Murder At the Foul Line

WHITE TRASH NOIR by Michael Malone

All of a sudden Dr. Rothmann, the foreman of my jury, says she wants to talk to the judge. She gives me a look when she walks by the defendant’s table, straight in my eyes, and I nod back at her but I can’t tell what she’s thinking because there’s so many different feelings in her face. But behind me my Mawmaw stands up and bows her head to her. The judge and the jury get up too and they crowd each other out of the courtroom and just leave us sitting here. My lawyer leans over and says, “Charmain, you have got to change your mind and take the stand.” And I tell him, “No thank you.”

Mr. Snow goes, “This is Murder One, Charmain. You just cannot kill your husband in the state of North Carolina if he played ACC basketball.”

I go, “Well, this is Charmain Luby Markell and I’m not talking about my personal private life to a bunch of strangers in a court of law and have them turn it all into lies against me and mine.”

I got this lawyer? He’s young, just two years more than me, and halfway through our first talk in the jail I can tell he hasn’t had a lot of Life Experience, which, between you and I, I’ve already had way too much. Tilden Snow’s his name, Tilden Snow III, and I think it’s lazy for a family to use a name three times in a row when there’re so many nice new names out there you can choose from. They even got little Names for Your Baby books at the checkout counters, which is where I got my Jarrad’s name. That’s what I call my little boy, jarrad Todd Markell, even though his birth certificate says Kyle Lewis Markell, Jr., totally because my husband’s mother worships the ground her son Kyle walks on. Well, did walk on before I shot him.

So Mr. Snow wanted me to get up on the witness stand and tell why I shot my husband in the head and set him on fire in our backyard.

Mr. Snow chews at a cuticle; his nails are a mess. He sighs a long deep sigh and shakes his head at me. “Please won’t you help me here, Charmain?”

Please won’t I help him? Who’re they trying to give a lethal injection to, me or Tilden Snow III? I go, “Mr. Snow-”

He holds up his hand like a safety patrol. “Tilden. I keep asking you, please call me Tilden. Mr. Snow’s my Daddy’s name.” I think he was trying to make a joke so I smiled and said I’d try to call him Tilden but I wouldn’t take the stand and tell why I shot Kyle.

“Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Well, you better hope your friend Dr. Rothmann’s telling the judge she’s going to hang that jury.”

I say, “What does that mean, she’s going to hang the jury?” But he just pulls on his ears like he wishes they were longer and he runs off with the other lawyers after Dr. Rothmann and the judge and leaves me to sit and wait, which is what I’ve mostly been doing since Kyle died. Which I admit he did do when I shot him.

I’m used to it now but the first time they hauled me into this courtroom, I was crying and grabbing onto my grandma Mawmaw so hard they had to prize my fingers from around her neck. I saw the way it was upsetting her how they had my hands and feet both hooked up to a chain. But Mawmaw whispered at me, “Don’t you cry, baby doll, don’t you let those folks see you cry,” and I tried hard to stop and I did. The only other time I ever went to pieces was when Mawmaw brought Jarrad into the back of the courtroom and held him up for me to look at (he’s two and a half now and he was nineteen months last time I seen him). He had a little toy basketball in his hands and I swear he looked like his daddy, maybe because he started to cry and his face turned purple the way Kyle’s did when he got mad.

The first day I was in court the whole jury kept staring at me like somebody was going to test them in the morning. Right off I noticed this one lady on the front row, a soft pretty lady, small, with a sharp smart face. From day one, she looked right at me with her head cocked over to the side like a little hawk, sort of puzzling about me. They said her name was Mrs. Nina Gold Rothmann, except they called her Doctor. She got to be the foreman of the jury even though she wasn’t a man. And for two whole weeks of the State’s making its case against me, she’s about never took her eyes off me.

Now the State’s done and it’s time for our side to “shred them to pieces,” according to Mr. Snow, except I’m not going to take the stand so there won’t be much shredding likely to get done. Maybe that’s why Dr. Rothmann’s made them all go off to talk to the judge now. Maybe she’s in there telling the judge just give Charmain Markell the death penalty so the jury can go on home. They must be about as sick of hearing about that gun and kerosene and Kyle’s eleven points against Wake Forest as I am.

The first day of my trial I didn’t like Dr. Rothmann. It’s rude to stare the way she does. But after a while I kind of felt like we was almost talking to each other. I heard all about her life at what they call the vow deer, I believe. She had to tell about herself to get on the jury, or get off it, which a lot of them tried to because of their jobs or kids or whatever. They said she was a big doctor at the Research Center. She told how she was working on what we’re all made up of, genomes, something like that. When you know their genomes, you can tell people what they’re going to die of someday. Well, but I guess I don’t need a research center to tell me that. Lethal injection. Least if the District Attorney, Mr. Goodenough, gets his way. Anyhow, this foreman lady’s job of sorting out our genomes sounded hard but interesting and I could tell she cared a lot about it from the way she talked. At first I smiled at her just to be polite, but later on it was sort of personal because she was divorced and had a boy in college. And I thought that was kind of like me-I mean, I’ve got one little boy and no husband anymore too. So a lot of days went by in court with me and Dr. Rothmann looking at each other. I started figuring out some beauty tips I could of given her if she’d come in Pretty Woman. She had three suits that didn’t do much for her; the sleeves were too long so she just had them rolled up. Her hands were nice though; somebody did a good job on her nails, but not us-I never saw her in Pretty Woman and I do all their hands.

After a while I decided her eyes weren’t mean, she was just thinking hard all the time, not like some folks on my jury that were taking naps with their eyes open. Not that I blame them. All that State’s evidence was boring me, and it was my life. But Dr. Rothmann, she hung in there even with that old fat Mr. Goodenough mumbling about ballistics this and ballistics that for four solid hours. Isn’t it something? I could not make myself listen.

After a week or so Dr. Rothmann got to be somebody I could kind of talk to in my mind in my cell at night, like maybe explain things to her that were all balled up inside me like string in a junk drawer, like she’d be smart enough to see how they’d look if they got untangled. When I looked at her over there in the jury box, I felt like she could see what was true. I tried to explain it to my lawyer, Tilden Snow, but he said, “I don’t trust Rothmann.” He figured the D.A. must know something or he wouldn’t have let her on my jury because he said usually the State avoids these Ph.D.’s like the plague on account of they are soft on crime.

Yesterday I told Mr. Snow in the visiting room how, deep down, I thought the foreman lady was kind of sweet and he snorts at me, “She’s about as sweet as a jar of pickled okra.” I said I was surprised somebody rich as him even ate pickled okra but he tells me, “Charmain, I’ve got a grandmama same as you and she loved pickled okra.”

I say, “I know you do because my grandma used to clean her house and your mama’s house.”

He says, “I know. Your grandmama was the White Tornado.”

“Yes, she was and still is. She quit your mama,” I say.

He wants to know why but he’s not surprised.

I tell him. “Your mama called her a servant and said how she had to iron your daddy’s boxer shorts. And Mawmaw’s like, ‘No thank you, Mrs. Snow, I am not your servant and I am not about to put my hands in a strange man’s underpants.’”

Mr. Snow-I’m sorry, I don’t want to call him Tilden-laughed. He says, “I didn’t know that. And here’s something I bet you don’t know. I remember you. Your grandmama brought you to the house with her one time while she was cleaning-”

I nod. “She brought me with her to a lot of houses because I helped her clean till I started at Pretty Woman.”

“Well, one time when I was there visiting my grandma and I guess I was about six or seven, I asked you if you wanted to swing on my swing and then I asked you if you’d marry me. Do you remember that?”

“No.”

“You don’t remember that?”

“I’m sorry.”

He shook his head like he couldn’t believe I’d forget he wanted to marry me when I was four or five years old. Then he stacked up all his papers to go. He says, “Well, my grandmama was a bitch on wheels. And I bet the same can be said for your sweet Dr. Nina Rothmann.”

People think you can’t be nice and smart both but I don’t see why. Mawmaw used to tell me and my brother Tanner, “I’d rather have sweetness and niceness in a child than a report card full of As,” but why couldn’t she get both? Course the last A she ever saw was the one I got in algebra in tenth grade. But I blame that on going out almost every night with Kyle, who was a senior and the star of the basketball team. Rich as Tilden Snow was, even he wasn’t popular like Kyle. So my grades slipped. Meanwhile my brother Tanner would probably still be stuck in first grade if all his teachers hadn’t passed him along to get him out of their classrooms. I bet he’s the only boy ever flunked conduct in a elementary school.

Our grandma Mawmaw raised me and Tanner after Daddy and Mama got killed trying to beat a Food Lion truck through an intersection. She said they wasn’t cut out to be parents anyhow, due to drugs, drink and the NASCAR tracks. They dropped us off at Mawmaw’s almost every night even before they got killed. Mawmaw said my Mama was the only thing my Daddy ever met that was as fast as him. He loved speed and speed killed him in the long run. And he took my Mama along for the ride. Only twenty-four, both of them, which is how old I am now, so I guess twenty-four is just a real unlucky year for the Lubys in general, since that’s how old my brother Tanner was three years ago when he held up the ABC store while still on parole.

Poor Mawmaw, she used to tell me with my brother Tanner it was déjà vu right back to our daddy only worse. Daddy was Mawmaw’s only child and she said he was one too many. Plus she said she didn’t have her strength like she used to. But she never quit. Thirty-five years at the job and she’s still cleaning houses. Because of her I was never cold and I was never hungry and I was never made to feel no good. And I know my little boy Jarrad never will be either, if Mawmaw can just hold on to him against Kyle’s mama’s, Mrs Markell’s, lawsuit. Kyle’s mama getting her hands on jarrad scares me more than a lethal injection. I mean, look how Kyle turned out. So bad his own wife shot him.

Way back when Daddy was fourteen and he robbed Mawmaw’s purse, stole her car and drove it down to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, she asked her minister at Church of the Open Door if the devil could of got her pregnant while she was asleep at night, ’cause she’d started wondering if Daddy was the son of Satan. But the minister said the Devil don’t make personal acquaintanceships in the modern world. Well, that minister never met my husband Kyle Markell. And I wish I could say the same. When Mawmaw came down to the hospital after they pumped out my stomach, she told me the only way somebody wouldn’t have killed Kyle sooner or later was they never met him. But I sure don’t think Mawmaw figured it’d be me. I never was a violent person, never yelled, never cursed, and I never could stand blood. I couldn’t even cut up a frog in biology. And when that Clemson guard whammed his elbow into Kyle’s nose his freshman year and they couldn’t stop the bleeding, I fainted dead away in the stands. I fainted other times too, like when Kyle had juliaRoberts put to sleep just because of her seizures. That was my dog that had eyes like Julia Roberts. I’m convinced Kyle ran over her with the van and swore he didn’t. I never wanted to hurt anything in this world till the day I picked up that gun and told Kyle to put down that basketball and shut the fuck up.

Anyhow, the reason I wouldn’t go on the stand in my own defense was the samples Mr. Snow gave of what the District Attorney would likely ask me. I wouldn’t tell that sort of thing to Mawmaw on my deathbed, much less testify on a Bible about it to everybody in my hometown. Like the weird disgusting stuff Kyle heard on the Internet that he kept trying to make me do in bed. And Mr. Snow said how they’d twist things all around so lies would look true and the true things sound like lies. So I kept telling the lawyer the same thing I used to tell Kyle. No thank you. He got real upset. The lawyer, I mean. To be honest it was nothing much compared to the way Kyle used to freak out on me when he was alive, which I guess it’s my fault he’s not anymore. All my lawyer does is grumble how I’m tying his hands behind his back. One day early on in the trial he said I had a sympathetic personality and was young and petite and pretty-the way his eyes shifted around behind his glasses when he said that, I had the feeling he was coming on to me without even knowing it, which would be pretty strange considering, but he wouldn’t be the first man that got strange on me at the wrong time. His idea was if I took the stand and started crying I could maybe win over the jury to go easy on me even if Kyle had played in the Sweet Sixteen.

Three weeks back, the night before my trial started, my lawyer goes, “I don’t want to scare you, Charmain”-(Sure!)-but he explains how unless I testify so he can bring up about the drug stuff and weird sex stuff and the 911 and the rest of it, I could get Death.

I’m like, “Well, okay, then, I’ll take Death. But I won’t take the stand.”

He’s like, “Great. You know who’s gonna love this? The District Attorney. You know why? Because you just lay down in the death chamber, Charmain, handed him the needle and said stick it in!” He shakes this bunch of papers in my face. “Look at this, look at this, look at this!”

I say, “Excuse me but I heard you the first time.”

“This is State’s evidence. These are exhibits the State’s gonna be showing to the jury and you don’t think they’re not going to have a seriously deleterious impact?”

Well, I didn’t know what “deleterious” means but from the twitch in his mouth I could tell it wasn’t good. I looked at the papers. Stuff like:

STATE EXHIBIT #7. One desert eagle mark VII.44-caliber Magnum pistol, black matte finish. Six-inch barrel. Fingerprints of defendant on grip.

STATE EXHIBIT #13. Eight-round clip of.44 Magnum shells. Two rounds fired.

STATE EXHIBIT #28. Emptied kerosene can. Fingerprints of defendant on handle.

STATE EXHIBIT #51. Two.44 Magnum slugs taken from cranium of the deceased.

STATE EXHIBIT #85. Five-page letter of confession to shooting on Marriott stationery signed by defendant.

STATE EXHIBIT #97. ACC tournament basketball with bullet hole.

STATE EXHIBIT #103. Photographs of partially burned corpse of the deceased.

I said it did look like they had plenty of exhibits. Tilden Snow just nodded like his head was on a spring. But he was right about them making the most of what they had. For two weeks mornings and afternoons that sour-faced District Attorney, Mr. Goodenough, kept shaking plastic Baggies with those exhibits in them in front of the jury’s faces. He made it all sound like I was the original black widow spider. The worst was the pictures of Kyle’s body. I didn’t look at them. But the foreman lady, Dr. Rothmann, turned gray as a old dishrag when Mr. Goodenough shoved them at her, and I’m not sure how much she even saw because she turned her head so fast.

I’d rather be dead anyhow probably. I mean, I already tried. And failed flat as I did Algebra II when I was going out with Kyle every night, which was a shame, I mean the algebra ’cause it was kind of interesting. But at the time, I’m sorry to say, not as interesting as Kyle, who was already such a big basketball star at Creekside High he was on the news just about every week, leaping and dribbling and dodging and tossing. He could have had any girl he wanted in Creekside High and I was such an idiot I was glad he picked me.

Anyhow, I tried to die after I killed Kyle but I didn’t. I woke up alive in the ICU and I could just hear Kyle laughing that snuffling way he had about how Charmain Luby never could do a single thing right. But I did try. I bought a shelf’s worth of every pill Wal-Mart’s had on display, then I went to the Marriott and got most of them down with a bottle of vodka which tasted terrible because I’m not much of a drinker. I propped my letter to Mawmaw against the ice bucket and took out my silver-framed picture of my baby Jarrad (that Mrs. Markell got named Kyle, Jr., on the certificate) and I lay down with the picture on the bed and cried myself to sleep. I felt like I was dying and they said I would of too if it hadn’t been for the highway patrol knocking the door down and rushing me to the emergency clinic.

It was my brother’s Mercury Cougar got the police there, which I didn’t know was a stolen vehicle at the time I parked it out in front of the Marriott on Old 89, not that anything Tanner did would surprise me anymore. They had a whatever-you-call-it out for his car and it was a easy color to spot, Light Sapphire Blue, plus had a Pirates of the Caribbean flag from Disney World hanging on the antenna, plus Florida plates. They weren’t even looking for me yet. So they saved my life anc. went for the death penalty.

I always wanted to stay in that Marriott. Or any Marriott. Even on our honeymoon Kyle took me to a Motel 6 at the beach. “I’m not paying good money for a bed in the dark.” He wouldn’t eat in nice restaurants either. “I’m not paying good money for something that’s going to turn to shit in three hours.” Kyle always called it good money and I guess what was good about it was he never spent it on me. He spent it on drugs and what he called Antique Vehicles. He collected old junk motorbikes, cars and trucks, and anything else crappy that used to move and now couldn’t anymore. He claimed their “value” was “going through the roof” someday and then he’d fix them and sell them for a fortune on the Internet. But he never did, surprise surprise. All he did was leave them there turning to red rust and weeds I couldn’t get at to pull. Between his antique vehicles and his basketball court, he used up all the space in my yard so I couldn’t grow a vegetable garden. He squashed my peonies under a 1952 Ford truck and he shot free throws standing on top of my tulip bulbs. Mostly up Kyle’s nose is where the good money went. And I got Motel 6.

Where I really always wanted to stay at was the Polynesian Resort at Disney World. But considering what’s happened, it don’t take the Psychic Hotline to tell me Disney World’s not in my future, because even if I don’t get Death, I’ll get Life.

My brother Tanner went to Disney World. Drove down to Orlando right after he got out on the ABC store thing. I wish he’d taken me with him. At least I would have seen the Magic Kingdom. Or I wish he’d never come back with that Mercury Cougar that stopped me from dying at the Marriott. Or I wish he hadn’t come back at all, so I wouldn’t have gone over to his trailer and seen his Desert Eagle Mark VII.44-caliber Magnum pistol I shot Kyle with. (Mr. Goodenough has been talking for weeks about that gun, like it was the most important thing in my life, so that’s how I know so much about it now, because believe me at the time I borrowed it from Tanner, all I knew was it was black and heavy and if you pulled the trigger a bullet came out.) Most of all I wish I’d never eloped with Kyle.

I picked the Marriott because I figured as far as me and a nice motel goes it was sort of now or never, since I planned on meeting my Maker after those medications took hold-if there’s even Anybody up there to meet, though I’d hate for Mawmaw to hear me wondering something like that. And you know what’s funny-not really funny but freaky-is at first I was thinking, Ha ha, wait’ll Kyle gets this Visa bill, he’ll turn totally purple, because on top of $129 at the Marriott, I had tore through Wal-Mart, looking like Kyle used to on the basketball court before they found out he was using cocaine. After I loaded up on medications, I bought Mawmaw a Hoover Deluxe because she brings her own equipment to the job, plus $326.59 worth of toys for her to put out under the tree next Christmas for Jarrad. It took me a long time to choose the toys and it was like I forgot I didn’t have a long time. That’s what was funny. I had completely forgot I’d killed Kyle, shot him in the head and drug him out in the yard and set fire to him right under his basketball hoop with a big pile of brush and a gallon can of kerosene.

Then when I was lying on the king-sized bed in the Marriott swallowing those pills, it hit me how there was no way Kyle was ever going to pitch another fit over the Visa bill or the other million things he blamed me for, like his whole entire life, which I used to be dumb enough to think was my fault. And then it hit me how it was Mawmaw that was gonna get stuck with that huge Visa bill. And how it was Jarrad that was gonna get stuck with his friends saying his mama had murdered his daddy, which is worse than what I had to put up with in school because of my name and that was bad enough, calling me Toilet Paper and “Please don’t touch the Charmain.” Plus jokes about my parents being trash and roadkill. Trying to write a letter for Jarrad to read when he was old enough was the last thing I remember.

My lawyer said a suicide attempt didn’t look good for me in some ways, and did look good in others. The way it did look good was it showed I wasn’t in my right mind and was full of remorse and confusion and maybe had acted “on impulse” and wasn’t trying to get away with something. The way it didn’t look good was I’d left a note for Mawmaw asking her to apologize to Mr. and Mrs. Markell for me and say I hoped they could forgive me for killing their son but not saying anything about how shooting Kyle was a accident, or self-defense, or spur-of-the-moment, or too much to drink, or some other reason why it wouldn’t be Murder One. Plus setting fire to Kyle with kerosene-my lawyer said that had the look of a cover-up.

I guess it was a cover-up, just not enough of one. But it’s true, I couldn’t stand the idea of Mawmaw and Jarrad (when he was old enough) thinking I killed anybody, much less my husband, and I guess that’s why I tried to get rid of his body. I figured if Kyle was just gone and everybody thought he’d run off to Hawaii or something, then Mawmaw wouldn’t get her life ruined and Jarrad would have, I don’t know, a chance, I guess. When I tried to explain my reason to Mawmaw in the hospital, she said my Mama and Daddy hadn’t had half a brain between them but she had used to think I did have some brains. But I’d handed them over to Kyle to wipe his feet on. She said there wasn’t no reason for acting the way I had, and I had to accept I’d acted crazy and move on from there.

But I will swear this on a Bible. I never thought Mr. and Mrs. Markell would drop by our house that afternoon (which is something they never did, and Kyle sure never told me he’d asked them to supper) and find Kyle only half burnt up. I figured that brush pile would burn on through the weekend-nobody lives near us and besides Kyle liked to keep trash burning out back so you couldn’t smell his marijuana. I’d figured by the time anybody showed up, I’d be gone to Heaven or probably Hell, considering, and Jarrad would be at Mawmaw’s safe anc sound, and when Kyle wasn’t at Creekside Ford on Tuesday, because he had Monday off, somebody would call the house, and then one of his coworkers would come over and think he was gone. I never figured Mr. and Mrs. Markell would be wandering through my kitchen by four o’clock on Sunday, and they’d see the smoke and walk out to that brush pile. Because that is something parents should never have to see. Their son burning up in his backyard. And I do apologize for that.

Another thing that didn’t look good for me was my brother Tanner and the fact that I’d borrowed Tanner’s gun three whole days before I used it to shoot Kyle with. My lawyer called it “our elephant in the kitchen.” Before Tilden Snow got to be my lawyer, I admitted in my statement that I took the gun out of Tanner’s refrigerator and brought it home with me. “That gun implies premeditation, Charmain, which is why Goodenough’s going for first-degree homicide.” He (I mean Tilden Snow) couldn’t stop trying to get me to say something that wasn’t true about that gun. “Charmain, go back to that time frame. I want you to let me know when I say something that correlates to your motivation.” I swear that’s the way he talks; sometimes even the judge looks at him like he’s nuts.

But when Mr. Snow says, “Okay, go back,” I say I’m not going anywhere. He doesn’t listen any more than Kyle did. “Maybe you took the gun because you didn’t want your brother Tanner to get in trouble with it.”

I say, “No, I didn’t.”

“Maybe you took the gun because there’d been crime in the isolated rural area you lived in and you felt afraid to be in the house with Kyle gone.”

I say, “All I wanted was to be in the house with Kyle gone.”

He jumps on this. “So maybe you felt afraid to be in the house with Kyle and wanted that gun for self-defense.”

I shake my head.

He sighs. “Maybe you weren’t even aware you took the gun.”

I say, “Now, Mr. Snow-”

“Tilden.”

“How could I not know I took it? That thing weighs a ton.”

He never did ask me to tell him why I did take the gun out of Tanner’s refrigerator. But he made that a rule from the very start. The day we met, he said, “Charmain, don’t answer any questions I don’t ask you. Don’t tell me anything I don’t tell you I want to know. Do you understand?”

I shrug. “Sure.” And that was the end of honest communication. That’s what the marriage counselor I got for me and Kyle two years ago said good relationships was based on. Honest communication. But that marriage counselor was a moron, plus started hitting on me every time Kyle went to the toilet (which was pretty often and the reason why good money got sniffed straight up his nose). All I hope is, that moron’s marriage-counseling business has already gone bust. It can’t be real good for business when one of your patients shoots her husband in the head and sets fire to him. I told Mawmaw back when I quit the marriage counselor, “That man didn’t respect me any more than Kyle did.”

That’s when she said the thing that was haunting me from right then till a year later when I pulled the trigger on Kyle. She took my hands in hers that were like tree bark they were so rough, and none of the paraffin wax dips I give her could do a thing for them. She said, “Charmain, you listen to me. Since I was eleven years old I been cleaning out other people’s toilets and the only way I can stand it is, I get the respect of the folks I work for and if I don’t, I don’t work for them no more. Listen to me, you got to earn respect. But when you do earn it, you make sure they give it to you. They can’t make you turn any which way they want to. You got to learn that, honey. You’re my only hope that thirty-five years on my knees with a scrub brush wasn’t just a gob of spit in a week of rain. You got to learn that.”

I said, “Mawmaw, I’m trying.”

She said, “I know, baby. You’re my hope. Because the Savior knows your brother Tanner is nothing but your daddy born again to torment me.”

My lawyer felt about the same way about Tanner as Mawmaw. He said Tanner looked bad for us. First of all, he had a record of crime and violence that Mr. Goodenough could use to show a bad family background or bad genes or whatever. Second of all, Tanner had told the police he’d advised me to shoot Kyle and had said he’d be glad to shoot Kyle himself if I didn’t want to. After he blabbed this total lie at the police station (and Tanner would always say any wild thing he could think of to get attention), for a little while the police got the idea in their heads that Tanner had shot Kyle. They kept trying to get me to admit I was just pretending I was the one had killed Kyle, instead of my brother. They accused me of lying to protect him because he had a record and I didn’t. The police chief came to the hospital after my suicide attempt, questioning me about that.

I go, “I’m sorry. But I am not a liar. And I wouldn’t lie for my brother about something like this.”

The police chief, a nice man, with a little smile like life was one big joke, said, “Wouldn’t you lie to protect him, Mrs. Markell? Isn’t that a Luby family trait? I remember when your brother shot ya’ll’s cousin Crawder Luby in the chest at point-blank range following an argument over a girl in the parking lot of Lucille’s Steak House.”

I say, “Tanner was never charged with shooting Crawder.”

“That’s exactly right. Tanner drove Crawder to Piedmont Hospital and tossed him out in front of the emergency entrance. Now, when we came to interview your cousin Crawder, he claimed he had no idea who’d shot him. That’s why we never could charge Tanner with that crime because his cousin that he shot stood by him. So, yes, Charmain, I think you Lubys will lie to protect each other.”

“Well, I won’t,” I said.

Pretty soon they had to believe me because it turned out Tanner was off with Crawder the day I shot Kyle. They’d gone deep-sea fishing off of Wrightsville Beach and had run out of gas and had to be rescued by the Coast Guard. That’s why Tanner’d given me his Mercury Cougar to keep till he came back. At least I thought it was his. Now I see he was hiding it out.

So then the police believed I shot Kyle and wanted to know why. Was it for money? Was there another man in my life? But by then Mawmaw had got Tilden Snow III to represent me and every time I’d open my mouth he’d say, “Don’t answer that, Charmain.” Mawmaw got him because she knew he and his daddy and grandpa were all lawyers, and they knew her from back when she was the White Tornado in their house. He took my case on what he called pro bono.

According to my cousin Crawder, Tilden Snow III only did it because it was a good way for him to make his name as big as his Daddy’s, since newspaper and TV people were crawling all over us at my trial. That was a little bit because they said I don’t look like your regular-type killer, plus had been a Teen for Christ, even if some big snoots in town called my family white trash, and Mrs. Markell didn’t think I was good enough to marry her son Kyle since he’d been a big basketball star in high school and started out that way in college and scored eleven points at the NCAA tournament Sweet Sixteen game. He could of kept on playing too if he hadn’t got caught using cocaine.

But the other thing was two people in Creekside besides me had murdered somebody this same year and it’s not that big a place. So we were getting a reputation. A Mexican man used rat poison on his wife, which folks thought was a accident at first because that part of town did have rats you couldn’t kill with a pitchfork unless you hit them with a sledgehammer first. But then they found the rat poison in his wife’s Maalox. Then Lucas Beebee (who was crazy and everybody in town knew it) used a chain saw on a Jehovah’s Witness and put her toes and ears in a flower arrangement on his mother’s dining room table. A friend of the victim was there for the Beebee Easter buffet and recognized this woman’s earbobs in the ears and called the police. So Kyle’s murder was number three in a year and instead of Creekside, North Carolina, which is our real name, they started calling us “ Homicide, U.S.A. ” for a joke.

So Mr. Goodenough the D.A. said he was going to make an example out of me and he sure has tried. He’s been elected District Attorney in Creekside for twenty years running and they say it’s mostly because of his name. I remember those campaign billboards from when I was little: HE’S GOODENOUGH FOR YOU.

At my trial the D.A. said I had broke every vow I took in church when I promised to love and honor Kyle till death do us part. He said I was a black mark on the holy name of “Wife.” Every chance he got he told the jury how Kyle had been a basketball star and played for the ACC because around here that’s like saying you taught Jesus how to walk on water. He held up that souvenir basketball Kyle had from the Sweet Sixteen game that I’d shot a hole in and he carried on about it almost like it was worse I’d shot the damn basketball than shot Kyle in the head. That’s when I could see Dr. Rothmann on the jury start to fidget in her seat like she wanted to tell the judge to make the D.A. stop talking so much about how this was the very same basketball that Kyle had shot that three-pointer with, with two seconds left in overtime. Dr. Rothmann even rolled her eyes at the ceiling when the D.A. said how I’d cut short a promising young man’s great career in pro basketball when even the newspapers knew it was drugs cut short Kyle’s career when he had to drop out of college his sophomore year and no pro basketball team had given him the time of day since. He couldn’t even have held on to his job at Creekside Ford if his uncle hadn’t owned it.

Now, my brother Tanner is so dumb he figured it would look better for me if he told the police he gave me the gun to take home because Kyle hit me all the time and I was scared of him. The truth is, I don’t believe Tanner even knew I took his pistol out of his refrigerator that day.

And Kyle didn’t hit me. Oh, he said he was going to hit me all the time, but he didn’t have the guts. His style was more stuff like kicking my dog JuliaRoberts when I wasn’t looking. Or pouring nail polish on my new winter coat and saying Jarrad did it when Jarrad was so little he couldn’t even walk yet. Or making fun of me in front of his stupid buddies at Creek-side Ford. Or smacking Jarrad in the face when he was a tiny baby, which is the one time I ever slapped anybody in my life, when I slapped Kyle as hard as I could except it mostly just got his shoulder and he laughed at me.

So I couldn’t help Tilden Snow with his plan to use the “battered wife syndrome.” The only 911 ever got called from out house was me getting the ambulance for Kyle when he sniffed too much cocaine and knocked over his trophy case and almost bled to death from broken glass. Course if I’d let him die that time maybe me and Jarrad would be in Disney World right this minute, staying at the Polynesian Resort.

I don’t mean to make it sound like I wanted a fancy life. And maybe this is what I would of tried to explain to Dr. Rothmann if there’d been a way for her and me to talk. I could of took not having things, easy, no problem, if I’d had somebody that loved me, even liked me. Because you can hit somebody without laying a hand on them, which is what Kyle kept doing to me. That’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about what Mawmaw said about how I was her only hope and had to earn respect. So I told Kyle he had to respect me more and not make me feel small. But he laughed at me and said, “Yeah, well, maybe I would if you stuck a gun in my face.”

So that’s really why it all happened. That’s why when I was over at Tanner’s trailer and I saw that black pistol of his in the refrigerator, all of a sudden I got the idea I’d do just what Kyle said. Next time he was making fun of me, I’d stick a gun in his face.

So that Friday when Tanner carried Jarrad down to the pond to look at the ducks, I took his gun and hid it in my purse. Then on Saturday Mawmaw watched Jarrad for me and I worked all day at Pretty Woman. That night was bad because Kyle was trying to make me do stuff in bed I didn’t want to. Sunday morning he’s mad at me. He’s sitting on the couch in his underpants and wearing his old college basketball shirt, Number 56, click-clacking with that straight razor blade at his cocaine. I’m trying to get me and Jarrad dressed to go pick up Mawmaw for church and I’m late. Then Kyle tells me to nuke him a cup of coffee and when I can’t get the microwave to go off Defrost, he starts laughing about “No-Brain Charmain.” Then pretty soon he starts bouncing his souvenir Sweet Sixteen basketball off the living room wall like he was in a gym and not our living room.

Then he starts in on me about the Visa bill and what was I buying shoes for “that kid” for anyhow when he was so dumb he couldn’t even walk yet so he must take after me? I’m looking at Kyle bouncing that basketball while I’m standing there crying, and Jarrad’s crying too because I’m crying. I’m thinking, How dumb was I marrying this man when I was just sixteen when Mawmaw begged me to at least finish high school? How dumb was I not knowing maybe he was a freshman in college and a big basketball player, but he was still, excuse me, a total asshole?

So I’m standing in the living room, holding Jarrad. Kyle’s yelling about the Visa bill, and my whole body fills up with the idea that year after year after year for the rest of our lives Kyle’ll do the same kind of meanness to me and he’ll do it to Jarrad too if I don’t make him respect me starting now. And that’s the first time I think about Tanner’s gun since I took it. So I walk down the hall to our bedroom and I put Jarrad in his crib. Now he’s crying at the top of his lungs, and I can hear Kyle yelling from the living room, “Shut him the fuck up!” I go get the pistol out of the bottom drawer of my bureau where I hid it and I walk back in the living room and I stick it in Kyle’s face and I say, “You shut the fuck up.”

He’s surprised and his mouth falls open. But he’s not scared. And then he laughs. “Hey, where’d you get that thing?” he says, pointing at the gun. “You planning to shoot somebody?” I don’t say a word, I just keep looking at him. He says, “Well, No-Brain, if you’re planning to shoot a pistol you got to take the safety off.” He laughs some more and then he snatches the gun right out of my hand. He waves it in my face and says, sarcastic, “Here you go.” He snaps this little lever on the side of the handle. “That’s the safety.” Then he hands the pistol back to me. “Knock yourself out.”

Off in our room, Jarrad’s bottle falls out of his crib and he cries harder.

All of a sudden Kyle starts throwing the basketball against the wall close to me. He breaks a lamp. Down the hall Jarrad screams like the world’s gone crazy and Kyle turns purple. “I told you, shut that stupid kid up!”

I say, “You’re scaring him.”

Kyle screams, “I’ll scare him okay!” And then he throws the basketball hard right at me and hits me in the head with it. Then he grabs the ball back and spins around to run down the hall. And that’s when I pull the trigger. The pistol goes off. The noise was so loud it hurt. Most of the back of Kyle’s head flies away. But he spins around and it goes off again and then it flings out of my hand. His knees bend, and it’s weird, it’s just like he’s at the free-throw line and is going for a basket. But then he drops the ball, which is all crumpled because I shot it, and his knees give way like the floor fell out from under him. He jerks over sideways and lands hard. The whole room shakes. Down the hall Jarrad keeps screaming. All I can think about is, at least Jarrad didn’t see it but the noise must have scared him. I run and go pick up my baby and I hide his eyes against me so he can’t see Kyle lying there and we run out of the house. I drive Jarrad to Mawmaw’s and tell her I can’t go to church. I say I had a fight with Kyle and I can’t talk about it now. Then I go back home and Kyle’s still lying there with blood oozed out all around his head and his stomach. I have to run to the bathroom ’cause I’m sick to my stomach. I don’t know what to do. I just keep wishing I could make it go away. After a while I get an old blanket and wrap him in it. He’s cold but I try not to touch him. I think I fainted. I don’t remember the rest but I must of drug him out to the backyard and poured the kerosene on him and lit it.

That’s the truth. If I could take the stand and tell Dr. Nina Rothmann the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, that’s what I’d tell her.

But Mr. Goodenough made out how I’d plotted and planned to kill Kyle for his insurance policy and how I sneaked up on him and shot him in the back of the head from behind. Like I would plan for Jarrad to hear that gun go off so loud! The D.A. claimed how I tore up my own house to make it look like burglars so people would think I wasn’t anywhere around and it was the burglars that set fire to my husband. But how I was so dumb I used my own brother’s gun and left my fingerprints on it and on the kerosene can too and left them both right at the scene. The D.A. said I never meant to really commit suicide in the Marriott. It was a “ploy.”

Mr. Goodenough spent a lot of time telling the jury, “Imagine the horror and anguish” of Mr. and Mrs. Markell when they saw their only son smoldering on a brush pile. Then he’d hold up the crime scene photos (that my lawyer tried to get excluded but he lost) and wave them right at the jury and shout, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, just imagine!”

Both the Markells testified against me. They were the State’s last witnesses. Mr. Markell slumped and looked beaten down. Mrs. Markell could scarcely sit still on the stand she hated me so much. Course that was true even before all this. I didn’t like her either. She had spoiled Kyle so bad he told me himself how when he was little he would kick and slap her and she wouldn’t do a thing about it if they were in public except give him what he wanted. On the stand Mrs. Markell said it didn’t surprise her at all that I’d killed her son and she wouldn’t rest easy till I had paid the price. They had to haul her off the chair she was shouting at me so loud even after she was excused. Her face looked just like Kyle’s when he was yelling.

I’ll tell you how I could rest easy even strapped down in the death chamber. That’s if I knew Priscilla Markell had lost her case trying to get my baby Jarrad away from Mawmaw. I can’t stand the thought of her screaming at Jarrad until he turns into a screamer too. And Tilden Snow has promised me he won’t let that happen even if I do get the maximum. Which he’s worried I’m going to get if all he’s got on the defense side is character witnesses and the emergency doctor saying I really did try to kill myself judging from my stomach.

But some things you can’t do. And letting Mr. Goodenough ask me sarcastic personal questions and twist my answers around into lies and make fun of me and say I don’t deserve to be Jarrad’s mama is one of them.

So that’s all the far we’d got to in my trial by this morning. And that’s when all of a sudden Dr. Rothmann calls over the bailiff and hands him a note and then the judge studies it for a minute at the bench and then the judge says we’re taking a recess and he calls Counselor Goodenough and Counselor Snow to “come in my chambers,” and they all leave us sitting here, waiting and waiting.

About an hour later, Tilden Snow comes back looking surprised but sort of smug. He motions for Mawmaw to lean forward and he whispers to us all this stuff about how Mr. Goodenough was backing down and dropping Murder One because otherwise he’s going to get a hung jury and how if they could work it out would I agree to say I’d shot Kyle but I didn’t plan to. Would I say I did it without premeditating and when I’d gone to pieces for a minute. I look at Mawmaw and she pats my hand. I tell him yes I will say that because it’s the truth. Tilden Snow says I ought to thank my stars he got Dr. Rothmann put on my jury! I swear I think he even believed it was his plan all along, after he’d told me I was wrong for trusting her. He runs back off to the judge’s chambers, all puffed up like a little rooster in a tan suit.

So we wait some more. After a while Mawmaw leans over again from the row behind me and every now and then I can feel her hand patting me on the back. Right through my blouse I can feel the stiffness of her fingers and the calluses and rough spots on her hand like each one had a memory in it like a electric spark. I can see her mopping the kitchen floor of this house, and me helping her make the beds in that house, and us walking in the rain to the bus stop from this other house, dropping off the trash bags on the way. I can see her fingers working to tie the bow on my dress the day she took me to Tilden Snow’s grandma’s big house that they called Heaven’s Hill. That was the day the little boy ran out the front door and hollered, “That’s my swing. Get off of it.” It was only after his grandmama came out with Mawmaw and told him to be nice to me because I belonged to the cleaning lady that he said, “I’m Tilden Snow. You want to marry me?”

I said to him, “No, I don’t.” And I looked over at Mawmaw ’cause I was worried she’d be mad but she was smiling like I had said the right thing.

So I’m feeling all these memories in Mawmaw’s hand while she rubs my back. Then the jury comes back with the judge and all, and Dr. Rothmann stops in front of me for a second and looks right in my eyes. And I nod at her and behind me Mawmaw stands up and gives her a little bow.

After a lot of talking, the judge tells me to stand up and I do and say I’m guilty and I get fifteen years. The first thing I think is, I’ll get out in time for Jarrad’s high school graduation. Then they come over to take me out. I turn around and I grab both of Mawmaw’s hands and I kiss them. I say, “I’m sorry, Mawmaw, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

She says, “You hang on, baby.”

So I do.