doesn’t get six months to play catch up on her mortgage, that it’s all coming due with no warning at all.
This tree she planted has twisted roots. Roots that want to choke her dead.
“Good luck with everything,” Mitchell says. He reaches up and musses her hair; she swats his hand away.
“Wait,” she says. He stops and smirks. “Let me tell you something, Mitchell Erickson. If I find out you had anything to do with Chris’ death, anything at all, then you better run and you better hide because your Daddy or his banking buddies or his gun club fascist freak-show friends won’t be able to stop me from hurting you. I’ll crash your car. I’ll break your pitching arm. I’ll find whatever it is you love—because even for a monster like you there’s gotta be something—and I will tear it into screaming pieces.”
Again his face falls. The smirk drops. “Coyne killed himself. It was suicide.” The way he says it, like he’s not sure.
“That your story? That what helps you sleep at night?”
Mitchell grabs her. Both hands around her shoulders. His face a sudden rictus of rage. “You listen to me, I didn’t have a fucking thing to do with—“
“Hey!” Madge Sawicki yells from the counter. “Git off her! You wan’ me to come out dere with my Louisville?”
She offers up a baseball bat, shakes it above her head like a monkey with a bone-club.
Mitchell relinquishes his grip. Steps backward off the curb, almost gets hit by a car. He says nothing else, just points at Atlanta and then crosses the street. As if harried by dogs nobody can see but him.
Atlanta lets out the breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Goes back to the counter where Madge waits.
“Thanks, Madge.”
“Nat a problum,” she says. “Richie-riches are ruinin’ this dang town. You go’n home now, ‘Lanta. Go’n.”
* * *
When she gets home, Mom’s in the kitchen, which is never a good sign unless the waffle-maker is out or she spies a carton of open eggs, and this time she spies neither. What she instead sees is a fryer chicken. And a box of generic cornflakes. And a big jug of vegetable oil that’s been in their pantry so long it’s probably rancid.
“You’re gonna start a fire,” Atlanta says.
Arlene shrugs. Sniffles a little. Eyes so puffy the crow’s feet are gone, like bird tracks swallowed by snow. “I want fried chicken so I’m gonna make me some fried chicken.”
“Do you know how to make fried chicken?”
“Well.” Arlene blinks and looks around her at the fixings like an archaeologist staring at the icons of a lost civilization. “Sure. Coat the chicken in flour. Then cornflakes. Or maybe cornflakes, then flour. And I guess I need some way to make that stuff stick to the chicken. Whatever, and when that’s done you dunk it in hot oil. For some… amount of time. Abracadabra, got us some fried chicken. See? Can’t beat that with a stick.”
Atlanta thinks that if she sees her mother go anywhere near a pot of hot oil she might just have to beat the woman with a stick. Thing about Atlanta’s mother is, when she gets in a mood, Arlene decides she wants comfort. And the way she gets comfort is with home cooking. Collard greens. Or red beans and rice. Or god forbid some ugly ill facsimile of barbecue. Of course, she can’t cook worth a shit. Unless it’s breakfast.
Though, maybe if she burns the house down they’ll get the insurance money and all this will be blood under the bridge. Provided they both don’t die in the fire.
“Mom, we gotta talk.”
“Can we do it over dinner?”
“I think we should do it now.”
Arlene picks up the box of cornflakes, shakes them at her daughter dismissively. “Honey, I know that you’re thinking I’m going to burn the house down but I promise I am not.” She pleads: “Just let me have this.”
“It’s not about that. I mean, it is about the house. It’s about the mortgage payments—“
The woman begins to move about the kitchen, improvising this fried chicken recipe as she goes. Atlanta watches as she dumps an indiscriminate amount of flour and cornflakes into a plastic grocery bag—which has a little hole in it so tiny streamers of flour drift from the bottom like dust from a broken vacuum bag. Clouds of it kicked up. “I got that taken care of, sweet-cheeks, no problem. Mommy’s on the case.”
“You… are?”
“Uh-huh. I took what we had in the bank account and