After You Were Gone

by Alexis Harrington

  Yeah, that was Cherry, too. Always interested in Number One. “At least you knew it before you had them. Some people don’t figure that out until it’s too late.” His own mother’s image flitted across the back of his memory.

  “Motherhood is one thing I don’t miss. But I sure miss you, lover.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll prove it!” she challenged. “You come by the Captain Gas. My shift ends at eight tonight; then we can get a few drinks and talk about the good old days.”

  Did he really want to start this again? he asked himself. There hadn’t been many “good old days” in Mitchell Tucker’s life. And the few he’d known had not involved Cherry. Then he heard his father inside, coughing his phlegmy smoker’s cough and swearing at the TV news anchor reporting a story about government spending. Maybe it would be good to get away from here for a while, after all.

  “I guess I could meet you at Lupe’s,” he said, not wanting to be pinned down to anything more. It wasn’t a date, at least not in his mind. And he wanted his own car in case he wanted to make a quick exit.

  “Ooooh, brrr! That’s not too friendly—what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, I’ve just got some things to do. I’ll meet you at Lupe’s at nine.” He’d take the junker Skylark. It was the only car in the yard that would actually start.

  “All right, then,” she said, apparently satisfied. “I’ll see you there. I can’t wait to get a look at you again.”

  Mitch chuckled and clicked off, then looked at his hands. They were covered with grease. He’d need a shower and probably a shave, too. He stood and went inside.

  “Got a date, huh?” James said, grinning. “I knew the females would be jumping your bones once they found out you were in town.”

  “It’s not a date,” Mitchell said, thrusting the cordless phone into James’s hand on his way to the bathroom. “I’m just going to have a beer or two with Cherry.”

  James wiped the greasy receiver on the leg of his jeans. “Cherry Claxton? We’ve all been out with her one time or another.”

  Mitchell stopped. “Yeah?”

  “Sure. Cherry doesn’t much like being tied to one guy. We gave her a spin while you were gone.”

  A funny quiver went through Mitchell’s gut, but he ignored it and shrugged. “Well, that’s her problem.”

  “So I told that son of a bitch if he thought he was going to rob the place while I was there, he was in for a world of hurt. Nobody cheats Cherry Claxton.” She downed her shot of tequila and slammed the glass on the laminate table. “Nobody.”

  Mitchell raised his brows and sat back. “It’s pretty hard to argue with someone pointing a gun in your face.”

  Cherry dismissed the comment with a careless wave. “Oh hell, I figured it wasn’t real. Anyway, some guys came in just then and saw what was happening. They jumped that little shit and held him till Gunter showed up in his squad car.” She flipped a long red curl over her shoulder. “A few months later, some meth head and his dumb girlfriend came in and tried to hold up the place with a pair of pliers. Pliers! Can you believe it? By then, I’d talked Ernie, the owner, into getting me a shotgun. So this time I had the gun, and those scabby tweakers ran like their butts had been dipped in Lupe’s hot sauce.” She laughed and cuddled up to him on the seat of the red vinyl booth. “But enough about my glamour job at the Captain Gas. Let’s talk about you.”

  They had been sitting here for about an hour, and Cherry had done most of the talking. It was a slow night at Lupe’s, but it looked and smelled the same as Mitchell remembered it. A blue haze of cigarette smoke hung over the place, and Vince Gill wailed from the jukebox about being a victim of life’s circumstances. God, if that didn’t fit. Mitchell had caught a few curious glances, and some people leaned their heads together to mutter about him. For the most part, though, he was invisible. It was like that everywhere he went. People didn’t harass him, but they weren’t likely to forget the most sensational bad guy in Gila Rock’s recent history.

  He took a long sip from his beer and shrugged, inhaling Cherry’s heavy cloud of perfume. “There isn’t much to tell. You know where I’ve been the last few years.”

  “Did you ever think about me?”

  He gave her a dry look. “As often as you thought about me.”

  She smiled. “You might not realize how often that was. We go back a long way, you and me.” Her freckled face lit up, and she barked out another laugh. “Remember that summer night before our junior year when a bunch of us got together with a pony keg out on the flats? Billy Jamison decided we should play another game of mailbox baseball, so down the road we went in his beat-up Eldorado, the radio blaring. You had that great swing! Old man Bennett’s mailbox went flying. I think it bounced off his roof and landed in the yard. I was hanging onto the back of your belt to keep you from falling out the car window. We were all laughing our heads off.”

  Mitch chuckled. Everything had been different then. “Yeah, I remember. I damn near dislocated my shoulder hitting that post. And then Alvie was so mad he built a brick monument around the next one. I suppose after losing a couple, he decided to put an end to it. A smashed mailbox is just one of the joys of living in the sticks.”

  “At least we never got caught.” She arched a brow and gave him a better view of her cleavage. He felt her bare foot creep up the inside of his thigh beneath the table and nestle against his crotch. “Not at that, anyway.”

  Mitchell grabbed her foot and put it on his knee. “Keep that up and we’ll get caught now.”

  “Pffft, no one is paying any attention to us. But if you’re feeling shy, we could go back to my place,” she said, with her boobs pressed against the tabletop.

  That thready streak of hesitation went through him again, especially when he thought about all the other men who’d probably gotten the same invitation from her. Then he shrugged. He didn’t want to start up something with Cherry, but he didn’t have anything else to do. Beer had put a slight but pleasant blur on everything, and he sure as hell didn’t want to go back to the mobile home. “Okay, why not?”

  She straightened up and gave him a come-hither look. “Great! We’ll have a little party of our own. You can follow me over.”

  He drank the rest of his beer in one gulp and edged out of the booth. “I’m just going to stop at the head first. My back teeth are starting to float.” He threw a couple of bills on the table. “I’ll meet you outside.”

  She slithered across the vinyl seat after him and put her sharp-heeled shoe back on. “Okay, honey.” When she walked toward the door, her hips swayed, and she looked back. “Don’t be long.”

  He made his way toward the restrooms, past the neon beer signs and crummy, wood-paneled walls. In the john, which still smelled like farts overlaid with deodorizer, he saw that the old condom vending machine was there. The price had gone up, though—three bucks. Someone had written on it with a permanent marker, This gum tastes like rubber. Yeah, everyone was a comedian. He shuffled through the remaining cash in his money clip and fed the machine.

  On the way out of the bar, he glanced at the bulletin board that had hung there next to the doors as long as he could remember. All sorts of notices and ads got posted on it: church pancake breakfasts, livestock for sale, babysitting services, real estate—even Benavente’s had a help-wanted flyer stuck in the cork, looking to fill two recent openings, his and Cabrera’s, no doubt.

  But one in particular, copied on neon-pink paper, stopped him dead.

  HANDYMAN NEEDED

  FOR ODD JOBS AND REPAIRS

  APPLY AT BICKHAM’S ON ROSALITA ST.

  Bickham’s. This was perfect, too good to pass up. Like an open invitation right into Julianne’s living room. The other chances he’d had to confront her had failed, but this time he wouldn’t let her blow him off. He pulled the sign off the cork board.

  He remembered that Cherry was waiting outside for him, but suddenly his halfhearted interest in spending the night with her fizzled c
ompletely. He turned and headed for the parking lot, dreading her reaction. She’d be typically pissed off, but he was going to send her on her way for now. Alone.

  He had some planning to do.

  “Look at this, Dale! This is the worst yet. You know who’s responsible for this—are you going to tell me there’s nothing you can do?” Julianne stood in her oldest jeans and a blue tank top under early morning sun, with the shotgun cradled in one arm. Her clothes didn’t look much better than the charred remains of flaming dog-shit bags—nine in all—that sat side by side on each tread down the center of the back steps of the dime store. They were like disgusting luminaires from a bad home-and-garden magazine. Martha Stewart would never envision this. Fat, lazy blowflies buzzed around them, landing occasionally in the mess, grooming their iridescent bodies and wings with their legs.

  At least the concrete steps couldn’t burn, too, or the whole building might have caught. She could see Sheriff Dale Gunter making a mighty effort to keep a straight face, which only made her angrier. Considering everything, how could he possibly think this was funny?

  They stood at the bottom of the steps behind her building. His squad car was parked next to the side, a gleaming black-and-white Crown Vic with a light bar that was probably never used except in speed traps on the highway into town. Not that Julianne expected sirens and flashing lights, but nothing around here seemed to qualify as urgent to Dale Gunter.

  “Nope, I’m watching the Tuckers. But this feud between your families has been going on longer than even I can remember,” he said.

  She stiffened, and the shotgun slid down to her palm. “I never had anything to do with that! That was between Earl and my father, and I never knew what it was about.” Even Mitchell hadn’t known. They’d talked about it during those stolen, desperate moments and nights they’d spent together so long ago.

  Gunter gestured at the Remington. “I’d feel a lot better if you put that down for now, Julianne.”

  She nodded and propped the weapon against the building, but not without reluctance. This ongoing problem was making her jumpy.

  The sheriff offered, “I can lean on Mitchell Tucker and push pretty hard. Do you have anything solid I can use? Did you see him out here?”

  She crossed her arms and couldn’t smooth the sullen, frustrated tone off her answer. “No.” She’d just seen the light of the flames reflected on the apartment ceiling. She wasn’t afraid of fire in general, but that displaced glow had jolted her out of bed and summoned the memories of the barn fire that haunted her sleep, even now. “By the time I got downstairs and saw what was going on, he—or they—were long gone. And there are the midnight phone calls . . . some voice I don’t know . . .”

  “Julianne, if I’m going to make this stick, it would help to have something to go on. It doesn’t matter if I know the perp who did this.”

  She straightened her arms to hang stiffly at her sides, her hands clenched into fists. “Perp—perp! This isn’t CSI Miami with a big city full of possible suspects. It’s just Gila Rock. Mitchell Tucker comes back to town and all this starts up again. That seems pretty cut and dried. He’s your perp.”

  The sheriff shook his balding ginger head. “Yeah—or maybe some high school kids could be behind this. It’s a pretty juvenile prank, not the sort of thing grown men would do.”

  She tightened her lips into a thin line. “Should I look for an accomplice—like the dog?”

  He pulled off his mirrored sunglasses before he stuck one temple in his shirtfront and leveled his pale-eyed gaze on her. “I want to help you—I’m not your enemy, y’know.”

  Right now he wasn’t much of a friend, either.

  He gestured at the scorched remains. “Uh, you didn’t step on these, did you?”

  She heaved a deep sigh. “Of course not. I came around from the front door. But how bad does this harassment have to get before I can get something done about it? You can’t have forgotten how Wes died, and—and everything else that happened. That was supposedly a juvenile prank, too. I hope it won’t take a repeat of that horrible, horrible night to get something done.”

  That got him—he couldn’t just brush it off. He straightened and shifted the weight of all the equipment strapped to the paunch of his middle-aged waist. “Okay, I’ll send a car around at night to step up patrols here.”

  Under the circumstances, Julianne knew that was the best she could hope for. Her shoulders sagged. “All right, Dale, thank you. I appreciate it.”

  He nodded and put his sunglasses back on, then headed for the patrol car. “You call if you see anyone out here, day or night.”

  It took considerable willpower to keep from reminding him that she was doing just that. At least he was trying.

  She watched the cruiser pull out, its tires crunching the gravel. Turning to look at the mess on her stairs, she sighed. She could easily imagine those idiot Tucker brothers sneaking over here last night with no witnesses except katydids and crickets to see them leave this calling card. The sun climbed higher, and so did the stench. There was no help for it—she had to clean it up, and it would take more than a hose. Cade had already called to say he couldn’t borrow his sister’s truck for a few days, because she was using it to help haul stuff to the church for a rummage sale. But with that broken arm he wouldn’t be able to push a shovel or a rake anyway. There was so much to be done inside, but here she was, fooling around with this nonsense. Except this was worse than nonsense. It was an insult, juvenile or not, and it her made her feel more vulnerable, and Julianne hated that.

  She marched to the small shed and grabbed a few tools, plus rubber boots, a gallon bottle of bleach, a bucket, and the garden hose. Then she sat on an upended old Nehi soda crate, pulled on the boots, and took up her weapons. Shoveling and scraping the steps, trying to hold her breath and wave off the flies, she could easily imagine how those bastards would laugh if they could see her now. The image infuriated her. Suddenly she glanced around, wondering if that had been their plan all along—to complete her humiliation by watching her clean this up. But the back of the building didn’t provide many hiding places. The higher vantage spots looking down on Gila Rock were too far away to provide as much satisfaction as front-row seats. Just a lot of craggy boulders sticking out of the earth at sharp angles, streaked here and there with various minerals. Still . . .

  No, she thought, those people were not going to run her out of town. Not now. And she refused to give into the galloping paranoia she’d lived with for so long. But that damned feud—she considered the trouble and grief it had brought about, the lives affected. And even now, after all these years, she still didn’t know what had triggered it. The long-simmering grudge had survived the years and those originally involved. Her own father’s death hadn’t ended it, and neither had Wes’s.

  Marrying Wes had been such a horrible mistake. She should never have let herself get talked into that.

  She had never dated another boy except Mitchell, and Paul Boyce had assumed that his daughter had never gone out with anyone except friends. So when he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, he’d worried about what would happen to his girl with no one to help her after he was gone. He’d always been convinced that women needed protectors, not partners.

  He’d had an old friend with a nice son named Wesley, and they’d arranged an introduction of the two young people. Julianne had been just seventeen. She’d wanted to argue and scream to her father that he was blackmailing her with his illness, and that it was unfair of him to put this burden on her shoulders. She’d wanted to tell him she loved Mitchell. That this arranged marriage was an old-fashioned relic of a plan that wasn’t necessary. But she couldn’t do it to him. He’d been only a pale, fragile shell.

  In a panic, she had told Mitchell what was happening. If they didn’t do something—run away, elope, something—she might very well end up married to Wesley Emerson. But Mitchell had fiddle-farted away his time, playing baseball, unwilling to commit, and was busy running around wi
th his friends. He’d asked her to wait a little longer, to stall on the wedding and not lose faith in him. He’d said that baseball scouts were considering him for the pros, and he couldn’t make any moves until he’d heard what they’d decided. He hadn’t seemed to grasp that the clock was ticking, and the crushing weight of familial duty was pushing her inexorably toward that arranged marriage to Wes. She’d felt abandoned and used by Mitchell. But when she’d told him about the wedding, his expression had turned to stone, and he’d accused her of having no faith in him, of being fickle.

  After she’d married Wesley, then . . . oh, then, the problems had begun, dished up by the Tucker brothers in great, heaping portions. The harassment, the pranks. And then the ultimate calamity that had turned Julianne into a widow. Mitchell had claimed he hadn’t known Wes was in the barn when the fire had started. Maybe he hadn’t, but the result had been the same. Wesley had been a good man, earnest and sincere. In fact, Cade possessed a lot of the same qualities that Wes had had. Wes’s attraction to her had been immediate and shyly intense. Five years older than she, he’d grown up on a ranch on the other side of the county, and he’d known what it took to keep a family operation afloat in this economy. Wes had loved her with his whole, simple, honest soul, and he’d been thrilled when she’d told him she was pregnant.

  But Julianne had not loved him. In their short life together, he’d never guessed that another man still owned her heart, and for that she was grateful. He hadn’t realized that when they made love, only her body had been present, nor had he known that his touch had never quickened her or reached the empty, longing part of her. She had cheated him of everything he’d thought he’d won when he’d married her.

  But it still wasn’t over.

  The more her mind churned through the memories, the harder she worked, and the hotter she became. Her tank top stuck to her back, and her hair was soaked with sweat. They were well into May, and that meant summer was already underway here in the Big Bend, with scorching heat that bleached most vegetation and tanned or burned nearly everything else. She’d supposed that running a store would be cleaner, cooler work than pig farming, but—