Richards did not respond. Just kept the car moving
westward through the rain.
Eventually her silence got to Jamison. “Look, in two
years, I’ll have a quarter-million dollars. Enough for
Cindy and me to pay off all our bills and build a house.
And it’s not like Jay’ll even know I’m gone. I’ll be back
before he’s walking and talking good.”
“Be sure you get one of those life-size pictures of
yourself before you go,” she said angrily. “Cindy can
glue it to foam board and cut it out and Jay can have
his own Flat Daddy for when you get blown up by a car
bomb.”
“That’s not very damn funny, Mayleen.”
“I didn’t mean for it to be.”
“Easy for you to talk,” he said resentfully. “No kids,
your dad and mom both well and working. You’ve even
got brothers and a sister to help out if one of them gets
sick or dies.”
His words cut her more than he could ever realize,
Mayleen thought. No kids. No red-haired, brown-
203
MARGARET MARON
skinned babies. Because if she did have kids, then she
would have no brothers and sister. No mother or father
either. They had made that very clear.
She had gone down to Black Creek last night expect-
ing to celebrate a brother’s birthday and they had been
waiting, primed and ready to pounce. No nieces or
nephews, no in-laws around the birthday table, just her
parents, her two brothers, and her sister, Shirlee. Her
mother had been crying.
“What’s wrong?” she had asked, immediately alarmed,
wondering who was hurt, who might be dying.
“There’s been talk,” her father said, his face even
more somber than when she had told them nine years
ago that she was divorcing a man they had known and
liked since childhood, a hard-working, steady man who
didn’t use drugs, didn’t get drunk, didn’t hit her or run
around on her. That had been rough on them. There
had never been a divorce in their family, they reminded
her. Leave her husband? Leave a good town job that
had air-conditioning and medical benefits after growing
up in the tobacco fields where her father and brothers
still labored? Ask Sheriff Poole to give her a job where
she’d carry a gun and wear an ugly uniform instead of
ladylike dresses and pretty shoes?
“You ain’t gay, are you?” her brother Steve had asked
bluntly.
She had slapped his freckled face for that. Hard.
