the time she got up to the order screen, her fury had simmered back down to its usual bubbling simmer.
“Number three,” she said. “And a chocolate Frosty. Better make it a large.”
Stella visited the bottle of Johnnie Walker Black before her date, just to make sure there was enough left for a powerful belt before bed. She unscrewed the top and inhaled—held it—then replaced the cap with a mild sense of regret. She was running low—and that was an errand she couldn’t put off. Johnnie was a staple item in Stella’s pantry.
But she never drank before her standing Sunday night date with Todd Groffe. It would be bad form, since he couldn’t join her, being thirteen and all.
Todd let himself in the front door without knocking at a little after seven. “Damn them damn girls,” he said by way of greeting.
“What’d they do this time?” Stella asked, getting a couple of cans of Red Bull out of the fridge and tearing open a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
“Got in my dresser and got my damn boxers and they’re wearin’ ’em around the house over their clothes and shit. And Mom thinks it’s cute so she won’t make them take ’em off. She’s all like taking their pictures and stuff.”
Todd’s twin sisters were six. Stella, like everyone else in the world besides Todd, thought they were adorable. Todd’s father wasn’t in the picture anymore, and his mother, Sherilee, worked long hours during the week and brought work home on the weekend. They lived in a little house a few doors down from Stella, and Sherilee had a hard time with the upkeep on the place, not to mention paying the mortgage.
But on Saturdays Sherilee got the girls a sitter and took Todd out on the town. Stella admired her for that. Sherilee took her son to Burger King, to action movies, to play paintball. They went to Wal-Mart and played laser tag and mini golf.
Sunday night it was the girls’ turn, and Todd came over to Stella’s. They shared a secret passion: they were both
Tonight, though, Stella had a hard time concentrating on Tyra and her crew as they shuttled the models through a photo shoot in what looked like a muddy jungle. Her thoughts kept going back to Roy Dean and his insolent, stupid expression as he denied that he was seeing a new girl.
She had a bad feeling about this one. He might turn out to be one of the ones who required creative thinking, a step up to an intensified program of discouragement.
Stella didn’t relish this aspect of the job—the turning of the screw, the dialing up of the pressure, the creation of new varieties and levels of pain. She understood that there were people in the world—plenty of them—who got their kicks from hurting others, who experienced a rush of pleasure to see other human beings contorted in agony. Heck, if she were to advertise for an assistant—someone to wield the whip or rubber hose or cattle prod or pliers or lit cigarette so she could keep her hands clean—she’d probably have applicants lined up out the door.
But her business didn’t work that way. Stella knew too much about pain—the kind inflicted on the innocent, the defenseless, those whose worst sins were bad judgment and displaced loyalty. And she’d pledged to stop it. Not every abuser, everywhere—there were simply too many. But if it was in her power to help a woman in Sawyer County, she did so. And gradually word reached sisters and cousins and best friends and acquaintances further afield, down through the Ozarks and up to Kansas City and over to Saint Louis and—as the months grew to years and Stella learned how to turn vicious and conscience-deficient men into cowering repenters—across state lines.
Stella picked off the sons-of-bitches one by one, leaving their women free to breathe easy, to live without dread as their constant companion. And now this sideline threatened to overtake her real job, the shop she’d inherited from Ollie, supplying the women of Prosper with sewing notions and keeping their sewing machines in good working order. Every time she thought she’d earned some time off, a new woman would show up, terrified or battered or both, but finally ready to make it stop. And Stella knew what kind of courage that took—and she never turned a client away.
Though she did daydream about the day when the world straightened itself out, when the last abuser met his doom and she could go back to selling sewing machines and thread and needles full-time. Keep her highlights fresh and her nails done. Work in the garden. Bake banana bread.
Go on an occasional date with a real man.
Todd yawned and zapped the TV off with the clicker. He grabbed a last handful of Cheetos and jammed them all in his mouth at once. While he was chewing, Stella collected the Red Bull cans and folded the crocheted afghans and brushed a few crumbs off the couch.
“See ya,” Todd said, wiping his orange fingers on his baggy shorts.
“Thank you very much for inviting me, Miz Hardesty,” Stella said.
“Yeah, whatever. Bye, Stella.”
Stella waited a few moments after Todd left, then eased the front door open and watched him skateboard down the street to his house, holding his helmet loosely by the strap, pushing off with his foot and leaping up onto the curb and back down with grace. She waited until he slipped into his own front door, using the key he wore on a shoelace around his neck, before she went back inside.
Just two doors down, but the world was a dangerous place. Anything could happen.
Good folks had to look out for one another.
One of the biggest rip-offs in the universe had to be when the pleasant buzz you took to bed with you at midnight turned itself into queasy can’t-sleep at 5 A.M. Where the hell did all that lovely sparkle go?
Stella had drained the Johnnie. She hadn’t really intended to, but some nights were like that. Some nights were for thinkin’ and drinkin’, when it seemed like you couldn’t do one without the other.
Stella rarely drank in the days before Ollie died. She’d figured that someone in the house ought to stay sober, and Ollie frequently wasn’t up to the job.
The Johnnie thing—she’d discovered Johnnie Walker Black a few weeks into her new life as a widow and was so grateful for the way it took the edge off that she started spending more and more time with the bottle. There was a stretch there, four or five months, that didn’t bear recalling—even if she could remember anything through the whiskey haze.
But these days her relationship with Johnnie was more measured. Once Stella took up exercise, jogging around the neighborhood and dragging Ollie’s barely used Bowflex out of storage, she didn’t need the alcohol- induced numbing as much. Just the nightly drink, or occasionally two… except for the rare night when two didn’t do the trick. When she needed an extra layer of fuzzy loveliness.
If only she could skip the early-morning sleeplessness that always followed.
In those pre-dawn hours Stella sometimes amused herself by imagining how she would do in the joint. It was luck more than anything that had kept the law from investigating her sideline business, but her luck couldn’t hold forever. Eventually, one of her parolees would decide to roll the dice and turn her in. Or the long arm of the law would somehow get wise enough to catch her in the act of rehabilitating a subject. Either way, questions would be asked. Leads would be followed. And when that happened, odds were good that Stella would be headed for jail.
Stella wasn’t sure she much cared. Life with Ollie had been worse than anything the prison system could dish out. Life without Ollie was better, but it was still lonely. Becoming a stone-cold enforcer had changed her, taking away any desire she’d ever had to play nice just to fit in. She called it like she saw it now. Cussed when she felt like it. Didn’t back down.
Jail didn’t scare Stella. With an assault conviction or two, she figured her reputation would precede her. Her nickname would be some variation on Hardesty, probably “Hard-ass.” Of course you didn’t get a handle like that for free; she’d probably have to shank somebody on the first day or something.
But then there was the matter of all the pairing-off that happened in women’s prison. She’d seen a TV documentary on the subject. Diane Sawyer, Stella’s favorite journalist, spent the night in jail, wearing a prison-issue
