Stacking in Rivertown - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara Bell, a poet, songwriter, and professional gardener, lives in the Indianapolis area. This is her first book.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One: The Shoebox

Ten Chits. That was what Mama called me ever since the day I came home bloody in the mouth from having kicked Gedders' ass.

"His hands don't go by me," was all I'd tell her, and she called me Ten Chits. I guess because ten was the highest she ever learned to count, and a chit was just a something to her.

Anything could be a chit. Mostly I was the chit. You're just a chit, she'd say. Sometimes, my big brother Vin was the chit. Or maybe she called that whip-tailed hound dog from down the street a chit when she had another bag of "groceries," having come up from town, and "that chit of a mongrel" growled at her, smelling the steak bones, I guess, with some of the meat still on, but dainty bites sawed away, or healthy man-sized cuts knifed out. She brought home baked potato skins hollowed and still wrapped in foil, and wilted green stuff too slimy to swallow.

The river there bent near in half right around our two-room, as Daddy called it, and a long patch of grass went right down to the bank. In the summer the water shrank down, leaving a mucky rock-strewn mess that Vin, me, and Mandy squished into barefoot.

"Bag of twigs coming down the road," was what Daddy said whenever he saw Mandy skipping down the lane. She looked all sticks and hands with a head, and lived in a trailer with her mama down near where the titi and the pop ash grew too thick to wiggle through.

Mandy, me, and Vin spent our time digging out crawdads and sneaking up on bullfrogs that sat fat on the edges of puddles left flat, full of waterboatmen and striders skimming.

Swarms of mosquitoes and gnats danced over in the afternoons, and the brown water gone lazy carried a film on top that curved and caught cottonwood seeds floating down. Damselflies screwed all the time, floating by tail to tail, and the lacewing and mayfly all broke out fine in their time.

But now I'm off my story and the chits. I've begun to think of the chits as pieces of evidence, like in a detective novel, to be numbered, catalogued, and put in order. I never counted them up that year, the year the chits fell so heavy, but maybe there were ten altogether. Most people collect evidence to solve puzzles outside their lives. I need it to solve my own life. I appear to have a problem with memory.

I know now that none of what happened was Jeremy's fault, even if he was a screwball. It's just that I wasn't meant for marriage, especially to someone like Jeremy, or living that kind of life. The life where you write your books in a studio in the afternoons after a morning jog and a trip to the spa. Eating dinner for two in a house meant for twenty. Or sleeping at night and getting up before his alarm goes off just to have him smile that inane smile when he comes in the kitchen, adjusting his tie, maybe whistling a horrible cheerful tune.

But I do blame him. It was his fault that I sold the novel. I completed it under Jeremy's constant insistence, his gentle pressure on "your talent," as he said to me. He was the one that prepared queries, synopses, and outlines, printed out and stuffed into envelopes sent off to small presses, large presses, literary journals, agents, anyone at all who might show an interest.

"We'll keep trying," he said after every rejection, his confidence a disease that weakened me, kept me worrying about the upholstery, a need for new carpeting or a more tasteful tile for the shower.

Jeremy liked my stories. That's what drew him to me. Jeremy was seemingly blind to my other "talents," as Ben would say. Where most men I'd met thought my mouth had a better use, for Jeremy it was the stories.

And he believed in this weird notion called synchronicity. What with both of us having surgery in the same hospital on the same day and both recovering in blue gowns with wheelchairs and matching IVs, for him it was love at first sight. The synchronicity thing cinched it.

My appendectomy had been sudden, the obsolete fingerlike organ having burst without so much as a bleep in the symptom department. I had collapsed, Ben said (now there's a chit; I hadn't remembered that before), at the reception for the Senator. Fell right down the stairs in the black strapless (he added for my benefit), and had beat myself up pretty bad by the time I hit the last step.

Jeremy probably fell in love with my bruises, too.

He was always bringing home strays from Wall Street. He offered them scraps wrapped in napkins and saved from one more in a long line of power lunches.

Dogs loved Jeremy. They could tell he only had eyes for them. I think it would have pleased him immensely to be born a dog. He loved to adore, to press close excitedly. He was easily trained and loyal to a fault. So finding me all bruised and sick, after a minor gallstone removal on his part, was like finding the ultimate stray, the she-dog of his dreams. Except for Ben, I had no friends, no family.

Jeremy was in dog heaven.

Ben worried him. He's admitted that. Just to have Ben in the room with you felt like hanging around a pissed grizzly.

But Ben only visited me once at the hospital, holding buttercups nearly mangled in his massive, squat hand. His other hand was fat in a big white bandage. He must have hurt it trying to stop me from falling, I decided, a fall that for the life of me I couldn't remember, down those stairs in the ballroom.

Ben brought with him a shoebox and a small suitcase filled with my clothes. He gave me his card. "Call me when you're ready," he said. And I said I would, but then Jeremy wheeled by, measured Ben's extraordinary height with his eyes, and got his first look at me dressed in bruises.

The woman of his dreams.

After his first eyeful, Jeremy spent every minute at my bedside, offering me water when I was thirsty and helping me up to take my five trembly steps to the john. He offered me grapes and slices of oranges his mother had brought to enhance his healing in place of hospital fare over which she clucked her tongue in dismay.

I wasn't much on talking...