An Excerpt from "Little Town Lies"
Chapter 1
Sally Hopkins gave up trying to find an NPR station. They didn’t make that kind of radio out here, not on the long road back home … and maybe that was just as well. She stopped twisting the dial when she heard the faint sound of country music coming through the static. It was impossible to make out the words, but she imagined that she was hearing Tammy Wynette, singing “D-E-F-E-A-T," which become Sally’s theme song in Houston.
She didn’t know what she would have done—maybe something desperate—if Ed hadn’t told her he could use her back home in Maryvale. She hadn’t felt needed for a long time, and frankly, his words had caused grateful tears to come. He’d alluded to a problem that he considered “kinda strange,” that was, according to him, connected with her line of work. Which fascinated her, of course. Actually, it also kind of worried her, because little old Maryvale was not the kind of place that had strange problems involving family issues. Surely it was just strange to him—an alcoholic twelve-year-old or something, the kind of thing she saw in Houston every day.
A restless sort of depression had rolled over her like a bitter fog about a month ago, when one bleak night it had hit her: she’d used up Houston … which was a pretty damn big place. She was on a collision course with that dreaded milestone, her fortieth birthday, and there were no princes showing up in her life—not even any frogs to kiss. She’d long ago stopped thinking that sex with strangers was exciting, but lately she wasn’t even getting any offers.
Her first thought had been, Let’s shake things up a little. Get a hot new job. But there were no fast-track jobs to be found online or in the classifieds or anywhere else for a gal with a master’s in social work. In fact, the number of slow-track jobs was about zero, as well.
When a social worker finds her idealism is all used up, she ends up just like Sally was right now, driving down a long, long road in a beat-up old car.
So here she was, sure enough, clattering along the one road that led to some sort of home. At the end of it was her own private heaven, the town of Uncle Ed and the sweet summers of her childhood. Here, in the one happy place of her heart, she intended to find out if it really was possible for a gal on the last frontier of youth to find some real fulfillment.
The car hummed right along. You’d think that the suitcases and boxes and books of a lifetime would put a strain on an old Camry. But after toiling for fifteen years in the big city, it came down to this: she could fit everything she owned into a very elderly compact car and not even make it groan.
It scared her to think how easy it had been to drive away from her old life. When she finally decided to make the break, her first impulse had been to hike up to Dallas and see if maybe they painted the offices of the Department of Social Services something other than Navy surplus gray. Maybe, if she played hard to get, she could wrangle an office with a window, even.
She’s sat at her workstation staring at the transfer request application so long people started to worry that she’d gone into a coma or died.
All of a sudden, she’d picked up the phone and dialed a number she’d remembered all these years, from the age of twelve. Even the ring—brrring-brrring—sounded like old times. And, oh, that, gentle, familiar East Texas twang of his—when he answered she’d choked up so completely that he was just about to hang up before she heard herself say, “Ed, hi, it’s Sally.”
He had been the sheriff in Maryvale for what seemed like forever. After an initial silence, his voice had vibrated frank surprise. “Why, Sally—well, darlin’ … hello. Hello, there!”
She’d left Maryvale behind as the only good part of a hard childhood. He hadn’t heard from her in years, and had no reason to expect to. So she’d just plunged in. “Ed,” she’d said, “I’ve been missing Maryvale for too long. I’m coming home.”
Another silence, then, “You’re in social work, aren’t you?” She told him she’d been working for Texas for all these years. That digested, the old, welcoming smoothness returned. “Why, Sally, darlin’, I think that’s just real fine.”
She’d asked him if there was any work like that in Maryvale, maybe with the county.
He had been surprisingly quick on the uptake. There was indeed money in his budget to take her on. “Heck, Sally, your call came at just the right time,” he’d added. “The truth is, we can use someone with your skills. Most of our troubles are right up your alley, like alcoholism, families beating up on each other and hurting their kids, young people watching too much violent TV and running wild.”
Oh, yes, those were a social worker’s problems, all right. “Seems like those kinds of sins are the same just about everywhere, Uncle Ed.”
Then he’d added the little something that she hadn’t expected. “Well, we got kind of a special problem here.”
A tone had entered his voice that she didn’t like to hear. Really did not like. “What problem?”
“Might be your kind of problem. I’ll tell you about it when you get here.”
What could trouble Ed so much his voice would get all tight like that? She knew stress when she heard it. “I hope Maryvale’s not turning into South Houston.”
He’d chuckled, and his old East Texas style slipped back into place like a well-kept old Ford pickup sliding through its gears. “You’ll still find a lot of the old Maryvale around here, darlin’. I’ll be waiting for you.”
The closer she got to Maryvale, the clearer the radio station became. Where was it from? Not Maryvale itself, surely. There couldn’t be more than two thousand people in the whole county, if that. Somewhere farther down the road, then. East Texas is a big stretch of country that contains some of the most isolated corners of the whole United States.
She hit the scanner on the radio, and it swept right around to the same station again. Fine, she’d loved country and western when she was a girl. Who knew, maybe there were still square dances on Saturday nights. Course there were, what could she be thinking? Texas was still Texas, at least out here.
With Johnny Cash rumbling in the background, she thought back to her last week on the job, when the truth about her life had just plain struck her in the face. She had just visited her favorite client, Rashanda Martins, spent half an hour more than she should, sitting across from her in her cigarette-choked little kitchen with that rotted green curtain on the window and the screen door that let the flies in.
Why not get another curtain? A couple of bucks at Wal-Mart. Or fix the damn door, a project of an hour, maybe two?
Sally knew what Rashanda’s monthly check was—about two hundred bucks less than her own salary. It was all in the attitude, and Sally’s job was just that: change their attitudes.
She didn’t know why she enjoyed talking to Rashanda so much, since her life was pretty much the same as all of Sally’s other clients. Rashanda’s project was a disintegrating warren of concrete block apartments along dark halls scarred by eerily beautiful and violent graffiti. “DOS EZE,” in fluorescent purple and orange, with blood falling from the letters. “Git me Rad Ate,” whatever that meant.
Rashanda supplemented her aid with a little drug peddling and hooking on the side, so she did have a flat-screen TV in the living room and a curious, round bed with satin sheets, so crammed into the tiny bedroom that it looked like it had been grown in there.
The state of Texas wanted Rashanda to get off her rear and quit spending all her time smoking joints and watching daytime TV. It was Sally’s job to inspire her.
“Miz Hopkins! How you doin’?” she would crow, her smile too wide to mean anything but “Hello, enemy.”
Most of Sally’s clients were so hopeless and glum, giving them suggestions was about as effective as kicking a snail. They couldn’t wait for her to write up her damn report and get the hell out. However well she might conceal it, they knew that she felt contempt for the way they’d screwed up their lives. Texas wanted these people to get off their tails and get a job scraping dishes or rendering fat or something. The nobility of labor—minimum wage, minimum benefits, no unions need apply.
Sally, however, could relate to Rashanda, largely because she was so refreshingly straightforward. When she started her standard lecture about the pride to be gained from earning an honest living, Rashanda said, “Hell, Miz Hopkins, I know I’ve messed up by playing around, but that don’t mean I got to be punished in this life by going out to clean public toilets. Ain’t no way what I do’s gonna make any difference in this world, so I may as well enjoy myself as best I can. Trouble is, I like men too damn much, and they ain’t never been any good for me.”
She had left that last visit in a sour funk—and not because Rashanda was stubborn. For another, darker reason: as she bypassed the broken elevator and walked down the long flight of stairs to the parking lot, she reflected on the idea that maybe Rashanda was dead-on right.
Truth be told, Sally’s middle-class life was, in fact, no better than Rashanda’s poor one, and it was certainly a lot less fun. She lived in a tiny, sterile hole of an apartment with a grouchy roommate, and she had the same problems with men that Rashanda did. She liked them too damn much, and they were never any good for her.
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