, um, concerns, a squeaky “don’t shoot” chirped from behind the bullet-riddled car.
“I’m unarmed,” the voice continued. “Please don’t shoot me. I’ll come out with my hands up.”
Yeah, that’d be great. With his hands up. “Mother, who’s behind that car and what have you done to him?”
“That’s Demon Seed,” Lucille said venomously. “And he hasn’t got a scratch on him. Yet.”
“Who?”
“He’s nothing but a lying little weasel. He’s the one trying to take my property and ruin my life. Now, go get me those clips or get out of my way.”
“Take your house?”
“Steal my house is more like it, the lying little twerp. The clips, Jolene, hurry up.”
“You know, you’ve pretty much destroyed his car,” which best I could tell was a Hyundai. “Let’s call that good for the day.”
“I’m making a statement here,” Lucille groused, “and I haven’t even shot out all the tires yet. The fool won’t be thinking he can walk all over me when he’s afoot!”
If you can come up with a reasonable response to that, well, you’re way ahead of me. The best I could do was to try to distract her. “You know, we haven’t been shopping together in ages. Why don’t we get dressed and run into town to the mall. Don’t you need a new purse?” Yes, it was truly a desperate moment.
“I have a new purse, thank you very much, and the mall is not open yet anyway, and you don’t give a hoot about shopping with or without me.” Lucille Jackson puffed out her chest and pointed a long acrylic nail to the front of the yard, where a sidewalk would traditionally be, if indeed Kickapoo had such things. “You look right there. I put up my signs just as plain as day. He chose to ignore them so he got just what he asked for. I have rights.”
She was right about one thing. A garden of yellow and white squares had apparently cropped up in the yard when I wasn’t looking. “Just because you put up ‘no trespassing’ signs, doesn’t mean—”