Ah. Police Chief Gary and Kennie
had
been dating. “Oh. I’m sorry.” Mostly, I was sorry that she was in my house. We weren’t exactly girlfriends due to our differing viewpoints on how to treat people, dress, speak, and think, and I took it as a depressing statement on her personal life that she had only me to turn to right now. She must be one of those people who equated proximity with friendship.
She certainly was a pitiful figure, snuffling and wiping her fist across her face to divert the cry-snot. Her hand trailed a little mascara mustache on her upper lip. “I have done everything for that man. And he has left me for another.”
“Who?”
“Gary. Gary has left me for another. Try to pay attention, Mira. I’m spilling my heart.”
“No. Who’d Gary leave you for?”
Kennie sighed dramatically. “God.”
“I’m sure it must be tough.” I waited for her to continue.
“No,
God
, you idiot. Gary left me for God. He’s found the church, and he doesn’t think it proper for us to continue our ‘unholy’ relationship. That’s what he called it.”
For once, I agreed with Gary. I reached for the vodka and chugged, dismayed to find that it tasted salty. “What sparked his conversion?”
“Some new minister in town, a friend of a friend, Gary says. Rat bastard took my man.”
I wasn’t sure if the rat bastard in question was God or the minister, but I was all about trashing on the unfair sex right now. Gary had chosen God over Kennie, and Johnny had chosen who-knows-what over me. “You can’t rely on one single man in this town.”
“Hallelujah. Do you know that I just got done nursing that man after nose surgery?”
“Gary got a nose job?”
“No, he got his sinuses drilled. They clean out all the junk and then stick some cotton tubes up the nostrils to absorb the blood. You couldn’t pull ‘em out for days.”
I threw up a little in my mouth. “You must have really liked him to do that.”
“I did.” She sniffled. “And who else am I supposed to date? I can’t go out with strangers.”
Ah, the
Little House on the Prairie
model of dating. Being from the tiny Minnesota town of Paynesville, I recognized this attitude. You could only go out with men you met at the Mercantile, or a friend of a friend you ran into on an occasional trip to Sleepy Eye for some poplin. Developing a relationship with someone no one in your circle knew, or, heaven forbid, seeking out new experiences, was out of the question. I did appreciate the benefits of sticking with the familiar, but the downside of this dating model was that even a Mr. Edwards or a Willie Olsen would start to look good after all the Almanzos were taken. Hence the plethora of smart local women living with seasonally employed mouth-breathers.
“Maybe you could just be single for a while?”
She snorted and took a long pull off the vodka. “You got any more liquor?”
I did. It was for emergencies only, but if not now, then when? I got up and strode to the rear of the double-wide, fishing the bottle of tequila out from under the bathroom sink. I cracked it and shivered at the spicy kerosene smell. The bottle felt hot and heavy in my hand, and I recognized I was riding the buzz cusp, that point where you’re sober enough to know you should go to bed right now and drunk enough not to care. I glided back to the kitchen and mixed us both a tequila on ice with a squirt of lime juice.
“How long had you and Gary been dating?” I asked, handing Kennie her drink.
“I’ve known him since high school. He worshipped the ground I walked on.”
The liquor I was drinking like Kool-Aid made me generous. “Well, of course he does.”
“Did. He did. Now he’s all godly.”
“Bastard.”
She clinked my glass. “I suppose you don’t have to worry about none of this, being a lesbian and all.”
I coughed, sending burning tequila through my nose. “Huh?”
“Oh, is it supposed to be a secret? Then you really should start wearing makeup, honey. And curling that fieldworker hair of yours. Else, you might as well wear a sign that says you don’t want a man.”
I ran my fingers through my hair and self-consciously wound it into a bun at the nape of my neck. Holding my hands up that high made me feel dizzy. “I don’t want a man, but not for the reason you think. They’re unreliable. The whole lot of them.”
Kennie nodded sympathetically. “Like your dad? The murderer?”
Christ. No wonder Kennie didn’t have any girlfriends. She didn’t know how to hang. For the record, my dad was guilty of manslaughter and not murder, but it hurt everyone involved just the same. When he was alive, he nearly drank himself to death, and when that proved too slow, he’d drink and drive. One night, he crashed into another car, killing himself and the mother and baby boy in the other vehicle. I was sixteen when it happened and people started calling me Manslaughter Mark’s girl. Not to my face, of course, but I had heard the whispers and sometimes thought I still did. Suddenly, the tequila tasted sour in my mouth, and my stomach felt oily.
“I’m tired, Kennie. I think I wanna go to bed.”
“That’s fine, honey chile. I’ll just crash on your couch.” She made the “sh” on “crash” long and snaky.
“What?”
“Oh, don’t mind me. I’m as quiet as a dead man.”
Oof. That hit too close to home. “Can’t you sleep in your car?”
“No can do, sugar. I biked here. I’m going to look so hot by the end of this month that Gary Wohnt will forget all about God.”
“Biking home right now would be great exercise.”
But Kennie wasn’t listening. She pingponged over to the sectional couch with the rust-colored, cabin-in-the-woods pattern, where she fell face down into the nappy cloth. She twitched and wriggled a little before she began snoring so vociferously that it came out her ears. I sighed, stumbled over, and lifted her head to the side so she wouldn’t suffocate. My hands were sticky blue with her eye shadow when I pulled them away. I capped the tequila, returned it to its hiding place in the bathroom, and shoved the empty vodka bottle to the bottom of the garbage so it couldn’t judge me in the morning.
Soft tears slid down my face as I cleaned. Without Kennie to distract me, I was left with my dark and slippery thoughts, which came surfing back on the tequila and vodka. Johnny hadn’t shown up, and he wasn’t ever going to. I had been an idiot to get my hopes up, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to make that mistake again. It was long past time that I realized I wasn’t going to find love here, or anywhere. I was an independent woman, á la Kate Jackson, circa
Charlie’s Angels
. I didn’t need anybody, and for sure nobody needed me in this lousy, dead-end, murder-drenched town. In that instant, my mind was made up. I was going back to the Twin Cities as soon as I could find a real librarian to take over my job.
___
I woke up Friday morning with a hangover so familiar I considered it a friend. Feeling a little sad, a little relieved, and a lot empty, I chewed four bitter aspirin and took a shower. I was quiet as a clam so as not to wake Kennie, who had flipped herself over in the night. Her melted makeup had attracted some tufts of couch lint as well as a healthy dose of calico cat hair, thanks to Tiger Pop. He lay benevolently on her chest, a Cheshire grin on his pink kitty lips. Every now and again his tail would twitch over her nose, causing her to honk and sniffle in her sleep. I grabbed him off her, as much to save him from getting any more lipstick on his fur as to do her any favors.
I pinched an apple and a bottle of juice and opened the front door to herd out Luna and Tiger Pop. Outside, the sun’s rays tattooed my hungover head, piercing my eyes like hot needles. The July morning was humid and pushing eighty degrees, even though it was not yet nine a.m. This summer had been tropical, and my vegetable garden looked like something from
Land of the Lost
, with monstrous green tomatoes dripping off the staked stems and orange squash blossoms as big as dinner plates opening up to the sun. I rinsed out Luna and Tiger Pop’s water bowls and filled them to the top before hiding them in the shade under the house. Part of the apron had come off the double-wide, creating a cool retreat for my animals as well as a wayward skunk or two. I slid a couple bowls of food under there and promised them that I’d be home before dark.
“Stay out of Kennie’s way,” I warned them. T. P. rolled his eyes at me, but Luna was eager to please, as usual. Dogs are such sluts.
Kennie’s bike, an ancient no-speed with big black handlebars and a banana seat, lay flush on my blooming roses. I had planted the peach and white climbers against a wooden trellis on the sunny south side of the house this spring, and they had been doing great right up until the bike had flattened them. When I disentangled her two-wheeler, the salty-sweet smell of crushed roses drifted up. I rolled the bike to the front porch so Kennie would be sure to see it first thing and be on her way.
The last part of my morning ritual was feeding the birds. I am not a fan of the winged population, and they don’t exactly wait in line to beg my autograph, either. I get pooped on at least three times a year, but I keep the birdbath and feeders full in hopes of an uneasy truce. They still like to play chicken with me, lunging at my head at opportune moments and then veering away after I make some embarrassing spastic gesture to protect myself, but at least they don’t charge en masse, and I figured that was because of the food I put out every morning.
I curled into my two-door Toyota Corolla, slapped on the seat belt, and donned sunglasses against the bright, blazing ball rising behind me. I’m sure it looked gorgeous reflecting its lavender and tangerine rays off Whiskey Lake outside my front door, but I wasn’t in the mood for beauty. I was all business, intent on heading directly to the library to write a help-wanted ad. By the time I opened at ten a.m., that ad would be in all the regional newspapers, every college in the five-state area with a Library Sciences program, and on all the major Internet job search sites.
I noticed my hands gripping the steering wheel tight enough to leave marks, and I forced myself to relax. Any life change was sure to create stress, I reasoned, and that’s why I was so uptight about last night’s decision to move. The thing about change is at the outset a good change felt as scary as a bad change, and sometimes you just needed to jump and hope you landed right.
That’s what I was telling myself as I drove into Battle Lake, already bustling as tourists drove their boats and RVs into town. I nodded at Harold Penderly, the owner of the Hardware Hank, out front washing his own windows, and pulled into the library parking lot, cruising into the spot marked “Reserved for Librarian.” I stared at the yellow brick building that I had come to know so well, and shook my head to clear out any sentimentality.
The phone greeted me shrilly as I unlocked the front door. I jogged over to it, my keys jingling in my hand. “Hello?”
“Mira! I was hoping I’d get you.”
My heart leapt to kiss the phone and then dropped like a bag of kittens tossed in a river. “Johnny?”
“Yeah! How are you? I just called your house, but you weren’t home. Did you know Kennie Rogers is there?”
Anger, disappointment, and a third, unrecognizable emotion fought for my attention. “Yes. What can I do for you?”
He sighed. “You sound mad, Mira. I don’t blame you. I should have called last night, and I’m sorry I didn’t. You know when I left you to go check in with my mom? When I got to her place, there was a call from the University of Wisconsin. At Madison.” There was a pause as he waited for me to respond. “Mira? Are you there?”
“Yup.”
“It’s amazing, but it was one of my old professors! She said she has a six-week project she needs a research assistant for, and it might lead to a full ride for fall semester. She said she needed me out here immediately.”
“Here? You mean you’re in Madison right now?” My old friend, the hangover, suddenly felt like a hangman’s noose.
“Yeah!”
“I thought you were taking a year off to help your mom.” It was a spiteful thing to say, and I immediately regretted it after I heard the guilt in Johnny’s voice.
“I was, but she said she’s fine and would never forgive herself if I didn’t go.”
“Well, I guess there’s nothing holding you back. Good luck.”
He was quiet on the other end of the line, so quiet that I almost apologized for my chirpy, dismissive words. “I’ll be visiting a lot. There are some people in Battle Lake who I care a lot about.”
“Yeah, there’s some nice people here.” I squished my eyes shut. I hated being a crybaby.
“I mean you, Mira. I think we have something.”
“I guess we’ll never know, huh? You’re in Madison, and I’m moving back to the Cities.”
“What?”
“Yeah, there’s not much for me in Battle Lake, you know?” I liked myself a little less with every word that cracked out of my mouth, but I couldn’t stop. “You’re a good friend, and we should keep it that way. Hey, maybe we can be pen pals!”
A pause. “That’s what you want?”
“It is. I’ll be sure to check in on your mom for you when you’re gone, okay? Until I move, that is.”
“Okay. Fine. Bye.”
“Bye, Jeff!”
“What?”