Chapter 2

They had just dropped Cal at the Dew Drop Inn on the far side of town. Junior bounced the pickup over the railroad tracks without slowing down, which caused Roxie to be jarred in her seat. It was hot already on the Sunday morning in early June and no rain in sight again for the fourteenth straight day.

Through the rolled-down window Roxie could hear the gravel under the tires as they sped along. The house was just a hundred yards ahead on the stub of the County Road where she lived with her aunt.

“Junior’s getting romantic these days,” she thought to herself, and then rolled her eyes when she realized the silliness of it.

She knew Junior was paying no attention. She knew that his morning-after view of her changed from moonlight lover to a delivery to be made.

It wasn’t long ago that (rain, shine, drought or snow) he would drop her off at the railroad tracks about a hundred yards from her aunt’s house, leaving it to her to walk the remaining distance. He said that it was because her secondary road didn’t have a good cut-over to the main road that would take him back to the farm. The road that ran alongside the tracks took him almost right there. It was a lot more convenient to stop there, so he knew she wouldn’t mind the short walk. That was the story he gave her.

Roxie knew his real reason was to avoid her Aunt Flora, who just might have been standing on the porch waiting for Roxie to come home. Then she’d insist that Junior come inside for coffee and the third degree. So, to avoid the possibility of having to face Roxie’s aunt, Junior left it to her to walk that exposed stretch of road by herself.

It was as though he was telling her not to expect much from him, and she had long ago taken the hint. She decided that what she got was better than getting nothing, so it was better to be satisfied than unsatisfied. He would pull over onto the shoulder of the road so she could hop out of the cab clutching her tote bag.

She would only have to walk the length of a football field. It seemed like the distance was a lot longer, all exposed to the elements as it was, and to the eyes of any nosy person who might have happened along.

Oh, everyone did like to talk, as though they had no problems of their own to occupy them. As she trudged along she would look down at her clothes, almost expecting to find a scarlet ‘A’ embroidered there. She never got used to the ordeal but learned to live with it.

Of course, there wasn’t any mystery when they saw her pulling up to the house in a pickup on a Sunday morning. Everyone in town knew Junior’s pickup and no one would have supposed that they’d just come from church. At least it showed he treated her better than he used to.

As a practical matter, she knew that there were hardly any eyes on her. No one cared about the little spur of a road without sidewalks just over the tracks from the city limits, or what happened there. Nonetheless, she worried about those nosy sets of eyes that she kind of knew weren’t there, but worried her, just the same.

That it concerned her gave her presence and meaning regardless of it being bad or good. It proved to her that she existed—respectable or not.

Her tote bag was always stuffed with her waitress uniform, or maybe her clothes of the night. Often, as the vagabond of the morning stumbled her way to the house a telltale article of clothing or wayward pantyhose would trail out the open top of the tote bag like a ship’s pennant.

Most often, she was nursing a hangover, which didn’t allow for careful packing, and Junior wasn’t the patient type. All-in-all it wasn’t a pretty scene and Roxie worried about the day that she would ever stop worrying over it. She knew deep down that if one ever ceased caring about themselves, it was a sure bet that everyone else would stop thinking about her, too.

Junior’s truck kicked up a cloud of dust and gravel as he wheeled a U-turn and headed for home. Roxie watched the rear end of the truck get smaller and smaller as it moved away from her. It was time to face her Aunt Flora. Before turning to go into the house she paused and peered behind her through the settling dust. Just over on the far side of the tracks was a sign: Welcome to Appleton, New York; Population 17,890.

“Eighteen thousand poor souls with nothin’ to do, but don’t have the gumption or brains to do nothin’ somewhere else.”

It was one of those small cities halfway between Syracuse and Binghamton, made obsolete by the interstate that passed by it. After the typewriter factory closed the only non-farm employer of any size was Appleton College, located at the edge of town. A lot of the locals worked there in maintenance and in the offices.

All the professors drove in from Syracuse, or perhaps Ithaca, where they could live in the shadow of a university. Appleton just wasn’t their kind of place. The college, itself, was part of the State University System. It could be seen from nearly anywhere in town, a collection of yellow-brick complexes perched on a nearby hill looking down at the small city below it.

Roxie shook her head and shrugged. She turned toward the house and saw the curtains in the front window move. It was Aunt Flora on the lookout for her. She hesitated a half minute to give her aunt time to situate herself at the kitchen table, where she always waited for her.

Roxie took a look at the old house in which she’d lived nearly all her life. There was a wooden picket fence around the little front yard. It might have looked quaint from a distance, but Roxie dared not lean on it for fear of it falling down or knocking off a portion of what little white paint remained on it.

At least the house didn’t need painting, due to the dark red asphalt shingles that covered it. The trim looked bad, but one had to look close to notice. It occurred to Roxie that the house and Appleton were in the same fix in a lot of ways.

She opened the screen door and let it slam shut behind her. She tossed her tote bag near the landing of the stairs leading to the second floor. The kitchen was in the back of the house. The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee met her, which meant that Aunt Flora expected her to linger for a chat.

“Mornin’, Aunt Flora,” she muttered as she walked past the table and straight to the counter where the coffee pot sat waiting.

Her aunt said nothing while Roxie poured the magic brown tonic into a coffee mug. Aunt Flora sat at the kitchen table, patiently tapping the ashes from her cigarette into a ceramic ashtray that Roxie had once made for her at Girl Scout camp a long time ago. Roxie skipped the cream and sugar. Straight-up black seemed best at the moment. She set her coffee mug on the table and took a seat in the chair across the table from her aunt.

“Can’t talk for long, Aunt Flora. I work the two-to-ten shift at the diner. I’ve got to get cleaned up first. I’d like to lie down for awhile, too.”

“Wasn’t that Junior Tucker who dropped you off in that pickup truck?”

“Why, yes, Auntie, it was,” Roxie answered.

The older woman frowned.

“You said you were staying at Jennifer Becker’s last night. You said you were goin’ to help her with the wallpaper for the baby’s room. That’s what you told me. I didn’t know that Junior...”

“Junior gave me a lift home,” Roxie countered. “He came over to the Becker Farm this mornin’ to borrow somethin’ from Josh. I needed a lift—my car broke down—so he gave me a ride.”

Roxie reached across the table and snatched her aunt’s cigarettes, bumped one out of the pack and lit it. She took a deep drag and waited for the relaxing feeling.

“I thought you quit smoking, Roxanne-dear,” Aunt Flora said.

“I guess I just quit buying,” Roxie confessed while trying to hide a smirk, and then took another drag.

She’d discovered long ago that a cigarette was a good thing to have during these aunt-to-niece chats. She could always take a drag when she didn’t want to speak at any particular moment. The technique absorbed a good portion of the allotted conversation time. With practice, she could cut the content of any conversation in about half.