In The Middle of Middle America

  Copyright © 2021 David B. Lyons

  The right of David B. Lyons to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-9160518-8-1

  Created with Vellum

  Praise for David B. Lyons

  “Keeps you guessing right until the end” – Mail On Sunday

  “Simply outstanding” – The Book Magnet

  “Impossible to put down” – The Book Literati

  “So clever” – The Writing Garnet

  “Lyons is a great new voice in fiction” – Bestselling author John A. Marley

  For

  the O’Hanlons

  —AMERICA PAST—

  When lives entangle, webs will weave…

  One

  The limousine stretched as long as the three yellow cabs belching exhaust fumes toward the overcast sky as they lined up at yet another red light behind it. At the far end of the limousine, by a cracked open door, stood posture-perfect, a kind-eyed man whose snow-white hair puffed out like clouds from under his tightly fitted, navy peaked cap.

  It was a dull afternoon in the city, dry and still; yet a chill would still cut through the layers of those rushing by whenever the sun would inevitably peek behind the annoyingly consistent and persistent conveyor belt of loose, gray clouds.

  “Good evenin’, Ma’am,” the kind-eyed man in the navy peaked cap said, bowing his head. He took a step forward, pulling the door wider open with him, before motioning to them with a sweep of his free hand, an invitation to the cream leather, U-shaped interior.

  “Ya don’t gotta call me no Ma’am,” she said, tapping him on the shoulder as she passed him. “Sarah-Jane will do.“

  She slid, ladylike, into the back of the limousine, before Phil clumsily clambered in after her. Then the man with the peaked navy cap shut them inside, muting the rush and the hum of the city. Phil looked scruffy against the crisp, clean interior, even though Sarah-Jane had presented him with a newly purchased double-breasted winter jacket that very morning.

  Sarah-Jane had, over the previous days, considered suggesting he comb his unkempt hair, or at least trim his scruffy, patchy beard. But, designer double-breasted jacket aside, she ultimately decided she didn’t want Phil to change much at all. She was content for him to be the same, oddball, practically mute, middle-aged, scruffy-looking shy guy she had driven every street of northern Kansas with over the previous three years.

  They met on the morning of her very first day at Kansas City PBS. She had used the local public broadcasting service for work experience during summer breaks of her completing a degree in journalism and, after becoming a hit with the few dozen local viewers who bothered to tune in, was offered a full-time role as a reporter covering the suburbs of northern Kansas. When she walked into the damp and disappointing PBS studios for the very first time, like a supermodel — all bright-eyed and undeniably attractive — Sarah-Jane’s station manager led her into a stuffy office no larger than the closet she packed her shoes into back home. In that stuffy office, staring down at his worn-out meshed New Balance sneakers, stood Phil—his hair just as unkempt and his beard just as patchy and shabby as it was the day he clumsily clambered into the back of that limousine after her.

  “This is Philp Meredith,” her station manager said. “He’ll be your cameraman slash producer.”

  “Cameraman slash producer?” Sarah-Jane said, snorting a laugh through her nose. “Is that what it says on your business cards?”

  Phil glanced up from his sneakers at her, then blinked his eyes slowly. Phil always blinked slowly. In fact, Phil did everything slowly.

  “I ain’t got no business cards,” he mumbled.

  Sarah-Jane glanced at her new station manager, then back at Phil. Neither of them were laughing.

  “Aren’t we like just four blocks from Times Square?” Sarah-Jane said as the limousine vibrated and hummed to a stop behind yet another line of yellow cabs.

  “Dunno,” Phil said, scratching at his beard.

  After sighing heavily, Sarah-Jane reached into her oversized purse, removed a notepad and then sat back into the cream-leather seat. As she flicked through the notes she had scribbled back in her hotel room before she had been informed her driver was downstairs waiting for her, Phil looked her up and down; from the point of her high-heeled leather shoes, all the way up to her marble eyes. Then he fake coughed into the back of his hand nervously. It was unusual that Phil would feel nervous, but he was nervous in the back of that limousine because he felt a need to speak. And Philip Meredith was not a man who enjoyed speaking. It’s why Sarah-Jane loved working with him. She could control him. From day one of meeting him in that stuffy little office in the bowels of the PBS studios, Sarah-Jane adopted a career puppy dog; a puppy dog who would leap to her every command.

  “Just wanna say,” Phil said, before nervously coughing again, causing Sarah-Jane to slap her notebook closed because she knew more than anyone that when Phil spoke, it was because something needed to be said. “Thank you for taking me with you.”

  “Oh, you’ve thanked me enough,” Sarah-Jane said, batting him away with a wave of her hand.

  “But I haven’t said it properly, ’cause I’m not really good with words. But thank you. You didn’t…”

  He paused, to scratch at a patch of his scruffy beard again, shrugging his shoulders.

  “I know I didn’t have to take you with me to New York,” Sarah-Jane said. “But I needed to take you with me.” She leaned toward him, and as she squeezed his elbow, she winked one of her beautiful, mirror-like eyes. “And look at you now, Phil, huh? A producer on one of the biggest networks in America. Business cards and all.”

  Sarah-Jane waited for Phil to snort his usual hoarse chuckle, then she leaned back in the leather seat and sighed, because the limousine had stopped, yet again, behind another line of stationary yellow cabs.

  “It’s one, fifty-five,” she said, pulling at the cuff of her left sleeve. “Screw this. Come on, Phil.”

  She snatched open the limousine door and stepped into the vibrating hum of the stalled traffic, where she waited on Phil to join her.

  “We’re gonna run,” she said, slapping at the driver’s window before darting between the rows of stalled traffic. Phil jog-walked after her, carrying her oversized purse under his arm as if it was a football.

  They were headed toward the lights. The brightest lights the city had to offer. The brightest lights in all of America. Lights that seemed to shine brighter and glow more magical the closer they raced toward them, especially so for Phil. He hadn’t been to New York City before; had only ever seen these bright lights through the screen of his bulky television set back home. Whereas this wasn’t Sarah-Jane’s first time in Times Square. She had visited on both occasions she had come to New York to audition for stage roles during her late teens. It had been mentioned to her more than once that her looks would be enough to elevate her to the boards of Broadway, from where she would inevitably be offered a first-class ticket to the hills of Hollywood. Only she was turned down without any feedback whatsoever for the two auditions she managed to book, simply because she didn’t possess anywhere near the talent required to be treading the bo
ards of a Broadway stage. When the second casting director she auditioned for squinted at her as if she had two heads and ranted, “Have you even taken the time to consider the nuances that might emanate from within the character you are auditioning to portray?” she shook her head, dropped her script to the floor and slowly shuffled her shoes toward the exit—ending not just that particular audition, but her aspirations of becoming the next Michelle Pfeiffer.

  Although she quit acting that day, she didn’t quite quit on her ambition of finding fame. And so, after long consideration, she decided she would study journalism when she eventually graduated high school. If being the next Michelle Pfeiffer was too far of a stretch for her, then perhaps being the next Katie Couric was within her grasp.

  “How hard can reporting the news actually be?” she once asked her journalism professor. “S’not as if anybody is gonna expect me to consider the nuances that might emanate from within the character I’m wishing to portray, is it?” The professor barked out a laugh, then placed a hand to her shoulder. He liked touching her shoulder. In fact, he did so as often as he could without, hopefully, coming across as too creepy. He had a wife and three children at home in his three-story townhouse and could do without the damage being labeled a sleaze would inevitably bring. His infatuation with this particular student never ran so far beyond the line that he blatantly came on to her, but it ran far enough for him to award her A grades and glowing feedback even when she didn’t, perhaps, deserve such acclaim.

  The hum of atmosphere around Times Square rarely pauses even as the sun revolves around the high-rise buildings. In the very early hours of the morning — between the hours of three a.m. and five a.m., and under the darkest navy of the smog-filled skies unique to New York City — Times Square can be somewhat deserted, save for the street cleaners who go about their business of sweeping up the previous day’s mess. But in every other hour of the day on either side of those two hours, bodies continually squeeze through this intersection almost shoulder to shoulder, as lights dance and blink around them.

  By the time Sarah-Jane skidded to a stop outside the Virgin store, Phil was already struggling for breath. He bent over, resting his hands on his knees and sucked in as much of the polluted air as he possibly could from between those bodies rushing by almost shoulder-to-shoulder.

  “It’s gonna be this one here,” Sarah-Jane said, patting him on the back as he remained bent over.

  Phil looked up, following the direction of Sarah-Jane’s finger, to the biggest and brightest lights across the busy street. There were three billboards on the opposite side, stretching as high as the twenty-story building next to them. A Coca-Cola ad was beaming from the bottom screen, blinking its “Enjoy” logo behind a silhouette of the bodies veering off in all directions in front of it. On top of that, on another large screen, equal in size, shone an advertisement for Samsung — flashing a blue-and-white striped logo onto the rooftops of the cabs lined up underneath. On the highest of the three billboards squinted the piercing blue eyes of Leonardo DiCaprio, staring down at Times Square from beneath his curtained center-parted haircut, before his face disappeared and the words “Titanic. January, 1998” flashed instead.

  “Which one?” Phil asked, standing back upright.

  “The top one. The Titanic one. It’s due to change at two p.m.” She curled a finger into the left cuff of her blazer and hooked it back. “It’s past two, now. It should be up already.”

  Phil turned down his lips while he continued to stare at the top billboard, watching Leonardo DiCaprio’s pretty face advertise what was being regarded as the most eagerly anticipated movie of the decade. Sarah-Jane had already been distracted from the Hollywood star’s piercing eyes by the hum of the people way below as they swarmed across her and by her in every conceivable direction. She noted not one of them was staring up at the billboard Phil was staring at, and began to wonder if it was wise for the network to have spent thirty-thousand dollars just to blink a shiny ad high above the oblivious tourists below in Times Square.

  “There,” Phil said, pointing.

  Sarah-Jane glanced up from the sea of bodies in front of her, to see her own teeth shining bright.

  “Ahhh,” she squealed, as she slapped both hands to her face. “I can’t believe it!”

  “Zdanski,” flashed up under her chin. “Tonight 7 p.m., Eastern.”

  Phil, who participated in the art of body language as irregularly as he participated in oral conversation, lifted his arm and placed it, gingerly, across the back of Sarah-Jane’s shoulders. She was touched by this gesture so much, that she grabbed his hanging fingers and gripped them as tightly as she could, just as a tear spilled from her eye.

  “Do you think I should be smiling?” she asked. “I probably shouldn’t be smiling.” Phil, as always, took her question as rhetorical, and remained silent. “Doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her head. “My name up in lights in Times Square. I can’t believe it. Okay…” She reached into her pocket, took out a yellow box camera and then wound it to its setting. “Take a picture,” she ordered Phil.

  He removed his arm from her shoulder, placed her purse between his New Balance sneakers on the filthy sidewalk, and then squinted through the square lens, taking a full-length shot of Sarah-Jane Zdanski making a peace sign in front of Sarah-Jane Zdanski beaming a wide smile.

  “Cool,” she said, taking the camera from him. “I’m gonna get that one developed first thing in the morning. That’s one for the scrapbook.“

  “Get more than one developed,” Phil said, picking up Sarah-Jane’s purse.

  ”Yeah,” she replied, as she stuffed the camera back into her coat pocket. “I should send a copy of that back to my folks in Kansas.”

  “Hey,” a voice called out. “That you? Are you Zdanski? Holy shit. It’s you. You’re Sarah-Jane Zdanski.”

  “Shhhh,” Phil cut in, holding a hand to the man’s chest. “Keep it down.”

  “Sorry, dude,” the man said. “Can I… can I get your autograph, Sarah-Jane?” The man reached inside his bomber jacket, removed a balled-up Footlocker receipt from the inside pocket and held it toward the blonde beauty.

  “You got a pen?” she asked.

  “Damn it, no!” the man replied.

  Then Phil pressed his thumb to click a pen in front of his boss’s face before she uncreased the man’s receipt and scribbled her name on the back of it.

  “Best of luck with your show tonight,” the man said, taking the receipt from her and grinning at it as though he had just gotten her phone number. “I’ll be watching.”

  She give the stranger a thin smile, then walked away swiftly, with Phil jog-walking behind her, her purse tucked back under his arm.

  “First autograph,” she side-mouthed back to Phil as they weaved around the shoulder-to-shoulder bodies.

  “First of many,” Phil said.

  LUCY DECKER

  It don’t feel right to place your hand between your legs while you’re peeing. But every time I do this, there’s always a wave of optimism sloshing around inside me that recedes the annoyance of urine misting my fingertips.

  I shake the stick into the toilet when I’m done while, at the same time, I stretch both my underwear and my sweatpants upward with my free hand until they snap back to my waist.

  “Please. Please,” I whisper to the stick. I place it, carefully, down onto a prepared sheet of toilet paper before turning to the sink to rid my fingertips of mists of urine. After I dry them, I read the back of the box one more time, as if I don’t already know with absolute certainty that it will take two minutes for a result to show.

  When I reconfirm to myself that it does indeed take two minutes, I spin on my bare feet and head for the kitchen. Well, it’s a combination kitchen-living room. Open-plan living, if you will. But open-plan living if you’re a family of either three elves or one average-sized lonely human being. Which is ideal for me. Because that’s exactly what I am. One averaged-sized lonely human being.

&nbs
p; I stab my finger at the TV as I walk past it before pacing into the kitchen, allowing the last news channel I was watching late last night to blink itself back to life. Before I go through my two cupboards in search of something to eat, I snatch at the receiver of my phone hanging from the kitchen wall and speed dial seven. Only out of habit. I really don’t care what the message says. It’s just… I’m still paying for the monthly subscription and I may as well check in every now and then. Just in case…

  “Hello, Lucy,” the robot barks down the line. “You have…..” Long pause. “Zero dating requests.”

  I sigh a routine sigh that seems to always accompany my speed dialing of the number seven, then hang the receiver back to the phone on the wall.

  The cupboards are as bare as I really should start expecting them to be. I don’t know why I look through them with renewed optimism every day, as if Santa Claus arrived overnight to pack them full of groceries. I grab at the battered box of Oreo O’s, then stretch for the fridge door to get some milk… when… What? What did that CNN reporter just say?

  I crane my neck to take in the TV, then shuffle my bare feet closer to it, my mouth hanging open, my neck still craning.

  “It is believed the Princess’s car was traveling at considerable speed and, according to eyewitnesses, was being chased by a number of paparazzo at the time of the collision.”

  Holy fuckin’ shit!

  I collapse into my worn couch and drag my security blanket all the way up to my chin.

  “Holy. Fucking. Shit.”

  I stare, wide-eyed, at the TV — soaking in the episodic updates from the studio; the live broadcast from two pompous, even when mourning, royal experts in London; and the live links from a Parisian reporter who is gripping his microphone with pale knuckles just yards from the tunnel in which the crash reportedly happened — until my stomach growls, reminding me there’s a dry bowl of Oreo O’s waiting for me on the kitchen countertop.