Page 35 of Road Queens
“—Starfish?”
Oh, hell. Hewasresponding, in addition to sucking. “How do you even know about Operation Starfish?”
He made a show of wiping his (perfect) forehead. “I thought you might’ve thrown me out again for bringing it up.”
“The night is young,” she warned him.
“Everybody around here knows about Operation Starfish,” he replied, which was just about the most alarming thing she’d heard in all that long alarming day.
“My ass,” she replied, because she was busy sifting through
(Everybody knows.)
the import
(EVERYBODY!)
of what he’d said to come up with something better.
“Your ass?” he asked. “I, um ... it’s nice. It’s very nice.”
She ignored the tentative compliment. “And when you talk about ‘everybody,’ you mean ...?”
“The people you helped. And the people who got angry when you helped. Lethally angry.”
“Uh-huh.” It was hard to hear him, what with all the screaming
(EVERYBODY!)
in her brain. “Which category are you?”
He dropped the teasing tone and replied with a simple, “The former.”
Assuming he’s not full of shit, it’s someone he knows, as it’s statistically unlikely we helped him. Plus, I’d remember if we met before. Sister? Neighbor? Absurdly young mother?
She realized they were leaning against her counter, hip to hip. He wouldn’t look at her; his arms were crossed over his chest and his eyes were focused on the floor, and she could feel the tendons in her neck strain as she turned her head to stare at him. “Why are you in the ‘former’ category?”
“Because of Dinah Beane. That’s what she calls herself now. But seven years ago, she was—”
“Dinah Linquist.” The penny dropped. Dinah Linquist (five feet one, expert quilter, gourmet-jam maker) was the only Dinah she’d ever met, a petite brunette with blue eyes exactly like her brother’s. Her build was so slender and small that the fat red cast made her broken arm look like a corn dog slathered in ketchup. Domestic violence was always awful, but the size disparity between Dinah and the man who’d broken her arm almost on a whim was frightening (“He hates the way I fold the fitted sheets, but those are impossible to fold!”).
Scared to stay, scared to leave, but the positive pregnancy test and his habit of punching her in the stomach (like when she put flannel sheets on the bed in January instead of the tacky silk ones he liked) helped make up her mind. She’d expressed her gratitude to Cass, Sidney, and Amanda with a case of pear-apple butter, blueberry-thyme jam, plum jelly, and lemon curd. Each. It made Amanda picture Dinah’s garden as a wasteland, stripped of absolutely everything that could be used to make jellies, jams, curds. Place probably looked like a tornado had whipped through by the time Dinah was done in the fall.
No wonder I thought I knew him.Amanda began putting away the ingredients as she pondered. “You said your family used to live forty miles away.”
“Yeah. I settled in Minneapolis after the academy, and my folks, who split when I was younger, both retired; my mom moved to Missouri, and my dad went to Florida. And once she was out, Dinah never went back. Not even for her clothes.”
That’s right. We ended up going back and doing all her packing.Amanda nodded. “Good, that’s very good. I wish they all did that.”
“Me too. She lives up in Fargo now. She had her baby, making me an uncle, and found a great guy.”
“That’s wonderful,” Amanda said with total sincerity, since not all the people OpStar helped were saved. Or were saved, then wentback. Like poor Debbie Frank. They got her out and away. Unlike many abused wives, Debbie had the resources to keep her distance and start a new life. Once she was clear of that house and that husband, she was more or less safe.
This is why we do this,Cass had said.To save the starfish wecanreach.And in their smug stupidity, they’d all given each other figurative high fives.
But Debbie Frank returned to her husband, who demonstrated his displeasure by beating her to death. She believed his promises. Maybe he believed them too. And for all Amanda had studied the reasons women went back to their abusers, for all her attempts to try and understand what was essentially a POW mentality, she would never, ever understand the impulse to, not just return to the lion’s den, but stick your head in his mouth.
“Dinah never said, y’know? Not one thing to me. Not until it was over. If she had—I was in college when it happened, but I’d have come home so fast. I would have helped her. I would have done anything.”
