Exasperated at not being obeyed, Tommy uses the gun like a pointer again, jabbing it in each of their directions, then jabbing it at the floor. Sylvie thinks about him jabbing the gun at the papers he wanted Nadine to tear up. Based on what she’s seen so far, she can’t blame Nadine for filing those papers, for being so hesitant to tear them up even with a gun pointed at her. Sylvie wants to blame Nadine for this mess, but she cannot. In all honesty, she probably would’ve done the same and stood her ground. Nadine couldn’t possibly have known that it would lead to this. Even Sylvie hadn’t truly appreciated what was happening until it was too late.
For now it’s best to keep him calm. Appease him. And someone has to go first.Age before beauty, Sylvie thinks as she steps away from the counter and motions to the others to follow her over to the largest area of floor space in the small room. “Let’s all have a seat,” she says. The other three pick up their things and slowly move with her.
Morrow, Blythe, and Nadine slide down into sitting positions on the floor seemingly without thinking about it even as it strikes Sylvie that she cannot do the same. She can’t remember the last time she’s sat down on a floor. There was a time, in her fifties, when she faithfully got herself down on the floor and then got herself back up again every day just because some guest on a TV talk show said that women her age should do so.
Somewhere along the way she’d abandoned the practice, which she both regrets and wonders how much it would’ve helped as she stares down at the white specks dotting the tile beneath her feet.She tries to picture lowering herself—thinking of the balance, dexterity, and control such a feat would require. Even if she got herself down there, there is no way she could get herself back up.
She feels as helpless as a child. Worse than a child. A child could throw herself to the floor and pop right back up again. Sylvie cannot. For a moment she is mad at this man who is forcing her to feel this way. But even as angry tears fill her eyes, she reminds herself that anger is not the way out of here. With all the gentleness she can muster, she says to the room, “I’m an old lady.” She gives a little laugh as if she has said something funny. “Sitting on the floor is difficult for me.”Impossible, she thinks.
She stands, immobile, as they all stare at her, uncertain what to do. She is a problem, but she does not mean to be. This is one part of aging she was not prepared for: the humiliation. The degradation. She was never incapable in her younger years. She never allowed it.
“Here, let me help you,” says Nadine, hopping up from the floor as if it’s nothing. She goes over to the counter and tugs the stool she’d been sitting on as she worked out of its little nook, then drags it across the floor to where the other women are seated. The steel legs of the stool scraping across the tile floor make a grating noise like fingernails on a chalkboard. They all wince at the sound.
Nadine stops when she reaches Sylvie and extends her hand, which Sylvie, with gratitude, takes. With Nadine’s assistance, she climbs up onto the stool. Nadine stoops down to tuck Sylvie’s purse and the envelope under the stool. When Nadine stands up, Sylvie starts to thank her for the help, but Nadine’s attention is diverted to the vestibule area.
Sylvie watches Nadine’s mouth make a small, round O of surprise and turns to discover two women standing in the vestibule, eyeing Tommy’s hastily constructed barricade withconfused expressions. One of them is holding what looks like a hot dog. One of them is getting out her phone. When Tommy walks forward and raises the gun at them through the window, one throws the hot dog to the ground and the other starts talking fast into her phone.
Sylvie feels a mixture of relief and jealousy as the two women turn and run, exhaling for them as the outer front door opens and they both disappear into the bright light, wincing for herself as the door slams shut behind them. She looks over at Nadine, who stands frozen in place, looking like a child who has been abandoned.
Nadine watches Stacy and Martha go but wants to scream at them to come back. Not that she blames them for running away. Not when Tommy just aimed his gun at them. This situation is getting further and further out of hand. Nadine feels helpless to stop it, yet responsible for her part in it. If only she’d torn up those stupid papers when she had the chance. “This is all your fault, Nadine,” he’d said. Now she says it to herself.
Nadine looks at Sylvie, perched uncomfortably on the stool, looking sad and worried. She thinks of her own grandma, how she’d want to kill anyone who put her in this position. She gives Sylvie a small smile, trying to communicate that things will be okay, even though she doesn’t know if they will or not.
She doesn’t think Tommy would actually shoot someone—that bullet he fired off in the back went high on purpose. An experienced hunter, Tommy knows how to shoot a gun too well to miss that badly. But she doubts the cops will take any of that into account, especially seeing as how Tommy has now pulled a gun on two of her coworkers. She looks out at the vestibule. The hot dog is lying there, freed from its bun. Sure enough, there’s yellow mustard slathered across it. Nadine rolls her eyes and looks away. The sight makes her nauseous.
Tommy strides back to the counter, to the envelope they’d fought over, still where they left it. He stares at it for a long moment as the four women watch him warily, then looks back at Nadine. “Do you want to tear it up, or me?” he asks.
Nadine sighs. Not this again. “It doesn’t matter if I tear it up, Tommy. All this”—she waves her hand at the room, at the seated women—“sort of overrules that.”
Tommy grimaces, his brows knit together and his eyes squinty. “All this”—now it’s his turn to gesture to the room, the seated women—“is because of that. If you’d just torn it up like I asked, given us a chance like I asked...”
Nadine cocks her head at him. “Yes,” she says, deadpan. “You’ve made giving you another chance look likesucha good option.” She rolls her eyes as punctuation.
In response Tommy seizes the envelope and, with a dramatic flourish, holds it aloft like Moses with the Ten Commandments. If he wasn’t currently clutching a gun in his free hand, they all would probably crack up laughing. Instead, they all watch, frozen, as he puts the gun down where the envelope used to be and uses both hands to tear the envelope into pieces.
Well, they don’tallwatch. Morrow registers both the gun discarded on the counter and Tommy’s full hands and carpe diems her way to the barricade, pushing with all her might to remove the smallest obstacle, a display of tourism pamphlets, freebies meant to entice visitors to come to the local attractions. The pamphlets about the local planetarium fall to the ground and fan out as Morrow grunts with the effort even as she thinks of the one time she took Maya to that planetarium. There’d been a laser show featuring Taylor Swift music. She’d thought Maya would love it, but she fell asleep halfway through and didn’t want to stop for ice cream afterward.
Tommy sees what’s happening, drops the bits of envelope, grabsthe gun, and goes after Morrow. Except he isn’t prepared for a mother who’s already had a very bad day. Morrow turns on him with claws bared. She uses her nails, manicured in a lovely shade of rosy pink, to fend him off, swiping at him in an attempt to keep him at bay as she continues to try to remove the obstacles he put there, straining for her freedom. She uses her hands and feet and elbows. She puts up one hell of a fight.
Though the other three women don’t join in, they do live vicariously through Morrow, appreciating every time one of her appendages makes contact with one of his. Later they will wonder why they never moved to help. If they’d all worked together, they will think, they might have gotten free. But they were too afraid to move, too swept up by the danger flowing through the room, cowed by the threat of Tommy’s weapon.
Though it seems much longer, the fight is over in minutes. Tommy gains the upper hand and pulls Morrow away from the doorway, pushing her back to her spot among the others. She slumps down, not making eye contact, the picture of defeat. Blythe thinks of saying something to her, something about how brave she’d just been, how she’d done what they’d all wanted to do but had been too afraid. She wants to tell Morrow she is a hero. But Blythe says nothing. She returns to picking the nail polish off her own nails, quietly marveling over how well Morrow’s manicure held up in the fight.
Chapter 11
Still winded from the altercation, Tommy marches over to the barricade to try to put it back together. As he leans down, his head swims from the alcohol and the exertion of the fight. He’s never fought a woman in his life, and he hadn’t intended to just now. In hindsight he figures he should’ve let her run out. Then he should’ve let them all run out after her. Then this would be over and he could let the chips fall where they may.
But when he saw her trying to escape, something in him had to stop her. He doesn’t know what compelled him, but it was something he doesn’t like, a deep-down kind of meanness he wishes wasn’t there. It is the same impulse that led him to create the barricade, a combination of stupidity and stubbornness that has got him locked into a situation he can’t get out of now. He feels a wash of shame flood his cheeks and travel down through his chest and into his belly, coming to rest there like a hot, spreading fire. He has no choice but to see it through.
He turns his focus back to gathering up the tourism pamphlets that fell to the floor as they struggled. It seems odd to him that they have tourism pamphlets in a post office. How many tourists actually come in this post office? Do people on vacation need to mail things? He doesn’t know why they would. The whole point, as far as he can figure, is that people go on vacation to take a break from doing things like going to the post office.But Tommy doesn’t know about taking vacations. That wasn’t something he grew up doing.
His dad always said, “Son, we live where people come to vacation. Why would we need to go anywhere else?” Tommy figured that was true, but still. He always wanted to go on vacation like he’d seen people do on TV and heard about from kids at school. He and Nadine said they would go on a vacation someday, but money was always tight, and he heard himself saying to her, like his dad, “Why would we need to go on vacation when we can go to the beach here?” He told himself it was enough. He looks over at Nadine. Maybe it wasn’t.
He continues with the pamphlets, each one promising a better time than the one next to it. He goes to pick up the ones on the floor, fanned out like a deck of cards. They are for the planetarium, which is right down the street. He went there once on a field trip. He can’t remember what grade it was, but he remembers learning about the stars and finding them fascinating. For a while after that field trip he’d asked for a telescope for Christmas. Instead, he’d received his first hunting rifle. Instinctively, his hand moves to pat the gun in his pocket. It was probably a mistake to bring it in here. But right now it feels like security.
As he continues with his task, his eyes fall on a familiar logo. It is a pamphlet advertising the Tiki Bar over on Ocean Isle. “Hey, Nadine,” he says, holding it up. “Look!”
From her place on the floor, Nadine scowls at him. “So?” she asks, as if they haven’t been there too many nights to count. As if they hadn’t stared out at the night sky from the roof deck, trying to name those stars they learned about in school but had long since forgotten, as Jimmy Buffett sang through the speakers. She can try to pretend she’s forgotten all she wants.But he knows she hasn’t. Somehow, he thinks, he’s just got to make her remember.
