One of the remarkable things about Tonya’s popularity was the fact that she had become popular at all. Growing up just north of Parksley, she’d been a bit of an outcast. Her eyeglasses were huge and round. She was bullied, especially on the school bus. She rode the bus several times a day: Arcadia, the high school she attended, had a lot of vocational tech programs in the early 1990s: Future Farmers of America, or Future Mechanics. Tonya, along with a small group of other girls, was a member of the Health Occupations Student Association, a group of students who took regular school classes in the morning and then got on a bus in the afternoon to take classes in home health care, allowing them to graduate as certified nursing assistants.
The kids in that program were smart, recalled one student who went through it with Tonya, but moreover, they were practical and realistic about their future options. Their families didn’t have the money to pay for college. These students expected to graduate high school and then immediately go to work, so they spent their teenage years learning to turn patients to prevent bedsores, or lift heavy objects without lower back strain. It was a pathway for girls to get the kind of work that would be useful in Accomack, a place with an aging population where the demand for home health aides was regularly listed as a “growth occupation” in the Virginia Employment Commission’s annual report. It was that way across the United States.
For Tonya, the work did seem to come from a place of genuine interest rather than just a practical fallback. Her mother, Susan, had studied to be a nurse before marriage. She’d never officially entered the profession, but she’d kept her old textbooks. Susan was a gentle person, the kind of friend who would see a good deal on cantaloupes in the grocery store and pick up an extra for a neighbor, or who would hand out homemade preserves as gifts. Tonya’s father had been a farmer, mostly working other people’s land. People thought that Carroll was an odd man. He had an unpredictable temper, as one man whose family employed him remembered. Certain strains of Bundick men were ornery. It came with the blood.
The blood also ran through Tonya, who herself gained a reputation for orneriness, though of a different kind. The people who remembered how she’d been teased also remembered how she’d taken it: When people teased her on the bus, she never cried and she never accepted it. She fought back, schoolmates remembered, even when the perpetrators were twice her size.
She graduated from high school and she did become a nursing assistant. She moved to the nearby island of Chincoteague and ended up pregnant by a local landscaper who specialized in bringing southern palm trees to Eastern Shore front lawns. He was black, resulting in the kind of union that, even in the late 1990s, made a good portion of Accomack County take notice. Accomack was about 61 percent white and 29 percent black. The chair of the Board of County Supervisors was black, and so was the clerk of the court, and the population was too small for the two public high schools to be anything but integrated—all of the neighborhoods went to them—but like a lot of the South and like a lot of America, there was a difference between who people worked with and who they socialized with. Tonya and the landscaper weren’t ever officially together, though, and after the birth of their second son, she took the children and moved back to the mainland without him.
She got another nursing job, at a residential house for mentally disabled adults where she arrived by 6 a.m. to make beds and help residents through their wake-up call and breakfast. Her colleagues liked her, thought she was a fast learner and unflinching in the face of messy, intimate work. It was hard, and it didn’t pay particularly well. In that job, she almost never made more than $15,000 a year. When she talked about her private life with her colleagues, it was about her boys, whom she doted on. She complained, sometimes, that the boys’ father didn’t send regular child support, but she made do. She baked cupcakes for school fund-raisers, she bought the boys clothes from Peebles, a local department store with precisely hung jeans and collared shirts, instead of from Walmart or Rose’s, the discount chain where clothing was always sliding off hangers and sometimes had holes.
In 2006, Tonya’s mother, Susan, collapsed in her own backyard. She died instantly. Tonya was the one who found her, out near the clothing line like she’d been getting ready to hang some laundry. A short while after that, Tonya moved with her two boys back into the house in which she had been raised, a white ranch-style home on a two-lane road in an unincorporated locale called Hopeton. The house had been left to both Tonya and her sister, Anjee, but the two had decided upon an arrangement. Anjee would sign over the rights to their parents’ house for the sum of one dollar, plus, as they decided to word it in the transfer of deeds, “natural love and affection and other good and valuable consideration.” In exchange, when their still-healthy grandmother eventually passed away, Tonya would similarly sign her rights to that house over to Anjee.
At nights to unwind, she’d started going to Shuckers. Old acquaintances saw her, people who had never left the mainland, and they were stunned because somehow, in between the two kids and the hard job, and the move to Chincoteague and back, she’d become beautiful. The glasses were gone. Her hair—whether she was wearing it blonde and spiky or brunette and curly—was meticulously styled. Her makeup, frosty lips and dark eyeliner, was expertly applied.
Some folks didn’t even recognize her. One man, who had gone to high school with her and whose wife had counted herself as one of Tonya’s only friends, spent several minutes chatting with Tonya before she laughed and said, “You have no idea who I am, do you?”
Gradually, this new Tonya replaced the old Tonya in people’s minds. At Shuckers, she found the popularity she never had in high school. One night she invited a coworker from the residential facility to come out to Shuckers with her. The colleague hadn’t ever been there before—she was black and thought of it as a place where mostly white people hung out. But she went and was surprised by how much fun she had, and even more surprised at how popular her coworker was. “The queen of her own little world.”
So that was Tonya, or a version of her. The version that anyone who had lived in Accomack for more than a decade would have gleaned just through idle grocery store chatter. Sometimes there would be grace notes added to the story—people gossiping over the parentage of her kids, or saying that women who had children shouldn’t leave the house dressed as she dressed, or marveling at the orange color of her skin.
But set all of that gossip aside and there was still a clean narrative: There was a girl. She was plain and unpopular. She moved away. When she came back, she was beautiful. Both when she was plain and when she was beautiful, she had a spark to her, the kind of spark that led her to stand up to bullies or, as one person who knew her socially remembered, arm herself with a preemptive beer bottle when another female patron was getting up in her face.
By day she was a hardworking nurse and terrific mother, by night she got dressed up and went to Shuckers, and that was the other part of Tonya’s story people could agree on: it was here that she met a funny guy, a firefighter with a drug problem who everyone said had a big heart, and they got to talking.
CHAPTER 7