The Good Fight 4: Homefront Read online

  David stepped from the doorway, where he’d retreated after introducing this stranger as his wife. “It’s no joke. Es mi amor. Es Linda.”

  Marisol stood up. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. You really expect me to believe that this—” she gestured at the man sitting perched at the front of the large green chair across from her, his hands clasped demurely between his knees. “. . . this man is your wife?”

  “How can I prove it to you?” the stranger asked. None of the women answered. Anna was still scowling. Bett was staring at her own shoes and chewing a thumbnail. Jean looked as if she might cry. The man looked a little teary-eyed himself. “We’ve been friends for almost twenty years, Marisol,” he said. “There has to be a way to make you understand.”

  Everyone turned to her. Marisol wasn’t the oldest woman in the room, but she had always been the leader of their little group, the one who arranged the block sales and summer pool parties and organized the covered dish sign-up whenever a family needed help. So, it made sense that the women of the neighborhood would look to her to settle this. But she had no idea what to do. The story David and this man, whoever he was, had brought them was beyond preposterous. She couldn’t imagine what would motivate David, whom she had always known to be an honest and reasonable man, to come to them with a story about how his wife had been transformed into a man.

  By soap.

  Things like that simply didn’t happen.

  She turned to David. “What really happened here, David? Where is Linda?”

  Her heart was beginning to race as her imagination ran scenario after scenario that could explain this situation. None of the stories her mind spun ended well for her friend Linda. Was David delusional? On drugs? Under the influence of some kind of con man? Cheating on Linda with a man? She fought to keep the hysteria out of her voice.

  “Where is Linda?” she asked again, louder. When they talked about these kinds of things on the news, the friends never suspected a thing. They always said that the criminal was an ordinary man, kind to animals and children. No one ever said that they got the heebie-jeebies every time he came into the room. Had they been blind to a wolf within their midst?

  “I am still Linda,” the man said, standing and laying a hand on Marisol’s shoulder. She shrugged it off violently, fighting the urge to rub the shoulder where he had touched her. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, tucking the long strands behind his ears and then tugging on the ends. It was a familiar gesture, one she knew from long, heartfelt talks with her friend. Marisol gasped, putting a hand to her mouth. It couldn’t be.

  Anna bolted from her chair then, unable to contain her anger any longer. She moved towards David, violence crackling from her like summer lightning, palpable and dangerous. “If you’ve done something to hurt Linda . . .”

  The strange man leaped to place himself between Anna and David, a human shield raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Anna! You can’t think that my husband would hurt me. You know he’s never raised a hand against me or our daughters. David is a good man.”

  Anna didn’t look convinced. She closed and opened the fists at her sides. She and the strange man stared into each other’s eyes, neither one backing down. David put a hand on the arm of the man protecting him, peering at Marisol over his shoulder. The strange man put his hand over David’s and gently squeezed. The tenderness of the touch spoke of physical familiarity between the two men. Marisol felt sick.

  She sank into the chair and let her head fall into her hands. After a minute or so of tense silence, she spoke quietly. “Okay. If you’re Linda, you should be able to prove it. Tell me something only she would know.”

  The man smiled. He was gorgeous when he smiled, like a movie star. Antonio Banderas with the muscles of Dwayne Johnson. It didn’t make her want to trust him.

  With an apologetic nod to Anna, who was still scowling at the two men, he crossed the room in two long strides and knelt at Marisol’s feet, taking her hands in his. His hands were large, but the nails were carefully manicured and might even have sported a coat of clear paint. “When David and I moved here, you were the first one to welcome us. You brought us a basket filled with cookies that you and your daughters had made. They were beautiful, but terrible. David chipped a tooth trying to eat one. I still have the basket. I think of you whenever I use it.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Anna interrupted. “David could have told you that. Trying to make us accept his gigolo by giving him stories to use against us.”

  David’s face turned scarlet with embarrassment. The man stood and went back to Anna. All the women watched him, their faces a panorama of dismay. “Anna. When your sister was in the hospital, I picked up your children from school every day. They ate dinner with our family every night for months. When she was finally able to come back home from the hospital and you were home again, I had to teach you how to make enchiladas the way I do because they had become Shanise’s favorite food.”

  The man turned to the other women in the room, telling about the time they would have gotten a speeding ticket on the way back from the beach if Bett hadn’t flirted her way out of it for them. The time that Jean lost her grocery money in Las Vegas and they had taken up a neighborhood collection to keep her husband from finding out. The time that Rose’s husband had gotten drunk and fallen off the back deck and had punched David when he had tried to help, giving him a huge shiner.

  With each story, another set of eyes grew wide. They were all thinking it, but Marisol was the first one to say it out loud. “Linda? Is it really you?”

  * * *

  Some days later, Marisol agreed to meet Linda for a morning power walk, just as they always used to do. Once they might have greeted one another with a hug, but Marisol turned from her friend’s outstretched arm. It was just too weird. It was all so damned weird.

  “What should I call you?” In all their recent encounters, Marisol had been avoiding calling her friend by name at all, but it was getting awkward. Sometimes you just had to call someone by name.

  “I use Leonel as my man name, and it’s probably less confusing if you call me that when other people are around, but when it is just us, I would love it if you still called me Linda. Who I am inside has not changed.”

  Marisol arched an eyebrow and gave her friend a lingering once-over, as they stretched out. From the one-day stubble stippling his jaw to the prominent biceps and the well-formed thighs discernible through his workout pants, there was little to suggest the short, curvy grandmother who had been her best friend in the neighborhood all these years. “Well, your outsides sure have changed, Linda.” She stopped, turning to look into his eyes, the only place where she saw traces of the woman she’d known. “My sister thought I was having an affair when she saw us having lunch.”

  Linda blushed. “I’ve been getting a lot of that. When I met my daughter for coffee, people thought I was some kind of dirty old man.”

  “Old? I don’t know how to tell you this, Linda, so I’ll just blurt it out like usual. You were pretty when you were a woman, but as a man? Dayum, girl, you got it going on!” Marisol linked her arm with his, but blanched when her breast bumped against his arm and let go abruptly.

  Linda, sensitive to Marisol’s moods, as she had always been, reached out to take her hand. “What’s the matter?”

  Now it was Marisol’s turn to blush. “It’s just so weird, suddenly having this hunk of a man as my friend. I keep thinking that you’ve seen me naked . . . all those times we took our children swimming.”

  Linda laughed. Though the voice was deeper, Marisol could hear the bouncing cadence of her friend’s familiar laughter in the sound. Linda dropped her voice to a whisper. “I grew a penis, Marisol. I didn’t become a lesbian. David is still mi vida. I still like men.”

  Marisol picked up her pace, stepping ahead so that Linda couldn’t see the conflict in her face. She was trying hard not to imagine the bedroom life of her friends and failing. It was amazing and
romantic, that Linda and David had been able to stay together and still love each other under the circumstances. It was also beyond bizarre. She couldn’t imagine staying married to her own husband should he wake up a woman tomorrow morning.

  Thinking of the two of them together made for an uncomfortable set of imaginings and she fumbled for another topic of conversation that would distract her from it. There was so much she wanted to ask, and at the same time felt like she couldn’t ask. Were she and David really still intimate? It was a shocking idea, almost as shocking as her best friend becoming a man in the first place.

  “You know, when you were hiding from all of us all those weeks, some of us thought you were having plastic surgery.”

  “De veras? What did you think I was having done? A face lift? A boob job?” Linda pushed her hands up where her breasts had once been, laughing.

  “That was quite the breast reduction!”

  The two friends stopped on the corner to catch their breath. That was when the fire truck zoomed around the corner and careened back towards their street. Without a word, they both took off running as fast as they could. Linda, with her new long legs, outstripped Marisol within a block. She paused to wait, but Marisol waved her on when an ambulance came around the corner, too. “Go! Find out what’s happening! I’ll catch up!”

  By the time Marisol made it back the seven or eight blocks to their street, her lungs felt like they were on fire. She fell heavily onto the bench in front of the still-ugly and fire-damaged old Liu house, and sat watching and trying to understand what was happening. There didn’t seem to be a fire. The truck was parked at the end of the block, kitty-corner from Linda and David’s home, in front of Mr. Singh’s house. Mr. Singh was the hermit of the neighborhood, an old man who was rarely seen out on the street. Had he had a heart attack or something?

  A boy on a skateboard went by and Marisol stopped him. It was Bett’s son. “Ryan? What’s happening down there?”

  The boy pointed. “The big tree fell on Mr. Singh’s house. The whole thing just pulled up by the roots. That drunk guy’s car hit it last summer, then the ice storms this winter. Mom says the tree just got sick and died. They think Mr. Singh is still inside the house, but they can’t budge the tree.”

  Letting the boy go, Marisol stood and made her way towards the blinking lights. Where was Linda? A small crowd gathered near Mr. Singh’s house. They were keeping a respectful distance, but also watching the firemen and ambulance crew. Two men were standing beside the tree and discussing whether it was better to send someone back to retrieve a more powerful saw, or if they should use a winch system to remove the tree whole.

  Marisol drifted to the side of the group for a better view and gasped at the sight of the house. The giant oak tree which had graced Mr. Singh’s yard since before the house was built had simply toppled. Its thick roots reached into the sky like the tentacles of a petrified octopus. The wide trunk filled the space between the curb and the house, with branches filling most of the yard. It had been a very old tree.

  The entire front porch of Mr. Singh’s house was caved in and the upper branches of the tree were embedded in what she was pretty sure had once been the living room. She turned to the other neighbors in the crowd. “Does anyone know if he’s in there?”

  Someone spoke up to share that the firemen were breaking in through the back to find out. There was a flurry of activity as a man came running around the house and reported to the group of emergency workers. Word made it down the chain to Marisol’s end of the crowd that Mr. Singh was definitely inside, trapped under the tree, but able to talk to the rescue workers. Marisol crossed herself and looked to the sky, thankful that the man was, at least, alive. The next question was how they were going to get him out of there.

  Then, there was Leonel . . . Linda, striding across the lawn, the red and white lights of the ambulance flashing behind her head. Without saying anything, he began pulling branches off the tree and setting them aside, clearing the yard so the workers could get closer. The emergency workers and gawking neighbors stopped and watched, stunned into silence. Some of the branches were as thick as Marisol’s arm, but Leonel simply snapped them off as if they were twigs. When the branches were cleared, he paused, leaning down and resting her hands on his thighs as if he were merely winded from a run. By then, the head of the volunteer fire department had recovered from his shock. He approached Leonel. Everyone heard it when he asked, “Who are you?”

  “Just a neighbor. You can call me Leonel.”

  “Thank you for your help, Mister, um, Leonel.” The man was obviously embarrassed and uncomfortable. He looked around at the crowd. “I’ll need to ask you to get back behind the perimeter now and let my men work.” The man’s face turned scarlet as the neighbors and other onlookers began to grumble to each other about gratitude.

  Leonel just nodded and joined Marisol at the edge nearest the house. They both tried to pretend that they weren’t the new center of attention of the entire crowd.

  “That was amazing!” Marisol whispered, reaching over to squeeze Leonel’s hand.

  Leonel ducked his head, hair falling across his cheeks. He shuffled his feet the same way she always had when you tried to give her a compliment. It looked out of place in the body of such a tall and striking man, like a child had taken up residence inside Hercules and needed to go to the bathroom. “I’m glad I could help,” he said.

  Both friends and the rest of the crowd looked up at the sound of a machine starting up. The volunteer firemen had hooked a chain around the now branch-less tree and were preparing to use a winch and crane to pull it out away from the house, allowing them access to the living room where Mr. Singh was trapped. “I hope el viejo is going to be all right,” Linda said.

  Marisol hoped so, too. Mr. Singh might be a bit of a grump, especially with neighborhood children, but she certainly didn’t wish him any ill. She wondered if the old man had anyone to care for him. He’d been a widower already when he moved into their neighborhood, and she’d never seen him receive visitors. They might have to arrange some meals for him. “Do you think he’s very badly hurt?” she asked, gripping Linda’s arm, startling at the taut musculature she felt there, but not letting go this time.

  Linda shook her head. “I hope not. When I was close to the house, I could hear him calling out, so he’s at least conscious.”

  The winch continued to whine as it pulled the mighty old tree away from the wreckage of the front porch and living room. As the tree began to pull away, Marisol could see that the tree had actually taken the place of the main supporting wall. Now that the tree was moving, the second story wobbled, threatening to collapse on the lower floor and the old man trapped within. She screamed, along with several other people in the crowd. The fireman operating the winch couldn’t hear them over the noise of the machine and the tree kept moving. Marisol closed her eyes, knowing she was about to witness the old man being crushed to death by his own house.

  She opened them again when she heard the shocked exclamations of wonder coming from all the people around her. The air was full of dust and debris and she tried to wave it away with her hands, to see for herself what had happened. She cried out in astonishment when she could see.

  Leonel had moved into the archway and was holding the second story of the house up with his bare hands. As she watched, Leonel shifted his body so he could support the remnants of what had been the outside supporting wall on his shoulders. His newly long arms stretched nearly the length of the wall. He ducked his head and his hair fell across his face, obscuring it.

  Marisol ran from the crowd, ducked under the perimeter tape, and grabbed the astounded paramedic standing beside the gurney in the middle of the yard. “Don’t just stand there! Get in there and get Mr. Singh!”

  The man shook his head as if clearing it and yelled at his partner to grab the other end of the gurney. “Let’s go!”

  As Leonel stood holding up a house with his arms, the two men worked quickly to uncover th
e old man from the table he had been sheltered under, get him on the gurney and remove him from the wreckage. As Mr. Singh went by on the gurney, everyone heard him say, “I think I hit my head pretty hard. It looks like there’s a man holding up my house.”

  Marisol felt her eyes well up with tears. She wasn’t sure if she was crying from fear, joy, shock, pride, or something else entirely. Around Leonel, the firemen continued working, placing metal struts to hold the weight of the upper story. When they said it was safe, he let go his hold on the house, and all of them hurried to a safe distance. The struts creaked and moaned, but they held. Leonel sat down heavily on the ground and Marisol ran to his side. “Are you all right?”

  Leonel smiled up at his friend. “Just tired. It’s a big house.”

  Marisol’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think you’ve told me everything yet, Linda.”

  Leonel flopped down on his back. “No,” he agreed. “Not quite everything.”

  -~o~-

  Samantha Bryant is a middle school Spanish teacher by day and a mom and novelist by night. That makes her a superhero all the time. Her secret superpower is finding lost things. She writes The Menopausal Superhero series, and other feminist leaning speculative fiction. Her novels are all available on Amazon or by request at your favorite bookseller. You can find her on Twitter @mirymom1 or at her blog/website: http://samanthabryant.com .

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  Consent

  Palladian

  I’m no angel by the stretch of anyone’s imagination, and although I’ve been called the Devil Herself, I maintain that’s just hype. I mean, I guess there is a limit to how many times someone might want to get off in one night, but there’s no need for name-calling. At any rate, I do admit I am a woman of many vices, and on the night I’m going to tell you about, I was preparing to indulge in one of my favorites.

  When I looked in the mirror, I smiled at my reflection, satisfied that I’d done everything I could to look as hot as possible. I wore one of my favorite bustiers—black leather, with lacing in front that showed my tits off and a zipper in the back to get it on and off, and I’d paired it with a green silk skirt. A demure choice by my standards, since it came to my knees, but tight enough to show off my ass, and my high heels showed my legs off well enough, too. I’d braided parts of my hair and put the top of it up, letting the rest of my curly red hair hang free, over my shoulders and down my back. I made a kissy-face in the mirror to check my lipstick, then I smiled at the overall effect before I grabbed my tiny purse and left the room.