![]() Jack, barefoot and shirtless, in OP corduroy shorts, was out the door. Jack, who’d known Lola since she was eight, said, “Call an ambulance.” She rolled onto her back and stared at her hands.ĭeb said, “Fuck me.” Lola’s face looked like it’d been sliced open. She touched her face before looking at her hands, carmine red, redder than red, unreal, before falling down. She started to get up, blood pouring from a deep gash. ![]() Lola was on the shag carpet, but her face was connected to the table. Deb was dancing and singing, “My woman took me higher,” and flung her arm hard, a “Solid Gold” move, smacking Lola in the face with her bony elbow.ĭisoriented, her nose smarting, Lola turned, one sneaker catching the other, and fell face first into the oversized glass coffee table-much too large for the room. Deb tied a black shoelace between the metal latch and plastic handle that opened and closed the awning windows.ĭeb was at home with her friends, coked-up, listening to the Bee Gees, when Lola came up the cinderblock steps through the door that never shut all the way. A lightning rod and TV antenna mounted to the roof. Busted fiberglass walls had been filled with cardboard and duct tape. The trailer, purchased by Deb’s mom before she passed on, was second-hand. The land had belonged to her mother and grandmother. ![]() But like the cats, she got knocked up and everything went to shit.ĭeb’s trailer was a single-wide on a double scrub lot. She had yellow hair like Cinderella and a good figure. She was meant to go to college or be a cruise attendant. She was prone to put out a can of tuna or a saucer of milk for the feral cats, down on their luck-something she understood. Lola and Deb Brewster lived three doors down from Cam. Fuck that.” He flicked his cigarette butt. Taking a drag off his smoke, he said, “If I take them to animal control, some do-gooder liberal is going to adopt them, and they’ll end up right back here mewing all hours of the night. He’d shrugged, not wanting to upset the neighbor girl. Lola was ten and asked, “What do you do after you catch them?” One of Lola’s neighbors, Cam Lewis, had gotten a raccoon trap a couple years back and started catching as many cats as he could. Lola and Deb lived here among the ever-multiplying stray cats who fed off the AG’s dumpsters. Further along were the public library, built in 1971, a stone theater dating back to the mid 1800s and a Baptist Church where Lola’s mother, Deb, had been a congregant.Īcross from the clock tower sat the AG Supermarket, the Flower Market, Spoonful, a coffee shop, and Mission Thrift, run by the Baptists to fund missionary trips to Ghana.īehind the AG Supermarket stretched a grid of streets with dark buckling roads, dirt yards and double-wide trailers. Two doors down was Bean’s Pharmacy with a real soda fountain dating back to 1951. At the town’s center was an ivy-stitched gazebo beside a clock tower where a grandmother and granddaughter, Alice and Susie Fitzpatrick, sold herbal elixirs. Nearing downtown Rock Gap, the scenic byway turned to a scenic Main Street, and the speed limit dropped to twenty-five. Kudzu and oak shaded the hilly road where the waning light cloaked milkweed and berries, and the only sounds were of the river, of twigs snapping and leaves rustling, and Lola’s breath. The scenic byway was wild with white-tailed rabbits and deer. It was August, and the sun was going down fast. He’d been asked by Lola’s mom to stay out of the picture, for now, but now had turned into forever. The wind swept a cellophane wrapper across the lot where gas pumps used to be, the Coca-Cola sign groaning from rusted hooks. Lola had faint memories of coming to this market with an uncle or grandfather, and sitting on a pea-green stool that swiveled, a burly fellow behind the counter unscrewing the tin lid, the uncle or grandfather plunging his hand into the brine. Lola Brewster, twelve-and-a-half, running home from the Spivey Trail, stopped at Red’s, boarded-up now, the concrete overgrown with weeds. You could dig your whole hand inside and pick the best one out. The Route 6 Scenic Byway snaked its way east to west, ten miles south of the interstate, following the Rockfish River through forgotten Virginia towns with squat cinderblock markets where old men once sold red-hot sausages out of glass jars.
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