March Madness - Day 3 - Prompt: meat with gravy

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Monday morning came

on the heels of a restless night. Mom barked at Mindy to get out of bed and get ready for school. Blinking in disbelief, Mindy dragged herself to the breakfast table. “You’re making us go to school?” she said.

“There is nothing for you to do here but fret,” Mom said. “Dad and I will man the fort and do what we can do. Your job is to do what you need to do. Put one foot in front of the other. Go to school.”

To my amazement, she had biscuits fresh from the oven with sausage and gravy.

“I can’t eat,” Mindy said.

“You need to eat. Do it.” Mom grew up on a farm too, just like dad. Our friends were as intimidated by her as they were scared of dad, but she wasn’t really cold and unfeeling. Compared to Grandma and Grandpa Lindner she was all warm-fuzzies. We never wanted for anything. She taught us to cook and clean, iron and mend, pinch a penny, mind our Ps and Qs, and be the people others looked to for guidance in time of trouble. Well, she tried, anyway. Jenny was a rebel. The more rules and regulations a responsible parent enforced, the more she opposed them on principle. As the second child, I witnessed her heroics and hysterics. Drama, drama, drama. Mindy was the baby, Daddy’s girl, the pleaser.

I was every bad thing you’ve ever heard about the middle child.

Meat and gravy over biscuits? I made a good show of eating a fist-sized serving, then packed up my books and stood outside waiting for the yellow school bus. Mindy would dawdle until the last minute and shout out the door for me to beg Roger, the bus driver, to hold on a few more seconds.

“I’d say leave without her,” is what I said to Roger, “but then Mom will have to drive her in, and Dad will have a cow.” Roger, a retired farmer with gray hair jutting out from under a seedcorn cap, would just give Mindy a ferocious look and scare the kid half to death. She’d pull being late again at least once a month.

Roger. Four sons and two daughters of his own, and he always said the daughters were equal to twenty boys for the mental stress they could inflict. His dad would have used a leather belt on ‘em but these days, DHS, Department of Human Services, would confiscate the kids if the parents laid a hand on them or even yelled too loud. Our bus was the only one that never had trouble. Roger would stop the bus and utter dire threats against bullies. Mindy was a frequent target, being a four-fort-eleven pipsqueak with big blue eyes and Goldilocks hair and a voice as sweet and high-pitched as Disney’s Snow White. Last I heard the woman who splayed that flake for Disney was still alive and proud as hell of something she did a hundred years ago, and she still singing those songs every day. How sad was that. Playing Snow White was the glory and ultimate joy of her long, long life. I hoped the last great event in Jenny’s life wasn’t going to be her big show choir solo that got her first place at five out of six competitions her senior year. That was something, those trophies, the spotlight, the screaming crowds. Something I hated almost as much as Dad did. The noise. The crowds. But Jenny loved it, like most girls our age would.

Mindy finally hauled her perky little ass onto the bus and Roger deposited her at the middle school with most of the other kids. I was one of the few high schoolers stuck riding a bus. The beauty of extracurricular activities was the excuse to drive ourselves in so Mom wouldn’t have to pick us up after school. Mindy’s choir didn’t start till seven o’clock though, and I was like Dad when it came to school stuff. When that 3:20 bell rang, I was done. After being trapped indoors all day why would I want to go back for more?

What were Mom and Dad doing all day now that Jenny was missing? What could anyone do? The cops were looking at security cameras and asking questions.

“You know she’s dead,”

people were posting on Facebook. As if we the sisters and parents wouldn’t see their comments.

Uh, no, we do not know she’s dead. We hope and trust Jenny Bennett is a survivor no matter what.

I couldn’t think about the “what.” What happened. To my tiny, five-foot sister with the big blonde hair and baby-blue eyes and a wide, white smile that made guys melt at her feet.

I got off the bus and walked through the double front doors and past the powder-blue lockers and beige brick walls with thick gray mortar. I stopped at Locker 129, staring at the combination lock, but all I could see was Jenny at the dinner table a few days ago, taking the liver from the turkey. I stopped her from taking the heart. “You know I always make sure Dad gets it,” I hissed at her. Because Grandpa always got it until he died, and now it was Dad’s turn. When Dad died the heart would be up for grabs. Mom had indoctrinated us with respect for our elders. Nobody would rob Grandpa Bennett that little delicacy in his final years of life, the coveted turkey heart at Thanksgiving.

What if that was the last turkey heart Jenny would ever stick a fork into? Oh God!

Jenny come back, I’ll find a place that sells turkey hearts, I’ll roast a dozen every Sunday just for you, and I don’t even cook. Jenny. Oh God. Jenny.

A punch in the shoulder jolted me. I turned my head left and there stood Ethan Frasier towering over me like an Apache warrior with shoulder-length dark hair. “Hey, blink,” he said. “Whatdja do, get into your sister’s weed?”

He was cute and smiling and meant no real harm, and likely hadn’t heard yet that Jenny was missing. Still, I lowered my head and aimed it at his chest, jolting him back a couple of feet. He let out a breath, then laughed.

“Guess not.” His smile was maddeningly cute. “Stoners aren’t known for being so feisty.”

Ethan was six foot three, and I was the tallest Bennett girl at five-five, but he gave my neck a workout, craning it up to make eye contact with the brute.

My mouth opened, but I couldn’t even think what he had just said. Jenny. That was all I could think. I turned to my lock and spun the dial, grabbed my books, and bolted off before he could rack his brain for another one-liner.

First hour was Geometry, which I was somehow naturally good at, while Mindy and Jenny couldn’t hack it. They were naturally good at hair, makeup, and wardrobe, and saying the right things to make people smile and laugh. I was good at calling a spade a spade, unless it was a fahking shovel, pardon my British.

“It was on the radio this morning,” some show choir girl was saying in the bathroom before the next class, U.S. History. “Her parents reported her missing. She didn’t show up for work and her phone is like dead and gone.”

Her phone. Had they located it yet? All phones, even the non-smart phones Dad thought we should be so grateful for, had GPS. Jenny, Mindy, and I were stuck with the equivalent of Downs Syndrome IQ phones while our peers had apps and internet access 24/7. Like being on a farm ten miles from town wasn’t isolation enough, we had to be cut off from social media as well because it was an invasion of privacy and a way for bullies to drive people to suicide. Just ask Dad. He knew everything.

Except where Jenny might be right now.

On my way to lunch a firm but gentle hand on my shoulder caught me. Sara Lacey, the school cop, who was now infamous for being on some TV show Dad wouldn’t let us watch, Naked and Afraid. She spent ten days in an Amazon rain forest or something fighting bugs, snakes, humidity, and the usual survivor shit. We were all surprised she came back to this armpit of a job after millions of TV viewers saw her naked and unafraid, but whatever.

“Kristy.” She looked at me with that pucker of concern adults get in their foreheads. “How’s it going?”

“I don’t know." Obviously, word was getting around now. "Have you heard anything since seven a.m.?”

She shook her head. “No, but I’ll let you know if I do. And if you need anything I’m here.”

“Cool.”

She really was cool. A medium-sized almost-30 woman cop with long, curly red hair and green eyes, kinda like that Disney heroine nobody remembers, the one in “Brave.” Merida. Her name was Princess Merida. The archer. I took up archery on account of that movie. And I always wanted a concealed pistol after seeing Sara Lacey patrol the hallways of Truman High, but Dad went as far as teaching me to shoot and no farther. No guns in Kristy's pocket or waistband, no knives, just a good strong left hook. He really should have tried harder to interest Jenny and Mindy in such things.

I kept my gaze locked on far-off images in the distance all day, dodging concerned or curious or nosy looks from everyone, and bolted to the back of the bus after the last bell. Afternoons we had Lucille Pospicil, a very large woman who, like Roger in the morning, scared everyone into nearly civil behavior. The woman was so wide, so rotund, we could never believe the seat was strong enough to support her weight.

She laid a hand on my shoulder as I headed for the door at our stop. I glanced sideways at her. She just gave me a look and nodded. Good ol’ Lucy. Ya gotta love a woman who understands the futility of words.

Mindy trudged after me to the kitchen door of our old white clapboard two-story with a front porch no visitor would walk to. The sidewalk to the front door had grown over with grass years ago.

I was floored to smell cinnamon rolls and see Mom doing all her usual after-school stuff. Well, not all. She didn’t ask how our day was. Didn’t ask how much homework. Didn’t remind us of chores.

“Where’s Dad?” Mindy asked.

“In the barn.” Mom pulled up a chair at the kitchen table and I noticed the dark rings under her eyes, the chalky face. “We got a locksmith to open the door of Professor Pershing’s house.”

Oh God. When she disappeared, all her keys and her phone vanished with her, and nobody could get a signal off the phone. Did they find Jenny there unconscious with a fever or comatose from a fall, like those commercials where the old lady says help, I've fallen, and I can't get up? Cats wouldn't get help like Lassie…the phone charge would be dead...

“She wasn’t home,” Mom said, “and the litterboxes were overflowing. We got hold of Professor Pershing to let her know she’ll need an alternate house sitter for...a while.”

Brazil. The music professor was on a sabbatical studying that bossa nova stuff Jenny liked. Jenny was good at every kind of music, even country, even opera.

“So. No trace of Jenny..”

Mom let out a long, shuddering sigh.

“Was anything missing? Coats, suitcases?”

Mom shook her head. “Not even her make-up was missing. You know she’d never pack up and go without that.”

Not Jenny. She and Mindy spent more time on hair and makeup before school each day than I did in a whole year.

“Did you find anything?” I said, louder than I meant to, almost accusingly, and Mom flinched, and I felt like a jerk.

“Nothing,” Mom said. “She walked out the door at the end of her shift, and nobody can say where she went after that.”

A punch in the gut, a kick in the chest, took my breath away.

Jenny was gone.

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March Madness!!!! Day 3 - Prompt: meat with gravy

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