“I need to think,” was what she told Big John. “Can you give me time to think?”
“Certainly. Nothing’s set in stone. We’re working with Play-Doh here. That’s all.”
“All right,” Mona said, although she couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, the Bright Side was already his.
Big John pulled up his jeans and nodded toward the house. “Mind if I poke my head in?”
“Oh—you don’t want to do that. It’s a mess in there. Really. We can set up another time.”
“Sydney and me, we’re not too tidy ourselves. Two bachelors in a rancher. You can only imagine.” He was already making his way up the driveway, which would have pissed Mona off even if the sign wasn’t in her truck.
“Really, we’ll do it another time.” She held her hands out like stop signs. “Please.”
“Just a glance,” he said. “In and out.”
“This is my property,” she said, a new anger in her voice. An anger that felt good.
But by now he had already rounded the curve and spotted Mona’s truck. “What in the name…” he said, eyes locked on the sign. When he looked back at her, he was smiling. “I figured it was teenagers from another town. Never would have suspected a grown woman.”
This made Mona laugh. As if a grown woman wasn’t capable of stealing a sign. A voice in her head said, Well, you did need Gideon’s help, and she said to this voice, Shut it.
“You know, maybe if you and your brother quit underestimating grown women you’d find a couple to make you sandwiches.”
“What sandwiches?”
“That asinine bumper sticker on your truck. About well-behaved women making sandwiches.”
“I bought that truck on Craigslist—the sticker came with the rig.”
“And you didn’t bother to take it off?”
“I thought it was kind of funny.”
“Well. My point exactly.”
“And what point is that?”
“That you’re an asshole.” She could feel her heart racing—how long had it been since she’d called someone an asshole? “And a chauvinist.”
He smiled, a mean smile. “Look at you, Miss Dictionary. Now if you’ll excuse me. I have some phone calls to make.” From his back pocket he removed his phone and took a series of pictures. “And to think I came out here to do a nice thing.”
“You can have the sign back if you really want it,” Mona said, feeling that although she was not in immediate danger, there was danger lurking for her ahead. It was stupid of her to call him an asshole. It was stupid of her to have stolen the sign. She thought of what it would mean, for Gideon to keep his job. For the farm animals to stay on the property. There wouldn’t be a better deal coming.
Sensing something was awry, a pack of dogs, led by Old Crow, began to approach Big John. A German shepherd named Katydid leaned into Mona’s side, as if to say: I’m here if you need me.
“I don’t want the sign,” said Big John. “What I want is for you to call off your fucking dogs, because if they run in front of my truck, I’m not stopping.” He slammed his door. Engine growling, he made an aggressive U-turn, kicking up a cloud of dirt along the way. He was not joking about not stopping. Mona began frantically calling for the dogs, grabbing the ones closest to her by the scruffs of their necks.
Big John sped out the driveway, not bothering to close the gate.
* * *
All day, Mona waited for something to happen. When Sheriff Donner eventually showed up, she felt almost relieved. She’d introduced Donner to the love of his life, a golden retriever named Red Dog, and for this, she knew, she could get away with anything this side of murder. She still remembered the day Donner came around looking to adopt, how he’d halted in front of Red Dog’s pen as if a physical force had stopped him. Red Dog was only a bag of bones, afflicted with ear mites, heartworms, and a big gray wart that sat on his lip like a tiny raw meatball. “That wart will fall clean off in a month and you’ll never know it was there,” Mona had told the sheriff. She was worried about Red Dog, who’d been at the Bright Side for nearly three months—unusual for golden retriever puppies. Donner had looked at her, a flare of hurt in his eyes. “Are you suggesting he isn’t perfect the way he is?” Here was a grown man, kissing a dog on his warty black lips. From then on, whenever Mona ran into them, Red Dog would look at Donner, as if to remind him that even though he was about to happy-jump all over this lady he used to love, he still loved Donner first, best, and last. And so, when Donner stepped out of his car, sans Red Dog, Mona worried, for the first time, whether she might really be in trouble.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” Donner said. He’d parked his car in the gravel visitors’ lot and walked the rest of the way to where Mona was sitting on the front porch, cutting dreadlocks from the fur of her wolfhound, Opal. The old dog had fallen asleep as soon as she heard the scissors—she’d always loved a good pampering.
“Done what?”
“Don’t play with me, Mona.”
“Well, who says I did it anyways? What happened to innocent until proven guilty?”
“I can see the sign right there.” Donner pointed to the truck where the sign still lay. Why should she have moved it? Big John had already taken photos. What was done was done.
“Can’t a woman have a sign?”
“We all know it’s not yours, Mona.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Can you?” asked Donner, his tired eyes meeting hers. “Look, I know you’re going through a lot. I’m the last person who wants to see you sell this place—you do good work. Not everyone here understands that, but I do. But when it comes to the law, I have to draw a line. I have voters, and those voters have expectations. Especially now, with things the way they are.”
“Just spit it out, Donner.”
“I’m saying Fuller wants me to press charges, and there’s enough evidence for me to do it, but between you, me, and the lamppost, I don’t really want to. I’m saying this is a warning. I’m saying if he presses the subject, the next time I come here I’ll be coming with a warrant.”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” she said, cutting a carrot-sized dreadlock from Opal’s underbelly.
He said, “Don’t be dumb.”
Ariel
Happy hour, a week after the election, and downtown Lawrence was buzzing with pissed-off liberals. As Ariel made her way down Massachusetts Street—Lawrence’s central nerve, known as Mass Street or simply Mass, as if it were a holy place—she counted how many times she heard the new president’s name (or, if not his name, then one of his thousand monikers: The Cheeto-Elect, The Orange One, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named). After three blocks, her tally was up to seven. The whole town had its hackles up.
Head down, she walked past a crowd of women holding signs that read, LOVE TRUMPS HATE!, RESIST!, and I’M NOT USUALLY A SIGN PERSON BUT WTF? She’d once heard on a podcast that when a plane is going down, there are two types of people: those who will help and those who will sit, paralyzed, unable to even speak. She’d always wanted to be the first kind of person, jumping into action with a calm but powerful resolve. She realized, now, that everyone wanted to be the first kind.