Table of Contents
Copyright
Revolutions of the Heart
Acknowledgments
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Revolutions of the Heart
By Marsha Qualey
Copyright 2014 by Marsha Qualey
Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing
Cover Design by Ginny Glass
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1993.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Also by Marsha Qualey and Untreed Reads Publishing
Thin Ice
Venom and the River: A Novel of Pepin
One Night
Close To a Killer
Hometown
http://www.untreedreads.com
Revolutions of the Heart
Marsha Qualey
I would like to acknowledge the help of Sarah Hanna; Marilyn O’Brien; Nanette Missaghi; Dave Qualey; and, above all, my editor, Laura Hornik.
For my children—
Laura, Ellen, Jane, and Ben.
Brilliant stars.
1
Cory Knutson gave the volume knob on the radio a good crank, lifted the vacuum hose up to her face, gripped it with both hands, and sang into the brush attachment: “…home of the brave.” She punched the air with a fist and took a bow as the stadium crowd cheered for Whitney.
She turned off the radio. Most of her friends just hated Whitney Houston. Cory often accused them of listening only to music by bone-thin guys wearing extremely tight pants. She, however, had always liked listening to the kind of singers her mother called “babes with big voices.” Liked them, maybe, because she couldn’t sing at all—couldn’t even carry a tune in a bucket, her mother once observed. But Cory sang anyway, especially in the motel rooms while she cleaned.
Singing was a way to pass the time and amuse herself while she did the tedious motel chores. Change the sheets, scour the toilet, vacuum the carpet, clean, clean, clean. Bored as she got on her five-hour weekend shifts, Cory still had to admit that it wasn’t the world’s worst job, not by far.
She yanked the vacuum cord out of the outlet, pressed a button on the canister with her toe, and the cord was quickly reeled in. “Slaughtering pigs,” she said to herself. “That would be the worst.” Her stepfather’s uncle had retired the previous summer after forty years of working in the hog kill in a meatpacking plant in Minnesota. Shortly thereafter he had visited them at their home in northern Wisconsin, and every day, four times a day, had gone swimming in the lake behind their house. Even when he was soaking wet with the clean, cold lake water, Cory had imagined she could smell the stench of the hog kill.
“The worst,” she said firmly. She sniffed her hands and made a face. She had her own occupational aroma: cleanser and dust. No matter how thoroughly she showered and soaped and perfumed, she was certain the odor of her work was embedded in the pores of her hands.
But all in all, it was not a bad job. Especially when there weren’t that many employment options, not in a small town like Summer, not for someone whose parents wouldn’t let her work on school nights. Not many options at all for a seventeen-year-old with a five-hundred-dollar debt.
Cory collected her rags and cans of cleansers and dumped them into a pail. She gave the room a once-over, knowing it would be perfect even though she had rushed. The guests had departed late, and she had stayed to clean the room.
“I am the best,” she said, snapping her fingers. The bathroom sparkled and the bedding was taut. The dresser was dusted and gleaming, with only the Bible left on its polished surface. Recently, Cory had started picking out Bible verses and setting the ribbon marker to open onto some of the good passages, the ones she and her Sunday school classmates had giggled and moaned over outside of class, the passages about illicit sex or gruesome violence or ceaseless begetting. Today she had marked all the Bibles at Judges 4:21. Death by tent peg driven through the skull.
The room passed her inspection, and she slipped the pail handle over her arm and pulled the vacuum toward the door. She grimaced as she reached the large mirror that was bolted onto the wall. After six hours of room cleaning she didn’t need a mirror to remind her that she looked like the floor of a New York City cab. Not that she had ever been in a New York City cab. Not that she had ever been in New York City. Not that I’ve ever been anywhere, she thought. Cory appraised the image. She hated the height (five two); admired the figure (soft only where it should be); made plans for the straight brown hair and face (a perm, a black rinse, a trip to the dermatologist).
She blew a kiss to the girl in the mirror and left the room. Wind blasted across the motel parking lot and tossed up snow in her face. She loaded her equipment onto the maid’s cart, lowered her head, and pushed the cart along the concrete walk that ran the length of the motel. In the office, Mr. Bartleby was checking in a guest and nodded to her as she wrestled the cart through the door and around the front counter.
“All done, Cory?”
“You can call the health inspector.”
Mr. Bartleby handed a key to the guest. “Number Twenty-two. Out the door, go to your left, upstairs.” The man departed, and the motel owner turned to Cory. “Thanks for staying late.”
“I get paid extra, right?”
“Right. One hour, time and a half.” He looked out the front window. “I wish that snow would come down harder and bring in a few nervous travelers. I love a good Saturday blizzard.”
Cory watched his hand stroke up and down his massive belly. She wondered what such a huge stomach could look like bare. Maybe just like an enlarged version of the man’s round, pasty, bald head. She decided it was probably too gross for words and hoped she would never see Mr. Bartleby in a swimsuit. Or in nothing at all. She couldn’t imagine how his wife enjoyed sex, or how they even did it.
“Are you going to the basketball game tonight?” Cory looked directly at his smiling face and had a terrible thought: What if he could read minds? She breathed deeply and tried to clear hers.
“Is something wrong, Cory? Do you feel faint?” He shook his head. “You and your mother. I saw her the other day at the IGA and she looked terrible. Of course, if Mike is doing the cooking these days…”
“I’m fine.”
“Going to the game?”
“No.”
He smiled. “Still in prison?”
“That’s a fair description of my life.”
“Cory, you can’
t blame your parents. You put a nice big hole in Dawn’s store window. My oldest girl—” The phone rang and Cory was saved from once again hearing about his daughter’s string of auto accidents. Mr. Bartleby was a talker and hard to escape. As he addressed the phone, she quickly pushed the cart into the private room behind the counter and unlocked the maid’s closet. She could hear the conversation and sensed that it wouldn’t go on long. She wanted to get away before her boss again claimed her as an audience.
Yes, she had put a nice big hole in the front window of Dawn Remer’s Country Store. And yes, she was still grounded, restricted from anything resembling fun. Prison, the cheerful man liked to call it. Ha ha.
But the whole town knew she was in a social prison, knew that Cory Knutson had sneaked out one night in her stepfather’s new pickup after her mother and stepfather had said, “No, the weather is too bad and you may not drive to town.” They had left then (in the same bad weather, Cory had pointed out) in her mother’s car to visit friends.
Bored and thirsty, Cory had reasoned to herself that a half-mile trip to Dawn’s store wasn’t the same as driving five miles to town. She left to get a soda.
She hadn’t guessed there would be ice under a large patch of snow in the store’s parking lot; therefore, when she braked hard and braked fast just as she was reaching across the seat for another cassette tape, the truck went left, went right, turned around, and slammed its backside into the store window. No one was hurt, but the truck lost a taillight, the window was smashed and spread everywhere, and Dawn’s stock of magazines and romance novels was ripped and smeared with glass and grime. The damage was covered by insurance, except for the five-hundred-dollar deductible. Cory’s parents paid that but demanded that she pay them back.
So Cory found a job at Bartleby’s Inn. After the first weekend of work, she’d decided the worst thing, the crudest part, wasn’t the job, or the debt, or maybe even the grounding. But she had also lost her driving privileges, and that hurt. She loved driving—loved the movement, loved the liberty. Ever since she had passed her driver’s test and got her license, Cory had been on wheels. She drove to town, drove friends to basketball games, drove for groceries, drove anywhere. She always drove with music on. Singing, seat dancing, pounding the beat on the steering wheel, she drove to the limits of her world.
But for the last three weeks her keys and her license had been locked in a drawer in her parents’ desk.
“Extreme cruelty,” Cory muttered, then gave the maid’s cart an angry push and it rolled into the closet and slammed against the wall. Loose items rearranged themselves noisily. She emptied the dirty linen into the laundry bin, grabbed her jacket off a hook, nudged the door closed with her foot, and ran through the office just as Mr. Bartleby was saying good-bye.
“I’m done,” she said firmly. “See you tomorrow.” She was out.
She didn’t stop to put on her coat for nearly half a block and didn’t realize until she raised her arm to push it into the quilted sleeve that she was still holding the ring of motel keys. She froze while considering the gruesome thought of listening to her boss tell another lengthy family story, and for a full minute she stood in the blowing snow along Main Street, Highway 8, dangling several keys from a silver ring looped over her outstretched hand.
A car horn blasted, and she breathed again. As she watched it pull over, she dropped the key ring into her pocket. Mr. Bartleby had his own set; she wouldn’t go back.
Tony Merrill waved her into the car, and as she pulled the car door closed she shivered with the first realization of how cold it was.
“Hey, old man,” she said. “Thanks. It’s cold.” Tony was a classmate and lifelong friend. They had even dated a few times the previous year until he had been blindsided by a ferocious love for a new girl in town, Sasha Hunter. Fortunately for Tony, Sasha was likewise afflicted, and they had been together since. Cory hadn’t minded, since Sasha had become a good friend.
“You shouldn’t hitchhike.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Standing by the side of the road with your arm out?”
“I was thinking.”
“That’s a first.” He sniffed. “Nice perfume. What is it, Bleach ’n’ Bath?”
“Really. I’ve been working. Know what that is?”
“No comment.”
Cory leaned, twisted, and wiggled into her coat. She twice accidentally socked Tony on the arm as she maneuvered in the small space.
“I’m beginning to regret this simple act of kindness,” he said after she hit him the second time.
“Sorry. I left the motel in a hurry. Tony, could you drop me off at the nursing home? I have to meet my mother.”
He nodded and turned the car back onto the road. “Going to the game tonight?”
“No.”
“Still grounded? Well, it was a pretty big hole.”
Cory looked out the window. “I think I’ve had this conversation before, maybe in a bad dream.”
“When is your release?”
“One more week.”
Tony honked at some classmates who were loitering in the cold outside of Zanker’s service station. “Could you sneak out and go with Sash and me?”
“Only if I have a death wish. Anyway, you know how I love being a third wheel with you guys.”
He pulled into the nursing home parking lot. “There sure are a lot of cars. Is it visiting hours?”
“Oh, no,” Cory groaned. “I forgot they were having a wine and cheese party for the residents. The head nurse is leaving.”
“I’ll take you home.”
“It has to be almost over. And I can’t go home because Mom and I had plans.”
“Saturday night with your mother? What fun did you have in mind, a Disney movie?”
Cory closed one hand over another and sat still. She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell him. Bad enough that she was spending Saturday night with her mother. She watched as a crooked, white-haired lady waved from the door of the home to her departing guests. The woman continued waving long after the car had driven away. Cory turned to Tony.
“Do you want to know the god-awful truth?”
“Sure.”
“We’re going to a powwow.”
Tony was usually quick with a joke or a sharp remark, and Cory waited for it now. He surprised her.
“The one at the armory in Twin Lakes? Sash wanted to go.”
“She did?”
He shrugged off her disbelief. “She’s real curious about things. I told her, though, that the Indian stuff around here is all part of a different world. She called me a cute bigot. I’m not a bigot. It’s just not my world, and I don’t want to go gawk at a bunch of people dressed weird and dancing in a circle. Why are you and your mom going?”
“To gawk, I guess. One of the women she works with is sort of a friend and she invited us. My mother accepted.”
Tony combed his fingers through his chin-length blond hair, which was straight and usually hanging over half of his face, a style nearly identical to Cory’s. Tony’s mother ran the town’s only hair salon and whenever she was enthusiastic about a new look or cut it showed up on any number of townspeople, regardless of gender.
Tony’s hair fell back down over his left eye. “After Sash called me a bigot, she said it would be a good idea to have some school programs on cultural understanding.”
“Like what?”
“You’ll have to ask her. She’s full of ideas. She said…” He stroked the bumpy ridge on the underside of the steering wheel with his thumb.
“Said what?” Cory prompted.
“That since you were one of the junior reps to the student council maybe you would bring up some proposals. She’d write them.”
“When did she start cooking up all this?”
He shook his head. “Beats me. I warned you, okay?”
“You should keep her busier, Tony.”
“Hey, I try, but I can’t keep the lights off all the time.”
Co
ry feigned disgust and punched him on the arm. “Ow,” he said. “That’s three times. You’re out of here.”
Cory stood and watched as he drove away too quickly. Tony’s car swerved as he turned onto the street, and he almost swiped a lamppost. He regained control and disappeared around a corner.
Just inside the nursing home front door several residents were clustered, looking at the ground and laughing. Then they looked up and at each other, and the laughter increased until each of them seemed in danger of shaking apart. One of them noticed Cory.
“Here’s Margaret’s girl. Tell her what you did, Alicia.” A pudgy hand with several rings permanently embedded in the fingers clamped onto Cory’s arm with surprising strength. “Tell her, Alicia!”
Cory smiled at Alicia, who was one of the residents she knew best. Alicia was tall and towered over Cory. She leaned forward, and her long black hair fell around her pale face. Cory could think only of countless fairy-tale illustrations of wicked witches.
“My shoes,” Alicia began, articulating each word so clearly it seemed to pop out of her glossy, purple lips. “My shoes don’t match!” This was a signal for renewed laughter among her companions, which quickly dissipated into six simultaneous anecdotes about personal lapses of one sort or another. Cory squeezed Alicia’s hand and slipped away.
She sometimes stopped to visit with the residents when she came to get a ride with her mother after school or work. She was usually willing to listen to someone’s life story or admire a display of family pictures, but the encounters often drained her. She wondered frequently how her mother and the other nurses could sustain the energy needed to work at the home.
Her mother hadn’t managed today. Cory could tell immediately when she entered the staff lounge. Her mother was stretched out on the sofa, feet stacked heel-to-toe, eyes closed.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
Margaret Knutson turned her face slowly and Cory gasped. Her mother was as pale as Alicia.
“What’s wrong?” she repeated.
“Nothing.” Her mother sat up. “I’m just tired. Nothing’s wrong.”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” a voice said firmly. Cory turned and smiled at Roxanne Chapelle, one of her mother’s coworkers. Roxanne eased around Cory and dropped a box on the cluttered coffee table. Cory heard the muffled tinkling of metal on metal.
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