Somewhere Between Luck and Trust

“Of course, the weather’s awful, and somebody’s probably expecting you at home,” he said. “I’m being presumptuous.”

“That’s not it.”

“I hate to see this kid ruin his life.”

She was too tired to be tactful, and too thrown off balance. “Why do you care?”

“I’m new here, but there’s a little place in Weaverville, not that far from my house, that makes everything from scratch. I can tell you the whole story while we eat. Outside this building you’ll feel more like listening.”

He seemed to understand exactly how she was feeling, and he didn’t even know her. For a moment that, coupled with her visceral reaction to Lucas Ramsey, seemed like enough reason to say no. But Dawson’s future was too important to play games with.

“Nobody’s expecting you?” she asked, since he’d brought up the subject.

“I’m more or less a stranger here. I live alone. There’s a stray cat I feed, but he comes by late.”

She thought about the ground they’d covered in a few sentences. Her exhaustion had drifted away, and something like anticipation was filling the void.

“Tell me where, and I’ll meet you there,” she said at last. “Six, seven?”

He got to his feet. “Six. I think you need the pizza transfusion sooner than later. And if this storm continues, you’ll want to get home early.”

She couldn’t help herself. She smiled.

He smiled, too; then he told her where to meet him. In a moment he was gone.

She got up and stretched, aware she was already looking forward to dinner. If she went home now she would have just enough time to shower and change and maybe close her eyes for a few minutes before it was time to go. She decided to skim the top papers on her desk and put them in her briefcase. After pizza tonight she would sift through them so the rest of the stack wouldn’t be so unmanageable tomorrow.

She got her briefcase and began to scoop, then she stopped. Under the first pile she saw the bracelet that Edna had admired on Friday afternoon. It was right where her granddaughter had left it, only an avalanche of white had covered it. Sighing, she went to her doorway. Marianne was getting ready to leave for the day.

“Did a student stop by today looking for a bracelet she left in my office?”

Marianne shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

Georgia thought maybe the attendance or instructional secretaries had intercepted the request. If either of them had checked her desk, they wouldn’t have seen it without disturbing her papers, and who would risk doing that?

“Well, if somebody comes looking tomorrow, I have it,” she said. “We can send it to lost and found if nobody claims it by week’s end.” Lost and found was a jumbled cardboard box in the gym office, and she was hesitant to relegate it there quite yet.

Georgia went back to her desk and picked up the bracelet to drop it in her drawer for safekeeping. It was, as she’d told her granddaughter, a charm bracelet, and not an inexpensive one. It was heavy with charms—gold, not less expensive sterling silver—and the chain was delicate but sturdy, finely crafted.

She gazed at the bracelet thinking about the girl who had lost it and how upset she must feel. She tried to remember who had been in her office the day it had appeared, but she was too tired.

As Edna had said, there were a mixture of charms. Animals. A cat, a horse and something more stylized. She held it closer. The head of a scowling bulldog, but not just any bulldog. This dog wore a familiar cap with the letter G emblazoned on it.

The mascot of the University of Georgia.

For a moment she stood perfectly still, then she reminded herself this was simply a student’s bracelet. Perhaps the owner had a boyfriend at UGA, maybe a brother or sister, or perhaps she was simply hoping the university was her destination after high school.

She opened her drawer to drop it in, but stopped when she noticed an envelope with her name on it right where the bracelet had rested. The envelope must have been under the bracelet all along, or, at least, it might have been. She couldn’t be certain Edna had replaced the bracelet exactly where she had found it.

Frowning, she opened the envelope and took out several sheets of yellowed newspaper folded four times to fit inside. There was no note, nothing included with them. She carefully unfolded the paper and read the headline of the article on top.

Sweatshirt Baby’s Life Still Touch-and-Go.

She stared at the paper a moment, then she refolded it without leafing through the other sheets and carefully placed them inside the envelope again.

She didn’t have to read the top article to know exactly what it would say. No one knew better than she did. Georgia herself had lived the story.

Chapter Seven

ON MONDAY AFTERNOON at the Goddess House, rain fell in great silver sheets that washed the porch floor. The rain would have saturated the glider cushions if Cristy hadn’t dragged them inside an hour before when the wind had picked up. A gloomy morning had changed to sullen, and now, in the late afternoon, to hostile. Through the window she could see trees bending under punishing winds. Even though the sun didn’t officially set until sometime after six, there was no sign the sun remembered.

When it had become clear the storm might be significant, she had hunted for candles and flashlights, since losing power seemed like a good possibility. She had found both, plus an oil lantern filled and ready in case of emergencies. A larger problem was what to do with herself.

Even with electricity the day had inched along like molasses in January. Yesterday she had inventoried the cupboards and refrigerator. Samantha had made sure she knew all the food was to be eaten, and there were a variety of canned and packaged foods as well as fresh vegetables and fruits, frozen hamburger and chicken.

Samantha had left cash, as well. While living and working in Berle, Cristy had saved what she could, but every bit of it was gone now, spent for necessities at the prison canteen, along with the extravagant forty cents a day she had earned working in the kitchen. She didn’t want to use Samantha’s money, but she knew she would have to dip into it until she found some way of earning her own. If nothing else, she had to have gas to make trips to see Michael.

Thinking about Michael had the same effect on her spirits as the storm.

She could have gone to see the baby yesterday, as planned. Her son was already four months old, older than Harmony’s Lottie. Berdine had sent photos while she was in prison, but Cristy had only glanced at them, not willing to look closely. What hair he had seemed to be an indeterminate color. His face wasn’t shaped like hers, and his eyes were brown, like the Reverend Roger Haviland’s.

And Jackson’s.

If she waited too long to visit, Michael might be frightened to let her hold him. She knew babies often developed something called stranger anxiety. She had paid attention in Samantha’s class, although being there hadn’t been her choice. But she was used to listening, used to paying attention to everything that was said to her and around her. She remembered almost everything she heard, and most of the time she could recite whole conversations verbatim.

Not that having that talent had done her much good on written exams.

She was out of prison now. She had paid her so-called debt to the citizens of the great state of North Carolina, but she was still the loser she had always been, only this time, she was a loser with a baby she was afraid to see.

This morning she had cleaned the house from top to bottom, although there had been little to sweep or wipe away. Then after lunch she’d tried to watch a DVD, but she hadn’t been able to concentrate. Now she tried to nap to soft music from the CD player, but when she found she couldn’t, she leafed through a couple of fashion magazines from a neat pile on an end table. The clothes looked as if they belonged to women from a different planet. After prison’s blues and pale greens, the variety, the colors, were overwhelming, and she was sure the prices were, as well.

In a cabinet in the living room she found a stack of jigsaw puzzles and pulled out what looked like the hardest. She wondered if all the pieces were in the box, then wondered why she cared.

She hoped tomorrow would be sunny. She might not feel comfortable outdoors by herself, but she had to learn to be. She would make herself take a walk, make herself take her car from the barn and park it below the house.

She had to get out. She had to try. But for whom? For what?

Right now a real life seemed as unattainable as a pardon. She had no high school diploma, no skills except floral design, no money except what a kind young woman had given her. She would scour the immediate area for a job, but even if such a thing existed, she was still an ex-con, a felon who had tried to steal a diamond ring. What business would feel confident allowing her to operate a cash register or work on a sales floor?

And so many jobs were beyond her skills, anyway.

She dumped the puzzle on a small table by the living room window and began to turn over the pieces so she could see what she had. Outside the wind howled and the sky grew darker, until lightning briefly illuminated the landscape. She rose to retrieve one of the flashlights, just in case, and to turn off the CD player and unplug it. Then she settled herself again with the flashlight at her fingertips.

She found the straight-edged border pieces and set them around the perimeter, and easily found the four corners, which seemed like a good sign. After she’d hooked half a dozen pieces together, she got up to make some tea, adding just a little milk so the carton in the refrigerator would last longer. Back at the table she glanced outside. She froze when she saw a figure silhouetted against the tree at the base of the path up to the house. She blinked in disbelief and stared harder into the storm, but now she couldn’t make out a thing.

Nobody would be outside in this weather, at least nobody with any working brain cells. She held her breath and waited for the next flash of lightning, but when it finally came, nothing looked out of the ordinary. She told herself she just wasn’t comfortable in the house, that her first days here had taken a toll and she hadn’t yet slept well. She seated herself and began to move puzzle pieces back and forth.

Until somebody banged on the front door.