Free Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson

carted off to Loganville General. It was nominally over.
    I pieced it all together later, questioning everyone who had been there, getting the details separately like puzzle pieces I had to put together in both time and space to get a clear understanding of what had happened and when. It was strange, the odd bits that stuck with different people. No one but Bernese had any idea what the male dogs had been up to. Isaac Davids was the only one who noticed Ona’s trail of bloody bare footprints. And Henry told me that while he was fighting with the dog, that trucker walked out of his bookstore with about five Dennis Lehanes on tape.
    “It’s terrible to be robbed, of course,” Henry said to me later.
    “But looking at the bigger picture, perhaps I’ve created a reader.”
    I added the trucker to the scene. I saw him, a big man, thick through the chest with long, meaty arms, looking across the square. He squinted to see down Grace Street where the dog was tearing up Genny. I watched him choose not to help, instead grabbing whatever he could reach and then dashing for his truck in the lot behind the church. I could not forgive him.
    I couldn’t forgive myself, either. Mama had needed me to help her choose a head, Genny had needed me to soothe her nerves, and Fisher had simply needed me, like always. But I had been un-willing to lose one of the last days left that I could rightfully call Jonno mine. I’d been simultaneously afraid that if I so much as looked away, Jonno would find a way to gum up the works and stop the divorce himself. Maybe I’d wanted to prove to them all that I wasn’t such an easy dog to call. Whatever my motive, the result was that I found myself in Athens, staring into the vapid honey-brown eyes of Amber DeClue with a cell phone clamped to my ear, listening as Bernese told me everything I’d failed to avert.

CHAPTER  5 
    THE BITCH GOT Genny?” I said into the phone, and for a dizzying moment, I thought Bernese was telling me Genny was dead. Amber was still looming over me, blocking me into the booth, or I might have thrown the phone and gone running pell-mell crazy for home.
    “She’s in the hospital,” said Bernese. “Serious but stable. She lost a lot of blood. The Bitch tore her up and down.”
    “The hospital?” I was suddenly so afraid that I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I helplessly said, “Bernese, Bernese,” while Amber’s eyes got bigger and bigger in her pointed kitten face.
    Bernese chose that moment to be intuitive for the first and last time in her life. She said, “No, no, she’ll be able to sign just fine.
    It didn’t get her hands at all,” and I could breathe again. Bernese continued, “It went for her throat, but you know podgy Genny doesn’t hardly have a throat you can get to.”
    I heard the low tones of a male voice in the background, and then Bernese apparently covered the mouthpiece with her hand.
    I couldn’t make out anything my uncle Lou was saying, but I could have heard Bernese braying through a brick wall. “Yes, it’s long-distance—it’s Nonny. Nonny is long-distance.”
    I heard the rumbling male voice again. Bernese overrode it and snapped, “You act like I’m sticking a monkey up your nose. I’m just making a phone call.”
    “Aunt Bernese, where’s Mama?”
    “She’s in the hospital over to Loganville. I couldn’t make her understand what was going on, and she was flushed and flapping around, ill as hornets. Then she went paper-color. The EMT took her pulse, and no one could talk to her. He was worried she’d stroke out, so he pumped her full of Ativan. They admitted her right alongside Genny. Stacia won’t wake up for at least another four, five hours, not with the dose that EMT put in her. Hell, she’s likely to sleep through the night. But I can’t be for sure.”
    “I’ll be there before she wakes up,” I said. “I’m on the way now.” Already my brain was ticking back and forth like a metronome, flipping