Page 94 of Ash Fall

"No," her voice has a bit of a shrill tone to it when she says, "you wouldn't."

Every part of me goes still and alert as I take a slow step back.

"I watched you go into that supply room with the dark-haired one last evening." She tips her head and narrows her eyes. "And I watched you come back out of it all mussed up. Now this one throws you around in front of the whole building for everybody to see. How many is boys are you dallying around with, dear? I’ve lost count, and it may be that you have too."

Heat rushes up my face so fast it stings. "That…that's not any of your business."

"It became my business the moment you put it on display where young people could see." She says it almost kindly, which is so much worse. "Whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding. He that doeth it destroyeth his own soul. That's not me talking, that's Proverbs, and it was written down long before you decided the rules didn't apply to you." Her thumb shifts in the pages. "My mother had a word for a girl who carries on with multiple men at once. I was raised not to say it in mixed company but the way you’re behaving, well, I've just about run out of reasons not to."

My hands have curled into fists. There are nine things I want to say and every last one of them is something cutting and ugly. Not one of them makes it out of my mouth. She's a sixty-something year old lady, and my mother spent my whole childhood teaching me how a person should speak to her elders. Those lessons don’t switch off just because the elder in question is horrible. The whole long list of what I want to say jams up in my throat and sits there as I try and stay polite.

"Ms. Sorensen." My voice shakes on her name. "I think you should walk away."

"And that isn't the worst of it." She isn't anywhere near finished with me I guess. Her eyes cut past me down the bay toward the racks where Anders is still working as her voice goes lower. "What that old man was doing with his hands this morning and the blonde one does to water, and that young man who tears up the ground? Well, it’s written plainly. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. There were people in this world who understood that once."

Cold runs right through me at what she’s implying.

"That is an abomination in His sight and it is the devil’s work in mine." She's close to spitting at me in her conviction. Her eyes are wet and they never once leave my face. "Eleven days ago, I had a town. I had a church and two nephews who cut my grass every second Saturday without being asked. Then a crack opens up in the sky, everything I love goes into it, and what comes back out the other side is things like you, tossing around dark, evil deeds and laughing about it."

"I didn't do that." My voice cracks in denial. "I didn’t break the moon or ask for any of this. I didn't..."

"The Lord knows exactly what you are." Marlene tightens her grip on her bible and steps around me. "One of these days the rest of them will get around to knowing it too." She takes a few steps away, but I can still hear her last words like she’s whispered them in my ear. "Witch whore."

She walks off toward the visitor centre stairs with her chin high as I stand alone in the aisle listening to my own heart slam against my ribs. The work continues on at both ends of the building, and not one single person notices anything happened.

My eyes have started to burn so I press the heels of my hands into them hard and refuse, absolutely refuse, to cry in the middle of an equipment bay over a woman that is having some kind of mental break down. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. No-one could really believe the nonsense she just spewed all over me…could they?

When I can breathe properly again, I go and start making dinner to keep busy and try and shake her words off. What I really want is my mom. God, I miss her. She would know exactly what to say or do about what just happened. She would sit me down with a cup of hot chocolate and know the right words to say to me to make me feel better.

Since I can't have her here, I go into the motorhome storage and dig through the freeze-dried bins until I find the bags of her burgers, the ones she made every single summer of my life that I can remember. Atlas named them Luna burgers when I was six, after I ate four of them at the lake when no-one was looking and then threw up in the car on the way home. I drag the tips of my fingers over her handwriting on the bags and try to feel her here with me.

I run water into a baking pan and set the burgers in it to rehydrate, and I stand there with my hands on the counter watching them as they swell and come back to life, pretending she’s here beside me telling me what comes next.

The little travel barbecue is still strapped in the storage compartment under the motorhome where Dad stored it. It takes me twenty minutes to wrestle it out, find the propane, and set it up on the matt Gigi put down in front of the motorhome like it’s her own little yard.

The patties go on in batches. Grease hits the grill and the smell of every summer I ever had with my family starts wafting up from it. People start drifting over before the first batch is even flipped, asking if they can have one. Gigi appears at my elbow, takes one look at the burgers, and rubs her hand up and down my back without saying anything at all.

I flip burgers and hand them out as everybody talks around me while I think about what to do. By the time the last batch comes off, my apron is grease splattered, my feet ache, and I've changed my mind completely. Tomorrow I'm going to find Anders and tell him to go have that word with Clayton after all.

I love you, Mom. I wish you were here.

Chapter 35 - Gage

The Monopoly game has been running for twenty minutes and there's already been one formal accusation of theft against the bank.

Jules is the banker, which was everybody's first mistake. Briar bought three properties in a row and then announced she wasn't paying rent to anyone on principle, but everyone still needs to pay her. Elenor keeps sliding extra bills across to Milton every time she thinks nobody's watching. Torrin has his back against a stack of totes with a beer in one hand, arguing rules with a woman who has probably been cheating at this game since before he was born. Reid is quietly winning while nobody pays him any attention at all. Somebody in the next row of campers has a guitar out and is gently strumming it. The whole bay sounds alive tonight with normal life sounds for the first time since we got here.

I'm on an upturned crate outside the circle of players with a beer I haven't touched, and I have not taken my eyes off the motorhome’s door once.

She's in there doing dishes. She wouldn't let a single person help her, either. Plenty of people offered and got turned down in the same pleasant voice she's been using all evening, the one I could pick out of a full room and know was wrong. Something’s happened to her today, and nobody else has noticed. Something more than what’s hanging between us right now.

I've watched Luna Bolton for five years and I know every facet of her. There's a difference between her real laugh and the one she uses to make other people comfortable. I know her shoulders climb when she's bracing for something and how she’ll keep reapplying her Chapstick and then chew it right off when she’s trying to process something she’s worried about. Tonight she smiled at everybody, hugged Gigi twice and didn't eat one bite of her own dinner but probably ate an entire tube of that Chapstick off her lips. Now she's been at that sink for thirty-five minutes washing dishes because being alone in there is easier than being out here surrounded by people.

Then there's the burgers, I’d know the taste of those anywhere even if I hadn’t seen the mylar bags with Hannah Bolton’s writing on them. Her and Elenor found those in the house when they were putting together supplies and I know just how important they are to Luna. Tonight she cooked bags of them for a crowd of people, half of whom she barely knows. Then she didn’t eat a single bite of one. She's drowning silently in grief, and that isn't a guess on my part. I know it. She used to come to me when she felt like that because I don't push and I don't try to fix it and I never made her explain herself. I just sit with her and let her walk through it with silent support. Tonight she didn't come to me. She stood at that grill alone with whatever's tearing her apart, and I sat forty feet away with my mouth shut and let it.

She was right, I've been punishing her, and I know it. Days without one word from me, and I told myself it was a man needing time to get his head around something he can't get his head around. That's a lie I've been very comfortable telling myself. What I've actually been doing is standing across a room letting her hurt over it. Seeing her there grilling the burgers alone, it finally hit me that she hasn't done one single thing wrong to deserve the way I’ve been treating her.

Days of not hearing her say my name, of not putting my hand on her back when I pass her in a doorway. Every hour of it has been miserable and every hour of it was completely my fault. I can't do another minute of it. I set the full beer down on the crate and walk across the floor to the door and climb the three steps up into it. She's at the sink with her back to me, hair piled up off her neck, sleeves of that little dress shoved past her elbows. I can tell the pot she's scrubbing has been clean for a while now.