Flies on the Butter Read online

  “Can I hold it? Please?” Rosey asked, extending her light brown hand. According to her daddy, her “rich olive complexion” came courtesy of her daddy’s mother, who was part Cherokee Indian.

  Christopher set the roly-poly gently into her palm. Okay, well, he had shown her the world these first five years of her life—introduced her to climbing trees, making mud pies, and getting soybeans from the neighbor’s farm to make their own concoctions—he might as well show her this. “Okay, Rosey, just take it and roll it around in your hand.”

  Rosey’s brow furrowed as she held out both hands to obey.

  Bobby Dean elbowed her. “Lighten up, Rosey. You look as serious as my mama on salon day.”

  She elbowed him back. Harder.

  She turned her attention back to her latest discovery. “Why does it roll up like that?”

  “To protect itself,” Christopher said and then picked up another one. Bobby Dean reached over him to retrieve his own prize as well.

  “To protect itself from what?”

  “To protect itself from you!” Bobby Dean retorted.

  Rosey crinkled her nose and wiped a hanging curl from her eye, depositing a streak of mud across her forehead. “But I wouldn’t hurt it,” she said, carefully rolling it around in her hand with her index finger. “I wouldn’t hurt it for the world. I would never hurt anything, Christopher.”

  A horn honked long and loud. Rose registered that the light had turned green. She was tired of horns already.

  “Get a grip, woman! The light just turned green.” Rose cursed as she put her foot on the gas and merged onto the interstate.

  If Rose’s mamaw had heard those words come out of her mouth, she would have marched Rose straight to the church next door and baptized her in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And she would have dunked her with each name just to make sure it took. But Rose would offer the driver behind her no mercy. With Rose, mercy was an ever decreasing commodity.

  The green of the interstate sign that sped by her window at eighty miles an hour caused her to reach for the green folder she had brought along. She needed to make a few phone calls to the opposition to ensure their compliance. But the passenger seat held no green folder. She refused to panic. She snatched her fifteen-hundred-dollar handbag, a gift to herself, from the floorboard of the car, and there was still no green.

  “You have got to be kidding me!” she yelled over the background music. Then she sighed in disgust.

  That’s when she remembered. Even now she could see the green folder on the back of the caramel-hued velvet sofa that she and Jack had purchased their first year of marriage. She had perfectly positioned it there and left it for the purpose of making it unavoidable as she walked out the door. But then Christopher had called to soothe her regarding the destination to come. He knew she’d need soothing, and she was, as always, grateful for it. So how could she blame him? Besides, something more unavoidable than green on caramel had distracted her: the wedding picture on the bookcase nestled between the windows in the family room. She had picked it up slowly. Tried to push the aching back to the recesses of her mind, where it belonged. The never-talked-about aches. The unnoticed ones. Until something forced you to notice.

  Glimpsing Jack’s face in the picture this morning was what had caused her to pick up the photo. She hadn’t seen that face on him in a long time. The youthfulness in his eyes had turned older. The beautiful smile had been replaced with a solemnness she’d never known was in him. For a moment this morning, she had ached.

  But not for long. Rose never ached for long. So she laid the picture facedown. She didn’t want to have to look at it when she got home. Then she walked out, fortified by her statement to the world and to herself . . . and left her green folder perfectly positioned for her distracted eye.

  Remembering it all now made her fume even more. She accelerated the car to eighty-five. And blue lights soon followed close behind.

  2

  Do you know how fast you were going, ma’am?” the police officer asked after striking an official pose beside her window and seeming not to notice that Rose’s window was still rolled up. She read his lips.

  Rose cut the radio off and glared at him as she rolled the window down, freezing wind sweeping into the warm vehicle. That caused her to roll the window only halfway down. Well, that was part of the reason. “You caught me,” she said, “so not fast enough.”

  The muscle in his jaw twitched. “License and registration . . . please. ”

  She reached to open the glove compartment. That was about the only thing in her new Lexus GS300 that didn’t operate itself or talk to her. She’d bought the Lexus right off the showroom floor. It made her feel special. The engine started simply by pushing a button. Air-conditioning blew air up through the seat and cooled off her behind. Now, that was an offering most would have no idea they even needed until they had it. The sedan was painted charcoal gray, and the same hue was inside, with black accents. It was powerful, making the statement she wanted it to make. Though unfortunately today it made the statement, “Pull me over, please. I’m a power machine.”

  Rose extended her license and registration through the narrow opening, suppressing a shiver.

  The officer took them and said, “I’ll be back in a—” She rolled up her window before he could finish.

  She sat there on the side of the interstate, watching the motorists who passed by watch her. Each one breathing a sigh of relief, she knew, thankful that they weren’t her. And if she were being completely honest, she would say there were probably days she desired the very same thing herself.

  “You really need to slow down, ma’am,” the officer said when he returned and she had rolled the window down slightly again. Her declaration of defiance. “This is a weapon you have here.”

  Rose scanned the officer, meeting his gaze for the first time. “May I go now?”

  He gave her back her documents, along with a ticket. “Yes, you can go. But please be careful. No one else on the highway deserves other drivers to be distracted. And by the way you were floating all over the road, I’d say you are way too distracted today.”

  She rolled up her window without offering another word. She merged back onto the highway and, going the speed limit, tapped her cruise-control button to keep herself from getting another ticket. She crossed her right leg over her left, leaving the accelerator free. It was the position she had assumed through the years for comfort on monotonous car trips. Well, as monotonous as a ten-hour road trip with a speeding ticket in the first thirty minutes could be.

  “So, Rosey, what’s the actual amount of time a person should be forced to endure craziness?” Charlotte complained in her rich drawl, the sounds of craziness echoing in the background. “Crap! I didn’t mean to call you Rosey. It’s just such a habit. Why did you have to go and change your name anyway?”

  “CHARLOTTE! DON’T YOU SAY ‘CRAP’ IN THIS HOUSE AGAIN,” Rose heard Charlotte’s mother scold.

  “A thirty-two-year-old woman still being scolded by her mother. What a sad life I have.”

  “Join the sad-luck club. I just got pulled over.” She didn’t try to conceal her agitation.

  Charlotte barked her unmistakable laugh—half hyena, half snort. “You always were dangerous behind the wheel.”

  Rose couldn’t help but laugh at Charlotte’s laugh. Come to think of it, she’d laughed at Charlotte most of her life. Charlotte was the vanilla to her strawberry, as her daddy called them. They were more alike than Rose would ever admit. Because Charlotte was a continual reminder of what Rose ran from. The Southern mind-set. The Southern perception. The Southern lifestyle. At least the lifestyle Rose still perceived the South to have. But they were alike in so many ways that they couldn’t help but like each other. And even though Rose had run from so much, Charlotte always reached out to pull her back home.

  “You remember that time you completely convinced Uncle Junior that you could drive?”

  Rose sc
anned her memory. “Oh my word. I’d completely forgotten about that. What were we? Thirteen?”

  “You were thirteen. I was twelve.” Charlotte loved to remind Rose that she was older, especially the older they got.

  “We had ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut, hadn’t we?”

  “Yeah, and you told him that you had your driver’s license.” She snorted again.

  “It did take me awhile to convince him, though. I think he even followed us.”

  Smack and snort. “He did. He knew we were lying through our teeth.”

  “I can’t believe we made it home alive. Because when I had to make that left turn at that huge intersection, I scared myself to death.”

  “Get yourself outta here, girlfriend! I don’t buy that for a second, Rose Fletcher. You’ve never been scared of anything.”

  Rose half chuckled to herself. Little did she know. Little did she know.

  “And it was sooooooo dark.” Christopher’s voice tremored.

  Rosey dug her head farther under the covers.

  “And they heard him outside, saying, ‘I’m going to get you.’” He leaned his mouth closer to where her head was hidden.

  “I don’t want to hear anymore, Christopher!” Her muffled cries came from under the comforter. “It’s too scary.”

  “And then”—his voice grew softer, more evil sounding—“they finally got the car running and sped out of the creaky old park. And when they got home”—Rosey whimpered—“they found his hook attached to the door handle.”

  Well, that was the final straw. Rosey took off like a streak, screaming in fitful tears as she ran into the family room. Her mama and daddy were curled up on the sofa, watching television. “Chris . . . he . . . hook . . .” She gasped for air, trying to get the words out. Her little body was shaking as though she had found the hook herself.

  Her daddy wrapped her in his arms as she buried her face in his neck. “Did Christopher scare my baby?”

  “Bad, Daddy, bad . . .” She continued to cry.

  “The one-armed monster will take care of him,” he assured her as he sat her down on the sofa, underneath her mama’s waiting arm.

  Rosey could still hear Christopher’s laughter. He had plumb near made himself slaphappy. She knew he hated her being in his bed. But she liked it better than her own.

  She was in the family room, still cowering beneath her mother’s arm, when she and her mama heard rustling outside Christopher’s window, followed by his screams, and then came the streak of his body as he ran through the kitchen, in their direction. Her poor brother planted his head in the seat of Daddy’s recliner as if that would prevent the wicked one-armed monster from finding him.

  The one-armed monster returned via the back sliding glass doors and looked pretty much slaphappy himself. Once Christopher realized that the noise was only his father’s retribution, he gathered his nerves and went back to bed. Back to bed, with Rosey curled up beside him. This time he actually let her.

  And Rosey would spend the rest of her life being scared. Only years down the road, the monsters became real.

  “So no more lead foot,” Charlotte stated. “Did you hear me?”

  Rose caught sight of the road before her and wondered what all had transpired while her thoughts had been somewhere else. Another world. “No more lead foot,” she assured. “So how is everybody doing, you know, with all the emotion that surrounds an event like this?”

  “Everybody is waiting on you to get here. Well, you and Aunt Lavernia. You know that woman is slower than a turtle on Valium. We’ll probably still be waiting on her by the time the last bite of pound cake is eaten. But trust me, as soon as you get here, we’re all going to see Mamaw together. But we want to see you in one piece. There’s enough going on around here without adding you to our worry list.”

  Rose knew what she meant and how she meant it. “Don’t worry, I won’t be demanding anyone’s attention this weekend. This is about Mamaw and Mamaw alone.”

  “Everyone will be glad to see you. You don’t need to worry.”

  Rose said good-bye. And she wasn’t worried. She wasn’t worried about how her family felt about seeing her. No, that wasn’t the real issue on her mind.

  She clicked on the radio to destroy the silence. Silence made Rose uncomfortable. She was too good at talking, anyway, to enjoy silence. Rush Limbaugh’s voice came through the speakers. Rose listened to everything. Information was Rose’s friend when it came to her job and her life. And she was so good at what she did and at making people feel comfortable that each side of the aisle was convinced she had voted for the one on the other. Because of that, Washington’s regard for her was growing.

  She had gone to the College of Charleston her freshman year, while her brother, Christopher, was finishing his senior year at the Citadel. When he graduated, she decided she would rather make a life for herself in the North, so with her 4.0 she transferred to the more liberal Brown University in Rhode Island to try to get away from the South and its backwoods and chewing tobacco and talking in a way that left off the last letter of the word. Like wantin’, somethin’, watchin’, gonna—well, that word they just changed altogether.

  Basically, Rose ran from what she had come from and made herself what she had become. A professional advocate for children who was taken seriously and respected immensely. The years of Northern dialect, as well as her own determination, had removed most of her Southern drawl. But sometimes when she was excited or wasn’t thinking, it sneaked up on her. Yet as soon as someone noted the accent as “cute,” she snapped it back into shape and commanded it to obey. It did. All things she commanded obeyed. Well, maybe not all.

  But Rose had flourished in Washington. The National Education Center had recruited her from the public relations firm she’d joined right out of college. Her gift for communication and the art of persuasion provided teachers and children with one of the most effective mouthpieces Washington had seen in awhile. She was Max’s star pupil.

  A beep came from her BlackBerry on the passenger seat, alerting her to a new e-mail. She loved having everything in one handy device. She pressed the open button.

  I have a few questions about the lunch tomorrow. Call me after you’ve viewed the attachment. Helen.

  Rose’s car swerved. She decided against opening the attachment right now.

  She clicked the radio off and entered Helen’s number on her Blackberry. The car phone wouldn’t let her dial while the car was in motion. Obviously manufacturers had heard about drivers like her. But her BlackBerry’s Bluetooth allowed calls to be heard through the car phone.

  “Rose Fletcher’s office,” came Helen’s voice through the speakers.

  “Hey, Helen. What’s up?”

  “Have you ever wondered why people feel the need to pierce their tongues?”

  “Does this have anything to do with the lunch tomorrow?” Rose inquired.

  “No, absolutely nothing, but it has everything to do with the strange-looking creature that just brought me my coffee.” Rose heard her slurp. “Okay, now my brain can officially function.”

  Rose shook her head.

  “I just wanted to make sure you got the update I just received from Senator Waterstone.”

  Rose heard the shuffling papers. “No, I haven’t opened it yet. I’ve taken to not reading my e-mails while I’m driving. I think it might be best.”

  “Already gotten a ticket?” Helen always knew. “I told you about that, Rose. If you don’t slow up, you’re going to wrap yourself around a tree. Not that I’m trying to put that mojo on you or anything, but I’ve ridden with you. Honey, I almost went out and bought me some Depends in case I ever had to do that again.”

  Rose laughed. “Helen, you’re too young for Depends,” she assured her.

  “You’re too kind—but also a liar. I guess all that Clairol is working. Do you think the black’s too harsh for my skin tone?”

  She would ask until Rose answered. “No. It’s the perfect complement.”
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  “It never comes out quite like the bottle. Of course, those faces have ten years on me.”

  Rose wouldn’t laugh, even though she knew those faces had thirty years on her. Yet Helen called Rose the old soul.

  “Now, stop distracting me and read that e-mail as soon as you stop.”

  “I’ll be stopping soon to get a bite to eat anyway. I can look over it then. I guess this means that my breakfast companions and I will have even more to talk about next week.” A sly smile touched her lips. She relished the verbal negotiation.

  “I’m sure they’re looking so forward to having breakfast with you.”

  Rose sat up straighter in the car seat and decided she liked the position of power. “I guess I’ll have to make a few phone calls beforehand, won’t I?”

  “You do have a way with senators,” Helen replied with a reprimand in her voice.

  “Helen,” Rose scolded.

  “Well, say what you will, but not only did he send the memo this morning, which reveals that the opposition must be waffling”—she didn’t allow Rose to respond about this irritating development—“but he also called for you again this morning. Something about wanting to make sure your calendar was clear for this Monday and Tuesday. He said he’d called you but kept getting your voice mail. He figured you were on the phone or something. I told him you were having to go home because of an event in your family and that you should be back sometime over the weekend. And oddly enough”—the inflection in her voice grew in concern again—“he seemed to know you were going home.”

  Rose didn’t comment. Neither would her senator.

  3

  The bottled water Rose had consumed needed liberation. A rest area sign indicated that her goal was one mile ahead. It couldn’t come soon enough. She remembered the last time the surging need had her heading to the restroom so quickly that she missed seeing the skirted stick figure icon and walked in on Congressman Watley. He had his back to her and was donning his baby blue sport coat. She screamed, “Don’t turn around!” to his startled expression in the mirror and abruptly reversed direction. Since then, word had gotten out that Rose Fletcher would follow a person anywhere to get her job accomplished. She didn’t really mind such talk.