Black Coffee Fiction Volume 2

Black Coffee Fiction

Volume Two

Bettyann Moore

Wade Peterson

and

Colleen Sutherland

Copyright 2013 Bettyann Moore, Wade Peterson and Colleen Sutherland

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors.

To my incredible daughters and amazing granddaughter, with love.

—BM

To Susan Marie, writer, romantic, steadfast friend and role model.

–CS

To Mom and Dad, whose stories inspire my own.

—WP

Contents

Part I: Porpoise

His Cross to Bear

Indulgences

The Old Man

Anatomy of a Boy

Live Bait

A Nudge in the Right Direction

Part II: Michael and Corncob

Corncob

Corncob the Librarian

Private Idaho

Part III: Glen Valley

Priorities

A Beautiful Day

The Diamond Anniversary

Coyotes

Four Old Farts

The Glen Valley Compact

Library Column

The Funeral

Part I: Porpoise

The first time I wrote something just for fun – something that wasn’t an assignment or a letter – was for the Writing Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where I was a tutee (and some months later, a tutor). The name Porpoise McAllister came out of nowhere and from that same murky point of origin came his first story. The angst-ridden teenager, a true Sad Sack in many ways, was just plain fun to write about. That was 40 years ago. Since then, I’ve written countless Porpoise stories. I say countless because I’d have to brave the depths of my sodden basement and soggy file folders (Remember the Colorado Flood of 2013!) to actually make a count. No, they’re not all digitized yet – it’s only been 40 years. This volume of Black Coffee Fiction is the first place where his stories – six of them anyway – are in chronological order. Of course, in the next few weeks or so I’ll probably write another one and throw it all out of whack, but such is Porpoise’s nature. He never follows a pattern.

– Bettyann Moore

His Cross to Bear

by Bettyann Moore

Because Leslie McAllister was born on a Wednesday evening, Brian McAllister was wearing yellow silk bikini panties beneath his overalls when his son came into the world.

The panties, purchased used from the 10th Avenue Goodwill (half-off Green Tag Day), were just a tad snug, causing McAllister to walk with an odd hitch in his gait as he paced the waiting room floor. His discreet attempts at adjustment – hand deep in pocket, pinkie finger slipped beneath the tight elastic – only fixed the problem for as long as his pinkie held the elastic away from his body. He thought of going into the men's room to take them off, leaving them stashed beneath used paper towels in the waste basket for the janitor to wonder about, but there was something unseemly about not wearing any underwear while his child was being born.

Had it been any other day, Friday for instance, he would have been wearing the white cotton briefs his wife bought for him in bulk from the downtown Woolworth's. Who knew his wife would go into labor on a Wednesday, almost a month after her due date?

Wednesday evenings were the only times that Brian McAllister indulged his ... need. The word fetish never occurred to him. That it coincided with his wife's weekly knitting circle (Stitch 'n' Bitch), held from 5 to 9 p.m. wasn't, of course, a coincidence. At great personal sacrifice he had told her not to go that night, but Thea McAllister merely patted her husband's smooth cheek as she squeezed her obscenely swollen belly past him in the doorway and told him to quit worrying so much.

"Bertie King only lives a mile away, a mile closer to the hospital, she said, and if anything happens, I'll call you and you can pick me up there."

Brian had already stopped listening as she pushed past him and waddled down the walk to Bertie's waiting car. He was sorting mentally through the cabinet in the basement, deciding which ensemble he felt like wearing. The powder blue thong with the matching bustier? The chartreuse all-in-one? He shivered in anticipation, locked the door behind his wife, and headed for the basement stairs, unhooking one strap of his overalls as he went.

Thea McAllister wedged her bulk into the passenger seat of her friend's Volkswagen, a smile playing upon her lips. She'd discovered Brian's secret years ago, of course, but never said a word about it to him, or to anyone. From sunrise to sunset Brian McAllister worked the 80 acres that he had inherited from his grandfather, Dolan McAllister. On even years he planted corn; soybeans on the odd. In the bedroom he was a man through-and-through (the thought made her blush a little, causing Bertie to ask if she were okay). If he wanted, needed, to don ladies' underthings on occasion, what harm did it do?

She knew he'd never wear her own white cotton briefs, and her utilitarian bras with the outside stitching were safe. Every once in a while she sneaked down to the basement to see what new dainties her husband had bought. The first time, feeling slightly unfeminine afterwards, she took a trip to Macy's and bought a peach-colored Merry Widow for herself, a smart little number that set off her raven hair.

Brian stopped dead still in the door of the bedroom when he walked in that night and saw her self-consciously posing near the bed. And, while he was sweet about it, letting a low wolf-whistle escape his lips, Thea never wore fancy underwear again. His look that night wasn't shock, wasn't disgust, or even lust ... it was envy. Thea would rather not see that look again.

She was thinking about that night and half-listening to her friends' animated discussion about the high school teacher – a woman! – who had been caught necking with a student in a parked car on Strawberry Point, when she felt a warm gush beneath the afghan she was knitting on her lap. For a woman in the tenth month of pregnancy, Thea moved fast, springing up from the straight-backed chair (the only kind that would accommodate her girth at this point), knocking it over behind her.

As the other women clucked and exclaimed, Bertie King calmly lifted the receiver from the wall phone and dialed the McAllister's number. She hoped Brian wasn't out in the barn.

Brian, though, was still in the basement. A naked bulb swung overhead as he slowly pulled up the yellow panties; he always avoided the full-length mirror that hung next to the ironing board until he was fully dressed. He still wore the green flannel shirt he'd worn under the overalls, its tails caught in the waist of the panty. It had taken him a delicious amount of time to make his choice that Wednesday. Yellow wasn't usually his color, but yellow was the color of spring, planting season, and spring made him think of pastels: yellow chicks, daffodils, lovingly-colored Easter eggs hidden in the yard of his childhood.

He had just pulled the shirt tails out and was unbuttoning the shirt when the basement extension phone jangled. Should I get it? he wondered. Lord, it could be Thea ... yes, there was no doubt he needed to answer.

Brian, it's time, Bertie said without preamble. Thea's fine; her water broke, though, and she should be taken to the hospital at once.

Brian had his feet through his overalls before she finished speaking. This was it! Their first child at long last. He barely registered the fact that he still wore the yellow panties as he jammed his feet back into his boots and rebuckled his overall straps.

If it was born today, he thought, lumbering up the stairs, the baby would be a Wednesday child. How did that old rhyme go? Monday's child is fair of face. Tuesday's child is full of grace. Wednesday's child ... oh dear ... Wednesday's child is full of woe. Who knew, though, if it would actually born tonight? The kid was already a month overdue; it surely didn't seem to be in any hurry.

Leslie Dolan McAllister, all 10 lbs. 9 oz. and 25 inches of him, was born with a full head of black hair and one prematurely eager front tooth, at seven minutes to 7 o'clock on the seventh day of the seventh month. Brian and Thea chose to believe that all those sevens meant good fortune for their first – and what turned out to be their last – child, due to a low sperm count. Brian thought it was caused by those cotton tidy whities his wife bought for him. He switched to boxers, but Leslie McAllister remained an only child.

At his seventh birthday party, Leslie (by then dubbed Porpoise by his maternal grandmother) came tripping up the basement stairs decked out in a bright blue camisole tucked into a hot pink half-slip, a red garter encircling his head. The color combination is all wrong, Brian thought as he slumped to the kitchen floor in a dead faint. When he came to, the faces of concerned, smirking party guests hovering over him, Brian’s need was gone. In its place grew a cold, hard center of self-loathing. Porpoise became its target.

Indulgences

by Bettyann Moore

On the eve of her son’s second birthday, Thea McAllister put down the sifter she was using to make the boy’s cake, crawled into the narrow guest room bed, pulled the blankets up to her chin and stayed there.

The bed, which had been Thea’s while she was growing up in her parents’ farm house, sagged in the middle and smelled faintly of urine and knock-off Evening In Paris, the perfume of her teens. It felt like home.

With cake ingredients littering the kitchen counter and a house full of guests due to arrive the next day for their son’s birthday party, Thea’s husband, Brian, was more than a bit worried. He thought having a party for an oblivious 2-year-old was a ridiculous idea anyway (though less ridiculous than the one Thea had thrown for Leslie’s first birthday, complete with pony rides and clowns – Thea loved clowns), but Brian was loathe to pick up the phone and start making cancellation calls. What he wanted to do, even if it wasn’t a Wednesday, was head down to his secret cellar room and indulge in his lifelong and unmanly habit.

He called