13. Maggie
When someone put a song on the jukebox called Like a Hurricane, Maggie had to laugh. Well, she’d been laughing a lot tonight, despite the gale-force gusts outside Gator Jack’s Bar and Grill in Crawfordville.
She hadn’t expected her first hurricane party to be quite this much fun, but somehow Brick Collins made sure it was. She nursed a wine, sitting next to him at a centrally located table near the dance floor, feeling a little like a queen.
Every one of the sixty or so people jammed into the dive bar knew him and wanted to greet him. The man all but signed autographs. He also introduced Maggie—and Jo Ellen, when she wasn’t flitting around like a social butterfly—as his friend from Destin.
He carefully kept his promise to treat her as such, which just made her realize more and more that Brick was a gentleman. He might ride a Harley, have a bushy beard, too many tattoos, and speak with an accent that a duck hunter would envy, but he was a very, very good man.
Outside, a not so good man, Norman, was doing his worst. The rain came down on the metal roof in a roar, and every few minutes the wind buffeted the whole building and the lights flickered.
The front windows were shuttered tight, the door boarded up, the electricity still working with promises of a generator that would kick in five minutes after they lost power.
Inside, Gator Jack’s was warm and gold and defiantly alive. The jukebox was on overtime, dozens of locals, bikers, and a few stranded travelers who’d given up on the traffic packed in together.
They all hummed with that cheerful noise as though they’d decided, as a group, to not be afraid.
It was, Maggie thought, the most ridiculous place she had ever been happy. She’d shifted her attention to the dancers, searching for Jo Ellen, who was on the next level of happy tonight.
“You’re smiling,” Brick observed after a young couple had lingered talking to them for nearly half an hour, mostly about hunting deer, of all repugnant topics.
“Maybe. But probably this is my face at rest.”
“No. Your face at rest is just this side of an angry bird. That’s a smile. I’d like it noted for the record that I caused it.”
“You may note whatever you like. The record is not admissible.”
He laughed, the big, easy laugh that came up from somewhere under the gray beard, and Maggie sipped her wine to hide the fact that the laugh was increasingly…yes, attractive.
Even though there wasn’t anything objectively attractive about him. But there was definitely something…comfortable about him. She let her guard down because, honestly, carrying that thing around was a job.
“Where’d your partner in crime get to?” Brick asked.
“I was just wondering that.”
Ten minutes ago, Jo Ellen had been holding court near the jukebox, chatting with Charlene, the pink-haired bartender, who remembered them from when they’d been stranded travelers. She’d hugged them like they were her long-lost aunts.
But Jo Ellen, who’d been strutting around in white slacks and a red top, was nowhere to be found.
“Where could she be?” Brick asked, following Maggie’s gaze.
“That,” Maggie said, setting down her wine, “is the question I have been answering for sixty years.” She gave him a look. “My best friend has a reckless streak, an addiction to fun that one of her daughters inherited, and a penchant for finding the room where the boys are at a party.”
“I knew I loved that woman.”
She did, too, remembering the first time she’d learned this—at a mixer after pledging Tri-Delt, when Jo Ellen evaporated and Maggie found her on the back stairs of the Sigma Chi fraternity house, barefoot, refereeing a card game she was also somehow winning.
It would be one of many such nights.
“It’s my role in this friendship,” she told Brick, rising. “Kind of like air traffic control at every party.”
“You want help looking?”
“No, just tell me where the trouble is.”
He lifted a brow and looked at the bar. “Charlene’s on break. Go toward the ladies’ room, pass it, and open a door marked Employees Only near the back. Char usually takes a cigarette break outside, but obviously not tonight.”
“Be right back.”
“Another wine?” he asked.
She considered it, then nodded. “Sure. Thanks.”
Brick lifted his barely touched bourbon in salute. “Godspeed.”
Maggie found the door past the restrooms and inched it open, getting a whiff of cardboard and lemon cleaner and, underneath that, something sweet, sour, and bitter all at the same time.
She knew that smell, like a hazy memory, like an old song, like a…
She wouldn’t!
Maggie pulled the door fully open and stopped in the doorway just as Jo Ellen, sitting on an overturned milk crate, whipped her hand behind her back, her eyes wide, her lips sealed, looking as guilty as Nolie the time Maggie caught her with five Oreos an hour before dinner.
Next to her, Charlene leaned against a shelf of ketchup with the serene expression of a person who had ridden out a great many storms and intended to enjoy this one.
“What are you doing?” Maggie demanded with her Nolie-and-the-Oreos voice.
Jo kept her mouth shut tight.
“What’s behind your back?”
Still shut, but she squirmed. Charlene gave a soft snort.
“Are you smoking marijuana?” Maggie asked, breathing the unthinkable question.
Unable to hold her mouth closed any longer, Jo Ellen parted her lips and let out a puff of smoke.
“No,” she croaked. At Maggie’s look, she squirmed again, and brought her hand out…with a small burning stick in it. “Maybe.”
And then Jo and Charlene shared a look and a laugh like they were in the front row at a comedy club. Jo turned to Maggie with enormous, guilty, delighted eyes as she held up the joint.
“It’s like old times, Mags. Remember in college, right before we met Roger and Artie, and we—”
Maggie swiped her hand, forcing her to stop. “Jo Ellen, you are seventy-eight years old.”
“I am aware of my age, Mags, I was at all of the birthdays.” She looked at Charlene. “Many more than you’ve had.”
“Twice as many,” Charlene confirmed.
Jo Ellen stuck her tongue out at her, and they both melted into giggles.
“You are a grandmother.” Maggie scowled at her.
“Grandmothers are people, too,” Jo Ellen said, sitting up straighter, with the airy dignity of a drunk. Or a stoned person, whatever they were called—other than ridiculous.
“What if your kids walked in here right now? How would you feel if they saw you?”
She considered that as if it were a serious question. “Tessa would be proud. Kate would be…curious. How would Eli feel?”
Maggie huffed out a breath. “I hope to God I never have to find out.”
“Oh, please.” Jo Ellen wiggled the little smoldering thing at her. “Don’t you come in here and act scandalized, Magnolia. It is not as though we never did pot in college.”
Charlene made another choking sound. “Did pot? Is that what they said back…when?”
“Late sixties,” Jo Ellen said. “They heyday of ‘Mary Jane,’ as we called it.”
“No one called it that,” Maggie corrected her. “It never stuck.”
Jo Ellen flicked her wrist. “Whatever. We did it. And not just once, either.”
Not ever after she met Roger, Maggie thought, remembering his strong stance when they’d been at a party where people had smoked dope, which was what they’d called it. And Roger said there was a reason for that name—anyone who lit up a joint was a dope.
“We did it a few times,” Jo Ellen continued, her gaze on Maggie, her eyes soft and sentimental with memory.
“Remember that spring of ’68? Everything in the world was about to change.
” She turned and looked at Charlene. “Summer of ’68 was…
well, the world was crazy with riots and politics and war.
But we were blissfully unaware of all that, and we pooled our cash and Carol Ann Petrie’s boyfriend sold us a dime bag of Acapulco Gold.
Remember, Maggie? We smoked it on the roof of our sorority house, and you tried so hard to catch a moth—you insisted it was a butterfly—that you almost fell down into the azaleas. ”
Maggie wanted to deny that she ever did anything so uncouth, but…the azaleas. “They were white,” she recalled as the memory of the flowers and the night blasted her. “The brightest, whitest azaleas I’d ever seen. I’ve never been able to grow those with any success.”
“Wait, did you say a ‘dime bag’?” Charlene asked. “Does that mean…”
“Ten dollars,” Maggie supplied.
“No way.” Charlene smacked the ketchup shelf. “Inflation has hit.”
“And so has this.” Jo Ellen held up the no-longer-burning joint. “I like it.”
Maggie drew herself up to her full and considerable authority. “You know they put things in that now? Like…” She couldn’t think of the word for it so said the only thing she could remember. “Angel dust!”
There was a pause.
“Maggie.” Charlene’s voice was the very gentlest Maggie had heard it.
“That is a different drug. That is an entirely different drug, from a different decade, and it is not in my storeroom. I promise you, the last time anyone in the state of Florida said the words ‘angel dust’ with a straight face, the cellphone hadn’t been invented.
Actually, the whole internet. Maybe computers. ”
With that, Charlene pushed off the ketchup shelf and gave them an amused smile. “As much as I would love to hang and relive the sixties with you, I have a barroom full of humanity trying their level best to ignore a hurricane.”
She paused in the doorway and looked back at the two of them, a tender expression crossing her sharp but not completely unattractive features. The pink hair had to go, though.
“Y’all take your time. Storm’s not going anywhere. And you two have some nice memories to relive.” She winked at Maggie. “From when you ‘did pot.’”
Laughing, she left. The door swung shut behind her, and the roar of the bar dropped to a hum. The storeroom was suddenly small and close and private, just Maggie and Jo Ellen and the rain and…the acrid smell of marijuana.
“Sit down,” Jo Ellen said, patting another crate next to her. “I hate when you loom all judgey and put upon. Relax, Mags.”