The Weight of Feathers

“He came here to handle people, didn’t he?” Lace yelled, shaking the fence. “Tell him to get out here and handle me.”


If she had still been with her family’s show, Abuela would have fired her, swept all her things into an empty suitcase like she had Licha’s. Las ni?as buenas did not stand outside fences, squawking and making shows of themselves.

But what had all this behaving gotten Tía Lora? A lover she had not been allowed to see. A lie that ruined the one man who’d been kind to her. And a son she’d barely gotten to hold. A boy who grew up thinking his father was a man he had never known, and his mother a woman who considered him nothing more than a weak copy of his older brother.

The security guard watched her, the dilemma pulling at that half-closed eye. She could see it twisting the muscles at the corners of his mouth. Should he escort her off the property? Throw out the girl the chemical plant cooked? Right now she was nothing. A number, an injury, an item so low on the lawyers’ list she drifted off the bottom of the page. But if some in-town reporter caught the story and got it into the next day’s paper, the bad publicity might stick.

The red heart on Lace’s cheek already showed. She turned her head so it was all he could see.

She lowered her voice. “Get him out here, or I start talking.”

He knew what she meant. She’d hidden from the papers and local station camera crews, first with her family, then with the Corbeaus, los gitanos the reporters wouldn’t get near. But she didn’t have to. Some county paper could print her picture, the garnet on her cheek showing up even in black-and-white.

The guard nodded to another guard. She waited five minutes, and a man in a newly pressed suit came out to the fence line. He held an ice pack to the side of his face.

She could smell his aftershave through the fence, the sharp resin of synthetic pine. His hair, neat and styled, made her think of leather briefcases, dry cleaners, first class red-eyes.

She pointed at his cheek. “Luc Corbeau gave you that, right?”

A sneer wrinkled his upper lip. He smoothed it, and said nothing.

“Are you pressing charges?” she asked.

“That’s none of your business.”

He started walking away, giving the security guard a look of don’t let this bother me again.

“Actually it is.” Lace held the fence and stood on her toes. “Because I want to know if I’m going to the county paper tomorrow morning.”

He stopped, the heel of one polished shoe lifted midstep.

The chanting pressed into her back.

“They’re afraid now,” she said. “They don’t want to lose their jobs. But if the news crews come in, they’re gonna find out what everyone’s too scared to say.”

The plant should have installed an overfill pipe. Cluck knew it. This man must have known it. And he must have known of a dozen other little mistakes. A disregarded pressure gauge. A broken thermometer. Pipes that hadn’t been cleaned. Slip blind procedures skipped. A shift worker so bleary from overtime he could barely read the numbers.

These things would come out. The question was how fast, and if Lace would help.

The man turned around. “Nobody knows who you are.”

“You’re right,” she said. “And this isn’t a story. It’s two lines in anything but the local paper. But it could be bigger. It will get bigger. All that noise is coming. You know that. So my question is, do you want me to be part of it?” She turned her face again to show her cheek.

“I don’t have time for this.” The man turned his back, shaking her off through that chain-link fence.

All Lace had left was a thing that was not hers to tell. What Lora Paloma had figured out with Alain Corbeau’s help. Not because Tía Lora wanted justice for her dead husband, but because she did not want the sinking of a grove of trees to destroy the family she now called hers.