Moving to the city
was not something anyone ever dreamed Lenna might do, but here Rory stood with his odd little dog at his side, saying his mom had been threatening it for years.
"Doesn't sound like the Lenna I knew," DeLorean said.
"You don't know my maw." He bent a surprisingly long arm down to the dog's ears, stroking one and then another, his vivid blue eyes focused on the animal rather than the woman who had barged into his life. "There's a word for people who live out here, a hundred miles from the nearest WalMart."
DeLorean waited for it.
"Urban Rejects."
"That's two words," she said, figuring it would get him to look at her again even if it was to scowl.
"You're like two people," she dared to say this strange man, this virtual stranger, this short, wiry, long-armed son of her mom's cousin. "Sometimes you talk like Lenna, and sometimes you talk like someone in book. More educated."
"I'm just full of surprises."
That he was. Those wild looking yoga poses, something he picked up from the nut house, not that he called it that. What had he called it? Not rehab. Sandy the nosy nurse would know. Anger Management facility?
He pointed to the north, where a distant barn and house huddled on the horizon. "That's where the trouble began. Mom's favorite dog in the world came to a terrible end there, and it drove her to God like nothing else ever had."
DeLorean frowned. "I thought finding the forty-year-old mummy of Marlin was what sent her over the edge, so to speak." Everyone knew Lenna had always been a fan of the Catholic saints and known for talking out loud to them, especially Tony, the patron of lost things. Anthony. Tony, Tony, look around, my lost car keys can't be found.
"Mom's not as far off her rocker as people like to think." A little fire of rage started flickering in Rory's eyes. "Her dog was a friendly little fellow, a terrier. Houdini. He could spring straight up in the air and make her laugh on the darkest of days. He also liked to run after things and nobody could catch up to him then. Problem was, he liked sniffing around the Tomlinson place, and he had this thing about taking a leak on their truck tires. It's what dogs do, right? Well, Dick and Shirley took so much pride in their shiny new Dodge Ram, they started threatening to shoot the dog if we didn't keep him from running off to pee on their tires. One day Mom gets a call from Shirley that the dog is there and she'd better come get him or she'd shoot him like the stray that he was. Mom gets there, and Shirley has her pit bull at her side. Soon as she sees Mom get out and call Houdini over, Shirley lets Houdini out of a pen, then says to her dog, "Rocko. Get the puppy." And that pit bull charged so fast, Houdini didn't even hear him coming; he was too busy wagging at Mom. Right in front of her eyes, Mom saw that pit bull shred her favorite little dog ever."
"Oh!" DeLorean clasped a hand over her heart. "No. No!"
"Yes. Yes. I tried to press charges, but the sheriff, he don't care. Our dog was on someone else's property. And not for the first time. It was the property owner's right to get rid of the pesky stray however they saw fit."
"But your mom showed up. And Houdini didn't do anything worse than pee on a truck tire, and for that, your mom had to witness something so traumatic? And this Shirley woman just gets away with it!"
"You got it."
"Lenna must have wanted to shoot her."
"See, I been tellin' ya. You don't know my mom. I wanted Shirley to get struck by lightning, but Mom just started praying for her. Forgive us our trespasses, she mumbled while mopping floors or chopping cabbage for dinner, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and she'd look right at me. We all do our share of trespassing, one way or another, she'd say. So she prayed for Shirley's heart of darkness to see the light and receive God's mercy."
"Well, dang." DeLorean wouldn't have been that charitable.
"She actually did move to the city for a spell," Rory said, "but she didn't like the traffic, the concrete, the noise."
"So where is she now?" DeLorean fixed her own gray-eyed stare on him. "If you're not an urban reject, why'd you greet me with a gun barrel when I got here?"
"Ain't none of your business where Mom is now," he said.
Day 605: 5 Minute Freewrite: Monday - Prompt: moving to the city
NOTE:
Earlier today I posted about a published novelist whose book began as a series of vignette about assorted characters, who took shape in her mind, gradually, as one character, "Uksana." I got to thinking I should do that with my assorted freewrites. Another revelation came to me: instead of trying to weave an ongoing story into the daily prompts, I could just not worry about how the last part ended and post the new freewrite without any effort to weave the threads that lead from one day to the next.
See
Freewrites, Short Stories, why not "a Novel in Stories?" + "Murder By the Slice"