by Ann McMan
Sonny was still rubbing his shin. “You had no call to kick me like that,” he complained.
“Yes, I did. You’re worse than a old woman.”
Sonny looked back at him with a blank expression. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Bert rolled his eyes. “You don’t need to be tellin’ tales on Dr. Heller—especially to her daughter.”
“I didn’t tell her nothin’ she didn’t already know. You heard her.”
Bert ignored him. Something more interesting was brewing outside.
“Here comes trouble,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Look.” He pointed out the window. “It’s Junior’s loaner car.”
“Well, I swanny. Why’d the mayor stop behind Doc Stevenson’s Jeep?”
“I dunno,” Bert said. “But it looks like he’s gettin’ out.”
“Hells bells,” Sonny said. “He looks hoppin’ mad.”
“This ain’t gonna be good.”
Dr. Stevenson was now out of her Jeep and the two of them were standing between their vehicles having words. They made an odd pair. The tall doctor topped the mayor by at least six inches. It was almost comical to watch him stand there fussing and squawking up at her like an angry catbird. He kept pointing at the courthouse and shaking his finger at the doctor. She seemed a lot calmer than he was. But all that changed when he stepped closer and poked his long, skinny index finger into her collarbone.
“Uh, oh . . .” Bert knew this wasn’t gonna end well.
Doc Stevenson slapped his hand away so fast her arm was a blur. Even from this distance, Bert could tell her blue eyes were blazing like fire.
He fumbled for his cell phone.
“What the heck are you doin’?” Sonny asked.
“What do ya think?” Bert was already dialing. “I’m callin’ her mama.”
◊ ◊ ◊
Maddie counted to five before she put the Jeep in park and got out to see why the mayor had blocked her into her parking space.
She didn’t have to wait very long.
It was clear that he was seething with anger—he wasn’t trying very hard to conceal it. His face was beet red. As a clinician, she couldn’t help but notice how the cast to his complexion accentuated the purple contusion on his jaw.
Apparently, Raymond had a good right cross.
“How dare you interfere with due process.” He spat the words out at her.
She folded her arms.
“Mr. Mayor, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t play coy with me, Doctor Stevenson.” He thrust out an arm and pointed to the courthouse across the street. “I know what you did. This matter does not concern you.”
“Mr. Watson?” Maddie sighed. “It’s been a long day and I’m tired. Will you kindly move your—conveyance—so I can go home and enjoy my food while it’s still hot?”
“Oh, no. I’m not finished yet.” He took a step closer to her. “Don’t think I’m unaware of how much you enjoy inserting yourself into the middle of everyone else’s business around here. You may choose to regard yourself as local gentry—but you’re no better than the rest of those deviant freaks you choose to associate with.”
Maddie took a deep breath. She hadn’t slugged anyone since the seventh grade, but right now he was making it hard for her to resist the temptation to give it another try.
“I’m not certain which aberrant freaks you’re referring to, Mr. Mayor. But I can assure you that any combination of them would be preferable to my present company.” She glared at him. “Please move your car. Now. This conversation is over.”
He ignored her request.
“You think you’re better than everyone? That you have some exalted right to do and say whatever you want because you went to the best schools and had everything handed to you—while the rest of us are forced to work and fight for everything we have?” He shook his bony finger at her. “You’re a perfect example of what’s wrong with this country. And I, for one, am here to stop you and your kind from carrying out your godless mission to destroy the moral fabric of our town.”
Maddie had a clear sense that if she didn’t walk away from him—and soon—she’d end up occupying Raymond’s spot in the jail cell. She was just about to turn away and head back inside the restaurant when Watson made a big mistake. He gave up on shaking his finger in her face and chose, instead, to drive his point home by jabbing it into her clavicle.
Maddie reflexively smacked his hand away with so much speed and force it caused him to lurch sideways and nearly lose his footing.
“Do not ever touch me again,” she hissed.
He looked at her with surprise and more than a trace of wariness.
She glared back at him.
Their wordless faceoff continued until he cut his eyes away.
“Um, Doctor Stevenson?”
The voice came from behind her.
She turned around.
It was Bert Townsend. He was holding out an open flip phone.
“I got your mama on the line,” he said. “She wants to talk to you . . . right now.”
◊ ◊ ◊
The drive to Bridle Creek took less than ten minutes, but it was long enough for Maddie to bring her blood pressure down from the stratosphere. Now that she had a few minutes and as many miles separating herself from the events in the parking lot, she could reflect on the creative way Bert and Sonny had brought the altercation to an end.
It was pretty inspired.
Nobody had called her mother to express concern about her behavior since . . . well. She really couldn’t recall another time. This was a first—for her and for her mother.
To be fair, she wasn’t prone to getting into trouble. At least not the kind of trouble that snowballed into an occasion for her to punch somebody’s lights out.
Gerald Watson. What an ass.
No. That wasn’t strong enough. The man was more than contemptible, brutish and provincial. He was dangerous. She knew that now. She’d seen it in his eyes when he confronted her. There was a raw, naked ugliness there that terrified her. She was certain that David’s decision to challenge Watson in the upcoming election would escalate the mayor’s rhetoric and energize his increasingly hostile attacks on all the “aberrant freaks” in the community.
Freaks like her . . .
It was a paradox. Returning to Jericho to live after her father’s death had been a relatively easy decision to make—even though she harbored no illusions about the social and political conservatism of the area. To be fair, she’d never felt directly affected by either—and she felt the sting of the mayor’s words when he accused her of being “local gentry.” It was true that she benefited from the luxury of an implied status that came with her position. For many years now, that status had allowed her to live an idealized life, tucked up inside her pastoral bubble on the periphery of the hardscrabble world that gave rise to dark prophets like Gerald Watson.
But those days were over.
It seemed ironic to her that David had been so quick to hone in on the ominous threads that linked Watson’s recent string of administrative edicts. She’d been guilty of passing off his epic rants about the mayor as just the latest examples of his penchant for overreaction and excessive statement. It was true that Watson had always been a self-righteous jerk. But David had been the first to recognize that the mayor’s simmering homophobia had finally reached its boiling point when the country’s slow march toward marriage equality finally landed squarely in the middle of Jericho’s town square.
That so-called abomination was the proverbial beam in the mayor’s eye—and it was leading him into a myopic frenzy of lashing out at anyone he regarded as complicit.
Tonight’s events changed everything. It wasn’t that she no longer saw the goodness and simple beauty that defined this remarkable place called Jericho. She did. But she also understood that caring enough to preserve those qualities came with a price—a price that meant surrende
ring her comfortable seat on the sidelines.
Self-styled autocrats like Gerald Watson succeeded by preying on fear. They wrapped their accusations and empty promises in righteous indignation, then hawked their own twisted brand of miracle cures to the public like patent medicine.
The adage was true. Once the scales fell from your eyes, you could never see things the way you did before. And what she saw now was a once bright and vivid landscape dissolving into a palette of bleak and sinister hues.
◊ ◊ ◊
When Maddie pulled in behind the refurbished bungalow, she was surprised by how much progress Bert and Sonny had made on the exterior. All the shutters were in place now, and they’d nearly finished cladding the chimney with reclaimed river rock. That had been Celine’s idea. She liked tying the house more directly to its setting—high on a bluff overlooking the river.
Maddie had thought her mother was crazy when she announced her decision to buy the old house that sat abandoned for decades, on the edge of an overgrown pasture in a remote part of the county. But Celine had been right about it—just like she’d been right about so many other things.
On their first walk through it, her mother observed that any structure determined enough to persevere and remain standing through nearly two centuries of catastrophic weather events and human neglect deserved their respect.
She said the house had good bones.
Even Bert and Sonny said the process of setting the place to rights would be as much about undoing the things that were wrong, as it would be about adding back refinements like insulation, centralized heat and indoor plumbing. Those things were just window dressing, they said. The house already had all the things it needed to be good and livable. They just had to uncover it, clean it up and stay out of its way.
Looking at the place now, Maddie realized how true that was. She had no doubt that her mother would thrive out here. Probably more than she had in any of the places she’d lived before. She believed this was true because her mother was finally giving herself permission to be happy—and that was a sea change in attitude and behavior that Maddie was determined to support.
She collected her bag of food and went to meet her mother, who waved at her from the unfinished patio. It was a balmy night. Maddie could see that Celine had a makeshift table set up for them. She was apparently confident that the storms firing up tonight would skirt around them as they had the last few nights. Faint flashes continued to light up the ridges off to the northeast. She hoped Syd and Roma Jean weren’t piloting that battered book wagon home in a downpour.
Celine stood up to greet her.
“The prodigal daughter returns.”
Maddie rolled her eyes. “Better thirty-seven years late than never, I suppose.”
“I won’t argue with that. Do you need to heat up your food?”
“No.” Maddie set her bag down on the table and gave her mother a hug. “Right now, I could eat the bag.”
There was a rumble of thunder, but it still seemed distant enough not to pose a threat.
They both sat down.
“I made us some hot tea. Chinese Gunpowder. It seemed appropriate given the circumstances. Or would you prefer something stronger?” Celine smiled at her. “I know from experience that brawling can make one thirsty.”
“Yeah. Byron and I were reminiscing about that earlier when I went by the jail.”
Celine seemed momentarily flustered by Maddie’s mention of Byron. But she chose to follow up only on the second part of Maddie’s observation.
“Why were you at the jail?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“I guess not. But then, I don’t tend to monitor police band radio.”
“I just assumed you had your own conduit to goings-on in local law enforcement.”
“Maddie?” Celine laid a hand on her arm. “We can discuss Byron later. Right now, I want to hear about how you ended up staging your own version of High Noon in the parking lot at Aunt Bea’s. Okay?”
“Okay. Fair enough.”
Celine withdrew her hand and reached for the teapot. It was a beauty—one Maddie had not seen before.
“Where’d you get that one?” she asked. Celine loved tea and had an impressive collection of pots from all over the world.
“You like it? I think it’s my favorite.” She held it up and rotated it so Maddie could appreciate it from all angles. “I got it last week in North Carolina—in Seagrove.”
“It’s beautiful. I like the color of the glaze.”
“They call it bronze. It’s vintage Jugtown—a very traditional design. One the potters there have been making for generations. Something about it seemed right for the house, you know? A perfect synthesis of old and new. I love everything about it. The weight. The balance. The old-signature domed lid. It pours perfectly, too.”
Celine was right. The teapot’s simple elegance derived from its restrained but masterful combination of form and function.
“I agree. It looks like a piece of art.” She held up a mug so her mother could pour her some of the strong, fragrant tea. “Why were you in Seagrove?”
“Sonny told me about a blacksmith there. I wanted to find someone who could replicate the original, box-style rim locks on the interior doors.” She refilled her own mug and set the pot back down on its trivet. “As you may know, such antiquities are woefully absent from the hardware bins at Home Depot.”
“Any luck?”
“Oh, yes. The good news is that the blacksmith there can make the locks for me. The bad news is that it may take a year to get them. Apparently, he has quite a backlog of special orders.”
“I knew I should’ve gone into a trade.” Maddie unpacked her Styrofoam box of chicken. “What will you do in the meantime?”
“Fortunately, one of the advantages of living alone is that you rarely have to close doors.” Celine regarded Maddie’s food with a raised eyebrow. “Are you really going to eat all of that?”
Maddie’s face fell.
“Not at the rate I’m going. Please don’t tell me you’re going to rat me out to Syd?”
“Of course not. I was simply going to ask if you’d consider sharing it with me.”
“Oh.” Maddie brightened up. “Sure. Want part of this biscuit, too?”
“Only the part that hasn’t been soaking in that lake of mayo from the coleslaw.”
“I know.” Maddie picked up the biscuit and blotted its underside on a paper napkin. “I don’t understand why they make it like this.”
“Your Oma was fond of saying that all gentiles thought mayonnaise was a food group.”
Maddie paused mid-blot. “Did she really say that?”
“Oh, yes. She was quite a bigot.”
“You never mentioned that before.”
Celine shrugged. “You were too tender to hear it before.”
Maddie broke off the dry part of the biscuit and handed it to her mother. “So, why are you telling me now?”
“Because now you’re an accomplished street-fighter who thumbs her nose at adversity.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“No? Then how about setting the record straight. Tell me what actually happened between you and the mayor tonight.”
While they ate chicken strips and drank their tea, Maddie filled her mother in on the evening’s chain of events. She ended her story at the point where Bert showed up, holding out his cell phone and meekly telling Maddie that he had her mama on the line.
“That was a pretty inspired intervention,” she said. “The mayor was as flabbergasted by it as I was. I assume it was your idea?”
“Mine?” Celine pointed a finger at herself. “Oh, no. I was as surprised as you were. All Bert said when I answered the phone was that you were about to get into a fist fight with the mayor and I needed to talk you down—immediately. The next thing I knew, you were on the line—sounding, I might add, just like your father did every time he got caught in the middle of a colossal lapse in judgment.”
“He actually said that?”
“Well,” Maddie clarified. “I think his exact phrase was ‘aberrant freak,’ but it’s the meaning that matters, not the vernacular.”
“So, you decided to slug him?”
“No.” Maddie rolled her eyes. “I did not decide to slug him. He made the mistake of jamming his eerily long index finger into my collarbone and I slapped his hand away. I won’t deny that I would’ve slugged him if he tried to touch me again.” She shivered. “There’s something seriously creepy about that man, Mom. I think he’s genuinely evil.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Do?” Maddie was confused. “Do about what?”
“I think it’s fairly obvious that you’ve catapulted to the myopic center of his crosshairs. I doubt he’ll let up on you, now.”
“Well, he can just bring it on. I’m not afraid of him.”
“I’m sure you aren’t. But what about Syd? And Henry?”
Maddie didn’t immediately catch her meaning. “What about them?”
“He may use them to get back at you.”
“He wouldn’t dare.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. If he’s as dangerous and unscrupulous as both you and David suggest, he’ll be certain to use anything at his disposal to damage your reputation.”
“Such as?”
“Take your pick. You’re a lesbian. You live with another woman—out of wedlock—and the two of you are de facto foster parents to the innocent child of a disabled veteran. Your live-in lover is a divorcee who happens to be an outspoken, county-paid peddler of banned books. Your best friends are gay men who make a living performing same-sex marriages, and who knows what other manner of Bacchanalian rites, at their secluded B&B. Your aging mother amuses herself by translating German porn and is actively scandalizing the county by sleeping with the sheriff—who, by the way, is twelve years younger than she is.” Celine paused in her recitation. “Any of that resonate for you?”