She peered over the dash out the window and saw Hollis spread out by the elm. His hand twitched a couple of times and stilled. For a second, the sun looked like it had lit him on fire, a wave of heat rippling up from his body.
Slowly, Patsy counted to five and then held her breath and tried to turn over the engine again. It didn’t catch.
Danny groaned.
Patsy’s neck itched, burned from the anxious rash eating at her skin. Her armpits were soaked, the lovely yellow prom dress sticking to her like filled-up flypaper. She scratched her neck, plucked at the fabric pasted under her arms, and again stroked the fires eating at her flesh. My pearls, she almost cried out again. She’d have to sweet-talk Flannery into helping her find them before Mama found them missing.
Danny thrashed in the backseat.
Glancing over her shoulder, she saw his grim, pale face, a bloody hand pressed to his sleeve, his busted nose, swelling and bloodier still. Droplets of drying blood freckling his cheekbones.
“Hang on,” she said.
“Did you let him do it, Patsy?” Danny whispered. “Let Hollis have what you promised me?”
“Don’t be silly,” she gasped. “I want you. Only you. I saved myself just like I promised I would. You believe me, don’t you, Danny?”
Turning back to the wheel, Patsy leaned in even closer. Someone was there, someone in a long blue dress, not twenty feet from the hood. Patsy rubbed her eyes. A woman stood over Hollis, her back to the automobile.
“Help! Oh, Danny, look,” Patsy said, throwing an arm over the bench seat. “There’s someone here. Do you see her? Do you see the lady? . . . I can’t tell who it is. Maybe it’s Farmer Parsons’s wife from across the field?” She honked the horn and rolled down the window. “Over here. Help us. Please help.” Patsy squinted to get a better look.
Danny coughed. “J-Jo,” he wheezed out. “Joet—”
“What?” Alarmed, Patsy turned back to the windshield. “Joetta? No,” she said, dropping her head down to the big, round dials on the dash, pinning her eyes to the fuel gauge. Shaking, Patsy fumbled for the ignition, turned the key far enough to light up the dials, and watched the gas needle rise slowly. Half full.
Patsy turned the key, again got nothing, and then dared to glance back out to the elm. No one was there but a knocked-out Hollis.
She exhaled. “Joetta’s ghost is just a tale. You know that.” Fear chewed at Patsy, stealing her courage. She rubbed briskly at the panicky stink rising from her chest, fanned herself. Nerves. That’s all, she thought, and Danny was letting his fever talk.
“I’m cold,” he whined, more bothered than before.
Quickly she cranked the window shut.
Danny cried out again, startling Patsy into turning the key once more. This time the engine roared, and she shifted the gear into reverse and backed out, lurching the heavy Mercury away from Ebenezer.
“Hold on.” Patsy steered onto Palisades Road toward County Hospital on the other side of the cliffs. “It’s okay, Danny; we’ll be there in no time. They’ll fix you right up.”
“Ho—Hollis has been a-acting”—Danny’s throat seized, and he hacked once—“pretty cozy with you . . . and if you gave it up to him, Patsy, if you . . . with him, and if you’re lying to me ’bout all this, Patsy—”
“Hollis is the liar!” she yelled. “And you’re still skunk drunk.”
“Patsy?”
“Stop it. You hurting like this is making you mean. Mean. Just like Hollis. Just shut up now. Please, Danny. Shut up. We have to get you to a doctor.”
“Patsy—”
“I have to keep it on the road here or else.” Stretching her body upward, Patsy leaned in to the wheel. The Mercury’s big nose was hard to see past. She glanced into her rearview; the shaved trunk dipped heavy and low, awkwardly. It was like driving a big bathtub up and down and around a bumpy roller-coaster.
Gripping the steering wheel, she fought to keep the Mercury on the narrow road, careening too close to one drop-off shoulder and then veering across to the other. The tires sprayed small bites of limestone into the wheel wells, pruned patches of wild rye and mountain lover out from under the low, fishtailing frame.
Danny mumbled something that she couldn’t understand, then fell silent.
“You okay, Danny? Danny? Danny, wake up!” Patsy begged.
CHAPTER 11
Flannery
1972
Flannery said a silent prayer for her sister’s safety, slipped back into the car, and sat for a few minutes, the rocky Palisades cradling her hope, giving her the courage to face whatever was down there.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it resting at the end of the rail among the empty beer bottles, scattered cigarette butts, and pieces of broken glass, poking up from the concrete in a spindly thatch of determined grass. The white plastic egg someone had tossed, lying there like a chicken had indeed crossed the road to roost. She laughed at that, a short mad laugh, before marshalling it safely back inside her.
Here she was, going for possibly dreadful news, but thinking about shopping. It was still hard for Flannery to believe you could buy cheap nylons in an ugly fake egg. That women had been scooping them up as soon as the company began selling them last year.
Not Flannery, nuh-uh. She preferred her stockings neatly folded, silky, pressed and packed in slick, fancy cardboard sleeves, and even better, when she could find them, in small, thin linen boxes embossed with a fancy golden script, like the ones that filled two of her dresser drawers in the city.
Flannery jerked her hand down and pulled up the hem of her jeans. She’d been in such a rush to leave, she feared she’d forgotten to wear them. Relief washed over her as she rubbed a finger over the hosiery. They were a reminder, her armor, and she never risked leaving the house without them, ever since that final evening at Chubby Ray’s.
Chubby Ray’s. Flannery knocked the name onto the steering wheel. It was still there. Pull up a stool at the all-American Chubby Ray’s. Refresh with cold, two-dip milkshakes, luscious sundaes . . . Chubby’s, America’s home to the tasty hot-rod hotdogs and Chevrolet cheeseburgers and fun treats. Fun, fun, she recalled the old advertisement she knew by heart.
Though Chubby Ray himself had long passed, and the drugstore and soda joint belonged to his son, Junior, it was still a decent business. A popular spot dishing up the same fifties fun, the only entertainment in Glass Ferry, serving kids like it had when Flannery worked there, like it had, from what folks said, when it opened way back in the late ’30s as a diner first. Fun.
But Flannery’s last night at the soda fountain had been anything but. She’d been out of sorts when she arrived to work her sister’s shift. Late. Yet, Flannery felt smug leaving Patsy in the dirt like that, having swiped her pearls without her twin seeing. Patsy deserved it, her sister in the lemon layers of princess tulle, while there Flannery was, stuck in the ugly uniform Chubby made them all wear. The ruined nylons in the dirt. Their jeers. That just flew all over her. Twenty years later it still did.
*
That spring night in ’52, Flannery hotfooted it most of the way to Chubby Ray’s, not slowing till she reached the screen door around back of the old red-rose brick building. Breathless, she’d squeezed past Chubby’s son, Junior, standing in the back grill room, looking over the kitchen.
She grabbed a ticket book and pen to take orders from the crowd beginning to pour through the front door.
“What are you doing here, Junior?” Flannery asked, smoothing down her skirts, pulling out her soda-jerk cap and bobby pins. Remembering the pearls, she patted her left pocket. She blew a sigh and quickly pinned the hat onto her head.
“It’s prom. Pop thought you weren’t showing,” Chubby’s twenty-four-year-old son said, dipping his curly red hair toward the big clock hanging on the wall. “Called me in.”