Chapter 14
After Shana’s dreamy trio of movers had left yesterday, after Kate and Kelly had visited to make their contributions to what Shana had dubbed the DGN—Dominion Gossip Network—and further muddy her perception of her old home town, she and Shana set up their bedrooms, put their clothes back into their dressers and made their beds. Shana’s dreamy trio had put the frames together. Shana dug out the drop cloths, placed four in her own bedroom and six in her mother’s.
“Because you’re sloppy as—”
“Just keep that to yourself.”
They went to MacDonald’s again for supper, dropped by Cavanaugh’s Grocery to get milk, bread, peanut butter, raspberry jam for Shana, strawberry jam for her, coffee, filters, eggs, a small ham, Shana’s favorite meat if honey-garlic chicken wings weren’t available, pizza and pistachio ice-cream, Shana’s favorite dessert if honey-garlic chicken wings weren’t available.
They then finished cleaning the sections of the basement they hadn’t got to. At 8 pm, they accepted defeat and surrendered to exhaustion. Despite the hot day, Shana popped the pizza into the oven, which only smoked a bit when it was turned on. They ate and drank and then went to bed.
She was spared a return trip to the Crowley farm, though she did again get up twice to check through the house and look in on Shana. She was also spared a siren wake-up call. She wasn’t spared further stiffness.
This morning, there were two pieces of pizza left, which was Shana’s favorite breakfast if honey-garlic chicken wings weren’t available. Shana had both pieces and milk, she had toast and coffee.
The local Lowe’s store was open at 8:00 am on Sundays. They picked out sage green for Shana’s room, a close match to her preferred ice-drop green that she had in Portland. She chose light taupe for her bedroom. The moment she did, Shana walked away from her and let her bring the paint and paint supplies in the buggy to the cashier by herself. Shana exited the store while she paid for everything and walked a dozen steps behind her when they returned to the Mazda.
Shana loaded the sage green into the car but wouldn’t touch the other cans of paint.
“Your room is going to look like some little boy tried to spread his—”
“Don’t go there, I’m warning you.”
“If it looks like I think it’s going to look, I’ll padlock you in one night while you’re asleep. You can go all Poe in there and I still won’t ever let you out.”
“It’s a light shade. If it doesn’t look right once it’s dry, I’ll just use it as an undercoat.”
They got into the Mazda after she returned the buggy.
“I know exactly how it’s going to look.” Shana bowed her head and covered her face with her hands. “I just wish you’d show some consideration for others. I have to live there, too, you know.”
“How selfish of me, I’ll return it tomorrow and get black.”
Shana raised her head. “There, now, don’t you feel better?”
“Weight lifting, back straightening.”
Because two leftover pieces of pizza, two slices of toast, milk and coffee were not enough for breakfast, they stopped for another coffee for her, hot chocolate for Shana, and two bacon and egg sandwiches at Peterson’s, a small grocery store and delicatessen. After putting in their order, she joined Shana at one of six tables in the delicatessen section of the store. They were the only customers.
A woman brought it to the table. “You’re the new sheriff, aren’t you?”
“Yes I am.”
“Remember me?” The woman beamed down at her.
Joan stared up at her. She didn’t mean to, but the face, with a smooth, freckle-filled complexion, huge green eyes and a pointed chin, was surrounded by long, chestnut hair. It was the eyes, hair and pointed chin that she soon recognized.
“Good Lord, Stephanie. How are you?” She lunged up from her chair and hugged Stephanie Peterson hard.
Stephanie hugged her back every bit as hard. “It’s been so long, Joanie. When I heard you were coming back, I cried all night. I was so happy.”
She kissed Stephanie’s cheek and hugged her again. When they broke, she wiped tears from Stephanie’s cheek and then her own.
Stephanie looked down at Shana. “She is beautiful, just like you told me. Of course, that was twelve years ago.” She held out her hand to Shana.
Shana stood up. “Don’t I get one, too?”
“You sure do.” She hugged Shana as hard and had to wipe more tears from her cheeks when she let go.
Shana wiped her eyes. “I know you.” She slapped her mom’s shoulder. “And you didn’t remember her at first?”
She suspected why she hadn’t recognized Stephanie right away, but had decided before returning to Dominion not to dwell on the second time Stephanie had saved her life. It wasn’t fair, but Stephanie had just been shoved into the dark recesses along with the rest of that memory.
“You were the one who looked after her broken heart when Vince Dorchester ditched her a week before they were to be married. She told me all about that once.”
Stephanie let out a low belly laugh that belied her delicate features. “Balls to that. I kept her from becoming nothing less than the trailer-trash, teen-queen of Dominion.”
“That’s my daughter you’re talking to. I have not authorized you to provide any further information on the matter.”
“She’s just kidding,” Shana said. “Tell me all about it from your side. Did she really try to jump off a bridge?”
“I never told you I tried to jump off a bridge, only that my heart was broken.”
Stephanie roared with laughter. “More like your pride.” She mimicked a young girl’s voice. “I’m going to have the biggest wedding Dominion has ever seen.”
“I never said that.”
“The hell you didn’t.”
Shana said, “She’s always had memory problems. I’m never going to know if she’s suffering from early onset or not. Please continue.”
“Later, you said no one could possibly know how much you loved him and thus no one could possibly understand how great your pain was.”
Shana gasped. “Oh, mother, honestly, you didn’t.”
Her face sizzled. She started laughing.
Stephanie laughed even louder.
Shana went back to her sandwich.
She said to Shana, “That’s why you are never going to date a boy from a trailer park.”
“You’re never going to let me date anyone.”
“True.”
“Do you know what happened to him?” Stephanie covered her mouth to prevent another burst of laughter.
“Didn’t really try to keep in touch after that.”
“He’s married.”
“Poor woman.”
“More like justice served. She’s almost three hundred pounds. They have two boys aged fifteen and sixteen who you will be arresting frequently, and she’s put him in the hospital three times with a wicked right cross.”
“This sandwich is delicious,” Shana said. “Can I have another, please, and a small mocha?”
Joan said, “Hold the mocha.”
Stephanie signalled to the girl at the delicatessen counter to make another sandwich.
“I’m glad you dropped by, Joanie. This is my last week. I’ve sold out to Safeway.”
“But Peterson’s has been here since the beginning.”
“A little place like this just doesn’t work anymore. I tried to make it more chic with this deli, but. . . .”
“What will you do?”
“Travel, see the world, plow through some men.”
Shana sat back down. “Can I go with you?”
Stephanie hugged Joan again. “Funny, isn’t it? You finally come back to Dominion, which I thought you would never do, and I’m finally leaving, which I thought I would never do. Do drop by anytime, both of you.”
“As much as we can, I promise.” She sat back down as Stephanie returned to the delicatessen.
S
tephanie waved at them before slipping through a door to the back of the store.
Joan’s stomach pinched, her hands trembled. She hid them under the table.
“She saved your life, huh?” Shana said after her second sandwich was delivered.
She nodded. “Twice. You were almost named after her.”
“Was the second time when your dad killed your mom and tried to kill you?”
“When you’re older.”
“I’ll be older at four this afternoon.”
“Finish your sandwich; we have a lot of work to do.”
Back home, Shana helped her unload the paint and supplies and proceeded to set up her own room for painting. She had taped around the baseboards, doors and windows of both rooms yesterday. Once her room was ready, daughter helped mother complete the prep for her room.
Shana conceded, “It is bigger, and you are much older. You’ll tire easily even with two cups of coffee in you.” She returned to her room to start painting.
Joan took a moment to watch Shana at work. Shana would probably do a better job on her bedroom than she would with hers. Shana was great with finishing and detail work, Michael was great with measuring, designing and building. Her talent was in demolition. A sledgehammer just felt right in her hands. She opened a can of that god-awful color and got busy.
Mattie arrived at 10:38 am ready to help. Shana handed her a paint tray, gloves should she want to use them, a paint roller and sent her to help her withering mother.
While Mattie’s intentions were good, her effort was lacking. She moved stiffly and often had to take a break.
“Are you all right?”
“A little too much tennis Friday,” she said. “I’m still a bit stiff, but this is good. You have to keep moving to get out the kinks, right?”
“So I’ve been told.” Both shoulders protested with sharp, hot spasms of pain when she started painting again.
Mattie painted half as much of the wall as she did, but made herself useful in other ways. She went to get burgers for lunch. When she came back, Joan recognized the bags.
“Burt’s Burgers, that’s still around?”
“Oh, yeah, Burt’s still there. He’s seventy-five now, but he works there four hours every day.” She handed a burger and a milkshake to Shana. “During the summer, you can still get waiters and waitresses serving you at your car on roller skates. I guess they’re called blades now.”
“Mom wouldn’t let me work there because the skirts were too short.” Mom’s smiling face flashed through her mind. They’d had a good-natured argument about Burt’s the day dad . . .
“They wear pants now, or tights with shorts.”
When they went back to work after lunch, Mattie was even less physically helpful. She made an effort, but accomplished little. Even a little help was better than none at all.
If the physical effort wasn’t there for painting, maybe her gossip muscle wasn’t too tight to be of some use.
“What happened with Kate Eiger?”
“I hope what I said yesterday didn’t make you think the worst of her, or me.”
“Not at all, but you can’t just leave it at that.”
“I want to make clear that Susan was right about Kate. I’m not sure we could have convinced Do-Dads or Karyon to come to Dominion if not for her efforts.”
“However?”
“Other people have their own ideas about how Dominion should develop once those two are up and running. The two main players are Dorset, Bental and Company, run by Carter Dorset, and Carter’s silent partner, Morton Colter. They want to develop an old section of the town near where Do-Dads is putting its plant. Kate felt they would be forcing out the poor who live in the trailer park there. Leo sided with them.”
“Colter is a silent partner?”
“As silent as he can be.”
“I take it there was no middle ground they could agree to.”
“Leo, Morton and Carter ganged up on her and pressured everyone on council. They gathered all the support they could in the community and made it a campaign of a new and excited future versus the old, monolithic ways of the past.”
“With Kate playing the role of the stone blocking the way.”
“There were allegations of kickbacks, though nothing was ever proven. Kate and Susan got threatening phone calls during the campaign, as well as attacks on their character, things like that. People got pretty whipped up.”
Yesterday, Mattie had claimed not to know much about the details.
“That stuff comes out in every election, even in a small town like Dominion. Why should this be any different?”
“It was Susan, and Kate’s marriage break-up, that played the biggest roles. Susan likes women. That’s something that still bothers people in little towns, even in the twenty-first century of man’s glorious civilization. Then the rumor started that Kate’s marriage collapsed because she was having an affair. Kate denied it, but that kind of stuff is hard to fight.”
“The morality card; it’s like punching smoke.”
“I think it wounded Kate deeply, and Susan, too. I don’t think she’s forgiven Dominion for what she thinks it did to her . . . and to Susan. They tend to keep to themselves now.”
Would Kate tell the story the same way? What would she do if people came after Shana? Heaven help them if they did.
Shana came to help once her own room was finished and took over Mattie’s spot.
Mattie stayed until the bedroom had its first coat of new paint on the walls, but she excused herself soon after that.
“Sorry, Joanie, one more showing this evening.” She started down the stairs. At the front door she said, “I’ll call you.”
“You and I should go see Stephanie one day.”
“Love to.” She closed the door softly. Had she just frowned the same way she had when she’d seen Kate standing at the door?
What was Stephanie’s take on the last election? Maybe she knew something about the Wiley and Nguyen cases? She’d probably just dodge telling her anything about them, too. Everything else was fair game on the DGN but not those two.
Shana put the lid back on the can of paint. “We’re going to have to do two coats in every room.”
“I think so, too.”
“She was your BFF?”
“Yes, but she was always a selfish flake.”
“What was Stephanie, then?”
Though she had unfairly packed Stephanie away into her own dark recesses with the other details of that day, she still remembered clearly Stephanie prying her father’s hands from around her throat, getting him off her and dragging her out of their burning house.
“My guardian angel,” she said. Her voice faltered. “And I’ve never told her that.”