by Julia Keller
After all that, only someone with a heart as black and hard as the surface of this parking lot could pass on by without first digging through a change purse for a few spare coins or—Praise the Lord!—an actual piece of folding money. The last time, Raylene had netted $647.18 over a three-day period. But that was March, when the cool morning air had caused Marla Kay to wrap her arms around her tiny little torso and shiver ever so slightly. Jackpot, Raylene had told herself back then, assessing the weather and the girl’s beleaguered appearance that morning. Ka-ching.
Today, under a blue sky with cottony dots of clouds stuck here and there, the prospects for pity seemed severely reduced. When you added that to the general lack of customers in the lot to start with, there was ample justification for the thought rattling sadly around Raylene’s head like the last pill in a prescription bottle:
We’re screwed.
Honestly, she wondered why she had resumed the scheme at all. For the past few months she had been making decent money at the other thing. It was more dangerous, sure, but it was also more reliable. This was just plain pointless. And stupid, too. Apparently nobody gave a rat’s ass anymore about a sick little girl. Heartless bastards. What kind of town was this, anyway?
A large woman in a bad wig was walking out of the store. Raylene started to cue Marla Kay to cough, but then she realized that the woman wasn’t a customer. She was an employee. You could tell by the pink smock with the blue L on the pocket. Raylene recognized her; it was that nosy cashier. The one who had tried to talk to Marla Kay the last time. The one who had come out that morning and glared at them, before going back inside to resume her shift.
Bitch needs to mind her own damned business.
Raylene tapped the top of Marla Kay’s head. The girl looked up.
“We’re leaving,” Raylene said. “Come on.”
Marla Kay rose in one quick, fluid motion. That annoyed Raylene, and she gave her a mean glance of reprimand. She had told the girl over and over again: When there’s a chance that people are watching, you gotta move real slow. You’re sick, remember? You hurt all over. You’re suffering, okay? Suffering something awful. So act like it.
Marla Kay was always forgetting. She loved to run and jump, and Raylene knew that the burden of trying to look sick and weak weighed heavily on her. The truth was that Marla Kay Hughes did not have cancer. She had never had cancer. She had not been sick a day in her life.
“Where we going, Mommy?”
“Never you mind,” Raylene snapped back. “And don’t talk so loud. I told you and told you. Talk like it’s hurting you to talk. In a whisper. And don’t you forget to cough.” There were a million things she had to make sure Marla Kay remembered.
The little girl nodded at her mother. She started to bend over and retrieve the Dr Pepper container, but Raylene clamped a hand on her arm and jerked her upright again.
“Leave it,” Raylene said. “Got enough to carry as it is.” She yanked the yardstick out of the trash can and handed it to Marla Kay. Then she stowed one trash can inside the other. She lifted the cans and started to move toward the road that ran in front of Lymon’s. There was a secondhand clothing store across the street. Just in the past few minutes she had seen more cars going in and out of that lot than had visited Lymon’s all morning long. The grocery store was visited mostly by women, but the clothing store clientele was fifty-fifty, and that was a good thing. Men sometimes were more generous than women. Not always—you would think so, with a cute little girl sitting there, the stamp of the cancer on her sad pinched face—but sometimes. Other times, men were even more suspicious than women. They’d look sideways at Marla Kay, holding their car keys in a hard cupped palm, and they’d pull their mouths to one side or the other, maybe comparing her in their minds to other people they had known with the cancer, a soon-to-vanish grandparent or an unlucky cousin.
Nobody trusts anybody anymore, was how Raylene put it to herself. That’s the problem with the world today. No trust.
She looked back at the store. The cashier had gone back inside again. Good.
Raylene led Marla Kay to the edge of the road. In order to tote the yardstick the girl had first slung it over her shoulder, but her mother corrected her: She should drag it, like Jesus hauling the cross up Calvary. She was supposed to be exhausted. Weary from the chemo. Marla Kay did as she was told, wrapping her small hands around one end of the yardstick and letting the sign bump along behind her.
Before crossing the road they had to wait for an orange pickup to go by, its tires kicking up fist-sized squalls of dust. Orange was an unusual color for a pickup in these parts. Mostly trucks came in bold blunt colors like red or black. “Fuck-you colors,” is how Raylene’s father, Tommy Hughes, had described them. Colors that told you what a man’s made of. Colors that weren’t sissified or wishy-washy. Even a blue truck was risky. Orange? Orange might as well be pink.
Raylene was reflecting upon that reality when another thought struck her: Oh, no. No. This time of day? Couldn’t be.
But it was.
The truck made a quick, tight turn into the parking lot and then halted abruptly, and now Raylene noticed what was painted on the side in white letters: RISING SOULS CHURCH, along with a small white cross. The driver’s door popped open. The man who pitched himself out was short and muscular, with a headful of stacked-up black hair and an angry face. Dark stubble outlined the sharp cut of his jaw. His jeans and his flannel shirt were stiff and clean, as if they belonged to somebody else; the boots, though, were scarred with filth and grit, and run over at the heels. They definitely belonged to him.
“Raylene,” he said. There was an ominous undertone to his voice. He was walking toward her, fists balled at his sides. He hadn’t bothered to close the truck door. Or even shut down the engine. His walk had a wobble to it, an appreciable lack of balance for which he compensated by keeping his legs spread wide, thereby increasing the width and stability of the base. It made him look somewhat bowlegged when he moved, as if he’d just slid off a horse. “Raylene,” he repeated.
“Eddie, you leave us alone,” she yelled back at him. “We can do what we like. We don’t need no permission from you. So go away. If you had a real job and could give us some money—not scraps and leftovers from that church of yours—then I wouldn’t have to be out here doing this. Beggin’ like a damned dog. You ever think of that?”
“Raylene.” He stopped about a foot away from her. “You said you’d quit this.”
Her head whipped around. Had anybody heard him? He could ruin everything.
“You shut your damned mouth, Eddie Sutton,” she said. “If you mess this up for me—if you tell a goddamned soul—I swear you’ll never see your girl again. Ever. And I can do that. You know I can.”
He shook his head. “This is shameful,” he said. “Shameful and embarrassing. You know that.”
“All I know,” Raylene retorted, and her tone had a sauciness to it now, the same coy quality that, when she heard it in her daughter’s voice, caused her to give the little girl a quick smack on the bottom, “is that you better get the hell out of here.”
Instead of answering her, the man looked down at the girl. She grinned back up at him. It made Raylene a little jealous, the way they related to each other. But only a little. She could see that the man and Marla Kay were living, just for now, in their own little world, the two of them. Raylene didn’t like being left out of anything. Then the feeling passed.
“Hi, Daddy,” Marla Kay said.
“Hey, sweet pea.”
Rhonda
11:35 A.M.
The world—even this one, small as it was—had its share of Raylenes: selfish, sexy, size-6 women who did as they pleased and took what they wanted and to hell with anybody and everybody else. They were attractive, and that settled the matter. They had their pick of men. They could get away with anything, no matter how outrageous. There was always somebody around to pick up the pieces.
Rhonda moved the stack of file folder
s from one side of her desk to the other. As Bell had just pointed out, she had a boatload of work to do. Each folder bulged with the massive paperwork attached to a particular case. She’d deal with it all later, after she got back from Lymon’s. Right now, just for a minute or so, she wanted to wallow.
And that was okay, wasn’t it? She didn’t have to be cheerful all the time. Cheerfulness took effort. She never got any credit for just how much effort it took. Good old Rhonda: the hefty gal with the sense of humor. Everybody’s pal. Need an errand run? A favor done? Call Rhonda. She won’t have any plans.
Raylene wouldn’t get those calls. Because a woman like Raylene always had plans.
Rhonda was feeling sorry for herself, and there were few venues more perfectly suited to self-pity than the assistant prosecutors’ office in the basement of the Raythune County Courthouse. Was “office” even the proper word for it? Rhonda thought not. The word was too generous. Because this was a hole. A lowly, stinking, dirty hole. The county had run out of space on the upper floors, and so Rhonda and Hick were forced to do their work down here, at two shoved-together desks beneath a tube of fluorescent lighting that draped the place in a sickly blue pall. It was a narrow, low-ceilinged room with a cracked concrete floor and sticky walls and no windows. It was sweaty-hot in the summer, and so cold in the winter that water left in a glass would freeze overnight. No matter how often the custodial staff—on the day shift, that meant a stout, silent woman named Helene, and on the night shift, a moody, stooped-over man named James—cleaned it, dirt reappeared instantly, as if it was playing some kind of game with them. There was a constant sprinkle from the swaybacked ceiling; the misty ash and gritty flecks settled perpetually on the chairs and the lamps and the law books and the phones and the computers. Rhonda had once returned from a week’s vacation and found that she could use the top of her desk like a sketch pad; with a few loops of her index finger, she could draw a picture or write her name in the thick gray dust, first, last and middle:
Rhonda Beauchamp Lovejoy.
Beauchamp was her mother’s maiden name. There were Beauchamps tucked up and down the mountains around here. If you could somehow pick up the landscape and turn it over like a salt shaker, there would be a perpetual rain of Beauchamps, like dirt from that ceiling.
She sat back in her chair. Hick was in court just now. She was glad. She couldn’t indulge her bad mood when Hick was around. He was a cynic—oh Lord, yes—but other people’s cynicism brought out the optimist in him. It was perverse: All day long she was forced to listen to his dark mutterings, to his sour conviction that nothing good would ever come out of Acker’s Gap—but if she dared to express a negative thought, he was all over her, slinging affirmation after affirmation, pelting her with happy little nuggets of wisdom mined from the caves of Oprah and Dr. Phil and various sunny-side-up preachers.
It wasn’t fair. If he could be bitter, why couldn’t she? True, she was usually a happy person, and there were aspects of her life that she found deeply satisfying: her church work, her animals, those times in a courtroom when she felt as if justice had been done and she had helped to make that happen. But on the rare occasion—like right now—when her thoughts were dark and troubled and knotted-up with frustration, why wasn’t that okay? Why couldn’t she be granted the luxury of a bad mood now and again?
Her hometown was disintegrating, and damned if she didn’t have a front-row seat for it. Drugs, poverty, violence, isolation. Lopped-off mountaintops. Crooked politicians. And con artists like Raylene Hughes. Granted, Raylene was pretty far down the list as far as grievous public nuisances went, but still. Using your child that way. And never getting punished for it, because you had a nice big bustline and a flirty way about you. And a line of bull that you could concoct while you batted your eyelashes at some besotted man.
Was she jealous of Raylene, as Bell had posited? No.
Okay: maybe. But it wasn’t Raylene herself who sparked the envy. Rhonda didn’t really know her. She’d seen her maybe three times since high school graduation, and never up close. Raylene’s run-ins with the law had occurred in adjacent counties, not here in Raythune. It was more what Raylene represented: taking the easy way out. Preying on people’s weaknesses. And using her looks to get out of her responsibilities. Rhonda could diet for the next decade and she would never—never—look like Raylene Hughes. Couldn’t happen. Anything Rhonda wanted, she had to work for. Nobody gave her a damned thing. Especially not men. They didn’t even notice her. They were too busy sniffing and pawing around the Raylenes of this world.
She was getting herself all worked up. And over something small and personal. She wasn’t even thinking about the carfentanil and the overdoses, which she should have been, because that was her job. Her duty. And Rhonda Beauchamp Lovejoy always did her duty.
She had had a chance to leave, to live somewhere else, which is more than most people from around here could say. She had a law degree from West Virginia University. Middle of the pack, grade-wise. That hadn’t brought a ton of job offers, but it did bring some.
Okay: one. It brought one. In Roanoke. But she didn’t take it. Instead she came back to Acker’s Gap after law school. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but whatever it was, she would do it here. Was it fear that had chased her back? Fear of leaving a place she knew so well? Maybe. She wasn’t too proud to admit it. The offer from the new prosecutor, Belfa Elkins, had come out of the blue, and she took it. And here she was. The town was now eight years older than it was on the day she had walked into this office for the first time as assistant prosecutor, and so was she.
In another year, she and the town would be nine years older, and then ten, and then eleven, and then—
The phone’s shrill ring interrupted her dismal arithmetic.
“Lovejoy. Prosecutor’s office.”
“Never mind. They’re gone.”
That was typical of Penny; Penny didn’t go in for hellos or ice-breakers such as “How are you?” She was blunt. Everyone on Penny Latrobe’s side of the family was that way. They weren’t mean, only focused on what was right in front of them, like a cow and its next mouthful of grass.
Rhonda could picture Penny holding her cell in a big red fist, standing just inside the door at Lymon’s in her stretchy polyester pants and her white socks and tennis shoes and her pink smock. She was a middle-aged woman, thick in the torso, who wore a blond wig to cover her baldness. Penny had buried two husbands and now was the sole caretaker of a third, a sweet man named Harve who was incapacitated by black lung disease. Every step he took cost him dearly. His sandpapery wheeze had been known to frighten small children.
“I went out to the parking lot and saw them packing up their stuff,” Penny added, before Rhonda could jump in. “Wish you’d come when I first called you this morning.”
“Had some things to take care of.”
“Bet you did. I heard about the overdoses.” Penny’s job meant she often got the news early, from shoppers making small talk as they unloaded the canned peaches and loaves of bread and jars of mayonnaise from their carts onto the moving black belt. “Lord help us all.”
Rhonda had no ready reply to that; the Lord might or might not help, and she tended to think that He had decided to leave it to them to figure it out.
“If Raylene and her little girl come back, let me know,” Rhonda said.
“Doubt they do. Pickings are pretty slim today. Customers few and far between. Nobody to beg from.” Penny sighed. “Kind of worries me, the way business has been. You don’t need a cashier if nobody’s coming in to buy.”
“I hear you. But things’re bound to pick up.” There I go again, Rhonda thought ruefully. Upbeat again. Can’t seem to help myself.
“Could be.” Penny did not sound convinced. “You know what?”
“What?”
“All those overdoses—well, it got me to thinking. There was a time when I didn’t get it. I’d hear about people selling drugs and I’d say to myself, ‘How can
they do that?’ But the worse things get around here, the more I think sometimes that I can almost understand it. Say you’ve got a bunch of kids to feed. Say you’re four months behind on the rent and the landlord’s knocking at your door. Maybe it’s not so farfetched to consider…”
“You don’t mean that, Penny.”
“How do you know I don’t mean it?”
“Because you’re still worried about a little girl whose mother isn’t doing right by her. That’s how I know. You still care about this town.”
A sigh of acknowledgment. “Guess so. And speaking of the child—I’ll keep an eye out, just in case Raylene happens to drag her back here. Like you said.”
“Can’t hurt. Wish we had a deputy to spare, but we just don’t. Not today.”
“I get it. What with folks dropping in the streets and all.”
A call was coming in on Rhonda’s second line. “Gotta run, Penny. You take care.”