Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

The moment passed.

She sat down on the chair across from him and leaned her elbows on the table, resting her gun hand casually on the sticky surface.

“So you got you a new girl,” she said conversationally. “What’s her name?”

“She isn’t—I don’t got—”

“Aw, sugar, don’t try to keep secrets from Auntie Stella,” she said. “You know I’ll find out.”

Roy Dean stared at a nail-bitten thumb. “There ain’t anyone.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Stella said slowly. She let the silence stretch out in front of them, letting him cook in his own juices. Nervous wasn’t a bad way to keep these boys.

“Well, that’s real good,” she finally said, keeping her voice friendly. “I always say, it’s good to let a little time go by after a tough breakup. You know? You’ve got to give your heart a chance to recover. Who needs a rebound relationship, all that drama? Nothing but trouble. Am I right, Roy Dean, or am I right?”

Roy Dean shrugged and mumbled something that might have been assent.

“Hey, Roy Dean,” Stella said, like she’d just thought of something interesting. “I ever tell you about my returning customer special?”

Roy Dean froze for a moment, then slowly shook his head, still not looking at her.

“Well, it works like this. First time around, I look at a guy and I say to myself, ‘Stella, what are the odds we can make a decent citizen out of this moron who’s been beating up on his woman?’ I look him over good and I try to find it in my heart to give him another chance. I believe in second chances, I really do.”

After staring at his thumb miserably, the temptation evidently became too much for Roy Dean, because he stuck the thing into his mouth and started gnawing at the nail. Stella tried to suppress a wave of nausea at the sight.

“But if that same man—the one I gave a chance to, the one I didn’t nail when I had his dick in a vise—if that man gets a little full of himself and decides to pick up on his old tricks with a new lady… well, then I tend to lose all my patience.”

She leaned across the table and waited until Roy Dean flicked an increasingly terrified glance in her direction to continue. “Roy Dean, you know that tire pile out back of Vett’s body shop?”

Roy Dean took his thumb away from his mouth long enough to moisten his lips with his tongue and choke out a “yeah.”

“Well, a couple years ago, a man—a preacher, if you can believe it—came back for my returning customer special. He was smart enough not to bother his ex-wife, she and I made sure of that. But get this, he wasn’t smart enough to stay away from the lady who played the organ at the noon service. Moved her right in with him and everything. Now I’m not saying she was any kind of smart to hook up with him, but still, stupid ain’t a crime. Oh, I’m sorry, here I am babbling on, taking up all your valuable time.… What I mean to tell you is…”

She leaned even farther across the table, keeping her finger nice and easy on the trigger, though she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be needing it today, and whispered, “That preacher’s in about six pieces buried under that tire pile.”

She lowered herself slowly back onto the chair, gauging the effect her news had on Roy Dean. There was a fair amount of truth to the story—all of it, in fact, right up to the tire pile.

Stella didn’t kill the man, though. She had only one death on her hands, and she meant to keep it that way. Killing Ollie had been a case of special circumstances—she was pretty sure that when Judgment Day arrived and she was called for her audience with the Big Guy, He would understand.

Still, there were other ways to skin even the most stubborn tomcat. When the preacher took up his old ways on a new lady, Stella merely switched tactics.

Whenever a garden-variety restraint-and-reckoning first visit didn’t do the trick, Stella got creative. In this case, the preacher’s hypocrisy reminded her of a story she’d read in her English class at Prosper High School, and she slowly and carefully burned a scarlet A on the preacher’s chest with her electric prod.

If she remembered her lessons properly, poor Hester Prynne lettered in Adultery. The preacher, Stella figured, earned his for Assholism. But at least now he was a retired Asshole. Taking his shirt off was probably all a lady needed to see before she took off running.

Roy Dean left off his thumb mid-gnaw. The color drained from his face, and he blinked rapidly a few times.

“No’m,” he said, pure sincerity. “I’m off women, and if I ever take them up again, you can bet you won’t have no trouble from me.”

“ She won’t have no trouble from you,” Stella clarified. “That’s what you meant, right?”

Roy Dean nodded and gulped air.

“Okay, good. Well, now, I’m glad we got that out of the way, but since I’m here I thought I’d ask about something a friend of mine saw down at the speedway.”

Stella watched carefully, especially Roy Dean’s eyes, tracking to see which way his glance darted, but he didn’t look up. “Well, I been there. Same’s about a million other folks. But I ain’t taken no woman there.”

Stella leaned back in the dinette chair, disappointed. The online criminology course she was taking from a college based in Idaho had offered up a bunch of theories about how to tell when somebody was lying. Apparently, liars looked down and to the left when they spoke. They also tended to touch their faces and turned their bodies away and showed emotions only in their mouth, not their eyes.

What a bunch of crap.

“Dang, Roy Dean,” Stella said. “I wish I could believe you. But I don’t, I just don’t. I mean, you’re all twitchy like—”

“You got a damn gun pointed at me!”

“Yes, I guess that’s right. Thing is, if I put it away in the truck, and come back in here all nice and friendly, it’s not going to be much of an incentive for you to say any different, is it?”

Roy Dean started to say something, then apparently realized the futility of the argument and just shrugged.

“Well, how about this,” Stella said, pushing back her chair and standing, giving her bum hip a shake. “You know I’m a friendly kind of person, right, Roy Dean? I got a lot of friends, all over the place. And not just in Prosper, either. They’re all over Missouri, and I got a few in Kansas and Arkansas.… I even got one gal all the way over in Ohio. And these nice friends of mine, if I ask them to keep a special watch out for you, maybe let me know how you’re doing, since I can’t really spend all my time babysitting—well, I’m sure they’ll be glad to keep me posted.”

Roy Dean’s chin hung lower, his lower lip jutting out.

You can run, Stella telegraphed with her expression, but you can’t hide. She stood and pushed her chair back in under the beat-up old table. “Roy Dean, you ever figure on getting a real job? You know, one with a paycheck? Benefits?”

Roy Dean’s spiky eyebrows rose up in surprise. “I done that, already, Stella. That’s what got me in this whole mess with you in the first place.”

“Really?” Stella paused at the door of the trailer, interested. “How’d you figure?”

“Well, when I was on at the Home Depot, I got this promotion, see? Thirty-five cents an hour, and Chrissy thinks suddenly we’re all moneybags, took herself over to Fashion Gal and bought her that leather jacket.”

“And this is a problem… how?” In truth, Stella figured she knew where this was headed, and felt her fingers tighten on the frame of the screen door.

“I tol’ her we couldn’t afford that! Bitch wouldn’t listen, started in on me about a few times I went out after work, while she just keeps spending my money, one fucking thing after the next—”