She bought a red-eye flight ticket to Virginia from Illinois. She’d heard rumors that the Department of Corrections had decided to allow inmates on Death Row to choose the electric chair or the new, less violent and certainly more civil and humane method of death by lethal injection.
She did not know if Alexandre was in Virginia. He might be the one scheduled to die first with this new technology. Or he might be the first scheduled to die this way in any of the other states as they accepted the new method over electrocution or the firing squad.
She would not know his face or his name. But she would know him by his hands.
She pushed up the plastic window curtain and stared at the moon. The moon was the same, year after year, century after century. Was it cursed, too?
“I come, Alexandre,” she said to the night.
And if she failed, she would only have to wait and try again. She would save him. She would rescue him. Someday.
She had all the time there was. All the time there would ever be.
No Solicitors, Curious a Quarter
Across the kitchen table from Chloe sat Nannie, her right hand holding a melamine cup full of hot tea, her gnarled left hand trembling on the surface of the table, stirring grains of salt and sugar into miniature whirlwinds. Afternoon sunlight strained through the dusty window, and June bugs hummed a relentless tune in the woods beyond the side yard. Nannie lifted the cup to her lips, the nubs of the missing two fingers of her right hand beating the air. The bandage on her left elbow had begun to ooze again. Brown and red stains bubbled up beneath the gauze.
The rotary fan on top of the refrigerator rattled as it moved back and forth. Nannie’s smell wafted back and forth with the moving air.
“Stony say it’s gonna make tumors,” Chloe said. She held a cup of tea as well, although her cup was a fine piece of blue china, inherited from her mother. The steam drew a pink glow from her face. Although only seventeen, her hair was bound up and back like her grandmother’s. A handmade ragdoll sat in Chloe’s big lap, its face flopped over. “Stony say you gotta stop.”
Nannie swallowed, then looked at Chloe. There was kindness in her eyes. There was even kindness in her reprimand. “You do the embroidery?” Nannie asked. Chloe shook her head. “You do the needlepoint, and the dolls? Honey, you’ll just never understand this. We won’t never be rich, but we don’t care. We make enough from the people that come and see. You seem to be eating fine. You’s getting to be such a big girl.”
Chloe’s fingers played across her pudgy face, and then dropped to her big stomach.
“You’re my girl,” Nannie went on. “We’ll be all right. Enough talk of Stony.”
There was a click beetle on the floor beside Chloe’s foot, and Chloe stepped on it with her toe. She held the doll’s head down for it to see. “Bad old bug,” she said. Then she said, “Nannie, Stony said you being bad.”
“Child,” said Nannie. She put her cup down and swiped her lips. Some of the drips were wiped away, many were left. A small string of spit followed the hand down to the table. “You’s simple, but I love you. Trust me. Them boys’ll never have the best of me long as I live. You’ll always be my girl who needs me and I’ll do right by you.”
Chloe was silent. She watched her grandmother pull herself up from the table to put the cups away. There was no telling Nannie what to do. Stony, Chloe’s older brother, was always trying. He would continue to come over once a week after a day at the turkey plant and try to scold some sense into the old woman. It did no good. Nannie would tell Stony to go home to his wife and son and take care of them because she would be all right. Then Nannie would take the knife to her side again.
At the sink, Nannie braced herself and rinsed out the cups. It was hard for her to walk. She hadn’t gotten used to hopping on one foot yet. One cup clattered as it slipped from Nannies grasp. Chloe flinched, and grabbed the straps of her sleeveless sundress, her forearms coming up over her breasts. She said, “Break, Nannie?”
“Nah,” Nannie said. “It was my cup. Plastic don’t break like glass, honey.”
“Oh,” said Chloe.
“Goin’ to the porch?” asked Nannie.
Chloe nodded and helped her grandmother out of the kitchen and down the short hail to the barren living room at the front of the house. The doll went, too, crammed under Chloe’s unshaved armpit. A breeze blew through the screened door, lifting the stench of Nannie’s wounds and making Chloe rub her nose with her free hand. Out on the porch, the fresh air made sitting next to Nannie more tolerable. Nannie settled down on her chair, the wood barely giving under her wasted body. Chloe’s own chair creaked mightily under the girl’s weight.
“Want me to read you the funnies?” Nannie asked after Chloe had retrieved the folded Virginian Dispatch from the base of the porch step.
Chloe shook her head. She sat the doll on her lap and stroked the yarn hair.
Nannie fumbled the newspaper open with the three fingers of her good hand. “Fine then. Don’t forget to fix that sign ’fore you go on your walk,” said Nannie. Chloe nodded. “And you’ll watch out for boys?”
Chloe said, “Uh huh. But you got to tell me what letters to put on the sign.”
Nannie smiled at her granddaughter. It was Nannie’s great pleasure to take care of Chloe. Chloe had been twelve and Stony sixteen when their mother died, the result of massive head injuries after being struck by a pickup truck on the road outside their home. Stony inherited the old family car and the gun that belonged to his long-since-run-away father. Almost an adult then, Stony had said he was ready to be on his own. He secured a cheap room with a friend and a job plucking turkeys at Plenko Poultry. Chloe, who received her mother’s set of china, an old collection of perfumes and Avon decanters, and a little pocket change, moved in with Nannie. She grew up in her grandmother’s house, quiet and obedient. Each year school classified her as mentally deficient, and her absence was subsequently ignored when Nannie took Chloe out of school in the eighth grade.
The old woman and girl sat on their porch chairs, watching the road as no one came by, squinting until the sun was gone behind the clot of maples at the road’s shoulder. Nannie sighed, then shifted down as if to fall asleep,
Chloe got the paint cans and the brush from inside the house and walked down the short graveled driveway to the large sandwich board sign. The sign was gritty and as worn as the siding on Nannie’s house. The bottom of the wood was frayed like an old hula skirt.
Nannie’s old sign had been painted over and over many times in the past weeks. Originally, large once-red letters proclaimed that here was “Blue Ridge Country Crafts.” Ever since Chloe had lived with Nannie, Nannie had been a maker of crafts. She designed marvelous cornhusk dolls, embroidered hankies, and warm, thick quilts. The entire front living room had been Nannie’s show place. Travelers from the Skyline Drive, looking for another isolated route to wherever they were heading, came down the mountain in all seasons, driving the hairpin turns and cracked pavement to view the forest in its fall-splashed or snow-shrouded beauty. At the bottom of the mountain, the road passed Nannie’s house. Nannie would sit on the screenless porch, sunning her arms, waving a gaily painted fan and wearing a homemade bonnet. The travelers, intrigued, would stop by to chat. And to buy.
Money from the vacationers’ purchases as well as a little Social Security had kept Nannie and Chloe in food, craft material, and heating oil.
Chloe stooped down and pried the top from the paint can.