by Molly Harper
As she moved closer, kitten pout firmly in place, Duffy was enveloped in the familiar scent of imitation Obsession. Lana wore her usual combination of skintight jeans and a low-cut tank top in a loud tropical print. Her only concession to the late-winter weather was a jean jacket. Her short dark-blond hair was swept back from her face, which had changed over the years, mostly in the frown lines etching deep brackets around her bright red cupid’s bow of a mouth.
“I brought something for you,” she purred, pulling a blue plastic glasses case from her shoulder bag. “I guess I must have knocked it into my purse while I was leaving your place.”
“This isn’t mine,” he said, lifting a gingery eyebrow as she handed him the case. “I don’t wear glasses.”
“Are you sure? I could swear it came from your place,” she chirped, though her green, narrow-set eyes weren’t quite meeting his. “Thanks for keeping me company the other night. I was just so upset about Randy. You’re such a good friend to me, Duffy. Just like you always promised. I know I’ll never be alone as long as you’re around to make things better.”
Duffy swallowed heavily. It always made him squirm inside, hearing her describe him as a “friend” so pointedly, like she was trying to friend-zone him, when she was the one who came looking for him every time she had an itch. Why did he keep doing this? Was it guilt? For leaving when he had the first chance? For not fulfilling his marriage vows of forever and end- less patience?
His sister, Marianne, had always said he had a savior complex, which could stem from having so many relatives living within throwing distance, not to mention growing up with an active alcoholic and a very ill child in the extended family. Someone always needed a hand, needed a favor. Marianne also offered “being an incurable dumbass” as a potential explanation. Lana trailed her fingers across his chest, a gesture that would have sent shivers down his spine just a few months ago. Now it made him step back, putting space between them. “They cut my hours at the store again and I’ve moved in with my mama. So you might be careful about calling. You know she doesn’t like you since you divorced me.”
“You filed the papers,” he said in the flattest tone he could muster. Because she always got so upset when she thought he was mad at her, and that derailed the conversation like a couch on the tracks.
“Yeah, but she says you were a real asshole to sign them,” she said, smiling sweetly. “I don’t know where she gets these funny ideas. I don’t say anything but nice things about you.”
“Mm-hmm. I thought the cops got called the last time you moved in with your mama. Something about you setting all her shoes on fire with a can of Sterno?”
Lana’s lips curled into a sneer and he knew that he’d pressed the wrong button. Lana did not like it when people reminded her of her interactions with the legal system. She snipped, “Well, I didn’t have a choice. It’s not like I could move back in with you with how your family feels about me.”
“No, you cannot,” he told her.
“I wasn’t asking,” she huffed, poking her bottom lip out in a pout.
He gritted his teeth. Right, like she “wasn’t asking” two years before when she’d been dumped by the local weatherman and showed up on his porch with a Hefty bag full of her clothes. When Duffy refused to let her crash on his couch for “a while,” Lana had told a very nice nurse he was dating at the time that he had crabs.
“Because we are not married anymore. Because you filed divorce papers,” he said, with a little more heat in his tone than he usually used. The crabs rumor had taken months to die down.
“Well, I didn’t realize it would be a federal case, wanting to spend time with a friend. If you don’t want to see me, I’ll just go.”
He didn’t want to disagree with her, because getting her out of the parking lot as soon as possible would prevent her from interacting with his family. But at the same time, it might be better to placate her a little bit because once he’d bolstered her up, he usually wouldn’t see her for weeks. Not for the first time, Duffy realized how absolutely fucked-up it was to have to negotiate with his ex-wife like she was some sort of terrorist holding peace and quiet as her hostage.
“McDuff Marion McCready!”
Shit-fire, his mother had used his full name. This was not going to end well.
He turned to see Donna McCready standing at the steps leading to the dock, her hands propped on her hips. Her angular face, never what one would call “pleasant” these days, was thunderous.
“Son, you’re already winning ‘Jackass of the Week’ for being late to work and leaving me to open up the shop alone,” she said. “Don’t compound the idiocy.”
“Mother McCready, why are you always so grumpy in the mornings?” Lana asked, her tone all peaches and cream and arsenic. “You know they’re making prunes in all sorts of new flavors now.”
Duffy sighed in defeat. From the beginning, Lana had tried too hard to force a close relationship with his mama, who was like a cat when it came to, well, anybody. Donna only wanted to spend time with people who weren’t super keen about spending time with her. And after it became clear that Donna wouldn’t be penning Lana’s name in the family Bible, Lana seemed to delight in poking at Donna’s antisocial underbelly.
Donna growled lightly. “Don’t call me ‘Mother McCready.’ Any family connection between us was severed by the divine wisdom of the state of Georgia!”
“Okay, let’s just stop the insanity right here before I have to call Eric and he sees how bug-ass crazy our family is and runs away from the only remotely healthy relationship Frankie has ever had,” Duffy barked, hurting his own head with his volume. “Lana, thank you for bringing me the glasses case. Now, Mom and I have a lot of stocking to do and we need to get to it.”
“Oh, I can help!” Lana said brightly.
Donna’s growl was no longer light. “March your little skinny chicken legs over to your car before I have you towed.”
“Mama, calm down. You’re gonna have a stroke. Get back to the shop. I’ll be there in a minute. Lana, you need to leave. You’re just stirring the pot right now and that’s not all right,” Duffy said, opening Lana’s car door.
“Oh, fine.” Lana sighed, rolling her eyes but smirking heavily. She straightened her shoulders and winked at him. “I’ll see you later, Duffy. Mother McCready.”
Donna took a threatening step toward Lana. Duffy stepped back and stopped her. “Mama, I do not have enough cash on hand to bail you out. I’ll have to raid Uncle Bob’s swear jar. It ain’t classy to have to count out your bail money in stacks of quarters.”
Lana gunned her engine and waggled her pink-frosted fingertips as she sped out of the parking lot, barely missing Duffy and Donna with the spray of gravel she threw. Donna glared at him, her whiskey-colored eyes sharp as razors over her aviators. “What sorry excuse do you have to say for yourself?”
“I know I’m late,” he said. “I took those clients out for beers at the Dirty Deer, since the charter was kind of a bust, and who knew a bunch of Vols fans could drink so damn hard?”
“Oh, no, you’re not late,” his mother scoffed. “You’re just in time to do all the restocking your damn self. I’m gonna go have a coffee with Leslie in the Snack Shack.”
“I deserve that,” he conceded.
“And the bait crickets got out again,” she called over her shoulder as she walked down the dock.
“Wha— How?! I locked the barrel!”
“Well, I unlocked it and tipped it over!” she yelled back. “Yeah, I deserve that, too,” he muttered.
* * *
***
* * *
THE CRICKETS DID not go down easy. Duffy spent a good portion of his day chasing the critters around the bait shop and dumping them back into the bait cage. About a third of them escaped, which was going to cost them, so his mama had to have been pretty pissed off to do that on purpose.
Pulling into his driveway at the end of the day, Duffy stepped out of his truck and surveyed the li
ttle collection of cabins on the lakeshore that his cousin Margot called a “compound.” Considering the fact that the whole family worked together all day and then lived in houses within shouting distance, a body would think they’d hate the sight of each other.
But somehow, they made it work. With the exception of Frankie, McCreadys minded their own business.
The McCready family descended from a pair of brothers, John and Earl Jr. Earl built a little bait shop on what became the shore of Lake Sackett, offering tackle and lunches to fishermen and tourists. His brother, John, a carpenter by trade, was called on to give up cabinets for coffins when the Spanish flu epidemic took out a good portion of the town’s population. When John needed more workspace, Earl offered him the use of the back of his shop and a family legacy was born.
Some McCreadys—his cousin Frankie, Grandpa E.J.J., Uncle Bob, and now Cousin Margot—buried Lake Sackett residents with all the expected pomp and frills, while others—Aunt Leslie, his mother, and himself—devoted their time to stuffing customers full of delicious deep-fried delicacies and guiding them on fishing tours through some of the best crappie beds in the county. In the best cases, one half of the family was able to help the bereaved with funeral planning and then the other half could distract the bereaved from their grief by feeding them and taking them out for some postburial cheer-up fishing. Grandpa
E.J.J. loved cross-promotion.
Duffy knew his family wasn’t quite normal. Most people had nightmares about mortuaries. They didn’t spend Christmas in one. But he was proud that the McCready Family Funeral Home and Bait Shop was a Lake Sackett institution. Or the McCreadys belonged in an institution. It was a thin line.
Rolling his sore shoulders, Duffy shuffled toward his cabin, exhausted, looking forward to a cold beer and a warmed-up portion of Aunt Leslie’s special macaroni and cheese. She used four kinds of cheese and none of them was Velveeta, which she called her “secret noningredient.” She did use bacon, because this was Georgia and no respectable side dish should remain unbaconed. Tootie and Leslie were nice enough to deliver Tupperware dishes to him every Sunday to keep him from relying on TV dinners and carryout. His mother did not participate in this food prep relay because “he’s an adult, not a dumbass teenager.” Also, Donna’s cooking was basically poison.
Shampooing his difficult-to-manage curls gave Duffy something to do while considering his strange encounter with his ex that morning. Something about Lana’s behavior was sticking in his craw. His ex avoided Donna whenever possible. Why would she come to McCready’s, where she was sure to see Donna, Frankie, or Leslie, none of whom tolerated her? Was it because she was moving in with her mom? Was she trying to wangle an invitation to stay with him? She had to know that wasn’t possible. He was willing to commit to a little comfort on a long dark night, but surely she had to know they were never getting married again.
Oh, fuck a duck, what if she didn’t realize they were never getting married again?
After showering and microwaving his mac ’n’ cheese, Duffy settled onto the front porch swing with a beer and his laptop, an early model held together with duct tape and positive thinking. He usually checked sports stats or news while he was eating, but tonight he fired up his seldom-used email, attached a picture of the ugliest cupcake he could find on Google, and wrote, A humble suggestion from a friend.
He signed off with just Duffy and hit send before he could overanalyze it. And then he logged onto Facebook. Well, technically, he tried to sign into Facebook, entered an old password, and had to reset it because it had been years since his last login. He rarely updated his timeline. He didn’t see the point in posting pictures of his food or deep philosophical thoughts about which pants he was going to wear that day.
Margot had informed him that his social media footprint was “shamefully small” during her revamp of McCready’s online profile. But she noted that his timeline was free of political rants and inappropriate memes, which she appreciated. Tootie’s account had been a mess of both, because Tootie was a bit more tech savvy and a lot less circumspect than the average senior citizen. Duffy’s updates informed him that he had more than forty new friend requests pending, most of them from old school classmates or distant relatives on his mom’s side. But other than that, his account was pretty stagnant. His real friends knew that if they wanted to contact him, they had to do it through his phone or talk to his face, like he was a person.
He scrolled by Tootie’s feed because that way lay madness and dog memes. Frankie had posted a picture of her pale, smiling face snuggled up to Eric’s photogenic mug. She looked so . . . weirdly and completely happy. He’d never seen her grin like that. He’d seen her smile with puckish delight, with gleeful anticipation of vengeance. And then there were those rare, scary moments when Frankie smiled because she was mentally calculating how long it would take to disintegrate your body in the crematory. But he’d never seen her beaming like her whole world was right.
Duffy was glad Frankie was settling down after so many years of “casual” dating. She had waited long enough to find someone who seemed to enjoy her crazy, even if Eric didn’t seem to fully understand it. Duffy was happy for her, just like he was happy for Margot and the L.L.Bean-catalogue-perfect life she was starting with Kyle and his girls. He didn’t even want to think about what happened in his sister’s marriage to the guy he’d sworn blood- oath loyalty to in the sixth grade (the sister-kissing traitor). But Marianne was content, too, and that was all that counted.
A beagle mix, just out of his puppy stage and most likely one of Grandma Tootie’s pack members, toddled onto Duffy’s porch and sat at his feet, waggling his tail so hard that the whole back half of his body shook. “Hey, there, pup, what are you doing?”
The dog whimpered and zeroed in on Duffy’s mac ’n’ cheese dish with huge, glossy brown eyes.
“Oh, hell no,” Duffy told him. “The minute I do that, Tootie comes over here yelling at me because I gave you something you’re allergic to and I spend the rest of my night on puppy puke patrol.”
The dog’s butt stopped wiggling and he simply stared up at Duffy, as if he could make the mac ’n’ cheese move into his belly through sheer force of will. Duffy moved the dish out of reach and pulled the dog onto the seat with him, scratching behind his ears. The dog seemed willing to accept this offering instead of cheesy, carby goodness, and leaned into the scratch.
Taking a deep breath, he typed in Lucy's name with the hand not occupied with scratching. She immediately popped up as a friend of Marianne’s and Tootie’s. The sight of her face seemed to make his chest tighten up. She’d been a looker ever since their elementary school days, swanning right through that awkward phase unfazed with her deep brown eyes and high cheekbones—not to mention the obstinate set to her soft pink lips that she’d inherited from her late mama.
Lucy had her arms wrapped around a boy of about four, who had Lucy’s coloring but Wayne’s stocky build. She gazed at her son with the sort of motherly love they wrote about in storybooks. She’d looked happy with her husband. They’d had a nice life. And he felt like an asshole for being salty over it.
She didn’t need him coming at her with his unresolved feelings. She was mourning a man she loved. She needed time and space. She needed a friend. And he wasn’t sure he could be her friend right now. He wanted so much more from Lucy.
He remembered the moment he fell in love with her. They’d been in seventh grade. Lucy had hit her growth spurt well before Duffy had, and stood three inches taller than his springy ginger curls. Wayne Garten and some other older boys had been poking fun at him in the cafeteria, calling Duffy a freak because his daddy cut up dead bodies all day.
Lucy had yelled, “Shut your mouth before the toilet fumes make us pass out!” And then she had walked right up to Wayne and punched him in his stupid face. Blood had spurted in a beautiful, gruesome arc from Wayne’s nose as he toppled to the floor, arms windmilling comically. She planted one pink Con- verse on Wayne’s chest an
d asked him if he had anything else to say to her friend Duffy. Wayne insisted that he did not.
Jimmy Greenway, the principal at the time, informed Lucy that she’d earned herself a three-page essay on alternatives to fighting. She crowed that it was worth it and she would make it four pages. Duffy knew then that no girl would ever be as awesome as Lucy Bowman, and none of them should even try.
“It’s not pathetic if I close the browser now, right?” Duffy asked the dog. The dog dropped his chin on Duffy’s leg and avoided eye contact. “Oh, what do you know?”
Duffy glanced up at the purr of an engine rolling toward him. Carl, the aforementioned sister-kissing traitor, was steering his massive red tow truck over the gravel drive. He rolled to a smooth stop directly in front of Duffy.
“What are you doing out here?” Duffy asked.
“I got beer that needs drinkin’,” Carl said, hopping out of the truck with two six-packs of their favorite brew.
“I can help you with that,” Duffy said, throwing his feet up on the porch railing.
“Marianne said you’d had a rough day,” Carl said, handing him a cold can. “Frankie told her something about a plague of crickets and your mama being all pissed off?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
“She also said Lana dropped by and threw her particular brand of joy around.”
“It was not a red-letter day,” Duffy said, cracking open his beer. “A man can’t even walk across the parking lot of his work- place without getting caught in the cross fire of his mother and his ex-wife cat-fighting it out . . . and then getting ratted out by his cousin . . . who tells his sister.”
“Has it occurred to you that the women in your life exercise a little too much control over you?” Carl asked.
“I try not to think about that too much,” Duffy said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, one issue at a time. Every one of those women is terrifying,” Carl said as he slumped onto the swing next to Duffy. He scratched behind the beagle’s ears, prompting the dog to crawl into Carl’s lap and attempt to lick his beer can. “I mean, I love your sister more than my own breath. But one time I ate the last peanut butter cup in the house, and she replaced the batteries in the remotes with duds she’d been saving in a drawer.”