Free The Angry Woman Suite by Lee Fullbright Page A

overdid. Pain crossed Stella’s horrible features. I could tell she felt rejected, and I felt the old solar plexus punch of compassion.
    “Stella!” I cried, running to her, grasping her arm and burying my face at her waist. “Stella! It's all right! Please don't cry, Stella!” Stella’s arms slid over my shoulders.
    “You're a good boy, Francis! You're a good boy! I don’t want fighting, Francis! No fighting!”
    “It’s all right, Stella,” I crooned, unable to move my head. “I love you, Stella. It’s all right.” Stella’s fingers dug into my arms, hurting me, but it didn’t matter. Next thing I knew, Mother had her hands on my shoulders, too.
    “Yes, he's a good boy,” Mother agreed. “He's my good boy. Now Stella darling, calm down and let me have my good boy.”
    “Well, you did it again,” I heard Grandmother say, and then I heard the clickety-clack of her needles dropping into her needlework box, heard her say, “Come, Earl, it's bedtime,” and Grandmother and Earl left me immobilized, unable to breathe, held solidly in place by prostrate women.
    “Well, that was stupid,” Earl yawned. “When’re you going to learn?”
    “You’re stupid,” I retorted. I took off my shoes and stockings, folded my stockings inside my shoes. Removing my pants and shirt, I took my nightshirt down from its peg on the wall and pulled it over my head. I wondered what it might be like to sit in parlors like other families, listening to Aidan Madsen on WDEL hosting “Folks at Home,” instead of watching women fight. I wondered why my insides had to churn so much all the time, and why I even tried pleasing the women when there was never any pleasing them. I wondered what it would be like to be grown up, to be able to do what I wanted, without women telling me to take my hands out of my pockets, or to sit up straight and stop humming.
    I started humming, and Earl told me to shut up and go to sleep, and I wondered why he had to be such a thorn in my side, and why the women had so much hate, and why in the world they wanted to keep it alive. If I’d have had all that hate, I’d have wanted to kill it. And then it occurred to me, an idea, and I wondered if Matthew Waterston was the young man who’d gotten away from the women and made them so mad at one another. It seemed likely.
    “Earl,” I said, slipping between sheets and grasping my cramping gut, “who’s Matthew Waterston really? Is he alive or dead? Mother said he’s still famous, so he’s alive, right?”
    Earl yawned again. “Don’t you know anything, stupid?”
    “I don’t know why this Matthew Waterston’s name got the women so riled up. In particular, I mean. Is he the reason why the women hate men? Was it his running away that broke their hearts in two?”
    I heard Earl turn over. “Where’d you hear that one?” Then, “Ask Mr. Madsen,” he said.
    And that was it, the genesis of two things: the first being the notion that broken women could be fixed. The second being my idolization of Aidan Madsen, not only the most respected man in two counties, but a man who apparently knew all about Matthew Waterston breaking women’s hearts. And if Aidan Madsen, who’d rescued me once, could see himself clear to helping me out one more time and tell me how and where Matthew Waterston had done his heartbreaking thing to the Grayson women, then all I had to do was work backward from where he left off and pick up those broken pieces and put them back on the women. Then, with the women patched together, I could hum to my heart’s content, knowing I’d saved a life.
    Mine.
    ***
    Hot breath on my eyelids. Lips grazing my cheek. I squeezed my eyelids tighter, hoping the tiny teeth would not bite down this time, or at least not too hard.
    “Please,” I pleaded.
    “Jamie,” she sighed like always. “Oh, Jamie.”
    Why did she always call me Jamie?
    The lips moved away, but her breathing remained ragged. I couldn’t open my eyes, not yet, because I