“You got a menu?” he asks, voice rough.
I point to the chalkboard Myrtle uses. “You’re looking at it.”
He peers across the room at her writing. “I want the BLT.”
“Sorry,” I tell him. “We ran out of bacon at four o’clock.”
He looks up at me, and I recognize the haughtiness in his expression, that same edge Henry always had, as if he were a head above everyone else in the room. As if I am lucky to be in his presence. “I don’t like tuna fish,” he says slowly.
“Well, we can make you a peanut butter and jelly,” I suggest. “It’s what we give the kids.”
He glares at me, licks his bottom lip. “Fine.”
I turn to the woman. “And for you?”
For the first time, she looks up, and that’s when I see the swollen cheekbone, shiny and purple, the broken vessels and bruising under her eye. Suddenly, the large dress makes sense. The injuries beneath it are probably worse than her face. She can’t bear anything against her skin.
“She’ll have the same as me,” her husband or boyfriend interjects. He eyes her across the table. “I don’t want to smell fish on you in the car.”
My hands begin to tremble. I wipe them across the front of my shirt.
“Tonight would be great, sweetheart,” he says, shooting me an irritated glance.
In it, I see her body crumpled on the floor, see the trajectory of his leg as he kicks her, watch her bleed across the carpet, the baby lost to her now. My blood surges, a whoosh sounding in my ears.
“Sure.” I bite the word off at the end and walk slowly to the kitchen, passing Myrtle on the way. She’s been roped into a conversation with two of Ed’s friends, who spend most of theirfree time at the Drunken Moose. Their favorite subjects are the weather, guns, and fishing.
“And coffee!” I hear the man shout across the café at me.
My shoulders jerk and I duck behind the counter to pour his cup, hands shaking the whole time. I know this man. He’s not Henry’s exact match, but he’s of a kind. And I know an abused woman when I see one. She’s lucky he let her come in here at all, looking like that. He probably figures no one knows them, so they won’t be confronted. Guys like him count on people’s need to maintain the status quo. Or he’s become so arrogant he’s lost touch with the fact he’s committed a crime. He’ll speed out of here when he’s done, probably hold her down while he rapes her tonight for having the gall to look me in the face. I stare into the black void of his coffee and see all the pain Henry has ever caused me. Anger flushes across my skin like heat, and I begin to perspire. My stomach twists. It’s not nausea exactly, but a need for release. My lip curls. Leaning down slightly, I work my tongue, gathering saliva, and spit a long drip into his cup, stirring it with my finger for good measure. Someday, I’ll find a way to fight back that really counts for something, but for now, this little gesture brings a modicum of justice.
I set the coffee before him, burning with every step. I place a glass of ice water next to her. I want to touch her shoulder, tell her Iknow.But that would only make it worse for her. I walk back, preparing to make his sandwich, when Myrtle steps in front of me.
“I’ve got this,” she says, grabbing the handle of the fridge. Her eyes dart from me to their table. “Why don’t you go outside, check on the bathroom, make sure there’s plenty of toilet paper.”
“But there’s so many people—” I start to say.
Myrtle narrows her eyes at me, tucks her chin. “Go outside, Acacia. Cool off. You look… flushed.”
I think she knows what I’m feeling. She must have seen the woman, too. I nod and stalk out into the cool air, not even stopping to pet Bart. I dally in the bathroom, restocking toilet paper and changing the trash. I wash my hands and splash water across my face. And then I kick around in the grass behind the café, waiting for my internal body temperature to regulate, for the tremor to leave my hands and the burn to leave my skin. It takes several long, slow breaths as I look up to the sky, stars beginning to spill across it like glitter.
It’s so beautiful here it hurts, a deep ache in the chest like your heart is stretching, too small to take it all in. These mountains hold me in a fertile embrace, a mystical undercurrent pulsing just beneath the soles of my feet. I never fancied myself the outdoorsy type, but here I feel connected to something I’ve been missing my whole life. As if these mountains and I are made of the same stuff. As if I am closer to the bobcat and the timber wolf and the black bear than I am to another human being. It helps that I can’t imagine Henry here, in a place so rugged and wild, so free. He would detest the natural order of it, the lack of right angles. It makes me love it all the more. I can see why Myrtle came here and never left. I may never leave myself.
Convinced I’ve taken enough of a break, I head back toward the café. I’m just walking up to the front door when I see the man from the road through the window. He stands, takes an ungainly step as if his legs don’t quite work, and turns to the side. His stomach swells before my eyes and he clutches at it. His skin burnishes with a sickly urine color, the whites of his eyes turning yellow like aged paper. He stumbles forward, vomiting violently across his shoes, and I see the wet stain grow along the back of his tight jeans as he shits himself. The woman with him begins screaming as he collapses, taking another table down with him in a great clatter of dishes.
I am frozen with one hand on the door. As he falls, my eyes meet Myrtle’s across the café, and in them, I see fear.
10Sheriff
I didn’t create the monster, I just married him. But I met the woman who did.
After he proposed and I accepted, Henry explained that he came from an old English family, a relic of the British nobility on his mother’s side—Eleanor. She’d technically been born and raised in the United States but clung to the social etiquette of her ancestors. It had made his childhood especially challenging. He adored his mother, but she was cold, and she didn’t mingle with people outside her own family. He wanted to invite her to the wedding, but he had to be sure she wouldn’t encounter any guests “beneath her station.” As it turned out, all Charleston was beneath Eleanor’s station. So, we married alone, with only her arctic blue eyes and disdainful pout to witness it.
The ceremony was minuscule, under the wide branches of oak trees at a historic site with just the three of us in attendance.
She walked up to introduce herself after the nuptials in a black lace skirt and jacket set, dark crimson lipstick rimming her smile. She had Henry’s lean build and thin hair, but her eyes were lighter, like those of a corpse. “You must be the bride,” she said as she looked me over.
I smiled nervously. I wanted so much to make a good impression, to please Henry in this way. I knew what his mother meant to him, despite their troubled relationship.
