Backseat Saints
Authors: Joshilyn Jackson
gods in Alabama
Between, Georgia
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Joshilyn Jackson
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Grand Central Publishing
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub
First eBook Edition: June 2010
Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-446-56917-0
For Lydia of Netzer, the patron saint of never being wrong.
Contents
PART I: A MARRIAGE MADE OF SWORDS
PART II: THE GIRL LEFT IN THE TOWER
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m so ridiculously over-blessed.
This is my fourth book with Caryn Karmatz Rudy, and she is like editorial heroin. I’m addicted to her keen insight and insatiable
love of getting the words right, and so she is hereby forbidden from moving to France to be a perfumier and/or running in
front of a taxi. Jacques de Spoelberch has been my agent and good friend ever since I pulled his name out of a book and he
pulled my letter out of his slush pile. I cannot do without either of them.
I’m privileged to have a mighty army of friends and advocates at my publishing house who fight with flaming swords to help
my work find its readership: Jamie Raab, Martha Otis, Karen Torres, Chris Barba, Emily Griffin, Amanda Englander, Harvey-Jane
Kowal, Evan Boorstyn, Elly Weisenberg, Miriam Parker, Nancy Wiese, Nicole Bond, Peggy Boelke, Anne Twomey, Liz Connor, Thom
Whatley, Toni Marotta, Les Pockell, and Cheryl Rozier.
The above list hardly covers it. I have endless thanks for everyone at Grand Central Publishing; they gave me my dream job.
And thanks to the host of righteous handsellers in bookstores of every stripe who have allowed me to keep it. I am hugely
indebted to all of them, from Jake Reiss and the Alabama Booksmith Gang who were kind enough to read my first book in MS form,
to the bookseller halfway across the country that I have never met who just put a copy of
Backseat Saints
in the hands of a reader and said, “Oh, you have to try this one!”
I misplace modifiers as if they were my keys, and sometimes I think I am on a mission to let no comma pass unspliced. It is
terrifying to think I once taught English to America’s youth. God bless copyeditors in general and Sona Vogel in particular.
STET!
Big thanks and night whispers to the community of writers and readers and friends who give me their time, support, patience,
and martini recipes: Lydia Netzer, Karen Potsie Abbott, Sara Fonzie Gruen (Wait, did I just by the process of elimination
make myself Ralph Malph?), Anna Schachner, Julie Oestreich, Mir Kamin, my Best Beloveds at Faster Than Kudzu, and the crew
of foul reprobates who WoW around with me in BoB. Lok'tar Ogar!
Jill James put me up for weeks so I could learn firsthand how a small-town southern girl would see the gorgeous, eclectic,
and endlessly fascinating Bay Area, and she went with me to have our cards read and our auras cleansed. (They were filthy.)
Tarot maven Deb Richardson read for Rose.
Boundless thanks to the quiet heroes of Building Futures with Women and Children (especially Dr. Liz Nickels) in San Leandro,
California. They are working tirelessly to end violence against women, and their input was invaluable.
My family (Scott, Sam, Maisy Jane, Bob, Betty, Bobby, Julie, Daniel, Erin Virginia, Jane, Allison) and my extended family
(Macland Presbyterian Church, especially the very Slanted Sidewalk-ers and smallgroup) are my living home. Thanks for reminding
me daily that Love wins.
Most of all, I thank you for reading.
Amarillo, Texas, 1997
I
T WAS AN AIRPORT gypsy who told me that I had to kill my husband. She may have been the first to say the words out loud, but
she was only giving voice to a thing I’d been trying not to know for a long, long time. When she said that it was him or me,
the words rang out like church bells, shuddering through my bones. For two days, they sat in the pit of my belly, making me
sick. I had no reason to trust her, and I’d as soon take life advice from a Chinese take-out fortune cookie as believe in
tarot cards, but I’d lived with Thom Grandee long enough to recognize the truth, no matter how it came to me.
So on Thursday morning, I got my Pawpy’s old gun, and I lay for my husband near Wildcat Bluff. Thom liked to run a trail out
there. It was too far from the picnic grounds to attract most day-trippers, and he got his miles in early, when he could trust
it would be his alone. That day he had me for secret company.
Not two hours ago, I’d gotten up before the sun to make him real biscuits. I’d cut Crisco into flour until it felt soft, like
powdered velvet. I’d mixed the dough and rolled it and pressed out circles with the top of a juice glass. I’d fried bacon
and then cooked two eggs sunny-side up in the grease. I had loaded his grits with salt and cheese and put thick pats of butter
to melt on everything that looked like it could hold butter. There must have been a thousand calories in fat alone floating
on that plate.
I’d often made him devil-breakfasts like this after fights, so I hadn’t thought of it as a last meal. It was more of an absurd
apology. Like me saying, “Baby, I’m scared I might blow holes in you later, but look, I made you the naughty eggs.” Last night
I’d made sex for him, too, in the same way, buttery slick and fat with all the things he liked best.
An hour before the sex, he’d held my head sideways in his big hand, my other cheek pressed into the cool plaster of the wall.
I’d been pinned, limbs flailing helpless sideways, while he ran four fast punches down one side of my back. Then he’d let
me go and I’d slid down the wall into a heap and he’d said, “Lord, Ro, why do you push me like that?”
I didn’t say a word. He knew the answer. We both knew; I was a good wife most times, but I was made like nesting dolls. I
had something bad, some other girl, buried way down in the meat of me. That inside girl was the thing that needed to be hit,
that deserved it, and I called it to her. Last night, I’d lay coiled on the floor at Thom’s feet, wondering why a big man
like him couldn’t hit through, could never hit me hard enough to reach her.
On Tuesday morning, I’d driven my elderly neighbor, Mrs. Fancy, to the airport. She’d come over the week before with a plate
of her hot cheese cornbread and asked me if I would drive her. She was on a fixed income, and I knew four days of airport
parking would be a trial for her, so I’d lied and said I’d love to spend a solid hour fighting highway traffic. I owed her
more than a ride to the airport, as good as she had been to me.
“We can take my Honda,” Mrs. Fancy had said, smiling her thanks at me with her brown eyes squirrel bright. “You’re saving
me the parking, Ro. At least let me save you the gas.”
Since my ancient Buick got about twelve miles a gallon with the wind behind me, I was happy enough to take her in the Civic.
That would have been the end of it, if I hadn’t helped Mrs. Fancy tote in all her luggage. The gypsy was standing near the
airport’s
little coffee shop like she’d been waiting for me. Like she’d known that I was coming.
That gypsy looked at me and knew me. She saw me whole, inside and out, as if my skin was made of glass. She laid her tarot
cards for me, and that reading… it was like she took my life and ran it through a Cuisinart. She told me it was Thom or me,
and God help me, I believed her. As I drove home after, I was shaking so hard I like to run off the road. I pulled onto the
shoulder and sat, trying to remember how to make my lungs work right. My hands gripped the steering wheel so tight, the knuckles
had gone bloodless. As I looked at them, a chill, small voice rose up inside of me, not shaking at all. It said, clear and
cold,
What we got here is an almost anonymous car for three days. That could be right useful.
So instead of taking the Honda back to Mrs. Fancy’s garage, I’d parked it on a busy street a few blocks over. The hours until
Mrs. Fancy’s return began ticking backwards in my head, like a countdown. I was set to pick her up come Friday, so this muggy
Thursday morning was my last chance. As I’d made Thom’s final, butter-logged breakfast, my eat-in kitchen had looked as fake
as a movie set, the sunflowers nodding cheerful on the wallpaper, the mellow old linoleum gleaming under its fresh coat of
Mop & Glo. I’d whisked about, wiping down the countertop and washing the cook pans like I was an alive cartoon, hand drawn
into a sunshiny kitchen.
“You trying to kill me, woman?” Thom had said when I’d set the plate in front of him. My mouth had gone slack, and he’d grinned
up at me. He’d tucked into the bacon, eyes closing as he chewed. “I can feel my arteries hardening, but my tongue don’t much
care.” I’d managed to get my lips to close before drool fell out. He’d broken the yolk with one of the biscuits and said,
“You’re gonna get me as fat as your damn dog.”
Gretel had thumped her tail on the floor in honor of the word
dog
, or maybe the word
fat
. She knew both words meant her. Gretel was mine. She was a khaki-colored mutt, mostly hound dog, but
Thom always said at least one of her ancestors must have been a piece of carpet, as much time as she spent sprawled out snoozing
on the floor. I’d listened to the real sound of her tail on the linoleum and thought to myself,
This is how to kill a man. I keep myself believing I won’t, but I keep going, until I am there and already doing it.
It was a trick I was playing on myself, and it worked even though I knew I was playing it.