Between, Georgia

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Bernese flared her nostrils like a bull and said, “Why were you using condoms in the first place?”

  I said, “Because the pill makes me crazy, and we weren’t ready to have a baby.”

  “And you stopped?”

  I felt myself flushing, and when I spoke, my voice came out barely above a whisper. “Because I thought we were ready. I don’t see a way back from going to your doctor’s office and being told that no, actually, you don’t have a urinary tract infection from all the sex you’ve been having, trying to conceive. You have syphilis.”

  It was hard to meet Bernese’s eyes, but I forced myself. Over her shoulder, I could see Henry Crabtree drawing closer and closer. But then he turned abruptly, veering off to my left, and I realized he was heading for Mama’s front door, not Bernese’s. In four more long strides, he was out of sight.

  I blew out a relieved breath and turned my full attention back to Bernese and signing for Mama. Of course he had no way to know I was over here. I would catch up with him later. Maybe he had been coming to say that the kiss was a mistake. To apologize.

  To restore all our old ease. I needed that so badly right now, his friendship, but I didn’t believe it. He had moved with the unwa-vering gait of Prince Charming preparing to broach the witch’s tower.

  Bernese, meanwhile, was suffering some sort of internal drama.

  Her cheeks had reddened, and she threw the pill bottle down. It skittered across the coffee table and dropped to the floor. “That rotten piece of stinking meat,” she said. “And you didn’t know a thing until you went to your gynecologist?”

  “No,” I said. It had been awful. Syphilis, of all things. Practically a dead disease. Jonno couldn’t bring home some regulation rampant campus animal like the clap or crabs. It had to be some bizarre throwback of an illness, one my gynecologist hadn’t seen in ages. “I wonder if we’ll get a rash of it now,” she’d said, considering me speculatively, and I had flushed at the implication.

  Mama, who knew all this, patted my leg while Bernese regarded me with worried eyes. “Nonny, tell me you’re sure that is all he gave you.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “I got tested. Twice.”

  Bernese nodded, relieved. Her gaze flattened back into anger, and she said, “I can’t believe you’re going to divorce him.” I boggled at her until she added, “You need to track his sorry butt down and shoot him. Put him in the ground.”

  Henry reappeared and headed back up Grace. But then he piv-oted and paused, staring speculatively toward Bernese’s house. He started moving in our direction again, looming larger and larger in the bay window.

  Bernese had launched into a long anti-Jonno diatribe, threatening all manner of biblical vengeance. I tried twice to break her flow, but she overrode me. I signed to Mama, Bernese is on a tear, and Henry Crabtree is coming up to the house. I have to talk to him.

  Then you should go. Because this conversation is worthless.

  Yes. Bernese is talking at me, but she isn’t saying anything interesting, I signed. I’ll have to let her wind herself down. Do you want to go home, or stay here, or come with me to talk to Henry?

  Henry reached the bottom step of Bernese’s wide front porch.

  He hesitated there. I could see his eyes burning with a bright blackness, as if he were trying to incinerate the front door with the intensity of his gaze.

  Mama seemed to be thinking over her options, so I signed, Bernese is going on about how Jonno should be taken out and hanged with a loop of his own intestines, and you were right. I shouldn’t have let her divert me. Now it won’t be about the divorce, it will be about why I don’t kill him. It’s all smoke, because she doesn’t want to deal with what she’s doing to Fisher. I was signing to keep Mama abreast of the situation, but also so Bernese would think I was still interpreting and therefore probably listening to her.

  Henry was standing completely still, his eyes on the door, and I tried to think of something softening to say to him. But honestly, considering everything that was going on with our families, the trouble between us was nothing. It was just a kiss. He was being ridiculous. I felt a stab of irritation. I didn’t have the energy for romantic drama today.

  At last Mama said, I will stay here and have a lie-down on Bernese’s sofa. My hip is bothering me. Let me rest, and then we can go to the hospital and check on Genny.

  I nodded my hand in hers and then stood up abruptly while Bernese was in mid-sentence. Henry, frozen on the porch, caught the movement through the sheers. He peered through the window and then came toward it, and our eyes met.

  I understood immediately that whatever his mission was, it had zero to do with romance. He hadn’t been standing immobile at the door because he was feeling at all uncertain. Henry Crabtree was angry. So angry he was practically vibrating. I saw his shoulders shudder, as if he were shaking a weight off his back. He pointed a savage finger at me and then jerked his whole hand back toward himself, telling me by gesture, “Get your ass outside.”

  CHAPTER 13

  HENRY STOOD IN the driveway, staring at Bernese’s tires. It had taken me a few minutes to extricate myself from the derailed conversation with Bernese and then get Mama settled on the sofa. In that time, Henry had become contained, if not calmer. He waved a hand at the tires. “Those are shredded.”

  “Yeah. It’s a mercy Bernese hasn’t seen them yet.”

  His head jerked up, and I watched some of the fury leach out of his black gaze.

  “Henry, what’s going on with you? What were you doing standing on the porch steps for so long?”

  “I wasn’t sure I could see Bernese yet without beating the living shit out of her,” Henry said. I raised my eyebrows, puzzled, and he stared back at me. At last he said, “Come and see. Because you won’t believe me if I tell you.” He started stalking back up Grace Street.

  “Henry?” I called after him.

  “You have to see it,” he said, pausing to wait for me.

  I trotted to catch up. “I can’t be gone long. I need to take Mama to the hospital soon. Genny’s going to get nerved up if we aren’t there when visiting hours start.”

  He nodded curtly, and we walked up the street side by side until we came up even with the fence that surrounded the Crabtree parts yard. The dogs didn’t appear, and when I looked ahead, I saw that the chain was swinging loose and the gate was open.

  I stopped, staring. “Holy crap! Are they out? Henry? Did someone let them out?”

  Henry responded by grabbing my hand and pulling me on to the gate. We went inside. I hadn’t been in the Crabtree parts yard in years. Not since I was a child. Even then I never spent a lot of time there. In the brief period when Ona had unsupervised visitation with me, I’d been told at home that on no account was I to play in the yard. Genny said it was a death trap filled with rusty sharp things that dripped tetanus. The refrigerators and chest freezers looked to her like suffocating coffins, even after Ona went out there with a hammer and broke every latch so that the doors gaped open obscenely on the uprights.

  From what I remembered, it looked very much the same.

  Rusted-out bodies of cars and partial cars, heaps of old lawn mowers, fridges, gas stoves, and chunks of various engines lay in disarray. A narrow path wound through the mountains of gears and scrap metal and spark plugs. Henry led me toward the other side, near the back entrance to the gas station.

  The two male dogs were there, lying together in a stiffening heap in front of a wall of used tires. Their eyes were open and glassy, and their mouths were ringed with white foam. All eight of their legs were stiff and curled, and their spines were bowed, making them look like they were in midleap, though they were lying on their sides. A large fly with a swollen bottle-green abdomen was marching across the closer dog’s face. It walked straight out onto one of the open eyes. I flinched, but of course the dog did not.

  “She was going to get rid of them,” he said, almost to himself.

  “Oh, no. Henry, has she called her br
other or his boys? Are any of them coming?”

  Henry shook his head. “I think I’ve talked her out of calling them in. So far.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. Bernese couldn’t have done this.”

  “I know,” he said. “I was so sure it was Bernese. I came down to see you so you could stop me from killing her. And then I decided to go straight to her house and kill her anyway. But then you told me she hadn’t seen what they did to her tires yet.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You thought she’d killed the dogs because of her tires? How did you know about her tires?”

  “I saw Lou at the diner this morning. He was telling Trude about the tires. I thought he was hiding out because Bernese was in a rage, but I guess he just didn’t want to be the one to tell her.

  Can’t blame the man. I got home from breakfast and my phone was ringing. It was Ona calling and asking me to come down to the parts yard. She was a wreck.”

  I cursed under my breath. If Lou had moaned to Trude, then everyone knew. Everyone except Bernese. And finding out last would do nothing to soothe her when she finally did clue in.

  The whole town, including Henry, must be assuming one of Ona’s sons had slashed the tires. I was about to tell Henry about Lori-Anne’s nocturnal visit, but he started talking before I could.

  “If she hasn’t seen the tires . . . And Bernese isn’t a poisoner. She would have marched up here in broad daylight and shot them.”

  At last he met my eyes, genuinely baffled. “So who did this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Henry’s shoulders were set and tense as he stared at me from behind his glasses. “Ona cried. She’s the toughest old bitch. But she cried when she saw them. I never saw her cry before. When she’s drunk, she’ll bray like a donkey over country songs, but her eyes stay dry. It doesn’t mean anything. This was different. She was silent. She was trying to suck it up, but fat tears kept falling out of her eyes. She wouldn’t look at me.”

  I let my hand drop from his shoulder. “You love her,” I said. It came out wrong: I didn’t sound surprised so much as accusatory.

  His brows came down. “Of course I love her. What do you think?” he said.

  “How?” I said. He looked incredulous and angry, and I held up one hand, rushing to speak before he could. “No, I meant it sin-cerely. How? She wants me to love her. She’s wanted it so badly since I was little. But I was scared to death of her. Her house was dark and filthy, and who knew what lived under the sofa. She sat around in all this squalor watching me, so hungry. I thought she would eat me. So, yeah, I am asking how you can love her, because I couldn’t. I still can’t. And now I can see why. She’s this horrible old racist drunk. She’s as mean as a bag of snakes. She’ll say awful things out loud, anything that comes into her head.

  She’s had seven or eight common-law husbands since I’ve been alive, and none of them treated her children any good. She let them stay around anyway, being crappy to her kids, having more kids with them, so yes, how? How on earth?”

  “You love Bernese,” Henry said.

  “Not today I don’t.”

  Henry went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Bernese and Ona are practically the same person.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “Fretts and Crabtrees are like two entirely different species. I don’t think they even share a genus.”

  Henry snorted. “Bernese is nothing but a dead-sober Ona with an outsize scoop of ambition and some money. She keeps her nasty parts yard in a black-lit terrarium and calls it a hobby, but squalor is squalor, Nonny. They both shoot before they think, and they’ll both do anything that needs doing for their families, no matter who or what is in the way.”

  I stared at him with my mouth hanging open, and then I shook my head. “Are you on crack? Bernese has been known to take a moral shortcut, but that’s not the same as not having any morals to cut across. I admit that Bernese is not the easiest person to love some days, but she isn’t like Ona. Anyway it’s not like I have a choice. She’s family.”

  Henry regarded me blandly. “What’s my name?” he asked me.

  “Yes, but . . .” I said, floundering. “But you’re not really like them. You aren’t a crazy, awful redneck racist with less self-awareness than a pill bug. You read for pleasure, and I’m not sure more than half of them can even read the want ads. You have things they don’t even know exist, like ethics and table manners.

  You’re kind to them, of course you are, but you aren’t really one of them. You never have been. You don’t even look like them, and I seriously doubt you actually are—” I stopped abruptly, horrified by what I was in the middle of saying. “I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

  “Yes, you did. And you aren’t the first.” His eyes were cool now, unfathomable. “I get this shit all the time from my relatives.

  Sideways comments about my mother’s habits, my dark skin. All the time. Never from you before, though. And never, by the way, from Ona Crabtree.”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I said.

  “Who do you think of as your mother, Nonny? Hazel Crabtree or Stacia Frett?”

  “You know who my mother is,” I said in a low tone.

  “Yeah. Because Stacia did the job. That’s all that counts. I know what I look like, and I know what people say. But Reau Crabtree did the job. He was my father. And that means Ona Crabtree is part of my family.”

  It had never occurred to me that Henry might be fighting to feel like one of them just as hard as I was fighting to distance myself. I’d never thought that anyone could want that. “I’m so sorry, Henry. I was out of line.”

  I felt as if I had killed something, the small green thing that had been growing imperceptibly between us. I must have looked as miserable as I felt, because his expression softened, and he said,

  “Ah, screw it. You didn’t mean anything. We’re both under some pressure right now. Let’s forget it, okay? We have bigger problems.” He stared down at the animals’ bodies, stuffing both his hands in his pockets. “No one but Bernese makes any sense.”

  “I know,” I said, relieved to be back on ground where we could stand together. “But Henry, she would never. I can’t imagine Bernese being clandestine.”

  “Maybe you’re underestimating her,” Henry said.

  “All I can think is, it must have been an accident. Did Lobe or Tucker put down any rat poison recently? Or maybe some old engine is leaking antifreeze.”

  “That would be quite a coincidence, wouldn’t it? If it wasn’t Bernese—” I started to speak, and he quickly said, “I see your points, but who else could it be?”

  All at once it came to me. I put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from speaking. Bernese would not have done this. It wasn’t her way, but there was someone else.

  Henry took one look at my face and knew I’d figured it out.

  He stared at me intensely, and then he leaned back, understanding dawning. “I’m an idiot. Of course not Bernese. It was her lawyer, wasn’t it.” It wasn’t said like a question, so I didn’t answer.

  He took my silence as confirmation, adding, “I should have seen that. She either sent Isaac Davids or he did it for her on his own.”

  I kept my hand over my mouth, my eyes wide. I wanted to answer him, but this was a war, and I was beginning to understand that Henry Crabtree and I were on different sides. He was part and parcel of everything I was fighting, and half a kiss didn’t make me his family. It didn’t make me his anything. I wanted to hurl myself at him and weep and put the answer in his lap to get his help. But I couldn’t. He’d made it clear where he stood, and anything I told Henry could be used as ammunition against my family.

  I couldn’t even tell him about Lori-Anne and the tires, because he might relay it to Ona. And wouldn’t Ona love that? Wouldn’t Ona love to be able to say to Bernese, “No, it wasn’t me or mine.

  It was your own child, your own child attacking you, and who
could blame her?”

  “You need to talk to Isaac,” he said. “I’m going to keep working on Ona. I’ll try to make sure she calls the police instead of her psychopath nephews.”

  I nodded, grateful. Ona would have to do something. She didn’t take things lying down. But the police were a cakewalk compared to the Alabama Crabtrees.

  “Good,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “Nonny, wait,” he called after me.

  But I didn’t wait. I turned and ran, leaving him in the jungle of old cars and junk stacks, sprinting full out as if running away from Henry Crabtree were a competitive event and I was training for the Olympics.

  Once outside the gate, I ran up Grace toward the square, heading across Philbert and into the butterfly gardens. I dropped to my knees beside the cobblestone walkway, searching, thrusting my fingers deep into the grass. I crawled, backtracking all the way across the square to the fountain, heading toward Bernese’s store.

  I found only two Percocets, melting in the morning dew.

  Isaac, my ass. If Bernese had sicced Isaac Davids on Ona, he would have put on a tasteful navy suit and a power tie and knocked on the gas station’s front door. He would have brought a court order and some folks from Animal Control, not poison.

  It wasn’t Isaac. And it wasn’t Bernese.

  It was Mama. And worse, I had helped her. I’d brought her the big plate of Trude’s meatloaf, extra gravy, and while I was downstairs in the store, she must have been loading pain pills into the meat. She’d probably wrapped it in her napkins and shoved it down into her giant handbag.

  Walking home, she’d dropped a trail of a few pills and the empty bottle, giving me something to do so she could make me leave her by the fence surrounding the parts yard. Once I was gone, she’d reached out and put her fingers through the fence, fearless, and dropped her bombs. The dogs, trained haphazardly at home by Lobe—who didn’t have enough personal discipline to hope to teach it to an animal—would have been happy to eat up the meat. Every bit.

  Half of me wanted to run home and ask her, “Why, Mama?