The Mud Sisters

by Edie Claire

  Teagan and Jamie stood poised for flight as the van careened uncertainly down the hill, attempting alternately to steer and pump out of an almost inevitable skid. But no movement on their part proved necessary. Despite all odds, the driver kept control, pulling the van to a gentle halt dead center in the roadway—a good six feet short of Teagan’s rear bumper.

  The women breathed out in unison. The van’s driver jumped down onto the road and called to them. “Everybody all right?” She was a petite black woman, probably somewhere in her forties, and she wore an industrial looking uniform. Despite her size, everything about her manner bespoke authority.

  “We’re all fine,” Teagan called back.

  The woman stepped over and surveyed the stopped cars, then looked back at Teagan and Jamie. “Who all was in this one?” she asked, pointing to the Corolla.

  “We were,” Teagan answered.

  The woman scowled over at the Hummer. “So where’s the fool driving this?”

  “Hiding over there,” Jamie explained, pointing, just as the man’s beet red face popped up over the barrier.

  “He better hide!” the woman fumed, heading toward the roadside where the women waited. “Blocking up the whole damn road; could have killed somebody. Still could!” She let loose a colorful string of curses, vaulted over the barrier, and began a determined march along the shoulder. “I’ll go uphill and try to flag people before we get a pileup. You call the police yet?”

  “Not yet,” Teagan replied. “But we will right now.”

  The woman threw another glance over her shoulder to where the head of the Hummer driver had disappeared again. “Damn fool idiot! Learn to drive!” she bellowed.

  “I think I love her,” Teagan muttered, pulling her cell phone out of her pocket.

  “Let’s walk downhill a little,” Jamie suggested, tugging at her elbow. “We can alert anybody coming the other way—and besides, it will be safer than here.”

  Teagan agreed.

  The 911 dispatcher was blessedly efficient, and the city police arrived within minutes. The officer accepted Teagan’s story without question; however, judging from the Hummer driver’s outraged expression and wild gesticulations, he did not seem to be having similar luck. The van driver was lauded for having safely stopped traffic upstream; apparently no vehicle other than the police truck had even tried to make it up the hill, since it was necessary to skirt around two other stalled cars at the bottom to do so.

  In the meantime, the snow, as if thumbing its nose at all concerned, had dried up to nearly nothing.

  Teagan and Jamie stood huddled in the wind, waiting for the tow truck. The police had warned them it could be a while. An officer had moved the Hummer down the hill and out of the way, but the Corolla wasn’t drivable, and until it was removed altogether the whole of McArdle Roadway would stay closed. Teagan had been able to pull her emergency blanket out of her trunk, and the women wrapped it around them both as they sought shelter in the closest thing to a windbreak—the area underneath the tracks of the Monongahela incline, which crossed over the road just downhill from the crash.

  Teagan pulled out her cell phone, hesitated, then pocketed it again.

  “Well?” Jamie asked, “Are you going to call Eric, or aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not,” Teagan answered, deciding as she spoke. “He’s got lawyerball. I don’t want to wreck his day, too.”

  Jamie’s eyebrows rose. “Lawyerball?”

  Teagan smiled. “A bunch of his attorney friends get together and play basketball on Sundays. He looks forward to it all week. I’m not going to make him miss it just so he can trudge down here in the snow and act like he’s rescuing me.”

  “Oh, right,” Jamie said wryly. “I forgot. Teagan Raye never needs to be rescued.”

  Teagan shot a look at her. “That’s Teagan Raye Hansen. Don’t forget it.”

  To her surprise, Jamie chuckled. “And how is Teagan Raye Hansen going to get herself out of this one?”

  Good question.

  Teagan thought a moment, then pulled her cell phone back out. “I’ll call my mother,” she answered. “She can’t drive on snow worth crap, but by the time we get the car towed the roads will probably be fine again.” Grimacing, she contacted Sheryl, gave the minimum necessary information, promised to let her know ASAP when and where they would be after the tow, and hung up.

  When Teagan looked at Jamie again, she was disturbed to find her grinning. “And what exactly do you find so amusing about all this?”

  Jamie’s grin broadened to a smile, even as her teeth chattered. She gripped the blanket tighter around the two of them. “It’s not this,” she answered. “Although I admit, it has gotten my mind off my own problems. I’m smiling because I was remembering ‘The Monsoon.’ Do you?”

  Teagan was about to say no when the wicked sparkle in Jamie’s eyes took her back like a shot. They were huddled under a dock, and it was raining. No, not just raining. It was a torrential downpour of solid sheets of cold water, it had come out of nowhere, and it was threatening to last forever. The girls had gotten soaked in their canoe, paddled to the nearest point on shore, and scrambled for the closest cover. The “cover” was minimal, as water still leaked in through the slats of wood above, and they had to stand waist deep in the lake in order to get under it. But at least the weight of half the water in the world was no longer pounding straight down on their heads.

  “Yeah,” Teagan said with a smirk. “I remember it. It seemed like we were holed up under that dock for hours.”

  “It was probably more like forty-five minutes,” Jamie commented. “But it stuck in both our minds, didn’t it?”

  “I even remember what we talked about,” Teagan mused. “Do you?”

  “Boys,” Jamie answered confidently. “You always wanted to talk about boys.”

  Teagan’s head whipped around. “I did not! You were the one the older guys at the lake used to watch all the time.”

  “Well, yeah,” Jamie agreed. “But I wasn’t the one who wanted to talk about it.”

  Teagan’s teeth gritted. Jamie was right, dammit. Adolescent Teagan had been boy crazy that summer. And annoyed that the few prospects around had paid her so little attention...

  “You would have gotten a lot more attention if you’d taken off that disgusting ball cap once in a while,” Jamie added. “And it didn’t help that you beat up a bully and were always strutting around pretending to be a lifeguard.”

  Teagan blinked. All this time, and distance, and anger... and Jamie’s ability to peg her thoughts was still uncanny. Her lips drew into a smirk. “At least I didn’t get caught in an elementary school bathroom kissing some guy named Marcus Slinkard.”

  Jamie frowned. “I would never kiss anybody named—” But then she smiled. “Oh yeah, I did, didn’t I? Why would you remember a story like that? I could have been making it up.”

  “If you’d been making it up, you would have used a better name.”

  “Good point,” Jamie agreed. “But for the record, he kissed me. I wasn’t interested in guys until high school.”

  An icy wind blew in suddenly from off the river, whipping up the already fallen snow and swirling it around the two of them like a blizzard. But in Teagan’s mind there was only rain, pounding hard on the wooden planks overhead, dripping through to pat her arms with steady drops of cool moisture. Her thoughts mellowed. “You wanted to cure cancer,” she said quietly.

  Jamie’s smile faded. “Yeah, that would have been nice. But turns out I sucked at biology. Never could stand dissecting things. I was always good at math, though.”

  “You could have been anything you wanted,” Teagan said, regretting the platitude as soon as the words were out of her mouth. The sad truth was that the odds had been stacked against Jamie academically the minute she entered the system. Foster homes were not always in good school districts, and moving frequently made sticking to any particular course plan difficult. Jamie’s having graduated from high school and then
worked her way through college entirely on her own, with no family safety net, was nothing short of miraculous. She didn’t need to cure cancer to be proud of herself.

  “We talked about what our tombstones would say, too,” Jamie mused. “Do you remember that?”

  Teagan considered. “I believe I was going to save the world.”

  Jamie chuckled again. “Well, you’re off to a decent start, I guess.” She let out a sigh. “You know, when I was a kid, I hated social workers. All of them. When I looked at my caseworkers, all I could see were people who were supposed to be doing all this stuff for me, but they were always so busy, and they were always saying no. No, you can’t do this; no, the system doesn’t work that way. The worst part was wanting to believe they really cared about what happened to me, when I knew they didn’t—they were just in it for the money.”

  Teagan opened her mouth to say something, but Jamie quickly cut her off. “Don’t bust a gut, Teag. I understand now. They’re given impossible situations and ridiculous caseloads and expected to do miracles while working under dicey conditions getting paid virtually nothing... and they do it because, despite appearances, they really do care. Believe me, I get that now. I wouldn’t take a job like that for any money. I think what you’re doing is great.”

  Teagan looked into Jamie’s warm golden eyes, then looked away again. She didn’t do accepting praise well. But that didn’t mean she didn’t like it.

  “I wanted my tombstone to say: ‘cured cancer and traveled the world,’” Jamie continued. Her tone turned bitter. “Somehow I don’t think that girl under the dock would be happy with: ‘banged a married man to get to Europe.’”

  The rain over Teagan’s head transformed back to snow. She twisted in the blanket to face Jamie squarely. “Stop judging yourself. You don’t have all the facts yet; Richard was only guessing. But even if what he suspected was true—” she struggled to find the right words, dismissing visions of Eric every time they intruded into her thoughts. “I understand now why the married-man thing bothers you so much. I do. In a way, you probably feel like you’ve failed your mother. But for God’s sake, Jamie—you’ve got to let that go and concentrate on what matters now. Whether the guy was married or not, he’s almost certainly the one who assaulted you!”

  Jamie blinked back at her for a long moment, her face expressionless. “Wow, Teag. You really know how to brighten up a room.”

  Teagan’s lips twitched reluctantly into a smile. Damn, it was cold. She adjusted the blanket, stamped her feet, and gazed hopefully down the road for signs of the tow truck.

  One of us does, anyway.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  With the heater in Sheryl’s PT Cruiser blasting on full power, Jamie at last felt her fingers and toes beginning to thaw. It being Sunday, the tow truck driver was willing to haul the Corolla and its previous occupants out of the middle of McArdle Roadway and back to his own garage—and that was it. All the body shops were closed; he had other calls to make. Since the garage was also technically closed, the women could not have been happier to see Sheryl waiting for them in the parking lot when the truck pulled in. But despite the warmth blowing through the Cruiser’s vents, Jamie felt a distinct chill emanating from the driver’s seat. Teagan was still in the cab with the driver completing paperwork, which left Jamie alone with Sheryl.

  “Teagan’s a good driver,” Sheryl commented, making a passable attempt at pleasantry. “But I do wish she’d let her husband ferry her around on days like this. He’s wonderful behind the wheel. And they make such a good team, no matter what they’re doing. So well suited to each other!”

  Jamie fought a grin, but failed. Sheryl’s efforts at subtlety were truly stunning. She had been nice enough during dinner on Friday, but that was before “the incident.” Her resentment of her daughter’s friend now was palpable. Which was unfortunate, because Jamie was rather fond of her.

  “I think they’re a great couple,” she agreed. “Teagan deserves a guy like him.”

  Sheryl’s eyes slid sideways. She appraised Jamie suspiciously.

  Jamie almost choked trying not to chuckle. “Seriously, Sheryl,” she assured. “I’m not after Eric. Not that he’s not fabulous, but he’s taken. And I know Teagan. And I value my eyesight. What else can I say?”

  Sheryl studied her a bit more, then drew her carefully penciled-on lips into a reluctant, albeit relieved smile. “I’m delighted to hear that.”

  The women sat in silence for a long moment, both staring out the window at the relatively uninteresting figures of Teagan and the driver sitting motionless in the truck. The snow had stopped. As Teagan had predicted, by the time the truck arrived all the main roads had been salted, transforming the icy coating of white into a safer brownish-gray slush.

  “I suppose one can hardly blame you for looking,” Sheryl said charitably. “Eric is perfectly adorable, isn’t he? If he wasn’t married to my daughter—” Her face suddenly colored with embarrassment. She cleared her throat. “Well, anyway.”

  Jamie clenched her jaws tightly. She could not laugh. But she was pleased to note that Sheryl seemed to know nothing of Jamie’s past with Eric. Teagan had been wise to keep that little gem to herself. Observing Sheryl—who had come to a garage to rescue two other women from a snowstorm wearing a low cut V-neck sweater, skinny jeans, and shiny leather dress boots—Jamie remembered how she had once viewed the older woman as exciting and worldly. In a way, she still did. Sheryl had traveled. Sheryl had dated scores of men, all types of men. Sheryl knew things.

  The haze of ill feeling that Jamie had managed to hold at bay since the crash descended on her once again. She could not avoid this demon forever. Sooner or later, it would have to be dealt with.

  “Sheryl,” she said suddenly, before she could think better of it. “Can I ask you a question?”

  Teagan’s mother looked at her with a candid expression Jamie found oddly comforting. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  Jamie cleared her own throat. “I’ve been remembering more of my past all the time, and I’m almost up to the present now. But what’s strange is that as I’ve been remembering different parts of my life, I’ve felt like I used to feel, too. When I was remembering my childhood, I didn’t think about men, for example. So it hasn’t been as simple as watching my life flash before my eyes—I’ve been reliving it. I remember what my goals were—how I felt when I changed them, what I was shooting for next. I remember my codes. You know what I mean by codes?”

  Sheryl’s thickly lashed eyelids blinked. Her forehead was creased in concentration. Jamie noted that Teagan’s mother was, if nothing else, a good listener. “I think so,” she answered. “Your own rules you live by, you mean.”

  “Exactly,” Jamie said with relief. “I never cared about anybody else’s idea of morality, but what I decided was right for myself, I stuck to. Except...” she bit her lip. She wasn’t sure why she was telling Sheryl all this. But she was committed now. “Except I think I broke my own code. At the end. And I don’t know why.”

  Sheryl emitted a sympathetic hum.

  Jamie took a breath. She wasn’t used to confiding in people; she’d never had any adult female friends worth confiding in. But the temptation was strong; her mother had always told her that talking things out was good for the soul. She would talk to Teagan if she could, but Teagan couldn’t help her on this one—and that was Jamie’s fault.

  “I never had anything to do with married men,” she blurted. “Ever. But I realize now that I did just recently—that I must have. And I don’t understand how it could happen.” She turned and faced Sheryl squarely. “I mean seriously, what the hell was I thinking? I’m not saying I was some pillar of virtue—I never worried whether a guy was dating somebody else or liked somebody else or even whether he was supposed to marry somebody else... I figured the choice was his to make. But I drew the line at guys who were already married because I had to be number one. Period. I would never let a guy use me like my mother got used. What could make me turn
my back on everything I always cared about, everything I valued for myself?”

  Sheryl’s eyes studied Jamie’s for a long moment. Then she turned her gaze to her lap, raised one perfectly manicured nail to her lips, and nibbled. After a long moment, she sighed and turned back to Jamie with a small, sad smile.

  “I wish to hell I could say that I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she answered, speaking in an unfamiliar voice devoid of any affectation. “But it happens, Jamie. It happens to a lot of women.”

  “But why?” Jamie pressed. “I could have any single man I wanted!”

  Sheryl’s smile broadened. “Oh, I don’t doubt that. I could have too, when I was your age. But sometimes the forbidden has its own appeal.” Her expression turned wistful, then she caught Jamie’s eyes. “Were you in love with him?”

  “Absolutely not,” Jamie answered immediately.

  Sheryl’s eyebrows arched. “You sure?”

  Jamie nodded. “I would remember if I had those kind of feelings. I don’t remember him, not really, but I can see flashes... and there’s nothing warm and fuzzy anywhere in those pictures, believe me.”

  Sheryl’s lips pursed. “Well, that’s different, then.”

  “Different from what?” Jamie insisted. “I just want to understand... to figure out where my head was at.”

  Sheryl looked out the window toward the tow truck, as if confirming that her daughter remained out of earshot. “I understand, Jamie. Believe me. I’ve certainly done things I’m not proud of. Most of the time by accident—meaning that when I figured out the guy was married, I broke it off. But I wasn’t always trying that hard to spot them, and when I was younger I saw what I wanted to see. The fact is, Jamie, if you weren’t in love, and you knew he was married, he must have had something else you were after.”

  A silver strand, delicate, yet strong. Masculine hands over her shoulders, tiny stones twinkling in the light...

  “But I never cared about things before,” Jamie murmured. “I wanted to earn my own way.”