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FORTY-FOUR

Ninety minutes later I was in my office, where I approved the purchase of a brush hog to the everlasting gratitude of the Parks Department, argued about street-cleaning regulations, hosted a luncheon for the downtown business alliance, and generally put out the fires, big and small, consequential and not, that flare up constantly.

Except for the fact that I’d just been given a death sentence cocktail and followed it up with an adultery chaser, it was a perfectly normal, boring, hectic day in the life of a small-town mayor.

I picked up some Thai food on the way home, had dinner with my kids, and because there’s a no-electronics-at-the-dinner-table rule, we had a fun twenty minutes, with the conversation ranging from Kevin announcing that he wanted to give up the violin to Katie telling me about the totally dope movie she saw where one of the bad guys puts the other in a woodchipper.

“ Fargo ,” I said. “It came out when I was a teenager. I loved it.”

“Awesome,” she said, either amazed by the fact that we both could possibly like the same movie, or that her mother was actually once a teenager.

After dinner Alex called to give me an update on the condition of the twelve bus passengers who were admitted to Heartstone General.

“Stable,” he said. “Every one of them.”

“I know. The kids and I saw you on TV,” I said. “Also, did you know that the governor sent out a tweet thanking you and the staff for your quick response and your dedication to public service?”

“Public service?” He laughed. “Typical political puffery. We’re a hospital. It’s what we do. Look, honey, I’ve gotta go. It’s been a media circus here all day, and as usual I’ll be the last clown out.”

“Do you have any clue when you’ll be home?”

“My best guess? About a quarter after never.”

“Spoken like the devoted public servant I know and love.”

“Love you back, Mags. Kiss the kids.”

He hung up.

The kids were nowhere to be kissed. They had dutifully cleared the table and disappeared into their netherworlds, not to reemerge again till morning.

I had the whole night and the whole house to myself. I was finally able to do what I had desperately needed to do all day. Have a long heart-to-heart talk with my mother.

I went to the garage, yanked the cord on the attic stairs, and my army of stalwart orange sentinels tumbled out, a few of them hitting me on the head and shoulders on their way down.

Ping-pong balls. Seven of them.

“Good evening, ladies,” I said as they clattered to the concrete floor below.

They were my early-warning system. If anyone had so much as tugged on that attic door since my last visit, the shock and awe of my little plastic warriors would have rained down upon them. And knowing my family, I guarantee they would have shrugged it off and not bothered to put them back. Bottom line: I might not be able to identify the intruder, but at least I’d know I’d been breached.

I lowered the stairs all the way and quickly began scooping up the troops. One, two, three, four, five, six... six... six...

I was one ball short. I flipped on my cell phone light and ran the beam across the floor. Oil stains, ancient paint spatter, thick clumps of dirt-caked leaves, gauzy spiderwebs rich with their latest prey. But ball number seven was nowhere to be found.

I dropped to my hands and knees, sweeping the light across the floor, slower this time, and wondered why I’d decided I needed seven balls to stand guard when one, or two, or at most three would have easily done the trick.

Because you’re the champion of overkill , the voice inside my head said. Because when you have something to hide, paranoia trumps logic. Because you don’t trust anybody, even your own ? —

A splotch of orange peeked out from under the stark white freezer. I zeroed in on it with the light. A big black bold STIGA logo confirmed its identity.

“Gotcha,” I said, plucking the rogue ball out of its sanctuary and shoving it into the bag with the others.

I stood up and exhaled. I don’t even know why I bother worrying. My house has two attics. The one over the bedrooms on the second floor is where we store the stuff we have to get to during the year, like Christmas lights, Halloween decorations, luggage, and Alex’s fifty-quart lobster pot. It’s easy to access. Just open a door and walk up a flight of stairs.

The one over the garage is no-man’s-land, an inconvenient storehouse for all the junk we no longer need but can’t seem to part with. At least that’s what Alex thinks, which is why he hasn’t been there since we bought the house. As for the twins, after the dead-possum incident I don’t think they’d venture up that ladder if Apple opened a store up there and was giving out free iPhones.

I tucked the Ziploc bag full of ping-pong balls under my arm, climbed the stairs, turned on the light, and with my head down low, I navigated my way through a makeshift path till I encountered an oversized plastic rocking horse. His paint was peeling, and the four heavy-duty springs that attached to his tubular metal stand were tinged with rust.

I moved him out of the way and sat down on the floor. We all have secrets. Mine are up here preserved in a cardboard carton marked Aunt Rosie’s Good China.

It’s my burn box. It’s filled with all the things I want incinerated after I’m gone, and there’s only one person in the world I trust to do that without opening the box or looking at the contents—my sister Lizzie.

You may wonder why I haven’t destroyed the whole lot of it myself. I can’t. I won’t. They’re part of my history. Sweet or painful, they make up the fabric of my life. And there are times in my life when I have to reconnect with them.

Today was one of those times. I opened the burn box.

Yes, I had asked Lizzie to destroy it once I’m gone, but in truth there were no smoking guns in there. Just things I didn’t want shared with the world. Like love letters I’d received from Van after he joined the Marines, plus some I’d written but never sent after I found out he was married.

Every poem I had ever written was in a manila envelope marked God Awful Teenage Girl Poetry . And, of course, there were diaries, seven of them in all, one for each of my teenage years.

I picked up the volume marked seventeen and started flipping through it. An hour flew by, and I realized I wasn’t flipping. I was reliving the year that my mother died, one painful diary entry at a time. I put it down and fished out another item of major significance that was stashed in my burn box. It was meant to be burned, but only a little at a time. A bag of loose joints.

I lit one, drew the smoke into my mouth and sucked in more fresh air as I inhaled. It was just another one of the little tricks Johnny Rollo had taught me to increase the potency of the hit.

And then I pulled out a second box. My legacy box. The private stuff I wanted to be kept and judiciously passed on. Reports and essays I’d written that dated back to middle school; awards I’d won; Dunn Gets It Done buttons, bumper stickers, and other souvenirs from my campaign for mayor; and, of course, the real purpose of my trip up to the Possum Graveyard, reminders of my mother—gifts she’d given me, the eighteen-page letter she’d written, and silly things she’d saved from her mother.

I picked up the framed photo of her when she was nine months pregnant with me. “Hey, Mom,” I said. “I’m dying.”

I took another hit on the joint, and another, and sat staring at the picture until the THC slowly opened up a channel of communication between us.

“Any advice from an old pro?” I said.

“You did the right thing turning down treatment,” she said. “I wish I had.”

“I’m worried about what will happen to the kids when I’m gone,” I said.

“I know. For me, the hardest part about dying was not knowing who would step in and be there for you and Lizzie.”

“We got lucky,” I said. “Beth is one of a kind.”

“Yes, but the world is littered with Connies.”

She was right. When my mother died, my father was a bighearted, blue-collar, knock-around barkeep, and plenty of women swooped down on him. Alex, with his movie-star magnetism and his seven-figure earning potential, would attract even more. The hospital was a hotbed of nurses, doctors, technicians, and patients, all looking for husbands. Most of them were looking for the perfect happily-ever-after guy. But I knew that there’s always a handful looking for the take-him-for-all-he’s-worth guy. And if she destroyed his life and his kids along the way, that’s their problem, not hers.

I finished the last of the joint and stretched out on the attic floor, my brain in a cannabis haze. I folded my arms across my chest and stared up at the rafters. Only they weren’t rafters anymore. They were the walnut ceiling panels at Kehoe’s Funeral Home, and I was in a box, Alex and the kids dressed in black at my side.

And then they came. The perfumed piranhas in pretty print dresses, circling, moving in, angling for the best position, their noses twitching at the scent of money?—

I bolted upright. “Get out, you fucking bitches!” I screamed. “Keep your fucking claws off my fucking family!”

The sobs came in waves. “My family... my family... my family...” I whimpered.

My family. My shy, supersensitive son, who would be lost without a strong mom to help him navigate the adolescent minefield. My sensational maverick daughter, who will go off the rails without somebody she respects to rein her in. My broken-at-birth husband, who will crumble if he is abandoned yet again.

I closed my eyes, and my ears homed in on the hum of the attic fan. I breathed in the sound, and soon it went from monotone to musical. And in my head I sang along with it.

“Ain’t no mountain high enough. Ain’t no valley low enough.” My mother’s love song to my father.

When I opened my eyes, I was staring down at her picture. She looked so beautiful in her pink floral maternity dress, her eyes already glowing with the joy of motherhood, her hands gently cradling the me that was to be, safe inside her belly.

“Thanks, Mom,” I whispered, kissing her gently. I neatly packed and resealed the box and made my way downstairs, a woman empowered. A woman on a mission.

Find the next Mrs. Dunn.