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You little tart, just like my cousin Lenna,

Mom used to say. “Words fitly spoken are like apples of gold in pitchers of silver,” Solomon said in the book of Proverbs, but Mom quoted the Bible without internalizing it. “Everything is the mother's fault,” they say. But to be fair, the predicament she was in now began with a cat. Lenna's cat.

All right. Her present predicament went back farther than that. Technically speaking.

Dwayne always had anger issues. When the lying GPS took him to a shortcut full of potholes, he punched out the navigation screen in their car. “You see,” she said, stupidly enough, “I’ve been telling you not to trust that liar. That Emily. You always listen to her, not me.” Dwayne then proceeded to grab a fistful of her hair. He slammed her head against the passenger side window. It didn’t break--the window, that is--but that prying nurse who just so happened to attend the same church had to go notice her bruises, had to go put that paperback in her coat pocket (who else would have done it), and really, you might say her present predicament was all on account of Sandy, that nurse who tried telling her “marital rape” was a thing. That Mom’s mantra, “my lot in life,” was not Biblical. That women have “agency”--and by that she didn’t mean a business or organization.

Sandy also had a thing for pink carnations. Said "carnis" in Latin meant flesh, the flower's original pinkish color, and "incarnacyon" (incarnation) reminded us God made flesh, Jesus, who existed thanks to his mother Mary. Sandy was a character, all right. Pink carnations first appeared on earth from the Virgin Mary's tears, it was said, but Sandy took a more feminist approach to all things Biblical. Only in the Catholic faith, not among those Protestants, was a woman so exalted, Sandy said. Good thing Dwayne never attended church or Bible study groups. Sandy taught one. "Our Lady is revered as the first Christian," she said, honored because she did what no man could ever do. “But no living man am I! You look upon a woman,” Sandy quoted from somewhere, and it turned out not to be the Bible but Tolkien, which would only go to show that church-going women shouldn't put too much stock in what Sandy said. Mary, like some sort of Second Eve, had power to crush the serpent under her heel, and Dwayne was a serpent, a devil, and a good wife, a really good wife, would not serve the devil.

Well, her newfound “agency” put her in the old minivan with a 1989 road map to Mayer, a pistol in her purse, one Dwayne knew nothing about, or he’d have added it to his own arsenal. Gun shows, thousands upon thousands of dollars in ammo and weaponry, because of Y2K, the computer catastrophe that never came to pass when the clock rolled back to double zeros in a new century. Dwayne had anger issues, all right, and enough ammo to mow down every living or marginally living or artificially animated thing that angered him.

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Dwayne didn’t look like James Dean anymore. He looked like a paunchy, bald, mean old SOB, Sandy said. Along with that other word. Misogynist. And sociopath. And narcissist. These words were in the book-on-tape she replayed in the minivan on the road to Mayer, audio books from the prying nurse who couldn’t overlook a bruise or a history of raging UTIs (she couldn’t spell that out even in the privacy of her own heard, Urinary Tract Infection, or comprehend that Dwayne’s daily demands could be the cause of these.)

Lenna could have written a book on bad husbands.

You’d think these men had all read Shakespeare, had “internalized” (that was a Sandy word) the concept of The Taming of the Shrew, that men like Dwayne went after women like her because taming “the little tart” was more exciting than finding a gal who was already willing to follow him to the ends of the earth and make his happiness her life’s mission.

Seeing Lenna was her new mission, Lenna, that cousin Mom heard from once a year at Christmas, until Mom died. One year, in addition to the glad tidings that Jesus was born, Lenna had announced Rex’s death. The next year, she mentioned that Rory had moved in with her to help run the ranch. Everyone knew he had nowhere else to go and that his last gig had been the funny farm, but not even Lenna would mention his mental condition in a Christmas card. Lord knows she’d said worse things about the other loony tunes Rex had sired.

Time to revisit her mom's side of the family.

Who needed that lying GPS, anyway? She memorized the road map. Ninety miles out of town, as the sun was slinking westward, she turned onto a gravel road, found a narrow, grassy driveway into some farmer’s field of corn stubble, and spray-painted the old Chrysler minivan. One paint color was on clearance, burgundy. She slept all night in the van while the paint was drying, then drove fast on a muddy road to make sure the license plates were splattered beyond recognition.

Let Dwayne dare to track her down to Lenna’s. Rory lived in bear country and carried a big ol’ Winchester .30/30 bullet on his key ring. Rory was short and skinny, but Rory was like his mama, Lenna, “the little tart,” not the flirty kind of tart, but the saucy kind who took no sass from nobody.

Burgundy. “So much depends on the red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens,” some poet had notoriously said, but for her, so much depended on burgundy. Not the wine, so much as the place in France. That awful movie, where the Duke of Burgundy betrayed Joan of Arc and she ended up burning at the stake, in spite of her confidence in God.

What really put the nail in the coffin for Dwayne was the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral, so there it was again, the things that brought her to this state. You might have said it was fire in France led to her present predicament.

Why pin it all on the cat?

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Day 593: 5 Minute Freewrite: Wednesday - Prompt: carnation

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