March 02, 2023
Short Story by Katherine Vondy
The PatrolSoon my family will be ready. Maybe not one hundred percent ready, because you can’t be ready for everything, but we will be ready enough.
Our garden has string beans and tomatoes and squash and many varieties of medicinal herbs. We collect bounties of eggs from our chickens on a daily basis. The left side of our cellar is filled with glass jars of the vegetables we preserve and the right side holds an industrial-sized freezer stocked with meat: pork, lamb, beef. We slaughtered those animals ourselves. Most people today prefer not to think about the fact that animals must be killed before they can be cooked, but that thought doesn’t bother us. We are not squeamish about what must be done to get by.
We have trained in self-defense and boxing and martial arts—all of us, even Josie, who is twelve. The same is true of shooting guns. We own several kinds of pistols and revolvers. We store them in secure locations around our property. Fun fact: the Ruger SP101 is the kind of gun Jesse Pinkman buys in Breaking Bad. We don’t watch TV but we know people who do, and this is what they have told us. We own the Breaking Bad gun, and it fires like a dream. We understand why Jesse Pinkman, whoever that is, wanted this gun.
My husband, Rally, has lost his job. But no, that is the wrong terminology, because it’s not like he misplaced it. A job is not something that can be accidentally tossed in the garbage or left behind on a bus. Rally has been fired from the job he’s had as long as I’ve known him, by some bastards who probably never appreciated him in the first place.
“Walton says that business is down, that they can’t afford to keep as many employees any more,” he says. “But that’s a straight-up lie.”
He points to something on the computer screen in front of him, then waits for me to come close so I can look over his shoulder. He’s on the website for T & W Agricultural Supply, the big wholesale company two towns over at which he was, until recently, employed. The top of the page reads “Career Opportunities,” and underneath, there’s an opening for a Sales Associate. This is the job Rally used to have.
“They just updated it,” he says. “Those assholes. They’re not reducing the size of their staff. They’re replacing me.”
“Oh, honey,” I say, stroking his hair, trying to comfort him.
“Ouch!” he yelps, pushing my hand away from his head. “Watch it, Amber. I’d rather keep my scalp, if you don’t mind.”
“Sorry, Ral.” I often don’t realize how mad I am until someone points it out to me; that I’ve used so much force to erase the classroom blackboard that the felt’s worn off the eraser, or that my knuckles are white from clenching the steering wheel of our station wagon. When I’m angry, it’s hard to be gentle.
I let my hand drop, and tell him that we’ll survive.
“Fuck every single one of ‘em,” he says.
“We’re stronger than they are,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “Me and you and Brett and Josie. We’ll outlast ‘em all.”
Then the kids come in the front door, carrying their backpacks, already stuffed full of books and papers even though the school year just started a week ago. They’re laughing at something I don’t quite catch, something about how their bus driver missed the turn-off to our road and held up traffic while she navigated a U-turn.
“Her face,” Josie says, and blows air into her cheeks and squints her eyes like her head is about to explode. Brett laughs at her antics, then remembers that he is the older brother, by three whole years, and is supposed to be too cool to be entertained by someone who’s still in middle school.
“You weirdo,” he says to her, and his voice is mostly dismissive but also a little bit affectionate. He’s a sweet boy underneath all the teenage posturing, at least when the opportunity arises. It is just that in today’s world, there are so rarely opportunities to be sweet.
Frances has the classroom across the hall from me. She’s only lived here for two years and so is not a part of any of the local friend groups, the ones that are really just longstanding holdovers from all the cliques that formed back in high school. I am not a part of those groups any more, either. This, in conjunction with the fact that we are two of the only teachers at Hollow Hills Elementary under the age of sixty, has made Frances and me the best of friends. Not just at work, either; once in a while she comes to my house for dinner, and when her kitchen flooded with groundwater after a big rainstorm last spring, I helped her replace the linoleum that had been ruined, and that her landlord refused to repair. I said she shouldn’t pay rent until he reimbursed her for her expenses but she didn’t want to cause problems. Sometimes Frances is too nice for her own good.
“They were little rascals today,” she calls out, after all the kids have finally made it onto buses and the two of us are straightening up our respective rooms.
“I bet mine were worse,” I say. This is our routine: we try to outdo each other with stories of all the crazy things our kids do. She teaches fifth grade and I teach third, and not a day goes by that one of us doesn’t have some outlandish tale to tell—Maisie from her class flushed a sock down the toilet, Shawn from my class swallowed one of the baby turtles we hatched in an incubator, things like that. Being around kids is a constant reminder that surprises lurk around every corner.
“Yeah, well, see if you can beat this: Patrick tried to start a fight with Arthur because Arthur said he didn’t like bananas. Patrick started screaming ‘you’re a dummy, you need potassium!’ and pushed Arthur into a wall.”
“Patrick knows that bananas have potassium?” I say, impressed.
“You’re missing the point!” Frances steps into my room and crosses her arms. “They were tussling about bananas. These kids’ve gotta learn what’s worth fighting for.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I tell her. This is a lesson I am forever trying to teach my own children. The way the world’s going, life’s only going to get harder. I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t teach Brett and Josie how to be strong.
At first Rally tried to apply for new jobs, but he didn’t get a single response to any of his inquiries. Not at the parks and recreation center in town, not at the Home Depot, not even at the plastics factory that’s always hiring people to work the line. Now he is in the stage of grief that causes him to lie on the couch staring at the ceiling most of the day.
The kids are concerned.
“Why won’t anybody hire Dad?” I hear Josie whisper to Brett one night as they set the table for dinner.
“Because of his felony,” Brett whispers back, and when I look down at the cutting board where I am chopping carrots I see that I have sliced open my left thumb and blood is pooling around the vegetables.
I turn around and give my kids a stern look, and say: “Listen to me. The economy is terrible right now. Nobody can get a job!”
“My friend Jessica’s sister just got a job as a teller at the bank,” Brett responds.
“Jessica’s sister is probably sleeping with the bank manager,” I tell him.
His mouth drops open.
“Jessica’s sister is married,” he says, awkward, his face turning rosy.
“Even worse if she’s sleeping around, then. Don’t look so shocked. The earlier you know the truth about human nature, the better. Anyway, believe me, as soon as the fiscal year resets and companies have budgets again, people are going to be clamoring to hire your dad.”
“Why?” asks Josie.
“Because nobody is as skilled as your dad. Nobody. Do you understand?”
Josie nods. Brett crosses his arms and raises his left eyebrow. But I raise my right eyebrow back at him, and eventually he nods too, and turns his attention back to the silverware.
The sound of a vehicle driving down the quiet road in front of our house catches my attention and I can’t help peering out the window to see what it is. This is something I do by instinct now. I’m relieved to see it’s a blue minivan.
In the living room, Rally is motionless and quiet on the couch. His eyes are closed but I know he isn’t asleep because he isn’t snoring. He always snores when he sleeps.
I wipe the blood off the cutting board and throw the contaminated carrots away. I am looking forward to the moment when Rally moves on to whatever stage of grief is next.
Frances tells me about Nico on Wednesday at 1:30 PM, which is when my class has music with Mrs. Elaine.
“Amber!” she hisses, and I look up from the spelling tests I’m grading to see Frances poking her head through my doorway, grinning like a damn maniac.
“Where’s your class?” I ask her, because I know that 1:30 PM is when Frances usually teaches geography to her students.
“I told them to read about Eastern Europe. I couldn’t wait any longer, I have to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve got a date tonight! And I’ve got a feeling about this one.”
“A good feeling?”
“Of course a good feeling. If it was a bad feeling, would I be wearing this?” Frances pulls down the neckline of her sweater so that I can see the top of the lacy red bra she’s wearing underneath. It looks absurd, especially next to the hopeful look on her plain face. “It’s push-up. Do you think Nico will think it’s sexy?”
“Who’s this Nico?” I ask. “I don’t know anybody named Nico.” Nico sounds like the name of someone on the Italian Riviera or someplace like that, not a person who could live here, in our little town.
“No, of course you wouldn’t know him. He just moved here.”
“Why?”
“He used to live in Winston-Salem but he wants a slower pace of life. He’s a CPA. He’s starting his own business.”
“Hmmm,” I say. “That sounds suspicious.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I just mean that you should be careful.”
“I’m always careful. Wanna see a picture?” She doesn’t wait for my response before she pulls out her phone and navigates her browser to a financial services website, which displays a picture of a dark-haired man with a too-wide smile. Nico Fletcher, Certified Personal Accountant it says underneath the photo. Something about the guy’s shit-eating grin reminds me of MJ, and I know I am right to warn Frances.
Rally is finally in the “anger” stage, which is a huge relief. Nowadays when I get home from work, he is out back doing target practice. The target is a thick board cut into the approximate silhouette of a man, and we have taped a blown-up picture of MJ’s face on the silhouette’s head. When the paper gets too tattered from all the gunfire, we just pull it off and tape up another copy of the same picture.
We have less income these days, living off my salary alone, but it’s all right because it’s hunting season and Brett is an excellent marksman, probably the best of all of us, even though he’s only fifteen. He’s brought down two does and a buck already and now we’ve got venison loin, venison chops, ground venison, venison jerky, venison everything.
One night I go down to the basement to get the laundry and I see Rally standing in front of the open freezer, staring at all that meat, the venison as well as the beef and lamb and pork.
“Honey?” I say.
“They’re not going to get away with this,” he says.
“You mean Walton? At T & W?” It’s been months since Rally lost the T & W job but I can’t think who else he might be talking about. He closes the freezer door and turns to look at me like I’m crazy.
“No, I don’t give a shit about Walton. I’m talking about the PD. Those power-hungry assholes on the police force.”
“That was a long time ago, hon.” I try to comfort him, but my voice doesn’t sound reassuring. After all, I know better than anybody that time does not heal wounds. It just renders them invisible.
“They’ve poisoned the community against me. I know it,” he says. “Why else would T & W have canned me in the first place? Why else haven’t I been able to get another job?”
“Because,” I try to protest, “the economy is terrible. You know this. Just hold out a few more weeks, just make it through the new year. Then you’ll have your pick of jobs.”
“Do you really think so?” he asks, and then I can’t answer, because the truth is that, when I really think about it, I don’t. His face is breaking my heart, cleaving pieces off one by one.
“Better yet,” I say, “don’t get a job. We’re doing fine. We’ve got everything we need.”
“We’ve got plenty of meat,” he finally says.
“Exactly.”
“We don’t need anyone else.”
“We sure don’t.”
“Other people will only screw you over.”
“That’s right.”
“And when the shit hits the fan, the only people we’ll have to rely on are ourselves.”
“Don’t I know it,” I say, and I go to him then, and wrap my arms around him and kiss him, and it’s a kiss that fills the whole cellar with feeling and understanding, and it grows and builds like a thunderstorm, and we are the rain and the lightning, the parts of the storm that are the most quiet, but also the most dangerous.
Things have gotten serious between Frances and Nico. They are so serious that Frances is no longer interested in comparing stories about our classrooms; she just wants to talk about the funny thing Nico said or the great movie she and Nico watched together. She is blinded by what she thinks is love.
When she comes into my classroom on the last day before winter break, she’s got this look so moony it makes me cringe.
“Guess what we’re doing for New Years?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for me to hazard an answer before saying, “we’re renting a cabin in the mountains! Just the two of us, in front of the fire, surrounded by nature...it’s going to be so romantic.”
I see the parts of the picture she’s not looking at: how isolated this cabin will be, how far away she’ll be from anybody if she needs help.
“Look, is that a good idea? You haven’t known him that long.”
“It’s been three months, Amber.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“You’ve never met him!”
“At least let me show you some self-defense moves.”
I step behind her so that I am facing her back.
“So if someone comes at you from behind you, like this...” I reach my arm out and wrap it around her neck to demonstrate what I mean.
“What are you doing?” she says, struggling against my elbow.
“Don’t try to push the assailant’s arm away. He’ll probably be stronger than you. Instead, push it down, against your collarbone, and—”
“Let me go!” she commands, but when I don’t she begins to scream, a wild, animal scream.
I release her and she stumbles away from me, short of breath, panting a little.
“I’m trying to help!” I tell her. “If you get attacked in the cabin, he’s not going to stop just because you start screaming.”
“You’re paranoid,” Frances says, very, very sharply.
For my part, I just feel sorry for her. I could tell her no, actually you are naïve, but I don’t know what that would accomplish.
“Why do you always see the worst in everyone?” she asks, still keeping her distance.
I am getting irritated.
“I spent too long believing in the wrong people,” I tell her.
My only regret is that it took me so long to learn how to fight. If I’d known earlier, I would’ve gouged MJ’s eyes out, or broken his nose, or even roundhouse-kicked him in the crotch. I would’ve stamped his balls right off his body. I did not own a gun then. I did not think I needed one. I know better now.
Back in high school I only saw MJ’s straight white teeth and his nice cheekbones, his lovely jawline. He was still a teenager but even adult women batted their eyelashes when he smiled at them. To this day Mrs. Elaine still talks about how he was the handsomest boy to ever walk the halls of Hollow Hills, how she knew from the moment she saw him that when he grew up he was going to melt the hearts of every girl he laid eyes on. And when he laid eyes on me, our junior year of high school, I melted and melted and melted until there was nothing left of me standing at all.
Mrs. Elaine does not understand how I could bear to divorce him, but then again how could she when she does not know how I got the scar below my left eye? Nor does she know the parameters of the restraining order that was issued after the split: that he was not supposed to have been within one hundred yards of my home, let alone inside my kitchen. Or what the chief of police said when I filed the report: that there was nothing they could have done, even though I had called twice just in the week before to state that he had not been following the order. Or why I always call in sick to work on April 27: the anniversary of the day I had the procedure that removed the baby. Mrs. Elaine knows none of this. Mrs. Elaine thinks I am a fool to have given up what I gave up. But in fact the opposite is true: I am not a fool any more.
“I’m glowing. Can you tell?” Frances has returned from her mountain getaway unscathed.
“I’m glad you had a nice time,” I say. I’m stapling decorative paper snowflakes to my bulletin board, and Frances comes over to lend a hand.
“Nice doesn’t even begin to describe it,” she says. “The cabin was so perfect...it had the fireplace and the bearskin rug and everything. And Nico and I, we drank hot chocolate and talked for hours and hours, and it just feels...”
She searches for the word she’s looking for.
“Right,” she concludes, pressing the business end of the stapler against the cork. “I really think you’ll like him, Amber.”
I’m noncommittal. “Maybe,” I say.
Frances sighs. “Why can’t you be happy for me?” she asks.
“I am happy for you,” I say, but both of us hear the forced tone in my voice. Frances sighs again.
“Look, I know it’s been tough for you all since Rally got fired. Maybe if he went back to school, even if he just got an Associate degree, there’d be more opportunities for him.”
“That’s not the problem,” I say. “He can do any job he’s hired to do. But nobody will hire him.”
“Right, that’s exactly what I’m saying. If he had more qualifications, if he looked better on paper, like on his résumé, then—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I interrupt her. “That’s not the problem.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
I am quiet. The whole story would horrify her. She can’t even read the newspaper without crying over the world events section, and those stories are about strangers.
“Look, just trust me,” I finally say. “And I’m sorry I was rude about Nico.” I’m not, but it’s what Frances wants to hear, and so I say it. Her face softens just a little.
“Seriously, you’ll like him. I’ll bring him by and introduce you sometime, and you’ll see, he’s a wonderful man. I didn’t think it was possible for a man to be so wonderful. At least, not for me.”
She says this last sentence as if she’s embarrassed, and I understand why: Frances is not the kind of woman that shows up on the covers of beauty magazines or, really, that anyone ever notices at all. She is unobtrusive. Once she asked me what it was like to slow-dance with a man, and I didn’t know what to tell her. Of course I’ve done it but I’d never thought about it. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing I could put into words.
It’s been fourteen years since MJ left town. I heard he was transferred, that the realtor he was working for expanded the business and moved MJ to their Raleigh office. But even though I know he is far away, sometimes I still see him out of the corner of my eye, filling his tank at the gas pump next to the one I’m at, or waiting for the light to change on the opposite side of the intersection from the side I’m standing on. And whenever a brown truck appears in the drive-thru teller lane when I’m at the bank, or shows up in my rear-view mirror when I’m on the highway, or turns into the Hollow Hills parking lot as I’m leaving school, my hands ball into tight fists, my thumbs wrapped around my second and third knuckles, the way I learned they need to be if I have to strike.
Rally has set up a patrol around our property. I’m not sure what stage of grief this means he’s in now. Perhaps it is acceptance. Most of the time he’s the one patrolling, but he gives the kids shifts a few times a week so they can learn about responsibility. At first I thought a patrol was unnecessary, but then Rally said, “If I’m going to be home during the day, I’m going to be damn sure that I’m not squandering my time,” and when I was still on the fence he said, his voice lowered so that I could barely hear him, “Amber, I think I saw the truck. Driving past us. Just like it used to.” Then I understood he was right. It’s better to be safe than sorry. Neither of us wants to be sorry, ever again.
The patrol starts at the house, checking all the rooms including the basement and ensuring that all the entrances are secure: doors locked, windows shut. From there the patrol begins circling the property, from the driveway on the east side all the way to the chicken coop at the west side, then all the animal pens to the south, widening out farther and farther each time around until at last it covers the whole perimeter of our land. If everything is safe, if there are no trespassers or signs of danger, then it’s back to the house, starting the patrol over from the beginning. Usually Rally carries the Sig Sauer 1911, which has night sights and is known for its shooting accuracy. Brett likes the Breaking Bad gun, while Josie opts for the Taurus Judge, which is lighter than some of the others. Josie is strong for her size—four-eleven, about ninety—five pounds—but she is still one of the smallest girls in the seventh grade.
Rally is an excellent teacher. He’s patient with the children and explains everything in a calm and reasonable way. He doesn’t talk down to them or say things are too complicated for them to understand. As we finish lunch one Saturday, he asks if any of us have noticed anything different about the kitchen. The three of us look around the room, and I immediately see what he’s talking about: the clock that usually hangs on the wall next to the oven is missing.
“Oh, yeah!” Josie says, when I point out the change. “I didn’t even notice.”
“Where’s the clock?” Brett asks.
“I took it off because I wanted to make a point about how easy it can be to miss details,” Rally says. “It’s important to be aware of your surroundings. To fall into a routine, to get complacent, to stop noticing what’s around you…that’s when you become vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable to what?” asks Josie.
“To people out there who might be trying to hurt you, or use you to their own advantage, or steal from you.”
Brett swallows the last bite of his sandwich and starts laughing. “Nobody would steal from us,” he says. “We don’t have anything worth stealing. We don’t even have a TV.”
“You’re wrong,” Rally says to Brett. “You know what the most valuable thing on our property is?”
“The car?” guesses Josie as she carries her empty plate to the sink.
“Not even close,” says Rally. “I’ll give you a hint. It’s full of feathers.”
“The chicken coop?” says Brett, incredulously. “You’re crazy. You can buy baby chicks for like three dollars each. Even less.”
“I’m not talking about value in terms of money,” Rally explains. “I’m talking about intrinsic value. Imagine if society falls apart completely. Imagine if money became worthless, if there were no restaurants, no stores.”
“Why would that happen? Why wouldn’t there be stores and restaurants?” asks Josie.
“Because when the police and the courtrooms stop working, it’s only a matter of time before everything else falls apart, too,” answers Rally.
“The police and courtrooms aren’t working?” Brett asks.
“No,” Rally says. “They aren’t.”
He leads the kids out to our porch. I stay inside to clean up, but my family’s muffled voices carry through the glass of the kitchen window.
“Imagine that world, where you have to survive on what’s already here, on our property. What would provide a reliable, self-sustaining source of food?”
There is a pause, and then, “the eggs!” yells Josie. “You can eat the eggs or you can let them hatch into chickens!” I can tell she’s proud to have lit upon the answer before her brother.
“Exactly. When you got tired of omelettes, you could butcher a bird or two.”
“So it’s most important to protect our chickens?” Brett says.
“After one another, yes. The most important thing is to ensure we’ve got the means to survive.”
“To survive what? And when?” asks Josie.
“I don’t know, darling. It may not happen in our lifetimes. It may happen tomorrow. None of us knows exactly what the future holds. But I’ll tell you one thing I do know: it’s better not to take chances. If something looks wrong, it probably is. You can’t trust anybody. Your mom and I, we’ve learned that lesson the hard way.”
“OK,” Josie says agreeably, and then comes back inside. She sits down at the table to do her weekend homework.
Brett’s still outside with Rally. “What do you mean the hard way?” he asks.
The kids know that Rally was in jail, though they don’t know why. They know that I was married once before I was married to their father, but not who that marriage was with, or why it ended, or who the face on our target belongs to. There have been times when they’ve asked questions that were difficult to answer. They’ve wondered why we put so much effort into our garden, why we don’t go to the church like everyone else around here, why they’re not allowed to go to sleepovers when all their friends have slumber parties all the time. Rally and I explain that every family is different, which is true, but only part of the truth. The rest of it is that we haven’t told our children certain details about the past, because we didn’t want them to fear the world when they were too young to fight it. But Brett is older now.
Rally lowers his voice. Even so I can still hear a few words and phrases from the story he tells Brett, ugly words and ugly phrases, words and phrases we’ve hardly spoken since those court dates sixteen years ago. I suppose there’s a part of us that thinks if we don’t say them then maybe they will cease to be accurate, but of course that’s not the way words work.
A while later, Brett comes back inside. He doesn’t say anything as he passes Josie and her pre-algebra book, just walks to the sink where I stand and hugs me even though I’m in the middle of washing dishes and my hands are wet and covered in soap scum. He doesn’t hug me much these days, which is part of him being a teenager, and I realize that I’ve nearly forgotten what it feels like to hug my son. At this moment, with Brett’s arms around me and my head pressed against Brett’s shoulder, it almost feels like I am the child.
When I met Rally—eighteen years ago, on a shopping expedition to T & W, in search of discount mulch—I did not know he was the love of my life. I was married to MJ and therefore believed that I had already found my soulmate. This phenomenon is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, when your mind convinces you that something is true because there’s no other way to explain your actions. It is a powerful, powerful thing. Cognitive dissonance kept me from knowing many things I should have known. I should have known that my soulmate would not punch through our bedroom door, I should have known that my soulmate would not push me against the wall with his fingers trapping my throat, I should have known that my soulmate would not hold a Swiss army knife to my face when I tried to walk away, but I didn’t; Rally had to tell me those things. I filed for divorce and got the protective order and when Rally kissed me for the first time, several months later, I felt the boulders that had been weighing down my heart explode into dust the very moment our lips came together. Rally felt the same thing. He found a house in my town and he bought it for us and said he didn’t mind the forty-five-minute commute to T & W, that he’d be thinking about me constantly while he was driving and the time would speed right by.
We got married, and I was so happy to print the announcement in the local paper, the Weddings & Engagements section, but that was a mistake. Afterwards we started to see a brown truck, just like the one MJ owned, driving slowly past our house early in the mornings and late at nights, and sometimes it would be parked down the hill, in the graveled patch of the road’s dead end. The police said there were hundreds of brown trucks in the state and it could be anybody behind the wheel, even if we got the license plate number and confirmed who owned it, but many of the policemen had gone to school here and had been pals with MJ. They were still pals with MJ. When Rally came home the evening after MJ’s attack and found me on the kitchen floor, concussed, half-dressed, he said that now the police would see how wrong they’d been.
They didn’t see anything of the sort. They didn’t collect evidence or even my testimony. At MJ’s hearing the officials reminisced with him about the days when they’d sneak beers into the back of the team bus and drink them after all the away baseball games, and then MJ plea bargained his way into one assault charge and thirty days in jail. One month later the brown truck was back, driving back and forth, back and forth, in front of our property.
This time we knew better. Rally drove to MJ’s townhouse and waited in its parking lot for MJ to get home, and when MJ got out of his truck Rally surprised him with a crowbar to the face. It was the only thing that could make MJ stay away, and for that Rally served five months. Five times the length of MJ’s sentence. The courts claimed that the attack was unprovoked, that MJ’s history with me was irrelevant and not connected to the matter at hand, but that’s bullshit. Everybody knows that the past never disappears. It’s always there.
What’s the point of the justice system when it isn’t just? When it protects the good old boys but punishes the good men? The community united around MJ, their handsome golden one, bruised but still beautiful after the reconstructive surgery, and I am ashamed to say that I did not speak up, even though I was the one person who knew best that MJ’s golden glow was only on the outside. Humiliation is one of the best silencers there is. I stayed quiet.
I didn’t explain that Rally had only been finishing what the court hadn’t bothered to, and our neighbors labeled him a criminal. He hadn’t grown up with us and they did not trust him. They looked around, at the public servants and patrolmen that they’d known for decades, and couldn’t imagine ever losing faith in them. They couldn’t imagine losing that sense of protection. But these were losses we did not need to imagine. We’d already lost so much.
From then on we knew we had to be stronger.
The weather is uncharacteristically warm for February and the forsythia in front of the kitchen window is already blooming. The yellow sprigs tap against the glass in the beautiful winter sunset light, a lovely thing to watch as I peel potatoes.
It is almost dinnertime when I hear the gunshot, and I know that it is not target practice because after the crack of the bullet’s release there is a choking scream. I think I recognize the voice.
“Frances?” I yell as I run out the front door and towards the west side of our property, by the chicken coop. The chickens are loudly squawking and flitting about the pen, raising a fine fog of dust and feathers. There are two figures on the ground: Frances and the man she kneels over, a man whose face I can identify even at some distance as belonging to Nico Fletcher, Certified Personal Accountant, though the shit-eating grin has been replaced by no expression at all. Some distance south Brett stands, the Ruger SP101 still clasped in his hands.
It takes me only seconds to reach Frances but I confirm when I arrive that there was no need to rush. Brett’s marksmanship has once again proved to be true and faultless. Blood spreads from the expert perforation in the center of Nico’s chest.
“What have you done, what have you done,” cries Frances. “He was just looking at your chickens...”
Brett has made his way over to us. He’s trembling, and there’s a look on his face that is equal parts fear and pride.
“That’s him, isn’t it?” he says.
“That’s who?” I ask.
“The face, the man with the face,” Brett says. “He was going to do something to our coop.”
“Nico, Nico, Nico,” Frances goes on. “Oh Nico,” she repeats in a whisper, cradling his handsome dead head in her arms.
“I saved us,” Brett says, and with those three words I see that little bit of elusive sweetness in his eyes.
Later, when the police come, the details become clear: how Frances had persuaded Nico to drop by our place so she could finally introduce him to me, how he’d gone over to look at our chickens while she put on a little more makeup with the help of her car’s rear-view mirror, how Brett, on patrol, had seen a man whose face resembled the one we’d been shooting at for years, the face he finally understood to be attached to the man who was responsible for all our family’s pain and hurt, lurking by our most precious resource. It is no wonder he took aim.
The officers&mdaash;men I actually remember as sweet boys in my kindergarten class, both of them&mdaash;string yellow tape between the coop and a cedar by our driveway. They look at us with narrowed eyes, shaking their heads. They tell us that guns are dangerous weapons. That what happened will haunt us forever. That we should be scared of what is to come.
But the truth is that I have never felt safer. The police beams loop through the air in undulating red and blue, like a curious lighthouse in a strange, beautiful dream. My love for Rally and Josie and Brett rises and swells, wave after wave of pure, true love. We are strong. We know how to protect ourselves, how to survive. We are ready for whatever comes.
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