by Noir, Roxie
“You can go on your own or you can be escorted,” Daniel says flatly. “Your pick, Walter, though I think you might not enjoy your escort.”
Walter finally takes a step back. He adjusts his suit jacket, an ugly tie underneath it, and he looks at all four of us with flat eyes.
“I get what I want,” he says, voice brimming with as much menace as he can muster. “Even if it means going through the lot of you.”
He stalks off toward the exit. Levi and I exchange a glance, and Levi follows him, a few paces back, just to make sure the man doesn’t get lost on his way out. Seth, Daniel, and I watch them disappear.
“Fucker,” Seth mutters.
“What was that?” I ask.
“That was a rich, entitled asshole who thinks that the world should fall at his feet just because his daddy owns a chain of grocery stores,” Seth says.
Daniel doesn’t say anything. He just frowns after Walter and Levi, like he’s thinking.
It’s par for the course. Daniel’s normally placid as a lake on a windless day and calm as a toad in the sun, while Seth is fiery and mercurial. He’s always the first to jump into a fight, but also the first to laugh long and hard at a good joke. It’s a wonder they can work together, but Loveless Brewing had a banner year last year so I guess something is going right.
“It’s not even our land,” Daniel says, half to himself. “It’s mom’s.”
Levi comes back around the corner and walks up to us.
“He out?” Seth asks.
“Yeah, but not before giving me the hard sell on selling him a hundred and fifty acres of mom’s land,” he says, frowning.
“I’m starting to feel left out,” I say.
“Yeah, you should be real bummed about that jerk not getting in your face,” Seth says.
“Rusty made it in here, right?”
“She’s on the office couch reading Little House on the Prairie,” Daniel says.
Then he shrugs, runs a hand through his hair, and looks from Levi to me and back again.
“You bring the juniper berries?” he asks.
* * *
“That slimy bastard,” my mom fumes, slamming open a cupboard. “That backstabbing, underhanded, weasel-faced no good son-of-a—"
“Mom!” Daniel shouts.
“I’m not listening,” Rusty says.
She’s sitting at the kitchen table, carefully coloring a pony with an electric blue mane and bright green hooves, looking innocent. It doesn’t work on me. Rusty is always listening. That’s why I owe her cake.
“Sorry, baby,” my mom says, pulling out a big pot and filling it with water. “But I can’t believe that —”
She takes a deep breath, then sighs, clearly thinking of all the words she’d rather be using.
“— That jerk thought that just because I said no, he could go behind my back and work up some kind of deal with you all,” she says, slamming the faucet off and yanking the pot out of the sink so fast it sloshes onto the floor.
I grab a hand towel and dry it, a few steps behind my mom.
“That sneaky, good-for-nothing, two-faced little man has always been an absolute prick —”
“Mom.”
“— Prick’s not a bad word, Daniel, he’s always been a prick who thinks that he farts rainbows. You remember the time he failed algebra and his daddy got him that remote control airplane to make him feel better?”
“No,” says Seth, with the air of someone who’s had this conversation before.
He’s just here for the food and has his own place in town. Daniel and Rusty live here, since my mom’s helping raise Rusty. I’ve got the attic room on a temporary basis, until I find my own place to live.
“You were a baby,” my mom says authoritatively, turning on the stove under the pot of water. She stands there glaring at it, like that will make it boil faster. From the table, I hear the distinct sound of Rusty trying not to giggle.
“And then he crashed it into the river?” Seth asks, knowing what comes next. Mom gets on a tear about the Eightons sometimes, so this is all familiar.
“So his daddy bought him a remote control helicopter,” Mom goes on, slamming open cupboards again. “He should have given him a whipping instead. Or an algebra tutor, for heaven’s sake, the man is nearly forty and I doubt he could graph an equation if his life depended on it.”
“I don’t think I could graph an equation,” I offer, still standing in the kitchen. Any time my mom starts cooking, I get nervous.
She turns and looks at me, disbelief written all over her face.
“I’m sure you just need a refresher,” she says, grabbing down a jar full of sugar. “Whereas Walter Eighton needs someone to remove his head from his colon.”
“Mom, that’s —”
She dumps the sugar into the water, then screws the top back on, jamming it back into the cabinet.
I sigh.
“He thinks just because he’s got money he can get whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Just walk all over other people like they don’t matter,” she fumes, slamming open another cabinet and grabbing a package of spaghetti.
“Mom, that was sugar,” I say, coming toward the stove.
“It’s spaghetti, Eli,” she says, holding up the pasta.
I walk over and gently take it from her hand.
“You just dumped sugar in the water,” I tell her. “Come on. I’ll make dinner.”
She huffs, glaring at me with her steely green eyes. I stare back, raising one eyebrow.
“Fine,” she says at last, ending the stare down. “There’s garlic bread, too.”
“No problem,” I tell her, steering her toward the kitchen table. As soon as she turns away from me, I made the universal get her a drink motion at Seth, who rises and grabs the bottle of good whiskey.
“That’s a beautiful horse, honey,” she says to Rusty. “Have you named it?”
“This is Gertrude,” Rusty answered.
I dump out the water, wash out the pot, refill it and put it on to boil while Mom continues half-ranting about Walter Eighton and half-talking to Rusty about her coloring book. While that’s going on I grab some eggs, onions, bacon, and parmesan, and get to chopping.
Walter Eighton offered to buy our family land. That, in and of itself, isn’t a problem. It’s not the first offer we’ve gotten for the hundred and fifty acres that border on the national forest, and I doubt it will be the last.
It’s the fact that when Daniel and Seth said no, things got ugly. Walter got pissed and threatened them, said he’d take the land by one way or another if he had to. He swore that he knew a guy from up in Richmond and he also swore that he’d sue us into oblivion, so it doesn’t sound like he’s made up his mind on how to do us in just yet.
Unbeknownst to any of us, it wasn’t the first offer he’d made on the land. A few weeks before he’d offered a lower price to my mom, and when she declined, he called her a senile old fool who’d regret turning him down.
Clarabelle Loveless is many things — bad cook, accomplished astronomer, doting grandmother — but she’s not senile and she’s certainly not a fool. She’s angry about the name-calling, but she’s furious that he went behind her back and tried to make a deal with Seth and Daniel.
Walter wants to build some sort of shopping center on the land, calling it ‘phase one’ of a project that will ‘bring economic opportunity to Southwestern Virginia,’ which sounds like bullshit to me. He wants to raze acres of perfectly beautiful forest for some outlet malls, followed by a ski resort and a waterpark.
We all know full well exactly who’d profit in that scheme. By and large, it’s not the people of Sprucevale.
Except the Eightons, of course. They’d profit while the rest of us would be lucky if the capitalist megaplex didn’t bleed us dry, put all our stores out of business, and ruin our beautiful countryside while they were at it.
“His mother’s a piece of work, too,” Mom says, the ice clinking in her glass. “Remember for Wa
lter’s wedding about ten years back, she insisted on importing the lawn from somewhere in Kentucky?”
Seth snorts.
“How’d she import a lawn?”
“In sod chunks,” Mom says. “On a flatbed truck. Bluegrass. All the way here from Kentucky. No wonder he thinks the world is his for the taking.”
“Did it look good?” Daniel asks. He sounds baffled.
“It looked like grass,” Mom says, shrugging. “At least when I saw it a week later.”
“Plus, she parks like an asshole,” I add. I remember Rusty’s presence one second too late.
“Oh, come on,” Daniel says.
“Sorry. She parks like a butthole.”
Daniel just sighs.
“Every time I see her Mercedes at the grocery store, she’s parked diagonally across two spots,” I say, tearing open the package of spaghetti, the water close to boiling. I’d already put the garlic bread in the oven, a pile of bacon and onions on low heat on the next burner.
I’d also quietly thrown away the jar of pasta sauce that my mom had gotten out, since I’d given it a taste test and I was pretty sure she’d made it with mint. Spaghetti carbonara was a much better option.
“I know it,” my mom says. “Last week when I was there I parked right up next to her, not a foot away from her driver’s side door. Bet she had to get in the other side and crawl over.”
Seth snickers. They keep on talking, moving from Walter to his parents and then finally off the topic completely. I boil pasta, crack eggs, pull the bread from the oven, and try to keep my mind from wandering to Violet and how much her continued presence in Sprucevale vexes me.
I have no idea why she’s still here. By rights, she shouldn’t be — when we were growing up, she never liked this place to begin with, and even if I don’t like her I can recognize that she’s meant for bigger and better things.
I know she’d gone to college nearby, but even though I lost track of her after my own disastrous college experience, I just assumed she moved on. People like her don’t stick around a tiny town in the middle of nowhere; people like her move to big cities, Richmond or D.C. or maybe even New York, and they get high-powered jobs and wear suits and make conference calls.
It bothers me that she hasn’t. I know she wanted to. If anyone deserved to move on from Appalachian Nowheresville, it’s her.
I finish the pasta, make a quick salad, and pull the garlic bread out of the oven while the rest of my family chats around the kitchen table. I make myself stop wondering what Violet’s deal is, since she’s not my problem and, with any luck, I won’t be seeing much of her.
“Eli,” Seth says when we all sit down a few minutes later, mouth full of garlic bread. “Tell us about your new job.”
Chapter Five
Violet
I flip through the pictures one more time. There’s the airy, bright loft space. There’s the small-but-modern kitchen, complete with a farmhouse sink. There’s the open-plan living and dining room; also small, but bright, sunny, welcoming, and all the things that my trailer isn’t.
Last but not least: there’s the view of Deepwood Lake, shot from the cabin’s deck, the day outside perfectly cloudless and beautiful.
I bet it’s always sunny at this cabin, I think wistfully, sitting in my tiny office. I lean my chin on my hand, staring at my computer, phone held to one ear.
I bet the neighbors there never shoot beer cans off the top of a fence post with a BB gun at three in the morning when they’ve been drinking for twelve hours straight.
Also, nothing there leaks when it rains. Ever.
I glance at the price one more time. $97,000.
I’m so, so close. And yet…
“Thank you for holding, Miss Tulane,” a voice on the other end of the phone line says, jerking me out of my cabin-by-the-lake reverie. “And thank you for confirming that you did not purchase the Wet And Wild Pool Party Floating Mechanical Bull With Real Bull Sound Effects And Bonus Accessory Drink Floats.”
“Not a problem,” I lie. It’s actually been at least three days worth of problems, but given that it seems like my stolen credit card woes are coming to an end, I let it go. I’ve already requested replacements of everything else in my wallet and this is, at last, the final piece.
I’m pretty sure I left it on the counter at the Mountain Grind on Friday morning when I got coffee. Someone must have taken it. I’d love to know who so I could give them a piece of my mind, but I’ll settle for having fraudulent charges removed from my credit card.
“Now, just to check, these other purchases on your card are correct, yes?” she asks.
I frown. I froze all my credit cards first thing when I woke up Sunday morning, and at the time, the only suspicious purchase was a floating mechanical bull.
I don’t even understand how a floating mechanical bull works. Doesn’t it capsize and dump its rider directly into the water the moment it starts moving? Doesn’t the bull have to be braced against something more substantial than water?
Though maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s some sort of special fraternity edition, used for wet t-shirt contests on spring break or whatever it is fraternities do. I don’t know. I went to a frat party once for about five minutes before some guy asked me if I had any Alpha Pi in me, then asked if I wanted some. It didn’t even make any sense.
“Miss Tulane?” the woman on the other end of the phone says, pulling me from my mechanical bull contemplations.
“What other purchases?” I ask, wondering what one buys to go with a floating mechanical bull.
“There are just a few,” she says, and I hear clicking in the background. “A fuel purchase in Iron River, Wisconsin for forty-two fifty-four, a charge for one hundred nineteen dollars and three cents at Mickey’s Candy Castle in New Haven, Connecticut, and another charge for three seventy-five and seventy-four cents from We Love Wrapping Paper Dot Com.”
For a moment, I’m speechless. Whoever stole my card has been getting around, and they’ve been buying some weird stuff.
“Was it all wrapping paper?” I ask.
“I’m sorry?”
I glance at the clock. I’m supposed to be at the all-staff meeting in seven minutes, but I also really want to know how much wrapping paper three-seventy-five-seventy-four buys. A lot, right?
“Did someone use my card to buy almost four hundred dollars worth of wrapping paper? From We Love Wrapping Paper Dot Com?”
There’s a pause.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell from this transaction report,” she finally says.
I look around my office, crammed full of wedding ephemera for the upcoming weekend, and wonder exactly how much wrapping paper that is. Maybe whoever stole my credit card really, really likes giving gifts. Maybe they’re going to wrap several cars in wrapping paper as a prank. Maybe they have a fetish and need to be wrapped before they can achieve orgasm.
If it’s that last one, I actually kind of feel bad for them.
“Can I assume that you didn’t make any of these charges?” she prompts.
“Yes,” I say, my mind still half on the possibility of wrapping paper fetishes. “I mean, no, I didn’t make any of them. I thought I froze my cards on Sunday morning, so I’m not sure how those charges got there in the first place.”
“Thank you. Do you mind holding for one more minute?” she asks.
The hold music starts before I can say please don’t make me hold any more. I sigh and go back to flipping through the pictures of my dream cabin: a bathroom with a real bathtub. Hardwood floors. A big oak tree out front. Sure, it’s only about a thousand square feet, but I can deal with that for that kitchen and that view.
Besides, I really, really don’t want to live in the trailer for much longer, but it’s cheap while I’m saving up. In a few more months, I’ll have the down payment and then it’s sayonara, Pine Estates.
Someone knocks on my door, and a moment later, my intern Kevin pokes his head in.
“Paper lanterns
are here?” he asks.
I point to a corner of my office, the one I use as a staging area for the upcoming wedding of the week. It’s piled high with brightly-colored seat cushions — the bride didn’t like the standard colors that we offered — sparkly gold tablecloths, five-foot-high glass tubes to hold flower arrangements, the lanterns Kevin is looking for, and bags upon bags upon bags of M&Ms with the bride and groom’s initials on them.
To my credit, I’ve eaten absolutely none of them even though there are way more than they’re going to need and I’ve been on hold for what felt like a year.
Kevin grabs the lanterns and takes off, leaving me still on hold. I glance up at the clock again: five minutes until the meeting. I squeeze my eyes shut to quell my rising anxiety, because if I weren’t stuck on the phone, I’d be there already.
I like being early, by at least five minutes if not a little more. I don’t like feeling as if people are waiting on me, and I especially don’t like that feeling if some of those people are my bosses.
The seconds tick down on the clock. I have visions of all my coworkers arriving in the meeting room, milling around, getting coffee. Calmly putting their folders and notebooks down on the table. Everyone perfectly relaxed, knowing that they still have several minutes before the meeting begins. Everyone but me, because at this rate I’ll probably run in there two minutes late, with a post-it probably stuck to me somewhere.
I check myself for stray post-its while I wait. None.
Finally, after another excruciating minute, the other end of the line clicks.
“Hi, and thanks for holding,” says a brand-new voice. “All right, Miss Tulane, I’m happy to tell you that we’ve updated your address on file and sent it to Pool Accessories On Fleek LLC, and it looks like the Wet And Wild Pool Party Floating Mechanical Bull With Real Bull Sound Effects And Bonus Accessory Drink Floats will be on its way to you very shortly.”
“What? No,” I say, sitting up straighter in my chair. “There’s been a mistake. I didn’t order that, my card was stolen and I asked for it to be canceled.”