1635:The Dreeson Incident (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  "That was long before Simon Jones became minister at First Methodist, of course. The man we had then was inclined to listen to Nani. She was taking on as if the remarriage of a widow was something shameful. Equivalent to the woman taken in adultery. She didn't even want us to hold it in the sanctuary. She wanted us to go to the parsonage. Street clothes. No attendants. No guests. No reception. She didn't want Anne to be present; Don's parents agreed with her. If it had been possible in our culture back then, I think they would have hired mourners, the way the down-timers do now to follow the hearses through the streets.

  "Finally, believe it or not, with nothing procedural decided here in Grantville, we drove down to Charleston the day after Christmas, got the license there, and got married at the courthouse, with Wes and Lena as witnesses. Wes knew people there because he'd been working in Charleston for several years, ever since he graduated from WVU. He persuaded the judge to waive the waiting period, so we didn't have to perch somewhere for three days. We've never had a church ceremony.

  "It isn't as if we launched ourselves into marriage to the sound of joyous celebrations, surrounded by legions of well wishers. So no wedding photo for the wall. In our dresser, I have a polaroid snapshot. I can show it to you. The judge's secretary took it. The four of us with the judge, in his chambers. That was his gift to all the couples he married. It's really faded, even though I've kept it in an envelope. If it had been up on Gran's wall, exposed to the light, it would be entirely gone by now."

  "Mom," Missy asked. "If things were like that, why did you marry Dad?"

  Debbie looked up frowning. "Your father can be very persuasive when he sets his mind to it. And he was persistent."

  That wasn't much help. "Come on, Mom," she said.

  Missy could almost see her mother counting up the birthdays and deciding that Missy was old enough to hear this now.

  "Nobody ever said that I had a full figure and it's a lot fuller now than it was then. Before we were married, Chad had never seen me undressed. He'd seen me in tee-shirts and shorts, of course, driving me between WVU and Grantville for two years. Anyway, after we started, well, sort of dating, I thought about letting him see more, like me in a bathing suit. Two piece. I wasn't, um, all that sure that he was prepared for stretch marks."

  Debbie fiddled with the dishcloth. "But any occasion that I was wearing a bathing suit, he would have been too. I wasn't quite ready to deal with that much… uncovered physique yet, the summer before we got married."

  Missy gave her mother one of those looks.

  "Well, all right. Being a young schoolteacher in any small town has the wonderful inhibiting effect of being the under watchful eye of not just your current students' parents but also that of all your former students' parents and future students' parents, as well as anyone in the school administration, as well as all the students from your school. Adding Don's and my parents was just frosting on the cake. Both of us all but nude in public when we started kissing, word would spread like wildfire."

  Her mother would obviously rather not have said that. Perhaps as a slight revenge, she added, "Which is something that you might want to keep in mind in regard to Ron Stone, now that spring is coming. Considering how far the two of you apparently managed to strip in a snowbank in the middle of February."

  "That," Missy said a little stiffly, "was a one time aberration."

  Debbie's face clearly expressed her doubts. "Keep in mind how far aberrant you would have been by the end if you hadn't started out wearing parkas," she admonished. "You both had melted snow in your underwear and I did not buy the 'snow angels' explanation for one second.

  "Anyway, Chad had to have been able to tell, by looking and feeling through my clothes, that he wasn't getting 'lush.' And when the time came, he seemed happy enough with what there was of my body. Ah… Well, it wasn't very impressive, but it worked fine. All the parts were in order. I got pregnant with you kids and all that."

  Missy took a very deep breath. "What went wrong? Nobody explained it to me, back then. Nobody explained anything."

  Debbie looked at her. "Long run or short run?"

  "Both. If you will."

  "Long run, I couldn't shut the door. Sometimes you have to shut a door. I couldn't admit to myself that the way things had worked out, for all practical purposes, Anne was my younger sister rather than my daughter.

  "I don't want to blame anyone else. Don's parents would never have liked it that I was marrying again. Bruce and Lily might, just barely might, have accepted my remarriage if I had chosen a man fifteen or twenty years older than I was, well established, and they could have persuaded themselves that I was marrying again for the sake of security. Stability. Something like that.

  "But Chad was just getting started, he was younger than I was, and he was, ah, obviously very, very healthy. Which didn't really give them much leeway for fooling themselves that there wasn't a physical attraction component involved in my decision to marry him. Which, as far as they were concerned, was adultery. Betrayal of Don. Even after nearly ten years.

  "Maybe, even then, they would have tolerated it better if I had given Mom and Dad custody of Anne. But I didn't. Wouldn't. I did still want to hang on to Don, in some way, through Anne. Even though, by the time I remarried, it was really too late for that. The first few months of our marriage were the easiest, before I put my foot down and insisted that Anne was going to live with us.

  "By the time Anne reached her teens, things were very, very difficult. The year after you were born was one of the worst. She was rebellious, Chip turned from three to four and was incredibly active, I was dealing with a baby. Next year almost the same, except that Chip turned from four to five and I was dealing with a toddler. I was tired all the time, like the energy was draining out of me.

  "I kept telling myself that if I could hang on until Anne started college, everything would calm down. In 1991, she was scheduled to start WVU. Tuition paid, board and room paid. Three days before she was supposed to leave, she announced that she had changed her mind. Didn't want to go. Wanted to stay with Nani and Pop and commute to Fairmont State, instead. Nani said yes. Pop put his foot down and said no. He thought she needed to learn to live independently. Don's parents got involved. Anne blamed me. Us. Chad. She went to WVU. But she made us regret it. Not academically. She did really well. But the tension built up and built up.

  "By then, I was staring forty in the face. Exhausted all the time. Not that… responsive to Chad. Starting to feel, really feel, that I was quite a bit older than he was. One thing led to another."

  "You mean," Missy said, "that he had an affair and you threw him out."

  Debbie's face turned pale.

  "It's true," Missy said. "Nobody explained anything to me at the time, but I found out later. Could you really expect that I wouldn't?"

  Debbie shook her head. "I suppose not."

  "Why did you take him back?" Missy had decided to press the issue. This might be the best chance she ever had, with her mother a captive audience at the sink. "Why did you take him back. After he had done that?"

  "Once I realized that my wounded pride wasn't worth it."

  Debbie stopped. "That isn't quite true. It's only a tiny part of the truth, though I guess it had to come first. We didn't plan that meeting as leading to a reconciliation. Just that we finally had to get together and resolve some issues. We couldn't leave the separation hanging forever. We had to decide something. I hate to say it, but before Chip went to live with Grandma Jenkins, he wasn't dealing with the situation well at all. By then though, he and your Gran were getting along well enough that I started having nightmares about having him live with your Gran any longer. Nightmares about having my experience with Anne repeated. We had to come to some sort of closure."

  Debbie laughed suddenly, a little bitterly. "In a way, we owe the reconciliation to Anne, I suppose. I asked Gran to take you for the day so your dad could come over to the house without the extra emotions that you'd bring into the situation.
I was surprised when she said, 'About time the two of you got this mess settled.' I didn't tell Mother and Pop he was coming. Anne was living with them again and working at the clinic in Fairmont.

  "Chad and I were sitting on opposite sides of the living room, sort of talking around what to do, the way we had every time we had tried to come to some kind of a resolution before. Then I heard a key in the front door and Anne came in. I didn't know she was coming. It was a Saturday morning, she should have been at the clinic, but she'd exchanged shifts with another nurse who wanted a weekday afternoon free for her child's teacher conference. When she saw Chad there, she started to spout Mother's lines, which I had been hearing for nearly two years. 'Time to get rid of him. What is he doing in this house? Pull the plug, take off his rings, get a divorce.'

  "First, I pointed out that it was his house, really. Which it is. This is the old Williams place. We bought it when it came on the market because he had a sentimental attachment to it and I adored all the oak and walnut woodwork. It's where your Grandma Jenkins grew up. Her parents moved into it after her grandfather died and your father used to visit them here. After Grandpa Joe died, Grandma Esther eventually went to live with your Great-aunt Elizabeth and sold the house. It's not the easiest house to keep, even after all the remodeling we did, but that's fine.

  "Then I said that I had taken off her father's rings long after his death, but Chad was still alive and we were still married.

  "Finally, I guess, she pushed me too far. I stood up and said, 'I don't want a divorce. I want him to come back to me and have things right between us again. More than anything else in the world.'

  "I've never seen Anne look so shocked.

  "But not much more than Chad did, honestly.

  "Not that I even knew he would be willing to come back. He'd never said so. I kept thinking to myself, the whole time we were separated, that he was probably waiting for me to get to the point where I would cut the knot and set him free to get on with it. He wasn't quite forty, yet. He could have started his personal life over, easily enough.

  "Just saying that had brought me to my limits. I couldn't do or say anything else, right then. I was standing there, shaking like a leaf. I couldn't believe that I'd said that.

  "Anne opened her mouth to say something else.

  "Chad got up and put his arms around me.

  "Then he laid down the law to Anne in no uncertain terms. The first time since we married. He told her that she was an adult woman and a registered nurse now, not a ten year old child. So she had two choices. The first was to go home, think about the fact of our marriage in a reasonable way, and come back in a couple of days when she was prepared to talk and act rationally. The second was to go home and not come back at all. And he added that if she went wailing to Vera and Lily and sicced them down on us before we were ready to deal with them, the first option would drop out of the picture.

  "She stood there looking at us for a little while. Then she left.

  "The next week was worse than when we told our families we were getting married in the first place. Chad's father was dead by then, so the only oasis of calm was provided by Wes and Lena. They were back in Grantville by then. Wes had left the state government and taken the job with Marion County Parks and Recreation.

  "I don't know what Wes said to your Gran, either, but I know he said something, because I know that Chad didn't have a chance to talk before we officially broke the news to her. She heard the news, nodded her head, called Chip and then stood stiffly with her lips closed tightly as Chip started bringing all the boxes of his stuff down from his room. They were already packed. She didn't like it, not one damn bit but knew that if we'd settled it between us, it was better this way. She's one tough lady."

  "Why did Dad come back?"

  Her mother looked at her. "I don't know, really. For the sake of you and Chip, I suppose. Chad never said. I'd said that I wanted to have things right with us again. Once we decided to get back together, it seemed to me as if asking more questions would be like picking at a scab. That things might never heal over if I kept trying to examine them under a microscope. Even if they weren't quite entirely right, that was better than an open sore.

  "Of course, I never really understood why he married me in the first place. Why he wanted to. He told me he loved me, but guys always say that. He could have dated any girl in Grantville. Any girl in Fairmont or Clarksburg, for that matter. Someone he had met in Morgantown. And he did date a lot of different girls, up until the day in May he told me we were getting married. Out of a clear blue sky. Actually, it was cloudy and started to pour rain almost right away. So he could certainly have married someone younger. Someone without all the tribulations and problems I brought him. Anyone he wanted. Someone with whom things would be simpler. I always realized that."

  Missy nodded. She had a lot to think about.

  She wished that she had the guts to ask one more question. Were you ever in love with him? Did you love him, Mom? But she didn't. Not right now. She had a feeling that she'd pushed her mother about as far as she dared. It sure wasn't because you wanted to be Mrs. County Commissioner. Or Mrs. SoTF Senator. You hate the politics. Why did you marry him, Mom?

  Chapter 57

  Grantville

  It was finally the block of reservations at the workmen's hostel that provided unambiguous evidence of Bryant Holloway's participation in the events leading up to the hospital riot, once they started looking. Steve Matheny had made it quite plain that the fire department had not had any training project under way the last week of February and first few days of March, and had known nothing of the men who had been billeted there with Bryant's name on the ledger.

  "We've got to deal with it," Wes said. "There's no way to pretend that he wasn't involved."

  The rest of the people around the table looked at him with considerable relief.

  "It's going to put you somewhat on the spot, Wes," Ed Piazza said. "He's your son-in-law."

  "He was involved with it. He was actively, heavily, involved with Jacques-Pierre Dumais. He was recruiting the thugs the man used. Mostly for the attack on the hospital, as far as Don Francisco can find out, but a few of them were in the mix at the synagogue. He's as culpable as the attackers themselves."

  "The question now," Arnold Bellamy said, "is not whether we deal with it, but how we deal with it."

  "We need to show that the judicial process does not play favorites because of family connections. Arrest him. Try him. Lenore doesn't know, yet," Wes said. "I wish she would never have to find out. That's what I wish as her father, at least. But there's no help for it."

  "Lenore is a big girl now," Clara said. "She should not have any illusions about Bryant left. If she ever had any to start with."

  The men looked at her.

  "She does not know what he was doing in this matter. I am sure of that." Clara paused. "She will have no reason for surprise that he was capable of doing it, I think. I will accept the task of telling her, if the rest of you prefer."

  Cory Joe Lang, representing Don Francisco Nasi, simply said, "Thanks." This relieved the other men around the table from the obligation of saying anything at all.

  "Then," Cory Joe said, "the next thing is to see about getting Holloway into safe custody. Preferably before the more radical local CoC people find out what he was doing, catch him, and decide to string him up in public without considering what the consequences for Lenore and the rest of the Jenkins family might be. They're prepared to live with a judicial process, I think. Isn't that really what you were saying, Wes?"

  "I have people looking," Preston Richards said. "They haven't found him yet."

  The phone rang early. Bryant grabbed it.

  One of the clerks at the workmen's hostel owed him a favor. So now he knew that the police had taken the record book containing that block reservation and that Matheny had been right there saying that it had not been for the fire department.

  So it looked like it was about time to get out of
town.

  But he was going to do a few things before he did.

  He went across to the nursery and looked at Lenore on the cot. She had slept right through the phone ringing, the lazy bitch. The first order of business was to make sure she stayed available until he got around to her.

  He had her more than halfway tied before she woke up. The rest was no problem. In his job, a guy had to keep himself in good shape.

  He walked right past the crib. If the other bitches said that he wasn't to lay a finger on Weshelle, then he wouldn't. The kid could lie there all day in her stink as far as he was concerned.

  ***

  Item the first. Wes Jenkins' German woman who had tried twice to get Lenore to walk out on him.

  She worked with Wes, at the Bureau of Consular Affairs. Bad example. Maybe she was why Lenore had gone back to work, too. He'd always thought that old-time women had been domestic. Docile. Big miscalculation. These Krauts. Rebecca. Gretchen. Clara. Wannabe Amazons, the whole batch of them. Some of them could make an outright American feminazi look like a piker. Like the women out in the fields, when a guy drove by, working like men. Or someone like Bibi Barlow, who outranked him.

  Item the second. Lenore. Damn Lenore.

  Item the third. Those papers Dumais had told him to get rid of. If Dumais had wanted him to get rid of them, they must have some value. That was why the three garbage cans were still on Veda Mae's back porch. He hadn't ever bothered to put them out at the curb to be dumped.

  Can't make that item the third. No way to move them. Item the third. Transportation. Pickup truck from the fire department lot. That was what he got when he went places on detail.

  Then item the fourth, get those papers.

  Somebody, somewhere, in the SoTF bureaucracy had decided to issue drivers' licenses to operators of motorcycles and dirt bikes.

  Separate from drivers' licenses for four wheeled vehicles. Not to be obtained by mail. Granted only between the hours of eight o'clock a.m. and eleven o'clock a.m. in the Department of Internal Affairs office in Grantville. Required to be obtained by April fifteenth. Subject to administrative penalties. Identification required.