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“Where’s your lovely wife?”Lovelycould be an insult too. Funny how words work like that.
“At the market. I planned to go with her but made an excuse when I saw you fall.”
“You saw me?”
“Through the kitchen window.”
Her insides warmed traitorously. She suspected he watched her often, but to hear him say it…
“And you just let yourself in, free as you please?” She hated how happy it made her.
“Sure did. You got a problem with that?” She did, and she didn’t, for reasons they both knew.
“No.” Taking a deep breath, she resigned herself to the fact that Paul would forever attempt to be her savior no matter how hard she tried to push him away. Maybe it was wrong to let him sit here, but who else did she have? No one. No one at all. They sat in silence for a minute, letting the moment sit between them like a third person in the room. Just because you can’t have something doesn’t make you stop wanting it, despite the number of years you put between yourself and the longing. This was no exception.
“I saw the papers. Didn’t mean to look, but when I went to pick them up off the floor…”
“I found them in papa’s garage earlier when I went looking for a paintbrush.”
He shifted in place. “Yeah, I saw the graffiti. I’ll finish painting over it for you. The kids in this town will end up in prison someday, and it’ll serve them right.” He went silent for a moment. “So, you didn’t know?”
She pinned him with a glare. “Of course, I didn’t know. I knew bits and pieces of my pa’s ramblings when I was a kid, but I didn’t know he knew what the hospital was doing or that Washington Plastics was doing it too.”
Paul reached for her hand, neither of them speaking. What was there to say? It all happened years ago, and most people involved were either dead or likely too old to remember much about it. Some weren’t, of course. But if the people in this town had anything in common, it was their collective hatred for the Gertie family and everything they represented. Penniless. Lower class. An unwillingness to conform. A willingness to stand up to the higher-ups.
But Sally was tired of standing, she only wanted to lie down and sleep. Maybe one day she would move far away but to where? It was already the late ‘70s. She had a bad reputation, the most meager possessions, and had already managed to lose everything good. Starting over wasn’t an option when you had thirty years behind you and still remained at the gate. There was no sense in going anywhere. There was even less to live for.
“Let me fight for you, Sally.” Paul said it quietly, almost like a whisper.
A sad smile curved her mouth. “What are you going to do? Sue the city? Tell everyone my papa, and I are the real victims here?” She turned toward the window and looked through its layer of dust and grime to the maple tree outside, waving in the wind like nothing could topple it. “There’s no point.”
“They took your son and used a hospital tragedy—one that could have been avoided, mind you—to do it. Seems to me it’s the only point.”
She pulled her hand away, quietly but firmly ending the conversation. No amount of analyzing or proselytizing would bring her son back. And she couldn’t even prove it. Even if she could, what was she going to do, force a ten-year old to come live with her? Even if Paul was right and Jack had taken her son, the boy only knew him as his father. There was no happy ever after for Sally. Never had been and never would be. It was time she accepted it.
“Sally, let me help.”
“No, and I don’t want to talk about it again.”
When Paul sighed and stood to leave, she thought that was the end of the conversation. Case closed. Never to be spoken of again.
She shouldn’t have been surprised to find news of a lawsuit making headlines in the local paper the very next week. She shouldn’t have been surprised that her name was attached to the story as the plaintiff. She shouldn’t have been surprised that Paul named himself as her attorney.
But she was. Paul had always tried to fight for her when no one else would. He was fierce where she wasn’t, strong where she learned to hide. He might have been successful too if she hadn’t withdrawn the suit the very next week.
There was more than one way to fight, and she decided she would rather do it alone. She glanced at the BB gun in the corner of the room, standing at attention in the same spot where Papa left it. He used it to shoo critters off their property that weren’t welcome and caused a ruckus, ripping through their garden and eating everything in sight. Raccoons. Armadillos. Snakes.
Alone would be Sally’s new way of life.
25
October 1998
Finn
It’s all there in black and red. Black for the ink that made up the story. Red for the bloodshed that made up that day, now stained pink after all the scrubbing and sweeping under the rug all involved did. The truth was easy to find if you spent five minutes looking, something no one ever did because they were told not to. Instead, the town leaders called the fire an accident. Negligence. Common human error that could’ve happened to anyone.
If you repeat something long enough, you start to believe it.
