Through the louvered dressing room doors, I could hear Viv and Dale arguing about the PDDL, and Dale trying to flirt with the sales clerk. I stripped off and tugged the dress over my head, almost afraid to open my eyes. I said one more quick prayer.
I faced the mirror. It was...well, it wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t good. The good part about having a somewhat plus-sized bottom is, it’s usually accompanied with enough boobage to fill out a v-neck dress nicely. The bad part was that the rest of it was fairly well filled, too. The ruching created little pockets all the way up my front that appeared to be filled with fat. I poked at a bulge. It sprang back with enthusiasm. I tugged the dress away from my front, and it snapped instantly back and hugged every curve and unsightly bulge.
I sighed and swallowed the lump of disappointed in my throat. I guess I could see if they had any tunics...
“How is it?” Dale asked through the door. “Do you want me to bring you another size?”
I saw red and flames shot out of my eyeballs. Well, okay, not actual flames, imaginary flames that incinerated Dale into a tiny smoking pile of ash.
“It’s great!” I found myself saying. “It looks frigging fabulous!”
“Really?” Viv said. I wasn’t thrilled with the somewhat disbelieving tone of her voice, either. “Let’s see.”
I ripped the dress over my head so fast I could have given myself a friction burn. “Sorry. I already took it off.”
I tugged my jeans and t-shirt on and hopped out of the dressing room to pull on my shoes. “I’ll take it,” I said brightly to the clerk. I beamed and even did a little happy dance at the counter.
Viv frowned at me. “What are you doing?”
“I’m, you know, being giddy. Because I got a pretty new dress.”
From the corner of my eye I saw a display of Smaxx “shapewear”. The model on the cover of the package had an actual six-pack, but still...maybe a little shapewear really could help the dress fit better.
I lifted my hand to reach for the package, then thought of Dale and stopped. I plastered my grin back on. “It looks great,” I announced to the clerk. “Fabulous. I’m so excited now about the banquet!”
“That’s great,” the clerk murmured. “Debit or credit?”
I grabbed the bag and followed Viv and Dale out the door, my grin still firmly in place. Before I reached the door I turned back and whispered to the clerk, “What time do you close?”
“Nine o’clock,” she whispered back.
“You never told me you had three sisters,” Viv said when we got back into the car. “Do they live here?”
“I don’t know,” Dale said. He looked out the window and was quiet for a second. “They stopped talking to me a long time ago.”
I thought I might have some idea why they stopped talking to him, but I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for Dale. He looked sad.
I had no idea what it would be like to have siblings. Growing up it had just been me and Mom, with my G-Ma, her mother, thrown in from time to time. Every once in a while a guy would come along and Mom would think he was the answer to all our prayers, but more often than not he’d be my own personal nightmare. What I saw as defending myself from unwanted advances got me labeled a defiant troublemaker, and I got shipped off to stay with G-Ma in Lubbock. That was fine by me. G-Ma generally kept me fed and although she had plenty of people coming and going from the little strip motel she owned on the old highway, she made sure they kept their hands to themselves where I was concerned.
As far as I knew, I had been an only child, but that was hard to verify if you were not 100 percent sure who your father is. Charles Pointer, the man I had been told was my father, had two kids a few years younger than me. I had never had the courage to get confirmation on my paternity. If I’d been able to show up at his door and say with confidence, “Surprise! It’s a girl! And you’re gonna be so proud. I’m a good person who’s never done anything rotten like, say, get three DUIs or steal from her friends!” maybe I could have. But I wasn’t. I had my hands full working on becoming a person who could look herself in the eye. I wasn’t ready to look anyone else in the eye just yet.
“This has got to be it,” Dale said, and I realized it was the third time he’d said it. “They’re having an emergency meeting in about twenty minutes. Public is invited.”
We were back in the car and I was busy trying not to feel sick over the look on Tony’s face when he saw my unsightly bulges all swathed and on display in shiny black fabric.
Viv looked at the phone Dale was holding out. “Yeah, I’ll bet that’s our group,” Viv said.
I agreed that had to be it because it was the only PDDL we could find. We still didn’t know what the letters stood for, but I was inclined to lean toward Dale’s theory – People in Defense of Decent Living, or something along those lines. I wasn’t going to tell him that, of course. It was not because I was resentful or irritated or rejoicing in wrongdoing – nothing like that. He and Viv were just too busy being chum-chums to let me get a word in edgewise.
He read the address to Viv, and I realized it was not too far from G-Ma’s motel. “I know that area,” I said. There were a lot of dive bars. “Let’s drop Stump off at G-Ma’s so I don’t have to lug her around.”
Stump gave me a look, and I questioned Dale’s earlier theory that she didn’t know what I was saying. She probably just picked up the two words – Stump, which she recognized as herself, and G-Ma, which she recognized as a grumpy old lady who didn’t like her. Just in case, I said, “I mean, it might get rough, and I love Stump too much to put her in a situation that might be unsafe.”
She hmmphed and curled up on the seat by the window, giving me the stink eye.
G-Ma was in the front office and was not thrilled with the idea of babysitting. “Last time I tried to keep her she shredded my bathmat and screamed so loud someone called animal control on me. They thought I was torturing her.”
Stump had rather severe separation anxiety issues, which was why she was always with me or Frank. I’d actually had animal control called on me once, too. I’d had to stage a fake abandonment and let the animal control officer stand on a bucket outside my bathroom window and spy on Stump going through one of her unholy, ear-bleeding frenzies before she believed me when I said I treated my dog humanely. I was fairly sure Stump was the reason our last neighbors had moved.
“She only gets like that when she’s alone,” I said. “She won’t be alone. You’ll be with her.”
“What if I rent a room and have to show someone the way?”
I looked out the window on the right side of the reception area, then the left. The Executive Inn had twenty rooms, and I could see all of the doors from the office in the center of the building. I knew from years of working with G-Ma that it took more than a simple act of customer service to get her off her stool, anyway, but I said, “You can take her with you. Just carry her. She’s not that heavy.”
“What if I have to go to the bathroom?”
“Again, she can go with.”
“This is an unhealthy relationship you and this dog have going, here,” G-Ma said.
“Could be true,” I said. “But still one of the healthiest I’ve ever had.”
She frowned at me, but I knew I’d won this round. I dumped Stump into her lap and backed out the door as quick as I could. “I’ll be back in half an hour!” Rarely had a promise been based on less information, but I got out while I could.
I wasn’t sure which bar we were going to, but a quick drive down from the motel confirmed that we would, in fact, be going to a bar. There were four or five on that stretch of road, and I used to sneak in sometimes when I was staying with G-Ma, to one in particular owned by a rotund man named Mac with bushy white eyebrows and beard. He looked like Santa Claus’s black sheep cousin. I would order a Jack and Coke, all nonchalant like I wasn’t fifteen years old, and Mac would give me an eye roll, along with a plain Coke with a cherry in it. He’d tolerate me for a while if the
place wasn’t busy and the crowd didn’t look too rough, but he always growled at me to leave after very long. I could have gotten him into a lot of trouble if the cops had showed up and I had been sitting on his bar stool. On the other hand, he also somewhat seemed to like having me there.
If I got lucky enough and Mac’s son was filling in for him, he’d slip a tiny bit of something into my Coke that made my eyes blur a little. That didn’t happen often, just enough to make me feel daring and grownup.
The PDDL meeting wasn’t at Mac’s old place, but across the highway in a bar that used to be called The Three Kings, and had at one time ambitiously tried to look like a castle. It was a flat roofed, one-story building with round turret towers on the two front corners. A couple of the little notches in the towers were getting crumbly but that didn’t seem to bother anyone. Now it was simply called “The Hangout.”
Viv parked the Caddy and we all crawled out. I was struck, suddenly, by the weirdness of being at a bar. It was like going to the movies in the middle of the day and then coming out to blinding afternoon sun. A disoriented sense of being jerked out of balance hung over me as I followed Viv and Dale across the parking lot marked with potholes. There was a time when this kind of place was my normal hangout, and I had barely noticed the potholes, the smell of old grease from the dumpster, and the dilapidated cars with loose bumpers and bald tires. The fact that these things got my attention now showed me just how much my life had changed over the past year or so.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but I thought...good, maybe. Maybe I felt good. Maybe I felt proud of myself. It was as if I’d been plodding along with my head down for a long time, and then I looked over my shoulder and realized there was a bit of space between me and where I’d been. I figured that once the surprise wore off, I was going to be really proud of myself.
The inside was dim and a little smoky, but not too bad. A couple of hangdog looking guys glanced up from the bar when we came in, but otherwise we went unnoticed.
Just like that, it was back – the urge to drink. I’d done really, really well. It had been a long time since I’d gotten so drunk I’d embarrassed myself. Of course, I’d done lot of things sober that embarrassed me, too, but that was just the way it was.
A little whisper in my head suggested that, perhaps, I had gotten enough balance that I could handle it all now.
Les had warned me that this day would come. Someday I would feel like it would be okay to just have a little slip, and I could either shut that voice down as soon as it started, or I could start the slow slide back down to rock bottom and have to crawl all the way back out again.
Viv stood looking around, her nose in the air. From all the stories she’d told me, this kind of place wasn’t exactly foreign to her, either, but you’d never know it to look at her now, in $600 shoes and carrying a handbag that cost at least triple that – or from her imperious attitude.
I lifted my nose and tried to mimic her expression, but I didn’t feel like I was pulling it off very well. I looked at her, wondering if the urge to loosen things up a little with a Jack and Coke was as strong in her as it was in me.
A waitress in cut-off shorts and a tank top walked by carrying an empty drinks tray and a white dishtowel. “You here for PDDL?” she asked.
I cast a glance at Dale, but he was looking to me to answer. I gave her a quick nod. We were either about to find our hate group, or we were going to be initiated into some violent biker gang.
The waitress jerked her head toward a doorway on the other end of the long wooden bar. “Back room,” she said.
I followed Viv back, feeling Dale hovering entirely too closely at my back. The back room was as dim as the front, and the paneled walls were bare except for a couple of pretty posters of prairie grass and blue sky.
There were two rows of folding chairs and a thin podium, but the room was too small to need a microphone and speakers. A couple of rough looking men with arms crossed over their chests turned in their seats and stared at us as we came in. They didn’t look happy.
Before I was even comfortable in my seat, a man in a black button down shirt and denim vest got up to the podium and cleared his throat. “Ummm, I know people are still kind of getting situated, but I’m going to go ahead and get started.” He held a small stack of index cards in his hand, and he reached up and scratched his scalp with them. “Look, first I want to thank Bull for letting us use this room. Having a safe place to meet like this, to discuss things openly without having to censor ourselves, well, that’s invaluable. It seems that our way of thinking is growing more unpopular by the day, and this safe haven just becomes more and more precious to me.”
Some of the men turned and nodded toward a skinny guy with slicked-back black hair, who nodded solemnly back. I thought Bull seemed like a strange nickname for such a thin guy, but who was I to judge? My mom had named me after her favorite menthol cigarette.
“I also want to thank our visitors for coming. It’s a fact that when things happen – newsworthy things like what happened last week – it attracts attention. And although I’m sorry it takes such violence to get attention, I believe that, ultimately, it’s worth it. Our way of life, the very ground we’re standing on here, is at stake. Make no mistake.”
With that he stopped, scratched his head again, and cleared his throat. “I know we all want to discuss the events of this past week, because from talking to a few of you, I know there’s a great deal of ill feeling about the way things were handled. Some of you think the steps taken were necessary. Others of you think it went too far.”
I felt my eyes bug out and it took everything I had not to look at Viv. She pressed her knee against mine and I knew she was thinking the same thing. This was it! I almost smiled, thinking about shoving this bit of crime-solving information under Bobby’s nose.
“I understand all that,” the speaker went on. “I can actually relate to both sides. I really can. And we can stand here and hash things out for the next hour or so. We can play coulda-shoulda-woulda all day long. But the truth is, what’s done is done. It can’t be undone. No amount of finger-pointing and blaming is going to turn back the clock. So all I can say now is, we need to look at where we are. It’s undeniable that we have the attention of the people. We have a platform now that didn’t exist last week.”
Someone from the audience murmured agreement, and a couple shifted in their seats.
“Now is the time,” the speaker went on. “It’s all over the internet. I’ve seen stories all over the Midwest. I’m getting calls from affiliates in South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas. You name it. Now is the time to get this issue settled, once and for all.”
A couple more noises from the audience, and I felt my heart start to pound. Good grief, what were they planning next?
I glanced at Viv, and she slid a slit-eyed gaze over toward me. I knew she was thinking what I was thinking. Wouldn’t it chap Bobby’s hide when we not only handed him a killer, but we gave him information that helped him prevent some big issue-settling epic event?
I bit the inside of my lip, thinking of the humble pie Viv would make piping hot fresh just for him. Maybe I could wear a little French maid apron to serve it to him.
I was so caught up in my fantasy that I got a little lost in the conversation.
One of the bigger guys, with a gimme tractor cap and an impressive belly spilling over the waist of his Wranglers, raised a hand and interrupted.
“The problem is, the kind of destruction we saw last week doesn’t help any of us. In fact, it hurts all the efforts in South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas and you name it,” he said, repeating the speaker’s own words back to him. “It draws the attention away from the real issue. When the violence escalates like that, I think it makes everyone more sympathetic to our enemies, and less sympathetic to our cause.”
Viv leaned over and whispered to me. “And there’s the guy we’re going to lean on first.”
I nodded slightly. Clearly, he was the weak link, not
as committed to the cause and more likely to speak out of a guilty conscience. It took everything I had not to rub my palms together.
“It reduces us all to the level of a bunch of closed-minded lunatics. Unreasonable fanatics. Nobody in their right mind wants to be associated with that kind of group, whether we are right nor not. I think we need to come out and denounce the attack. Officially.”
A couple of the men made affirmative noises, but I saw more shaking their heads. The speaker tightened his mouth and let the group talk among themselves for a moment, but it was clear an argument was about to erupt.
He put his hands out and shushed them. “Now, Chuck, I understand how you feel. But I think we can tread this line a little more carefully and get some mileage out of it.”
A younger guy with a thin ponytail stood, his shoulders rigid. “I don’t denounce it. I’m happy with what happened.” He turned to Chuck. “Do you have any idea how many prairie dogs were saved in that one act?
I frowned. I wasn’t too up on my gay culture, but I’d never heard “prairie dog” used as a euphemism for anything.
“For how long?” Chuck shot back, his voice rising. “You think they won’t fix that damned machine? Hell, their insurance adjuster is already there and it’s being repaired as we speak. All that fool did was prove we’re a bunch of crazies and delay things by one week. At best.”
Viv and I looked at each other. I saw from her expression that realization was dawning on her at the same time it did me.
“Well, crud,” she said. She sighed and stood.
“No, don’t leave,” the speaker said when he saw her. He motioned for the crowd to shush again. “Don’t go, it’s not always like this, I promise. Guys, please.”
“No, it’s not that,” Viv said. I stood beside her. “It’s just that...we were under the impression that this was a different kind of group. So you’re, what? Defending the prairie dog habitat?”
Dale looked slack-jawed between Viv and the group.
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