Free Breathe by Melanie McCullough Page B

Maggie’s hand. Folks who’d looked down their noses at us. Who’d called her a whore or crazy or worse. People who’d stopped me in the aisles of Howell’s grocery store when I was younger to show me pictures and ask if I’d ever seen their husbands or sons at my house. These same people stroked the bony side of Maggie’s skinny hand and offered empty promises. Hollow if-there’s-anything-I-can-dos.
    They didn’t know about Tom. Not the way they thought they did. They knew him only as a man whose life had been cut short. Side effect of consorting with people like my mother they would figure. They couldn’t know what I knew. They weren’t there when he’d moved in with Maggie and I. When the work dried up and the drinking began. They hadn’t had to watch as lack of utility soured a decent man. Rotted him from the inside out. They’d never had to push him off and race down the hall. They didn’t know the fear that could build inside a person when they were forced to listen to the pounding on a door they’d barricaded with a flimsy dresser. They never sat trembling, wondering when it would give. Wondering when something inside them would give and they would break.
    One night he’d forced his way into the bathroom while I was showering. I could still feel the sting of the leather where it met the wet skin on my back. Force against splitting flesh. Welts and bruises I’d had to hide for weeks because I’d left the lights on in the bedroom and he couldn’t afford my carelessness. Didn’t matter much that I’d been paying the electric bill since I’d learned to bus tables. That the money he gave Maggie never went anywhere but a till in the cash register at the local liquor store.
    This is what Maggie had always wanted. To be accepted. To be part of a town that loathed her. I’d just as soon leave the lot of them behind. They weren’t worth the mud on my boots. But Maggie wanted their approval. Craved it. Even more than she craved her next drink. So she lowered her eyes and faked a tear and I wondered if she truly missed him. If she truly loved him. If she’d ever really known him at all. I couldn’t imagine living with someone I didn’t know. Someone violent and unpredictable.
    Part of me hoped she had loved him. Then at least I could accept what she’d done. How she’d looked the other way. How she’d chosen a strange man over her own flesh and blood. Was I so unlovable I hadn’t deserved her protection?
    “It’s been hard,” I heard her say and inside I winced because it’d been anything but. Until his body had been found—until it had washed up on shore as if to haunt me—it’d been four nights of peace. Nights I’d spent sleeping instead of cowering. An unfurling of limbs and spirit that I hadn’t known in months.
    Later, at the bar I counted my measly tips while Maggie wiped down tables and served beers to the few customers who came on in Sundays. I folded the bills and stuffed the wad into the back pocket of my jeans. We didn’t normally work together, Maggie and me. But she’d insisted on coming in. Insisted on working my tables and playing to a sympathetic male audience.
    Garrett didn’t stop by for lunch like he usually did on Sundays. He’d sit in a booth in the farthest corner of the bar drawing circles on the tabletop with his index finger and poring over a textbook. He would always order a sandwich from the kitchen and insist that I eat half—his subtle way of ensuring I didn’t starve to death. But he wasn’t there today. Just the ghost of him in my mind. And he didn’t call. I waited until well after my shift ended, wiping down tables and restocking glasses. I waited until Uncle Jim demanded I leave.
    “Don’t you have better things you could be doing?” he joked as he pried the rag from my unwilling hands then used it to wipe down the bar. “At least go have Becca make you something to eat.”
    I hadn’t eaten all day. I’d been waiting on Garrett. There were