Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

Diane had on a fungus green jacket today, and a section of her hair, the part that was supposed to fall coquettishly above one eye, was doing something a little strange, winging out at an angle. “Not your best look,” Stella murmured at the television. But kindly: she could relate.

Stella decided it would be a day of hard work. She had a banana for breakfast and got to work in earnest. She put the laundry in the dryer and collected all the dirty sheets and towels and the remaining dirty clothes and sorted them. The sight of the color-coded piles made her feel pleasantly efficient.

She’d been a competent homemaker. As a young mother, she’d kept a spotless house, dressed her daughter Noelle in clean, pressed little outfits, with her hair in ribbons to match. She’d baked elaborate cakes for church fund-raisers, slipcovered all the furniture herself, vacuumed the drapes regularly, and dusted twice a week.

Now, with two businesses to run, she’d let the place slide. Usually it didn’t bother her. In fact, it still felt decadent and rebellious. Occasionally, though, Stella spent a whole day cleaning the place from top to bottom.

Today would have been such a day. Except that around ten thirty, the doorbell rang. Stella peeled off her yellow rubber gloves and set down the bucket of soapy water and the brush she’d been using to scrub the kitchen floor, and answered the door.

Chrissy Shaw stood on her front porch wearing a strappy purple top that showed off her pillowy breasts as well as the fading bruises along her shoulders and upper arms. She crossed her arms over her chest and shifted from one high platform sandal to the other, her face swollen from crying.

Stella’s heart sank. She hadn’t expected to see the girl for a while. Usually, her clients stayed away after a job. She didn’t take it personally—they usually just needed to distance themselves. Not everyone was as comfortable dishing out Stella’s brand of justice as she was. No matter how relieved they were with the results, it could be a messy business.

When a client came back this quick it usually meant something had gone wrong.

“Is Roy Dean bothering you?” Stella demanded, holding the door wide for Chrissy to enter.

“No’m,” Chrissy mumbled. She had on tight denim shorts that barely covered her jiggly rear, and she tugged at the fringed hems as she clopped past Stella. She trailed some kind of perfume that smelled like it came out of one of those peel-and-rub ads in Cosmopolitan magazine—a little musky, a little papery. Could be the girl had just spritzed on a little over-much to cover up skipping today’s shower; Stella employed that technique herself from time to time.

Chrissy walked into Stella’s living room and lost her momentum. She turned to the couch, the love seat, Ollie’s old La-Z-Boy and considered each one, but couldn’t seem to make up her mind. She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and managed a pathetic little whimper. Chrissy was in her middle twenties, but if you didn’t know better you might guess she was eighteen.

“Hell, sugar, don’t matter where you plant your butt, we’ll still be having the same conversation,” Stella said. “Tell you what, while you’re deciding, why don’t I get us some iced tea.”

When she came back with the tray a few minutes later, Chrissy had slumped low in the love seat and was leaking tears down her plump cheeks, pale blond hair sticking to her sweat-damp skin. Her wide blue eyes were ringed with smudgy mascara.

“Oh, dear,” Stella said. “I know it seems bad now, but whatever Roy Dean’s done, it’s nowhere near the worst problem someone’s come here to talk about. Nothing I can’t help you fix, anyway.”

Chrissy wiped her nose along her knuckles and sniffled. “Yeah? Well, guess what, I think this time I might a brung you a problem you ain’t had before.”

Stella sat down on the couch and picked up a long silver spoon off the tray and gave her glass of tea a swirl. Oh, these girls. Every one of them sure they had a new story to tell. Honestly, it tried her patience sometimes, until she remembered what it felt like to be in their shoes. When you were the one getting smacked around, trash-talked, cheated on, and generally treated worse than any man would treat a tick-infested hound dog, then yeah, your story seemed like the most singular piece of news on earth.

“Is that right, dolly.” Stella screwed down the lid on her impatience and settled in to hear the whole story. “Well, you tell me all about it, and then we’ll figure out what to do. But here, wet your whistle before you get rolling.”

Chrissy accepted a glass of tea but set it down on the table without sipping. “Roy Dean’s gone and run off.”

“Now honey, he isn’t gone, he’s just been staying out at a trailer down close to Shooter’s Cove,” Stella said, wondering if the girl had been foolish enough to go looking for him. Sometimes, even after suffering all manner of abuse, her clients had second thoughts. “But there’s no need to go stirring things up.”

“Ain’t Roy Dean I care about, Stella—only just he’s taken Tucker. Came and took him yesterday morning. Told me he wanted his hibachi back and when I went around back to get it, I guess that’s when he got Tucker ’cause when I came back inside they was both gone.” Chrissy snuffled and dabbed at her eyes, smearing her makeup further.

“Oh no,” Stella said, setting her own glass down and jerking to attention. “That does change things. Shit!”

“Yeah,” Chrissy said, and her glum expression slipped further and a shadow of terrible worry flashed across her doughy features. “That’s about the size of it.”

Stella excused herself,making sure that the plate of Oreos was in Chrissy’s easy reach, and called Sheriff Goat Jones from the kitchen. She was one of only a handful of people with direct access to the sheriff’s mobile number, and that was a result of her only case that had gone terribly wrong, a failure from which Stella would never entirely recover.

Two years back, Lorelle Cavenaugh went missing less than a week after she came to Stella for help. Stella spent forty straight hours searching for Lorelle on her own before calling the sheriff. She invented a story about them being third cousins and Lorelle leaving a terrified message on her machine, which she had just happened to erase, and which oddly didn’t show up in the phone company records.

By the time they found Lorelle, stuffed head-down into a rain barrel at Jack Cavenaugh’s fishing cabin, Stella had promised herself that she’d never again let anything get in the way of a woman’s safety. Not even if it meant danger to herself, or exposure, or bringing in the entire sheriff’s department.

Goat Jones told her she had more stick than a cocklebur after she hounded him to widen the search and ignored every order he gave her to stay away from him and his men while they scoured the county. He called her a few other things, too—the words bulldog and no-sense and damn stubborn fool came to mind.

Goat said he’d be right over, grousing only a little that she wouldn’t give him any details on the phone. Stella peeked in at Chrissy, who was nibbling morosely at a cookie, and hightailed it to her bathroom, where she got out the modest arsenal of beauty products that she kept in an empty Jif peanut butter jar, and went to work.

It wasn’t that she was fixing up for the sheriff, exactly. Because that would be ridiculous. For one thing, their work generally put them on opposite sides of the law. That alone made the man, if not exactly an enemy, certainly not a person she should be fraternizing with.

And anyway they didn’t run in the same social circles. Goat was a regular at the Friday night poker game at the firehouse—the same game Ollie had played in for years, the game all of Ollie’s old friends still belonged to. Not that it was fair to paint them with the same brush as her dead husband, but they had become a little standoffish since she nearly stood trial for killing Ollie.