Book of Mercy
BOOK
OF
MERCY
A Novel by
SHERRY ROBERTS
Copyright 2011 by Sherry Roberts
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Osmyrrah Publishing
St. Paul, Minnesota 55124
www.osmyrrahpublishing.com
info@osmyrrahpublishing.com
ISBN: 978-0-9638880-5-1
TO SARAH AND SUZANNE, who taught me there are more things worth fighting for than I could ever have imagined
and
TO FAYE FRANCIS GIBBAR, who showed me how to fight and how to be strong to the very end.
Contents
Chapter 1
Better than Bambi
Chapter 2
The Ban of the Month Club
Chapter 3
Inferno Love
Chapter 4
Taking Flight
Chapter 5
Do You Offer Combat Pay?
Chapter 6
When Wild Things Meet
Chapter 7
Fast and Furious
Chapter 8
Invisible Man Goes to School
Chapter 9
Doing Business with Hector Bob
Chapter 10
Banana Cream Ambush
Chapter 11
Refrigerator Rumble
Chapter 12
The Secret
Chapter 13
A Paine in the Neck
Chapter 14
Mercy Full
Chapter 15
The Day the Words Wouldn’t Stop
Chapter 16
I Read Banned Books
Chapter 17
Tofu Thanksgiving
Chapter 18
Upon a Midnight Clear, a Bibliothèque Was Born
Chapter 19
Food for Thought
Chapter 20
Whisperers Win
Chapter 21
Wish Upon a Penny Fork
Chapter 22
Inspiring Mutiny
Chapter 23
Lock Up
Chapter 24
Night Visitors
Chapter 25
The Pink Shark
Chapter 26
They Went Whicha Way?
Chapter 27
The Sunset Is Not as Close as It Seems
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1
Better than Bambi
MOST WOMEN DON’T LEARN they’re pregnant and then drive for fifteen hours trying to outrun the idea. Antigone Brown did. Today the open road called to her like a siren. It whispered: Today’s your birthday. You’re thirty years old. And you’re going to have a baby. What if she’s just like you?
Much to her husband’s despair, Antigone unwound on curving country roads, unraveling problems as yellow lines disappeared in the rearview mirror. Normally, the road healed. Her stress melted into the hot asphalt like ice cream. Her fears receded.
Not this time. This trip the pressure inside her had built with each passing mile. She drove through the warm night, hair flying, radio blaring, with the top down on the convertible, until she could drive no more. Finally, she whipped into a roadside park, with a spray of gravel, and braked in front of a pay telephone. She switched off the motor.
With an exasperated sweep of her hand, Antigone flung to the floor the bewildering assortment of documents from her doctor—prescriptions for vitamins, orders for lab work, handouts on prenatal care. They made her want to scream. So she did. Convertibles were perfect for a good scream. Her voice abruptly silenced the early morning twittering of the birds, but a few moments later, they were back at it again, conversing about the spring day, worms, whatever the talk was at their breakfast tables. As it grew lighter, she looked around and was struck by her aloneness. There was a single picnic table tucked back in a copse of maples. And that was it. Two-lane road, no traffic, no farms in sight. Just her and the birds.
Antigone staggered from the car, leaving the door ajar, ran to the edge of the road, and peered up at a road sign. As she slowly sounded out the words, she remembered: the smell of the girls’ school bathroom. She was huddled on the cold tile floor, hiding, rocking, reciting the alphabet song over and over again. “A-B-C-D-E-F-G . . .”
“I’m falling to pieces right here on the side of the road,” she grumbled. The mischievous letters on the sign continued to jump around, leapfrogging over each other. Maybe, she thought, crazy baby hormones had short-circuited her. All the little things she, a woman with dyslexia, did to cheat chaos, like singing the alphabet song, weren’t working. How would she survive without her normal tricks? She rubbed her eyes and whispered, “No alphabet songs for my baby. Please.”
She needed Sam.
Abruptly, she turned and headed for the telephone kiosk, old and abandoned. Without even looking at the buttons, Antigone punched in the numbers. No dial tone. She slammed the receiver down and redialed. Nothing again. She banged on the side of the phone box with the receiver.
“You need to put in some money.”
Antigone whirled and squinted into the dusky light. At last, she saw a figure lying on the lone picnic table.
“Of course.” Antigone dug in her pockets, but they were empty except for pellets of deer food and the small green stone she always kept in her left pocket. She glanced at the picnic table. “Do you have any money?”
“Do I look like an ATM?”
She searched her pockets again. This was the kind of thing that made Sam crazy: his wife on a lonely road, no cell phone, talking to strangers.
“Maybe there’s some change in your car,” the stranger yawned.
“Good thinking,” she said.
“Don’t mention it.”
Antigone ran to the car, flung her sunglasses on the dash, dropped to her knees, and pushed her fingers in the space between the Mustang’s seats. She knew the contents of her wallet: one twenty-dollar bill and a credit card. She never carried change. If you carried change, that meant, eventually, you’d have to count change, which was not an option. That left whatever the floor and seat cushions would give up. She found a barrette, some M&M candies, more pellets, and several quarters.
“Aha!” She held up the coins to the light with her dusty fingers and popped the stale, chipped M&Ms in her mouth.
Sam answered on the first ring. “Antigone?”
“Sam.”
Her husband’s voice instantly became alert. “What’s wrong? Where are you?”
“I don’t know. New York, I think.”
“New York,” confirmed the voice from the picnic table.
“Definitely New York,” said Antigone.
“Is there someone with you?” Sam asked.
“No.” Antigone shook her head, suddenly confused. “Yes. It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re not making sense.” She heard Sam sigh. “Dammit. You know how I hate this.”
Antigone leaned against the kiosk, exhausted. “I know . . . but I did leave a message on the answering machine.” Before driving north out of Mercy, North Carolina, Antigone had called home from the doctor’s office—“It’s official. We’re having a baby. Gone for a drive. Don’t worry.” Antigone never left notes; she always called the answering machine, especially when she was avoiding Sam. The answering machine was the first thing he checked when he walked into the house.
“Yeah, nothing like getting one of the most important messages of your life from a damn machine,” Sam growled.
“Sorry. I tried not to run. I really did.”
“I called the doctor’s office, but they said you
’d already left.”
“I just freaked. The doctor gave me homework—all these papers to fill out—and you know how I am with forms.”
“I know, you’d rather be put on the rack,” Sam said.
“I was driving around, and everywhere I looked there were babies.”
“If you’d driven straight home . . .”
She lowered her head and turned her back to the figure on the table. “And then I started worrying about who was going to help our baby with her homework.”
Sam’s voice softened. “Tigg, why do you put yourself through this?”
“I’m going to be a worthless mother, Sam. She’s going to hate me. She deserves a mother who can read.”
“You can read,” he insisted.
“But it’s so hard and it takes so long. I feel like an idiot,” Antigone said.
“She won’t hate you.”
“But the homework . . .”
“I’ll handle the homework; you’ll teach her to drive.”
Antigone smiled at that. She wished more than anything that she were cuddled next to Sam. Sometimes, at night, she watched Sam sleep, his hard chest rising and falling with each steady breath. Even in sleep, he exuded confidence. He made her feel safe. He never needed the alphabet song.
“I’m so tired, Sam. I can’t remember being this tired on other drives.”
“You’re killing me, Tigg. You know that, don’t you? Absolutely killing me.”
“Sorry.”
“I tried your cell.”
She kicked at a tuft of grass with the toe of her hiking boot. “I sort of misplaced it—again.”
“I know. I heard it ringing. In the yard. With the deer.”
Silence. She leaned closer to the phone, “Forget the phone. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
Sam groaned. “William baked a birthday cake like you wouldn’t believe. Quadruple chocolate. Come home, Tigg. I’m going nuts around here without you.”
“I love it when you turn all sweet and mushy.”
“I am never mushy.”
“Sam . . .” Antigone paused, and she could almost feel Sam tense.
“What?”
Playing with the phone cord, she whispered into the receiver, “I wish you could come get me.”
It was the first time she’d ever asked.
Silence, then finally, “You know I’d never find you.”
What a fine pair they were, Antigone thought, the directionally challenged Sam got lost crossing the road and she couldn’t even navigate her way through a prenatal brochure. What chance did their child have of being remotely normal? “Who ever heard of a mechanic who gets lost the minute he leaves the driveway?”
“This isn’t my fault, Antigone.” His voice was growing louder. “You’re the one who takes off for God knows where without a word. You jump in that little Mustang and drive until you’re exhausted.” Antigone moved the phone slightly away from her ear. From the corner of her eye, she saw the figure on the picnic table stir.
“Then you call me. You’re a binge driver, Tigg. You get upset or stressed, and you hit the road. It’s been fifteen hours! Fifteen hours is a heck of a long time when you’re waiting for someone.”
Antigone was swamped with guilt. She’d put him through this—again. What kind of person does that to the people she loves? She closed her eyes and imagined a happy Sam in the garage he loved, munching on Froot Loops, his comfort food, and lying under a car twirling wrenches as if they were batons. This had been a mistake. She should have gone to Sam—instead of the open road—to chase her fears away.
“Tigg, come home,” Sam said. “I want to hold you and my baby. Forget about the forms. Forget everything. We’ll work it all out. Like we always do.”
So, Antigone decided to go home. She told Sam to get some more sleep and hung up.
She did not tell him that, for the first time on her many road trips, she was lost.
Ordinarily, Antigone found her way home without navigational aids, an ability that was incomprehensible to Sam. He lived or died by his GPS. She thought of her phone at home, with the GPS she never used. She trusted her own inner compass more than technology. Even as a child, she’d known when her mother took a wrong turn or her father was driving in circles.
But today when she searched her instincts, all she came up with was confusion. She nervously fingered the green stone in her pocket. Sam and the O. Henry Deer Farm and Café seemed so far away. William’s heavenly chocolate cake sounded so good. She needed to consult a map. And she hated maps as much as Sam did. Antigone rubbed her forehead.
“You all right?” asked the voice from the picnic table.
Antigone jerked. Her head came up. While Antigone made a mess of reading anything from road signs to recipes, she was a genius at listening. It was almost an animal ability. While her deer smelled change in the wind, she heard it in the human voice. She listened to the radio, to voices from Alaska and Texas and New Zealand, and it was as if they were talking to her heart-to-heart.
The voice from the picnic table was young and tough but curious. It was not a trusting voice. Still, and this is what intrigued Antigone, there was a breath of concern.
The body attached to the voice moved. Legs swung around; a long, lanky torso sat up; arms stretched. Antigone froze, watching. A semi thundered down the road, pulling a tail of leaves into the vacuum behind it. There were no other cars at the little roadside park. Without taking her gaze from the stranger, she began edging toward the Mustang.
“Man, I’m hungry,” the voice mumbled.
Antigone stopped. She stared at the figure, which was going through all kinds of early-morning rubbings and twitchings. He drilled into his eyes with both fists. She smiled. He reminded her of a boy in one of the books her mother had read to her when she was a child, some sleepy towhead in baggy jammies shaking off moon dust. It was a ludicrous comparison. Sitting on top of the picnic table, his feet in gigantic unlaced tennis shoes resting on the bench, was a black kid in thin jeans and a navy blue hoodie. He was skinny and strange and scroungy-looking. A leaf stuck to his hair like Velcro. But when he dropped his hands and looked at her, she caught her breath. It was like looking into the eyes of one of her deer. Such amazing liquid brown eyes.
Antigone’s stomach growled. “I’m hungry, too,” she said.
The boy shrugged. “It’s a morning thing.”
Because she was tired and lonely, because the kid probably hadn’t eaten in days, and because someone was going to have to read a road map, she asked, “Do you want to get some breakfast? I’ll buy.”
The boy turned to stone. Suddenly, he was alert and suspicious. His stare zeroed in on her like a missile system. He slowly rose and stepped off the picnic table. She realized, with some trepidation, he was as tall as she, probably five-seven or eight. If it came to a tussle, they weighed about the same. But she figured his life experience would tip the scales. After all, he was out in the middle of nowhere, alone, obviously not afraid of her. Probably running from something. A gang? The law? Maybe breakfast wasn’t a good idea.
“Are you nuts?” the boy hissed. There—she heard it again, a softness, a caring. She relaxed. He paced several feet away, turned, and paced back. He stood in front of her, fists clenched on slim hips, legs apart and locked. “Are you crazy? Pickin’ up strangers. A white woman invitin’ a black kid into her car. I could rape ya, kill ya, and steal your car.”
“Do you know how to drive?”
The boy stared at Antigone with disbelief. He muttered to himself, “Save me from white people. They got no sense. They all livin’ in Disneyland.”
“You can earn your keep. Keep me awake. Talk to me.” Antigone scrubbed her face. She was feeling shaky, weary. She didn’t want to be alone. And her instincts told her she could trust this boy.
“I don’t talk.”
Antigone raised one eyebrow. “Ever?”
“Besides how you know I’m goin’ where you’re goin’?”
; Antigone turned away and waved her hand. “Forget it. It was just breakfast; that’s all. No big deal.”
She slid into the front seat and slammed the door. She felt flattened. She didn’t even reach for the key in the ignition. She simply draped her arms on the steering wheel and rested her head.
“You gonna sleep or we gonna eat?”
She tilted her head and watched the boy pull the car door open. He gingerly pushed aside the papers on the floor with his toe and lighted on the passenger seat like a bird. She didn’t move. After a few moments, he relaxed into the seat. He flung an elbow out the window with the nonchalance of male youth and gave her a stern look. “No more screamin’.”
She nodded.
“And I ain’t drivin’ no car. Some cop catch me in a ride like this with a white chick—.” He shook his head. “That’s the last anybody gonna see of old Ryder.”
“Okay, Ryder.” Antigone started the engine, plucked her sunglasses from the dash, and slid them on her nose. “I’m Antigone, by the way.”
His forehead wrinkled. “What kinda name is that?”
“Antigone was a girl in Greek mythology.”
“Did she have a unicorn? I heard all those Greek chicks had unicorns.”
“No unicorn. But I do have deer.”
Ryder shifted in the seat and turned toward her. It was like watching one of the deer coming to attention, swirling its ears in the direction of interest. “Deer,” he said slowly. “Like Bambi?”
“Better than Bambi.” Antigone laughed and reached for the glove compartment.
The boy jumped to avoid contact.
In the even voice she used with the deer, Antigone said, “Just getting the map.”