Sugar Run by Mesha Maren

Author:Mesha Maren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2017-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

THE ONE AND ONLY

—THE GOLDEN LEE—

Live at the Roanoke Coliseum on September 10.

Buy your tickets NOW.

Box office opens August 1 at 8 a.m.

Lee’s face leered at her, the crisp blue and white of his eyes glowing above his leather-tan cheeks. Jodi reached out and touched the poster, her heart speeding. The paper felt smooth under her fingers. She glanced at the lawyer, half a block up the street. She gripped the corner of the poster and ripped it off the pole.

The Milk Mermaid Cafe smelled strange, a mixture of farts and old flowers, and the music was up so loud it pulsed the floor. The lawyer sat close to Jodi, balancing his coffee and file of papers on a tiny round table but she couldn’t pay attention to anything he was saying, distracted as she was by the posters and the thought of Lee coming so close.

“As it turns out, Ron Leonards has your piece of land listed with Davis and Davis Realty for forty grand.” The lawyer flicked his eyes up to Jodi’s face.

She looked past a dread-headed man and out the back windows to the parking lot where a couple of kids practiced kick flips. She felt herself falling, sinking backward toward despair and the snaking certainty that victim was the only role she was ever really meant to play. She closed her eyes. Ron Leonards’s polo shirt was as green as the lawn that flowed out behind his house, as green as the chlorine-tinged hair of his white-blond children.

“Looks like he bought up a bunch of plots at auction back in the early nineties.”

Ron Leonards touched his toupee constantly, checking the positioning with his fingertips, his pinky ring glinting in the noon-high sun.

“The people over at Davis and Davis said he’s from around here originally, living down in Florida now. Eye on development.”

Ron Leonards’s green polo shirt hugged his distended gut. Bun in the oven? his wife teased. How many months? The girls at the Fox Den ignored his stomach. They dipped their sleek skin close, grinding hips and asses into his crotch, their eyes skimming but never really landing on him. He closed his own eyes, breathed in the smell of them, a heady, synthetic coconut beach party.

“Even at those prices, some of them have sold.” The lawyer shook his head and stirred his coffee, spinning the spoon three times in one direction and then three times in the other. Jodi watched the precise movements of his spoon, trying to narrow and calm her mind. She should never have come here; now she had the Lee poster and further knowledge of the hopelessness of the land. At least up on Bethlehem she had not known.

“Can’t we explain that I was in prison?” she said, an edge of desperation in her voice. “I could start to pay off the taxes now.”

The lawyer’s face pinched as if Jodi’s words had hurt him physically.

“The notice was sent,” he said, “in September of 1989 to the address listed for Andy McCarty.

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