For Good

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  12

  Marydale woke in the cab of her truck where she had parked at the Firesteed Summit. It took her a moment to realize her phone was ringing, wedged somewhere beneath her hip. She startled more fully awake. It was Kristen. It had to be. She fumbled for the phone and answered it a second before she registered the name on the screen: Aldean.

  “Hey, princess,” he said.

  She rubbed her eyes. The gorge wasn’t beautiful without Kristen. The wildfire smoke had washed the color out of the already muted landscape. The squares of brown farmland looked like failure. There was no water. No one won.

  “I need you to come over to the Pull-n-Pay,” Aldean said.

  She didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to talk about the still. She didn’t want to sit around drinking warm Coke and whiskey while Aldean smoked and welded, oblivious to the fact that he was one bad valve away from blowing up the place. She didn’t want to report to Cody or go to work or listen to Mr. Fisher complain that the meat loaf tasted meatier in 1960. Weariness settled in the very viscera of her body.

  “Can I come tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Pops is dead,” Aldean said.

  Marydale arrived at the Pull-n-Pay an hour later. The sun was up, streaming over the junkyard. Aldean was waiting for her at the gate. He took her hand, which he hadn’t done since they were ten. Together they walked through the piles of scrap metal and gutted cars.

  Inside, the mobile home smelled of cigarettes and motor oil. Across the small, cluttered living room, Pops lay in his recliner, his mouth partially open, his eyes closed, an ancient man in a flat-brimmed John Deere cap. He didn’t really look much deader than usual. Nonetheless, Marydale didn’t need to look for the rise of breath to know that he was gone. The stillness in the room was absolute. She and Aldean stood in the doorway for a long time.

  Finally Aldean said, “Let’s have a toast.”

  Marydale didn’t mention that it was eight in the morning. It wasn’t eight in the morning for Pops.

  Aldean retrieved a half-empty bottle of Poisonwood and two glasses from the kitchen cupboard, and they went outside.

  “Aren’t you going to give him some of your good stuff?” Marydale asked.

  “Pops always loved Poisonwood.”

  He poured two small glasses. They stood together, the rising sun making giants of their shadows.

  “To Pops,” Marydale said.

  “To Pops.” Aldean uncorked the bottle again and poured a thin, slow stream of whiskey on the ground.

  When it was gone, Marydale asked, “Did you just find him?”

  “I think I knew last night, but I didn’t want them to come take him away in the middle of the night. It just seemed right that he wake up at home.” His voice broke. “Or wherever he is now.”

  Marydale took his hand again, feeling the calluses and smelling the cigarette smoke on his clothes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “He was a good man. I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t taken me in,” Aldean said. “My fucking tweaker dad and tweaker mom…If it wasn’t for him, I don’t know. Sometimes I thought he was just staying alive until I was old enough to take care of myself. You know? Like he was hanging on for me. And sometimes I wanted to say, ‘You can go now.’” Aldean was crying. “He used to make me beans for breakfast. He’d just open the can and put it right on the stove, and he was there every morning.”

  He squeezed Marydale’s hand. “Marydale, I can go now. I can leave. I can sell the Pull-n-Pay and go to Portland.” He looked at her. “Don’t worry. I’ll get everything ready. I’ll start the distillery, and when your PO agrees to a transfer, you can come live with me, and we’ll run it together.”

  The sun stung Marydale’s eyes. The Poisonwood burned her stomach. She saw Kristen’s stricken face. She imagined Aldean’s old Dodge pulling out of the Pull-n-Pay for the last time. And she wished that her tears were for Pops, who deserved them, but she couldn’t even remember his real name—Floyd or Myron—and she clung to Aldean and cried for herself.

  13

  Kristen woke early after a night of disjointed dreams: Marydale on the side of a desert road. Marydale in her kitchen serving Thanksgiving dinner to an empty table. Marydale lecturing in a hall at Cascadia Law School. She showered quickly but stared into the bathroom mirror for a long time. Her hair hung in limp wet strands around her face. She looked pale. She kept thinking about the gap in Marydale’s smile. Had the tooth been pulled? Had someone punched her? Had anyone cared? She wanted to drive back to the house on Gulch Creek Road, fling her arms around Marydale, and yell, What were you thinking?

  Instead she dressed in the suit Grady had told her to soften up. She was at his office before he arrived, waiting in the parking lot of the low, squat office park. She didn’t let him get through the door.

  “I need to talk to you,” Kristen said.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve agreed to that postponement Hersal and I asked for,” Grady said with the confidence of a man used to angry, early-morning visitors. “Because we’re ready now. We’re going to court.”

  Behind him, the windows were painted silver, the words DOUGLAS E. GRADY, ATTORNEY AT LAW stenciled on the scratched surface.

  “I don’t give a shit about the postponement.”

  “Hersal will be glad to hear that.” Grady jingled something in his pocket. “Will that be all, Ms. Brock?”

  The two scrawny trees in the parking lot had lost their leaves, and the air held the chill of an early winter.

  “You didn’t tell me about Marydale Rae,” Kristen said. “Was it some kind of a power play? Did you think it was funny?”

  Grady bowed his enormous white hat.

  “I know you don’t like me,” Kristen went on. “You tolerate me. You don’t want city people coming into your town and your court, but what happened to professionalism? We’re colleagues.” She spit the last word at him.

  “You’d better come in,” Grady said.

  He jiggled the key in the lock for a long time. Inside, the space was devoid of decorations. Grady motioned for Kristen to follow him into the back office. He took a seat behind a heavy metal desk.

  “I think you’ve got me figured wrong,” Grady said. He pointed to a chair in front of the desk. “Sit.”

  Kristen stood.

  “Despite your personality,” Grady said with a leisureliness that made her want to sweep the files off his desk onto the floor. “And your general youth, I like you. You’re not as stupid as most people.”

  “You said Marydale Rae was a ‘rocky road to travel,’” Kristen said. “What was that? Driving directions? She’s been convicted of murder. I’m the deputy DA. I was living with her. You knew that, and you didn’t think you should tell me as a professional courtesy?”

  “I said Marydale needed a friend.”

  “Me?”

  “Aldean Dean is her only friend. He’s a good man, but that’s no role model for a girl like Marydale. She’s not going to marry him and live in the Pull-n-Pay.” When Kristen said nothing, he added, “Her parents are dead. She’s an only child. She’s a pariah. Sure, Frank at the diner will give her a job if she works under the table. He likes felons that way.”

  “She killed a man.”

  Grady looked up at her with bland concern. “You just learned that?” He set his hat on the desk beside him. “You just learned that.” This time it was a statement. He sighed. “People don’t tell that story as much you’d expect. The Rae women…they’re special. Marydale’s mom, she was—” He rubbed the back of his neck. “People around here would say she was a good Christian woman, but it was more than that. She made old men feel young again. Children loved her. Drunks stood up taller when she walked into a room.”

  “What about…?”

  Kristen couldn’t bring herself to say Marydale’s name. It was Ms. Rae, the defendant, the inmate, the felon. Not Marydale with her white dog and her sunflowers and her feet hooked around the rails of the porch, l
eaning back so she could see the stars.

  Grady chuckled. Kristen wanted to slap him or leave or cry.

  “Marydale always was her own woman,” he said. “She was special, too.”

  “And so you let me jeopardize my career, maybe my safety? Because she was special? Do you want everyone in jail right now to wait another six months while they recruit another deputy prosecutor because Boyd Relington’s busy drinking whiskey with Ronald Holten or whatever he does all day? I don’t see a big brain trust around here.”

  Grady held up his hand. “Kristen.”

  She glared at him.

  “Do you know why I came out of retirement?”

  Grady motioned to the chair. Kristen remained standing.

  “I had a nice trailer out at Coos Bay. Fishing every day. I could see the elk in the parcel behind my place. Then I heard about what happened to Marydale, not the stuff up at the barn with that boy, not what she did, but what happened right here.”

  “What?”

  “Marydale didn’t have any money.”

  Grady rubbed his hands over his knees, as though easing an old pain. It occurred to Kristen that he was old. She hadn’t seen it before. She hadn’t really noticed anything but his enormous hat.

  “Her father had died. Her mom had died. She’d sold off most of their herd to pay for her mother’s cancer. Marydale ended up with some public defender fresh out of law school. I think he wanted a murder on his résumé because he refused to plead down to manslaughter. He didn’t even suggest self-defense, which is what it was.”

  Kristen saw Marydale standing in the kitchen, her beautiful face wrecked by grief.

  She sat down.

  “Her attorney should’ve been able to walk in there and say, ‘For God’s sake, look at her,’ and walk away with a not-guilty verdict.”

  “There must have been a jury.”

  “People around here don’t like the gays. There’s no one here talking about marriage equality.” Grady put the words in quotation marks. “But Marydale Rae…” His gazed passed Kristen toward the door. “My grandfather was a sharecropper in Iowa. Corn mostly. Before they had all these insecticides. He said sometimes there’d be a plague of locusts, and they’d eat up everything. And there’d often be one farm or one valley where the wind would blow or the rain would fall just right, and the bugs wouldn’t touch it. They’d just pass right over. Marydale was like that…for a while.

  “Everyone knew she was a queer. She didn’t hide it. I mean she did, but you can’t hide anything from anyone, especially when there wasn’t a girl in town who hadn’t at least thought about kissing Marydale Rae. But she got brash about it after her father died. She was running that ranch, ran it as good as any man could’ve. She was born to that land, and she was a good Christian. She’d help anyone in a second, took care of her mother till she passed.

  “Mrs. Rae died in her arms. Preacher found them there together, Marydale just sitting up against that headboard with her mother in her arms. And they asked why she hadn’t called anyone, and Marydale just said, there wasn’t any hurry, ‘’cause God had already come and taken care of everything that mattered.’ People just couldn’t hate her for being gay.”

  “What about Aaron Holten?” Kristen asked.

  “The thing about those locusts…you didn’t want to be the farm they left alone, the only one to make it.” He shook his head slowly. “First they’d say God spared you; then, just as quick, they’d say you’d made a pact with the devil. I’ve seen the Holten women in court, swearing up and down they ran into a wall. It runs in families. There’s a lot of mothers in this town who’ve seen their girls go off with a Holten boy and cried over it.

  “When Marydale killed him, I think…some people hated her because she did it, and some people hated her because they hadn’t done it themselves. Some of them just hated her because they owed the Holtens so much money; they couldn’t not.”

  “Didn’t she appeal?” Kristen felt the sweat beneath her arms and between her legs.

  “Don’t know why not,” Grady said. “She was too shook up, I guess. I heard about it too late. But that’s why I came back, so no one ever had to take a shit-shoveling public defender again, because I can tell you one thing: if I’d been her lawyer, she’d be free.”

  The next days passed in slow procession. Kristen thought about Marydale constantly, but she entered the Almost Home from the back so she wouldn’t risk seeing her coming out of the Ro-Day-O Diner.

  Donna called one evening while Kristen lay on her motel bed, letting the blue glare of the television wash over her and drinking Poisonwood from a plastic cup.

  Two of the new hires at the Falcon Law Group had been let go. A third was on her way out.

  “You’re going to hate me,” Donna said, “but I gave Mr. Falcon your name. I know you don’t want to do big firm, but I’m lead on this energy-drink patent case.”

  “And somebody needs to take over the Lubbock divorce,” Kristen finished.

  She took another sip of the whiskey. Neither the taste nor the alcohol seemed to affect her, or perhaps there was already something numbingly intoxicating about the monotony of the motel, the television commercials, and her thoughts.

  “It’d just be for a little while. I told them I’d help find a replacement for the family-law side. It’s a big part of our business.”

  Our business. Donna had edged ahead in whatever race they were running to whatever golden future they’d respectively imagined on the other side of attorney general or Falcon law partner.

  “Our clients need to know they can come to the Falcon Law Group for anything, big or small,” Donna went on. “I think it’d be an amazing opportunity for you, Kristen.”

  “I can’t just leave my work here.” Kristen felt like someone else was speaking for her. “I’m shaping the lives of this community. They count on me and what I can do for them.”

  “Shit. I know,” Donna said. “It was worth a try though.”

  But in court, Kristen could barely keep the addicts straight. It didn’t matter. Every case was the same. Someone got drunk. Someone got high. Someone borrowed a car without permission, which counted as auto theft, but Kristen felt no satisfaction in the guilty verdicts.

  “It just gets worse with the rodeo,” Grady said, as they exited the courtroom Friday afternoon. “You talk to Marydale yet?”

  Kristen glanced around. The hall was empty, but nothing was private in Tristess.

  “You know I can’t do that,” she said. “I could lose my job.”

  “Your job.” Grady waved vaguely in the direction of the courtroom. “My job.”

  At the end of the week, the rodeo came to town or the town became the rodeo. Kristen couldn’t tell which. Tristess was busy and vacant at turns. Main Street was empty. The parking lot of the Almost Home was packed. From the walkway outside her motel room, she could see the sparkle of the Ferris wheel and hear the jingle of carnival music.

  Every single person she saw asked if she’d been to the rodeo. The answer was no. She didn’t even bother to lie and say she was going soon. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she should be going with Marydale. She should be walking under the Ferris wheel with Marydale. She should be listening to Marydale’s stories and passing an ice-cream cone back and forth with the intimacy of a kiss.

  And every night and sometimes during the day, even in court while Grady was droning on about sight lines and radar calibration, she argued with Marydale in her mind. You had an obligation to tell me. It was like briefing a difficult case. She just had to get the words right, and it would be true. I have to uphold the law. My job requires that I uphold the law. She tried again and again, but her imagined Marydale never answered back, and her silence became its own castigation.

  14

  Marlen “Pops” Dean died a good death. Marydale could tell the thought was on everyone’s mind as the people of Tristess filed into the Fellowship Hall of the Victory Waters Pentecostal Church. Aldean stood at the door, shak
ing hands, looking handsome in the same black suit he had worn to Marydale’s mother’s funeral and to the prom. And although he had choked up as he delivered his eulogy from the pulpit, he grinned at her from over the shoulder of buxom Lucy-Anne Beeker. Grieving Aldean Dean in a pressed suit was every straight girl’s dream. Aldean pretended to squeeze Lucy-Anne’s tight, black-clad ass.

  You dog, Marydale mouthed, but she felt indignant for Pops. Really? she added.

  Once the last of the receiving line had filed in, Aldean hurried to her side.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said. He wasn’t talking about Pops. “Old John said he’ll buy it. Cash.”

  “I know. I heard.”

  “Old John says he’s been wanting to buy the Pull-n-Pay for years, said he thought I’d want to sell, but out of respect for Pops and all…” He looked like the boy she remembered from the sod forts of their childhood. “And I found this industrial park north of Portland, right on the water. They’ll even rent me a little houseboat. It’s only five hundred square feet, but I swear, with all Pop’s junk, that’s about all the space we had in the trailer. You’ll love it. It’s by this bridge that’s built to look like one of those big French churches Mr. O’Rourke was always going on about in humanities.”

  She felt herself tearing up.

  “Hey.” Aldean wrapped his arms around her. He didn’t smell of cigarettes. “How long do you have to keep your nose clean? Three years? It’s been at least one. That’s two more, and your PO will let you transfer your parole. You’re missing out on all the hard work. By the time you get there, we’re going to be making the best whiskey in Oregon, and all you have to do is show up.”

  She hadn’t told him about Kristen. It didn’t seem fair to mix her tragedy with Pop’s death and Aldean’s excitement about Portland. She knew he would stay if she asked. If she said, Don’t leave me. I can’t live here without you, without her, without anyone, Aldean would stay, but that was a kind of prison, and she knew too much about prison to wrap a cage around him.