by Amber Foxx
“I don’t know. But I’m not coming home after work for a few days. That’s all I can tell you. We need time. Time out.”
At work in the morning, Mae tried not to let her exhaustion and worry show. Patsy deserved what she’d paid for in a training session, not Mae’s problems. Maybe later in the day sometime, Mae could ask about a place to stay.
At the end of her session, Mae had Patsy lie on her back with one heel resting in Mae’s hand so she could help her stretch out. “I graduate in a month,” Patsy said. “Can you imagine? I’ll be done with all this driving.”
“Congratulations. Did you get a job in Virginia yet?”
“In Williamsburg. It’s not quite the position I wanted, but I’m near one of my daughters. I’ve got her and her hubby with me now, packing and cleaning. Phew! When you’ve lived somewhere as long I’ve been in that house, it’s scary what’s in your closets. I got an apartment not far from the hospital in Williamsburg. Fresh start, and it’s not here.”
Mae’s heart sank. She knew she should congratulate Patsy, but all she could think of was losing her. “You’re moving already?”
“I’ll be gone in a week. We have one more session, can you believe that? I can commute to CVU as easy from Williamsburg as here, except I’ll have the tunnel.” She said “tunnel” with a drop in her voice, indicating dismay. “Sorry to end our training sessions—I feel like a new woman.”
They changed which leg was up for the stretch. One more sympathetic person leaving this area. One less client. And with Patsy’s family staying to help her pack, there was no chance of a place to put Mae. She’d met Patsy at her house once, before driving north to CVU, and it was a little shoebox of a cottage.
Reminding herself to pay attention to her client, Mae said, “I’m sure you’ll find a gym to join up there.”
“There’s a fitness center in my apartment complex. Would you make me a copy of my program? I’ll probably use that until I get more settled.”
“Glad to. I’ll explain some progressions you should make in the next month or so in our next session.”
They finished the stretch, and Patsy sat up, smiled, and bounced to her feet. “Almost out of this dismal swamp.” She did a little dance, waving one finger in the air, turning around and wagging her hips, laughing. “I cannot wait.”
Mae knew the feeling, without the joy.
“Too bad you don’t have your degree. You could get out of here, too.” Patsy looked into Mae’s eyes. “I know you’d be happier.”
“I’m ... I’m doing the best I can.” Mae looked away. She’d lain awake half the night on the couch, alternately longing for Hubert’s body beside her and feeling angry with him to the point where she wanted to get even further away. A few times she’d gotten up and walked to the door of the children’s room, which was left ajar, and simply listened to the soft sounds of their breathing. Leaving. If she did, it would be without them.
It was hard to hide her feelings now. “Excuse me,” Mae said, taking a deep breath. “I need to get ready for Mary Carter Hoggard now. You have a good day.” She started for the trainers’ office.
Patsy followed her as far as the door, asking, “What is the matter? You looked all of a sudden like—What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry. I need to stay focused—keep my mind on my job right now.”
“Mae.”
Patsy’s voice sounded so firm and motherly, Mae felt close to giving in and telling her. But she had only five minutes, and she was in a public place. She couldn’t let herself get emotional. “I’ll see you next week. Enjoy packing.”
In the office, Mae sat down at her desk and almost started crying. She could unload to Patsy later, even if it didn’t mean a place to stay, but she couldn’t let herself fall apart here and now. If she was about to be single, she needed this job more than ever.
To focus her mind, Mae began to make notes on Patsy’s program so Patsy would know what to do on her own when she moved. Mae would have to ask about the equipment at the apartment complex. Struggling to concentrate on her work, Mae saw the grid on the program blur and realized her handwriting was shaky. Patsy would get no use out of sloppy work. Mae would have to work on this when she had time and had her head on straight. Would Jen give her a place? Hubert’s old girlfriend from community college days. The girl he’d dumped for Edie, the twins’ mother. Awkward. She might have to stay in a motel tonight.
Mae stopped the thoughts, unlocked the cabinet, and took out Mary Carter’s program. She got Patsy’s file out as well, to put her program away.
Patsy leaving. Patsy had been more important than Mae had realized. A woman she could trust and talk to. Someone who didn’t judge her. She’d hoped to have that kind of friendship with Bernadette, but Charlie seemed to get in the way. Charlie. Mae still had to make a decision about Dana.
“Mae,” called the front desk attendant. “Mary Carter’s waiting for you.”
Fatigued and distressed, Mae realized she’d been staring into space. She rushed out of the office, hoping she didn’t look like a wreck, and met Mary Carter in the weight room. Her client was pale and red eyed, as if she’d had no better a night than Mae had.
“Take it easy on me,” said Mrs. Hoggard, not meeting Mae’s eyes. “I almost canceled.”
“You not feeling well? I’m sorry to hear that.”
“My health is fine.” Mary Carter looked at her clean white shoes. “Mae, you’re a wonderful trainer, and this isn’t personal, but ...” She glanced up, her jaw set, her voice unsteady. “As I said once before, you are not the person to whom I would talk about it.”
Rhoda-Rae and Dr. Hoggard. Now Mae was sure, after what she’d seen of her mother’s past. Things had been bad with Rhoda-Rae and Arnie while he was depressed. She’d probably started running around on him when he needed her the most.
“Yes. Of course, Ms. Hoggard.”
Mae adjusted her client’s workout to lighter weights and longer single sets, made positive comments on her form and her progress, and Ms. Hoggard seemed to relax and to appreciate the quiet, professional attention, the chance to get away from her problems.
At the end of the session, when Mae went into the office to make note of the lighter workout today and put away this client’s program, she was shocked to see Rhoda-Rae sitting at her desk, tapping the back of Patsy’s file on the edge of the desk, with a smug look on her face.
“HIPAA violation,” she said.
Exhausted and on edge as she was, Mae didn’t feel up for dealing with her mother, and tried to keep a calm and professional tone on top of her shaky interior. “It was in my office, Mama. Yes, I should have put it away. I had a tight schedule, and I messed up. But it didn’t leave my office.”
“You didn’t lock your door. Or the cabinet.” Rhoda-Rae shook her head. “God knows how bad it’ll be when this gets out, people knowing. Really.” She flipped the pages of the file and shook her head. “Breast reduction.” Rhoda-Rae sniffed. “She should have had an ass reduction.”
“You read that?”
“I’ve worked with Patsy for years. You think I don’t already know that? But someone else could have. They could—”
“Give me that.” Mae snatched the file, opened the cabinet, shoved Patsy’s file in, took Mary Carter’s out, put her program away, and jammed that file back in as well. “You had no business in here.” Mae yanked the desk drawer open, got the key, locked the file drawer, and dropped the key in its place, closing the desk just short of slamming it. Already losing control. She tried to pull back. “This is off limits to members.”
“I’m your mother. I think I have the right to drop in on you.”
“Why? What do you want?”
“I want to know what Mary Carter Hoggard said to you about me.”
“Nothing. She never talks about you.”
“Bull feathers. That woman would as soon kill me as look at me.”
“I need to get back out on the floor, Mama. I’m supposed to be watching t
he weight room when I don’t have clients. There’s nothing I can tell you. Ms. Hoggard never talks about you. She’s a lady.”
Rhoda-Rae stood. “What did you mean by that? I seem to recall you coming down to the locker room to give me a fine little speech about minding my manners not so long ago.”
“I didn’t come down to talk to you. I was putting something away.” Mae realized the DVDs were still in her locker. She’d never taken them home to watch them. Home. Where was that, now? Not a good time to think about that. “Now I’d like you to leave my office so I can lock it.”
Rhoda-Rae exhaled sharply through her nose. “You would not have given me your little lecture if Mary Carter hadn't been spreading some kind of filth about me. Now what has she said?”
“She hasn’t said a thing.” Mae felt her edges fray, and her words fell out as the fabric of her self-control unraveled. “But I’d bet she’s upset about how you act around her husband.”
“And how do I act? Like there’s something wrong with being friendly?”
“God, Mama, do you really want me to say this? You act a lot more than friendly. If you cheated on Daddy before you knew he was gay, I bet you run around on Arnie, too—with Dr. Hoggard. Is that what you wanted? Now leave.”
Rhoda-Rae’s face blanched, her eyes grew wide. If she’d been a cat, her back would have arched and her tail hairs fuzzed. Her voice came out in a hissing whisper. “Who told you that?”
Even as she spoke, Mae thought, What am I doing? But the words kept coming. Something had broken. Her engine was roaring and her brakes didn’t work. Defiance ran over everything in its way. “Nobody. I saw it.”
Their eyes met, and Rhoda-Rae shook her head, lips pressed tight, shoulders drawn back. A warning, like a rattlesnake shaking its tail, only silent.
Mae opened the door and said loudly enough that the front desk could hear her, trying to suppress the tremor in her voice and sound normal, sociable. “It was good to see you, Mama. Sorry I can’t have family in the office. Have a nice day.”
Rhoda-Rae grabbed her purse and gym bag from the floor near Mae’s desk, and slung the straps over her shoulder as she strode out into the hallway. “It is too bad,” she said, so softly that only Mae could hear, “about that unfortunate lapse in confidentiality.” Then, in a loud, friendly, too-sweet voice, “Nice to see you too, sugar. You have a wonderful day.”
Wonderful. Hardly. Didn’t even remember yesterday was my birthday.
Chapter Twenty
Drained and stunned, Mae drove to Norfolk in a steady rain, on a long series of country roads. First she had to get to Suffolk, Virginia, where she could pick up the highway. This was the last place she’d expected to find herself today. Heading for a night at Randi’s place, looking for a place to live—and for a job. How could she have lost so much so fast? It had been building up, like a little rotation in the sky that rolled itself into a hurricane, and yet it took her by surprise. She should have seen it coming. Malba had.
Mae found herself behind a truck full of caged hogs, and the stink crept into her car. Poor things might as well be dead already, if everything Jim and Sallie said about the way they were raised was true—always caged, they’d never seen the light of day until this trip to the slaughterhouse. Her phone rang but she didn’t dare take her hands off the wheel or her eyes off the road, between fatigue, the pig truck, and the rain. It was probably Dana still looking for Charlie. Mae wanted to imagine the call was Jen offering her job back, but that was irreversible.
Mae should have known Rhoda-Rae would do something like that.
Jen had asked Mae to stop in the office at the end of her shift. The manager’s normally perky face was solemn, and her small, manicured hands fidgeted nervously with a pen. “I’m really sorry, but ... this is your third strike, Mae. You missed orientation the first time, then we had a member complain about a rude gesture—I know, you say a bee stung your finger, but it’s in your file—and then this. This by itself would be enough to fire you. Leaving medical files lying around, the door wide open—”
“The door was closed. I forgot to lock it. If Mama hadn't gone in there—”
“I’m not saying who complained about it. This comes from Dr. Hoggard. Apparently both Ms. Johnson’s file and his wife’s were out, and you were out in the hallway talking—”
“Jen—”
“Hear me out. This member, who shouldn’t have looked, granted, told me things she’d read in both files. You left things that wide open, for that long.”
“Both files?” It wasn’t possible. Rhoda-Rae had to know things about Mary Carter from Dr. Hoggard’s private talk. It wasn’t the director’s wife Mae should have been trying to keep happy, it was his mistress. “This is more than half lies. I forgot one file, not two, and I closed the door. This member did more harm to anyone’s confidentiality than I did.”
“You can fight it, if you want. If you have someone who witnessed it.”
“Only the person that’s lying about me.”
“Mae, I’m really sorry. I believe you, but I’m doing what the head man says to do.”
“How do I get a job with this on my record?”
“Resign so I don’t have to fire you. Get references from your clients rather than Health Quest. Sorry. That’s the best I can do for you.”
Jen wouldn’t dare challenge Dr. Hoggard over anything. The phone call couldn’t be her.
Mae watched the pig truck sway around curves, going too fast for the slick road with its muddy shoulders. She slowed down, letting the truck gain some distance. The ankle, the phone, the ticket, the sting, the treadmill, the snake, the fight with Hubert, losing her job—bad luck had accelerated from mere accidents to full-blown disaster. The last thing she needed was to crash into a load of hogs.
The phone rang again. Had to be Dana. Mae had no decision for her, no time to even think about it. But what if it was Hubert calling? What if he wanted to apologize? Or what if it was Randi telling her not to come up after all? Maybe Randi had to ask Rick if it was okay. If Mae needed to change course, she’d better pull over and find out.
She pulled off as far to the side of the road as she could without putting her wheels in the mud. The call was from Deborah. She called about once a week, neither giving up nor pushing too hard.
Mae tried to sound normal, not as shaken and exhausted as she felt, while they exchanged greetings. Deborah’s voice was relaxed and humorous, ready to play their usual game of tag. “People are still talking about Breda. You’re becoming a legend. What’ll it take to get you back?”
The realization hit like a vehicle rear-ending her. Every disaster had been pushing her to this point. Mae had sworn not to do this kind of work again, but she had to take this.
And she had to get the most she could from it. She took a deep breath. “More money.”
“How much?”
“I want sixty an hour take-home upstairs.” Her mind scanned through all the things that had troubled her at that job. “A private room that other people don’t use, somewhere I can concentrate. And no fifteen-minute sessions. Got to be half an hour at least so I can be careful and set things up better. See everything I need to see before I tell the clients too much.”
“Are you serious? You’re asking a lot, but—you’d come back? You and Maloo are the only people I’ve ever had who weren’t pretty much faking it.”
Mae would have to work with Maloo-Malba. “If I can have those conditions, I’m yours. Any time except Saturday mornings.”
“Staying out of Maloo’s time?”
“I’d rather. She doesn’t like me.”
“Yes, she does. She doesn’t like you being better than her, that’s all. But I’ll keep you out of her way if you want. I can’t do sixty an hour take-home upstairs, though. After I raised it enough to get the store’s share, you’d price yourself out of any clients. If I charge seventy-five an hour you’d take home fifty-two-fifty. That’d make you more expensive than the other psychics, but not out o
f reach.”
I’m unemployed. “I’ll take it.” Mae let out a sigh of relief. She couldn’t believe she’d dared make the demands when she had nowhere to live and no money coming in. She was lucky Deborah had even negotiated. Lucky Deborah had never given up. Lucky. “When should I start?”
“Give me time to reschedule the rooms.” Deborah seemed to be checking on something, as the sound of her keyboard clicking came through the phone. “Can you start Friday? You’d only have a few hours, but we’ll see how it goes. I expect I can start booking people today if I advertise that Breda is back.”
“Name the time.”
Mae heard a troubling sound in the distance, a kind of splintering boom. Had the pig truck crashed?
“Four to seven.”
Before Friday she would have to go back home—or whatever that house was to her now—for her dressed-up clothes. Would that be it for her life in Tylerton? Would she pack her things and be sent away for good? Forcing her voice to be steady, Mae said with what she hoped was cheerfulness, “I’ll be there. Dressed to look like Breda.”
She said a quick goodbye to Deborah and pulled back onto the road, concerned about the truck driver. As she came over a hill and around a curve, she was relieved to see him walking along the side of the road, talking on his phone, cupping both hands around it to keep it dry. The cab of his truck, fully off the road, seemed to have caught the soft shoulder on the curve and sunk in, while the trailer had swung into a big tree across the road and tipped partly sideways, its far end leaning on the tree. From the cracked cages on that end of the trailer came pigs.
They wriggled loose and stood bewildered among the roadside trees, huge pinkish animals with white bristly hair, wet and shining in the rain, perhaps feeling it for the first time in their lives. As Mae’s car drew closer, they scattered, staggering at first as if weak from confinement. One pig began trotting along the pavement while the others vanished into the woods.
Good luck, fellas.
Good luck. Maybe she was starting to have some. If she hadn’t taken Deborah’s call, she might have skidded right into this mess herself. Instead, the only wreck was the rest of her life.