Back at the sanctuary, Mona poured two glasses of semi-flat Big K and opened a box of rock-hard Thin Mints circa who-knows-when. The house dogs danced around, confused but excited the humans were up late. For the first time in a long time, Mona felt hopeful. She wondered if this could be her new calling after the sanctuary sold, the cartoon-strip version of her life. She’d travel the country, pilfering signs. Eventually a masked Republican senator would punch her in the stomach—POW!—and throw her in the clinker.
“What happens if they find out it was us?” Gideon asked, donning his coat to head to bed. He lived in an old camper van on the other end of the property. The Man Van, Ariel had called it.
“They won’t.”
“But if they do?”
“There’s no use worrying about what’s not going to happen.”
By the time Mona crawled into bed it was nearly two in the morning. And yet, when she woke three hours later to start her chores, she felt invigorated. Stealing the sign was the closest thing to fun she’d had in years.
* * *
The older brother, Big John, came roaring down Sanctuary Road at noon the next day, his truck kicking up dust as it pulled through the gate. Mona’s first instinct was to duck into the barn. The next was to somehow cover up the sign, which was still in the back of her truck, visible to the world.
To keep him from pulling up to where her truck was parked, she jogged down the drive to meet him. She wished Gideon was around, but he’d gone to Middleton to buy kitty litter.
Big John rolled down his window.
“Can I help you?” Mona asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.
“Let me park, and I’ll explain myself.” He pulled off to the side of the driveway, taking care to avoid the dogs weaving around his truck. When he got out, Mona felt a little relieved; Big John was always smaller in person than she remembered. He wore a green plaid shirt tucked into jeans. The corner of a strawberry Nutri-Grain bar poked out from his pocket.
“Warm day for October, isn’t it?”
“You can thank climate change for that,” Mona said, knowing it would piss him off.
“Well,” he said, chuckling, “I don’t know about that.”
“You here for a dog?” she asked, playing it cool. “I’ve got a real sweet heeler who could use a home.”
“The reason I’m here is slightly more serious than that.”
Mona felt the anvil again. Here it was. Would he hurt her? Would he hurt the animals? As if cued, two of the dogs who’d circled his truck came over and sniffed his feet. A cattle dog named Old Crow lifted his leg near Big John’s shoe, his eyes flicking up toward Big John as if to ask: What do you think about this, tough guy?
“Cute,” said Big John, side-stepping the urine.
“It means ‘welcome’ in dog.”
“Look,” he said, clearly bothered. “I’m here because I’m interested in your property. I can’t meet your asking price, but if you’re willing to wiggle, I can keep the equines, the pigs, the sheep. The dogs and cats would have to go, of course. And the birds and whatever other creepy crawlies you got, but all the farm animals can stay. I’d do that for you. As a neighbor. It’s the offer I’m willing to make.”
It took a moment for Mona to process what he was saying. That he was not here about the sign. That he had not come to accuse or confront her. “You want to buy the Bright Side?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be the Bright Side under my name. It’d be a Fuller ranch. An extension of our grandma’s property—our property. This way, Sydney and I can stay close but not under the same roof.” He smiled. “I know how it looks to everyone in town, two grown brothers living together in our grammie’s old house.”
Mona was feeling too many things at once. She hated the Fuller brothers, but here was Big John, with his dirty sneakers and ugly haircut. He seemed sort of pathetic. Harmless, even. Then there was the matter of the sign. If he walked thirty steps toward the house, around the oxbow bend in the drive, it would come into view.
“I don’t know,” Mona said. “I honestly wasn’t expecting any offers this soon. It just went up last week.”
“I know how hard it must be, to let this place go. Which is why I’m hoping my offer will make it easier. I could give you time to transition, and you wouldn’t have the worry of finding homes for the big animals. Nothing has to go fast. I’m also willing to take on your worker—the Mexican one. What’s his name? Gary?”
“Gideon. And he’s from Texas, actually.”
Big John waved a dismissive hand. “Whatever. I’m willing to keep him on, to manage the animals. Whatever you’re paying him, I’ll match it plus some. So long as he’s legal.”
“I just said he was born in Texas.”
“Well, all right then. God bless Texas.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Why not? I get the land at a discount, you get the peace of mind. We’re neighbors. That’s what neighbors do.” He smiled, revealing a piece of something green between his front teeth.
“The pigs and the chickens—you wouldn’t slaughter them? Or sell them to someone who’s going to slaughter them?”
“We’ll keep them until they die, and then we’ll use the land for something else. That’s the deal I’m willing to make. I won’t promise back rubs or bedtime stories or whatever else they’re used to, but I can promise they won’t become bacon.”
She thought of the bumper sticker and then of Joss. Mona hadn’t known Joss well, but he would come over once a month to play cribbage with Gideon, the two of them eating microwave popcorn and drinking Hamm’s, Joss quizzing Gideon on his Spanish. Giggling like teenagers at jokes Mona didn’t get. On one of these nights, Joss fell in love with a cat named Cat Stevens whom he ended up taking home. Who knew where Cat Stevens was now? Nobody had seen Joss since August.
This is a bad man, she reminded herself, looking at Big John. But here he was, in the flesh, trying to do something kind. The truth was that Mona hadn’t spoken much to Big John or his little brother, Sydney, over the years. They’d moved to St. Clare when they were teenagers, to live with their grandmother Loretta after their parents died in a car wreck. Mona and Loretta hadn’t exactly been friends, but they’d lived on the same road, and in a town as small as St. Clare, that counted for something. When Loretta passed the year before, it had disturbed her how quickly the brothers, now men, overhauled their grandma’s estate. They wasted no time replacing her ceramic garden frogs with NO TRESPASSING signs, swapping her colorful lawn pinwheels for American flags, her bird baths for blank space, her floral curtains for white slatted blinds. With the money she left them, they expanded her herd of Jersey cows along with the small crew of workers who knew how to turn their milk into money. Their final bit of maintenance was to report Joss to ICE.
Since Loretta’s death, Mona had only spoken with Big John in passing—at the post office, in the hardware store—mostly about the weather or the state of the animals. How he’d lost a cow to a breached birth or how Mona had lost a litter of puppies to Bordetella. They were neighbors, in that they lived miles apart on a road on which not many people lived. When it stormed, they saw the same lightning. When the sun shone, their animals felt the same heat. Really, it was the younger one, Sydney, who had always creeped her out—the skull tattoo on his neck, the bags beneath his eyes. He and Ariel had been friends when they were in middle school, after the brothers first moved to St. Clare. Mona never did figure out why they stopped spending time together, and although she’d felt disappointed at first, that her daughter had lost her only friend, she was eventually relieved. A few months before, Gideon had shown her Sydney’s blog, a sloppily written eyesore filled with neon fonts and run-on sentences in all caps. She’d read a few paragraphs but had to stop after a line about the streets running red with the blood of homosexuals.