Free Disgraced by Gwen Florio

The interview—even if it wasn’t one, not really—was clearly over.

    Lola crossed Tyson Graff’s name off her list. Next up, Tommy McSpadden. She was grateful for his unusual last name. There’d been no reference in the newspaper to a hardware store job, or any sort of job or other connections, about McSpadden. She’d meant to ask Tyson how to find him, but he’d ended their conversation before she got the chance. Lola clicked through sites on her phone, finding references to only a single McSpadden family in Thirty. The address, she saw with relief, was in town. She didn’t even want to think how much time she could have wasted negotiating one after another of the gravel roads that ran like strands of a comb-over across the bald hills surrounding the town.
    The house stood a few blocks off the main street, across from an elementary school. The playground’s monkey bars and metal swingsets sat in full sunlight. Lola thought it could have used a sign warning parents that their children risked third-degree burns if they used the equipment. Not that any of Thirty’s young mothers were foolish enough to bring their children to the playground during the day’s baking heat. The McSpaddens’ house stood in cool contrast, its square of grass well-watered and green, shielded by cottonwoods whose girth and deeply ridged bark indicated stately old age. Cheerful geraniums planted in coffee cans marched up the front steps. Lola parked in the pool of shade beneath one of the trees and rolled down the windows, fighting an urge to simply stay in the truck and enjoy the brief respite from the heat. In just the short ride from the hardware store to the house, Margaret had fallen asleep, her lips puckered around a chubby thumb, wisps of hair stuck to her high damp forehead. Her features were a streamlined version of Charlie’s blunt visage, the nose tamed to mere assertiveness, chin like a small smooth stone. She’d be a string bean like Lola, her visits to the pediatrician since birth showing her at the top of the growth charts for height and near the bottom for weight. Lola’s heart lurched as she gazed upon her sleeping child. Until she’d had Margaret, she’d never understood the stories about mothers who rushed headlong into flames, dove into churning seas despite their inability to swim, offered themselves to would-be killers, all in the name of saving their children. Comprehension came the moment the nurse had placed newborn Margaret in her arms. “Stay with her,” Lola told Bub now. As though he’d do anything else. He curled beside Margaret’s booster seat, well aware of his job.
    A slight woman answered the front door, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, squaring her shoulders with a visible effort. Exhaustion scribbled the delicate skin beneath her eyes and around the corners of her mouth. She wore a starched pink camp shirt and pink-and-white flowered shorts. Toenails a shade deeper than her shirt winked from her sandals. Lola made a mental note of the effort it cost the woman to maintain the appearance that Everything Was Fine. She wondered what wasn’t.
    The woman held the door wide, wordlessly inviting Lola in before even ascertaining her name. Lola glanced over her shoulder at the truck, assuring herself she’d have a clear view from the doorway, and stepped inside. The assumption of goodwill that seemed to be first nature in the West, as opposed to the deep suspicion of East Coast residents, still surprised her. “I could have been an ax murderer,” she always wanted to say to all the people who, like Tommy McSpadden’s mother, ushered her into their homes without an apparent second thought. “A thief. A scam artist.”
    She might as well have said it, because Mrs. McSpadden found her voice as soon as Lola asked to see her son. “He’s asleep,” she said, backing deeper into a living room that owed its