The tinny clang of the phone sounded from the kitchen. She rarely got calls and resented the interruption. Let it ring, she thought and carried on, slashing doggedly. It pestered, ten, eleven times before it stopped. She hacked a great hole in the brush and peeled much of it away from the wall and onto a growing pile of tinder. The finer work of detangling the vines from the balusters she’d save for Charlie, who had more patience for little things. When she began to choke on the soupy air, wet and warm, she took one last slice, staked her machete in the ground, and walked around front for a gulp of water.
She exhaled in the cool of the house, a once-white clapboard two-story built imperfectly, but strong, by its first owners in the teens. The interior was shabby but inviting, designed for guests, with wide doorways and halls, big picture windows, a dine-in kitchen that peeked into the formal dining room. Though Kit had lived there for fourteen years, it still had the air of being someone else’s home. She had neither the desire nor the means to make her mark on the place and had been content to live among the floral walls, fabrics, and other grandmotherly things.
She doused a kitchen rag under the tap and ran it behind her neck, down her back, over her collarbone and stood in front of a dust-heavy tabletop fan. She’d drunk two tall glasses of water, felt her belly swell, when the phone started up again. It was a curse, this phone, a shackle. The school had required her to include a phone number when she enrolled Charlie, years ago, and she regretted it every time they called her. She had never gotten used to the idea that people should know where you were at any moment, be able to reach you on a whim. She was about to pick it up and slam it right back into its cradle until, remembering Charlie, she picked up.
She unhooked the pale blue receiver from its mount on the wall. A woman cleared her throat on the other end.
“Miz Walker? This is Lorraine Fowler,” said the principal of Charlie’s school, her voice dull and detached. Kit girded herself for whatever infraction Charlie had committed and the inconvenience it was likely to cause her. Fowler waited for a reply, a slight asthmatic whistle as she breathed. “Miz Walker, you’re gon wanna come down here and pick up Charlie. There’s been an incident.”
“An incident?” Kit asked. “Is she okay?” Charlie had been called down to the office before but it was usually truancy or mouthing off to teachers. The only other time they had called it an “incident” was when Charlie was suspended for whispering hateful things into a classmate’s ear, things which neither party would divulge. The boy had been so affected they sent him home to recover. The suspension had lasted a week, which suited Charlie just fine and had been a real hardship for Kit, as her daughter had been ornery and fickle company in the year since she started puberty.
“Oh, she’s alright,” Fowler said. “Just go on ahead and come down here now, we can sort out the details in my office. Mmkay?”
Kit looked at the clock above the stove. Quarter past 9:00 a.m. and she had to be at work at 10:00.
“Shit.”
Ms. Fowler grumbled her displeasure and cleared her throat. “We’ll be seeing you real soon, then.”
Kit didn’t like when Charlie got in trouble. It wasn’t so much the acting out—for Kit had been far worse by comparison—it was the consequences. Trouble meant scrutiny, meetings, making nice with other parents. She liked a quiet life where her business was no one’s but her own.
She started walking toward the door and the phone began to ring again, with the same incessant urgency. If it was Fowler, she could wait fifteen minutes until Kit got to school. As she opened the screen door she heard the answering machine—an old refurbished one only Charlie knew how to use—beep and clatter into motion. Kit was too far gone to hear who had called, and too annoyed to linger and listen.
Kit took a seat in the waiting room of the principal’s office at Pecan Hollow Middle School, the walls around her papered with announcements and cheery art projects. It smelled like fifty years of pencil shavings and paste. She felt partly responsible for her daughter’s troubles, because in the almost fourteen years they had lived together in Pecan Hollow, she had never found them a place in the community. She sometimes wished she knew how to be a part of something, but it was so much easier to keep to herself. She didn’t get any of it. The rules, the manners, the tacit agreements. All she could manage was the little world she had created, just her and Charlie.
Principal Fowler, dressed in beige from head to shoe, her faded chestnut hair teased and sprayed into a wiggy-looking bob, opened her door and dealt a hot stare.
“Miz Walker, you wanna go and warsh up?” She had a way of asking questions that sounded like commands.
Kit had not, until just now, noticed the spatter of violent purple staining her arms and clothes and, she imagined, her face.
“I’d just as soon get to it,” Kit said.
Principal Fowler looked like she would just as soon get to it, too. She motioned for Kit to come in.
Charlie sat glowering in the corner of the cramped office, her long hair spilling over her back in coarse waves. Like her mother’s, her shoulders were set close to her ears, as if always ready to dodge a hit. She was too tall for the stool she was sitting on, knees up by her chest. Seemed not too long ago that Kit could hold her, propped on her hip. Now Charlie stood an inch taller than her mother. Kit squared herself to Fowler’s desk and folded her arms.
“Is someone gonna tell me what this is all about?” she said.
Fowler sat down and steepled her fingers. She looked at Charlie then back at Kit and sighed a shallow, tired sigh.
“Miz Walker, I called you here today because Charlie stuck a sharp pencil in her classmate’s cheek. The point went clean through.” She pantomimed the pencil with her finger against her face and made a pop sound with her lips. “Practically skewered her like a shish kebab.”
“Jesus Christ,” Kit said.
“Miz Walker, please,” said Fowler, pursed and scolding. “Language.”
“Is this true, Charlie?” Kit asked.
Charlie nodded without making eye contact.
“Well, that’s just— Why would you—” Kit stammered, embarrassed to be caught off guard like this in front of an audience. “Who was it got stuck?”
“Leigh Prentiss. You know, Sugar Faye’s girl,” Fowler said. Leigh was Sugar Faye’s fifth child and only daughter, and she had been coddled her whole life like she was the last child on Earth. Kit would never hear the end of it from Sugar Faye.
Her first impulse was to march the girl out of there and put her somewhere she couldn’t make trouble. But Charlie looked so melancholy and far away. Kit reached out to stroke her daughter’s hair but ended up squeezing the back of her neck until she jerked away. With Kit, tender feelings rarely led to tender actions.
“I didn’t mean to,” Charlie mumbled. “It just happened.”
“Well, that doesn’t add up,” Kit said. “What did Leigh do to make you stick her?”