“It’s what Jesus would do,” Peggy said.
Shellie stood up and tossed her hat down on her seat. “Don’t you remember what Helen said to us? How she treated us? She’s made it clear she wants nothing to do with us, and I, for one, want nothing to do with her.”
Ruby looked at Shellie in that way of hers. “This is no time for grudges. She lost her grandson.”
“Oh I’m perfectly aware of who she lost. Remember, ladies, that I was the one who wanted to support Kenny, but no. Helen Garrety spit in our faces. She spit on our flag.”
“She did not spit on our flag,” Ruby said.
Shellie grabbed her hat. It was lopsided. She’d dropped four stitches in the last two rows. “I’m being metaphorical.”
Two years before, on the anniversary of September 11, everyone was doing something, everyone except Shellie, so she baked a cake. Actually, she baked six cakes. She figured she and her fellow knitters could sponsor a bake sale and use the money they raised to buy the soldiers in Kenny’s squad some razors, deodorant, comic books, whatever they wanted, and ship everything over in attractive care packages that would say “Our Thanks to You.” Inside there’d be respite from a cruel world. A taste of home, in effect. Love in a box.
Helen heard Shellie out, listened to her whole spiel, and promptly told her to fuck herself. Shellie was shocked. She thought Helen would love her for it. “But I’m doing this for you.”
“For me? No you’re not.”
“Well, okay. For Kenny then. He’s one of the heroes,” Shellie said.
“He’s no hero of mine,” Helen said.
“He’s your grandson. He’s protecting our freedom.”
“I would’ve shot him in the foot if I thought it would’ve kept him from going.”
“But you support the troops.”
“No. I don’t support the troops.”
“Helen.”
“Don’t Helen me.”
“But that’s un-American.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You’re just confused. I can explain—”
“Explain what?”
“Patriotism.”
“Give me a break.”
“George W. Bush says—”
“Don’t use that person’s name with me. Don’t ever use that man’s name in my presence ever again, do you hear me, Shellie Pogue? Do you fucking hear me?”
Then Helen had the nerve to show up at the bake sale, armed to the teeth with Sharpies, and before anyone could stop her, she was writing in sprawling letters on a big table weighed down with cupcakes, pies, and tarts, “Refined sugar kills! Corn syrup equals suicide! Crisco is the devil!”
The proceeds from the sale barely covered the cost of the cakes and one paltry box filled mostly with packing material, as well as six pens, three pads of paper, and two Speed Sticks. They couldn’t afford the overseas postage, so Peggy, who worked in shipping and receiving at JCPenney, just sent the boxes first class to Fort Campbell. Helen never apologized. In fact, she came to the knitting circle immediately following the sale for the sole purpose of handing in her needles. Then she said the thing about their fat asses. Shellie was heartbroken. It was around the time she’d buried Buff McBride, her third and favorite husband, and Helen’s defection made her feel like a widow twice over. Thrice, even. Before Helen’s meltdown, Shellie’d been the knitting circle’s de facto leader, the one to whom everyone deferred. Now, what Ruby said went. It was law. Ruby was the mayor’s wife. Ruby had a master’s degree. Ruby went to conventions on diversity, technology for baby boomers, and parenting as the new black.
“What’s that?” Ruby asked Una, who’d mumbled something into her yarn.
“I want to go.” Una was ready to cast off. Her hat was as fuzzy as a kitten. “I want to see Helen.”
Peggy seconded it and Ruby smiled her satisfied “It’s decided” smile. They looked at Shellie, all except Una, who kept her eyes on a spot of carpet littered with cookie crumbs.
“I heard that when they ship bodies home from Iraq they pack them in dry ice to keep them from melting,” Una said.
“Now Una,” Ruby said in her most motherly, admonishing tone.
But Una was still talking. “And that it’s someone’s special job to polish the jacket buttons until you can see your face in them. The pants buttons, too.”
Above their heads someone fell mid–line dance. The thud echoed through the church.
“Fine,” Shellie said. “I’ll go. But don’t expect me to talk to her.”
* * *
Shellie had a six-seater passenger van thanks to Buff, who’d been in insurance and overly practical. “Just in case,” he said the day he brought it home from the lot.
“In case what? We have five kids?” Shellie asked, laughing and patting her expired womb. Loving him made her glad to be alive most days, and that meant, of course, that he had to die, slow and in agony, despite all the good drugs the nurses gave him at the end.
The van still smelled like Buff: the peppermint candies he liked to swipe from the Pizza Hut, Aramis aftershave, and a subtle endnote of something Shellie couldn’t quite put her finger on. Masculinity, maybe. A mysterious, elusive quality men didn’t have anymore.
Way in the back Ruby was whining about her seat belt. She kept shoving the buckle over and over into the square receptacle like sheer repetition would make it stick. “It’s broken, Shellie. You really should get this looked at.”
Who died and made Ruby Ralph Nader? How had she become Ms. Politically Correct All of a Sudden? Ruby, whose husband’s last election had been a squeaker because of his friendship with Helman Yoder, on trial for employing a boatload of illegal immigrants at his dairy farm and paying them nothing but cheese curds.
There was Yoder Dairy now, on their right. What a colossal eyesore. With its flaking blue outbuildings and tacky metal cow statues scattered along the fence line, it was starting to resemble Spencerville Fun Spot. The whole property had quickly deteriorated in the wake of the estate sale, and the cows—the real ones—were scattered to the winds, some slaughtered, many sold to mega-dairies out west.
Someone behind Shellie mooed quietly. Una, of course. Always Una.
Prior to Daisy’s disappearance, the Yoder Dairy shutdown had been much talked of. It was considered by many to be a serious scandal, and not because everyone in town didn’t know what Helman was doing, but because it was assumed he would get away with it. Helman Yoder had been a man who got away with things. For her part, Shellie was conflicted. She found Helman an enterprising man. Was he to blame if certain segments of the world’s population would work for free? And he was attractive, too, in a sun-damaged way. Shellie had had her eye on him for husband number four now that he and Birdy were calling it quits. But there was also the fact that he’d single-handedly changed Colliersville forever. Just a few years ago, as Colliersville High School’s head cook and lunch lady, Shellie could count on knowing everyone in town. But now, wherever she went she ran into people speaking Spanish behind her back. At the post office and White Swan Grocery and Sharkey’s Bar and Breeder’s Laundromat and even at work, where the weirdo Juan Cardoza had replaced Josh Seaver as school janitor or, as Juan’s work shirt said, “Custodial Technician.” Shellie was confronted with whole families of strangers who clearly didn’t belong here. Consider the hats they’d knitted that morning. Anyone born and bred in Colliersville knew when winter was coming and how to prepare for it, but the Ranasack Apartments Mexicans were clueless and helpless and a burden on society. Nasty, too, some of them. Bad elements. Shellie not so secretly suspected that Juan or another one of Helman’s former employees was behind Daisy’s disappearance. So what if Juan was roughly twenty times better at the janitorial job than Josh had ever been? A good work ethic was one thing, a clean conscience another. If Juan was guilty of kidnapping and even killing the girl, it wouldn’t surprise Shellie. It wouldn’t surprise her one bit.
She’d shared her suspicions with Randy
Richardville and Em Nelson at the police station, hinting also that Helen Garrety might be up to no good, that at the very least she’d lost some of her sanity when Kenny joined up, but Randy and Em made it clear from the looks they’d exchanged that they thought Shellie was the off-her-rocker one. Fine, Shellie thought. Fine and dandy. She just hoped that if the truth came out and she was vindicated in the process, they didn’t come crying to her.
The evening was bright and warm. Shellie watched the houses get farther and farther apart until they gave way to woods altogether. Helen’s place was five miles out and once Shellie got past Yoder’s she could make it the rest of the way with her eyes closed. Two years weren’t enough for her to forget the turn onto Hickory at the old Heck’s Honey sign or the jog down Decatur Trail to the cattail pond where she and Helen used to wade every summer. At the pond Shellie took a left onto a pitted gravel drive, and out of a meadow of underbrush rose Helen’s big green house, flanked by a red barn and a field of neat herbs just starting to poke through the soil.
“I can’t believe we used to meet here,” Una said. “Remember that?”
Shellie remembered vividly the early years when the circle met in Helen’s kitchen, back when Shellie was still on husband number two and Brianna’s only drug was sugar. Brianna and Frannie played Barbies together and made fun of Shellie and Helen behind their backs. Things were better. Life made sense. Over pecan sandies and Constant Comment, Shellie suggested and all the knitters conceded her point that Colliersville might be going straight to hell, but the country was in good hands. Reagan, handsome, pre–head twitch, was just what America needed. Personal responsibility. Trickle-down economics. Grenada. Was there anything the man didn’t understand?
Later, when Shellie and Helen’s girls had grown up and Kenny came into the picture, things changed, but not too much. The ladies all loved Kenny, treating him like a beloved pet. They patted him on the head and gave him treats and spoke to him in funny voices. But then Kenny grew up, too, and he enlisted because it was what his friends did, and Helen met a woman on the Internet who was camping outside of George W. Bush’s ranch, demanding he bring her boy home. Helen got a plane ticket and a new suitcase, spent a few weeks in a tent in Texas, and came back to Colliersville a stranger.
“I always loved this place,” Una said, sighing, as Shellie parked the van under Kenny’s basketball hoop.
Just being in proximity to Helen and her ideas made Shellie’s throat tight, so when Ruby said something about the farm still looking real pretty and Peggy said, “Real pretty,” Shellie kept silent. She looked out past the ramshackle house to the fields beyond and a line of quaking aspens that bordered the Wyndham-on-the-River subdivision, only half its houses up and streets probably still wet. Ruby lived there in a cream-colored house with her mayor husband and two kids. Ruby, who’d grown up a farm girl mucking out horse stalls, had a perfect two-story and an in-ground pool and a contract with a chemical lawn service.
It seemed to Shellie that the world she knew, or thought she knew, was shrinking to the size of her palm. Soon there’d be nothing left but her sprawling love line and an age spot the color of dirt.
“How do we do this?” Una asked.
Ruby frowned. “We should have brought something.”
“Like what?” Shellie asked. “A bag of granola?”
“I don’t know. A loaf of bread. Maybe a hat.”
“‘I’m sorry about your dead grandson, Helen,’” Shellie said. “‘Here’s a hat’?”
“Never mind,” Ruby said. “Let’s just knock, okay?”
Shellie shrugged.
They approached the front door cautiously. Ruby did the knocking in a self-important way that seemed to say, Do I have to do everything around here? and Una, who because she was Una couldn’t help but crowd a body, was right behind Shellie, breathing her sickeningly sweet cough-medicine breath down her neck. Peggy was glued to the bottom step.
Helen must have seen them arrive. Ruby’s hand was still hovering near the door when it swung open. And there she was, their former friend, dressed in a long white robe, sparkly shoes, and a lime-green hat that put all their knitting efforts to shame. Shellie stared straight ahead, past Helen’s left shoulder where a grandfather clock in the hall ticked off ten seconds. Una coughed. Peggy coughed. Then Helen invited them in for tea.
But the kitchen table wasn’t set for tea. The large maple butcher block that years ago held skein after skein of yarn and plates of muffins and half-consumed cups of Earl Grey, orange pekoe, oolong, was draped with a purple cloth and lined with unlit candles. There was something large under the cloth. Some sort of art project, Shellie presumed, or maybe a new herb, psychedelic or illegal, that had to be grown just so.
You got pot under there? Shellie wanted to ask, but she’d promised herself she wouldn’t speak. Or I know. Jimmy Hoffa.
Helen grabbed one end of the cloth and rolled it back slowly like you would a sleeping bag or a scroll. It was Una who screamed, but thankfully she did it quietly so it came out more as a sad sigh or a moan. Ruby said, “Oh my,” which Peggy repeated, and Shellie just drew in her breath.
“I wanted to do him myself,” Helen said. “Funeral homes are such soulless places.”
Stretched out on the tabletop, pale, slightly swollen, and mostly naked, was Kenny Garrety. There were herbs scattered across his skin, glass beads on his eyes, and flowers between his toes. A sycamore leaf, big as a child’s baseball mitt, cupped his private parts.
Helen crossed her arms over her chest, surveying Kenny like he was a freshly planted patch of earth. “They embalmed him already. I tried to get a special dispensation to stop them, but the army has a procedure for everything. The makeup they put on him. Awful. I just got done washing him before you got here.”
“Washing him,” Peggy said weakly.
Ruby made a gurgling noise and ran down the hall to the bathroom.
“He looks great,” Una said, her eyes on her shoes. “So natural.”
Shellie had to go ahead and disagree with Una on that one. Kenny looked anything but natural. He’d been a young man when he left for the war two years before, vibrant and funny and sweet. There was still a layer of baby fat on him then, softening his cheeks and pulling his T-shirts tight. He was always laughing, even when something wasn’t funny, like the time he brought Brianna, old enough to know better, home from a party where she took something that made her want to eat her own hair.
Back then, before the war and a bombing that sent shrapnel through his skull, Kenny looked natural. Now he looked old and skinny and waxy as the beans Helen had soaking in her sink. Something bloomed at his hairline like an inkblot on paper. Shellie wondered if the back of his head was blown away. It was hard to tell. Helen had placed a plush pillow at the base of his neck.
Ruby came back into the room, blowing her nose into a handkerchief. “I’m fine,” she said. “Must have been something I ate.”
Helen blinked slowly at her and placed the purple cloth at the foot of the table under a box of brushes and wet rags. “I’m going to bury him tonight.”
Shellie laughed. She couldn’t help it. Then she looked around for some confirmation. This is crazy, she mouthed to Ruby, but Ruby just bit her lip. Una and Peggy, huddled together under a scaffold of hanging sweetgrass and sage, were staring past Shellie to Kenny’s uniform, folded neatly on the countertop, and an American flag with its stars showing. Then Shellie noticed the shovel leaning up against the cabinets, and a simple wooden box, roughly six feet long and two feet wide, stashed in the corner by the refrigerator.
“You’re serious?” Shellie asked.
“I am.” Helen grabbed a box of fireplace matches from a shelf over the sink and started lighting the candles.
“Is that legal?”
Everyone looked at Ruby. Anytime there was a question of legality they turned to her, assuming she was an authority on most, if not all, of the city’s ordinances, but Ruby threw up her hands. “Rupert never tells me anythi
ng.”
Helen cleared her throat. “It’s completely legal.”
“What about Frannie?” Shellie asked.
“What about her?”
“Aren’t you going to wait for her?”
“Wait,” Peggy said.
“For what?” Helen snorted. “She’s been brainwashed by some NRA Mormon wackos who won’t let her travel twenty miles beyond the compound. Wait for Frannie. Sure. I might as well wait for the Rapture.”
No one said anything, not even Una, who loved to mumble on about the Rapture, how it would come, who’d be pulled into heaven like lottery balls through a tube and who’d be left behind to drown when Christ turned the whole world to high tide. A candle dripped slowly onto Kenny’s right arm.
“Besides,” Helen said, “Frannie doesn’t care what I do. She said her people—her people—believe in water burials. Death as rebirth. She’s going to bury Kenny in effigy from Idaho. Some crafty lady out there is making a Kenny doll. There’s going to be a ceremony.”
“We thought maybe we could have a wake…” Ruby had one hand on her throat and the other on her belly, which pillowed out under her elastic waistband. “A memorial of some kind. At the church. We’d love to say good-bye. If you’d let us.”
Helen shook her head. “No. There was a thing this morning, some pompous nonsense on the tarmac with a gun salute and reporters. It was gruesome. You can say good-bye now.”
“You’re sure, Helen?” Shellie asked. Her voice sounded alien to her. “Helen” came out squeaky, the name a rusty hinge.
“About what?”
“Burying him tonight.”
Helen nodded.
“You have extra shovels, I think,” Shellie said. “In the potting shed?”
* * *
They stood slightly stunned under Kenny’s old tree house, a mess of two-by-fours that rested above their heads like a broken bird’s nest in the branches of a sycamore tree. No one was more stunned than Shellie, who still wasn’t sure how she’d gotten them all into this. Helen had stayed behind in the kitchen. There were more preparations to be made and besides, she couldn’t leave Kenny, not until it was time, so she told them where to find the shovels and where to dig.
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