Uncertain, TX: Chapter Two

Time flies when your heart gets shattered into pieces and your whole world falls apart.

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This suspense story has themes of racism, classism, and abstract mentions of abuse, nothing explicit on the page. Read with caution if you have sensitivities.

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CHAPTER TWO

NOW (September)

Of all the mothers throughout history who ever purposely made their grown children feel like hell, none took such rhapsodic pleasure in it as did Cherry Folsom.

“If you’d had any sort of feeling for your family,” Cherry moaned into her phone, “for the woman who labored for three days to even bring you into this world, who kept a roof over your head, maybe you wouldn’t’ve moved halfway across the country, abandoning me like you did. Then you wouldn’t have to drop everything to come help, something a good daughter would know to do, me being at death’s door, all alone.” She started coughing, a truly worrisome rattle with every tortured inhalation.

Dana sighed, rubbing her forehead. Her mother had flirted with death’s door for years, only now it seemed she was finally getting up close and personal... and demanding from her only child all the attention that came with it. “Yeah, okay, okay. So very sorry I took a job that wasn’t refilling bait buckets just so I could be at your beck and call.” At the shocked intake of air on the other end of the line, Dana muttered another, “Sorry.” She adjusted the cellphone on her shoulder so she could use both hands to type into her laptop. “Look. I can get a flight back home late tonight. It’s no big deal.”

“I know it is a big deal, so don’t lie to me. They don’t pay you anything out there. You can’t fool me.”

“I’m not having this conversation with you again, Cherry.”

“I hate it when you call me that.”

“Your name?” Dana snorted.

“It’s not right. I’m your mother.”

“Then act like a mother and stop riding my ass like a petulant brat.”

“I don’t know where you got that damn foul-ass mouth of yours.”

Dana held the phone away from her ear while her mother coughed, the sound worsening with a wet rattle the longer it continued. She could hear her mother gasp for breath, take a drink of water, and then return to the phone, her rough voice trampled and wrangled into a softer, more controlled tone. It was the voice Cherry used when she wanted to impress people, wanted to get her way. The hair on Dana’s arms stood up on end as her mother simpered, “I sure appreciate you coming out here, Dana-doll, I really do. I wouldn’t ask if there were anyone else.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I mean, I could have used you a month ago, but I guess you were too busy chasing work to be able to come.”

Dana didn’t know how her mother managed to always turn a thank you into a reprimand, but that was Cherry Folsom’s superpower. “Okay, let me finalize my ticket and get a car, and I’ll text you when I get in.”

“I hate texts. Just leave a message on the recorder like a normal person. And don’t come in late. You know how I hate being woken up.”

“I know. See you soon.”

Dana tossed her phone onto the sofa and forced herself to exhale and drop her shoulders. Although her mother’s worsening cancer was a terrible reason to skip town, it came at the perfect time between wrapping up a huge project and dumping the latest girlfriend. Perfect, she thought, snorting. The cancer had advanced, Cherry’s Social Security barely covered her food and light bills, the medical benefit and pittance of savings Dana had helped her build over the years were tapped, and from the sound of her, was nearing her end. Dana was all Cherry had, except for a begrudging acknowledgement of life every holiday from Dana’s dad, a town over.

“Honor your mother and I don’t give a rat’s ass about honoring your no-good father,” Cherry had often said over the decades. “Rubbing my nose in it that he got a wife—a Mexican! And they have their perfect little house and perfect little business and go to the casino in Oklahoma twice a year, like I want a Christmas letter from them.”

Dana knew she kept every single one in a folder wedged between some books. Cherry was a difficult person to be with when she was in better health. Now? There was no one else but Dana who would bother offering any degree of help. It may be the understatement of the year, saying their relationship over the years was strained, but Dana couldn’t fathom just ignoring her mother in her last days to suffer who-knew-what in that ramshackle, run down house in the piney woods.

Dana’s living arrangements were paid for by her employer, company-owned apartments and live-in hotel suites up and down the West coast. She had no pets and her social circle consisted of work acquaintances, drinking buddies, and the occasional one-night stand that sometimes stretched out for weeks until it inevitably ended with the next job and subsequent move. Contrary to what her mother believed, corporate financial consulting paid very well, but the constant travel meant she never really got to put roots down, which was just how she liked it, a problem she could solve, then move on without emotional entanglements. No looking back, just move on to the next gig or until a headhunter snatched her up for another employer with better benefits or pay, and then lather, rinse, repeat.

A few years ago, Cherry had griped over the phone that she knew Dana wasn’t making good money because “You live out of a suitcase. Only people who do that are damn vagabonds.”

“Damn vagabonds? If I ever form an all-girls rock group, that’s our name,” Dana retorted.

“Always changing the subject when I hit too close to home.”

Dana bristled at the smug satisfaction in her mother’s voice but didn’t give her more ammunition. It was a tactic she’d learned from a therapist earlier that year: cut off oxygen to Cherry’s vitriol. Dana changed therapists almost as frequently as she changed living arrangements, but every now and then something from a session struck gold.

Now, the lack of home ownership and entanglements made things simple. She only had to toss her easy-travel clothes and toiletries into a suitcase and well-worn carry-all. Tickets were as quick as opening the app on her phone, and God knew she had enough frequent flier miles to get anywhere. But Uncertain, Texas was the last place she’d want to go.

As she switched off all the lights, a habit beaten into her backside from youth, pulled a ballcap over her dark, short hair, ensured her express check-out processed on her phone app before shoving it in the back pocket of her jeans, she wondered when was the last time she’d been back home. She’d flown her mother out to New York City once, hoping to impress her at Christmas, the six months she’d been assigned to work in Manhattan, but Cherry only complained about the noise and crowds and the cold.

Dana scanned her boarding pass with a faint smile and settled in the airplane. Her father Keith and his wife Linda usually hosted holidays at their modest house in Marshall, Texas, a short drive south of Uncertain, but Dana had never known Linda’s expansive family, so usually phoned in holiday greetings, preferring to keep busy with work. Classic avoidance, as one therapist said.

When the plane began to land in Shreveport, Louisiana, Dana realized with a start that the last time she’d spent time with her dad and Linda was when Dana graduated with her bachelor’s from UTD in the early ‘90s. They’d all driven to Shreveport together to celebrate. There wasn’t really any place that was college graduation ceremony-worthy in Uncertain unless you took a boat over to Ferry Town and joined the rotary club in Oil City. Not really the Folsoms’ style. Or price range. They wouldn’t have been offered a membership invitation in the first place.

Dana dropped her bags into the trunk of her rental, shocked. Had it really been more than twenty-some years since she’d been back to her hometown? Much longer than that, she realized while pulling out into traffic. It wasn’t as if Uncertain had much to offer her and she’d happily kept it in her rearview mirror, without so much as a backward glance.

She chewed her fingernail, a habit she’d mostly broken except in cases of extreme stress. She didn’t think about her hometown at all, if she could avoid it. It wasn’t like there were happy memories calling to rekindle the good times. She rubbed her stomach, twisted with nerves as she pulled into the rental house she’d found closest to Cherry’s place a town over.

Well, there had been some happy memories, but those had been ruined by...

Damn. She hadn’t thought about Adelaide Winn in, huh. Over thirty years.

Time flies when your heart gets shattered into pieces and your whole world falls apart.

After a fitful night with not much sleep, she made her way to the house she’d grown up in. Familiar split-rail fences with clusters of old but well-kept mobile homes behind them lined the main thoroughfare through the tiny town of Karnack. Where there used to be a field marking the turn toward Uncertain, now stood a gas station with a modest travel-center and drive-through car wash. Thick stands of trees grew almost to the gravel edge of the now-two lane black top that led toward the even smaller town of Uncertain. Notices—many well-worn and faded to the point of blankness—peppered the telephone poles lining the roadside.

Turning off the state highway onto the narrow, rutted county road, she saw a few more weather-beaten “Have you seen me?” signs mixed with the price of minnows and cold beer plastered to the ice chests on the front porch of the Cut-n-Bait. The Church of Uncertain still stood, now with a fancy new LED sign with a scrolling message at the bottom. “We are CERTAIN that JESUS is LORD.” Dana slowed down to read the crawl.

“Those who are LOST can be FOUND in the LORD CHRIST.”

The overgrowth of strangle vine and hackberry trees crept right up to the blacktop out in these woods; she couldn’t see the marina from the main road. She almost missed the grouping of mailboxes that signaled the turn to her mother’s place. Looked like Earl, the retired long-haul trucker who lived a few houses down from Cherry, wasn’t as diligent with his bushwhacker as he’d been the in the past. Then again, he must be getting close to eighty years old.

Dana slowed the rental car to a crawl as it rocked and fish-tailed over the gutted gravel road past the few mobile homes and clapboard houses that dotted the woods. Her mother’s place was in the center of a one-house cul-de-sac, the bracken separating it from the water’s edge. The Folsom house had never been grand, hell, had never been more than barely decent in all the years Dana had lived there, but now, it looked as if the wrong storm would knock it over.

The front wooden steps sagged in the middle where a support beam had rotted away. Green, thorny vines had taken over the railing and clambered up a post where they had merrily twined among a few fallen branches on the slanted tin roof. A tree sapling had sprouted in the guttering. The porch looked as if it hadn’t been swept of leaves in a decade. The paint was chipping, clear gaps shone through the board-on-board battening in at least three places. To the left side was a makeshift ramp: two spare planks of wood set about a half foot apart. Dana could see where someone had tried to nail them in and apparently given up three-fourths of the way through.

“One good rainstorm and this whole damn place’ll come crashing on her head,” she muttered. She didn’t bother to get her things. She wouldn’t stay here. “Wonder if she’ll come with me to Jefferson for the night...”

She tested the steps before skipping the broken one. “Ma? Cherry, you here?”

“In my room,” came a croaked reply.

Dana turned right under the lintel, the dark green carpet of her mother’s bedroom all but obscured with litter—takeout bags, tissues and empty containers covered most of it. “What the hell has happened here?”

Cherry pushed up to sitting in her hospital-issue bed. “Well, nice to see you, too.”

She started coughing, her right arm going out so that she sagged to her side.

Dana rushed to help. A giant plastic cup with a bendable straw was on the bedside table. In garish blue ink, NORTH CADDO MEDICAL CENTER was stamped on the side. Dana shook it to check if it had liquid and helped her mother drink.

“Thanks.” Cherry got her breathing under control and drank a few more sips, her deeply wrinkled mouth working furiously over the straw. “You get here okay?”

Dana looked at her mother, really looked at the state of her. Thin to the point of emaciation, her once thick, dark hair that had fallen past her shoulders had been reduced to wisps of silver fluff that barely came to her ears. Her eyebrows, thinned from years of over-plucking, now were almost translucent. Her cheeks were sunken into her face, her eyes set so deeply in the recesses of her orbital sockets, it gave the eerie impression of raisins pushed into bread dough. Her cheeks were flecked with red from her coughing fit. The lines in her face were deep, prominent, and cross-hatched.

“Well? I look like shit, don’t I.”

“No...” At Cherry’s dry bark of a laugh, Dana grinned. “Got to say, I’ve seen healthier shits.”

That started Cherry off on another coughing fit, which led to more water. Dana found the bed’s remote and raised the head so Cherry could sit up comfortably. “Who helped you get this?” she asked. “Looks expensive.”

“One of the nurses at Caddo Medical. They’re real nice over there. They got this gal from Nairobi of all places that runs the numbers at the front desk. She got me the papers I needed for this, for the scooter and the lift for a car.”

“When did you get a new car? I thought you got rid of the Datsun a few years ago.”

Cherry glared at her. “I didn’t. I’m entitled to the lift if I get a scooter. Maybe I’ll get a car one day, and then I’ll be glad I have it.”

Dana sighed and scrubbed her face. “Well, that makes a kind of sense, I suppose.”

“Anyway, they’re both in the living room. I threw Meemaw’s blanket over it so no thieves would get any ideas. Took forever for them papers to get through.”

“You got a problem with thieves out here?” Dana walked to the doorway and peeked into the living room. The same old plaid sofa with the broken support under the right cushion was still there, as was the bookshelf made from boards of scrap wood and cinder blocks. The same well-worn paperback novels were piled higgledy-piggledy on the boards. In the middle of the room like a weird sculpture was a huge pile of metal and machinery scantily covered with a rainbow-hued acrylic yarn blanket. She lifted a corner and saw a bright red mobility scooter with a mechanical lift propped against it. It took up almost the whole room.

“Yeah, that ought to fool them.”

From her room, Cherry called out. “If we decide to go somewhere for the day, you’ll be glad we have all that. You can just hook it up to your car.”

“Where in the hell do you think you’re going? Head up to Shreveport, maybe pop into Dallas for some shopping? You can barely sit up.”

“I thought,” Cherry said, her voice a dry rasp, “you might help me get to a doctor’s appointment since you’re here.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. I didn’t raise you to be so thoughtless, for Chrissakes.”

“You didn’t really raise me,” Dana muttered to herself as she tossed the blanket back over the scooter. “There, Mama,” she hollered. “It’s invisible again.”

“I sure wish you’d gather up some of this trash. I’m gonna get racoons.”

Dana found a trash bag in the kitchen without sparing a thought for the horrific state of that particular room—one thing at a time—and began gathering up all the mess. “Who’s bringing you food and not sticking around long enough to clean up?”

“You can’t expect important people like the Women’s Auxiliary to pick up trash for me, Dana, honestly.”

“Their charity only extends to the easy stuff, huh?”

“You never did learn how society works, Dana, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

Dana didn’t bite. She knew Cherry felt entitled to wealth and prestige because they were white and resented their Black neighbors. Plus, Cherry’s favorite mother-daughter activity was pointing out all the ways Dana was responsible for their not making more of a splash in “society”, but in a town of a hundred and change—the neighboring towns weren’t much larger—there wasn’t much “society” to be had. And they didn’t have the money to run with the rich folks, people who created little pockets of pleasure hidden away in the swamp because the land was cheap, automated gates and security cameras were easy to come by and kept the undesirables at arm’s length, and because they had enough money to get away with whatever they wanted.

“Have you seen...” Cherry gasped a breath and started coughing once more, waving off Dana’s attempts to help her lie down. “It’s better if I stay propped up.” She drank some water, fumbling it back onto the C-table at her lap. “Have you seen anyone?”

“No, came straight here after getting myself a place to stay in Jefferson.”

“Well, what in the hell do you want to waste money on that for? Gabriela came by yesterday and got your bedroom sorted after I chewed out your dad for doing this to me. You better go see your dad while you’re here. Be sure to tell him ‘up yours’ for smoking around me all those years.”

Dana hadn’t seen her half-sister Gabriela in a long while. After Gabby got married to a boy in Marshall and started having babies, she couldn’t fly out to stay with Dana on a whim like before.

“Her new little boy is cute as a button,” Cherry said. “Mouth runs like a motor. Can’t understand a damn word. Just darling.”

“He’s what, three?”

“Mm hmm. You can put that on the front porch. Should be one of those county trashcans on the side of the house.”

Dana tied off the bag and lobbed it at the front door. Across the hall, she opened the door to her childhood bedroom and was hit with a wave of nostalgia. Her high school graduation picture sat on her worn dresser with rounded wooden knobs. “Class of 1990” in mint green puff-paint decorated the bottom of the picture, half-chipped away, coated in dust but still legible. A dog-eared and broken-spine copy of her favorite book when she was a teen, Annie on My Mind, sat next to a ceramic coin-catcher she’d made in art class. In the dish was an oblong cream-colored freshwater pearl, a soft-pink paisley scrunchie, and under those, a strip of four photographs from a booth. Dana’s breath caught in her throat. It showed two girls with their arms thrown around each other, cheeks pressed together and smiling for all they were worth, laughing until the last picture, where they stared at one another, clearly in love. Next to this was a dusty, chipped glass tchotchke nestled in the hair scrunchy. She could picture the card, the navy-blue box the glass bird had come in.

Finally found something that reminds me of you. I have one, too, to remember my Bird Girl.

Merry Christmas.

I love you.

Addy

The first expensive gift she’d ever been given, the first time Addy had voiced what they meant to each other. She fingered the old pearl, returned to her in an envelope along with the picture strip.

Addy’s fancy silver car pulled up to the marina, but instead of climbing out for an enthusiastic hug, she sat in the car, engine idling. Dana dropped her hand from where she’d waved, confused. She could see Addy through the tinted side window, breathing deeply.

The engine cut off and Addy climbed out.

“I brought this to you as a courtesy.” She handed Dana an envelope.

“A courtesy? Addy, are you okay? What’s—”

“Look. It was fun when I needed to keep busy. You were a great distraction. But I don’t want to see you again.”

Earlier that day, Dana had scooped out the entrails of a bass fish. Staring at Addy’s closed-off expression, she sympathized with the fish.

“What are you… Addy, I just saw you last night? What is going on?”

“What aren’t you getting?” Addy said, curling her hair behind her ear as a cruel smile twisted onto her normally beautiful face. “Dana, I’m breaking up with you. I need to focus on college and real life. So thanks for the fun, but—”

Dana grabbed Addy’s forearm. “Addy. Something happened. What happened? Is it your dad?”

Addy twisted out of her grip. “Don’t talk about my father like that. See, this is why it would never work between us. Just because your parents are awful, doesn’t mean everyone else’s are, too.”

Dana couldn’t speak, her heart clenched painfully in her chest, making it hard to breathe.

“You know why I didn’t want to you to work for my father or any of his friends, Dana?” She popped her hip and clicked her tongue. “Because I was embarrassed.”

Hot tears rolled down Dana’s face.

“I don’t need to waste my life with swamp trash anymore. You think I actually liked spending time with you? Aww. How sad. Stay away from me and my family.”

And with that, she looked Dana up and down, climbed into her car, and drove away. Dana stood frozen until she felt Ronnie’s hand on her shoulder, jarring her out of her misery.

“Dana? You gonna stay in there all afternoon? I thought you might bring me some dinner.”

Dana startled, jostling the items stored in the coin catcher. “Coming, Cherry.”

No. She wouldn’t stay here tonight.

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