Matthew Neill Null
Lucky Girl
Wind’ll cut you. She pulls her coat tighter, against the chill place where the car door has a seep. Doesn’t help her legs. Hurry up Sam. She has parked in the little wide space out front, a spit of gravel where she delivers his mail during her rounds, praying a coal truck doesn’t fly past and rip off the side mirror again.
It all feels very high school, makes them feel lively and illicit, though they’re both past forty. “Saturday night’s Saturday night,” he told Lorna on the phone. Why sure. Hell yes.
But Saturday’s freezing, in a particularly demoralizing February when no sensible person leaves the house if they can help it, yet her brother, whom no one would accuse of sense, called to beg a ride to the tavern. State took his license last year. “Your half-brother,” the others would correct, and because of their general cattiness and petty little comments, Lorna’s decided not to deny Sam a thing. They’re wanting to keep him out the bars, but Sam’s his own body, right?
She’s tempted to lay on the horn, but that would rile the dogs.
Thankfully, Sam comes tumbling out the front door, booted to the knee, shirt collar flung open to the elements, because Sam just doesn’t give a damn. He’s a moonlight-drinker, a cocaine-sniffer, a roll-down-the-hillside-at-the-party type. Despite mortgage and teenage children. “Because of ’em!” he cries now and then. His footprints make bluer pools of darkness in the snow. The lights are out. The kids must be off at their mother’s.
“Thank ye kindly,” he says, sliding in.
“Taxi’s here.”
“Oh quit that. I’ll go back inside if you’re gonna talk like that.”
But neither are upset, this is just play, here in the bubble of light that vanishes once he shuts the door. The beagles start raising hell in the kennel run. When he cries shut up, they bawl louder, as if someone’s rolling the volume knob on a guitar.
“Where to?”
“Ol’ bucket of blood.” Waneta’s, he means. “The redder the better.”
“You sure?”
“Meeting a buddy down there.”
Sam doesn’t always patronize Waneta’s, but he likes to “check in” now and then, glorying in the fact that it’s the lowest of the low. He loves to explain what occurs there: “Last night I seen a man on crutches try to kick somebody’s ass! Now ask me how he fared?” There’s a patched spot on the floor the owner, Mercer, likes to point out. One time Mercer kicked out some rowdy miners, and later that evening they drove past the open door (it was summertime) and lobbed a quarter-stick of dynamite inside. No one was killed, but the cigarette machine was destroyed. The eponymous Waneta (pronounced “Juanita”) is Mercer’s daughter, he thought a woman’s name would class it up. Several years after the dynamite incident, another disgruntled patron shot this Mercer in the stomach. Mercer seemed fit to die but pulled through. They did have to remove a few feet of intestine and fix him with a colostomy bag. When Mercer returned to tending bar, Sam asked how he was doing, and Mercer said just fine, he’d never much cared for shitting anyhow.
“Why don’t your buddy pick you up then?”
“Carl’s half-knackered’s why. Says he needs a partner on the pool table. Calling in the reinforcements.”
“Oh, you’re meeting some girl. . .”
“After twenty years of what I put up with? I could use a breather.” They glide down the slaloming highway, the endless turns that sicken outsiders, a black ribbon through whitely banked snow. But Lorna’s hands are easy on the wheel, the radio plays bombastic country music played to a click track. “Not that you didn’t warn me or nothing,” Sam says. “You hear from Anthony?”
“Not a word.”
“What his friends say?”
“Oh you know, can’t trust ’em.” Tick through them like rosary beads––some decent, some deranged, all of them country boys who tinkered with dirt bikes in their parents’ garage as Anthony did, overgrown teenagers at twenty-five and thirty, with child support and spotty employment. They live for the weekend, they read nothing but racing mags. Anthony was staying at his girlfriend’s father’s, but friends say he got kicked out months ago. A disagreement.
“Put a few holes in the drywall, did he?”
Before she knows it, tavern lights glitter ahead. “Ok. You call me if … you know, I don’t like you riding home with nobody’s been drinking hard.”
“I promise, Lorna.”
“You need quarters? Check the cup holder there.”
“I’m alright.” He steps out of her car. “Sure you don’t want to come with?”
“Riiiggght,” she says, pulling on the word like taffy. Lorna’s the beauty on this end of Marion County, which means that from age thirteen on, men have been battering down her door and she’s long sick of the attention. Sam’s helped run off various bad men, like the married land surveyor who sat outside the house all hours to catch her coming or going. One morning in the pre-dawn, Sam jerked him from the state vehicle, beat him with a tire iron, marched him to a gas well, and assured the surveyor he’d chop him in pieces small enough to be fed down the pipe. Their dad had to call in heavy favors––County Surveyor’s an elected position in this state. Sam was not charged. The surveyor was quietly drummed out of the Party. Of all the bad men, alas, the worst was Lorna’s own son at age seventeen. Anthony had to be straightened out when he laid hands on his own mother. Sam did the straightening. Blackest night of her life. But the next morning she applied makeup and made herself go into work. She had to.
“But I appreciate the invitation,” Lorna says as the bar owner, this Mercer, comes trundling out with the side-to-side gait he has post-shooting.
He dips his head to see her. “Just wanted to thank you. Wasn’t for you, ole Sammy wouldn’t have no social life to speak of.”
“Don’t let him get into trouble.”
“Aw girl,” Mercer says. “You Fluhartys cannot be killed.”
When no call comes, she assumes Sam got a ride home. It takes a couple days for the news to rattle her way. At Waneta’s, money changed hands. The informant was spirited away. Sam was collared out in the parking lot, where state police dug several patches of Fentanyl and the fat Oxy 80’s out of his watchpocket; the judge overseeing his divorce proceedings has taken notice. Suddenly certain habits make sense––still, to Lorna and the other Fluhartys, it’s a raw shock, they had no idea. Everyone else in Marion County mutters it was just a matter of time. . .
Picked it up when he was off work, Sam admits to her later, eyes glazed with Suboxone. Trashed back, shady doctor, same old tale. “Hadn’t got idled, wouldn’t be in this mess. . .” Sure, she knew her brother had a taste for cocaine, and had partaken with him a few times, Sam shouting across some party, “I don’t see why people stick that needle in their arm. Just makes you sleepy. Not a good drug for West Virginia. Cocaine is! Makes everything AMAZING. Flying down the ridge in your ratty truck listening to music’s AMAZING. We could use some amazement. Lifts the top right off your head.”
Their brother with the money––John Jr.––is the one who goes his bail and shows up on Lorna’s doorstep this day, his breath heaving and silvery in the cold. He’s gotten so much fatter since she saw him last.
Still in her pale blue uniform, Lorna eyes him warily. “Must be serious, your wife let you come out here.” She scoffs. “Or does she know?”
“Don’t be like that, Lorna.”
“House of ill repute. Never call, never say hello. . .” She’s seeing her home now through his eyes: careworn trailer, cluttered porch, dried-up morning glories. Never mind the garden (hidden under snow, unfortunately) and the tasteful addition. When he mumbles something about it being a busy time, she cuts him off, saying, “I seen you drive past Dad’s when I was there. Seen my car and kept on driving,” but before she can go on, he pushes a glossy brochure her way, says it’s for a rehab in Colorado, says Sam can’t be around his people, his “enablers,” which makes Lorna shoot John a dirty look, and he blushes and says he didn’t mean it that way, Lorna’s got to talk with him, she’s the only one Sam listens to. “I’ll pay,” John keeps saying, tears in his eyes. “I’ll pay every dime.” He owns a motorcycle dealership out on I-79, where his well-fed face shines from billboards as if coated in butter, and she remembers him tinkering with dirt bikes out in the yard, just as her own son tinkered here, making the oily divot that still remains. “I’ll convince him,” she says quickly. For a moment John’s a gangly boy in the yard again, letting her rev the bike. She won’t make him beg. “I promise.”
“I’ll never forget this.” John hugs her, he weeps like a child.
“We’ll save him. There’s a lot of good left in him.”
“Love you, Lorna.”
“Love you too.”
But it shall not be. Sam overdoses in some house in Grant Town, where his “friends” haul his blue body out and pitch it over the roadside like a gutted deer carcass, which passersby mistake it for until a boy scavenging pop bottles and cans calls it in.
The burying is dreadful. Lorna’s half brothers and sisters are looking askance at her for whatever reasons real and imagined, Sam’s two teenagers wail like souls in torment, the ex-wife stands there with an I-told-you-so expression, and Old Man Fluharty, dignified and calm in his funeral suit, having lived through a hundred awful surprises already, receives the seemingly endless line of miners and mourners. The U.M.W.A. has sent a massive wreath in patriotic colors, a veritable raft of flowers. Sam in the coffin looks handsome and healthy and strong, you’d never know. Lorna touches her dead brother’s hands one last time. Because her own son had no father, Sam’s the one who taught Anthony how to drive a quad, how to sight in a rifle, how to join two pieces of fishing line in a blood knot. With these hands. She falls weeping against the coffin. To the embarrassment of her brothers and sisters. Then Lorna feels a presence––Sam’s daughter Aubrey has fallen on her knees alongside her. The only one to come up.
And in dreams Sam comes, wondering if no one loved him, if that’s why he was thrown into bushes, if his children visit his grave, and Lorna answers honestly she doesn’t know, and he tells her gloomily that she always told it straight with him, that’s what he appreciated most. Can she feed his dogs? Can Anthony run them on Cheat Mountain where they outclass nimble snowshoe hares? Be a shame to let them waste away. . .
Loveridge Mine shutting down is what put Sam in an early grave, says Lorna; however, through some malicious mental alchemy, the rest trace it back to that one single night and the conniving half sister sneaking him out to Waneta’s, hell, maybe she was in on it, where’d she get the money to re-roof her place? Even John says that, the fucker.
But more on Sam now, as he’ll haunt Lorna’s dreams for decades to come. One of those longwall addicts, he had been born to mine coal and was reliable when working; when laid off or on strike, he’d drink steadily and without apology from midmorning on; he couldn’t bear to lower himself to lesser trades. When he ran his truck in the ditch, Lorna would rush out before the police showed up, clean the vomit off him, whisk him away, and call a friend to pull out the truck with a come-along. Alas, Sam was born too late, into an age when mining was erratic, suffering the whims of the global technocrats, for Marion County produces soft, dirty-burning, bituminous coal that only China and India still desire.
“Dad and them had it lucky,” Sam would whine, beer in hand.
“He’s gonna get his tit in the wringer someday,” was all their dad would say of his youngest son’s antics. “Fluharty,” everyone calls their dad, as if he’s the only one. Dad was big in the Mine Workers, he’d holler abuse at the sheriff on the picket line. “If you’re gonna arrest me, handcuff me!” Fluharty’d shout. “Arrest me like a common criminal! You won’t get me in the backseat without ’em!” When he was dragged off to the squad car, it put a shot of iron in the others’ spines. He suffered for the cause, he racked up many connections and many children, and besides Sammy and the love-child Lorna, the rest are self-consciously “respectable” now––hard-working, loyal to their grim little marriages (because their father has two divorces behind him), with the squared-off heads and jug ears of their parents. They pride themselves on working like draft horses, they clutch each dime. Lorna, on the other hand, has a dark, willowy, slightly lazy Calabrese beauty––born out of wedlock by another woman of Fluharty’s, a mother she never met, she was raised alongside the rest, the baby of the family, doted on, loved. Through girlhood, at least. Unforgivably, Lorna turned out to be her father’s favorite. He took her door knocking for the Party (“the presentable one,” her sisters seethed), he finagled her a plum job at the Post Office. People groused over how some nineteen-year-old single mother got to “jump the line ahead of our suffering veterans.” Fluharty had pull, the Senator took his calls. But when the four “real” children found out about a $7,500 check he cut Lorna to buy a little car, that was going too far, they broke off relations. . .except for Sam, her tether. When Dad dies, it will be as if she never was a Fluharty, as if she hadn’t existed.
“Aubrey!”
On a soft, wet, lilac spring day, four years after her brother’s death, Lorna arrives home to find her driveway blocked and a slightly bedraggled young lady on the porch. It takes her too long to recognize Sam’s daughter, whom she’s not seen once since her brother’s grim funeral, where the girl collapsed in her arms.
No collapsing embrace this time. Aubrey peeks out from the cave of a hooded sweatshirt, nicotine gum tucked in her cheek. Lorna waits for an explanation, but her niece just stands there with an expression you might call, generously, half a smile. A crumpled Honda is parked in the drive, taking up Lorna’s space, and the figure of a man inside tips cigarette ash out of a cracked window. The car door is red; the rest of the vehicle’s the original white.
“I’m kinda poking out in the road.”
“Mom told me to come here,” is all Aubrey can seem to say.
“Your mom told you that?” Lorna is flabbergasted.
“She said you’d understand.”
“How long you been waiting out here?”
“All day.”
What’s Aubrey, nineteen? Her lip is quivering, and she’s hiding a melon bump under a baggy, tie-dyed sweater. Suddenly Lorna understands. The silent man in the Honda pops the trunk. When he doesn’t get out, Lorna and Aubrey fetch out a roller suitcase and a garbage bag of clothes. “He’s just my ride,” Aubrey keeps saying.
It's alarming how little weight she’s put on. You can hardly tell she’s pregnant. “Does your brother help you?” Lorna asks later that evening.
“College boy,” Aubrey mutters, pressing her lips together in a hard line. Then: “He blocked me.”
Lorna does the math––too late for a legal abortion under the new law. Not that it matters, for the girl says haughtily when Lorna mentions the possibility, “I don’t believe in that,” and Lorna has to martial every nerve in her body not to shake her head at this bit of ridiculousness.
Bottles, clothes, doctors’ appointments––the girl has nothing, seems to know nothing (“What’s Medicaid?”), but fortunately it’s yard sale season and Lorna throws herself into the gathering, dickering over prices (when a crib is haggled down to thirteen dollars, Lorna glories in the accomplishment), dragging Aubrey along all over creation and explaining to her what a child needs, how grueling the first year will be, “but power through that and it gets a mite better.” Raising Anthony alone was such a trial. Lorna would turn on a hot shower, sit on the tiles, and cry. She’d allow herself twenty minutes of that at the end of a long day, as a treat. All over a stupid car so that she could drive herself to work and no one could say a Fluharty was on welfare. Was her father’s idea to gift her the money. But she took the blame, took it like an ax-handle to the face.
As Aubrey is peeling off her sweater, revealing the American standard tattoo collection, Lorna says, “We ain’t buying nothing white. You won’t be needing a white garment where you’re going!”
And daycare––it felt like half of Lorna’s life was spent on the phone cajoling flaky, ill-paid women to grant her one more hour, one more week, even if it just meant planting the kid on a squalid couch in front of a TV blaring God knows what. . . Anthony starting kindergarten was the happiest day of her life. Still has the picture tacked up, despite all. As they approach yet another driveway of folding tables, Aubrey comes alive a little, as if reading Lorna’s mind. “I remember playing with Anthony. He was fun.” She grins, a rare display. “You told us not to go in the barn, and that’s the first thing we done, swinging on that rope, place just full of blacksnakes.”
“I knew you did.”
“Really?”
“No child can resist. Man, you come flying out the loft.”
“And kickball––we wore it out! Then he’d bang his head on the wall when it didn’t go his way, do it for twenty minutes straight. Scary. I told the others, ‘He ain’t right.’”
Lorna sighs. Each family gathering (her father took care to invite her) featured a fit like that––that and strawberry shortcake. “Doctors are a lot better now with that stuff. Back then they’d half-tell you to send them off someplace.” As the years passed, Anthony grew increasingly violent and sticky-fingered, logging two long stints at the Boys’ Industrial School run by the state, which seemed to accomplish nothing but give him jailhouse ideas and jailhouse connections. When he finally disappeared from the county––and from her life––Lorna felt more exhausted than anything, drained as much as by his sullen silences as his household rages. His diagnoses were vague. Fluharty said, “Oppositional Defiant Disorder? Didn’t have it back then, we were too good about giving out ass beatings.”
“Anthony was a fine singer, he’d sing along to the radio, anything, rock, country, rap. He loved that one, ‘You Don’t How It Feels,’ you know, Tom Petty?”
This is news to Lorna, who suddenly sees her son lit in a new fashion. From time to time, rumors say he’s working coal barges on the Ohio (does he belt out songs on deck?) or living rough on the streets, but deep down she knows he’s dead. Aubrey hums along to the radio. Lorna has long been half repelled by Aubrey, for the girl, along with Anthony, was considered one of the two family fuck-ups of that voluminous generation of Fluharty cousins, a pair of changelings, the only ones “who just weren’t college material,” puzzling their teachers, buddying up to exactly the wrong kids in detention. “Matter of breeding,” John Jr. said knowingly. How Lorna yearned for Anthony to prove them wrong! The rest have gone onto to become radiologists, teachers, solid middle-class types with college degrees, pretty good for the progeny of shit-kickers and miners. Lorna clicks through their Facebook photos like a flagellant. Aubrey’s own brother got his Master’s (business administration) and a prized job at Mylan Pharmaceuticals. But Anthony and Aubrey were lost in deep space, with their flat affects, loose habits, and a curious indifference to their own safety; in a family of famous gabbers, they hardly spoke. With the baby due in three weeks, Lorna is alarmed that Aubrey seems to have zero concept of what she’s in for. If Lorna hadn’t lined up a pediatrician, what was she planning, show up dilated at the ER? Lorna quizzed her friends, settled on Ruby Memorial Hospital (brand-new maternity wing), and ensured a female doctor would deliver the baby––she learned the hard way how old men send you down the chute like cattle: “Everybody got a C-section whether you needed it or not. Pill you to the gills, stitch you up, free that bed. . .” The 1980s felt like twenty years of hell. Broken strikes and Reagan and cassette tapes spewing ribbon. The one who got Lorna pregnant was passing through town, a good deal older, forty-three at the time––he was installing stained-glass windows in the Methodist Church, in fact, and their fling lasted seventeen days, precisely the amount of time it took him to finish the contract. Was long gone by the time she realized what was happening. She pried his mailing address (an exotic state, Oregon) out of the appalled church secretary: return to sender. The last name didn’t match the one he told her. When she called Information, they claimed such a man did not exist. The Oregon-Idaho Methodist Conference told her the same. The child support agency told her the same.
The father of Aubrey’s child is not discussed. Lorna has to assume there’s more than one candidate––when she mentions child support, Aubrey clams up. The one way to get her talking again is to ask, “Do you want a boy or a girl?” and Aubrey will beam momentarily and start ticking off names, complete with pros and cons. Lorna gently tries to lead her away from ones that seem in poor taste: Bryleigh, Ashlynn, Braysin, Zayden, anything with an apostrophe. “You don’t want teachers judging them,” Lorna says, exasperated, letting her Fluharty malice peek through––the girl just isn’t getting it.
“God.” Aubrey snaps her gum. “Okay Mom.”
The pediatrician berated her for not seeking care months ago, not that the girl took much notice (her aunt was the one who felt humiliated on her behalf). The last three years of Aubrey’s life had been a horror show, a horror show that had the distinction of having been reported steadily in the county paper. Not long ago, Aubrey drove her then-boyfriend to a house in Manley Chapel where, they were told, an aged cancer patient had a veritable pharmacy of pain pills. The boyfriend’s sister’s girlfriend, or some such chain of woe, was the home health aide. Alas, Aubrey pulled up to the wrong house (718 Foundry instead of 716) where the boyfriend set off an alarm, located nothing of value (the home, just sold, was awaiting new occupants), smashed up two bathrooms in frustration, then fled in a blind panic. He forgot which window he’d come in through and busted another to escape, slicing his arm to the bone. (Reading the paper, Fluharty said, “Gonna be a criminal, might as well be a competent one.”) The boyfriend tossed the clawhammer into the bushes and screamed at her to drive; a sheriff’s deputy pulled them over not a block away, where he found the front seat covered in a gush of blood and the boyfriend spitting out nonsense about having been jumped by “a bunch of Black guys,” before fainting away. (This part of the story made Lorna want to vomit.) If that wasn’t enough, Aubrey was also hauled in on a bench warrant for a missed court date. On her second day at regional jail, she went into withdrawal. By the fourth, she was sweating, crying, shaking, vomiting, and emptying her bowels relentlessly in the open toilet while the other women cursed her nastiness. On the fifth day she attempted to hang herself with her own t-shirt, but the other women screamed for the guards. It did get her into the hospital on a psychiatric hold; a doctor took pity, got her steady with Subutex and through the worst, and shuffled her back to jail; at drug court, Aubrey swore to attend a thirty-day program, and did, then lived in a halfway house for several months. At some point, she realized she was pregnant, which, in a circuitous way, was against house rules as the place catered to single women. The matron told her she had to move on. She’d been working in fast food, but now with the baby on the way. . .
You’re a commercial for abortion, Lorna thinks glumly.
Then: I was, too.
As they clatter over railroad tracks, the hatch on the Subaru bounces up and down, for they can’t quite get it closed over the secondhand crib. A thought flares in Lorna’s mind: car seat, they need a car seat. How could she be so stupid? Imagine trying to leave the hospital and realizing you’ve no way to carry the baby. . . But it’s nothing compared to how stupid she was at nineteen, no clue what the word abortion even meant. She feels sad for the sheltered country girl she was back then. The city of Pittsburgh had a clinic, ninety miles to the north and a world away––at that age she hadn’t been out of the county. Now she dutifully mails checks to Planned Parenthood and browbeat the new, slick, young minister after a sermon for mentioning the sticker on her car.
“Getting tired?”
“Yeah a little.”
“Can you handle one more stop?”
“Won’t it be picked over by now?”
“Never know till you look,” Lorna smiles.
At the house in a neat subdivision, Aubrey whispers, “Oh God,” and won’t get out.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Chrissy. We went to school together.”
A chipper young woman in volleyball shorts is making change in the back.
“So?”
“I can’t go rooting around in her old stuff!”
“Come now,” Lorna says gently, coaxingly. “Everybody yard sales. Heck, we just seen the sheriff’s wife out and about.”
Aubrey scrunches down, covering her face with her hands. “Please, Aunt Lorna. Don’t make me.”
Lorna starts up the car, but as she extricates them from the grid of streets and turns back onto Route 20, she feels the bile rising. She can’t help but lecture: “There ain’t nothing harder than raising a child alone. Nothing. You got no idea. You got to get tough, girl. Tougher than a man. If you can’t, put a little iron in your spine” (this is Fluharty’s old phrase). “You won’t last a week. Ain’t like your mother’s people can swoop in and help. . . He needs you.” For the sonogram says it will be a little boy. “You can’t let him know you’re struggling. A kid can’t be thinking that. A kid ought to be carefree. I wish I could live it all over, I’d do it different, believe you me.”
Lorna rants for ten minutes, twenty minutes, as she nails her stare upon the white line, keeping her voice even and bludgeoning. If she looks over, she knows she’ll start screaming. She isn’t sure how Aubrey’s taking it. So she glances over in spite of herself.
Aubrey has fallen asleep with her forehead against the glass.
Lorna sighs, feeling old for the very first time. Aubrey’s head bounces slightly on its stem, nodding off in the country of sleep.
When a sudden terror surges in Lorna’s heart, she surges into a parking lot and shakes the girl awake.
“Aubrey! Aubrey, listen. I got to ask you something and you can’t go sulling up like you do.”
“We home?”
“Have you been using anything since you been carrying the baby? No, don’t look away now. If I’m helping on this, I got to know. Please, Aubrey, please look at me.”
“No,” Aubrey says groggily. “Well, at the very beginning. Once or twice’t. I didn’t know yet. Stepped out with people from the house. But I quit. Soon as I found out.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Oh thank God. You falling asleep here scared me. Here I go forgetting what it was like.” The baby’s on time, Lorna reminds herself––wouldn’t a drug baby come early? But later than afternoon, she will make a sneaky phone call out on the porch, under the guise of checking on a work matter, but she’s talking to a friend, a social worker.
“So they’re testing all the mothers now?”
“Every last one. Bringing charges, too. We’re in the top two states and the governor wants to make an example.”
“Is it a urine test?”
“No, urine goes back just a few days. They test the meconium or the umbilical cord tissue. The meconium records four to five months. Cord tissue gets it all.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the entire life of the baby. It’s like a book you can’t erase.” No, she isn’t sure which test Ruby Memorial uses, but she’s sure they test, her agency just “took a baby” last week that was born in opiate withdrawal. If a child tests positive, things happen quickly.
“I know it can twist up a baby.” Aubrey rubs her eyes here in the car. Sellers along Route 20 are waving at them, selling ramps and the year’s first morels out of their truck beds to those too lazy to hunt them up themselves. “I don’t want no retard.”
“Aubrey! Don’t use that word.”
“You sound like Miss Dragan.”
“Who?”
“English teacher. ‘Words matter!’” Aubrey simpers. “Failed me twice.”
Lorna is disgusted. She can’t understand how her big-hearted, charming brother produced this child, who has all the charisma of a blind, burrowing grub.
So, she takes a different tack: “You might jinx yourself.”
You can see Aubrey turning this over in her mind like an arrowhead. One morning before Aubrey woke, curiosity got the better of Lorna, who looked up her niece’s picture on the “West Virginia Daily Mugshots” Facebook page. What strangers posted beneath Sam’s daughter made her tear up. The women were just as vicious as the men, which made Lorna feel even worse. On that first afternoon in the driveway, Lorna felt different pressures in her body rise and fall like a barometer: spikes of fear (“she’s really going to ask”) against low surges of guilt (“Sam’s grandbaby”). She held Aubrey in her arms the day the girl was born, Sam beaming in a patchy beard he’d grown in a desperate attempt to look older, saying it was about time to “grow up, get serious,” right-right? Now that same baby girl snaps nicotine gum in the passenger seat and regards the world with the half-startled, half-drowsy look she acquired in three years of madness. Lorna remembers her as a lively, normal child. But the girl can only reel off her tale of woe in a disinterested tone, as if discussing a stranger.
From time to time, Fluharty calls up to ask, “Has Aubrey learned to hit a lick?”
“Dad!”
“Well has she? No? Sam spoiled her.”
They drive past the Grant Town power plant, which can’t help but remind Lorna of the last conversation she had with her rich brother John, when they were puzzling out Sam’s future. “We could get him over there hauling gob.” Dad could talk to the senator’s family, who owned the plant and found a way to use waste coal from shuttered mines, a worthless mess of clay mud, shale, and endless quantities of ash they would sift and burn, sift and burn, a process that makes no financial sense until you do it 10,000 times over. The senator, who chaired the Natural Resources Committee, managed to get the reused gob listed as an “alternative clean energy fuel” though it was ashy and vile-burning. “They’d have him,” said John. They’d even “forget” to verify his CDL.
“He won’t do it,” Lorna said softly.
“I know.”
“Too proud.”
Lot like dad, they both agreed. “Funny how that’s good for one and not the other.”
Flicking little looks at her niece, Lorna tries to make out the faint outlines of her brother. “Proud” is not a descriptor you’d hang on the girl. Is there any shard of Sam in her? Maybe the set of her jaw, the too-pendulous ears, the sudden cravings to drive off and do something flighty. But no, she’s her mother’s side through and through, a Tedrow, “pure-d holler trash,” hiss the younger Fluhartys. Public opinion on the Tedrows tends to dither: outlaws or idiots? An entire file cabinet at the local DHHR office is devoted to them. Even Lorna (with her own questionable origins) told Sam not to marry into that, told him hold out for better. But Sam went and got a Tedrow pregnant.
Maybe the baby will be like Sam.
Maybe it skips a generation.
But look how cherry Sam’s son turned out, with a Cheat Lake townhouse and a blond accountant for a wife. Anthony and Aubrey didn’t realize, or care, that to be born a Fluharty in Marion County is something special. That the family has painstakingly worked its way up from nothing; John Jr. might even run for House of Delegates. “Who are you?” Lorna wants to ask her niece, just as she could never bring herself to ask her own begotten son.
Aubrey says out of the blue, “Maybe you can get me on at the Post Office.”
That night, Sam visits his sister in a dream. He sounds like river water. Out of a blue face he’s trying to tell her where Anthony is, but she can’t quite hear what he says.
Two days after the birth, the meconium test comes back. The baby’s clean.
Cash Samuel Fluharty.
“Oh that’s just perfect,” Lorna keeps saying.
After the shock and joy of Cash’s birth wears off, the first few days, it must be admitted, are wretched. The newborn is colicky and emits a red, shrieking sound––he seems to hate sleep, seems to consider it a personal enemy. The slightest shifting wakes him. The flutter of an eyelash is enough to set him off.
“He wants to be on me all the time.” Aubrey’s eyes are frantic, like a woman in a lifeboat. “Will it always be like this?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Cash has trouble latching (“Don’t hunch like that, he needs to get the whole thing in his mouth”), and when he finally does, a milk duct in Aubrey’s right breast becomes clogged (“Take a nice hot bath”), so she switches him to the left and it grows sore from incessant sucking and the doctor will have to check for mastitis.
“’Bout as bad as withdrawal,” Aubrey says in the worst moments, getting weepy. “’Bout my fucking luck.”
Lorna tries not to indulge this line of thinking too far, but her niece does seem ill-starred.
“Least my tits look good,” Aubrey says that night, flouncing in front of the mirror. “Kind of wasting them on you two.” Lorna laughs––maybe there’s a fleck of Sam in her after all. Aubrey uploads photos from her phone, one with the baby and one without.
The newborn creates a soothing sense of crisis. Every nerve ending is focused on calming this screaming animal. So, no one has to talk about what Aubrey will do for a living, who will watch the baby, where she’ll live, how she’ll keep from relapsing.
Fine, the answers may be obvious, but that doesn’t mean Lorna has to let them dog her. Not yet. She bounces Cash and shushes him.
When she can, Aubrey retreats to sull up in Anthony’s room, which still has dirt bike posters and beach blondes on the wall and just enough space to cram a crib.
As Lorna sits watching late-night TV with the newborn, she realizes her niece reminds her less of Anthony and more of George W. Bush, who also seems bewildered to have survived his chemical years, always a step or two behind the conversation, emotions of bemusement and embarrassment veering wildly on his face. She and Dad loathed the man. The other Fluhartys call Lorna “the hillside socialist,” but so what? Used to be a lot of hillside socialists in Marion County, including their dad, and now his children claim to know better. Her Subaru is covered in punchy slogans (layoffs, war) that jar her fellow drivers. What the stickers say is true, of course, but it offends their sense of decorum. . . In darker moments, family members call her “that liberal bitch,” but their distaste is more for her origin than her politics. The day she was born, she assumes she gazed into her mother’s face, the two of them clutching one another in a hospital bed. How long did she stay with her mom––a day, a month, a year? Her first memories are of Fluharty’s house and the stout wife she long assumed was her birth mother until playground kids let her in on the secret: Lorna’s mom was the guard shack girl, the one who sat in a box and punched the miners’ cards when shift turned over. When Lorna came of age and had to apply for a driver’s license, Fluharty opened the gun safe and quietly handed over her birth certificate, which revealed the name Joyce Stella. Lorna has sat in classrooms with Stella children, delivered their mail, passed them potato salad at the union’s Labor Day picnic, but none of them acknowledge her, even if they own the same dark hush about the eyes, the same thick, beautiful hair and slender wrists and honking laugh. (A classmate hissed, “When they all got done with your mom, they run her out the county, couldn’t show her face no more.”) As a teenager, Lorna was somewhat friendless, the other girls suspecting she’d steal their boyfriends, “because blood will out,” and when the internet came to West Virginia, it told her that the guard shack girl died in a car accident in the city of Fairmont in 1978, when Lorna was in second grade. She logged off and cried. She can see her father and Joyce Stella meeting: clever smiles passed through the guard shack window, a joke, a provocation, a backseat affair on the ridge, two moonlight-drinkers. Fluharty’s wandering eye is no secret. Lorna knows how it played out at Haymaker Mine, but who knows how the baby was whisked away and delivered into Fluharty’s home, what the other children were told that day. Lorna’s grateful she was too young to witness this cataclysm. Though it was probably more of a humiliating silence. This small place. Everyone talking about it. Black dust circles the drain as miners rib Fluharty in the bathhouse. Chill stares in checkout line and church. Just as Lorna received them herself, aged nineteen with a boy-child in tow and no man in sight. As if that path was gouged for her, the future written in her blood.
Cash shoots awake with a poltergeist scream, as if enraged by the soul-deadening banter of starlets and comedians on TV, so Lorna carries him back down the hall to interrupt the young woman texting furiously on her new phone (bought by Lorna), who sharply retorts, “What?” This house is hell.
How to make hell cozy? Lorna develops a habit of getting off shift, strapping Cash into a front pack, and walking him through the woods out back before she has to interact much with Aubrey. Doesn’t even take time to shuck her uniform. She points out animals to Cash and tells him how they take winter, how they build nests, how they outsmart the hunters. It’s only for an hour or so, as Cash must nurse, but the walking comes to feel holy. He gazes into her face, smiling gently, her little fire newt. “You liking the fresh air? About the only time I see you happy, you’re a fussy little man.” Maybe the child’s picking up on her attitude toward its mother. It’s a guilty feeling. Like a lantern’s mantle taking off, Lorna flares with love, she cannot help it. The more Aubrey irritates her, the more she dotes on the child.
“Will your mom come seeing Cash?” she asks, stepping in.
“Didn’t even tell her.”
“Aubrey!”
“Let the bitch learn about it on Facebook like everybody else.”
“She got her own demons.”
“Got nothing to do with me.”
Frayed by sleeplessness, constantly easing past each other in this canister of metal, the women fuss and the end begins here. It bothers Lorna that this new mother hardly looks at the baby, just wants to clack away on her phone.
Aubrey is adamant she wants to switch to formula. “See, you can feed him too.”
“But the cost.”
“I don’t care, I’m not up to this!” Her left nipple is a cracked, angry color. “Hurts too bad.”
Lorna is about to ask, “And who’ll be paying for it?” but says instead, “He won’t bond with you like he ought to.”
“I was on formula.”
Lorna looks away fast, to stop herself from snickering. Too late.
“You’re always judging me,” Aubrey complains.
“Don’t act like a overgrown teenager and I won’t have to!”
Aubrey stamps back to her room, leaving shrieking Cash behind. Lorna takes him on one of their walks, and when they get back, a car of friends has pulled up. This’ll be good for her, Lorna thinks, assuming they’re coming in to visit the baby. But Aubrey says she’s stepping out awhile, she could use the break, and Lorna watches her go.
“You might think I’m a stern bitch,” Lorna says to the empty air, “but I’m what’s standing between you and the void. I could have used someone like me.”
Unknowable parents, unknowable children. In this season she stops dreaming. Or, at least, no one visits her dreams.
On the tenth or eleventh day, Aubrey starts cussing a man––the child’s father, Lorna assumes––but then this gives way to the cussing of all men, how little they do, how all they want is your pussy and how they turn on a dime the minute they get it.
“Don’t be thinking like that,” is all Lorna can say, regarding the boy in its mother’s arms.
“Will you be like that too?” Aubrey coos to her son.
“Aubrey!”
“He don’t know what I’m saying. Just like a dog.” She speaks to the child in a sweet voice, hamming it up. “Will you be nonstop hunting pussy? Just like your grandpa?”
Because Lorna’s already standing, she’s able to slap her niece very hard.
Nothing was held back. “This is your son,” Lorna fairly hisses.
Fleeing the house, nose bleeding in gouts, Aubrey pushes the child on her aunt. Whose hand aches just as much as the face does. Who hasn’t struck another human being since she quit spanking her son, when Fluharty said with real awe and concern, “Lorna, that child don’t seem to notice.”
It takes an hour to get the adrenaline out of her system and for remorse to come flooding the empty space it leaves, but all that pacing does quiet the baby. Until it doesn’t. The child begins to fuss. Because Lorna won a previous argument (her house, after all), there is no formula, and because Aubrey doesn’t have a compelling reason to do so, she never pumps, even if Children’s Health covered the cost to buy the one that still sits wrapped in cellophane in Anthony’s room.
When texting doesn’t elicit a reply, Lorna starts calling.
Directly to voicemail.
“She’ll get over it,” she murmurs to the baby.
An hour passes. Then three. Then five.
When it dawns on her that Aubrey is never coming back, blind panic like a sickly angel spreads its wings and casts its shadow. Like it did over that hospital bed when a nurse shoved Anthony into Lorna’s arms. Lorna had had to struggle through labor alone, without a word of kindness. It nearly deranged her. Maybe a man could have argued the doctor out of treating her so roughly. Back then a single mother got roughness, even from the nurses. Then her dad flew into the maternity ward all smiles, saying, “You’re a Fluharty through and through, you know how to get shit accomplished, you’re gonna be just fine, my love, I lined up a little job for you.” Took Anthony in his arms. “You’re a lucky little fellow, with a mother like that one.” Checked the digits one by one. “That one is true. Marion County woman’s tougher than a laurel root. Oh you’ll know!”
“I bet you ain’t feeling so lucky,” she had said to her newborn.
“Raised you better.” Her father shot her a cruel, almost hateful look. “You don’t talk to him like that. You been put on this earth to comfort him.” Even with lies? Even with lies.
Cash is gnawing at her forefinger’s joint. It hurts a little, but she decides to let him do it as long as he wants.
Matthew Neill Null is the author of the novel Honey from the Lion (Lookout, 2015) and the story collection Allegheny Front (Sarabande, 2016). His fiction has received the O. Henry Award, the Mary McCarthy Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Award, and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.