Countdown to Killing Kurtis

by Lauren Rowe

  Jeb stands and grabs his wallet out of his pants. “Here’s fifty bucks, honey.” He drops some bills into the empty coffee can in the cabinet.

  “Thank you, Jebby,” Momma says, “but it’s not the money I want—it’s you. I’m not sure I can keep on the straight and narrow without you.”

  Jeb flashes Mother a sympathetic face. “Aw, Carrie Ann, you’ve already made it through the first month, honey, and that’s the hardest part. You know I’ve got to make us some money. I’ve burned through all my savings these past months, hanging out here with y’all.”

  “I know, I know,” Mother replies. “Thank you, darlin’. But I don’t know if I can stay strong without you here. Every single day, it’s a struggle not to take a drink.” Her lower lip begins to tremble and she looks down, ashamed.

  “You can do it,” Jeb says earnestly, pulling Mother up from her chair and into an embrace. “I’ll be back before you know it.” He puts both hands on her cheeks and kisses her gently. “And when I get back, maybe we’ll start planning ourselves a wedding, making things official.” He smiles at her. “How does that sound?”

  “Oh, Jebby,” Momma says, her face lighting up. “That sounds mighty fine.”

  I feel dizzy. My stomach is squeezing. This cannot be happening.

  “And until I get back,” Jeb continues. “Charlene will be here the whole time, keeping you on track.” He turns to me. “Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

  My heart is pounding in my ears. Daddy’s gonna blow a gasket when he hears another man talking to his wife about making things official and calling his daughter “sweetheart.” And, worst of all, I reckon Daddy’s gonna be fit-to-kill when he finds out how it’s making my heart go pitter-pat to hear Jeb say all of it.

  I nod at Jeb. “Yes, sir. I’ll be right here.”

  Mother’s face melts with emotion. “Thank you, Charlene.” She steps over to me and sweeps me into her arms for just about the first time I can recall in my whole dang life.

  Jeb joins us, wrapping his big arms around the two of us at once.

  I’m suddenly overcome with the desire to cry a river of tears. I step away from our three-way embrace and sit back down.

  Mother and Jeb look at each other and something passes between them. Mother nods, as if she’s encouraging Jeb to say something and then sits back down at the table across from me. She’s fidgeting like a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.

  Jeb clears his throat and sits back down. “Charlene, honey,” he says tentatively. “I was thinking—well, your mother and I were both thinking, actually—you really should be going to school.”

  My stomach drops along with my jaw.

  “You’re so darned smart, honey—just as smart as a whip. There’s no limit to what you can do. I don’t understand why you haven’t been getting a real education all these years.” He looks over at Mother, and she crosses her arms across her chest, apparently thinking Jeb’s last comment was meant as a jab at her so-called parenting. “When I come back from the road, I want to get you enrolled right quick down at the high school, okay?”

  I close my gaping mouth and try to regain control of my face.

  “How does that sound, honey?” Jeb persists. “If you get yourself educated, there’ll be no stopping you in life.”

  I purse my lips as if I’m considering Jeb’s suggestion. “Hmm,” I begin softly, trying to quell the raging storm brewing inside me. I can feel heat rising in my cheeks and tears pricking my eyes. “Well...” I mumble. I’m shaking like cafeteria Jell-O. I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself, but it’s hard to do. Holy hell, I’ve got to get myself under control. I inhale and exhale several times. “I’d really like that, Jeb,” I declare with all the enthusiasm I can muster, but my voice is quavering. I try my darnedest to smile gratefully, but I can’t. I don’t want to do it, but I burst into tears.

  Jeb looks like he’s gonna cry right along with me. He gets up and covers me in a bear hug from behind, right where I’m sitting.

  I want to lurch out of my chair to escape Jeb’s arms and scream, “If dumb was dirt, you’d be covered in an acre!” But I don’t. Instead, I lean back into his warm chest and lose myself to wracking sobs.

  “There, there,” Jeb says softly, stroking my hair. “Everything’s gonna be all right, honey.” He kisses the top of my head. “We’ll get this all straightened out right quick.”

  The next morning, after a quick breakfast of Cheerios, it’s goodbye-and-can’t-wait-’til-you-come-home time for Jeb. Mother’s a blubbering mess during the whole, long farewell. Of course, Jeb hugs her and tells her he’ll be back before she knows it.

  “Hey, Jeb,” I say, my voice trembling, “how ’bout I bake you a welcome-home cake when you come home?”

  Jeb’s breath catches. He steps forward and puts out his arms, and I go to him, letting him envelop me in yet another hug.

  “I’ll bake it just the way you taught me to,” I murmur into his burly chest. When I pull back from Jeb’s embrace, he’s smiling like a dead pig in the sunshine, and when I glance over at Mother, she’s got tears in her eyes.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be back before you know it,” Jeb assures us.

  Mother nods, apparently too choked up to speak.

  After kissing Mother one final time and patting my cheek, Jeb climbs into his rig, starts his noisy engine and pulls away, waving and blowing kisses to us girls as he goes.

  It’s been three days since Jeb left.

  Mother went to bed over an hour ago.

  And I’ve finally managed to pick my butt off my shoulders.

  I sneak into the kitchenette, put on the yellow rubber kitchen gloves, and creep outside.

  Yesterday, while I was sitting at the kitchen table reading a biography of Marilyn Monroe—which, by the way, is the best dang book I’ve ever read in the history of my life—I overheard our next-door neighbor, Mr. Oglethorpe, talking to Mother outside.

  “Yeah, the rats are getting to be a problem,” Mr. Oglethorpe lamented to Mother. “Have you seen any in your trailer?”

  “No, thank goodness,” Mother answered, “knock on wood. I’d probably have a conniption fit if I saw a rat inside. I saw a big one scoot past me the other night when I was taking out the trash, right over there, and I screamed like a banshee.”

  “Yeah, some of ’em get pretty big,” Mr. Oglethorpe said. “I hollered like a Dallas debutante at a race riot when a big one scurried across my kitchen floor last night.”

  Mother squealed then, and Mr. Oglethorpe chuckled heartily at her reaction.

  “I’m gonna get those suckers,” he continued. “I’m putting out a bunch of traps, right over there and there, and I just put a big box of poison right under my front steps, too.”

  “I sure hope that does the trick,” Mother said, sounding squeamish. “But if you get one of ’em, good lord, don’t show it to me. I faint at the sight of anything dead.”

  And now, thanks to Mr. Oglethorpe’s conveniently timed rat-vendetta, I’m down on my hands and knees in the middle of the cold, dark night, shivering and shining my flashlight under Mr. Oglethorpe’s steps. Gosh dang it, it’s colder than a well digger’s butt in January tonight and as dark as a black cat in a coal bin.

  Sure enough, when I lay my cheek onto the gravel and shine my light under the steps, I see it—a box of rat poison sitting in the dirt, right where Mr. Oglethorpe said it’d be. I grab the box and tiptoe back toward my trailer, shaking like a leaf the whole time, either from the cold, my nerves, or both.

  I slip back inside our trailer and creep into the back room where Mother’s snoozing soundly on the mattress. Still wearing my yellow rubber gloves, I reach out with a shaky hand and gently press Mother’s fingertips onto the box of poison. She doesn’t even flinch.

  Back in my cot, I pull my covers up to my neck, trying to stop myself from shaking, but no luck. My nerves won’t stop zipping and zapping. I reckon I need to read—reading always calms me down. I pull out my Maril
yn book and my flashlight from underneath my pillow, and the minute I open the book, I feel calmer.

  I adore the way Marilyn closes her eyelids halfway when she smiles. I can’t get enough of the way she manages to look sexy and innocent at the same time. And I love how Marilyn let the world think she was exactly who they wanted her to be, and all the while, on the inside, she was something else entirely.

  I keep turning the pages of my book, studying every detail of every photograph.

  Gosh, looking at photos of Marilyn is like looking at photos of myself, if I had blonde hair and big boobs. When I’m older, once I’ve dyed my hair and my boobs have finally sprouted to their full size, Marilyn and I are gonna be just like twins. The two of us are the same in every way—and not just how we look, either, but everything else, too, from A to Z, right down to our crazy mothers.

  The only difference between Marilyn and me, as far as I can tell, is that poor Marilyn never knew her daddy, unlike me, so she wound up in a foster home after her momma went crazy. As much as I love Marilyn and want to be just like her, I’m actually glad for that one difference, to tell you the truth. I reckon not knowing your daddy and living in a foster home would be a fate worse than living in this trailer with Momma.

  My eyelids are getting heavy. The pages of my book are starting to blur.

  Poor Marilyn. I feel so sorry for her not ever knowing her daddy.

  My mind wants to keep reading, but my body says it’s turn-out-the-lights-the-party’s-over time. I shove my book and flashlight under my pillow, and slowly, ever so slowly, drift off to sleep.

  Chapter 11

  Odessa, Texas

  16 Years Old

  1,613 through 1,585 Days Before Killing Kurtis

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” the prosecuting attorney says, “the State of Texas will prove to you, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this woman, Caroline McEntire”—and here she points at Mother, who’s sitting feebly next to her Court-appointed lawyer at a small table—“committed first degree murder on October tenth of last year, when, with chilling premeditation, she poisoned and killed her live-in boyfriend, Jeb Watson.”

  I admit it was a shocker to find out Mother’s legal last name isn’t Wilber, after all, on account of her and Daddy not technically being married all these past years, on account of Mother being so young when she had me and not knowing for sure, at first, which boy was the lucky fella. I found all that out when I first became a ward of The State. Yeah, that part was a doozy of a shocker, too. I’ve had a lot of shocks to my system since the police first arrested Mother all those months ago—and all of it has made me feel lower than a snake’s pecker every goddamned day of my life.

  Maybe the biggest shock of all, the thing that kicked me in the teeth the hardest, was finding out Wilber’s not legally my last name, either, because it turns out Daddy’s name isn’t listed on my birth certificate. Nope, the only father listed on my papers is some yahoo named “Father Unknown.” Of course, Mother figured out who my rightful daddy is right quick after I was born, but I reckon she didn’t go back to my papers and fill in the blank. Of course, I don’t care what that gosh-dang piece of paper says. I’m Charlene Wilber and Charlie Wilber’s Daughter. And that’s a fact, Jack. But I reckon the folks at Child Protective Services don’t give two squirts about who I really am, because all those small-minded Napoleon-types care about is what the legal papers say. I’ve begged them to find Daddy out in Hollywood a hundred-million times, but I swear, those people must be trying to scratch their ears with their elbows.

  How hard can it be to find a guy living in Hollywood in a fancy mansion with a tennis court and a bowling alley and a fountain with naked ladies and cherubs and a little cupid with wings? My biggest fear is that Daddy came to the trailer looking for me, but I wasn’t there. My heart aches to think about Daddy walking into our trailer, a big smile on his face, and finding me gone without a trace. Why would Daddy think to look for me in some run-down foster home in Odessa? He’d sooner think Mother had kidnapped me to Mexico than go looking for me in a sad-sack facility for teens without parents.

  I’d bet anything Daddy came back to Kermit for me while I’ve been stuck in Odessa. I betcha when he came back to the trailer, he figured I must have gone off to California to find him. Lord have mercy, I could cry a deep river thinking about Daddy coming back for me and me not being there. But then again, almost everything makes me wanna cry a deep river these days. Goodness gracious, I didn’t know it was even possible for a girl to cry this many tears.

  It’s clear to me I’ve got to take matters into my own hands and get my butt out to California as soon as possible. Unfortunately, however, before I can do that, I’ve got to wait and bide my time at the stupid group home for a little while longer. Now that the police know my name, and everyone at Child Protective Services thinks they’ve got the God-given right to tell me what I can and can’t do simply because my only legal parent in this world has been locked away in a prison cell, and since I’ve got to show up at this gosh-dang trial every goddamned day so I can play Good Daughter for the jury, I reckon I’ve got no choice but to cool my jets and let this whole situation play itself out.

  I steal a glance at Mother at the defense table. From my seat in the gallery at the back of the courtroom sitting next to Mrs. Clements from the group home, I can only see the back of Mother’s head and her occasional profile when she whispers something to her baby lawyer. For cryin’ out loud, that lawyer can’t be much older than me, and I’ve only just turned sixteen—the boy looks like he stole his granddaddy’s suit. And Mother? Well, bless her distilled heart and fermented liver, she looks guilty as homemade sin. The two of them together look like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

  “For our first witness, the State calls Detective Mark Carter,” the prosecutor says. Mrs. Clements from the group home squeezes my hand, and I squeeze right back. I’m glad for her show of support, actually—my stomach’s turning over like a plucked chicken on a spit.

  Detective Mark Carter is a slightly rotund man with salt-and-pepper hair, bushy eyebrows, and pointy-toed boots. I remember him from when he came to our trailer on The Horrible Night of Jeb’s Murder.

  After swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help him God, Detective Carter with the bushy eyebrows proceeds to tell a rapt courtroom about what he encountered when he first came to our trailer that night. He describes finding Jeb, dead as a doornail on the floor in the middle of the kitchenette, blood and froth and cake chunks and unspecified bodily fluids gurgling down his chin and staining the front of his plaid flannel shirt.

  Detective Carter further describes finding a half-eaten chocolate cake on the table and Mother passed out drunk as a skunk in the back room. He goes on to describe finding me, sitting in the corner of the trailer, rocking back and forth, sobbing, my hands wrapped around my knees.

  In response to the prosecutor’s questioning, Detective Carter describes his masterful detective work. He tells us how he found an empty box of rat poison in the Oglethorpes’ trash bin outside their trailer, and he confirms, with a sparkle in his eye, that Mother’s fingerprints were all over it. I’m sure the jury’s thinking, “Wow, that’s some brilliant detective work right there.”

  When Mother’s attorney cross-examines Detective Carter, it becomes abundantly clear that boy’s aiming to be a half-wit, but he’s not gonna hit the mark—because everything that pipsqueak asks the detective seems to put yet another nail in Mother’s coffin. Isn’t the defendant’s lawyer in a murder trial supposed to make his client sound less guilty, not more? I swear, if you put that boy’s brains into a boxcar, it’d rattle around like a bee-bee. It’s all I can do not to run up there, knock that twelve-year-old lawyer onto his butt, and start cross-examining that detective myself, just to give poor Momma a fighting chance.

  For two solid weeks, I sit with Mrs. Clements in the courtroom gallery, listening to the testimony and alternately crying, hanging my head, looking defi
ant, confused, heartbroken, and/or shocked—sometimes all of them at once. Occasionally, Mother turns around to look at me, her eyes vacant and lifeless. I can’t for the life of me figure out what she must be thinking—and, honestly, I probably wouldn’t want to know.

  “The State calls Bernard Oglethorpe to the stand.”

  Mr. Oglethorpe describes his conversation with Mother about the rats. “No, I didn’t tell anyone else about the box of poison under my steps.... No, I never handed Carrie Ann the box of poison.... No, she didn’t handle the box in my presence, nope.... No, I didn’t remove the box of poison at any time.... No, I did not throw that box of poison away into my own trashcan.”

  “The State calls Margaret Monaghan to the stand.”

  Mrs. Monaghan describes how she’s known me for years, how I used to come into the library often, and that I’ve always been a “voracious reader.” She smiles at me when she says the “voracious reader” part—and coming from a librarian, I reckon that’s high praise, indeed. “Charlene’s always been an extremely shy and polite and curious young lady,” Mrs. Monaghan confirms, but, she adds, glancing at me, “I must admit I’ve often wondered about her ‘homeschooling’ and what seemed to be a complete lack of parental supervision in her life.” A scowl crosses her face when she says “complete lack of parental supervision,” and at the same time, I notice several jurors’ faces mirroring her disapproval.

  Mrs. Monaghan tells the courtroom about the unforgettable day I came into the library, not too long before The Horrible Night of Jeb’s Murder, anxious and fidgety and flustered—which was so unlike me she’ll never forget it. After she gently prodded me, she says, I admitted to her that I desperately needed information about ... dum-dum-dum!... Battered Woman Syndrome.

  Several jurors gasp when Mrs. Monaghan says “Battered Woman’s Syndrome,” and when Mrs. Monaghan further describes how I pleaded with her not to tell Jeb about my outburst—and says she’ll never forget the look of fear in my eyes when I cried “please don’t tell Jeb!”—a couple of the jurors just about slide off their chairs.