Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson Page B

genes I shared with them. I wanted to pull their careless arms off, rip at their throats. Tears were coursing down my cheeks, and if I was right, if it was war, I was at least very clear about which side I was on, even though no one had intentionally set out to hurt Genny, and Bernese had with malice aforethought shot that hell-spawned dog.
    It quieted as quickly as it had come storming through me. My stomach unknotted and my limbs stilled. I gulped, scrubbing at my eyes and panting. I sat a moment longer, letting it recede. I could feel the anger in me still, contained and waiting, as much a part of me as my freckles or the need for neatness I had learned at Mama’s knee. But I was so spent I could not have gotten up and walked away if the porch had been on fire.
    I wished I could simply lie here, paralyzed, until Jonno came home to pet my hair and touch me. I didn’t know what to do with this body, so angry and so limp. I did not know how to sit or stand or run in a way that would let me be this frightened and grieved, this angry, and so exhausted by my anger that my vision was wavering. I needed Jonno to appear and artfully arrange my limbs into an appropriate pose. As I imagined him bending me, shaping me, I could feel the ghost of something sexy trying to rise in me, and for a moment I was absolutely certain that he would come, that my need for him was strong enough to summon him.
    So I still hadn’t given up the fantasy: Jonno as he should be.
    And me as well. An almost-me. A me that wasn’t. The woman I could have been if I had been born a Frett instead of being an adopted Crabtree, if I hadn’t married so young, if I had taken the scholarship offered me and gone on to graduate school in North Carolina, if Mama and Genny and, later, Fisher hadn’t needed me so close.
    I could never be her. She would be my age now, thirty, but established and professional, with her black hair secured in a braided bun. Mama’s biological daughter would have a lovely wide mouth and half-moon eyes, and she would have to wear heels so her colleagues did not tower over her. She’d be in a museum somewhere, far away from dogs and Crabtrees and divorces.
    I saw her in my mind’s eye, poring over thick books, picking through the Civil War relics she’d unearthed. She sorted them into clean, cotton-lined boxes. Then I saw Jonno arrive, and he was a grown-up. He had grown-up things like a suit and a basic sense of personal responsibility. He took her in his arms.
    They moved together and became unbridled together. They forgot how pretty they were. They lost time. They lost the world around them. They fell to the floor in between the regimented rows of glass display cases. There they became a melded heap of beast: panting, sweaty, unbeautiful.
    It was crap, absolute crap. I could flop here in a pile all night if I let myself, weeping over woulda-coulda-shoulda, but half the things I so regretted were things I could not change. I’d been born what I was, and if I had been her? That other woman? Then I never would have picked Jonno in the first place. What Frett would choose a baby in a lovely man’s body who treated sex like art and her like crap? Once he left the bedroom, the chaos Jonno spread was beauty-less and anything but clean. But the fantasy had managed to survive ten years of marriage and a year’s worth of on-and-off divorce proceedings. And here I was, shaking myself into exhaustion with a violent rage and then running for sol-ace to a man who was all manner of bad for me.
    It was exactly what every other Crabtree would have done.
    I was instantly disgusted with myself. My family needed me, and here I sat. I couldn’t get the hell away fast enough.
    Literally.
    As I boosted myself out of the depths of the love seat, I saw Jonno’s Impala making the turn around the corner. My heart leaped up into my throat and pulsed wildly, practically hitting my gag reflex with every beat. He would see me any second, and before I could