Read part 1 here.
The car lurched over the crest of a hill on a winding road, the lights illuminating a stretch of old stone wall, a deep ditch covered with leaves. There was the McGradys’ house on the hill just beyond the wall, lit up with people straggling in and milling around a fire pit out front. Rosemary parked Nan’s car on the grass with the others and pulled herself out of the car. She looked crestfallen as she scanned the meager crowd for Frank.
The sound of his forced, hyena-like laughter alerted her to the fact that he was there. He’d really come to the party after inviting her. She took a sharp breath as her stomach churned painfully with unaccustomed excitement.
“Rosemary!” a chipper voice exclaimed as a figure burst from the shadows between the house and the bonfire. “I didn’t expect to see you here!” Rosemary stared dumbly. She should have noticed the Jeep in the row of cars that had left the front lawn muddy: Collin was here. “How’s it going, Rosemary?”
Rosemary looked around frantically for Frank, wondering where he could have gone. “Rosemary?” asked Collin again, his innocent 16 years as earnest as ever.
“Yah, hi, Collin,” Rosemary finally said, her eyes straining to see through the darkness, barely glancing at Collin’s crystalized hair gleaming in the firelight. Fate intervened and Collin wandered away to talk to the younger girls from his grade at the party wearing shorts so short and sweatshirts so long they appeared cold and pants-less in the evening chill. Rosemary’s bare shoulders barely registered the growing damp of the night, so preoccupied was her mind with its strange mission.
Then, finally, he was there. “Rose, hey, howya doin’?” boomed Frank, his voice unmodulated after several hours of heavy drinking. From that time on, Rosemary stayed glued to Frank’s side, a hint of a nervous smile playing at the corners of her mouth, her eyes darting around at the familiar people who appeared almost unrecognizable under the influence of Frank’s manic presence. They laughed when nothing was funny, the darkness of the surrounding woods pressing in on the group huddled between the light of the house and the fire.
As the night turned to early morning, Rosemary’s eyes burned with a need for sleep. But she couldn’t bring herself to leave the faintly glowing orb of attraction Frank cast around himself, a fleeting hope of something more refusing to give up.
Rosemary visibly bristled when conversation turned to Frank’s newly dumped girlfriend, but she tried to feel reassured as Frank cackled with forced glee, trying hard to appear as though he relished his new freedom. Heather, the dumped girlfriend was, of course, at the party as there were so few social engagements in the town. A senior in high school, younger than Frank by at least five years, Heather had flowing, light brown hair, a ready smile, and gentle nature. Next to her, Rosemary appeared alien, a towering, manly presence, a full ten years older, her fashion strange and outdated, her emotions furtive. Rosemary’s pace quickened at some imagined competition with the lithe and happy Heather, visible at the edge of the fire, laughing and smiling.
The question that did not occur to Rosemary was why Heather would go around with Frank, a malnourished drug addict, once on the honor roll, now relegated to the town pool in the summer and seasonal work at the candle factory. Rosemary, in her eagerness to feel wanted, assumed that Frank was honest in his bragging about leaving Heather, not wanting to date anyone because “women are all f**king crazy.” Somehow, this didn’t register in Rosemary’s cavernous skull that this meant she was not a prospect for Frank but merely a conquest.
As the early morning hours released dew on the grass and a haze settled at the edge of the woods, Frank began to grope Rosemary absent-mindedly, expressing little interest or curiosity. Despite her best efforts, Rosemary’s cheeks burned, and she glanced around to see if anyone noticed the hands straying across swaths of purple metallic fabric and into denim pockets.
Gradually, partygoers stumbled into cars or collapsed onto couches in the house, the television flickering images of horror movies across the slumped bodies. That was when Frank made a move. Gruffly, he grabbed Rosemary’s wrist and let out a hollow chuckle, jerking her arm painfully in the direction of the stairs. Rosemary’s pulse quickened, not so much with excitement as with dread. The sequence of events leading to this moment was so bewildering to her she didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed.
At the door, Frank tilted his head up and kissed her. Her lips felt slobbery wet; she resisted the urge to recoil at the acrid taste of cigarettes and cheap alcohol.
Up a rough-hewn pine stairway, Frank found an empty bedroom, the McGrady’s guest room with a clean quilt spread on the bed, random junk dusted over in the corner of the room. “Here,” Frank said decisively and began hastily undressing as Rosemary perched hesitantly on the edge of the bed. “What, you chicken?” he asked, for the first time a hint of uncertainty creeping into his forced confidence.
“I just didn’t know that’s what this was about,” Rosemary managed to mumble after a pause.
“What? Did you think I was hanging out with you for fun?” Frank spat, a plastered smile on his skeletal face.
“No. I just thought maybe you wanted to go out with me, like a walk or something,” Rosemary said, a pathetic note of longing in her words.
“Nah, that’s really not my thing,” Frank said dismissively. Readjusting his clothes, he lay down on the other side of the bed, rolling over and appearing to drop off to sleep in minutes. Rosemary sat up longer, her tired mind circling around a landscape of hope and despair. Finally, she reluctantly lay down as far from Frank as possible on the bed, letting her weary lids droop until she fell into a deep sleep.
Weak light of mid-morning broke through the haze as Rosemary opened her eyes, bare shoulders stiff, the top digging in beneath her armpits. Rosemary woke to find the hundred-dollar bills from Nan’s stash missing, surely taken by Frank who had found them with his wandering, claw-like hands. She saw on the bed his pipe, a swirl of blues in delicate glass, cool to the touch and intricate beyond the tastes of its user. She held the pipe thoughtfully, pocketing it as she rose from the bed.
She went downstairs to find herself the object of raucous speculation as Frank had not left the house before inventing wild tales of carnal fantasy about Rosemary, the bug girl turned town hooker. Except, it occurred dimly to Rosemary, she had been the one to pay.
The past two days of mounting excitement deflated to ordinary life. Rosemary drove down the hill, watching leaves falling in the early autumn air, not seeing their beauty but only willing herself to move the steering wheel with each successive turn instead of driving off the road.
After little sleep the next night, Rosemary pulled on her Artic Circle polo, not bothering to remove her garish party shirt. The jeans, with mud caked on the hem, looked worn and damp. Nan made clear that Rosemary was forbidden from taking the Oldsmobile to work, so Nan dropped her there and sped off, fury in her every motion.
Amethyst, Bethany’s daughter, was there, sitting on the sidewalk outside the gas station eating a raw potato, still smudged with dirt, unwashed after she picked it from the co-op where she and her mother rented a room. “Hi, Rosemary!”
Rosemary didn’t meet her eye, but Amethyst was persistent. “How was your weekend?”
“Fine,” Rosemary grunted, still not meeting her eye.
“My mom can’t come to work today,” Amethyst said matter-of-factly, causing Rosemary to raise her head for the first time in surprise.
“What? Why are you here?”
“Well, my mom got so mad when someone ran over the chickens in front of the farm the other day that she threw a rock through their windshield. She got glass in her hand and will have to go to jail. Or something. That’s what the guy said. I tried to tell Bruce—that’s my mom’s boyfriend. I tried to tell him she wouldn’t be here, and she was back at the farm, but he wouldn’t listen when he picked me up from music lessons. Insisted on driving me here! Luckily, I had packed some snacks,” she added, gesturing to the raw potato leaving smears of mud on her front teeth. “So, how was your weekend?”
“Your mom threw rocks through the windshield?” Rosemary asked skeptically.
“Yeah, they totally deserved it. The chickens wander onto the road, but they’re just chickens so they don’t know it’s for cars. They just think it’s a place to walk around and eat and stuff. They get in the road all the time. This guy didn’t even try to stop! Just flew around the corner and ran over Buffy and Raisin. I raised them from chicks with my mom. Dead. Blood smeared all over the road and on the bastard’s tires. Hank came with the shovel to put the dead ones on the manure pile, but mom just lost it. Started screaming, ‘You bastard!’ and throwing rocks. I’ve never seen her so mad. It was what he deserved.”
“I thought you said he didn’t stop?”
“Try to stop. Before hitting the chickens. After they were smeared all over the road, he pulled to the side and got out. That’s when my mom ran over from the garden and started throwing rocks. I hope she doesn’t get in trouble. It’s what he deserved,” she repeated doggedly.
“But how did she get glass in her hand?”
“The windshield wouldn’t break, even with all the rocks, so she just started trying to push on it and got some bits of glass in I guess. I don’t know. I didn’t see the whole thing.”
Rosemary stared mutely, the words “what he deserved,” settling into her brain with a sickening feeling growing her stomach.
The afternoon dragged by. Someone from the farm pulled in with Bethany in the front passenger seat, hand bandaged, eyes red from crying. Bethany waved weakly to Rosemary as Amethyst climbed into the bed of the truck. It was one of those days that the store was empty, and Rosemary could just sit. But it didn’t feel good.
Nan snored loudly in front of the TV that night, as Rosemary stared dully at the investigative report about a double homicide. Rosemary’s eyes kept shifting to her reflection in the window across the room, the lamplight shining off the exposed glass pane.
As the program turned to the nightly news, Rosemary finally stood up heavily, her dirty jeans creased from hours of sitting, her eyes haggard from lack of sleep. She quietly opened the front door of the house, stepping carefully onto the front porch with its floorboards sagging with rot. She glanced around the yard, set back from the small road, and headed toward the shed at the back of the house. A jumble of unstacked firewood and broken junk lay strewn in the open-air shed under the wavering beam of her flashlight. Rosemary moved with a decisiveness she rarely possessed, digging through piles of old tools on the workbench to expose the teeth and apparatus of a circular saw.
“It’s what he deserved,” Rosemary said quietly aloud to herself, fumbling for an outlet in the corner of the shed.
Continue reading in part 3.
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