I said, “I like it.”
“Does it pay okay?”
“It’s fine,” I said. I did not look back at her, but in my peripheral vision, I could see her big eyes focused on my face. I didn’t want to be rude to her, but I also wanted to avoid forming even a tenuous social bond. If she got comfortable chatting with me, she would be far more likely to address herself to me rather than James Leeds during the interview.
After another few minutes, she spoke again. “Overmilk. That’s a weird name, huh? Is that why you went to Frett? Except that’s kind of a weird name, too. So, but you didn’t say you were divorced?”
“No, I didn’t say,” I said. “I’ll wait another thirty minutes, but if he isn’t here by then, I’m going to have to go. You can reschedule through the agency if you still want to interview him.”
Her eyebrows came together. I waited, but she sat looking helplessly at me, her hands coming together to fiddle with an alarmingly large diamond solitaire on her ring finger. At last she asked, “So you think I should call him or something?”
“I’m not really supposed to advise you,” I said. “I’m only here to interpret.”
She turned sideways in the booth, scooting down and hanging her legs over the side. She crossed them at the knee, dangling her sandal off of her heel and swinging her leg. The sandal swayed hypnotically, balanced on her toes. Her toenails were painted sea-foam green.
“I’m not going to call him,” she said at last, turning those giant eyeballs back my way.
“All right,” I said. I sat another few minutes. Normally I’m comfortable with silence, but she never seemed to look away from me. Her gaze was earnest, and her little body was so restless, bouncing on the edge of the booth, her leg swinging more and more violently until the sandal was clapping against the sole of her foot. She was probably the owner’s daughter, or maybe fiancée—the solitaire was on the proper hand. Either way, she was dressed more like a princess than a junior manager, and I suspected she had never conducted an interview before. Or perhaps she had but was nervous about interviewing a deaf person.
I said, “This is going to be easy. When James Leeds comes, pretend I’m not here. Talk to him, not me, and ask him all the things you asked the other applicants. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
She shrugged and said, “So, if you’re not divorced, why are you going by Frett now? Because of, like, feminism or whatever?”
“No,” I said. We sat for another few minutes.
“I don’t think he’s coming,” she said. She clambered out of the booth and stood at the end of my long seat, blocking me in again.
“You’re not really allowed to talk to me? Is that it? I mean, even though he didn’t show up, you’re supposed to sit there totally silent?”
While she was talking, my phone began to vibrate, purring in-sistently against my purse. I held up one finger and looked at the display, expecting to see Mama’s number. It wasn’t a number I knew, but I could tell by the area code that the call was coming from Between.
“Could you excuse me for a moment?” I said.
She shrugged, annoyed, then took a step backwards and turned to the side, showing me her ski-slope nose. She was still standing close enough to block me in. I shook my head and then answered my phone.
“Nonny?” It was Bernese, but her voice was so hard and desperate I almost didn’t recognize it.
“Bernese? Are you okay?” I said. “Is Mama okay?”
“Stacia is going to be fine,” said Bernese. “It’s Genny, and may those Crabtrees rot in hell. It’s Genny. It’s our Genny.”
“The Crabtrees?” I said, confused. “What do the Crabtrees—
Bernese, what happened?”
“The Bitch got out,” Bernese said. “That Crabtree Bitch got out, and she ate your Genny up.”
CHAPTER 4
IT WAS NEVER a question of if one of the Crabtrees’ Dobermans would get loose and go after Genny. It was when.
Those animals were just this side of wild and mean straight through. They had been trained as guard dogs by Ona’s oldest boy, Lobe. He’d employed some half-assed Crabtree methodol-ogy, probably a booklet found among the impulse items they kept by the register at the Loganville Piggly Wiggly: 30 Days to Deadly Dogs. Add in general Crabtree carelessness, and apply these factors to a swinging gate held closed by a long chain that had to be wrapped three times around the posts before it was pad-locked. It was the algebraic formula for doom.
Genny was deathly afraid of any animal that came up higher than her knee. She was especially afraid of big dogs. Of course, she was also afraid of hospitals. And loosely wrapped Halloween candy. And crosswalks and Jehovah’s Witnesses and self-serve gasoline pumps and anything with more than six legs, particularly squid. But the acrid smell of her fear was probably the thing that sent the dogs into apoplexy whenever they caught a whiff.
And it was only Genny they didn’t like. The dogs didn’t mind even Mama, and she was Genny’s twin. Fraternal, but they had become more and more similar as they aged. Genny had always been prettier, but the differences had faded over the years, especially after Mama became completely blind and Genny started choosing her clothes. After their sixty-plus years of living together, a stranger would have a hard time telling Eugenia and Eustacia apart. They were short, plump ladies with strong Native American features that looked somewhat incongruous in their small, pale faces. Every day Genny put their black-and-white-striped hair up into identical tidy buns, powdered their noses, and pinked their cheeks with liquid rouge.
It boggled my mind to consider how tiny the delineation in their genes must be, and yet my bold mama, who had the soul of a pirate, came into the world stone deaf and with eyes that would fail her soon after she turned forty. Genny, on the other hand, was physically healthy but so timid and racked by nerves that I doubt she would have left the womb at all if Stacia had not gone first. But externally? They looked practically interchangeable.
The dogs, however, had no trouble differentiating, especially the alpha dog. The female. The one Aunt Bernese had christened “the Bitch.”
Bernese had called her the Bitch for so long that the whole family had picked it up, in spite of the fact that the Fretts usually only cussed if it was biblical. That is to say, they’d use “hell” to mean the literal place and “ass” to mean donkey. They’d all say “whore,” especially if it was followed by “monger” or “of Baby-lon.” None of them would dream of calling a person a bitch, or even use the word as a verb, but they’d refer to the Crabtrees’ alpha dog as the Bitch while standing in the vestibule of The First Baptist Church of Between.
The whole town was so inured to it that not even Pastor Gregg raised an eyebrow when we used that word in relation to that particular dog. Nervous little Genny had a spun-sugar heart. Her standard-issue Frett Steel Spine was bogged down in taffy. She was the pet of the family, if not the whole town, and any dog who didn’t like Genny was a bitch, and God already knew it, so there wasn’t much cause to ease up on the language.
Those dogs, the Bitch especially, more than didn’t like her. The Bitch wanted her dead.
The day the Bitch got out, Mama and Genny spent the morning on Between’s town square, up in Mama’s studio. The studio was on the second floor of a large Victorian house, the downstairs of which Bernese had turned into a museum featuring Mama’s dolls and her own prized caterpillars. The rest of the upstairs was storage where Mama kept her boxes and boxes of porcelain doll heads lined up neatly on bookshelves. Mama was in the storage room, running her fingers across the Braille labels, still trying to pick one. Genny was in her sewing area, getting fussier and hungrier by the minute.
Bernese had built that studio for Mama and Genny long before Ona Crabtree ever thought about owning guard dogs. At first Bernese had planned to tear out most of the wall that faced the landing and replace it with plate glass. That way, tourists who were visiting the dollhouse portion of the museum could come up the stairs and watch Mama work on the k
ind of outsize, tac-tile sculptures she currently favored. But the very idea had activated the fragment of Frett gumption at Genny’s core, and she’d put her little fat foot down.
“You’ve already got mile-high pictures of us downstairs, Bernese, and that’s about enough,” she said. Her voice got higher and higher as she spoke. “Stacia and I won’t sit in a cage and scratch like monkeys for whatever philistines come here to nose-pick and google.”
Genny signed rapidly into Stacia’s hands as she was speaking, and before she had gotten too wound up to stop herself, Stacia’s own hands were churning the air. Genny added, “And Stacia says if you put that window in, she and I won’t work here. Period.”
That ended it. The wall stayed a wall, and the staircases were roped off with velvet cord.
Now Genny was wishing there was a window. She’d been drooping around the studio all morning, and the air was beginning to taste stale and used. She went to the storage room and signed Lunch! Lunch! Lunch! until Stacia agreed to stop head-hunting. They gathered up their handbags, and Genny slipped her shoes back on. She had high blood pressure, and her feet tended to swell, but she wouldn’t give up her size-six shoes.
The front door of the museum was kept locked; tourists paid admission at the store, and Bernese personally took them over.
Genny and Stacia let themselves out onto the square, and Genny relocked the door behind them.
Between’s town square was the working definition of pictur-esque. It was so tidy and bright, with a burbling center fountain surrounded by riotously colored flower beds filled to bursting with seasonal blooms. Beyond that, a thick green lawn of preter-naturally healthy grass grew in cheerful spikes. A cobblestone walkway ran in front of all the shops and crossed to the fountain on the diagonal.
The square was lined on three sides by rows of connected shops, all fronted in warm, peachy brick with crisp white trim.
The First Baptist Church of Between sat on the corner closest to the highway. It was a textbook country Baptist church, with a tall steeple and bells that tolled the hour in happy tones.
The other three corners each sported a large Victorian house.
The first one contained Bernese’s museum, and next was the Marchants’ bed-and-breakfast. On the last corner, Isaac Davids lived in a buttery-yellow house with tons of gingerbread and pale lavender trim. His law offices were downstairs. Laughing gar-goyles peeked out over the eaves, and a tower on one side was topped by a weathercock.
It would have been faster for Mama and Genny to cut across the square. Grace Street began catty-corner to the museum. But Genny had an errand, and they wanted to see what was cooking at the diner, so they made their way around the square’s perime-ter. They passed the Dollhouse Store; they could see through the big front window that Bernese was with a customer.
Henry Crabtree’s bookstore was in the shop right beside Bernese’s, and Genny and Mama stopped there. Genny had ordered a book of quilt block patterns, but Henry told her it hadn’t arrived yet. He was one of the few people left in town who were around my age; most residents of Between were over fifty. Henry was my close friend, and he was good to my family and watched out for Mama and Genny on the weekdays when I was in Athens.
Genny, who was often twitchy and diffident around men, flat adored him. He was soft-spoken, and his low-pitched voice was like balm on her nerves, soothing and cool. Mama liked him, too, so they paused to chat, telling him I was expected in town on Saturday instead of Friday.
“Because of her divorce, you know,” Genny said in a confi-dential tone, her eyes gleaming. My mother released Genny’s signing hands to send her forefingers shooting triumphantly away from the corners of her mouth.
“ ‘Finally!’ Stacia says,” Genny interpreted. She gave her hands back to Stacia, so Stacia could feel the conversation. “I know divorce is wrong and all, but just between us and the little birds?
We’re glad. We don’t like that boy,” Genny said, signing at the same time.
Henry straightened his immaculate cuffs and quirked one black eyebrow at them. “Me neither,” he said.
They said their goodbyes, and Genny and Mama continued on to the diner. The special was written on a blackboard sign by the front door. Genny signed to Mama that it was Trude’s god-awful Turketti.
Mama made a sour face and signed, Soup at home?
Genny hesitated, trying to choose between the evils of walking by the dogs and Turketti. At last she nodded her hand and they walked on, past the row of three kitschy antique marts and then Isaac’s house.
Crabtree Gas and Parts was directly across from the square, on Philbert. The gas pumps and the dilapidated country store faced the square, and beside it two mechanics’ bays yawped open like black mouths. The parts yard was behind the store, and humps of twisted slag metal and junk were visible over the store’s low roof. Philbert Street was the border that separated the town square from the Crabtrees’ squalid holdings. It was a different world across the street, and Bernese was not alone in thinking the complex was an eyesore.
Genny and Mama left the square and crossed to the corner of Grace and Philbert. The gas station was on their left, and there wasn’t anything to the right but a sloping shoulder that led into a ditch full of kudzu. Beyond that was nothing but rolling Georgia wilderness awash in loblolly pines and scrub. The sidewalk ran parallel to the fence that surrounded the parts yard. My two little squashy marshmallow ladies, joined at the hip, stepped up onto the sidewalk and went tootling down the length of the fence.
Mama held Genny’s elbow in her left hand, her right hand swinging her cane to check her path. Genny took three teeny bird steps for every long, careful stride of Mama’s, and the white cane tapped out the rhythm of their walk. In their print dresses and orthopedic shoes, they were completely innocuous. But as they walked, the male dogs appeared, one slinking out from under an old Chevy, the other easing his head from behind a rusted-out refrigerator.
The Bitch came out of nowhere. Genny did not see the dog until she loomed up beside them at the fence about halfway to the gate. The Bitch bared her teeth in a menacing parody of a grin, and the males growled so deep in their chests that Genny felt it as a vibration of the air more than she heard it. They moved like sleek black birds in formation, the two big males flanking the sinewy female. The Bitch let her breath out, something between a growl and a hiss.
Stacia could smell the dogs, and she felt Genny’s arm trembling. She stopped walking and began their pet argument, one as old as the dogs themselves. She tucked her cane under her arm and signed that they should walk home on the other side of Grace Street, to give the dogs a wider berth, then reached for Genny’s hands so she could feel the answer she already knew by heart.
Genny signed, You know there’s no sidewalk. We’ll end up in the ditch with every hip we’ve got smashed into fifty different pieces.
They started walking again. Mama knew she would never win the argument, but the ritual of asking seemed to soothe Genny.
The dogs started walking when they did. The hair on the Bitch’s spine rose, and her legs stiffened so that her usual lithe gait became eerily mechanical. All three flattened their ears so tightly against their sleek, elongated skulls that they looked like evil seals.
They came abreast of the gate. The Bitch, as always, tried to stuff her narrow head through. This time, however, the chain had been wrapped only twice, and as she levered her snout into the narrow crack, the gate gave.
Mama felt the muscles in Genny’s arm tighten. She stopped walking and reached for Genny’s hand just as it was opening, the fingers spreading into rigid lines. Then Genny was gone and Mama was pushed, staggering and falling a long way sideways, landing hard on her shoulder on a wide surface so nubbled and unyielding that she knew she was in the street. She felt her body bracing futilely as imagined cars came speeding toward her, and she lay there waiting to be dashed to pieces in the road.
After an endless moment, she realized she was still in one piece, and she
tried to collect her wits. Her head was swimming, and the wind had been knocked out of her. She was dizzy from not breathing. She had to struggle to pull in a mouthful of air that was acrid with the smell of dog and road oil.
She rolled onto her stomach and got gingerly to her hands and knees, trying to feel her way to Genny or her cane or the curb.
But she had lost all sense of direction, and the street spread itself out flat and smooth under her hands. She smelled the bright copper of fresh blood mixing with the pollen of the May air, and she could feel it coming from her shoulder and arm. There seemed to be a lot of it. She did not know where Genny was, and she started pushing her air out in deep vibrating shoves. She pushed air out, hard, again and again, because years ago, when they were children, Genny had taught her that was how to make screaming happen.
Mama, deaf and blind, disoriented, didn’t know if the dogs were out or if a car had hit them, but Genny had seen exactly what was coming. To her, it had looked like the gate was giving birth to something evil. The Bitch’s face came shoving through first, stretched tight with the lips pulled back and open and her eyes showing a quarter inch of white. Then her head popped free and she got one shoulder through, her claws raking at the concrete. The two males barked violently, cheering the Bitch on. For an endless fraction of a second, it seemed she would stick at the second shoulder, but she braced her powerful back legs and shoved, twitching her shoulders back and forth, working herself out. Genny watched her long narrow hips slither through easily, and in two bounds, the Bitch was on her.
The dog hit Genny at an angle, knocking her into Mama.
Genny clutched at Mama, but her hand was ripped open by Mama’s weight as she fell. Mama’s cane sailed away in a high arc and then clattered and rolled in the street. Genny was falling, too, feeling hot breath and then the slide of the dog’s teeth against her skin as they missed a spine-snapping hold on the back of her neck. She turned in midair with the dog still on her, and she hunched her shoulders up high, shoving uselessly at the dog with her little fat seamstress’s hands. The two of them landed together, the dog’s weight slamming into her stomach. It got its teeth in her, puncturing the meat of her upper arm and then releasing and digging into her at the shoulder.