"Red-haired Girl at the Door" by Mary Taugher
Outside my window it was snowing, which was strange. It never snows in Nashville in July. A white truck screeched to stop in the middle of the road, skidding in the light dusting of snow.
A man stumbled out the passenger door and slammed his fist on the hood. From the driver’s side of the truck raced a red-headed woman with a wood baseball bat, so fast she seemed blurred. They began to argue.
The frosted window, above my kitchen sink, wasn’t open so I couldn’t make out the words, only what sounded like the noise of squabbling blue jays. The woman looked like Ashley, a neighbor’s thirtyish daughter, but I wasn’t sure. She smashed the truck's side view mirror with the baseball bat. The man grabbed her flaming red hair, but she swung at his legs and he tripped backward. He was big, but agile, and held his balance.
I thought about calling the police, but stood riveted. Adrenaline sizzled in my chest, dripped through my veins like hot grease. I felt an ache of recognition. Beyond the truck, a pack of feral dogs ran down the snow-covered street. The morning train whistled. It was too early for the train. And where had the dogs come from?
My phone rang. I could reach it beside my radio and still look out the window. It was Jack. "Maura," he said, "I'll be home in twenty minutes with donuts. You want cinnamon or chocolate-covered?"
"Jack?" I was surprised because Jack, my dearest — we were married fifty-two years, for better and worse — had died years ago. How many years ago I could not recall at that moment.
"Put your hearing aids in Maura."
"I can hear you fine."
"Why don’t you make a fresh pot of coffee?"
Outside, the man danced like a prize fighter while Ashley, or whoever it was, tried to hit him, her arms flailing so wildly she blurred again. The baseball bat was lying now in the tall grass of my front yard.
"I don't understand why you’re calling," I said.
"I just need a break from work. I’ll see you soon, my love."
"Jack, I'm afraid. There's quite a commotion out front.”
The line went dead. A sense of foreboding swept through me. I was more afraid than I let on to Jack. He'd had it easy. Heart attack in the hallway outside our bedroom. In the middle of the night. He probably thought it was only a bad dream, death coming for him. How I envied that suddenness. I was the one who’d had it hard. Wasn’t ninety-one years enough?
Heart kicking my chest, I picked up the phone to call the police. Maybe I could stall what seemed inevitable. There was no dial tone.
Instead, I heard Frank Sinatra singing Angel Eyes, and remembered the album cover, a photo of Sinatra washed dusty pink. Jack bought me the album the day he broke my nose. I was four months pregnant and we were afraid I would lose Jesse. We both had fierce tempers back then. I once threw a paperweight at Jack, took out his left eye.
We put on the album, built a roaring fire in the living room hearth, and nestled together on the couch. When the vinyl record came to an end, scratching shhh-utt, shhh-utt, shhh-utt, Jack licked my inner earlobe and whispered, “Maura, my love, please, please forgive me.”
Ashley was holding her cheek. My face throbbed. Had the man hit her while I was distracted on the phone? Keys in hand, he hurried around the front of the truck. Ashley leaned into the passenger side. She backed away just before the truck roared away, the open passenger door a weapon she sidestepped. Something glinted in her hand. Her cellphone, I supposed.
She walked toward my house. It had stopped snowing. The train whistled again, the dogs raced back down the street. I thought I recognized Bailey and Max and Toodles, the string of collies we owned when Jesse and Tim were young. Toodles was hit by a car, but Bailey and Max lived for many dog years, too many dog years. What a lot of bother they were at the end.
Her knock was polite. I opened the inner door. It was Ashley. She had asked me for money several times the past year. Drug addict, my neighbors said. Like my Tim. Twice I’d given her twenty dollars.
The odd thing was that today, except for her wild eyes and scruffy appearance, she reminded me of a younger me. That red hair I hated, and dyed a rich shade of blonde once it faded to grey. Freckles, thin lips, and sharp cheekbones. Crooked nose, too.
“Mrs. Sullivan? I need to borrow some money.”
“Not today,” I said.
Ashley yanked open the outer screen door before I could stop her. A wave of Nashville heat, heavy and sticky, hit me. She grabbed my arm. I slapped her cheek as hard I could, but Ashley didn’t flinch. The pain ricocheted and stabbed my frail wrist.
“Stingy old bitch,” she said, her face flushed and beginning to bruise. She pulled a silver handgun from her pocket and told me to lie face down on the floor.
“It’s filthy,” I said.
This wasn’t how I’d imagined ending things. I lay down on the checkered linoleum floor. Jack and I were going to replace it, but then he died and I never got around to it. Nose pressed to floor, I could feel the old ache from when it was broken.
Ashley turned on my radio before she dug the butt of the gun into the base of my skull. Sinatra began to croon Angel Eyes. I couldn’t make out the lyrics, but I remembered words about misspent love, about an old devil. Too soon, or it was maybe right on time, the record ended with its meditative rhythm, comforting and yet unnerving, like the sound of a windup toy giving out, shhh-utt, shhh-utt, shhh-utt.
Mary Taugher’s fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, Redivider, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Santa Monica Review. Her work will also appear in a new anthology, Coolest American Stories 2022, out this January. She lives in San Francisco where she is working on a short story collection.
