Twenty-three
AS THEY PULLED away from the Shellsford Baptist Church, Mary clicked on Hobson Mott’s e-mail message. It was a blanket memo to every one in the court house—judges, attorneys, police officers, maybe even the janitorial crews, for all she knew.
Please be advised that as of Monday, October 14, Assistant District Attorney Mary Crow is no longer associated with the Deckard County Justice Department. Ms. Craw’s cases will be reassigned immediately.
Hobson T. Mott, AG
The terse message seemed to dance, sneering, before her eyes. She felt as if she were trying to breathe through cotton. For the first time in ten years, she was without the one thing that had saved her—first, when Jonathan left, then later, when Irene Hannah died. For the first time since law school, she was without her job.
She sat there, stunned. She had never lost a case in her career, yet here she was, sacked like some bottom-of-the-class graduate of a third rate law school. Her cheeks flamed with humiliation. How could Hobson do this? How she wished she could spit in his eye!
“Jahyosiha?” Gabe’s halting Cherokee broke the silence that, she now realized, had stretched for miles. He had asked if she was hungry.
“I don’t think so,” she replied, too sad to launch into a language that she couldn’t really speak, anyway. They were driving along a two lane highway, through farmland that had grown more rolling than mountainous. She swallowed hard. “I’ve just been fired.”
“Fired?” He turned to her so quickly, he nearly ran off the road. “Why? I thought you just won your big case.”
“I did.” Mary felt her throat thicken. “Guess I didn’t win it the way they wanted it won.”
Gabe looked at her, his eyes sympathetic. “There’s a little restaurant up the road that serves a terrific lunch. Sometimes things don’t look quite so bad on a full stomach.”
“That’s fine,” she said absently, slumping back in her seat, not wanting food or comfort or anything except Lily Walkingstick and her old job back.
An hour later they sat in Christiana, Tennessee, at Miller’s Grocery, a restaurant housed in an old-timey grocery store, that now served the Southern cuisine of her grandmother’s day—fried chicken, butter beans, black-eyed peas, and the ubiquitous frozen fruit salad that had been a staple of Southern ladies’ lunches ever since refrigeration had gone electric. She looked across the table at Gabe and wondered if he held her grandmother’s opinion that a warm, crumbly wedge of corn bread could cure most anything. I wish, she thought, eyeing the menu, wondering how much she would have to consume to make all her troubles disappear.
“How come you know this place so well?” she asked as Gabe waved genially to the woman who stood behind the cash register at the back of the converted store.
“I used to teach here, a few years back.”
“They have a college here?” As far as she could see, the town of Christiana seemed to be a post office, a tiny gift shop, and this restaurant, all sprouting up in the middle of Tennessee’s version of nowhere.
He smiled. “There’s a state university in Murfreesboro, up the road a bit.”
She sat back in her chair, the clatter of lunch swirling around her. Two white-haired women at the next table gossiped about someone they’d seen in church yesterday; two other women behind them planned a baby shower for a friend. A busboy scooped dirty dishes carelessly into a plastic tub while a waitress refilled their iced tea. How odd it all seemed. Her godchild was missing and she’d just lost her job, yet people were laughing with their friends, eating chess pie for dessert, figuring up how much to leave for a tip. Lily had been stolen. She could not find her. Jasmine Harris had been abused. And she’d just been fired for sending her abuser up for twenty years in prison.
All at once, she needed to get away. The world made no sense today; none of the rules she lived by applied anymore. She grabbed her cell phone and got up from the table, knocking over her chair. Other diners looked up, startled, as she hurried to the door. She made no apologies but rushed outside, into the warm autumn afternoon.
To her right stood the post office, in front of her nothing but a road and a railroad track. She ran toward the tracks mindlessly, stopping only when she stood on a cross tie between the long iron rails. As she gazed down the tracks, the view looked like a perspective exercise in drawing class. Two arrow-straight lines converged into a vanishing point, stretching through acres of land to link Chicago with Mobile, the North to the South, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. And here she stood, in the center of it all, unable to find one three-month-old baby and hang on to her job at the same time.
She lifted her hand to shield her eyes from the sun when a sign caught her eye. Nearly covered by a sprawling trumpet vine, it stood tilted next to the tracks, its black letters peeling.
“Abandoning animals is unlawful,” she read aloud, and suddenly, without warning, everything—Lily, Mott, Jonathan, and Ruth—all crashed down upon her. She sat down in the middle of the railroad track and started to cry. She didn’t care if a train came along. In fact, she wished one would.
She wept until she heard footsteps crunching through the gravel. She looked up. Gabe stood there, holding their lunches on a tray. He looked ridiculous but somehow noble, too.
“I figured today might be a good day for takeout.” He said, smiling.
She lowered her head, embarrassed. Gabe had been nothing but kind and helpful ever since she met him. She’d no reason to run out of the restaurant as if he’d insulted her.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “You deserve better.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’d be a little hot too, if I were you.”
“If you were me?”
“In the past forty-eight hours I’ve seen you lose your godchild, face off with a small-town sheriff, comfort the woman who married a man you still love, and lose your job. I’d say you’ve got a right to be a little cranky.”
She stared at him, speechless. Who was this man? He’d known her less than two days, yet he seemed to read and accept the troubled terrain of her heart as readily as Jonathan. The smile she gave Gabe was wobbly, but genuine.
“Whoa,” he murmured, leaning down to touch the corner of her mouth. “That’s some thing you ought to do more often.”
“Let’s eat,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’m done feeling sorry for myself.”
They moved from the railroad track to the broad, gold field that stretched beside it. Gabe brought a blanket from the van and they spread their food out and ate, picnic-style. He’d ordered them both fried chicken and corn nuggets, turnip greens and pecan pie. Though Mary would have sworn she had no appetite, she soon had an impressive pile of bare chicken bones on her plate.
“Pretty good, huh?” Gabe lay back on the grass, his arms cradling his head.
“Delicious.” Mary looked over at the restaurant. “Don’t they want their dishes back?”
“I’ll return them in a few minutes.” He turned over to face her. “You feeling better?”
She nodded. Maybe her grandmother had been on to something after all. Maybe corn bread and butter beans did make things seem not quite so bad.
“It’s always hard to lose something you love.” Gabe’s face grew suddenly sad.
“Something or somebody?”
“Either, I guess. I’ve never lost much of anything, but I once lost somebody.”
“Your dad?” Mary offered the only person she’d heard him mention.
“My wife.”
“You lost your wife?”
“You saw our wedding photo.”
“I did. She’s gorgeous.”
“Yes, she was. Her name was Becca. She was a graduate fellow in archaeology at UT.”
“What happened?” She didn’t want to pry, but he seemed to want to talk.
“We were in Washington, at an archaeological conference. I wanted to drive over to Baltimore, to watch Cal Ripken break Gehrig’s game record. Becca didn’t even like baseball, but she went, just to please me. We watched the game, watched Ripken take a victory lap around the field. She wanted to leave; I wanted to stay to see the whole post-game show. On the way home a drunk driver T-boned our car. I came out okay. She didn’t.” He studied the blanket as if it could reveal the secrets of the universe.
“That’s awful, Gabe,” Mary said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
“It happened eight years ago. Every day I still wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t acted like such a jerk, if we’d left that stadium when she wanted to.” He glanced up at her. “You know what I mean?”
She nodded as the faraway whistle of an approaching train broke the warm silence of the meadow. The sad wail seemed to echo both the grief Gabe had just given voice to and the older grief that resounded in her own battered heart. How well she knew how he felt! She’d relived her own actions the day her mother died a million times. However fervently she wished she’d done things differently, the end result always came out the same. You lived your life in ignorance, thinking what harm can there be in lingering at a baseball game, or making love to someone you deeply desired? Only later did you learn the consequences of your acts, when the people you most loved lay dead and the only thing left for you to do was sit beside them and weep.