Just Shelby Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or organizations or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Just Shelby. Copyright © 2020 by Brooklyn James.

  All rights reserved. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.

  Arena Books, Austin, Texas, titles may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please contact: www.brooklyn-james.com

  Edited by Cynthia Gage

  Cover design © Sarah Hansen, Okay Creations

  Interior book design by Champagne Book Design

  First Edition—November 2020

  ISBN: 9798664934083

  LCCN: 2020914156

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Tucked away in the foothills of Appalachia are many small sheltered valleys called “hollows.” Surrounded by fifteen-hundred miles of sprawling mountains, we are reminded by each majestic peak that all the world is above us. A hollow is literally life’s low point, where hope ends and emptiness begins.

  Once rich in natural resources, the hollow remains, holding nothing but unfulfilled dreams…and small town secrets.

  Stratus clouds eat up the morning sun. Like most things in the hollow, the sun too struggles with its purpose to shine.

  Gray sky. Gray fog. Gray gravel. Even the air puffed from my lungs and out of my mouth is gray.

  I run so I don’t get left behind.

  The bursts of condensation remind me of those I saw as a child flaring from the nostrils of Grandpa’s harnessed draft horses skidding timber from the land in the crisp of winter. Logging by horse is tradition, Grandpa says. Everything in the hollow is tradition. Everything in the hollow is harder than it has to be.

  I wonder if draft horses ever count their steps. I do. Elite runners take one hundred eighty steps per minute, I have read and repeated to myself innumerable times. Overstriding is inefficient, lost opportunity. Short, fast, and light, every step counts.

  Appalachia is not fast, but she is persistent. The quintessential helicopter mom, she breathes down my neck. Each of my measured steps is merciful momentum, a chance to secure a one-way ticket from her hovering jaws and out of graysville forever.

  “Rawr!” The bellow, accompanied by rustling in the thick woods, interrupts my peace and my pace.

  So much for short and light. Heavy and lunging, comparable to those draft horses at work, my shoes dig into the earth. Not only in body, we are similar in spirit. Fear and aggression manifest in the searching and widening whites of my eyes. Let it be a beast I can outrun.

  Nope. Not a mountain lion nor a bear. Not even Sasquatch. A harmless yet reckless creature, true Appalachian wildlife—my neighbor Ace Cooper.

  He laughs and leaps from the wooded bank, run-dancing circles around me and fanning his arms like a flamboyant courting rooster.

  Doing what any uninterested hen would do, I run away.

  Too bad Ace runs akin to his reputation, taking next to nothing to catch up with me.

  “Would you quit doing that!” My voice trembles.

  “Maybe. When you stop reacting.” His mischievous eyes are as gray as the sky.

  Embarrassed by frailty, I pacify it with physicality, walloping him across his bare abdomen.

  “Hurt your hand?”

  “Yeah, right.” Resisting the urge to shake it out at the wrist, I coax feeling to return to my knuckles. Ace’s working-class abdomen has more ripples than the washboard I launder my clothes on.

  “We’ve waited our entire lives for this week, Shelby Lynn.”

  “It’s just ‘Shelby,’” I correct, for the hundredth time.

  “First day of our last year, it’ll be official. Seniors,” he scoffs, as if the classification was far too long coming.

  Although ambivalent, I nod in agreement. Having lived here all my life, Appalachia knows it is not school exactly that I cannot wait to get out of.

  “You get that scholarship yet?”

  “Not yet.” I have received no formal invitations, not even a meet and greet. No surprise. “Poke County isn’t on anyone’s radar, let alone recruiters.”

  “Poke County’s just as good as any other place.” His pride protects him from the truth. “You’re a shoo-in for that scholarship. You run faster than any girl I know.”

  Does that ever make me laugh. Ace Cooper runs with his fair share of girls, but I can’t imagine there is any running involved.

  “What?” he retorts, his head snapping in my direction, eyes full of offense. Eyes as steely as their gunmetal color. Gray with a bluish-purple tinge. But the lighter gray cyclone burst in the center gives them a certain precariousness. Yes, his future is as in the balance as the rest of ours.

  “Nothing. I was just thinking that you run really fast too. Bet you could get a scholarship.”

  “I already got a full ride. It’s called a job.”

  “For how long? I thought you said they were ‘taking the miner out of mining.’”

  “They are. But as you love to point out, they got no use for our mine…yet.”

  That I believe. For a county rich in coal, we can’t even attract strip miners. “Do you like it? Your job? Underground mining?” The mere thought induces claustrophobia, my lungs growing short of breath.

  “What’s to like or not like? It’s what Coopers do.”

  “Tradition,” I deadpan, uncertain whether I am bored with or envious of the predictability. I’m still trying to figure out what Lynns do.

  “You know all about tradition, don’t you…” he can’t help himself “…Shelby Lynn.”

  Ida Bell, Mary Claire, Becky Lou, Abby Grace—double names are as populous throughout Appalachia as hardwoods. Spoken in meter, anapests have two short, unstressed syllables followed by one long, stressed syllable. I fail to find the lyrical poetry in them.

  Does my name even count as a double name? Shelby and Lynn, that’s it. Unless you go by Mrs. Knickerbocker’s fifth grade roll call—Shelby Lynn Lynn.

  Strangely enough, my mother said that she and my father went against the grain—against tradition—in not giving me a middle name. If only she could say the same about my conception in the back seat of a beaten-down Shelby Mustang.

  A customary sighting in these parts, here comes another beaten-down vehicle beating down the hollow road. Ace tethers his sweaty shoulder to mine and veers our in-step forms to the berm.

  “Run, Shelby, run!” Miss Patterson shouts in the voice of the fairy godmother out the window of her
mustard yellow Cadillac Eldorado. She may have the voice of a pixie, but she drives like the devil.

  The need to slow down must be her only vice. Despite being a retired nurse, she still nurses everyone in the county.

  “Who’s she rescuing at this hour?” Ace coughs, our lungs under siege in the smoke of her Caddy’s exhaust.

  I take my cue from Miss Patterson’s driving and run like the devil after her.

  At times I might choose to compare myself to a working draft horse, but in this moment I am more like a hunted deer. Ducking and dodging through a tree-laden shortcut, my heart is in my throat. The pulse of my neck must be visible, imaginable that it could burst through the skin at any moment. This hunt happens so fast, but I already know how it ends.

  The forest giving way to the clearing, finally there is more gray—the frayed gray wood of home.

  “I’m so cold,” my mother cries, her naked body convulsing on the dilapidated front porch.

  Miss Patterson—short and plump as the fairy godmother—pulls from her Caddy and hoists over her shoulder a patchwork quilt that drags the ground at both ends, longer than she is tall.

  Grandpa, still nursing his first cup of get-up-and-go, is as brittle as the front porch railing he clings to in shuffling down the creaky steps and giving Miss Patterson a hand.

  Half their ages, my mother should be taking care of them. Nevertheless, employing teamwork, they faithfully cover and comfort her.

  I stop and stomp and spin. The agonizing and questioning bray that releases itself from the depths of my soul drifts and echoes, at last swallowed up by the grayness, unanswered. Each and every time I respond as if it is the first, somehow wishing it would be the last. Yes, this is tradition too.

  Indifference delivers. This is no work for a deer. The draft horse returns, carrying her weight.

  “Yer a angel, Imogen.” I hear Grandpa’s thick Appalachian drawl address Miss Patterson by her first name, as I retrieve the medical bag from her Caddy.

  “Oh, now, Gus,” Miss Patterson replies with his pet name, “this one is an angel.” She rubs warming hands over the quilt swaddling my mother’s body. “She just doesn’t know it yet.”

  She doesn’t look like an angel either. Her face streaked with mascara, the oxygen-deprived skin on it as gray as everything else in the hollow, she looks close to death.

  “Oooh, what a pretty bird. You don’t see many of those around here anymore,” Miss Patterson says of the Bewick’s wren inked on the interior of my mother’s rail thin ankle.

  Pronounced “Buick” like the car, those wrens fled Appalachia too. Now endangered in these parts, a single white stripe above each eye separates them from other more populous wrens. Maybe as a teen my mother chose it as inspiration to spread her wings and fly on out of here. What happened to that dream?

  “Where have I seen that before?” Miss Patterson reflects, attentively covering every inch of exposed skin beneath the quilt.

  She probably saw it the last time she hauled my mother’s naked, drug-riddled body off to the hospital. I gently re-expose her arm, which is as thin as her leg—malnourished and mistreated.

  With speed and precision, I lay out and assemble Miss Patterson’s supplies from her medical bag. Doing so enables the comfort of focusing on the task rather than the matter at hand. Checking off the list, I steady my mother’s trembling arm.

  “I’ll make a nurse out of you yet, Shelby, dear,” Miss Patterson says.

  Some nurse I would make. I can’t watch her insert the needle.

  It bothers my mother not one iota. The track marks on her inner arm are proof that she is no stranger to the uncomfortable sensation. She actually grows calm, as if the sting is associated with a feeling, a high she might expect.

  It is this grave reaction that moves me from reticent robot to desperate daughter.

  “I love you, Mom,” I whisper, wishing the high she might get from my affection could supersede all others.

  It is pointless. My mother is not in there. Her eyes are flat, impassive. My voice fails in garnering even a glance.

  Finished with sedating and establishing intravenous delivery of hydrating fluids and minerals for the purpose of replenishing my mother’s body with life, Miss Patterson attempts to give me life too. Her small hands hold great conviction as she holds my face in them. “She loves you, Shelby. We all do.”

  Not the first I have wondered. Not the first any of us here have wondered. And I wonder once again: Why couldn’t I have been born to her?

  So many to save and so little time, it is no wonder Miss Patterson drives like life depends on it.

  Grandpa sits in the back seat, nestled beside my mother who remains curled up in the fetal position beneath the quilt, as Miss Patterson leaves no gravel unturned in the driveway.

  Through the rear windshield of her supersonic Caddy, Grandpa’s head reminds me of the first bobblehead I ever saw. A Willie Mays papier-mâché original that my father bought at a flea market for twenty-five dollars. The “free market,” he called it. The only true free market left. He resold that bobblehead for two hundred fifty dollars, a nine hundred percent profit.

  Buying or selling anything with cold hard cash—untraceable, tax-free—was the only free way to live. If you could make it yourself, or trade for it, even better. Turning nothing into something, he called it.

  Others called it bootlegging.

  Mothers. What good are they anyhow. To have us then leave us? Bet Shelby wishes she could be so lucky.

  And why am I hanging out in the trees like an overprotective dog. If I really wanted to save her the embarrassment, I’d go my ass home. But I can’t.

  It’s Shelby.

  “Fearless women fought for Appalachia for years, and they’re still fighting. For decent jobs with equal pay. For opportunity, education, art, health care, human rights. For their children. I’m tired of fighting,” my mother said before she left it in her rearview mirror.

  There are boatloads of girls here who aren’t tired. There are boatloads of girls who like it just fine here. Why Shelby?

  And why is she tidying up the front porch. That thing needs more than cleaning. Wonder if her bootlegging daddy thought of that when he got himself shot over a deal gone wrong. They pulled his body from the river years ago. No gun, no contraband, just a hole in his chest. And a hole in his home, I guess. The whole damn place could use a father’s touch.

  Her mother could too, judging from the lacy bra and panties littered beneath the moth-eaten couch that competes with the porch itself for biggest eyesore. Whoever—whatever piece of trash—brought her home, dumped her out like mutual garbage and drove off as fast as they could.

  Does Shelby know what her mother did to get her fix?

  “Don’t stop there. I got a porch that could use a little sprucing up,” I say as I approach her porch, because it sounds less lame than “Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?”

  Bra clenched in one fist, panties in the other, Shelby looks green around the gills. So, she does know. She hurls the bra and panties onto the lawn instead of her breakfast.

  “I thought your mom was getting clean,” I say, like a dumbass, not knowing what else to say.

  “Does anything around here look clean to you!” Shelby lashes out, or maybe breaks.

  Finally! I know what to say. “Good. Get mad!”

  She does. Grappling one by one with waterlogged couch cushions, Shelby hurls them onto the lawn next to the bra and panties. Then like a SmackDown pro, she leaps—arms and legs splayed—off the porch and lands perfectly atop them. Impressive as it was, her ham-fisted punches springing back from the soggy cushions could use some work.

  “Don’t do it like that,” I coach.

  She strikes more wildly, at best irritated by my instruction.

  I take hold of her firmly from behind, standing her up while enduring a few unruly elbows in the process. “Ya gotta channel it. Control it.”

  “Control anger?” she pants, an oxymoron.


  “Yes, make it work for you. Convert it into power.” I make fists around her hands with mine, positioning them under her chin, tucking her elbows to her ribs. “Lock your wrists. From the shoulder. Follow through with your hip. Don’t tap it, ring the fucker’s bell.” I guide her through a few snapping punches.

  Her breath is quick, like my heart against her back. “Okay, yeah, this is good.”

  Too good. I let go of her and fill my arms with a sloppy couch cushion instead. Holding it tight to my torso, I face her.

  She doesn’t hesitate, full of surprises. She has more. “Is that all you got, track star,” I commence the trash-talking. It ain’t boxing without it. “Good thing you don’t have to rely on your hands for that scholarship. She floats like a butterfly, stings like one too.”

  This draws a harder swing, a one-two punch. Spurts of water pepper her forearms, the boggy cushion bowing under punishment. I see it in her eyes. I am not the only one that she surprises.

  But she has more. “Put your shoulder into it. Hell, put your heart into it. Something. Come on, Shelby Lynn.”

  Yep. That does it. Nostrils flaring and a mind like a sponge, she chants, “Control anger. Control anger.” I watch her breathe it in, bottle it up, and release it. The way lightning travels from an area of negative charge to an area of positive charge, the energy releases from her knuckles in basic yet effective combinations. Zap-zap. Zap-zap-zap. Zap-zap-zap-zap!

  “That’s it!” I brace myself more firmly behind the cushion from which moisture no longer spurts. Now it splatters.

  Up until her momentum slows. Until fatigue replaces fury. Anger dissolves and hurt remains. Guess I left that part out. The anger hangover. Coaching can’t cure it anyhow.

  Her feral grunts turn to feeble cries. Shoulders that seconds ago were powering thunderbolts now slump.

  I drop the cushion and all eye contact. I don’t do crying.

  But it’s Shelby.

  I hesitate. I can’t just walk up to her and hug her. Like ‘hug her,’ hug her. That would be awkward. So I circle around behind her and prop her up. Even more awkward.