When We Were Worthy

by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen

“Hey, Clay, I’d better go,” she said, feeling her strength coming back to her, the strength that comes from being needed by someone else, by being able to help another person.

girl—the smiley pleaser—was long gone but not entirely dead. She could still be summoned if need be.

Something unknowable yet permanent, as if they’d opened the door of the town and invited the devil right on in.

She was always surprised that MC hadn’t taken it down as she got older, but there it was, heralding her arrival forever. And now over by the lake there was a tombstone marking her departure forever, bookends of a life cut short.

who pinned recipes on Pinterest like she was being graded for how many she accumulated,

Savannah popped her thumb in her mouth, a habit they’d broken her of months ago. A habit that had returned in Ava’s absence.

It felt like a victory, like the smoke was at work within her, making her someone else, someone closer to who she used to be, that girl who wasn’t afraid to wear what she wanted or say what she thought. That girl who’d jumped on a table and danced the night she met Clay. It was how he had noticed her. Then he’d done his best to

change her so no one would ever notice her again.

This was living, she told herself—being afraid and excited all at once, buzzing from the beer, not knowing what was next. She was alive.

She stepped inside, grateful for the dark, smoky atmosphere where she could also go undetected. Stooges was the place in town for the undesirables to congregate. But it was also the place where some of the town’s business leaders showed up, anxious for a little “live and let live” themselves. It was a place where you weren’t Baptist or Methodist, Democrat or Republican, white or black. Stooges was Worthy’s equivalent of Switzerland.

“Aren’t you the devil’s advocate,” she said, her tone flirtatious. It was her default mode around men, a switch her mind and body flipped in unison, in some unspoken agreement made sometime during puberty.

Funny how something not so terrible she couldn’t remember, but something awful she could recall with disturbing detail.

She wanted to be one of those women who said, “I don’t need him,” and meant it.