Never Say Never

by Lisa Wingate

  “Oh, hon, there’s no judgin’ these things,” Donetta soothed. “Mamee used to say that. She got trapped in one once and near drowned. And there she was, a gal who’d been raised right on the bayou, and a Cajun to boot. There’s no figurin’ a hurricane.”

  I nodded, thinking about Don and the other shop owners in Perdida, and wondering who’d evacuated and who’d stayed. Where were they now and what had happened in Perdida when the storm surge came in?

  “You just decide you was tired of sea life, or you got family there in Perdida?” Donetta studied me for a moment, then added, “I asked you that already, didn’t I, hon? You gotta excuse me sometimes. My mouth’s like a all-weather creek—runnin’ all the time. It’s the hairdresser in me.”

  I laughed. “My mother went to hairdressing school for a while.” Until that moment, I’d forgotten about Mom’s first short-lived venture into cosmetology. Dad had landed a good job managing repairs at an auto dealership in Burnet, Texas, that year, and since we were finally in one place, Mom got a loan for beauty school. Gil and I loved it there. The town was small and friendly, and while Mom was in school every day, the two of us had the run of the place. We played on the baseball field in the city park, spent hours in the library, watched the trains come and go from the station, listened in on a murder case at the courthouse, and scoured the roadsides for aluminum cans we could cash in for change to pay our way into the movie theater. That summer, everything was perfect.

  Then life crashed in, like it usually did. Gil got sick, we lost the nice little house Mom and Dad had rented, and we were back in the camp trailer. Eventually, we ended up at Grandmother Miller’s. “We had to move before she got through beauty school, though. I think she finally did finish, later on.” I’d looked my mother up on the internet once when my ship was in port at Grand Cayman. It was Gil’s birthday, and all of a sudden, I wanted to call her. I wondered if she thought about my brother when his birthday rolled around—if she missed him. I found out she owned a salon in Tempe, Arizona, but that was as far as I got.

  “Well, isn’t that ni-ice? Good for her. A gal oughta git out there and go after her dreams while she’s young, that’s what I always say. Where’s your mama live now, hon?”

  “Arizona.” Tempe, I think. I felt the usual inner pinprick. Even when I was a kid, it was difficult to know how much to tell people about our weird, complicated family. The more I divulged, the stranger it sounded, and in the end people either felt sorry for me or didn’t want to have anything to do with me. After Gil died and my mother left, I just started making things up.

  “Oh, it’s beautiful out there in Arizona!” Donetta’s hands fluttered in the air, talking right along with her. “I drove through there one time years ago with my brother and his kids, Kemp and Lauren. We’d been out to California, takin’ some horses to a movie studio. Their mama died young—not the horse’s mama, Kemp and Lauren’s mama—bless her heart, so I took care’a them a lot when they were little. We always been real close. I never could have any of my own—kids, I mean. But my brother’s two were just like mine. ’Course, Frank and me got crossways about them kids more than once. You know how brothers and sisters can be.”

  I nodded, thinking about Gil and all the times it was a miracle that we hadn’t torn the trailer to shreds and killed each other.

  “You got brothers and sisters, hon?”

  I felt a blunt pain, like a clothespin snapping shut on your finger. There was never a good answer to that question. Gil’s story threw a damper on any conversation it entered, but acting like he never existed seemed wrong. “My brother passed away when he was eleven.”

  Donetta laid a hand on my arm again. “Oh, hon, I’m sorry to hear that. I had a little sister who passed young—Sherlyn, but we called her Sherry. It’s one of them things you never quite know how to tell people. ’Course, most of the folks I’m around already heard everythin’ about my family, but with new people, I never did qui-ite know what to say.”

  I felt a sense of connection that was immediate and unexpected. “People have a hard time with it. I don’t talk about Gil much. I think about him, though. I wonder what he’d be like if he were still here, what kinds of things he’d be doing.” It was a strangely honest admission, for me. I’d never even told Meredith and Maggie about Gil. “I always thought he would have gone to college, maybe become an astronaut or a pilot. Every time there was a space shuttle launch, he wanted to go to the library and look all over the internet for information about the mission.” Gil was never in any school long before the teachers realized he was smart. When we were on the road, doing homeschool, he was finished with his lessons in half the time it took me. Then he had his face in some book about the Apollo launches or secret spy planes.

  “Well, I bet he would’ve.” Donetta’s voice was soft, tender. The conversation ran out momentarily, and then she restarted it. “So, you just live down there by yourself, then? Goin’ on the ships and all?”

  I nodded. Just living by myself and going on ships …

  “Sounds excitin’.” Leaning forward, she checked the sky out the front window, studying the clouds. “Must get lonesome sometimes, though, no family nearby to depend on.”

  “I have friends in Perdida. After a while, it’s like a family.” The permanent residents of Perdida tended to be a loose-knit bunch, but at least I knew I could depend on them. I couldn’t imagine depending on my family for anything at this point.

  “It ain’t the same thing,” Donetta mused. “Your friends are just your friends. Somethin’ can happen and they can stop bein’ your friends.”

  Your family can stop being your family. They can decide to leave you behind and get a whole new life. I didn’t say it, of course.

  Donetta laughed softly, shaking her head. “A’ course, listen at me talkin’. It was me not wanting to depend on anybody that got us gals in this fix. Kemp—that’s my nephew. He coaches baseball at Daily High and teaches math. Did I tell you that already, hon?—anyhow, he offered to take a couple days off and drive us down to the cruise boat, and my brother, Frank, offered, too, but I wouldn’t let them, and now here we are. In trouble like a one-legged cat in a mouse hunt. Lot of good that phone and that computer did us. If it wasn’t for you, we’d still be stuck on the side of the road. Guess that just goes to show there’s none of us don’t need the kindness of a stranger now and then.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Thanks for pickin’ us up.” Donetta let her head fall against the headrest and sighed. “If I didn’t say it in all the commotion before, thanks.”

  “I don’t mind,” I answered, and we drifted into silence. Traffic came to a standstill for a while, then started creeping along again as the wind picked up and the sky dipped lower. Behind us, the storm pressed in, lightning splitting the air like a white-hot knife, thunder following behind. Bursts of wind moaned through the pines, rocking the Microbus and shaking the line of taillights ahead. A driver laid on the horn, and someone else honked in return. The frustration was palpable, the unwritten message clear. If we didn’t get off this road soon, Glorietta, along with straight-line winds, floodwaters, and whatever tornadoes the storm spawned, would blow right over the top of us.

  Another issue stole into my thoughts—something I’d been noticing for a while now. The Microbus was tugging to the right, and it was getting worse. I’d only been vaguely conscious of it while Donetta was talking, but now it was impossible to ignore. The right front tire was slowly going flat.

  Donetta leaned close to me. “We got a tire goin’ out, hon,” she whispered, as if we should keep it between us. “My daddy was a auto mechanic all his life, so I know the symptoms. You got a spare?”

  The question tangled in my chest, pushing heat up my neck and into my cheeks. “We’re driving on the spare.” Don had borrowed my vehicle two weeks ago and ended up with a flat. He’d insisted that, since he ruined the tire, he’d get me a new one, but the last time I’d seen the rim, it was leaning against the surf shop wit
h the flat still attached.

  The bus listed farther and farther to the side, inching another mile, then two, tilting like a sinking ship, until finally Donetta stuck her head out the window to take a look. A fine spray of mist floated inward, gathering on her hair as the van wobbled down a hill toward a narrow bridge. “I hate to tell ye-ew this, darlin’, but we’re gonna have to look for a stoppin’ place. That’s pretty well had it.”

  “We can’t pull off here.” The Microbus shimmied clumsily over a joint in the decking as we moved onto the bridge. The steering wheel tugged in my hands, and I slowed to a crawl, the bus leaning and swaying over each joint, top-heavy by nature. Donetta shifted toward the center, eyeing the bridge railing as if she were afraid we might tumble over it. Ahead, traffic inched away, creating a gap, and behind us, the motor home began honking. I hit the emergency flashers and continued limping on.

  Donetta balanced on the inner edge of her seat, her face compressing like a Chinese lantern as she squinted into the night. “You just ignore them, hon. We’re doin’ the best we can here. I’m lookin’ for a spot to pull off. If we can get up over that hill yonder, maybe we’ll hit it lucky and there’ll be a store, or a town, or somethin’. The ditches are too steep here to pull off, that’s for sure.”

  We limped toward the hill, upward, then slowly started down, the van swinging hard to the right and the brakes squealing as the shift in gravity increased the pressure on the front tires, grinding the flat down to the rim.

  The motion and the noise stirred Lucy in the back seat. “What go-een on?”

  Lucy’s voice surprised Hawkeye. He scrambled backward and bumped into Imagene’s legs, and she jerked upright, hollering, “The eggs are burnin’!” Catching her breath, she added, “Oh lands, I was dreamin’ I was at the café and Bob’d forgot about the fry grill again.” She sniffed the air and scooted forward in her seat. “I do smell somethin’ burnin’, though.”

  “We got a flat tire. We’re lookin’ for a place to pull off.” Donetta pushed out of her seat and leaned out the window, her legs splayed and her hands braced on the dash. “I think I see somethin’. There’s a light down there in the woods, just a little off the road. Must be a driveway, or house there. You see it? I can’t tell what it is.”

  The light flickered through the trees, appearing and disappearing until finally a driveway melted into view. The source of the flickering glow was hidden behind the thick wall of pines, but the driveway looked well maintained, covered in thick gravel with a new culvert over the ditch.

  “There’s a sign… .” Donetta stretched higher, trying to make out the official-looking roadside marker. “Maybe it’s a ranger station.”

  Lucy and Imagene squeezed into the space between the seats, scouting, as well.

  “It ain’t a gas station,” Imagene concluded. “It’s …”

  Donetta finished the sentence. “Somethin’ for the power company.” Her voice descended as we turned into the driveway, passing a sign that read TRW Electric Co. No trespassing.

  Chapter 9

  Donetta Bradford

  There wasn’t nothin’ at the end of that gravel drive but a parking pad and chain-link-fenced electric station with Keep Out signs everywhere. The place was like a little island floating on a bed of white gravel under a lonesome security light, the woods towerin’ all around, dark as ink.

  “There’s no one here.” Imagene’s voice shook as our moment of hope collapsed like a cardboard fort in a summer rain.

  Kai put the van in Park and turned it off, saying something about a can of Fix-a-Flat in back.

  I coulda told her there wasn’t any point looking for a can of Fix-a-Flat. My daddy, even sauced up as he was most of the time, was a good mechanic, and he had us working in the shop right along with him. When a tire’s off the rim, you’re not gonna make it right with a can of Fix-a-Flat. It was a shade more likely we could pray our way out of there. I said that to Kai, but she didn’t listen. She just got out to look for the Fix-a-Flat, and I didn’t stop her. Sometimes you gotta let other folks butt their heads against the wall on their own. I learned that from my daddy. Not because he taught it to me. I learned it by watching him take that bottle in hand and hit the wall over, and over, and over.

  I started getting worried when the lightnin’ moved closer and the wind come roaring through the trees like a freight train. Pinecones, needles, and branches pelted the roof, one of the dogs jumped in Lucy’s lap, and Imagene hollered, “It’s a tornado! Mercy!”

  “It ain’t a tornado.” I knew enough about the piney woods to know them trees could put up a mighty wail when the wind went through. “Not yet, anyhow. But we’re gonna have to do somethin’. We can’t stay here.” I was trying to sound calm so everyone else wouldn’t have a rigor, but my heart was pumpin’ like the old grinder engine that used to run all day at the mill. You could hear that thing all over Daily, like the town itself had a heartbeat.

  The wind quieted a bit, and I stepped outside. The smell of broken pine branches and moss and wet dirt choked the air, and overhead the sky hung low, like it was full of lead and about to fall. My foot sunk in gravel and mud, and I had a bad feeling we shouldn’ta stopped there.

  Kai was crouched down with the Fix-a-Flat, and she’d put her shoulder under the wheel fender, like she was gonna lift up the van, even though she wasn’t big as a minute. “Hon …” I laid a hand on her arm. “That ain’t gonna work.”

  “It has to work.”

  I squatted down beside her. “Hon, this tire’s too far gone.” In the soft glow of the security lamp, her hair catching the light and turning a feathery gold around her face, she looked like a little girl, lost and needing her mama.

  “It has to work.” If she hadn’t started to cry already, I could tell she was about to.

  “Darlin’, how old are you?”

  She glanced up, her pretty blue eyes wide and desperate in the lamp glow. “Twenty-seven… . Why?”

  Twenty-seven was about what I’d figured. Just a little younger than Kemp and Lauren. “You got a lot of experience with tires?”

  “No.”

  “They got lots of auto shops on those ships where you work?”

  “No.” Her shoulders sunk, and she pushed the back of her hand against her forehead, squeezing her eyes shut, like she knew I was right but couldn’t stand to hear it just now.

  “Well, I’m almost seventy, darlin’, and I seen a lot of flat tires in my life, and this one’s swan song’s done been sung. It ain’t comin’ back. We gotta do somethin’ else before that rain gets here.”

  Lightning flashed a white ribbon across the sky, and thunder boomed right behind it. I caught a breath and jumped out of my skin, then back in. “Let’s get in the van till we figure it out.”

  Kai stood up and wiped the water out of her eyes, then we got in the car. The wind turned real quiet for a minute. Everythin’ was still, so that you could smell the fret in the air. An empty soda bottle toppled off the dash and hit the floor, and all three of us jumped like we’d backed into a prickly pear cactus.

  “What we go-een to do now?” Lucy whispered while the bottle was still rockin’ to a stop.

  “I guess we’re gonna start prayin’, and start walkin’ at the same time,” I said.

  Imagene gasped. “With a storm comin’ and Lucy’s bad knee, and in the dark with who knows what kind of people on the road? S’pose them three beer-drinking yay-hoos come along again.”

  “Right now, I believe I’d ask them can we get in the back of the truck and have a ride.”

  Imagene snorted. “This ain’t a time for jokes.”

  “I wasn’t jokin’,” I said. “We got to leave out. Now. Any way we can.”

  Lucy started gathering her things. “I can go okay on my knee. I been sit all day.” She reached around behind and started loadin’ her purse with bottled water. I coulda told her in a few minutes we’d have more water than we knew what to do with. That sky was about to bust open.

  “
We should stay here,” Imagene argued, which didn’t surprise me. That’s Imagene. Measure twice, measure thrice, measure four times, then maybe cut. Or not. “At least down here, we got some protection.”

  “Down here things are gonna fall on us if it gets bad, Imagene. Come a big wind, them pine trees and electric poles’ll topple like matchsticks. We gotta get out.”

  “We can wait a little longer. Maybe someone’ll come. Someone from the power company, or …”

  “Ssshhh!” Lucy cut her off, waving a hand in the air. “Ssshhh! Opening the door a crack, she cocked her ear. “You hear-eeng?”

  “Hearing what?” I whispered.

  “Ssshhh.” She pointed into the dark. “Is a dog ou-side.”

  The minute she said it, Kai’s old dog, Hawkeye, got up and let out a little bark, and all of us jumped.

  “Hawkeye, quiet,” Kai scolded, and the dog whimpered, then sniffed toward the open door. The young dog got up and wiggled in beside him until the two of them and Lucy looked like three kids at the Barlinger’s Hardware display when the new Christmas toys come out.

  “Is a man, too,” Lucy whispered. “He’s sing.”

  “Oh, Lucy, for heaven’s sake,” I said, thinking, Well, that seals it. Lucy’s finally gone plumb over the edge. She’s hearin’ voices. It’ll only be a matter of time before the rest of us go, too, and …

  Then I heard somethin’. If Lucy was goin’ crazy, I was headed right along with her. They’ll just find us here when the storm passes. Three crazy women and one poor girl who got trapped in the storm with them.

  “I hear it, too,” Kai whispered.

  Gravy! She’s as far gone as the rest of us, and she’s young.

  I closed my eyes, thinking maybe that’d get my head clear. A panicky push of wind blew through the clearing, rocking the van, and for a minute there was no noise but pine trees blowing and branches moaning.