Raising Stony Mayhall

by Daryl Gregory

  Pax spotted the twins at a nearby table. The girls didn’t seem to be eating. The beta man who’d walked them into the church—a beta man in a dark suit—sat at the end of the table, the beta pastor beside him. The man seemed to be trying to talk to the twins, but they only stared at their plates.

  Rhonda half turned to follow his gaze. “That’s Tommy Shields, Jo’s husband.” There was the slightest pause before the word “husband.”

  “I’m sorry—what? Nobody told me she’d—”

  Rhonda lowered her voice. “Oh, hon, not the way anyone but them calls a husband.”

  Pax didn’t know what she meant. No betas had been getting married when he left town.

  He knew Tommy, though. He’d been a junior in high school when Deke and Jo and Pax were freshmen. Complete asshole. That freshman year, Tommy had beaten up Deke, evidently for standing too close to Tommy’s car, a red-and-white ’76 Bronco that he’d restored himself. Pax didn’t remember seeing Tommy after the Changes.

  “Still,” Rhonda said, almost sighing. “Tommy’s a help to those girls. They’ve got a hard row to hoe—but I don’t need to tell you that, do I?” She shook her head sadly. “It just breaks my heart. I let the sisters know that the town’s going to help any way it can. And of course, they’ve got their church to help.”

  Their church. “You’re not going here anymore?” Paxton asked. Rhonda’s grandfather had been a founder, and Rhonda had held the office of church secretary for twenty years. Pastors came and went, she’d told his father more than once, but she wasn’t going anywhere. Even during the Changes, when the church had closed and her own body was bloating, she’d refused to step down. Then again, Pax’s father hadn’t stepped down either, not until a year after Pax had left town. Pax had never tried to get the whole story—that was his father’s life, nothing to do with him now.

  “Oh, Paxton, it’s not like it was before,” Rhonda said, keeping her voice low. “This is Reverend Hooke’s church now. I go to First Baptist, though I can’t be as involved as I’d like.”

  Paxton’s father had impressed upon him at a young age that attending First Baptist was almost as bad as converting to Roman Catholic. The First was where the rich people went—as rich as anyone got in Switchcreek—and everybody knew they didn’t take their scripture seriously.

  “Aunt Rhonda’s the mayor now,” Deke said, sounding amused. He was bent under the ceiling, holding his plate and plastic cup of iced tea between big fingers. Waiting to see how Pax would react.

  “Really?” Pax said, trying not to sound too shocked. “Mayor Rhonda.”

  “Six years now,” Deke said.

  “Well,” Pax said. “I bet you keep everyone in line.”

  Rhonda chuckled, obviously pleased, and patted his arm again. Her mood kept changing, fast as switching TV channels. “You and I need to talk. Have you seen your father yet?”

  He felt heat in his cheeks and shook his head. “I just got in.”

  “He’s not in a good way, and he won’t take my help.” She pursed her lips. “After your visit, you give me a call.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said lightly.

  Her eyes, already small in her huge face, narrowed. “Don’t sure me, Paxton Martin.”

  Pax blinked. She wasn’t joking. He remembered a church picnic when he was nine or ten: Aunt Rhonda had found Pax and Jo misbehaving—he couldn’t remember what they’d been doing—and she’d taken a switch to their backsides. She didn’t care whose kids they were. Then she gave them both MoonPies and told them to stop crying.

  “I’ll call,” he said. “I promise.”

  She smiled, all sweetness again. “Now you better go eat your meal before it’s cold.”

  She turned away, and several people at the table nearest them resumed talking. The charlie man stepped away from the wall and followed Rhonda. He glanced back at Paxton, his expression serious.

  Deke walked toward the other end of the room, where a group of argos, including the woman in the green dress, ate standing up, bent under the drop-tile ceiling. Pax tried to follow, but he’d been recognized now, and people wanted to shake his hand and talk to him. Some of them seemed exactly as he remembered them. Mr. Sparks, already an old man when Pax knew him, had been one of the few of the elderly who’d survived, and in his own skin. He still looked trim and vigorous. Others had become distorted versions of their old selves, or else so changed that there was no recognizing them. Each of them greeted him warmly, without a hint of reservation or disapproval, as if he’d decided on his own to leave Switchcreek for greater things. After all, every other unchanged person under thirty seemed to have left town. After the quarantine lifted, after the Lambert riots and the Stonecipher murders, who the hell would stick around if they didn’t have to? The skips skipped.

  He squeezed past two tables of charlies, nodding back at those who said hello to him, even when he wasn’t sure of their names. The people of Aunt Rhonda’s clade were as wide as he remembered from the year and a half he’d lived among them: squat, moon-faced, engulfing their metal folding chairs. Finally he made it to the far side of the room where the argos had congregated. Most stood with their slouched backs touching the ceiling. A few perched on benches at the edges of the room, knees and elbows splayed, like adults at kindergarten desks. Each of them was a different shade of pale, from pencil lead to talcum.

  Deke held out a long arm. “P.K., you remember Donna?”

  Like all argos, the woman was tall and horse-faced. But while argo hair was usually stiff as straw and about the same color as their skin—troll hair, Deke had called it—hers was long and red, cinched tight close to her head and then blossoming behind, like the head of a broom.

  The woman held out her hand. “Good to see you again, Paxton.” Her voice was as deep as Deke’s—deeper maybe—but the inflection was more feminine somehow.

  “Oh! Donna, sure!” He put down his plate and grasped her big hand in both of his. Donna had been a year behind them at school. She was a McKinney, one of the poor folks who lived up on Two Hills Road. Poor black folk. And now, he thought, she was whiter than he was.

  “You two have been married how long again?” Pax asked. As if it had just slipped his mind. He remembered a wedding invitation that had been forwarded to him from his cousins’ house in Naperville. He’d meant to respond.

  “Eight years at the end of the month,” Donna said.

  “You guys were kids!” Pax said. “Tall kids, but still. What were you, nineteen? That must have been some shotgun wedding.”

  “Not really,” Deke said.

  “Oh shit, I’m sorry,” Pax said, then realized he’d said “shit” in church and felt doubly embarrassed. There was no such thing as a pregnant argo, no such thing as an argo baby. “I didn’t mean—”

  Deke held up a hand: Don’t worry about it.

  Donna said. “We want to feed you supper, then of course you have to stay at the house.”

  “No, really, that’s okay—”

  “We’ve got plenty of room. Unless you’re staying with your father?”

  “No.” He said it too quickly. “I thought I’d just stay at the Motel Six in Lambert.”

  Deke said, “Have you talked to him lately?”

  Pax started to say, Twelve years, give or take—but then the two argos looked over his head. Pax turned. Tommy Shields walked toward them, the twin girls trailing behind him.

  Tommy had been tall before the Changes, but he’d lost several inches of his height. His face was hairless, without even eyebrows, and his skin had turned a light brown that was splotched with dark across his cheeks and forehead. But he was still first-generation beta, with a broad jaw and too much muscle in the shoulders, and the old Tommy was still recognizable under the new skin.

  His voice, however, was utterly different. “You’re Paxton,” he said softly. His lips barely moved, and the sound seemed to start and stop a few inches from his thin lips. “Jo Lynn’s friend.” He extended a hand, and Pax shook it and re
leased without squeezing.

  Pax couldn’t think what to say, and finally came up with, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Girls,” Tommy said, “this man was a good friend of your mother’s.”

  The girls stepped forward. Heat flared in Paxton’s chest, an ache of something like embarrassment or fear. They were the same height, their heads coming up to just past Tommy’s elbow. They had to be almost twelve now.

  Tommy didn’t seem to notice Paxton’s discomfort. “This is Sandra,” Tommy said, indicating the girl on his left, “and this is Rainy.” They were second-generation betas—the firstborn of that generation—and their wine-colored faces were expressionless as buttons.

  “Hi,” Pax said. He coughed to clear his throat. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He knew their names from decade-old letters. Jo had rejected twin-ish stunt-names. No alliteration, no groaners like Hope and Joy. The only thing notable was that Rainy—Lorraine—was named after his mother. “Your mom was—”

  He blinked at them, trying to think of some anecdote, but suddenly his mind was empty. He couldn’t even picture Jo Lynn’s face.

  No one spoke.

  “She was a great person,” Pax said finally. “I could tell you stories.”

  The girls stared at him.

  “I bet they’d like to hear those,” Tommy said. “Come by the Co-op and we can talk about her. Before you leave.”

  Pax hesitated. Co-op? “I’d like that,” he said. “I’m not sure if I can, though—I have to see how my father’s doing. But if I can get away …”

  Tommy looked at him. “If you can spare the time,” he said in that soft voice. He smiled tightly and turned away. The girls regarded Paxton for a long moment and then followed Tommy across the room.

  Pax exhaled heavily. “Man,” he said.

  Donna said, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s just those girls.” He shook his head. “I know Jo loved them. She did, right?” Before they could answer he said, “Never mind, stupid question. It’s just that I can’t believe she’d leave them.”

  There was an awkward silence, and he looked up at the argos. Deke was frowning, and Donna wore a strangely fierce expression.

  “She wouldn’t,” Donna said.

  He looked from Donna to Deke, back again. He could see it in their faces. “You don’t think she killed herself?”

  Neither of them said anything for a moment. Deke shook his head. “It’s just a feeling,” he said.

  “Show me,” Pax said to him. “Show me where it happened.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people breathed life into this book. Martha Millard encouraged me to go for broke, and Chris Schluep pushed me to go for broker—nay, brokest.

  A crack team of forensic readers and fellow writers poked and prodded at the first draft. Andrew Tisbert, Matt Sturges, Jack Skillingstead, Chris Roberson, Dave Justus, Gary Delafield, and Elizabeth Delafield have my reverse-alphabetical gratitude.

  Ian Gregory read each chapter as it rolled out of the printer and then demanded to find out what happened next. His enthusiasm for this book animated every page.

  And Kathy Bieschke did all of the above, plus kept me breathing through the writing of this book—no mean feat.

  Thank you all so much.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Daryl Gregory won the Crawford Award for his first novel, Pandemonium, which was also a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. The Devil’s Alphabet, his second novel, was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and was named one of the best books of 2009 by Publishers Weekly. His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and several year’s-best anthologies. In 2005 he received the Asimov’s Readers’ Award for the novelette “Second Person, Present Tense.” He lives with his wife and two children in State College, Pennsylvania, where he writes both fiction and Web code.