by Lee Lynch
Now Chantal wouldn’t let go. “You managed to shake me up enough over at my place that I’ve been thinking about retiring from love for a while, but when Louie called me just now—well, I know right from wrong, Sugar.”
“John called me,” offered Maddy.
“You came here on your bike? With those Nazis outside?”
Maddy pushed up the sleeves of her enormous hooded flannel shirt. “You think I’m going to let some crude geeks stop me? Where’s Gramma Gus?”
Annie filled them in. Chantal still held her arm and Annie clung hard. “They’ll keep Gussie at least overnight because of her medical history.”
“Should we take her a few things?” asked Chantal.
Maddy offered her backpack. “Where’s her stuff? We can use my excellent valise.” She excavated a comb, newspaper clippings, and grape gum wrappers.
“She’s got an overnight bag downstairs. I’ll get it,” Annie said, trying not to smile as she and Chantal exchanged glances at Maddy’s preparations.
“I’ll keep an eye on the street then,” Maddy offered. “There’s Cece with some biker-goons. I’d dig on giving those two flying lessons—to the nearest dying star.”
Chantal nodded. “Her buddies. She’ll get them to help.”
Annie realized how much she’d missed Chantal’s husky laugh. “Is Cece out to them?” she asked.
“Cece is out to everybody but the gang at Club Med,” Chantal replied as she squeezed closer to Annie. “Maybe Cece is right, Sugar.”
“You think tonight wouldn’t have happened, Gussie wouldn’t be on her last legs, if I stomped around town like Cece?”
“Well,” Chantal said, her heavy eyelids lifting with roguish mirth, “there’s stomping and then there’s stomping. I mean, at your stompingest, I don’t think you’re going strut like Cece when she’s in her dotage.”
Despite everything, Annie had to laugh. “Thanks,” she said with the best scowl she could muster.
“So,” Maddy reminded them, “this is all great, but what’s the plan?”
“Do we have to have one?” asked Annie. “I’m ready for bed.”
“Don’t you want to be at the hospital with Gussie?” asked Chantal, not quite hiding an amused gleam in her eyes.
“Elly and Dusty are doing that. I’m staying home minding the store,” said Annie. “Besides, Gussie needs some rest, not an audience.” She looked pointedly at Maddy.
“You think I brought this attack on,” Maddy asked, “pushing for action?”
“No. I just think we’re not all capable of operating at your speed.”
Maddy kicked at a chair. “I don’t want anybody else to get hurt, paisan. I’ll give it a try your way, but if this community’s little surge of energy dies a slow death, be watching for me and Jennifer on your local yokel five o’clock news. Meanwhile, you want company watching the house?”
“Company? Let’s have a damn party. You’re still alive!” said Chantal.
“Compromise,” Annie said. “When we get the paint cleaned up and good news about Gussie, then we party till the pop runs out.” Chantal laughed again and let her arm go. For a moment, Annie didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, just looked at Chantal. In this evening of quiet revelations there was something else calling her attention. The thoughts came slowly, while Chantal bantered with Maddy.
She expected to feel safer in the world when she was with a Vicky, a Jo, a Marie-Christine. Something deep in her yearned for them as guides, these women who seemed born to navigate what to Annie were uncharted seas. Their families were successful. She’d tried to stow away with the daughters of captains. Had she learned from them to navigate? Hell, no. To this day, she steered straight into every ten-foot wave.
Now she’d chosen to take her stand in a place even native Jo planned to flee. There would be no free ride in Morton River, not with Chantal. If she made the trip, it would be steerage from port to harbor. Looked like, she smiled to herself, what she needed was a scrappy sailor by her side, not some captain’s daughter. Maybe water was too unpredictable for her. Give her the Soo Line, the Burlington Northern, the Erie-Lackawanna, and a little home in the hills of Morton River.
Annie turned to Chantal. “Want to come down to the basement with me to get Gussie’s bag?”
“Sounds adventurous.”
“No, basements give me the creeps.”
“Sugar, I love adventure.”
“Mind the store just for a few minutes, Mad?”
“Primo!”
Chantal took her arm again. They squeezed through the door together. At the bottom of the steps, Annie reached for the lightbulb string but Chantal stopped her.
“No,” said Chantal, turning to her and pressing close. “Annie, I missed you. Why didn’t you answer my calls?”
She hung her head, remembering that Chantal had felt safer outside Verne’s apartment because she’d been with Annie. “So you wouldn’t get wounded in my war.”
“It’s not your war. You have to share, you dope.”
Annie looked off into a dark corner, spooky with spider webs and relics. For the moment, her fear left her. It was perfectly clear that she wasn’t backing off into any closet. “Yeah, I’ll just lose it for us, won’t I, all by myself?”
“And make it worse for the survivors when you run off somewhere safer where we can’t go.”
“I’m sorry.”
Chantal forced Annie’s chin up. “You’ll let me help?”
“I need your help. Especially when I go back to the Farm outed, with the whole town waiting for me to abuse a client.”
There was a thump, then a scrabbling sound. Annie whispered, “What was that?”
“Poor Sugar. Ralph has basement phobia too. Go ahead and turn the light on.”
She started to reach for the light, but didn’t want to let go of Chantal. She kissed her instead.
“What is this, desire therapy?” Chantal whispered.
“You do want to cure me of basement phobia, don’t you?”
“Kiss me again, so I can make an informed decision.” The kiss went on and on. A scrabbling sound interrupted it. Annie tried not to jump.
“Okay, Sugar. Stand aside.” Chantal pulled the light cord and headed off toward the noise. “Who’s making all this racket down here?” she called, noisily lifting cartons. “Yuck. A rodent porta-potty. Looks like you have a mouse problem. Got a trap?”
“Gross. You mean kill them?”
“It’s the only solution, believe me. Though if you want to get one of those have-a-heart traps, so you can relocate them to Pastor Norwood’s church, that’s fine with me.”
“I should have come down here and cleaned up for Gussie.” Annie was trying to be unobtrusive about it, but she’d backed up onto a step. She’d faced enough fears tonight. She’d hire an exterminator. “The suitcase should be right on top of that table. And we probably ought to bring some rags and thinner to clean off the paint.”
Chantal, with only a small smile as comment, retrieved what they needed and followed as Annie bounded up the steps two at a time.
At the top, heart thumping, she breathed again. “Thanks,” she told Chantal.
“Sure, Sugar.”
She teetered, wanting to ask Chantal to stay, but terrified she’d back out again.
“Chantal—”
“There’s no hurry, Sugar,” Chantal said, moving toward the others. “I’m not going far.”
Chapter Seventeen
As she drove home from work the next day, Vicky’s words filled her mind, filled the Grape, filled the world. She’d called Oregon to tell Vicky about the Rafferty Street attack.
Vicky had been horrified. “I feel like I pushed you into this level of involvement,” she confessed. “Out here we’re trying to put human faces on prejudice. You know, the concept that the queer next door is no one’s enemy? You’ve gone and done it, Annie.”
“Right,” she teased, “It’s all your fault, Vicky. You know what I think got to the
Rafferty Street toughs, besides finding the dyke-monster who molested Lorelei? A house that no men go in and out of. Except for one meeting, all they’ve seen is women perfectly happy without men. They are so scared of anything that messes with their power trip they have to flex their kill-it-if-it-thinks muscles.”
“Still,” said Vicky. “It makes me want to take care of you, as if I could.”
“Yeah,” Annie acknowledged. “I wish you could. I wish somebody could.”
She’d been keeping Vicky updated about Chantal and now heard her silent query, Can Chantal? Instead, Vicky had said, “If you need a rest, you know you’re welcome here.”
“Maybe when it’s all over, when you beat your bigots back, when I’m doing my real work and have some school behind me, when things settle down on Rafferty Street.”
Vicky’s voice was pained, as if she were breaking bad news. “Annie, this may not end for a very long time.”
Annie pulled into her favorite train-watching spot and punched the tape button. Music sounded like so much noise to her these days that she turned it right off. “This may not end for a very long time.” She wanted to drown out the echo of those words.
A freight train came along, a loud commanding presence that made life seem grand for a moment, larger than itself. She roared a great curse at the unperturbed Conrail cars as if they were to blame for every unfairness. By the time their simple clackety-clacking faded, her throat felt raw. Around the first bend the train threw back a come-hither call. A last rumble and then a profound silence fell before the mundane, irregular whisper of passing automobiles seeped back in. It was time to rejoin real life.
The rainy weather had disappeared for the moment. No flood heroics would save the gays of Morton River this time. She forced herself not to cringe as she bumped over the tracks and reluctantly rounded the corner onto Rafferty Street, her safe haven turned war zone. No one was in sight. She let out the breath she’d been holding. On this hot day, almost two weeks before the end of spring, music blasted out of a house down the street where a car, hood and trunk open, tools on the ground, sat in a driveway. The attackers weren’t far.
The house was a mess from last night’s confusion. She set about straightening it, imagining a new home for herself in San Francisco, or Kansas City, Ithaca, Northampton. Minnesota had just passed gay rights protections, but, darn it, Connecticut had them too, for all the good they did. How about Alaska, everyone’s end of the line? Amsterdam? Now there was a liberal city.
But Annie knew, as she handled Gussie’s familiar objects, some reminding her of her own childhood, that she was an American right down to her toes, a Yankee who thrived on crisp falls, who enjoyed the odd snowball fight and had always been thankful to live in what she’d been brought up to believe was the greatest country in the world. Grump about life in the Valley as she might, she wasn’t budging.
She walked up the street to buy some ice cream for Gussie. The shopkeeper seemed to start toward her, then shy away. Crap, she thought. Do I have to worry about where I spend money now? When he rang her out, he mumbled, “I’m sorry about those young punks. Is Gussie going to be all right?”
Overreaction or not, she wanted to smack his timid little face, but summoned up words she imagined Vicky might use. “Not unless the neighbors help take a stand against the punks.”
He shook his head. “It’s not right, but I can’t afford to lose any customers.”
Later, on the way to visit Gussie, she ran into Elly and Dusty in the hospital lobby.
“She’s looking good, Heaphy,” said Dusty.
Elly’s face looked softer than Annie had seen it in a long while.
“You’ve got ice cream? She’s been having erotic fantasies about peach ice cream, I swear,” said Elly. “We brought her some real-world food too,” Elly announced. “Wait till you hear her on hospital meals!”
Dusty looked better. She stood straighter, and there was a real smile on her face.
“Did Dusty tell you, Annie, that we’re going to Ireland?” Elly’s voice was hushed, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. She wrapped her hands around the crook of Dusty’s arm and squeezed herself close.
Innocently, Annie jingled the change in her pocket. “I might have heard a buzz somewhere.”
Dusty propped herself against the back of a vinyl couch and folded her arms. “I’ve hired a guard service to make sure the Queen of Hearts is still standing when we get back.”
“Don’t forget my offer to help, Reilly.” She lifted her chin at a man in white who stood outside the plate glass windows watching them, smoking a cigarette. “What’s the breeder staring at?” she asked. “I thought Gussie would be safe here at least.”
“Annie Heaphy, you’ve always worried too much. You don’t have to fight the creeps twenty-four hours a day. For all we know he’s gay.”
“Tell me another one, El.”
Elly grabbed Annie and danced her around. “Never mind that. I’m going to draw Ireland on paper! Every green, mystical, impoverished inch of it.”
“That’s centimeters, I believe, lady.”
Annie slipped an arm around Elly and flaunted their dance for the onlooker. “Bring me back a drawing of a gypsy wagon. I’d love to buy an original Hunnicutt.”
“It’ll be a true test,” predicted Dusty. “We’ll either kill each other or…well, I’m hoping for the or.”
“Dusty’s worried that all we know how to do together is work.”
“Vacationing may come more naturally than you think,” advised Annie, bringing them to a halt. “Don’t get too hooked, we need the diner.”
She thought for a moment. “Tell you what,” she said, visualizing a huge homecoming celebration. “You’ll find a surprise when you get home.”
“I don’t know if I like that devilish grin,” Elly said.
She’d noticed the wheelchair roll past, but was surprised when the tall bearded man maneuvered it around and back toward them. Then she recognized Judy Wald, the Director of the Herb Farm, in the chair. She looked shrunken, and leached of blood.
Judy smiled tremulously and held out a hand.
“What happened?” asked Dusty. Annie had forgotten that they knew each other through the Special Olympics.
Judy made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “It was a little more than gall bladder. I went back to work and got worse. Now they’ve taken out everything but the kitchen sink. And got it all, they tell me, though I’ll be doing some other therapies to be sure.”
Annie felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. “Geez, and here we were dancing. I had no idea.”
“Neither did I. It explains a lot about my behavior recently, though. I was driven to distraction by the pain and scared because none of the doctors could find anything. When that horrible Mrs. Norwood called, I just couldn’t deal with one more thing. I’m afraid you’re the one who suffered—the whole town too, from what I’m hearing. It was a terrible decision on my part. Please let me apologize and encourage you to come back.”
“You’ll find a stack of massages on your desk—all from me.”
“I’m so glad.” Judy looked at Dusty. “She has a playfulness that’s valuable with our client population.” Judy faced Annie. “I like your ability to balance that with your staff responsibilities. You’re so good with our workers.”
“Not good enough,” Annie grumbled. She could hear Elly, behind her, softly drumming her fingertips on her purse.
“It’s true you’re not experienced. You didn’t get the support and information you needed. Lying in a hospital bed has given me a lot of time to plan. I’m going to increase the in-service training opportunities as well as supervision. If I get it approved, you’ll get paid to take college level courses.”
“You mean you don’t think I screwed up?”
“As confused as I was, it broke my heart to think I’d lose you from the staff, and that the workers would be without your obvious affection for them. They had a good time wi
th you and were as productive as they’ve ever been.”
Dusty smiled. “I’m glad you’re going back, Judy. You are the Farm.”
The bearded man, his glasses even thicker than Judy’s, spoke. “That job’s keeping her going.”
“This is my husband, Matt. And he’s right. I hope to be back at work two weeks from Monday, but I’ll be missing a lot of time for therapy. Please come rejoin the team with me, Annie. I need you.”
When Matt wheeled Judy away, Annie looked at Elly and Dusty. “Holy moley,” she said.
“She’s right,” Dusty said. “You can do some good at the Farm. And I want you as a Special Olympics coach this year. No gaff. We’ll take on every Mrs. Norwood in Morton River.”
Elly gave her a hug. “This is a great place to live, Annie, except for the quicksand, the volcanoes and the snipers. You’re going to love it here just like the rest of us peculiar folks.”
Upstairs Chantal was holding Gussie’s hand. Gussie spied the ice cream and elevated her bed. “Do you know they’ve been feeding me Jell-O? You’d think in this day and age dieticians would have more sense! Why give a sick person colored sugar? All the dieticians should get presented with a gallon of Jell-O on their deathbeds. See how they’d like it.”
Annie said, “I can’t believe I ever had the nerve to resent you. I should have known a whole community couldn’t be wrong. You’re a Valley jewel.” She poked at Gussie’s slippers under the bed with a toe. “There’s something distrustful inside me that has to say no before it says yes.”
Shyly, she let her eyes touch Chantal’s over Gussie’s bedding. Their hazy blueness got to her every time, making her insides shiver. “I didn’t see your car in the visitor’s lot.”
“Ralph’s home on leave. He’s chauffeuring today. He needed the car.”
Annie bit her lower lip, in conflict, but remembered Vicky’s advice about letting her friends make up their own minds about taking risks. “You need a ride home?” she asked.
Without hesitation, Chantal nodded. “I thought you’d never ask.”
With all her misgivings, Annie was so pleased she gave Chantal a big sloppy grin. She turned to Gussie. “Things seem to have calmed down at home, Gus. The guy at the grocery store asked after you.”