The Small Crimes of Tiffany Templeton

by Richard Fifield

  “Mr. Francine?”

  “No talking. You know that.” Mr. Francine didn’t even look up at me. He was involved in his own obsessive thoughts and peeling Post-it notes, one by one, and placing them in the center of a page full of lists of numbers. He didn’t trust the adhesive, rubbed his finger across over and over until he was sure the Post-it note was secure. Official business, important business, even though each yellow square was blank. I watched his process, centering the yellow square, moving that page to the left side of his desk, before moving to the next.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “No, you don’t.” He returned to his ritual, center, stick, rub, stack. What would be written? What tiny message needed to be expressed, so exactly, so immaculately? Most people wrote something first, then stuck it, a note that could be a reminder of something forgotten, or a dashed-off comment, a critique, or even praise, unlikely in the case of Mr. Francine.

  “I took all of your can openers. Three of them. I stole them out of your secret bunker.” As soon as the words flew from my mouth, I regretted them.

  He looked up, a Post-it note stuck on the end of his finger. “I take an inventory every week,” he said. “A very, very careful inventory. I would have noticed.”

  “It’s been over a year,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You have made me doubt my accounting,” he said. “Even worse, you jeopardized my survival.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I did those things.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. “People like you are the reason I have a shelter in the first place. A survival shelter. Not a secret bunker. Don’t minimize this.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’ll bring them back tonight. I swear to god.”

  “I don’t want your promises,” he said. His voice had raised, an edge sharpened, the volume sliced like that pearl-handled knife. “You are a piece of filth. This is the same as attempted murder, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I’m sure you would have found a way to open up the cans,” I said. “You’re a really smart guy. You would have figured something out.”

  “Some people plan for the apocalypse,” he squawked. “And some people create it!”

  I’d never heard Mr. Francine yell, but I figured I deserved it. His raised voice was enough to conjure Kelly, who pushed Rufus out the door and beckoned me inside.

  She already knew what I’d done, but she gave me the speech I was expecting. “You know about consequences, Tiffany. I have to do my job.” She leaned close to me, and in a quieter voice, reminded me of the conditions of my probation. “If he presses charges, things will change.”

  There was nothing I could say. I pushed my pages at her and steeled myself to face the scene outside of her door.

  Sheriff Schrader was waiting for me, but his gun was holstered. He must have broken speed limits to respond so quickly, and there was a look on his face of exasperation, but I wasn’t sure if I had caused it or if he was annoyed by Mr. Francine.

  “He wants to press charges,” said the sheriff.

  “Okay,” I said. I sensed Kelly, standing behind me in the doorway. I didn’t expect her to protest or offer up any kind of defense. These were consequences, and this was her job. She was silent, but the sheriff looked over my shoulder at my probation officer.

  “I’ve got to take her in,” he said. He sighed and pointed to the door. I moved toward him, and Mr. Francine stood up from behind his desk, flung himself against the wall as if I was truly a menace.

  “I called 911,” he said. “This is serious business, Sheriff. I would expect handcuffs, at the very least.”

  “Sit down and be quiet,” said Sheriff Schrader, and Mr. Francine obeyed. As the sheriff passed Mr. Francine’s desk, his holster brushed the ceramic pumpkin, and I didn’t flinch as it hit the floor and shattered. It’s almost like I was expecting it to happen. The sheriff glanced at the broken pieces, and the unloved Tootsie Rolls, and offered no apology.

  I followed behind, wondering if it would help if I stopped to clean up the mess. The sheriff moved too quickly for me to even consider it. My head was full of noise as I tried to remember the piece of paper that listed the rules of my probation, the exact language, and I was sure I had crossed yet another line. I was just glad that it was the sheriff who knocked over the pumpkin, that property destruction would not be added to the charges. I had done the work, I had made things right, and I had been so careful not to get knocked down. I breathed through my nose and out through my mouth, and I knew that I would be okay. I would put myself back together again. I would not stay broken. I took a glance over my shoulder, and Kelly stared back at me sadly, and I took one last look at that stupid pumpkin.

  That’s not me.

  Pushed to the edge, precarious.

  I’m not that girl anymore.

  * * *

  * * *

  SHERIFF SCHRADER DROVE LESS THAN three blocks, and without a word, stopped his car in the empty parking lot of my mother’s gas station. I expected a speech or for him to write a ticket, but he just leaned over and opened the passenger door.

  The gas station had been closed for days, and maybe he was trying to make a point by dropping me off here. Like I was responsible for the gas crisis of Gabardine. He sighed, and I unbuckled my seatbelt and watched as he drove away.

  The last time the gas station was closed, my mother had bariatric surgery. The doors were locked for exactly eleven days, the orders from her surgeon. But she had warned the regulars in advance, and they stocked up on snack foods and gasoline. They suffered through it.

  I didn’t want to go home. As soon as his car disappeared from sight, I left the empty parking lot. I was pretty sure he would not approve of me walking the streets of the town, as I had just committed another crime, and I was a threat to public safety once again. I took my chances. I felt the need to walk through Gabardine, because I was most likely going to be shipped off to Texas. I turned off the highway and tried to really look at the stores and the streets, to commit them to memory. You stop seeing things after a while, not blindness, but seeing things for what they are. Never what they could be; that’s not this type of town. Off the highway, just blocks away from the gas station, I walked past the thrift store, another abandoned thing, and today, I finally paid attention.

  In the window, written on the back of a cardboard box, white paint that dripped in places. A sign that had been in that window every single day I ever walked past: Everything Must Go.

  Today, it struck me as the truest thing I’d ever heard.

  FROM THE DESK OF TIFFANY TEMPLETON

  I told you there were two secrets about Dogwood.

  On my eighty-second night, I woke to an alarm, the first and only alarm I heard, amazing for a locked-down institution. Bleary-eyed, we were ordered to stand in the halls.

  The girl who cried all night, the girl who was afraid of the dark. The girl who was never tough enough. I knew it was her, even before I saw the body.

  She ate a handful of the blue salt.

  The staff sprinkled it across the icy sidewalks, but the girl who was afraid of the dark had filled her pockets when nobody was watching.

  When they carried her out, I stared at the blue stains around her mouth. I couldn’t bear to look at her eyes.

  The next morning, a bus took us to Billings. The thirteen girls that remained were all sent back to the counties we came from. We left with our belongings, and a week’s worth of Seroquel, shaken into an ordinary envelope, left unsealed.

  We were rushed away, because the school had been shut down for good. The blue-mouthed girl was the eighth suicide in five years, and somebody finally took action.

  I know things now. I know the blue mouth. I know the truth about desperation.

  The girl should have been allowed to sleep with the lights on. She should have been offered some kindness, some
grace. In order to clean up my mess, I need to do the same. I’m going to turn the lights on.

  Chapter Thirty

  ON THE FIFTH DAY OF the gas crisis, Waterbed Fred came to our door. I don’t know if he had given up on courtship, but he didn’t bring flowers. He didn’t even bring potato chips, even though his truck was parked outside.

  “This isn’t my idea,” he said, apologizing on our front porch before I could say a word. “I was sent here. They took a vote, and everything.”

  I assumed he was referring to the city council, and stared at his boots as he stepped around the screen door. Maybe someday Bitsy would fill out like this, maybe someday Bitsy would grow a mustache that I should hate on principle, but swoon over secretly.

  I didn’t speak, just pointed to my mother’s bedroom. I didn’t know if he had been in my mother’s bedroom before. Even though they’d been dating for a month, I was basically under house arrest and would have noticed the delivery truck, or a smear of mustache dye on my mother’s face.

  He knocked, and then knocked louder. “She’s dead,” he said, stepping back slowly from the door. “She’s gone and done it.” He looked at me, and I swear he was on the verge of tears.

  I knew my mother wasn’t dead. She was not the suicide type. She would want to make a big speech first, issue proclamations, rip up the deed to the gas station just like she promised.

  I sighed and pushed past him. I didn’t bother knocking. I turned the knob, and in the gloom of her bedroom, I could still see her white face, jaw clenched, furious. She was wide awake, and her nest had grown in size; her head the only thing visible in a mountain of quilts, afghans, even winter jackets. I didn’t recognize the newest parts of her nest. I had a suspicion David was smuggling these things to her, shoving them through her bedroom window. The gas crisis meant nothing to him. He lived for this kind of drama, and I knew he had a stockpile of medication from his allergist. Even if the town dried up and died from a lack of gasoline and snack foods, David would continue to mule blankets across the trailer court in the dark of night.

  I didn’t want to hear any of it, didn’t want to bear witness to the assassination of Waterbed Fred. Walls in trailer houses are thin, and I sat on the steps of the front porch and waited. Less than five minutes later, Waterbed Fred joined me.

  “I tried to be helpful,” he said. “Compliments don’t work. I kept reminding her that she was two-thirds the size she used to be.”

  “I don’t think you can help,” I said. “Unless you can figure out a way to rig all the scales in Carney County.”

  “Two-thirds,” he said. “I mean, that’s amazing. She won’t hear it. Her head just poking out of all those blankets, glowing in the dark. Just that head, like a horror movie, insulting me. Even when we switched to Crystal Pepsi, she wasn’t that mean.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry that they sent you here. Four pounds and the entire town shuts down.”

  His whole body seemed to collapse right there on the top step, muscle and bone no use for this battle. His posture melted, and he dropped his chin to his chest, exhausted. “She’s two-thirds the size, but six times more terrifying. I guess that balances out.”

  “I don’t think your math is right,” I said.

  “It never is,” he said. “I just drive the truck, and somebody else does the invoices.”

  * * *

  * * *

  BITSY AND I MADE OUT in the front seat of my mother’s car several times a day. I didn’t want to go all the way, and he respected that but respected the virginity of my mother’s new car even more. I don’t know if it was the make and model, but he bought Armor All and wiped down the dash, sprayed Scotchgard on all the carpeting. New cars were a rarity in Gabardine.

  The women arrived for play practice in the white van; there was no gas crisis in Fortune. Betty witnessed Bitsy polishing my mother’s side mirror, and as she walked inside the theater, she cast a knowing glance over her shoulder.

  Today, David blocked a scene from the first act, and the ladies could not get it right. He’d even begged me to rewrite it, to add characters, a haughty reverend and a gang of pious women.

  “This play is a feminist statement,” I said. “Eight women and only eight women. Irene Vanek says that it’s revolutionary.”

  “What about The Vagina Monologues, Tiffany? That’s all women, and there’s like a hundred different vaginas.” Once again, that free month of HBO proved invaluable.

  “I refuse to add a male character just because you can’t accommodate Miss Connie’s walker. She can’t sit on the couch during the entire play.” Truthfully, I probably could have rewritten the scene, but I had a lot going on, between my mother’s hibernation and Bitsy’s constant presence.

  I thought that the scene was fine. Just referring to the visit from a squad of Bible-thumpers worked—just like the fire, some things had to take place offstage.

  Betty Gabrian stared stage left, where a window would be. Supposedly, she was watching the reverend and his flock walk away. “I’ve been threatened with damnation for ten years but never by a man cursed with a birthmark on his face. There is irony there, my dears. We are not women of ill repute.”

  “We have no illnesses,” said Miss Connie. Eileen Lambert shuffled forward with her walker to pat Betty on the back, offering consolation. “We are in the spring of our youth.”

  “No,” said Betty. “Only our repute is ill. I will forgive your atrocious vocabulary. The reverend was referring to our salacious reputations.”

  “I am unusually limber,” declared Miss Leslie. “My reputation is gold.”

  “Uff-da,” said Irene Vanek, rolling her eyes. She still had not mastered a Hungarian accent, but David was terrified of her.

  “And those women,” continued Betty. “That flock of pious creatures. Hatchet-faced, every single one of them.”

  “Their husbands are regular customers,” said Judith. “I’ve seen them with their wives in town, at the mercantile. As the only woman in this brothel who purchases dry goods, I can assure you that I am correct.”

  “Hypocrites,” declared Betty Gabrian. “The only thing I hate more than hypocrisy is tuberculosis. May God spare us from both.”

  “Where is the whiskey?” Loretta’s file had been accurate. The wig had created a patch of hives above her eyebrows. David kept Benadryl in his pockets for this very reason.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  WHEN YOU HAVE A BOX filled with twenty thousand dollars stashed behind a Laundromat, it feels like you are in a completely different movie, the kind of movie I usually hate. If I knew the twenty thousand belonged to Bitsy and his mother, I would have left in on their porch, anonymously. Everybody in Gabardine needed money. There was a depth to love, but also a depth to amends. It’s simply not enough to throw cash at the surface of a problem and watch as it takes on water, until it sinks entirely. I knew what happened when adults came into sudden money. I’ve seen what they do with their tax returns.

  I stopped Betty before she could climb into the passenger seat of the van. She now claimed the best seat in the van. She had made the right moves, ascended the hierarchy of the nursing home. Betty played the game, and she played it hard.

  I knew I had made the right choice.

  “I need to tell you something,” I said and pulled her to the back of the van, the exhaust pipe pumping out steam in the cold air. “I need you to keep it a secret.”

  “Oh, dear. Aren’t you using protection?” Betty grabbed my arm, and I thought she was going to try to shake some sense into me. “I can tell from looking at him that his genes are no good. No good at all.” She paused. “We can take care of this.”

  “We don’t have very much time, so I need you to listen to me.” Inside the van, the women had craned their heads to watch our encounter, and I spoke as quietly and quickly as possible. “I’ve got twenty thousand dollars in cash. It’s
in a box behind the Laundromat.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me one bit,” said Betty. “But I don’t think the procedure is going to cost that much.”

  “I need you to spend it.”

  Betty looked at me suspiciously. “I know what you’re capable of, and you know that it fills me with joy. If there was ever a fifteen-year-old girl with twenty thousand dollars that needed to be laundered, it would be you.”

  “Sixteen,” I said. “I’m sixteen now.”

  “I missed your birthday,” said Betty. “I missed your sweet sixteen.”

  “Here’s your chance to make it up to me,” I said, conscious of Irene Vanek, who was attempting to open the van window to eavesdrop. Thankfully, her elderly hands did not have the strength. “I’ve got to remain anonymous.”

  Betty gasped. “A hitman? Your brother is odious, but you already stabbed him once. You’d be the first suspect.”

  “There’s a city council meeting next Tuesday. I’ll pick you up, and I need you to look as powerful and glamorous as possible.”

  “I shall wear my wig.” She stood up a little straighter, newly empowered.

  * * *

  * * *

  THE BEST SALESPERSON IN GABARDINE had taken to her bed, and besides, she could never know about the money. Betty Gabrian was the second-best choice. I prayed that Betty could make a successful pitch, could intimidate the city council with her posture and her eloquence. Posture and eloquence were things my mother didn’t have, but she was a magician at the gas station.