Romeo Fails Read online

  Things clearly were not going the way Maggie had envisioned. Puzzled by their stilted exchange, she said to them, “Well, you two chat for a moment, okay? I’m just going to run to the little girls’ room.”

  Setting her basket down, she hurried off to the tiny restroom by the office in the back of the store. Dorsey’s brother had declared it off limits to customers, but Maggie was practically family. And besides, Good wasn’t there at the moment. The silence was getting awkward, Dorsey felt. Say something! she ordered herself. And of course could not think of a single thing to say. Sarah still held a can of spray paint in her hand. Her slender, pale fingers wore no rings, Dorsey noticed.

  “Did you have a question about the paint?” Dorsey finally asked her, deciding on the professional approach. She could play it cool too and hide behind the facade of customer service.

  Sarah glanced blankly at the can in her hand. Her dorky spectacles were long gone, along with the gawky child she no longer resembled. She now wore a small fashionable pair of thin black frames with clear rectangular lenses. Cute, Dorsey thought, then caught herself. Don’t go there, she warned herself—she doesn’t even remember you. But she couldn’t keep from automatically registering a few aspects of the other woman’s appearance—the same things she’d found so compelling at the festival: the cute glasses, that promising gleam in the eye, the soft black hair in a delicately spiky cut and the deceptively slim body beneath the jeans and jacket. Not the type of face you’d see on a magazine cover, maybe, but an attractive, intelligent face nonetheless. A nice face.

  My type of face, Dorsey thought with an inner sigh. And what a body…

  Sarah’s eyes met hers for a moment, then flicked back to the can of paint in her hand.

  “Oh, yeah, the paint,” she said, her voice low and a little husky, just like Dorsey had remembered it. She felt the tiniest jolt in her stomach at the alluring sound of that voice. Sarah hesitated, darting a glance over Dorsey’s shoulder where Maggie had gone. “Oh, hell,” she said suddenly and decisively, startling Dorsey.

  “What?”

  “Are we alone?” Sarah asked in an undertone.

  “Well, yeah, until Maggie comes back.”

  “Look,” Sarah said, then paused, staring deep into Dorsey’s eyes, seemingly trying to gauge her reaction. She then went on in a rush, her words tumbling out. “I’m sorry. I owe you an apology. And a shirt too, I guess.”

  Dorsey felt a warm rush deep in the heart of her. She remembers! She remembers! She couldn’t help but smile at Sarah, eliciting a small smile back.

  “I still have yours,” Dorsey told her. Not adding that she’d been sleeping in the soft festival tank top ever since that night. Sleeping… and dreaming.

  “Look,” Sarah said again, speaking rapidly and urgently while taking a step closer. To Dorsey’s delight, she reached out to touch her bare arm. “I’m really sorry about that night and about just now, but I’m not out to Maggie or anyone else in the family here. Do you understand?”

  Sarah’s face was tilted up to look imploringly in Dorsey’s eyes. The soft black leather of her coat brushed Dorsey’s hip. Her hair smelled faintly of apples.

  “Oh,” was all Dorsey could say, finding herself dazzled by Sarah’s sudden closeness, as well as somewhat nonplussed by her confession. Especially since Dorsey had been out to Maggie and everybody else since, well, since forever. And Maggie had always been the best friend a girl could ever wish for.

  But everyone’s situation was different. Dorsey understood that. Who knew what Sarah had been through, that forced her to keep her very identity secret and separate from her own family?

  Maggie was bustling back down the aisle toward them, the grin on her face showing how thrilled she was to see them in close conversation. Sarah shot Dorsey a meaningful and entreating look, eyes wide behind her glasses, then took a step back.

  “I get it,” Dorsey said quietly to her in an undertone. “But… can we talk later?”

  Sarah nodded gratefully. As Maggie rejoined them, Dorsey resumed the paint conversation, acting as if nothing of import had passed between her and Sarah, although she felt like a dog to be playacting in front of Maggie. The three of them walked slowly up to the cash register, chatting about nothing much.

  “You’ll come to brunch with Mother and us tomorrow, right?” Maggie said to Dorsey as she rang up the purchase. A meal with Mrs. Bigelow senior was not normally much of a draw for Dorsey. Sarah, who obviously knew her aunt well, took in Dorsey’s reluctant expression with an arched eyebrow and a small smile.

  Maggie said, “Come on, Dorse, I promise you Mother Bigelow will be on her best behavior. Especially with Sarah here.”

  Sarah suddenly grinned at Dorsey, which brought back that jolt in the stomach feeling and sealed the deal. Maybe with the three of them outnumbering the old bat, it would be a fair fight for once. Mrs. Bigelow disapproved of Dorsey’s “lifestyle” (as the older woman put it), was a general pain in the ass and had done many subtle and not-so-subtle sly things over the years to try and break up the friendship between her daughter and Dorsey, or at least put some distance between them. All her efforts had been futile so far, but she hadn’t given up yet. Vivian Bigelow was no quitter.

  “All right,” Dorsey acquiesced with a shrug and a grin. “Eleven o’clock at the café?”

  “Right,” Maggie said. “Right after church. Unless you want to join us?” She should have known from long experience that Dorsey’s answer would always be no, but couldn’t seem to stop herself from asking anyhow.

  “I’ll meet you at the restaurant,” was Dorsey’s reply. From Sarah’s look, she would have preferred that too, but there was no way Mother Bigelow would let her skip church, not with Sarah staying under her roof. Maggie had moved back in with her parent after her divorce from Dwayne Bergstrom the past year. There were no apartments in Romeo Falls and without the money to buy a house of her own, her options were limited. She had been saving her money steadily, but was still a long way from a down payment. She’d been talking about renting a mobile home in the trailer park just to get out from under her mother’s bossy thumb, but was too scared to break it to her, Dorsey thought. The old battle-ax would probably throw a fit when she heard.

  Gathering up her purchases, Maggie said, “Well, we’re off to Grover for dinner with Cousin Buell and his family. Since this is Sarah’s first visit here, we’re making the rounds. But we’ll see you tomorrow, right, Dorse?”

  Dorsey nodded, taking a seat on the stool behind the counter. To her surprise, Sarah then leaned across and took her hand.

  “It was a real pleasure meeting you for the first time, Dorsey,” she said, the pressure of her fingers and the laugh in her eyes leaving no doubt as to exactly what she meant. A tingle ran right up Dorsey’s arm at her touch.

  “Yeah, me too,” she finally managed to say, finding herself momentarily tongue-tied in the face of Sarah’s double entendre and Maggie’s cheerful round visage innocently beaming at them both. They waved as they went out the front door.

  Oh, no, Dorsey thought as they left. This was not good. For one thing, she was a terrible liar, so she always told the truth. The truth was just so much easier to keep track of. On the other hand, it had gotten her into a lot of trouble over the years. People are much more comfortable with their facts liberally sugar-coated, she’d found. She’d decided at an early age that she’d rather speak the truth or be silent. Which didn’t leave her with much to say in Romeo Falls. But even if she did want to fib, she could never lie to Maggie—when you’ve sold Girl Scout cookies door-to-door together, presided over the marriage of your GI Joe and Barbie dolls countless times and mutually suffered through puberty, high school and small-town melodrama for twenty years, there’s just no room for deception. And she didn’t want to deceive Maggie. But this wasn’t her secret to tell…

  All of a sudden, her summer was looking a lot more complicated.

  * * *

  Shaw wandered in around four thirty to h
elp her close. Dorsey set him to sweeping the floor. The old hardwood floors were pretty clean, but it gave him something to do and would make him look busy if Goodman showed up unexpectedly, which he was wont to do. Good was easily exasperated by Shaw, the youngest and dreamiest of the Larue siblings. Shaw wasn’t lazy, but he had a tendency to lose focus if a task didn’t engage him. Dorsey had encouraged him to go to the community college in Grover City after high school, but Shaw couldn’t quite seem to settle to anything. As his big sister, Dorsey worried about him a little from time to time, but, in truth, Shaw seemed happy with his life. He had a job and a roof over his head and that was more than a lot of twenty-three year olds could say. She’d had no interest in going to college either, so she could hardly pester him about that.

  She found herself worrying more and more about her older brother as well. Goodman seemed to get a little angrier, a little more stressed out with each passing year. He had inherited the hardware store when their father, Hollis, died several years back. Dorsey didn’t mind about the store as it wasn’t the future she wanted and she knew it was what Good wanted. She’d gotten everything she needed from her father when he was alive—not only had he given her his unconditional love, he’d also taught her everything she knew about carpentry and woodworking. The workshop Hollis had built behind their house was now her refuge. There, amongst the power tools and the smell of sawdust, she could indulge her hobby of “re-imagining” the antique (or just plain old) furniture she found at garage sales and curbside. In a perfect world, she would be making a living off her hobby. But Romeo Falls was far from a perfect world, in more ways than one.

  She knew she had a job at the hardware store as long as she wanted one, since Good was fair-minded and generous to a fault. Despite the always uncertain incomes of farmers and the unpredictable economic times in general, Larue’s Swingtime Hardware usually made a small profit. The three of them were scraping by, but only because the Larue family had owned both the store building and their house for three generations. But the new home center in Grover was a looming threat on the horizon, like a funnel cloud seen from afar on the prairie.

  Sometimes, lying awake in the middle of the night, Dorsey thought about packing a bag, getting in her little pickup and just taking off for some place like Chicago or Denver. California even. Anywhere far from Romeo Falls. But she knew that was just a fantasy. She couldn’t leave Good in the lurch like that. And everything else aside, taking off would mean leaving her woodworking workshop behind, which she could never imagine. Besides, she told herself on those sleepless nights, what would she do in such a faraway place, a big city, not knowing anyone? Seriously, who would hire some nonunion butch carpenter girl from the sticks? No one, that’s who. So she was stuck. And you’d better get used to it, she told herself sternly.

  But the loneliness was getting harder every year. She was stuck all right—stuck with no girlfriend, no sex life, not even any prospects. Besides herself, the lesbian population of Romeo Falls totaled (maybe) four. There was the old dyke couple in their seventies who’d been around so long people had almost forgotten they weren’t respectable. And the town’s wannabe wild child, the jailbait daughter of the Presbyterian minister, whom Dorsey didn’t count despite the rumors of the girl kissing one of the cheerleaders from the rival high school. No, Dorsey suspected wild child Mariah was just a poser since she’d already worked her way through short attention-getting stints of cutting, bulimia, dying her hair magenta and professing to have both read and enjoyed Virginia Woolf. Finally, there was the new doctor in town, whom everyone was assuming was gay because she was unmarried, in her early thirties, with short hair, short nails and sensible shoes, and—worst of all—didn’t socialize much. Plus, she was from Chicago, which was right next door to Sodom and Gomorrah in the eyes of most Romeo Falls residents. How the hell she had ended up in their small town was a mystery. It was widely assumed she must have been at the bottom of her med school class and/or killed several patients on the operating table. Dorsey didn’t get any gay vibe from the doctor (who was definitely not her type anyway), but since no one had asked her opinion, she kept it to herself.

  These gloomy and depressing thoughts were interrupted by the jangling of the bell. Shaw was slowly sweeping his way past the front door when a smirking young man came in.

  “What’s up, La Puke,” he said nastily to Shaw.

  “Hi, Justin,” Shaw replied glumly. He and Justin Argyle had never been friends, despite the fact they’d gone from kindergarten all the way through high school together. Mostly because Justin was a jackass. He was the only child of a divorced woman who had taught history at the junior high school for several years. Dorsey, Maggie and Shaw had all suffered through her classes, as had Justin himself. Mrs. Argyle was quickly dubbed “Mrs. Gargoyle” by the kids, which meant that Justin was soon known throughout the county as Gargoyle, Jr.

  Mrs. Gargoyle had surprised everyone by quitting her teaching position about five years back and applying for the police officer job which opened up when Luke Bergstrom—Maggie’s one-time brother-in-law—was promoted to chief on the occasion of the old chief’s retirement. Even more surprising was the fact that she got the job. A tall, raw-boned and ill-tempered woman, she was even more imposing in her uniform and gun belt. Not a single one of her former students had given her any lip since she got the gun. But they still called her Mrs. Gargoyle behind her back. Her son, Justin, who had been in and out of trouble since he was thirteen, still lived with his mother.

  Now, as he headed down one of the aisles, Dorsey and Shaw exchanged a look. Justin was about as trustworthy as a snake, so Shaw moved over to sweep the floor at the head of that aisle, keeping his distance but vigilant for any attempt at shoplifting. Justin was back out again in a minute, though, and headed toward Dorsey at the cash register.

  “How’s it going, Justin?” she said evenly.

  He shot her a look in which dislike was ill-concealed and said nothing. He slapped a single item down on the counter—a red plastic “wand” lighter of the type used for lighting grills and candles—and rummaged in the pocket of his dirty jean jacket for some money.

  In another attempt at pleasant conversation, which was totally wasted on Gargoyle, Jr., Dorsey asked, “You and your mom doing a little barbecuing this summer?”

  He shrugged irritably. “Whatever. How much?”

  She rang up the purchase and took his crumpled bills, then gave him the change and receipt.

  “Would you like a bag for that?”

  He shook his head impatiently and stuffed his change and the receipt in the pocket of his grubby jacket. He grabbed the lighter and headed for the door, sneering at Shaw who was standing well out of his path with the broom clutched to his chest.

  “Well, you say hi to your mother for me!” Dorsey hollered after Justin, not meaning a word of it. The door clanged shut behind him, the bell jangling one last time for the day. Dorsey’s gaze met Shaw’s and they both burst out laughing at the one-sided exchange.

  “What a doofus,” Shaw said.

  “Yep,” his sister agreed. It was two minutes past five on a Saturday evening. “Let’s call it a day,” she said. Shaw turned the cardboard sign on the door to CLOSED and locked the door.

  * * *

  Late that night, a solitary, dark-clad figure silently approached the highway department’s big green sign just outside of town. Entering Romeo Falls, Pop. 3,557, it said in large white characters. Casting a furtive glance in all four directions, the figure dug deep into an inside jacket pocket. A shaky flashlight beam and the distinctive clanking sound of a can of spray paint being shaken disturbed the still, pitch-black night. Two long bursts, then some quick detail work. The artist paused to consider the results. Yeah. Done. The spray paint can was capped, the flashlight shut off. Then, without a backward look, the dark figure slunk off into the night, toward the lights of town.

  Chapter Three

  The vandalism was the talk of the town on Sunday morning. Someone h
ad crossed out the word “Falls” on the big green highway sign and spray-painted “FAILS” next to it. In red spray paint. Dorsey heard all about it when she arrived a little early at the Blue Duck Café to secure a table for herself, Maggie, Sarah and Mrs. Bigelow. The post-church brunch crowd was abuzz with speculation about the misdeed and who might have perpetrated it. The finger of suspicion seemed to point most firmly at Mariah Reinhardt, the minister’s seventeen-year-old wild child, since she’d been caught red-handed the previous summer painting the F-word on the water tower. But Mrs. Reinhardt claimed her troublesome daughter had been home all night, in bed with a cold. Or so the gossips said.

  Dorsey sat alone at a table for four, surrounded by the chattering townsfolk. She felt remote from them and yet at home amongst them, the contradiction that defined her life in Romeo Falls. Whoever had defaced the sign had her sympathy. Romeo Fails, indeed.

  “Coffee, Dorsey?” The waitress handed Dorsey a menu and laid three more at the empty places.

  “No, thanks, Penny, the water’s fine for now. The rest of them should be here any minute.”

  “Okay, just let me know if you need anything.”

  As usual, Dorsey tried to not check out Penny’s impeccable ass as she headed back to the kitchen. And failed. She hoped she’d been discreet. The waitress’s folks owned the restaurant. At thirty-six, Penny Bergstrom was unquestionably the most beautiful woman in the county, an opinion Dorsey shared with most of the women and all of the men in Romeo Falls. Penny had gone to school with Goodman and was married (to the chief of police, no less) with two kids. The short skirt she was wearing that day was worth the price of brunch all by itself, Dorsey thought as she perused the menu.