Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson

Author:Joshilyn Jackson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Family secrets, Abusive men, Spousal abuse, Abused women, FIC000000, Family Life, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Fiction, Psychological, General & Literary Fiction, Fiction - General, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, General, Domestic fiction
ISBN: 9780446582346
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2010-09-15T07:38:07.590000+00:00

CHAPTER

10

THE NEXT MORNING, I lay for Arlene outside of the classroom where she was teaching. Ambush time. Her job offered no easy door that she could lock between us. She wouldn’t want a scene, and I was willing to stage an entire opera on the campus green, complete with hair rending and the wailings of the damned, if that was what it took.

I leaned up against the wall with my new boots crossed, trying to look relaxed and in control. By the time she came out of the room, head down, deep in thought, my shoulders were aching and my knees were trembling with the effort it took to hold the pose.

“Hey, Arlene,” I said.

She did a double take that ended in a recoil. “How did you find me?” Her voice came out in a mousy scratch.

“They gave me your course schedule up in the English Department.”

“No,” she said. “I mean how did you know I worked here, or my address? How did you even know to look in Chicago?” She was clutching a soft leather satchel like a briefcase, and now she shifted it in front of her so it was between us.

“Oh, that,” I said. “I talked to Bud.”

“Bud Freeman?” Arlene sounded incredulous now. “My cousin Clarice’s husband?”

I nodded, and she turned away from me without another word and walked off at a good clip, heading out the front doors and across the quad.

I boosted myself off the wall and came after her. She wasn’t running, exactly, but it was close. I trotted to keep up, relentless. With the whole green lawn of the quad in front of us, where could she go?

“Hold up, Arlene. I just need to ask you a couple of questions and then I swear I won’t bother you anymore.”

Then she did start running, actually running away from me, like I was some sort of vampirous animal that had crawled out from under her bed to make a God’s honest try for a daytime chew on her vitals. I broke into a lope, too, raising my voice.

“I called your cousin Clarice, but she wasn’t home and I ended up talking to Bud. He told me you talked to Jim Beverly, the night Jim wrecked his Jeep.”

Arlene stopped so fast that I barreled into her. His name had retained its magical effect on her. It was like she’d been hypnotized at a party once, and now the words Jim Beverly made her body jerk and panic. We stood facing each other, exactly eye to eye. She was breathing hard, as if we’d run a marathon together instead of dogtrotting halfway across a quad.

“I didn’t talk to him,” Arlene said, but she came down hard on the word talk, and I stepped in a little closer, pressing my advantage.

“But you saw him?” I asked. I grabbed her arm, trying to make her look at me. “Where was he? What was he doing?”

She pulled away so hard, I almost overbalanced. “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s nothing I can tell you about this.

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