Page 18 of Dyson

“Hello.” Tabby was about as pissed off at her brother as she’d ever been. “Is anyone there?”

“Yes, I’m calling about the sale that you’re having.” She said it wasn’t until the next morning. “I wanted to know—”

“Let me cut you off right there. No, I’m not going to go through the pallets and tell you exactly what we have. I’m not going to set aside the best of the lot for you to come by and look over. It’s a sale on pallets. You’ll be picking what you want from the stacked pallets. I can tell you that we have more root vegetables than fruit. Also, there will be no discounts on how many pallets that you take.” The person, a woman, laughed. “I have a lot of work to be done, and I still have to answer calls like this. It said right on the paper not to call until after five.”

“It is after five.” She looked at the big clock on the wall and noticed that it was five-thirty. “I take it you’ve had people calling all day with those exact questions. I wasn’t going to ask but to see if I could come by tonight and buy the entire lot from you.”

“Sight unseen, and you’ll take it all.” She told her that she had a lot of people to feed. “I’m sure you think this might help, but you’d have to use this stuff within the next week. Some of it even less. I’m not going to give you a discount either. I just need it off my docks.”

“Good. I can bet here in…she said in five minutes. More than likely less, but she has to find some hotspots before she can make it there.” She asked her what she was talking about. “Is that going to work for you? I’ll even sign something that says we came an hour later with the trucks—which are on their way to you now. She has cash, like you asked for, to pay you for all of them. Whatever the amount is.”

“I don’t understand. You’re going to come back on me later, aren’t you? Saying that I sold your store some shitty fruits and vegetables. Correct?” The woman, she’d not heard her name, said that she wasn’t very trusting. “You have no idea how untrustful I am. I work with my brother and father, and they do shit like this and leave me to hold the bag. Christ, I need a drink and a vacation.” She thought about what she’d said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I just said that to you.”

“It’s fine. My colleague should be there now.” A woman was walking towards her as the woman on the phone was talking. “Her name is Amy Walsh. We don’t have a grocery store to use but I’m sure that it would sell. We have two shelters, not including a women’s shelter in the county. There is a shelter too that serves two meals a day that we’re going to donate the things to as well as there are a great many people in our town alone that would benefit greatly by having some fresh vegetables and fruit.”

“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have been so nasty to you.” The woman told her that it was fine. It sounded like she was having a crappy day. “You have no idea. My brother, Earl, he’s been running the business since our parents went on a cruise. He’s good at it most of the time. We’ve worked together before. But this time, it’s like he keeps getting these hair brained ideals that get me stuck with trying to sort it out. The too old produce? It’s only one of the seven things that he’s done to make me pissy with him. We’re a fresh warehouse, and he bought fish. How the hell do I get rid of seven hundred pounds of salmon. Not to mention the cost of it.” She sat down on the corner of her desk. “My name is Tabitha Reader. I didn’t catch your name if you told me.”

“Emma Walsh.” She thought that she’d heard that name before and knew it when she began talking again. “We’re trying to bring businesses into our little town and surrounding areas so that there will be jobs for everyone that wants them.”

“I don’t suppose you have about five hundred acres for sale, do you? I need to enlarge my footprint, and that’s not happening with where we are now.” She asked her if she was serious. “Ibelieve that I am. I wouldn’t close this warehouse down. There are a lot of locals that take advantage of how fresh things can get to them. But since we do a lot of business in your area and surrounding states, having another, larger place would triple our business so that we don’t have to turn away so many customers.”

“It just so happens that we do have that much land that we can sell, actually, about twice that. There are a lot of farmers going out of business around here due to lack of help. I’m not saying that you’d have no one working for you. However, it would be a great place to have the kind of business that you have. It’s just off a major highway and there are some new hotels going up surrounding the area that would accommodate the drivers when need be.” Emma went on to tell her of the other perks there would be. “I can see this working out for both of us. I won’t have to divide up the land for smaller places and there are enough lands around here that drivers could also benefit from some newer gas stations going in.”

They didn’t talk for long because she wanted to get Amy Walsh taken care of. When she showed her what she had in the way of crates of too-old things that her brother had purchased, she did indeed buy it all. She said that within the next hour, they would have two refrigerator trucks there to take it back to Ohio. And the influx of cash getting it sold off made up for a couple of more of her brother’s mistakes.

“Emma said that you have fish.” She explained how she had salmon that would go bad if they didn’t have a buyer within the next few days. “We’ll take it. All of it. Name your price and we’ll have the local pack help us with getting it into freezers around the county.”

It occurred to her what a pack was. But in all the time that she’d been with Amy, she’d never once seen her on the phone. The two of them had some sort of link going on, and she was nervous about that. Tabby didn’t know why she was nervous, but it was making her especially tense to know that these women were talking to one another, and she wasn’t privy to the conversation that would be about her.

“You’re all right.” Nodding, she told Amy that she thought she would be. “No, I mean, you’re not wrong in that we’re talking about you, but we’re thrilled with your help in this, and it was all good.”

“You read my mind.” She only grinned, and for some reason, that pissed her off. “I’d rather you didn’t do that. What I have in my head is private.”

“I understand, but I wanted to tell you that you’re going to be all right when you go home tonight, too. He’s gone.” Tabby sat down and didn’t know how to ask her if he really was. “Yes. He really is. You were smart to have the locks changed as soon as he was gone and that you took your money out of your bank and put it into another.”

“He was robbing me. Selling things that belonged to me. Taking from my accounts and…I don’t even want to know how you know this, but I’m grateful all the same.” She could feel the tears filling her eyes as she looked at Amy. “Is he really gone? I’m not asking you if he’ll be back, I’m sure that he’ll try something, but he’s not in my house any longer, correct?”

“Yes, I promise you that he’s gone, and the police are there now to make sure he doesn’t return before the locks are changed. I did that for you. I thought that once he got to the bank and found out that you changed things around, he’d go back and try to take something else. Perhaps do some serious damage to your home.” Tabby couldn’t help it. She burst into tears. “I have you. You’re all right.”

With the other woman’s arms around her, she told her everything that had been going on over the last six months. It had been a nightmare when she woke up one morning, and he had moved into her house.

“I’d been out with him a couple of times. Levi had seemed like a decent person, he paid for the meals that we went to. I took him to a couple of functions that I was required to go to. We’d never had sex or anything. Not even a kiss at the door. He was like…I guess I thought of him as a friend more than anything. Then, about eight months ago, he started telling me that he needed money. I didn’t give him any and was going to break off all contact with him. It must have pissed him off because a monthlater, no more than about six weeks, he moved into my home and was holding my daughter hostage. You have no idea what I had to do in order to get her out of the house and away from him.” When she didn’t say anything but continued to hold her, she finally had to tell someone what had happened. “I pushed my daughter down the stairs. She had on a helmet and I wrapped her up well so that she’d not break anything important like her neck.”

“How old is she?” She told her that she was fourteen. She’d had her when she was sixteen. “I’m assuming that she was all right after you pushed her.”

“Yes, a broken leg. It was her idea. She knew that if she could get away from him, then I could get away too. We’d planned it for a week and when he went out to get pizza, taking my car with him, the two of us did it. She was right. It got her out of the house for a few days, and now he’s gone.” Amy told her that she was proud of the two of them. “You don’t think I’m a monster for making my daughter fall down the stairs and hurting her?”

“A monster? No, I don’t think that at all. You were desperate. I’m assuming that you didn’t involve your parents or brother in what was going on.” She told her that she couldn’t. They’d been so supportive when she’d gotten pregnant that she couldn’t bring them in on something she’d done a second time. “They sound like a good family to have around. And I’m sure that they would have done anything to get you out of the situation, but I don’t know, and it worked. As I said, I’m very proud of the two of you.”

She felt stupid after telling a stranger what she’d done, but it also felt good. Her daughter, Mandy, was going to be released in a couple of days, and after that they were going to live in a hotel for a few days. Neither one of them wanted to stay in the house again. It had somehow been tainted by Levi. Besides, they were both looking forward to being pampered for a few days at a posh hotel.

They did very well today on getting the salmon and the crates sold off. When the trucks pulled into the lots, she was thrilled that one of them was a freezer truck. That way, the salmon would be able to last a bit longer. And it didn’t hurt for it to be slightly frozen for a couple of days, what the trip would take back to their home place.

Tabby sat in her office after everyone else had gone for the day and brought out the map of Ohio. With the exact coordinates, she was able to find where the land was that was for sale. It was just what she said it was, a bit of scrub that would need to be taken care of, but it was the highway that she was most interested in. It looked to be only a short four miles from where they would build their new warehouse. Printing out a copy of the area, she gathered up her things and made her way to the hospital. She needed to see Mandy in the worst sort of way.

There was a police officer outside her door when she got there, and it scared her to no end that Levi had gotten to her daughter. Rushing inside without asking the officer what she was doing there, it was Mandy who she could only think about.

“I called in a couple of favors.” Pausing outside the room before rushing in, she tried to figure out who was speaking to her and how they were doing it. “It’s Amy. I wanted to help you keep Mandy safe. And the favor was something that I could do for you. There will be police there until you’re released. To speak back, all you need to do is think about what you want to say to me. Hopefully, it will be nicer than you were thinking of your brother.” Tabby laughed a little.

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