Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson Page A

my way up the rickety porch steps and rang the bell.
    No one came. Boyd’s moped was on the porch, chained to the rail, but he could be off with Jonno, prepping for the gig. I stepped over and peered through the window.
    The windowsill was lined with Chianti bottles and plastic toys from Happy Meals. Boyd was twenty-eight years old, and he lived on Happy Meals and Chianti. The bottles blocked half my view, but the window above them was clean enough to see through. This was probably due to Jonno, who had been known to wave a bottle of 409 around. But the place was decorated in a style best described as Early Piles of Crap.
    The floor was littered with drifts of folded laundry and boxes of CDs. An amp was sitting in the middle of the floor next to a giant brass hookah that had been used as (among other things) a candleholder. It was coated in multicolored wax drippings all down its tarnished neck and belly. The only light came from a forty-watt bulb screwed into an ancient floor lamp with a stained-glass shade. The TV was off, and I couldn’t see any light coming from the kitchen or the back hall.
    The dimness mixed with the clutter made the house seem ex-otic to me. All the quasi-dank places Jonno frequented had an air of mystery about them; when I was growing up, the cans of soup on the lowest shelf of the pantry had to stay in order, and the door to my room had to be closed unless it was “fit for company.”
    All the Fretts were meticulous to the point of mental illness, but Genny and Mama had, by inclination and necessity, taken it further, until order was a religion.
    Nothing ever changed in their house. I knew that when I walked in their door in a few hours, the same square table would be by the front door, with the same dusty blue vase in the same spot, still sporting a decades-old spray of plastic gerbera daisies. A willow-pattern china bowl sat empty beside the vase. When I brought Mama home, she would immediately drop her keys in it.
    I straightened up. I was anxious to be on the road, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave without seeing Jonno. I decided to give him fifteen minutes. They might be out on a quick clove-cigarette run for Boyd.
    There was a permanently damp upholstered love seat on the porch. I sat down, immediately sinking a good eight inches. I rooted under the cushion next to me for one of the coverless paperbacks Jonno shed like cat hair wherever he went. I found one near the back and pulled it out. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
    I scrunched down to read in the fading afternoon sunlight, but I couldn’t get my eyes to focus on the words. I pulled in a deep breath, my first since I had talked to Bernese. The porch smelled of Jonno. Not like him personally, but like the air around him. It smelled like a place Jonno would be. I wanted him there so badly, although if he did show up in the next few minutes, I wasn’t sure what I would say.
    Except that was a lie. I knew what I wanted to say. I said it anyway, even though he wasn’t there. “I’m so angry,” I said. “I’m so angry, so angry,” and saying it at last made me able to feel it.
    Down in the pit of my stomach, I could sense how it had grown beneath my initial panic, creeping along my bones like a vine, filling me and twining down through all my limbs, spreading up through me and binding me.
    The anger was a living thing, separate from me but so deep, so basic, that it had been working its way through me as unnoticed as my blood, circulating to its own fierce rhythm. The words on the page wavered and danced. I threw the book down beside me so my hands were free to beat at the sagging cushions. I uncurled, drumming my feet hard against the porch.
    Out loud I said, “It was an accident, a stupid accident, the dog got out by accident,” but the anger burst out through my skin, enveloping me, and I wanted to tear up Ona Crabtree, all the Crabtrees, even though I knew anger this hot and violent was coming from the